The X-Axis – 12 May 2013
If you like middle chapters that aren’t vastly dissimilar from the previous chapters of the same storyline, well, you’ll love this week’s offerings from the X-office!
Astonishing X-Men #62 – First, though, we have the start of a new storyline for the X-Men title everyone forgets is still being published. The last couple of issues were part of the god-awful “X-Termination” crossover, which didn’t have much to do with anything that’s happening in this title – by all appearances, Astonishing was simply parachuted in to try and prop up sales on the wrap-up of two dead titles. There’s a vague attempt in this issue to suggest that Iceman’s terribly shaken up by the events of “X-Termination”, but you kind of get the feeling that any story would have worked in that role as long as it involved something moderately horrible (and most of them do).
This is supposed to be the down-to-earth X-Men title (which is another reason why it was an odd choice to appear in a storyline about dimension-hopping cosmic destroyers), and Marjorie Liu duly yanks it back in that direction, with an issue largely devoted to the cast hanging out in New York cafes and discussing the terrible weather. Not entirely, to be fair – Mystique shows up for a few pages, and the story builds to making clear that something is really very seriously wrong with the weather – but it’s a chatty issue by any standards. And that plays to the strengths of artist Gabriel Walta, though he’s also looking increasingly comfortable with the action sequences in this story. I like his style, and it’s good to see he’s making it work on these stories without compromising it too much.
Something is wrong with Iceman, who isn’t sleeping well, and attributes it to the Age of Apocalypse. But you rather get the idea that it’s going to turn out to be something else. The centrepiece of the issue is Bobby discovering that he has apparently invited a bunch of his ex-girlfriends to the same cafe, though he doesn’t remember doing that at all. The obvious explanation would be shape-changer – and I suspect Mystique’s here primarily to try and rule that one out, though I suspect for many readers it’ll just flag it up. Liu’s trawl through Iceman’s back catalogue turns up Polaris (who was his love interest way back in the 60s), Opal Tanaka (a supporting character from late-80s X-Factor), and Annie Ghazikhanian (from The Time Of Which We Do Not Speak, and having just googled her to remind myself of the story, I wish I hadn’t). No Zelda, oddly, but maybe she’s too obscure even for this story.
I was going to say that Liu doesn’t seem to have got Polaris’ voice right, though on reflection I wonder if it’s the art rather than the dialogue that’s making her seem a bit too Nice here. But Walta does a great job with Kitty’s sulking, and for the most part the character subtleties come off well here. It’s a good opening issue that gets the book back onto its home territory after a detour we’d probably all prefer to forget about.
Uncanny Avengers #8 – So… what exactly is going on here? This is a storyline with a lot of elements I really like. Rick Remender’s X-Force thrived on reinvigorating old superhero tropes by coming at them from a different direction, such as the completely different design aesthetic of the Horsemen. To some extent he’s doing the same thing here by giving the Apocalypse Twins bizarre power quirks like “time-space synaesthesia” (which in practice means being able to see the future by playing music). He’s also making good use of Sunfire, who’s already settling back into his role as an arrogant hero testing the patience of his teammates. And by building off an old X-Force story, which is supposed to be a secret, he’s got a reason for the X-Men to be keeping something from their Avengers teammates. All that’s good.
I like the personalities of the Apocalypse Twins, too. Instead of just showing up as zealots or maniacs, they’re presented here as a duo who evidently think they’re doing something worthwhile, and even have a degree of sympathy for the people who are going to suffer horribly along the way. While it’s nothing drastically new, it is something different for villains in Apocalypse’s role.
On the other hand, while we’ve got all these interesting elements, the story remains rather vague about what everyone’s actually trying to do or why. There’s a sense of high stakes, but at a very abstract level. Judging from Kang’s comments in earlier chapters, I think the idea is that he’s decided that he can’t simply avert the Twins’ reign, because the timeline keeps coming back to it, so instead he’s trying to set things up so that the reign itself ultimately works to his advantage. But exactly what the Twins hope to achieve, and how it figures into Kang’s plans, is thoroughly unclear to me, and we’re four chapters into this arc.
It doesn’t help that the issue ends with the way-too-on-the-nose assertion that the Twins can be foiled if only the X-Men and the Avengers can work together. Obviously that’s going to be the story – it’s the whole point of the book – but it works a lot better if we understand the threat and can figure out for ourselves that co-operation is the key, rather than just have characters asserting it as a fact.
Uncanny X-Force #4 – This series also seems to be taking an awfully long time to explain itself. The four issues to date are basically one extended action sequence, which isn’t necessarily a problem (though it would help if this book had the accelerated schedule of most other major titles). But we still don’t really know who the villains are and what the threat is.
Here’s what we do know. Spiral has been dumped on Earth and has hooked up with a new mutant called Ginny. Spiral has set herself up as a drug dealer, selling placebos and using Ginny’s psychic powers to deliver the highs. Storm, Psylocke and Puck arrive to shut her down. Suddenly, Bishop also shows up, having returned from the future (again), now apparently possessed by two personas, one represented as an owl, and the other as a bear. They want Ginny – for some reason or other. Everyone runs around the city chasing one another. Also, Fantomex and Cluster come to town thinking that Dark Fantomex might be after Psylocke, though that hasn’t really tied in with anything else yet.
There’s some decent work being done here to try to rehabilitate Psylocke by defining her as something more specific than a broken character, and also an attempt to add a bit of heart to Spiral by establishing that she clearly sees herself as some sort of screwed up mother figure for Ginny. (I’m not entirely sure I understand why the story seems to think Spiral’s a ninja, though. Carrying a sword is surely not the only entrance requirement.)
But, four issues in, we really still don’t know what the owl or the bear signify, or what they’re after, or why they’re connected with Ginny, or what threat they actually pose (other than to Ginny herself, and since she appears to be absorbed into Bishop halfway through this story only to reappear at the end, I’m a bit vague even about that). Nor are there really any hints that would let us speculate on the answers to these points. Again, four issues in, I’d really expect a bit more clarity – especially in what’s basically a one-act action story.
Wolverine #3 – Wolverine is also in mid-storyline, but at least it’s developing more effectively. This is another story where we don’t know who the mind-controlling alien villains actually are, or what they’re trying to achieve, but the key difference is that this story is feeding us enough new information each issue to let us try and puzzle it out – and the focus is on the hero’s attempts to solve the puzzle himself.
A lot of this issue is devoted to introducing what appears to be a new supporting cast for the book, consisting of obscure Marvel Universe characters hanging out at a bar. You might wonder why Wolverine needs still further teams to spend time with, but Paul Cornell boldly attempts to answer that point, explaining that there are some threats he doesn’t want to risk taking anywhere near the school. Nor, understandably, does he want to lead mind-controlling villains to the Hulk or Thor. Much better to stick with people who are going to outthink them. For those keeping track at home, Victoria Frankenstein has popped up in a scattering of comics since the 70s; Anne-Marie Hoag is indeed the established character from Damage Control; Marcus H Harold bears a suspicious resemblance to Tomb of Dracula comic relief character Harold H Harold (who was a vampire); and the other two seem to be new, but who can tell?
Nick Fury – the new Nick Fury – shows up here as well. It’s the first story I’ve read that uses him prominently. On one level the story makes good use of him, casting him (logically) as the rookie SHIELD agent that Wolverine talks down to. On the other hand, that tends to illustrate why this idea of replacing Nick isn’t going to work. We all know why they did it – the movies went with the Ultimate version of Nick Fury, and they wanted to bring the Marvel Universe character into line. Such are the vicissitudes of synergy. But the result has been to create a character who looks like the movie Nick Fury, but can’t be written anything like the movie Nick Fury, because he has to be put in a much more junior role. They’ve traded one problem for another – and if there’s one thing worse than clumsy corporate synergy, it’s clumsy corporate synergy that doesn’t even work.
I suspect Marvel’s private answer to that would be that their long-term plan is to stick in him in precisely the role he occupies in the movies, but time will tell. At any rate, it doesn’t pose a problem for this particular issue, since Cornell just treats him as a new character and gives the name little more than an obligatory nod.
Cornell and Davis are producing some really well crafted superhero comics here. It’s certainly one of the X-books I look forward to most.
X-Factor #255 – The penultimate part of the “Hell on Earth War”, and while this arc has probably been a bit longer than it really needed to be, it does at least have some progression to it. Tier nobly stick to his determination not to become a killer – and instead of everything working out just fine, as it usually does in such stories, it turns out that they really did kind of need him to kill some demons, because without that, Mephisto simply wins the war and declares himself ruler of Earth.
Obviously that’s heading towards X-Factor saving the day at the last possible minute anyway, since plainly the story can’t end with Mephisto ruling the world. Still, David knows how to build to a crisis. I have to admit, though, that the mystical stuff still isn’t the side of this book that particularly interests me, and at this stage I’m pretty much looking forward to this arc being over, so that we can get back to a few issues of wrap-up that I suspect will be more to my tastes.
AXM is still dealing with the whole X-Termination business, since it’s almost certainly the nasty, horrible bad seed thing that Dark Beast put into Iceman [insert obligatory ‘Iceman is gay’ joke] that’s causing his fugues and the building winter storm. I wish they’d mentioned that plot point somewhere other than on the recap page, since it got like two panels in the actual cross-over, and if they’re going to use it to kick off a storyline, it’d be nice to bring the folks who sat it out up to speed.
I was neutral on the issue overall. Very nice art and some decent character interaction, but Kitty mooning over Piotr felt like Bella Swan levels of denial considering everything he’s done to her and I’m never happy to see Chuck Austen’s contributions to the X-Men resurface.
Nick Fury Jr is a major character in Secret Avengers, which is presumably the book that’s going to elevate him to more of a leadership role within SHIELD in due time.
But yeah, in the meantime he’s a character who doesn’t quite work.
I kind of wish that the parade of Iceman’s exes included the gender-bender Cloud from the New Defenders series.
Weren’t Lorna and Iceman a couple c. HoM? And isn’t Nurse Annie *Havok’s* ex, not Bobby?
@Somebody – Nurse Annie and Iceman dated for about five minutes before Havok came out of his coma. I guess that’s enough to qualify.
Wouldn’t it have made more sense for Marvel to put Nick Fury’s consciouseness in a black man’s body if they wanted him to look like the movie version, rather than presenting a this new problem they’ve created where neither one of the Nick Furies lines up with Samuel L. Jackson in that role?
Ironically, that would have been much less contrived than what they’re doing. For comic books any way. And a much quicker solution.
And then when studio recasts and reboots the role in a decade, they switch him back to the old body if a white guy ends up playing him in a movie.
I think bobby and nurse Annie had a very, very brief thing at the beginning of Austen’s run before havok realized his great coma induced love for her. (gah, dreadful story…)
Oops, suzene already explained. Sorry for the repeat.
Did Iceman and Nurse Annie date before Havok came out of the coma? Or was it after Lorna came back to reclaim Alex?
Never mind. Who gives a shit.
If you check out the cover to the next issue of Astonishing, Cloud is included in her female form. So it looks like she’s not entirely forgotten…
Of course, if you want a truly bizarre ex-girlfriend, there’s always “Marge” aka Mirage, daughter of Oblivion, with whom Bobby had a fling in his first limited series. (Hey! Cloud and Marge! Guess who’s been reading Essential Defenders 7!) I’d love to see the sentient nebula and cosmic personification of an abstract concept show up for awkward chat as well.
Bobby Drake. Has any other supposedly hetero superhero had such bizarre and short-lived relationships, none of which ever seemed to go anywhere?
(I just remembered, he always had a thing for Darkstar back in the Champions days… and she’s back from the dead again. Hmmmm.)
Haven’t read Astonishing – Mystique turns up as one of Bobby’s exes, or separate to / as well as that?
I remember that Oblivion story, because they reprinted it in one of the old Marvel UK weeklies. Must’ve been either Secret Wars or Spider-man.
Ha. Glad Cloud is getting his/her moment in the sun. It’s kind of sad that the default story of Iceman, after fifty or so years of publication, is “Bobby Drake, You’ve Wasted Your Life!”.
@dave: My reading was that we were initially supposed to think that Mystique had been gathering up all the exes, but it’s then revealed that she’s been a part of the general “summoning” as well.
Oh, and in terms of bizarre relationships, I imagine Johnny Storm has to give Iceman some competition. His are generally longer, but just as odd: Lyja, Crystal, Nova, Namorita, and, according to Google results, “become involved with the time-traveling Cindy aka Psionics of the New Defenders of an alternate future Earth.” That sounds reasonably complicated.
Okay, so, if Kang literally can’t find a possible future in which the Apocalypse twins don’t rule, how is it that they’ve had no presence whatsoever in every possible future that we’ve seen in a Marvel comic? Isn’t the fact that Kang’s running around doing stuff proof that he’s from a future where the twins either didn’t come to power or aren’t a significant inconvenience to him?
I don’t inherently dislike time travel stories, but ones in which the author’s idea of how time and time travel work is radically different from mine are very frustrating.
“Isn’t the fact that Kang’s running around doing stuff proof that he’s from a future where the twins either didn’t come to power or aren’t a significant inconvenience to him?”
Is it that they didn’t come to power, or they simply haven’t yet? With time travel no guarantee [the current story] is when they took power, or that it was one constant rule.
I liked the fact that Liu seemed to be writing Polaris to sound as if she was being written by Peter David in the pages of her book.
The Run-That-Shall-Not-Be-Mentioned… I had the misfortune of having to review an issue of that for my podcast recently. As in this week. It was the issue where Havok is out of the coma, Polaris acts like a bitch, and lots of X-Men stand around looking constipated. It’s also the issue where it’s revealed that the X-Gene provides immunity to AIDS. Very surprised to see that anyone was interested in bringing back one of Chuck Aus- no, I can’t finish writing his name in case it summons him back to writing – one of HIS pet characters back. I’ll put a fiver that no mention of her son was made…
You’d win that bet.
Between Annie and Azzie resurfacing, I’m quietly horrified that putrid remnants of that run are seeping back into the current books.
The casual way Chuck Austen threw in the whole “Oh, don’t worry about me putting my magic blood into everyone, mutants can’t get AIDS” thing baffles me to this day.
“The casual way Chuck Austen threw in the whole “Oh, don’t worry about me putting my magic blood into everyone, mutants can’t get AIDS” thing baffles me to this day.”
I went to town on that a little on the show… The killer thing is that there might have been something there with that. If, and only if, the revelation hadn’t come from a lovestruck teenager, and if the highly-trained medical professional listening to it hadn’t got distracted by an unkempt bed as opposed to, you know, running off to human scientists and working something out to provide a global cure.
Someone should flip the dystopian-future-the-Xmen-must-divert trope on its head and write a utopian-future-the-Xmen-want-to-bring-about story arc.
A future X-person comes to the past and says, “Hey, remember all those dystopias we used to be trying to prevent? Well, the future I live in is pretty good, so here’s how you go about getting to it.”
No ulterior motives, no deceptive or shady dealings. Just the Twelve Labors of Hercules that will bring about Xavier’s Dream. The tension is twofold: (1) can they do it, and (2) should they do it.
Don’t even make the labors particularly morally ambiguous. No “kill an innocent child to prevent a future war” or any of that stuff. Just: prevent various catastrophes, take certain subtle actions, maybe do a little PR about some upcoming missions. Perhaps some significant personal sacrifices along the way (though no deaths or depowerings, please).
Then, have them fail at one or two, making the utopia less likely or impossible. Heck, get the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth, with two strikes, and have them strike out. No happy ending, just another tomorrow, another day.
Nick Fury Jr is a major character in Secret Avengers, which is presumably the book that’s going to elevate him to more of a leadership role within SHIELD in due time.
But yeah, in the meantime he’s a character who doesn’t quite work.
I was going to bring this up. To further the point, Fury Jr. is *already* in a leadership role in SA. Not THE guy in charge, but far enough up the ladder that he’s giving orders to the likes of Hawkeye and Black Widow.
Which really doesn’t work at all. I mean, it may work to someone who is new to the Marvel Universe. But Hawkeye doesn’t even like to take orders from Captain America. And Widow is the uber-spy of the MU. It beggars belief to think that they’d blindly follow this rookie.
(Despite its title, Secret Avengers is much more a SHIELD book than an Avengers title. Which is fine — Marvel needs a SHIELD book with the movies and show coming up. But anyone coming into the title wanting Avengers stuff will be let down.)
I presume there will be an Agents of SHIELD book by the time the tv show starts in the fall.
Imagine new marvel fans going to a LCS asking for a shield comic and getting hickman’s Isaac Newton book.
“Imagine new marvel fans going to a LCS asking for a shield comic and getting hickman’s Isaac Newton book.”
Funny.
Speaking of which, whatever happened to the rest of vol 2? I remember #4 being solicited, but I don’t believe it ever came out.
@errant- I think it signifies that Marvel understands that putting Nick Fury in blackface is a step in the opposite direction of diversifying their line.
“consisting of obscure Marvel Universe characters hanging out at a bar.”
How many of these are there? While it’s hasn’t become a cliche yet, it sure feels like there have been quite a few of them.
i think hickman said on formspring they were not going to solicit again the book was in the can.
Same difference, but even more awkward and noticeably pointless, the way they are actually handling it.
As far as black fury goes, I think it was a pretty bad idea to begin with. Not the hiring a black actor thing, I mean the making the drawing of a white guy into a black guy because the movie was a black guy thing.
Re: the Hickman/Weaver SHIELD, Weaver updates his blog when there’s anything to report. Latest news is #5 is finished, but won’t be released until #6 is complete.
http://dustinweaver.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/s.h.i.e.l.d.%20update
“Which really doesn’t work at all. I mean, it may work to someone who is new to the Marvel Universe. But Hawkeye doesn’t even like to take orders from Captain America. And Widow is the uber-spy of the MU. It beggars belief to think that they’d blindly follow this rookie.”
Daisy Johnson, Director of SHIELD, bothers me too. How old is she?