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Jul 12

All-New X-Men vol 5 – “One Down”

Posted on Saturday, July 12, 2014 by Paul in x-axis

Well, more or less.  The fifth All-New X-Men collection actually starts with issue #25, the jam issue, which we’ve covered already.  But after that, it’s the four-part Brotherhood storyline, which finished this week.

Taken at face value, this is a straightforward story where the Brotherhood – the future version introduced in “Battle of the Atom” – attack the X-Men’s headquarters, try to kill them all, and fail.  It’s interwoven with some flashbacks (or should it be flash forwards?) to the Brotherhood’s back story, which principally serves to establish that the Brotherhood is really just Charles Xavier Jr and Raze, with everyone else having been under Xavier’s mental control all along.

Xavier’s motivation is apparently to take revenge on the X-Men for what he sees as the disrespectful writing of his father out of history.  At times, though, he seems to be claiming that this is also to do with fixing the problems caused by the Silver Age team to the present (even though his father was dead before that happened).  All this, he somehow believes will be achieved by getting rid of Jean.  As I’ll come to, though, a degree of slipperiness in Xavier’s thought processes might well be intentional here.  Raze’s position seems a little more straightforward: he seems to just hate the X-Men and want an opportunity to cause all manner of chaos.

Basically, though, this is an extended home invasion story.  It’s one of Brian Bendis’ better attempts at an action-driven story – never really his forte – even if some of the mind control details in the final chapter are a bit garbled.  And Stuart Immonen does some quality work on the fight scenes and the Brotherhood besieging the X-Men’s base (even if, once the action gets inside, he faces the common problem that an all-grey converted military installation just isn’t all that visually interesting).  Still, it would be hard to claim that the attack itself was a great story in its own right, or that it really needs to run to four issues.

Let’s take a step back, though, and ask where Bendis is going with all this.  After all, it’s not as if he’s the sort of writer who’s ever seemed particularly interested in doing multi-issue fights as an end in itself.

The high concept of All-New X-Men is that the Silver Age X-Men are brought to the present day, and are appalled by seeing how the world has turned out.  As of course they should be.  The Professor is dead; Scott killed him; Jean is dead and (sort of) responsible for genocide; Hank is a giant blue ape; Warren is a grinning idiot; and Bobby… well, things actually turned out okay for Bobby, but there’s plenty left for the X-Men to be horrified by.  Plus, it’s not as though the X-Men seem to have made any real headway in their goal of co-existence between humans and mutants.  It’s not a happy picture.

This is an inversion of a well established superhero trope in which the heroes witness a dark and depressing future and resolve to make sure it never happens.  Normally that’s presented as the right and proper thing to do.  But here, the heroes are from the past, and the timeline they ought to want rid of is pretty much the last 40 years of published history of the Marvel Universe.  Plainly, this complicates matters, but only because we’re attached to the Marvel Universe; logically, it’s hard to see how that ought to make any ethical difference.  And the Brotherhood, by introducing an actual future time frame, are there to hammer home the equivalence.  What makes “our” present any more “real” than theirs?

There are two core themes at play here, the first being fate or destiny or whatever you want to call it, and whether our heroes can (or should) escape it.  And indeed this arc begins and ends with characters talking about whether Jean can escape her destiny of becoming Phoenix, going mad, committing genocide, and ultimately dying.  Leave aside the arguments about whether Jean was technically Phoenix; the retcon which brought her back was intended, in a roundabout and elaborate way, to preserve the validity of Phoenix being in some sense Jean, so Bendis isn’t straying too far from the intent of earlier stories here.

The second is the threat to the timeline itself, and by “the timeline” what we really mean is “continuity”.  At best it’s a thinly veiled metaphor.  If the X-Men return to their own time and set about trying to alter history – as the shape of a story like this would normally demand – then the history of the Marvel Universe is rewritten and continuity runs into a ditch.  But if they don’t return to their own time then the result is even worse, because history collapses into a horrendous paradox: they have to return or the entire history of the X-Men vanishes.  And in that case, who brought them to the present day?

The early issues of the series see everyone assuming that Xavier will simply erase the X-Men’s memories when they go home, in order to preserve the integrity of continuity.  But the series has been going out of its way to make that option less and less viable, partly by giving Jean new powers, and partly by having the characters from the future state outright that the Silver Age team were never sent back.  They seem to have just kept on ageing long beyond the point where they could be sent back to pick up their lives where the left off – leaving a massive, unanswered continuity hole at the centre of that future timeline.

One school of thought just dismisses the whole problem with the stock explanations about divergent timelines that were traditionally wheeled out by Mark Gruenwald in the 1980s Official Handbook.  But this won’t work.  It’s patently clear that Bendis is working on the model that there’s a single timeline here, and that changes to the past can alter the future.  We’ve been shown that on panel, with the present day Cyclops briefly vanishing in “Battle of the Atom” when his younger self was apparently killed, and with the Brotherhood in this story rewriting their own timeline by leaving messages for themselves in the future, so as to learn from mistakes they haven’t yet made.  And again, this is entirely consistent with earlier X-Men stories; the end of the Kulan Gath story explicitly has time being altered in this way, and numerous other stories, principally “Days of Futures Past” and its sequels, implicitly assume that history can be changed.

Besides, you can’t make the collapse of continuity into the focus of your story and then resolve the problem simply by disavowing the plot’s assumptions as to how time travel works.  So let’s take Bendis’ time travel ground rules at face value and see where he might be going with this.

One possibility is very obvious.  All-New X-Men is one of a number of stories in recent years that have gone out of their way to stress the damage that has been done to the timeline.  Next year’s “Time Runs Out” event is presumably the climax of these threads, and Marvel have at least been hinting that it’s a reboot – or, at least, some sort of opportunity to rewrite and streamline Marvel history.  At the very least, it seems clear that we’re meant to be entertaining the possibility that this is the direction.

There’s much to be said for a reboot, frankly.  The Marvel Universe is now dragging decades of continuity behind it, which gives most long-running characters horrendously convoluted histories full of dead ends and repetition.  Whole swathes of characters have back stories tied to countries that don’t even exist any more.  Magneto’s connection to the Holocaust, wonderful idea though it was, can’t remain viable forever, as the events start to approach the edge of living memory (not least since his back story also calls upon him to be a contemporary of Professor X, who in turn has increasing problems justifying a stint in the army so that he can be in the Juggernaut’s origin story, since the US hasn’t had a draft in decades… and so on).  The Marvel Universe isn’t going away any time soon.  At some point the sticking plaster is going to have to be ripped off.

And there are more than a few dated ideas that could advantageously be deleted.  The Celestials were a perfectly sound idea for Eternals, but incorporating them into the mainstream Marvel Universe means that any story which wants to explore the potentially fruitful topic of the origin of life on Earth is stuck with the facts that (a) it’s been largely explained already, and (b) the explanation is a Kirby take on von Danekenism, and thus parted company with the zeitgeist decades ago.

But reboot have their own problems, principally how to preserve the readers’ attachment to the characters.  That’s one’s a discussion for another day.  A less significant, but still serious, problem is to how to make a story out of perhaps the most blatant editorial intervention.  DC has plenty of experience in this field, and Marvel is in the happy position of being able to learn from their mistakes.  Reboot plot devices arbitrarily tagged on to unrelated stories – not entirely satisfactory.  Stories that are actually about the reboot – arguably worse.  I know Crisis was much loved back in the day, but it had the advantage of novelty to go with its epic scale.  At the very least, the cosmic villain with abstract motivations who nearly destroys everything, with the heroes saving the day by salvaging a revised version of the Earth, has been emphatically done.

So what about a story where you set up the destruction of the timeline as a positive choice, or at least play up the positive effects?  Instead of being just a glaring rewrite of history, you try and cast it as a second chance?  It might work.  And I increasingly suspect that that’s where we heading.

Viewed in that context, the Brotherhood’s primary function is simply to exemplify the increasing collapse of continuity itself – in the sense of narrative logic – within the Marvel Universe.  They already come from a completely paradoxical timeline – one where the Silver Age X-Men never got sent home, yet the X-Men still existed.  Their strategy is to keep sending themselves messages in the past – and by the end of this arc they’re even re-writing the messages.  Their main target seems to be killing Jean Grey, which will plainly just result in an even more glaring paradox than the one that already exists.

So, you might reasonably ask, if this future timeline has such an obvious (and plainly intentional) paradox in it, why hasn’t continuity collapsed already?  Part of me wonders whether the thinking here is a little bit meta.  The timeline is viable for as long as the continuity is viable – that is, literally for as long as the setting continues to somehow hang together as a context for stories.  And it remains viable by continuing to give the appearance that it could all be sorted out somehow, even as an increasing number of characters assure us that it won’t be.  The future literally is less important because the readers think of it as somehow more provisional (a logic which, if followed through, would mean that there actually is something more fundamentally wrong with altering the Marvel Universe’s past than its future).  The point of collapse is being staved off… for now.  And of course it only needs to be staved off until next year’s crossover.

This is getting speculative.  But the Brotherhood certainly are intended as emblematic of the story itself falling apart – which might explain why they take the form of such flagrantly unlikely characters as a child of Professor X and Mystique, two characters who have no apparent reason to meet for coffee let alone to procreate.  If the grand scheme of All-New X-Men is indeed a slow build to the point where the characters can no longer maintain the pretence that continuity is salvageable, much of what is happening with the Brotherhood and with the X-Men themselves makes reasonable sense.

None of which ultimately changes the fact that this is a four issue home invasion story that could probably have been done perfectly effectively in three.  But there are definitely points of interest in the wider series, as it seems increasingly likely that it’s intended not simply as a medium term visit from the past, but as something that poses a more fundamental challenge to the whole history of the X-Men.

 

Bring on the comments

  1. halapeno says:

    “Just make WWII and the Holocaust in the Marvel U have happened in 1985. Is that more or less confusing than changing origins to other, nearer real-life events?”

    Revising world history to fit the characters as opposed to the other way around? That would be far more confusing, yes.

    Magneto doesn’t need to be a Holocaust survivor. He could simply invoke it. Point to it. Some might argue that this wouldn’t resonate as much as him having actually lived through it, but I’ve never seen the Holocaust as Magneto’s reason for attacking humanity so much as his excuse for behaving the way he’d be behaving anyway.

  2. Jamie says:

    “You’re thinking of Crisis on Infinite Earths and Flashpoint, but forgetting the partial reboot Zero Hour”

    Not a reboot.

    “the various “Ultimate” and “All-Star” and other spinoff universes”

    As you yourself even said, they’re spinoffs, not reboots, or else you could claim every single Elseworlds is a reboot, which would be fucking stupid.

    “and both Valiant Comics reboots.”

    Nobody gives a shit about Valiant.

  3. Jerry Ray says:

    “One answer might be to take the big books weekly or at least bi-monthly. Marvel produce the same amount of work, and hopefully generate ther same amount of revenue, but keep the de-cluttering and focus.”

    Well, that’s kind of what they did when the went to one Spider-Man book (Amazing) published 3x a month a few years back. That resulted in a whole bunch of arguing over sales numbers for what seemed like 2 years.

    But yeah, it resulted in a pretty good book and the frequency really helped – I wouldn’t mind seeing that with the core Avengers titles, but it’d be harder to make work for the X-Men and their assortment of teams.

  4. Jerry Ray says:

    “Yeah, I think rebooting every few years would be a good idea, much like how it’s handled with the cartoons/movies. It’s a good way to keep the characters in circulation without weighing them down with years of history.”

    Or just go with the approach that something like the Simpsons uses – the characters are always who they are (Bart remains 10 years old or whatever), and their stories always take place “now.” There’s a little bit of continuity (when it’s needed for a joke), but not enough to really get bogged down in it.

    (Disclaimer: I haven’t watched the Simpsons in a decade…)

  5. jpw says:

    @Jerry Ray – The Simpsons got cancelled in 1999 (or so i like to tell myself)

  6. The original Matt says:

    The time/holocaust/magneto debate has been on this board for some time now. Thank you for bringing up the Simpsons. I’m using that as a jumping on point to weigh in on the subject.

    One of the very few Simpsons episodes I’ve seen in the past 15 years updated their… Would you call it an origin story? To the 90s. (Bear with me, this comes full circle.)

    Homer invented grunge with his band Sadgasm. Which admittedly is an awesome band name. Despite the fact Nirvana’s first album came out in 1989, and while I don’t know a great deal about grunge, that indicates grunge was around prior to the 90s. They also recreated the Back to the Future scene with someone ringing Kurt Cobain during Homer’s performance. “You know that sound you’ve been looking for? Listen to this”

    They also explicitly throw in 90s references like Seinfeld quotes. I believe it was specifically the “no soup for you” quote, which episode premiered in 1995, which obviously creates a discrepancy with the above noted Nirvana influence, as Cobain was dead by this point.

    It was framed comically, in a way that they were just shoving out anything that defined the decade, so it could be used in place of those flashback episodes involving Marge’s bra burning & references to Knight Rider on TV guide covers. (Or for that matter, TV guides.) Its also worth noting that the episode was set prior to Homer and Marge bearing children. The thrust of the episode was a Homer chose Marge over the success of music, which had driven them apart, culminating in the release of Sadgasm’s biggest hit “margarine”

    The other thing is, though, is that the Simpsons is a comedy show that doesn’t have to deal with heavy issues like someone getting the emotional centre of their motivational core from an actual historical event as specific as the holocaust. It’s a master stroke of story telling, and it’s what, at least to my mind, rose the X-men above any other superhero group. The transformers villains are abstract evil. Magneto was given a real point, and the weight of history turned the key conflict into something more. So with that in mind I wouldn’t like to see the following conversation….

    “I lived through humanity’s worst. You let them pass that law and they’ll have you in chains with a number burned into your forehead”

    “But Magneto, it’s 2030, how did you grow up during the holocaust?”

    “Because this is comics, you insipid buffoon. Just shut up and go with it…!”

    I feel we deserve better than that, the franchise deserves better than that, the characters deserve better than that & the history they are trying to teach us to learn from deserves better than that. Though what specifically is better? Elastic time bridge? Out and out reboot? Magneto aging slowly as a result of mutation? Your mileage my vary.

  7. Taibak says:

    A few random thoughts:

    Marvel only has five characters who for dramatic reasons absolutely have to have been alive during World War II: Captain America, Nick Fury, Namor, the Winter Soldier, and Magneto. You can get away with Namor by arguing that his Atlantean physiology causes him to age slower (or, more likely, because nobody seems to care much). You can get away with Cap and the Winter Soldier because their being frozen is an important part of their origin stories. If anything, it makes their origin stories work *better* because they’re supposed to be relics from the not overly distant past.

    With Nick Fury, you had the infinity formula, but it sounds like Marvel is (at least for the time being) getting rid of that. Plus, where he’s rarely a leading character, you can handwave a lot of the fussy bits of his origin away and get away with the formula being more obscure than Cap’s time on ice. Come to think of it, I suppose there’s no reason why he couldn’t have served in Korea or Vietnam….

    That really just leaves Magneto. Sure you have a poorly-remembered de-aging story from an obscure, 40-year old issue of Defenders, but how many people actually know that story, let alone have read it? I think I’ve read about multiple instances where people have asked Tom Brevoort at cons about Magneto’s age, so there’s at least anecdotal evidence that not many people know he was de-aged. And as others have pointed out, as horrific as the genocides in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sudan, and Rwanda were, they don’t carry the same narrative weight in the West that the Holocaust does. He might actually be the only character in the Marvel Universe where the sliding timeline is a problem.

  8. Taibak says:

    Incidentally, the above isn’t taking into account characters who are simply really old. We know that, say, Thor, Apocalypse, and Wolverine were alive in the 1940’s, but there’s nothing in their back stories that say they had to have been active in the war.

  9. Taibak says:

    And I’m just realizing I forgot the Red Skull, Baron Blood, and Arnim Zola. 🙂

  10. The original Matt says:

    Like I said previously, it can easily be thrown in that magneto ages slowly as a bi-product of his mutant power. As a bi-product of the de-aging process would be neater, but that happened after his debut. He still needs to be old enough to go through the holocaust and be the x-men’s first villain. The problem is that gap in time.

    If the choice was being made to change magnetos history that he was a victim of a more recent ethnic cleansing, it would be my preference that magneto be written out and another character be made.

    Though I’d like to see some characters like magneto, Xavier and Steve Rogers be retired/killed off, and explore the world they leave behind indefinitely.

  11. yrzhe says:

    You know, if a reboot really is coming, one solution to this sliding timeline issue would be to divorce the X-Men from the modern day entirely and set it in an alt-history 1960s/1970s setting where the civil rights movement parallels can be really played up.

    It looks like that’s the direction the film franchise is going in, after all.

  12. The original Matt says:

    My personal preference would also be to remove the X-titles from a shared universe. Interesting you bring a time period, too. It would be interesting to have total removal, and 3 different time period stories happening concurrently.

    Civil rights movement -the emergence of mutants, plus fighting for acceptance.

    The modern ear – which would include tolerance and a separatist state. Of course, tolerance would still mean hate groups.

    The future – the dystopia.

    This would be a unique way to have 3 core titles a month, with different cast members. Or in certain cases, young Charles and Magneto in the past. Old Charles and Magneto in the present, and then dead in the future.

    This would require some SUPER dense plotting, planned in advance, and the plan stuck too.

    And avoid having Wolverine on every iteration of the team.

    If I was the fan-fic type, I’d be writing my ass off right now.

  13. Looking at the solicits for October: http://www.newsarama.com/21573-marvel-comics-full-october-2014-solicitations.html – both Magneto and Red Skull are central to the Axis event. This could take them both off the table for a reboot/refreshing of the line and resolve the WWII issue.

  14. jpw says:

    The X-Men never really belonged with the rest of the MU, anyway. I always felt the concept would have been a lot stronger if there weren’t several hundred other super humans running around without public complaint.

    The early Ultimate Universe got it right when all nonmutant super humans were either villains or under government control. (And everyone thought Ultimate Spidey was a mutant)

  15. Leo says:

    I remember when Maggot got introduced as someone who hada slightly similar origin with Magneto and who wanted to find him and learn from him. And then he was taken to a completelly different direction. Granted, he wasn’t a great character but it was a great opportunity to create a “student” or a sidekick for magneto who would follow in his footsteps eventually if Magneto ever died.

    They could still do that however. Have Peter David write a book where Magneto starts a school himself and a student (why not quentin quire) be his right hand who can take over his mantle and be done with it? I like Magneto but killing him off like they did Xavier might not be such a bad idea right now.

    I insist that it is not in Marvel’s best interest to hard reboot their universe. It would only serve as a jumping off point in the long term. Besides, any good story has rich background (Game of Thrones, Dune, Lord of the Rings) even if new readers do not know the details. Dumping all that would be terrible. Most probably they will do a soft reboot like they did with Spider-man with One More Day and hopefully they will follow that with great stories, again like Spider-man did

  16. Luis Dants says:

    @Leo: fair point. It is true that reboots are good jumping off points (the New 52 sure seems to have become one) and that they solve little.

    However, they are still better than attempting to endlessly tell stories where nothing ever truly changes. Since both Marvel and DC have such a clearly difficult time making the stories reach natural conclusions and introducing new characters with staying power and appeal, the best realistic path to follow is making reboots happen fully and often, so that continuity is not the main focus of the tales (not all the time, anyway).

  17. errant razor says:

    A reboot by definition IS a story with a focal point about continuity.

  18. Luis Dants says:

    Yes, and it would be nice to have some stories that focus on something else every now and then, don’t you think?

  19. Nu-D. says:

    It’s not really true that Marvel can’t introduce new characters with staying power. In the 2000’s the X-Men titled introduced dozens of new characters that could have had staying power if they hadn’t been constantly upstaged by the old standbys. Only a handful of the characters from New Mutants/New X-Men have really stuck around, but if Cyclops and Psylocke and Wolverine were retired and gone, those new characters and their cohort would have been developed into characters just as compelling as the geezers they replaced. There’s no reason Hellion, Dust, Anole and Wallflower couldn’t be as popular as Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler; but they never got the development because the old properties wouldn’t get the hell out of the way.

  20. errant says:

    I was with you until Wallflower….

  21. jpw says:

    He meant to say Mammomax and Squid-Boy

  22. halapeno says:

    “There’s no reason Hellion, Dust, Anole and Wallflower couldn’t be as popular as Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler; but they never got the development because the old properties wouldn’t get the hell out of the way.”

    Partly that, but I also don’t think introducing a load of characters by way of a junior team book works in their favor. The New Mutants are still the New Mutants to me. I see Cannonball and that’s the book and the team that I immediately associate him with. To this day he still doesn’t “seem” like a X-Man to me. None of them do.

    On the flipside of that there’s Kitty who grew up on the team and integrated with them seamlessly. I think that’s the best approach to take. Introduce one new kid, stick them in with the veterans and immediately work on establishing the relationships.

    Because the old guys aren’t ever going away. Look over at DC and how they keep flailing about to find roles for the original Titans. Wally had met with the most success and now he’s wearing an “I was the Flash for more than two decades and I all got was this lousy reboot” t-shirt.

  23. Dave says:

    ““the various “Ultimate” and “All-Star” and other spinoff universes”

    As you yourself even said, they’re spinoffs, not reboots, or else you could claim every single Elseworlds is a reboot, which would be fucking stupid.”

    Comparing various separate Elseworlds to the whole Ultimate Universe is silly. The UU is ongoing, and all a single continuity.

  24. hueysheridan says:

    I’m coming in late so forgive me…

    Paul wrote:
    “Besides, you can’t make the collapse of continuity into the focus of your story and then resolve the problem simply by disavowing the plot’s assumptions as to how time travel works.”

    This is Bendis, so of course he can. His plots function as simple drivers to enable his characters to interact in interesting ways (Ive read you making this point several times). How those plots are resolved is an afterthought, and one he often does not seem to figure out until the last minute.

    Your reasoning about where they are going is interesting, but I think it gives Bendis and his editors too much credit for this reason. I would not be surprised if this review of yours amounts to a deeper analysis of the ramifications of the “original X-Men” plot than has gone on in total among Marvel’s various employees.

    Sure there seems to be some sort of reboot in the offing, but that appears to be Hickman’s thing and its connection to what Bendis is doing will probably be incidental.

    The suggestion of an Abrams-Trek like reboot where the original characters return to their own era and that’s the continuity we now follow is interesting but does not seem to be the approach they are going with.

    I am though surprised (and frankly depressed!) that you and the other commentator’s here are apparently enthusiastic for a reboot. I love Marvel’s rich history and think it adds so much more than detracts from their stories.

    And we should know that reboots never work. The idea that they function to clean up continuity is just naive. Future creator’s will just resurrect the old continuity or will just refer to it mistakenly forgetting that it was removed.

    For example, the Celestials and Eternals are mentioned in the review as concepts that could be left out of a rebooted continuity. But they are an interesting enough idea with enough cool history (Kirby!) that eventually exploiting them would be seen as worth doing. Marvel’s best vehicle for super-hero concepts will always be the Marvel Universe so that is where they will always end up being used.

    There will always be continuity errors and sliding-timescale problems. They are inherent to the type of huge monthly ongoing multi-title and multi-creator continuity modern comics thrive with. Perfection does not exist and we should not fool ourselves into believing that “if we just start again it can be done perfectly this time”.

    I do not doubt that a reboot is ultimately inevitable though (even if this “Time Runs Out” Thing does not end up being one). The (albeit very temporary) sales boost that DC got from their recent one ensures this. It is just sad to see long time fans who actually care about these characters and their stories cheering it on when they should know better.

  25. Niall says:

    One thing that would worry me about a re-boot would be what happens to the “new” characters? I’m thinking of people like the Young Avengers, the Runaways etc. These are characters who work because of their place within a Marvel Universe that is a certain age.

  26. errant says:

    That’s the problem with these reboots. They never start from the ground floor. Every character and concept that ever existed in the old continuity is usually introduced within the first 12 months of the reboot. There is no organic progression. They just throw everything out there almost all at once, wholly formed, because there are so many books to fill up with stuff now. It makes it all meaningless, because everything exists, all at once, and usually depends on familiarity with the previous continuity (or a writer/editor interview) to make sense of wtf is going on.

  27. dpvlr says:

    As you say, the reboots never start from the ground floor.

    And that’s not going to happen because it’s too hard to do with the number of characters that Marvel would wish to retain.

    It’s also dreadfully boring catch-22.

    It’s nice to ignore all the crap, but many characters have also had lengthy but decent arcs. (Magneto or Kitty during the Claremont years, say).

    The problem with a reboot is that you have limited options.

    You can push the character back to square one, when they were less interesting, and end up retelling that story – but either you end up telling a weaker, abbreviated version of it, or you bore the heck out of existing readers by retelling the same thing.

    Or you can jump to the current day version, but they either end up as a weaker less interesting character and you end up filling in the detail through flashback, which is less effective.

    Movies can do this because they focus on a very small subset of characters and usually trim away 95% of the universe. And, most of all, because their primary audience is new readers who won’t know the story.

    Realistically, most comic book readers will be veterans, and doing a reboot that doesn’t play to this audience’s prior knowledge is impossible.

    In general, I think a reboot would be a terrible idea.

    A reboot can work with a relatively simple property (and yes, Classic Star Trek was a simple property – one set of characters.) The closed universe of the movie X-men is another option that works okay.

    A reboot of an entire universe with scores of character sets and thousands of characters whose origins are mixed together is a disaster, as DC comics have shown.

    Because companies refuse to toss aside or bench characters (and doing so with those they did try often created huge uproars from their fanbases) the result is a total mess.

    It makes the timeline issues even worse. In DC, in the course of a few years, Batman apparently through a half-dozen different Robins, all pre-Boot, for example.

    DC’s reboots have led them into countless other reboots to fix and reboots and so on.

  28. halapeno says:

    @hueysheridan

    I would argue that Kurt Busiek’s appreciation and understanding of Marvel’s rich history trumps anyone else’s here.

    With that in mind, it might interest you to know that Busiek believes that Marvel made a mistake when they shoe-horned Kirby’s ’70s creations into continuity proper. Kirby never intended for the Eternals, Celestials, Machine Man, Devil Dinosaur etc, to exist in the Marvel Universe proper and Busiek gave compelling reasons why these concepts should have remained outside continuity. I can’t specifically remember them except for the Machine Man argument (he’s meant to be unique and he’s not unique in a world where characters like the Vision and others exist) but I do remember nodding my head in full agreement with him after reading his post.

  29. halapeno says:

    Oh, here we go. Follow that link and scroll down to Busiek’s response to question 13 of that interview.

    http://www.oocities.org/brenni_au/Kurt.html

  30. halapeno says:

    ” — they should be mutants, pure and simple, not the side-effect of some genetic tampering by space gods who were up to something else entirely — doing that reduces them from a simple, clear, emotionally- compelling concept to a murky, complicated afterthought.”

    -Kurt Busiek

  31. Nu-D. says:

    Partly that, but I also don’t think introducing a load of characters by way of a junior team book works in their favor. The New Mutants are still the New Mutants to me. I see Cannonball and that’s the book and the team that I immediately associate him with. To this day he still doesn’t “seem” like a X-Man to me. None of them do.

    But I think that if Cyclops had retired for good in 1985 like he was supposed to, and Storm had retired in 1992, and Psylocke in 1993, etc., etc., and Cannonball and Moonstar “graduated” to the X-Men and were the X-Men for the next ten years, you wouldn’t feel that way.

  32. halapeno says:

    Given that I never cared for the New Mutants characters back in the ’80s and I still don’t care for them today, I can assure you that I’d feel that way. Dullest characters in the canon, as far as I’m concerned.

  33. Niall says:

    ” – they should be mutants, pure and simple, not the side-effect of some genetic tampering by space gods who were up to something else entirely — doing that reduces them from a simple, clear, emotionally- compelling concept to a murky, complicated afterthought.”

    They CAN’T be mutants in the pure and simple way. Mutation and evolution don’t work like that. Ask people from Chernobyl.

  34. hueysheridan says:

    Halapeno I know about Busiek’s feelings regarding the Eternals. It is a popular point of view that I have read several times online before. My point is not to argue with it really.

    It is just that in the future Marvel will want to exploit the property again. Really I would say the same about just about any property – the Eternals just happen to be a pretty strong one which people nevertheless often refer to as being something that should be removed from continuity.

    Sure you could argue that The Eternals could be revived but placed in their own continuity. But why would Marvel disadvantage such a relaunch by doing that? there are clear promotional advantages to putting such a super-hero series in the Marvel Universe and the objections to doing so are so slight and tendentious that I have no doubt that they would be overcome eventually.

    DC’s continuous series of retcons and reboots give us many examples of this type of thing. Ideas like Superboy or Kamandi or the Legion are removed from continuity or rebooted by creators with strong intentions, but eventually these concepts are awkwardly returned to their original status by successive creators who are nostalgic for, and wish to get back to, “the real thing”. The whole process functions to do the complete opposite of cleaning up continuity.

  35. hueysheridan says:

    Just to sum up my main point – those of you who are advocating a reboot on the grounds that it will clean up continuity are being foolish.

    These things, when done on this scale, inevitably confuse the character’s back-stories rather than simplify them.

    And continuity is not some albatross that we should be constantly apologising for. Most of the time it is only of concern to serious fans who are more likely to be intrigued by a complex back-story than put off by it. Fantasy fiction is rife with property’s that are successful because of their intricate worlds. What puts off such fans is the messy, unthought-out and contradictory continuity that reboots naturally create.

  36. halapeno says:

    An Eternals series might be more marketable if it interacted with the MU, but I don’t like or dislike based on marketability. Creatively, it’d be a stronger concept if it didn’t have to share a universe with the Greek gods and the Asgardians.

    And to me, the Celestials being behind mutants is just as stupid and unnecessary as that totem shit Straczynki tried to impose on Spider-Man’s origin story, or that Romulus crap Loeb and Way tacked on to Wolverine.

    The X-Men are better off without cosmic origins just as Spider-Man and Wolverine are better off without any mythical bullshit in their origins.

  37. hueysheridan says:

    Fine so you don’t like these elements. Most fans probably have their own ideas about what particular pieces of continuity they wish did not exist.

    But that – bad storytelling or even just ideas you don’t agree with – is an inevitable byproduct of ongoing comics. I don’t see how a reboot solves anything.

    I am not actually arguing about the relative merits of particular pieces of continuity. I am suggesting that restarting continuity to “fix” it is a fool’s errand.

  38. halapeno says:

    It’s not that I don’t like those elements, per se. It’s that I don’t care for certain elements mixed together. For example, I dislike it when X-Men does magic. Magic, mysticsm, the supernatural… none of this stuff has anything to do with the X-Men concept. On the other hand, I’m a pretty big fan of Doctor Strange, and if he had a series out, I’d give it a look. But what I wouldn’t want to read is a story where Strange goes up against Sentinels or the Brotherhood of Mutants because, what the fuck are you doing if you’re writing such a story? What the hell do they have to do with Dr. Strange?

    The shared Marvel Universe is both a blessing and a curse. Yes it’s nice to see some of the concepts interact but some of them just don’t mix. Its like a kitchen full of ingredients. Lots of good stuff in there but just because I like spaghetti sauce and I like ice cream, doesn’t mean I’d mix them together in a bowl and eat it.

    And to be perfectly honest, I think the X-Men concept could be much, much better if it existed in it’s own universe. For example, you could put forward the possibility of a Days of Future Past-style future as a genuine threat. Because in a self-contained universe, the writers could conceivably go through with it. You can’t do that in the MU proper because everyone knows it can’t happen in a sandbox universe. So what’s the point of endlessly teasing it? Where’s the dramatic tension in building towards something the reader knows can’t happen?

    You could also have a character like the Angel come off a lot more impressively in a universe that isn’t already overloaded with flying superheroes. You know, instead of just trying to make him more impressive with blue skin and razor wings.

  39. hueysheridan says:

    I understand what you are saying. These are your personal references – I can even see the logic behind them and can agree with them broadly.

    I am not talking about my preferences though. I am talking abut practical realities. And practically speaking if you have a continuous never-ending narrative then at some point these types of elements will be introduced (or, even more probably, re-introduced).

    And why not? are you saying that there could never be an X-Men story with magic that could be good? that seems like a very definitive statement to me – one that ignores popular parts of the mythos such as Uncanny Annual #6 and Illyana/Magik.

    The fact is that no-one ever knows in advance if a story will work or not, and inflexible rules like “no magic” or “no cosmic” stories unnecessarily inhibit the creators and are always discarded eventually.

  40. halapeno says:

     “are you saying that there could never be an X-Men story with magic that could be good? that seems like a very definitive statement to me”

    It would be, had I actually said that, but I didn’t. What I said was “I dislike it when the X-Men does magic.”

    I don’t like it when a book I enjoy digresses from it’s core concept and magic has absolutely nothing to do with what the X-Men are about. When it comes to the Avengers however, I feel differently. The Avengers are the self-appointed protectors of the earth in a context where earth is under constant threat of attack in a variety of forms, magic included. That’s what they’re about. Their core concept is conducive to inviting all aspects of the Marvel Universe into the stories (aliens, demons, supervillains, anything goes). In fact, it’s very difficult for a book like Avengers to stray from it’s core concept unless someone were to come in and have them not be superheroes anymore.

    But when the X-Men march off into outer space or Limbo or whatnot, I tune out. Even though there can be, and have been “good” stories with the X-Men doing this sort thing (assuming we’re equating “good” with “largely well-received” which seems to be your definition of the term) I generally don’t care for them. I’d rather they be insulated against these ideas. So, on a certain view, I regard the X-Men in the same way Busiek regards the Eternals– a decent concept that would be better off if it didn’t have to exist in the MU proper.

    Having said all of that, I agree with much of what you’ve said about the pointlessness of reboots, but I also can’t wholly subscribe to the idea that the sandbox-style continuity is something we as readers should unanimously love and embrace for all of it’s flaws because it’s so gosh-darned wonderful. Some of it’s flaws really grate on me, and when I see Spider-Man do cosmic storylines, or the X-Men do magical storylines, like I said earlier, I tune out.

  41. halapeno says:

    While I’m at it, I’m going to add that I also don’t care for it when the X-Men do cosmic stories or time-travel stories either.

    At this point you may be tempted to point to The Dark Phoenix Saga and Days of Future Past as examples of two of the greatest stories ever told that employed cosmic and time-travel elements respectively.

    And while that’s true, and while I certainly enjoyed those stories, the thing is, The Dark Phoenix Saga was not ABOUT outer space and cosmic entities. It was a story about Jean Grey, her relationship with Scott, and the corrupting influence of unimaginable power. It was, in essence, a powerful and tragic love story.

    Yet for some reason, subsequent writers seemed to have missed that point and got the impression that the Phoenix force/entity itself is of massive interest to everyone and consequently, we see the Phoenix getting dusted off every few years so that various writers can elaborate on an idea that, in and of itself, isn’t particularly interesting. It’s a big, cosmic deus ex machina.

    Similarly, Days of Future Past was never truly about time-travel. It was, at the time, an uncharted exploration into the human/mutant relationship (which is precisely what the X-Men should be about) and an illustration of how awful things could turn out. Time-travel was merely a device Claremont employed in order to make his point, and it was a good point to make. It was after this story that the mutant/human conflict theme really began to flesh out and develop leading into things like God Loves Man Kills and the revelation that Magneto was a Holocaust survivor.

    But since then, writers have been mucking about with time-travel in the X-Men over and over again as if they feel the gimmick itself was the central appeal of the story. For example, All-New X-Men. What’s the point here, exactly? Seems to me that the point is to do an inversion of the original Days by showing that the original X-Men would find the present-day to be horrific. Okay, so? And? Does this bring anything new to the table besides allowing Bendis to play around with the paradoxial nature of having the O5 running around in the present? It’s a gimmick that seems to be premised on the idea that time-travel itself makes for great X-Men stories when in reality it serves to do little more than confuse continuity even further.

  42. Nu-D. says:

    All-New X-Men. What’s the point here, exactly? Seems to me that the point is to do an inversion of the original Days by showing that the original X-Men would find the present-day to be horrific.

    Tat’s what it should be, but that’s not what it is. It should be a way to examine the current X-Men through fresh eyes; to review where we were, where we are now, how we got here, and where we are going. But Bendis hasn’t been able to pull that off.

    Instead we have five new rookie characters who look exactly like the original X-Men but behave completely differently. No real reflections on the direction of the X-Men, just dull incomprehensible plots.

  43. hueysheridan says:

    Looks like we are discussing different things. You really sum up my point though when you say that reboots are pointless. I would just add that they do seem to be effective as a marketing gimmick, which is why Marvel will end up doing one.

    I do not think that the existing continuity is perfect or should be praised without any criticism. Absolutely not- there are loads of bad retcons that I wish were never introduced. I just think that they are inevitable and that reboots only worsen the situation.

  44. jpw says:

    Marvel does a de facto reboot of continuity every decade or so, anyway. Modern Avengers continuity began in Disassembled. Modern X-Men in Astonishing, etc. Before that, you could arguably point to Morrison’s New X-men orUncanny #281. The writers can still make vague reference to things that came before (Dark Phoenix, basic origins of characters, and the like) but all the details you need to follow the current story happened relatively recently. There’s no need to do a big cosmic reboot because (1) it complicated and confused things, (2) it won’t attract new readers for more than s month or two (good storytelling occasionally does, though), (3) it makes the universe even more impenetrable to outsiders becausewhat little they do know might not “count” anymore and there will always be fans referencing pre and post reboot continuity, (4) it’s a jumping off point for many,(5) its not a satusfying conclusion to the stories true fansvhave followed for literally decades, (6) all of the old ideas will just be recycled, usually within a few years, usually not as good as the first time around, continuity gets jumbled again, and only a new reboot can save us. this one comes sooner than the last one. Repeat

  45. Ryan F says:

    “They CAN’T be mutants in the pure and simple way. Mutation and evolution don’t work like that. Ask people from Chernobyl.”

    Yes. I mean, sure, this is a personal preference, but, to me, “evolution makes superpowers” is a mind-numbingly stupid misunderstanding of evolution. “Space-god-supercharged evolution makes superpowers” is a nice sf conceit that I have no problem suspending disbelief for.

    “And continuity is not some albatross that we should be constantly apologising for. Most of the time it is only of concern to serious fans who are more likely to be intrigued by a complex back-story than put off by it. Fantasy fiction is rife with property’s that are successful because of their intricate worlds. What puts off such fans is the messy, unthought-out and contradictory continuity that reboots naturally create.”

    Hear, hear. Continuity only seems to become a big problem when people try to solve the “big problem of continuity.” Ideally, continuity provides a rich backdrop that writers can use sparingly to great effect. Completely disregarding it threatens to compromise the shared-universe concept that has always been a big selling-point for the big two. On the other hand, pedantic continuity tends to annoy/alienate a lot of the audience. In my opinion, Marvel, for the most part, has done an excellent job balancing between those extremes for the past decade or so (probably a bit less).

  46. halapeno says:

    “…this is a personal preference, but, to me, “evolution makes superpowers” is a mind-numbingly stupid misunderstanding of evolution.”

    Then how do you feel about “radiation makes superpowers, Ryan? Because you know, radiation doesn’t actually do that. Would you prefer to attribute the origins of Spider-Man, the FI, and the Hulk to the Celestials as well?

  47. halapeno says:

    Whoops, that should read “the FF” above.

  48. Omar Karindu says:

    Because you know, radiation doesn’t actually do that. Would you prefer to attribute the origins of Spider-Man, the FI, and the Hulk to the Celestials as well?

    That’s sort of the case already, since the Celestials retcon has also been used to explain why some portion of humans have the latent genetic potential for super-powers. In other words, the Celestials stuff has already been used to justify “radiation = powers.”

  49. Brian says:

    “…and Bobby… well, things actually turned out okay for Bobby.”

    He grew up to be the accountant for a team of superheroes whose house gets blown up every other week — imagine the hell of being the one balancing the books to write THAT off!

    Bring on the Celestial Life Seed mind wipe, I say…

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