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Aug 4

Uncanny Avengers vol 2-4 – “Apocalypse Twins” / “Ragnarok Now” / “Avenge The Earth”

Posted on Monday, August 4, 2014 by Paul in Uncategorized, x-axis

It’s been some time since we checked in with Uncanny Avengers.  But then, it’s been some time since Uncanny Avengers finished a story.  These three volumes collect a story – not a multi-story arc, but a single story – that began in issue #5 last April (actually an epilogue in vol 1), and ran without interruption until issue #22 last week.

This is a story pitched unequivocally at an epic scale.  Multi-book crossovers aside, I can’t remember the last time we had a single story of this length.  Picking up stray plot threads from his X-Force run, Rick Remender starts relatively small, then dials up the scale to breaking point and beyond.

This is Remender’s Kang story, with all the circular logic and time travel that that implies.  Here’s the bare bones.  Back in X-Force, Archangel (as the new Apocalypse) had two children who were taken off by Apocalypse cultists.  Apparently, had Kang not got involved, the Twins would have emerged as the protectors of mutantkind to defeat Red Onslaught in the upcoming Axis crossover.  They then go on to block Kang’s conquest of the world.  Having been unable to erase them from history, Kang comes up with a plan to abduct them as babies and raise them himself, in an effort to shape their whole worldview.

The result is that the Twins – though they hate Kang and consciously distrust him – still end up convinced that humans will always hate mutants, and that the only permanent solution is segregation.  So they’re going to rapture all the mutants up to a spaceship and take them to start a new life somewhere else.  Problem solved, as far as Kang is concerned.  Unfortunately, Kang has pushed the Twins a bit far, so they add a further stage to the plan: destroy the Earth, purely to spite Kang.  So the Twins travel to the present, set up a barrier to prevent time travel (so Kang can’t interfere), and kill a Celestial using a magic axe that Thor stupidly enchanted as a youngster, in order to bring the wrath of the space gods down on earth.

The Avengers Unity Squad are supposed to be stopping all this, but turn out to be as dysfunctional as ever, and eventually implode completely when X-Force’s murder of the earlier child Apocalypse comes to light.  The Avengers fail to get their act together, the mutants are duly raptured, and the Earth is destroyed.  Five years down the line, the surviving Avengers finally manage to turn off the Twins’ time travel blocker, which allows Kang to finally enter the story directly.  Kang sends the Avengers’ minds back to their present-day bodies, and the Avengers save the world using Kang’s plan.  Kang tries a power grab to gain the power of a Celestial himself, but gets thwarted and driven into retreat.  There’s a lot more to the details – including a lot of character work for the team members, and a whole subplot about the Legion of the Unliving – but this is the general thrust.

It’s tempting to suggest that where some people are writing for the trade, Rick Remender has started writing for the omnibus.   But that would be unfair.  In fact, when you re-read it as a whole, it becomes obvious just how far this story is written for the single issues.  Despite the length of the story, it’s hardly stretching out its plot – if anything, it’s overcomplicating things at times in order to make sure it fits a big moment into every issue.   And where many writers increasingly seem to assume that readers have the previous ten issues committed to memory (as if they had only just read the whole story in one sitting), Remender is at pains throughout this story to keep reiterating crucial plot points.  It’s not full-bore plot recaps, but it’s a story that keeps pausing to jog the reader’s memory in a way that’s become somewhat unfashionable.

The story’s epic scale, then, is no mere artefact of decompression.  Were it not for the already protracted length, in fact, it might have benefited from decompressing a little bit more; it’s often epic in a writerly way more than a visual one, with the art grinding away on the detailed plot mechanics where other stories might have made more room for big widescreen moments.  I wonder whether Daniel Acuna is the best fit for a story like this, given that he’s always struck me as better on the small scale; but his remit here largely calls for clarity in a complex story, and he delivers on that, as well as bringing some life to characters who could easily have got lost in the welter of plot points.

And Remender probably doesn’t want this story to have too much room to breathe, given that it’s an exercise in continually building the tension up to the destruction of Earth.  That said, there’s also some fiddly stuff that feels like it’s there to keep the heroes occupied until the earth gets destroyed, or which just seems a little bit overcomplicated – much of the stuff with the Legion of the Unliving in vol 2, or the Twins’ rather odd powers that rarely play into anything, or a point about the timeline dividing into seven futures which I can only assume is going to pay off down the road.  There was room to play with there.

So what was the point of all this?  On the face of it, the moral which the story keeps hammering again and again is that the humans and the mutants need to work together if they’re going to save the world.  So “we’re better working together”, then.  And indeed, Remender duly repeats that theme at various levels: the Avengers and the X-Men, the humans and the mutants, even the Twins themselves (who are more powerful as a duo).

But you don’t do a year-plus storyline just for that.  After all, in itself, it’s not a moral so much as a genre convention.  And more to the point, the heroes already know that humans and mutants should be working together.  This is not a lesson they need to learn.  It’s literally the point of their team.

Besides, that basic lesson wouldn’t have much to do with Kang, who is after all the main villain of this story.  The Twins destroy the Earth, but they’re still ultimately just pawns in his scheme.  There’s a distinct implication that but for Kang’s interference they might even have turned out as heroes; they would at least have saved their people from what’s coming in Axis.  But Kang has deliberately screwed them up in a way that they can’t think past, even when they’re aware of the problem.

Kang, like the Red Skull in the first volume, is serving here simply as an opposing force.  Remender has pretty much zero interest in him as a fully rounded character, and quite right too.  Kang is not a compelling villain because of his rich inner life (not that the approach hasn’t been tried).  As a person, he’s a one-dimensional conqueror.  Rather, the hook with Kang is the kind of threat he presents.  We covered this territory a few weeks back in relation to All-New X-Men, but at root, Kang represents a threat to the story itself.  He can alter his own past with apparent impunity; and his solution to any problem he faces is to go back and change history.

There’s an obvious meta reading of characters like Kang, which I think actually is tacitly present in the story itself.  Although what Kang does is called time travel, the reality of what he does is to step outside the story and mess about with the narrative itself.  What he does screws with the rules of cause and effect that normally form the ground rules for storytelling.  He’s a threat to the internal logic of stories who potentially renders everything meaningless.  Partly, that’s a source of existential horror; but another major part of the appeal of time travel paradox stories is precisely the fact that they don’t make sense when judged by strictly conventional standards.  The fraying of the story at the edges is the frisson.  Kang’s function is simply to personify that (and thus avoid the problem All-New currently has, as a superhero comic where the main threat is vague and abstract).

Incidentally, Kang’s speech in the final chapter about his sense of honour dovetails rather neatly with this reading.  According to Kang, the reason why he doesn’t just go back and guarantee his own victory is that he feels obliged to ensure that his opponents are defeated by their own choices.  So, for example, he could go back, steal the scroll with Odin’s anti-Celestial spell, and make his own magic axe – but it’s much better to trick Thor into doing it.  Even better, he does so by posing as Loki, out of all the potential candidates – making sure that Thor knows perfectly well there must be an ulterior motive.

Kang behaves in this way because of the practical limit on what he can do: he can rewrite the story, but it has to remain in some sense a story.  “Kang wins, the end” is not a story.  All this, I think, is tacitly understood by readers in order for the likes of Kang to function as villains at all.  So while he’s not subject to the ground rules of the story itself, he’s still subject to wider underlying ground rules, and that’s why he can ultimately be beaten.

But I digress.  Returning to the “working together” theme: this is not a story about how the heroes learn to put their differences aside and working together.  It’s a story about how the heroes, despite being well aware that they ought to put their differences aside and work together, prove unable to do so.  They only manage it at the end because Kang nudges them in the right direction, and their victory there is subverted by having to follow Kang’s plan, and by needing to rope in the dementedly anti-mutant Sentry to do the heavy lifting.  And by the fact that all they do is kick the problem down the road a bit, by having Thor kill Celestial #2 in pretty much the same way that the Twins killed the first one, presumably guaranteeing that Celestial #3 will be showing up in the not too distant future.  It’s far from a convincing win for the good guys; it’s a scrape by.

So, if we tie all this together, is the idea that the Apocalypse Twins can’t escape from the worldview Kang ingrained into them, even though they know they can’t trust him, and by analogy humans and mutants can’t co-operate because merely being conscious of a history of mutual distrust is not enough to overcome that ingrained distrust? In which case Kang, as the manipulator on the cosmic scale of the story, is standing as a metaphor for those forces on the smaller scale.

Cutting against that are character arcs for the Avengers themselves which seem designed to tie the group together in future and work towards them becoming a proper team (in which case the book’s wider thesis is presumably “it’s easier said than done, but we’ll get there in the end”).  Remender’s take on Rogue is dubious in terms of the way the character’s been written in the last few years, but if you’re willing to look past that, she works in her role as the loose cannon who despises Wanda and isn’t that keen on any of the rest of the Avengers either.  The final issue interposes her as a blocking character between Wanda and Simon, in a way that locks the trio together for a while.  Havok and Wasp are left with memories of five years in a delete future in which they got married and had a kid, who is still apparently with Kang, no doubt to be rescued in future stories.  There’s strong character work in these issues, even if I’ve largely skipped over it in this review.

(Sidenote: the kid doesn’t entirely make sense.  Why do Alex and Janet have a child in a timeline they’re proposing to delete?  Kang claims that he manipulated them into having the child so that he could use her as leverage to force them to play along with his plan.  But how did he do that, exactly?  Particularly as the time travel barrier would have prevented him travelling to the point where she was conceived?)

It’s a long, long story in monthly form – probably too long.  In that sense it reads better as a collection.  I was certainly tiring of it a while before it reached the end.  But on re-reading the whole story and thinking it over a bit… it’s grown on me.  There are some ideas in here beyond the mere scale, and beyond the superficial moral that it seems at first glance to be pushing.

 

Bring on the comments

  1. Cory says:

    I lost interest in this series a while back, but I kept coming back to check in on it. It seemed like “the end” was always right around the corner but Remender just kept on pushing it back. Don’t get me wrong. I like most of the central ideas and concepts. It was just way too long and the art wasn’t always pretty or consistent. Plus, I second the idea that this book lost its main premise a while back. What’s up with The Red Skull, Xavier’s brain, and his S-Men these days, anyway? That seemed like a much bigger plot that they should have returned to in a much quicker fashion.

  2. The original Matt says:

    The upcoming Axis storyline will deal with the Red Skull. And as for checking in on them sooner? Yes, I would’ve liked it if the series itself did that, but I get the sense that only a week or so has gone by between the start of issue 5 and the end of issue 22. Of course, in that sense, the characters went off and did a load of other stuff (since I assume all the series so far happens before Infinity) before thinking to themselves “wait, we should check up on the newly telepathic Red Skull”, but that’s typically problem of a shared universe. Even worse so when the characters appear in dozens of titles.

  3. errant razor says:

    Didn’t Legion check up on him in Legacy?

  4. Chris Arndt says:

    The Uncanny Avengers also appeared in All-New X-Men and were the prime antagonists in Cable and X-Force

  5. Cory says:

    Gotta give it to Marvel for at least trying to give them exposure elsewhere, I guess.

  6. errant razor says:

    Right. Because the one thing that is lacking in Marvel’s books is Avengers exposure.

  7. Cory says:

    Very true. Let’s see how far they can stretch Rocket and Groot now…

  8. Neil Kapit says:

    Think the Uncanny Avengers were set to get a lot more exposure than they did, but the book was so delayed by John Cassaday’s art that they moved onto Hickman’s books as the line’s centerpiece, resulting in Uncanny Avengers being shunted off into its own little corner.

  9. The original Matt says:

    @Cory. Just be thankful they’ve got “new” characters they can push now. If more characters start to get spotlights thrown on them, we won’t need Wolverine this and Spiderman that everywhere.

  10. Omar Karindu says:

    Think the Uncanny Avengers were set to get a lot more exposure than they did, but the book was so delayed by John Cassaday’s art that they moved onto Hickman’s books as the line’s centerpiece, resulting in Uncanny Avengers being shunted off into its own little corner.

    It’s hard to say, really; this second arc spent so much time in an alternate Earth waiting for the reset button that it’s likely the book would’ve drifted away from the spotlight anyway.

    Some of that is the premise, which depends a lot on the particular status quo established by AvX. The Unity Team really can’t work with Cyclops’s squad except as the heavies. On the other side, the Avengers have had prominent mutant characters in their lineup for decades without it being much of a big deal. As such, paired with the Jean Grey School or one of the other Avengers rosters there’s not that much distinctive about them.

    Remender’s most salient point about the mutant metaphor so far, to my mind, was Wanda’s point that “mutant culture” doesn’t make much sense as a coherent concept, since they’re just randomly distributed people with a genetic difference. That’s interesting as a modification of the X-books’ central allegory, but taken too far it turns mutants into just one more type of generic superhumanity filling out the ranks of a generic Avengers team.

  11. Omar Karindu says:

    Or rather, the point should suggest that if there is “mutant culture,” it can’t work the same way as ethnic/racially-defined cultural groups.

    It’d have to be a bit more like deaf culture, gay culture, or something of that sort rather than the “mutants as ethnic minorities” concept that usually ends up being invoked. Even there, the argument is that individual mutants have very little in common even in terms of bodily experience, which means they don’t quite match up with most of these sorts of cultural groups either.

    Remender’s way of making that point seems rather assimilationist, though, especially against the backdrop of the “M-word” speech a few issues earlier. And we’ve just had a big arc about how mutant separatism and mutant nationalism are Bad Things.

    So unlike Morrison or even Fraction, Remender doesn’t seem interested in articulating some notion of “mutant culture” that might actually prove coherent. He seems more interested in rejecting that sort of thing as mere identity politics.

  12. errant razor says:

    Mutants seemed to have quite the culture budding up until Wanda killed them and/or de-ppwered them all. Wanda can go sit down and keep her opinons about mutants to herself.

  13. wwk5d says:

    “Wanda can go sit down and keep her opinons about mutants to herself.”

    Remender as well 😀

  14. Dreadpirate46 says:

    What’s up with all of the writers of Marvel NOW!!!!! trying to give us epic story-lines all of a sudden? You’ve got a 10-parter at the start of Captain America, Thor started with a 11-parter and Uncanny Avengers has this behemoth of a story. I’m not asking for single stories every month, but it does make it harder to keep track of what’s going on.

    Also, is it me or has Uncanny Avengers kind of lost track of the title’s mission statement? I thought it was supposed to be about a team of X-men and Avengers bridging the gap between mutant and human relations and bringing about a peace between the two species. Instead Rick Remender seems more interested in extrapolating on a convoluted story he started back in Uncanny X-Force that takes a year and half to tell.

  15. Mordechai Buxner says:

    Of course, in that sense, the characters went off and did a load of other stuff (since I assume all the series so far happens before Infinity) before thinking to themselves “wait, we should check up on the newly telepathic Red Skull”, but that’s typically problem of a shared universe.

    I assumed it was before Infinity too, but then I remembered that the Infinity tie-in Avengers Assemble 20 starred the Uncanny Avengers as they were at the beginning of Remender’s story. So I guess we’re going with an Astonishing X-Menny “time is stretched here because we’re slow” thing?

  16. The original Matt says:

    I didn’t read any of the infinity tie ins beyond the avengers/new avengers which weren’t really tie ins? Come to think of it, is it possible to read just the infinity core series and have it make sense?

  17. Mark says:

    I mostly avoided this series after its first arc because I just don’t like the mutant characters much, never have, and I wish Marvel would stop mixing their stories up with the Avengers side of things. I grew up reading 70’s and 80’s Marvel and in those days the X-franchise was pretty well segregated from the non-mutant books. And that’s the way I like it. Unfortunately those days are gone and it seems that Wolverine is everywhere.

    However, I admit I haven’t read all that much X-Men. I’ve read most of the Claremont/Byrne run and that was about it, and Claremont’s long-winded soap opera storytelling and hackneyed dialogue (“Hear me, X-Men!”) eventually wore me down.

    So I promise I am not being snarky when I ask: has Mr. O’Brien ever written a column in which he explains exactly why the X-franchise is a favorite of his? Because I’d like to know if there any really good stories that aren’t devoted to Wolverine swaggering and Phoenix being reborn yet again, and mutants, for some reason, having outer space adventures. Is there some awesome X-run out there that makes the franchise worth following? With great art? And preferably with little to no Wolverine? (And please God no Bendis?)

    Because it seems that in order to enjoy any of Marvel’s main books these days I need to be conversant with X-Men history and current mutant storylines and I’m woefully not.

  18. Chris says:

    He loves the X-Men because they never win.

    They have glorious new beginnings after defeats.

  19. Thomas says:

    @Mark

    1. X-Factor by Peter David/Larry Stroman. Stroman has his detractors, but I’ve grown on him a lot as I get older. If nothing else, his characters have a range of expression that most artists simply don’t bother with.
    2. Excalibur by Alan Davis. It’s off to the side in terms of the franchise, but your “no wolverine” policy takes a lot of stuff out of consideration.

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