The X-Axis – 30 June 2013
It’s one of the X-office’s semi-regular “let’s ship everything in one week” weeks! Seriously, all we needed was an issue of Astonishing and we’d have a complete set!
All-New X-Men #13 – I’ll give it this, though – for once, I can’t use the now-familiar Standard Bendis Review, because for a change, there’s some actual progress in both of his titles. Kitty, Wolverine and the remaining members of the Silver Age team are (at long last) actually trying to trace Mystique and her crew. It’s something they should have got around to ages ago – but now that the series has finally got round to it, the pace suddenly picks up tremendously.
By the end of the issue, the X-Men have not only located the baddies, but the inevitable fight has actually started, and Lady Mastermind has done something very ill-advised in revenge for what Jean did/will do to her father. On top of that, the issue furthers the subplot about her impatience over Mystique’s refusal to explain what the big plan is, and goes some way to revealing that plan – for whatever reason, Mystique wants to buy control of Madripoor from Hydra. (Is the idea here that Mystique is trying to buy a new Genosha, I wonder? That could work.)
Considering that the usual pace of this series could charitably be described as sluggish, this is a lot more like it. And it also, in passing, addresses another question I’ve been asking of late: is there any coherent plan behind Mystique’s seemingly unrelated appearances in multiple titles? While none of this week’s books provide an answer, it’s interesting that both this title and Wolverine and the X-Men choose this week to suddenly remember some of the other characters that she’s currently meant to be associated with, such as the current Silver Samurai.
In a further sudden sign of inter-title continuity, this issue also devotes a surprising amount of time to having its characters discuss Havok’s controversial “don’t call us mutants” speech from Uncanny Avengers #5 – something that the cast over in that book have also belatedly started talking about. My view on that speech, for what it’s worth, is that it was always fine for Havok’s character, who’s never exactly been an X-Men ideologue and would much have preferred a quiet life during whatever it is his degree was in (geology, wasn’t it?). But it’s rather out of line with the X-Men’s worldview and should have ruffled some feathers over there. That’s exactly what happens here, though the massive time delay in having those reactions tends to suggest it wasn’t exactly the original plan. Whether it’s a response to some of the criticism of the original scene, or just a case of Bendis seeing Uncanny Avengers #5 and wanting to do something with it, is another question.
This is a pretty good issue, on the whole. The series was overdue to send a message that it was actually heading somewhere, but this issue does so.
Gambit #14 – Considering that the book is heading for imminent cancellation, this issue feels remarkably like filler. James Asmus is clearly a fan of Pete Wisdom and MI-13, as they return as guest stars for a second time here. Wisdom enlists Gambit to retrieve the Faerie Grimoire, which has been stolen from his flat by a girl he slept with. The result is a few pages of Gambit trying to pose as a magic expert to talk to her, which doesn’t last very long before we have a somewhat directionless fight scene played out against blank backgrounds, and then the whole thing sort of collapses in an off-panel trip to Otherworld. Considering that this series is usually pretty good about working out the details of its heist sequences, this issue is a bit of a mess in comparison. Khoi Pham’s art veers on sketchy at times (and I have no idea what all those white marks on page 2 are supposed to signify), though colourist Rachelle Rosenberg does a nice subtle job on the Otherworld scenes.
Fundamentally, though, it reads like a story that’s meant to be a light-hearted comedy romp, and it’s just not very funny. The cover hits the tone the story seems to have been going for. But the story doesn’t.
Uncanny X-Force #7 – Um… did we finish the first story arc? Because I don’t remember it ever feeling like it had finished, but this issue feels like the book has moved on to something else. Psylocke and Cluster team up to rescue Fantomex, intercut with flashbacks to what Psylocke and Fantomex were up to prior to the series beginning. The basic idea of those flashbacks is that when Fantomex was split into three people at the end of the previous run, most of the really likeable qualities ended up with Cluster, not with the guy who’s now calling himself Fantomex, who’s wound up as an obnoxious kleptomaniac. Since that’s how Fantomex always acted on the surface, it’s hardly surprising that it takes Psylocke a while to figure this out.
There’s some very nice art in this issue – Adrian Alphona’s flashback sequences are solid, but Dalibor Talajic does some very strong work on the present day segments, with lovely clear storytelling that wouldn’t be out of place in the current Daredevil run. And I like the idea that all three ex-Fantomex personas are still convinced that they’re in love with Psylocke and are trying to impress her. Still, the series is starting to look a bit shapeless right now, and could really do with starting to resolve at least a few of the threads that were started back in issue #1.
Uncanny X-Men #7 – The conclusion of the Limbo arc, and rather more happens than I was expecting. Quite honestly, I sort of assumed this was a story thrown in there to give the X-Men someone to fight while the main storylines were building in the background. And it kind of it; a major part of this story is that Cyclops’ team only just get out alive, and the trainees realise that their new mentors don’t seem to be living up to billing.
But it also turns out to herald a major retooling of Magik. The pay-off – which is admittedly hand-waving and unsatisfactory – is that Magik is tied to Limbo so closely that she can defeat Dormammu just by shutting down the entire dimension and getting rid of it for good. Or internalising it or something. It’s a bit vague. I’m, shall we say, not altogether convinced that there’s much support for that in any earlier stories, but I guess if you’re feeling charitable you can link it to the “Phoenix/broken powers” storyline. It’s certainly the bit of this story that doesn’t work, since it’s the wrong sort of magic, the type which can just do whatever the story happens to find convenient.
However. The ultimate point of all this seems to be to break the endless cycle of “Magik tries to keep control of Limbo” stories once and for all, and dump her back in time where (it turns out) she’s been surreptitiously meeting with Dr Strange for a while now. I can understand Bendis’ thinking here. The story of Magik and Limbo ended with “Inferno” back in the late 1980s, and ever since it’s kind of been something that goes around in circles because as long as she’s in circulation, you’ve got to do something with Limbo. It’s really not a very interesting place once divorced from that original story about Magik’s slow descent into loss of control, and if we’re going to keep Illyana around, I have no great problem with dumping it or forcing it into the background, in order to take the character somewhere else. Even if Bendis never follows it up, at least there opportunity is there.
Frazer Irving’s art continues to impress me – aside from doing lovely landscapes for Limbo, he’s also the only artist so far who’s really been able to sell the idea that Cyclops’ optic beams are out of control. Most artists just do a bit of swirliness around a basically ordinary beam; Irving, there’s more of a sense that the best he can manage is a swirl of energy in roughly the intended direction and it just won’t go quite straight. It’s odd that this hasn’t really come across as well in earlier issues, but Irving gets it to work here.
Wolverine #5 – Ah. I thought issue #4 wasn’t very satisfying as the end to a four-parter. And now we know why: it’s part four of six. This issue is billed as “Drowning Logan, part one of two”, but it’s very obviously just the next act of the storyline in progress.
Why the odd labelling? Presumably, because these two issues will be drawn by Mirco Pierfederici, and it avoids the awkwardness of having to announce that Alan Davis wasn’t actually going to draw the whole of the first arc. But that’s letting the tail wag the dog. The bottom line is that the opening arc is six issues, not four, and it’s got two pencillers, not one. Randomly claiming that you’re starting a new arc when you aren’t doesn’t solve that problem, and if anything it’s confusing when you’re reading issue #4 and expecting more of a resolution.
Pierfederici is fine, by the way. He’s not Alan Davis, but few people are.
So… Wolverine knows that SHIELD are lying to him about the mysterious entity that’s been possessing people, and correctly assumes that’s because they’ve been infected too. He goes aboard a Helicarrier to try and stop them, and ends up teaming up with the handful of agents who aren’t infected (because they were stuck in an airlock). The baddies then have a stab at beating Wolverine by drowning him, hence the rather literal title being given to these two issues.
It’s an oddly prosaic way to try and kill Wolverine, but I’m glad to see Paul Cornell steering the character back in that direction. He’s suffered from power inflation perhaps more than any other character in the X-books, to the point where Marc Guggenheim had to do a story a few years back putting a stop to the idea that Wolverine can return from the dead. Originally he was more of a street-level brawler with built-in knives; over the years he’s become harder to kill than the Hulk. This won’t do. Of course, he can’t die because he’s the title character of his own series. But there’s a problem when he can’t die even within the logic of the series himself. Wolverine really ought to be at some sort of risk from his arch-enemy Sabretooth. If he can’t credibly be killed by a psychopath with a sharp object, he’s got too powerful. Between this and the upcoming “Killable” arc, Cornell seems to be firmly returning Wolverine to territory where he’s a reasonable opponent for the sort of villains he works best with. Good.
Wolverine and the X-Men #32 – Part 2 of “The Hellfire Saga” dials back the craziness a little bit, but we’re still firmly in territory where a lot of readers will find this just too far removed from recognisable human behaviour. I’ve said it before and there’s not much point going into detail again: I just don’t buy the Hellfire kids as characters, and I have similar problems here with most of the teaching staff at the Hellfire Academy. These are Howard the Duck villains. When Toad finally voices the idea that they ought to actually educate the kids, the moment doesn’t work, because there’s no reality to the school. He’s talking about a clown car like it was a Ford Mondeo. (Plus, it’s not like the Jean Grey School as shown in this series has any discernible interest in regular education either.)
There’s a suggestion in here that the actual power behind all this is the Siege Perilous, which is empowering the Club’s recruiter Philistine. I could buy the idea that there’s a proper villain behind the scenes manipulating the parade of weirdos, except where does that leave Mystique, whose inclusion in this series really does seem misjudged?
Sometimes – often, in fact – Wolverine and the X-Men manages to hold on to that human core in the midst of the insanity. But the Hellfire Kids miss that balance by a mile, and scaling that up to an entire school and making it the focus of a story… it’s just not working.
X-Men #2 – The launch of this series was delayed because of Olivier Coipel’s availability, and I’m guessing this is the issue where they were racing to catch up. It has three credited inkers (including Coipel himself), and three colourists, and some of the storytelling is a little bit ordinary. Still, for all that, the art is more than acceptable.
Issue #1 established this as the most traditional of the X-Men titles, and that continues here. It’s basically an issue of the X-Men having their initial fight with Arkea, and if you were thinking that she was going to turn out to be the goodie and Sublime would be the baddie after all… well Arkea is pretty clearly the baddie in this story, and Sublime comes across relatively well by comparison. He claims this is because he’s spent more time around humans and so at least has a good understanding of how they behave. And indeed, you can read Arkea that way in this issue – she attacks the X-Men because they’re harbouring Sublime. On the other hand, she does describe Earth as “a whole planet to conquer”, which certainly sounds like she’s the baddie.
There’s something a bit awkward in the fact that Arkea controls machines yet apparently still has to have a human host. I guess that kind of follows from making her Sublime’s brother, but thematically it seems a bit wonky. Still, it’s a solid issue of a team book, and should have a lot of appeal to the more traditionally-minded X-Men reader.
> But it also turns out to herald a major retooling of Magik. The pay-off – which is admittedly hand-waving and unsatisfactory – is that Magik is tied to Limbo so closely that she can defeat Dormammu just by shutting down the entire dimension and getting rid of it for good. Or internalising it or something. It’s a bit vague. I’m, shall we say, not altogether convinced that there’s much support for that in any earlier stories, but I guess if you’re feeling charitable you can link it to the “Phoenix/broken powers” storyline.
It was actually completely destroyed it once before in Excalibur v1 #37-39, during the long and fairly horrendous run of fill-in issues (with one or two bright spots) between Chris Claremont’s run ending and Alan Davis taking over as writer. (This was not one of the bright spots.)
Obviously, that didn’t take, since it was completely ignored thereverafter (despite actually containing an important plot point for Nightcrawler, since it abruptly fixed the teleporting problem he’d had all series to that point, where teleporting even once exhausted him).
Reboot: I always wondered what happened to the person who took over Limbo in that story.
RE: Arkea, I still think that baby is a machine of some kind. Beast says he built Karima a new, never-before mentioned, mechanical body. I’m assuming Wood got rid of the old since it was at least partially organic and presumably Arkea couldn’t control it otherwise. So, it only makes sense that Jubilee’s young charge is a machine as well.
> Reboot: I always wondered what happened to the person who took over Limbo in that story.
Well, took over the empty shell of it. But the reset button was hit pretty hard off-panel, so who knows.
> Beast says he built Karima a new, never-before mentioned, mechanical body.
No, he says it’s cybernetic, which means machine/organic hybrid. He then goes on to use morphine on her, which he wouldn’t do unless he expected her to be vulnerable to it, and he wouldn’t expect her to be vulnerable to it if he’d built her a 100% mechanical body!
” My view on that speech, for what it’s worth, is that it was always fine for Havok’s character, who’s never exactly been an X-Men ideologue and would much have preferred a quiet life during whatever it is his degree was in (geology, wasn’t it?).”
Sure but the characters don’t exist outside of their writers – over in Avengers, rick remender remains absolutely tone-deaf when it comes to issues of race, in the most recent issue he has Wanda talking about being a Romani as it is a religious/cultural choice – real car crash stuff.
i like x-men V4’s old-school vibe… i just wish wood came up with a better plot. thats pretty much been the problem with his proto-mutant arcs, too. arkea makes little sense so far and has the most boring motivation. and sublime has pretty much been neutered.
i too am a bit bothered about remenders “dont call me a mutant” thing. i can appreciate that hes taking on an aspect of the mutant metaphor that isnt quite black-and-white, and lets both sides voice their arguments. but im getting the impression that the author is ultimately on alex & wandas side, and the line between the opinion of the characters and the opinion of the author is getting a little blurry. in real life, ive heard similar arguments (“straight-acting” comes to mind), and it usually makes me think the person in question has some issues with self-loathing. i think its kinda hilarious how bendis slaps the argument down over in his book, but im firmly on his side.
question: if limbo doesnt exist anymore (or only exists “within magik”, whatever), does that mean pixie cant teleport anymore? she teleports through limbo, right?
not that i expect the writers/editors to pay attention to that kind of stuff. id be positively shocked if they did.
No, but every time she teleports, Magik throws up.
I wonder when we’ll be able to have stories set in Marvel’s Britain that don’t feature f*cking fairies or Otherworld? It’s been too long.
Beast is building cyborgs now? I have real trouble with Marvel not understanding how scientists work. Sure Reed Richards should be a polymath, or even an omnimath if you like. But Tony Stark is an engineer, Beast is a geneticist with a side interest in medicine, Bruce Banner is a physicist, et cetera. They really should be treated as such.
They could do stories like that, but who would want to read them? It’s like setting a story in Eastern Europe and not dragging out the torches and pitchforks. Or one in America without mutant-hating mobs or politicians. Or the god damn Avengers every other issue.
I’m pretty sure Beast is also a biophysicist but that’s neither here nor there.
He’s known to be an expert on Karima’s cybernetics from studying them for months during the Mike Carey/Chris Bachelo run a few years back, where he found her in a comatose state and repaired her from damages sustained after M-Day. Its certainly plausible he’d be able to repair/rebuild Karima’s body between Second Coming and now, especially if Jeffries and Dr. Nemesis are still around to help. It seems kind of odd to use him in that role at all since Wood specifically brought Kitty into the book as the team genius, and she’s much more of a computer architecture and engineering person than Hank is, but its still perfectly plausible that Hank would have Karima under his care.
I’m actually kind of unclear what the controversy over Karima is. Are people just not aware that she’s a pre-existing character, and not a robot that Beast arbitrarily created three days ago?
If Beast did build a new body for Karima it was awfully racist of him to forget that she’s supposed to be Indian.
I’m still strongly suspecting that X-Men was written with the belief that Rogue still has Carol Danvers’ powers and that Jubilee isn’t a vampire.
And I can almost buy the X-Men bringing a baby along on a combat mission – the X-Men’s track record for protecting kids makes Arkham Asylum’s track record for preventing escapes look impeccable – but the only member of the main cast that isn’t going on the hunt-down-Arkea mission is the only one who was of any use the last time they fought her? Oh well, at least Kitty isn’t the only one who knows anything about technology except that she totally is.
But on the other hand, it appears as if Areka has rigged the rubble of the Jean Grey school to explode, and Kitty is the only person who can keep that from killing all of the students.
I’m more interested in knowing why Jubilee is going on the mission. Her presence is tbh even stranger than Sublime’s or the infant’s.
If Limbo is destroyed or something, that would logically affect the Dire Wraiths and Space Phantoms as well as Pixie.
And that is without considering the religious implications in the MU, assuming that they do exist.
The best workaround is to assume that there are various levels or aspects of Limbo and that Magick’s is connected yet distinct from the others (it was shown to connect to that of the Dire Wraiths in a Rom Annual).
It has been established for a while that there are separate Limbos in the MU – “True” Limbo is home to Immortus, the banished Dire Wraiths (or at least it was, I think they escaped recently), as well as being the place where the Space Phantoms go. Magik’s Limbo is completely separate, with different physical rules. (We know this because when the Magus conquered Limbo, it had no effect on Immortus whatsoever.)
How long are the original teen X-Men supposed to have been around now? The first arc of Hickman’s Avengers has Peter as Spidey, then there’s the beginning of Superior, and he meets ‘cat’ Beast in Avenging, so that’s all before All-New #1. Now All-New is happening at the same time as Uncanny Avengers 5, which should only be days/weeks after Xavier’s funeral. The Uncanny team faced off against the Avengers, with Iron Man there, but in All-New he’s now gone off into space…and has Cap now had 3 or 4 run-ins with Bendis’ teams already?
As Tim notes, there’s multiple Limbos. There’s also a Thor one we dumped Surtur in.
The inevitable question raised by there being multiple Limbos is ‘who can go lowest in a dance contest?’ My money’s on the Dire Wraiths.
Martin must be banished there now.
That’ll give me the opportunity to compete in the Inter-Limbo Try-Outs!
“Beast is building cyborgs now? I have real trouble with Marvel not understanding how scientists work. Sure Reed Richards should be a polymath, or even an omnimath if you like. But Tony Stark is an engineer, Beast is a geneticist with a side interest in medicine, Bruce Banner is a physicist, et cetera. They really should be treated as such.”
I do miss the days when Bruce Banner was just a clever physicist who built bombs and knew stuff about gamma radiation. But he (and Beast, and Read) are now pretty firmly established as being one of the 15 cleverest people in the world. Even if they have a specialty, you’d assume that they’d be able to pick up other things with relative ease.
(Saying that, I always thought that Beast was a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. Doesn’t he even make comments about that himself?)
I was always under the impression that Beast was responsible for the image inducers he and Nightcrawler used to use to be able to go to Harry’s unnoticed. That suggests he’s been written as a polymath for quite some time.
Though personally, I am sympathetic to the idea that characters should have more well-defined areas of expertise. Practically speaking, I’m guessing the issue is that, at some point, each of these characters has been the sole “smart guy” in a given book, and so it was easier to broaden their horizons than establish another character’s STEM credentials out of nowhere.
Yeah, it’s a pretty classic trope, I think, that the team smart guy does whatever smart guy stuff needs to be done.
I think generally, these include medical and gadgets. And usually any medical they do is aided by their gadgets.
Donatello of the TMNT was kind of the same.
Hey, Paul. Just wondering if maybe you skipped Uncanny X-Force #6 by accident. I did the same thing and was very confused by issue 7 and felt like a lot of story was missing until I realized #6 was in my unread pile.
It is of course worth pointing out that the smart guys in the comics have always been able to do everything, depending on the writer. Still, it rubs me the wrong way.
i get the quibble about scientist characters, but i think its more important to have a well-defined cast. does it make sense for beast to be the expert on karima? maybe it should have been jeffrey maddison, dr nemesis, dr rao, forge? but beast is the recognizable scientist x-character, so lets stick with him instead of cluttering the background with peripheral characters, utopia-style.
@Andy: I think Xavier made the image inducer for Nightcrawler, or got it off “his friend Reed”, as he got it while Beast was off the team and with the Avengers.
@Martin S Smith: Well, whaddya know? You are correct, Nightcrawler got the image inducer from Professor X, and Tony Stark seems to have been involved in building it. I suppose that fits; Chuck was the original jack-of-all-tech-trades for the X-Men. I wonder how I got the notion that Beast made it? Maybe one of the various alternative continuities. Anyways, thanks!
Andy, it’s possible a Scott Lobdell comic credited them to Beast.
During the Dark Phoenix Saga (over 30 years ago!) Hank built the “mnemonic scrambler” that let the X-Men fight Dark Phoenix without getting killed for a couple of pages, so Hank’s been a techie for at least that long. And considering that cybernetics would require a knowledge of biology as much as engineering, I have no problem with Hank knowing all about Karima’s cybernetics. That doesn’t explain the line about him having built Karima, but if it’s just a reference to him having repaired her at some point, I can easily believe it’s something he could do (though I have no idea where you’d fit that into Karima’s timeline – maybe Scott forgot to write “Fragile” on the crate when he shipped her to New York before shutting down Utopia and she arrived all banged up).
Although honestly, if anyone at the Jean Grey School is going to be working on Karima, you’d think it would have been Deathlok.
Let’s stop the nit-picking about Beasts cybernetic expertise guys and focus on the real No prize question in X-Men so far. Why does Rogue have Ms Marvel’s powers back all of a sudden?
I generally prefer writers to be largely left alone by editorial but Wood clearly hasn’t kept up with Rogue’s status quo and what powers a character has is quite a big deal.
Paul wrote: “The launch of this series [X-Men] was delayed because of Olivier Coipel’s availability.”
While three inkers and three colorists often points to a delay at the pencil stage, the launch of this series was bumped back because of a death in Brian Wood’s family. That doesn’t preclude there also being a delay on Coipel’s end, or that one delay caused another, though. But I hadn’t heard of an art delay.
Going back to X-Men #1, am I the only person confused by what Rogue and Kitty did to save the train? The second train was not well established, and I couldn’t follow where we were with which train and what happened with the first three cars.
@Adam Halls: You’ve come to the same conclusion I’ve been suspecting: Wood doesn’t know Rogue doesn’t have Carol Danvers’ powers any more (or that Jubilee is a vampire), and editorial didn’t want to delay the comic even longer just to straighten out a few minor details so they added a line of dialogue about absorbing Northstar’s flight, forgot to explain her superstrength (or couldn’t think of who she would have gotten it from so they let it pass without comment and planned to employ a “you know how Rogue’s powers work, do we have to spell everything out?” stance if anyone asked), and said “hey, it’s not like Jubilee specifically says she’s NOT a vampire … maybe she’s just having a good day.”
I kind of hope that is the case, because that’s the sort of thing that will sort itself out as soon as we start getting issues written after the response to the first few issues came in. The alternative is that Rogue is just going to be sprouting whatever powers the plot needs her to have and we’re just supposed to accept that OF COURSE she had the time, opportunity, foresight and permission to grab that specific power and they’re not even going to bother mentioning from whom she got them sometimes. And that’s the worst version of Rogue I can imagine.
@Tim Finn: When I read X-Men 1 I thought they cut loose the first three cars and stopped the rest of the train, and those three cars kept going and hit the oncoming train, stopping it. Under that interpretation, it bothered me that they were so cavalier about the other train (I chalked it up to a fairly common writing error of forgetting people exist if they haven’t been established “on screen”) and it drastically musjudged how much force it takes to stop a moving train, but it more or less made sense.
Since then, I’ve become convinced that what’s actually supposed to be happening is that they cut loose the three cars and stop their train, and the three cars derail and explode for no real reason, and the other train just sort of stops. It doesn’t really make sense, and it even more egregiously misjudges the force of a moving train (I only suspect that hitting three cars going the other way wouldn’t stop the other train in time to avert a collision, I know for a fact that the brakes on the train wouldn’t be able to do it) but at least it means no one died … other than the two conductors that were killed by the electrical surge, which no one seemed even slightly fazed – no pun intended – by.
Hydra still owns Madripoor?
I thought since that Iron Man Director of SHIELD Annual Tyger Tiger was the Princess or something.