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Jul 26

Wolverine & The X-Men vol 1 – “Tomorrow Never Leaves”

Posted on Saturday, July 26, 2014 by Paul in x-axis

It is difficult to know what to say about the first volume of Jason Latour’s Wolverine and the X-Men run.  Difficult, because it is difficult to know what on earth the story is meant to be in the first place.  I gave up on this arc in confusion halfway through issue #5, resolving to have another go when the final issue came out.  But reading it in one go didn’t make it any clearer.

I did eventually succeed in deciphering the plot.  It took me five read-throughs and 1,300 words of working notes.  Meanwhile, I had asked on Twitter whether anyone else had read the story and understood it.  Nobody replied to say that they had, but there were quite a few “thank god, I thought it was just me” responses.

I’m not going to say it’s unintelligible.  It’s not.  But it does take a ridiculously disproportionate amount of effort from the reader.  It’s over-complex, and in a way that ends up detracting from pretty much everything else it’s attempting to do.  Nothing about the story suggests that it’s intended to be obscure; it’s structured as a slowly emerging puzzle which is meant to build to a dramatic revelation about Quentin Quire’s future.  But it doesn’t work, for a whole range of reasons.  One of those reasons is that when the audience is meant to be asking things like “Can Edan Younge be trusted?”, “What does this say about destiny?”, and “Where does Quentin go from here?”, the audience is in fact asking things like “What is going on?”, “What on earth is going on?”, and “Seriously, what in the hell is happening now?”

In fact, the central concept seems to be this: in the future, Evan becomes Apocalypse and Quentin Quire becomes Phoenix.  Quentin then has to fight and defeat Evan.  This fight apparently costs him the love of Idie, and (following his encounter with his younger self in “Battle of the Atom”) he comes to see it as a point where his life went wrong, so he tries to alter his past by showing present-day Quentin a distorted version of these events, and by sending some agents back in time to try and alter history so that the fight never happens – whether by killing Evan, or by getting someone else to kill him, or by simply prising Quentin away from the X-Men and taking his life in a different direction.  A secondary plot thread follows the attack on Evan, but the core of it is Quentin attempting to alter his own past.

This is not the most straightforward concept to start with, since it involves both a fiddly time travel paradox and Quentin’s connection to a hazily defined cosmic entity.  But it shouldn’t have been that hard to convey it to the reader.  Yet something has gone horribly wrong, and there are a range of reasons why that might be so.  I could spend all day listing defects with this story, but it would get dull after a while.  Let’s take a few key points that illustrate where the problems lie.

First of all, the story just doesn’t do a very good job of drawing attention to key information, which is often either lost in a welter of irrelevant material (loads of space is given to incidental characters, and a macguffin is pointlessly tied to a different macguffin from Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine for no apparent reason), de-emphasised (the death of a major character in the final issue is shoved to the side of a panel and goes completely unremarked on in dialogue), or actively contradicted by red herrings (Wolverine persistently claiming that Edan’s real scheme must be about personal power).

Second.  The future Quentin’s agents – who are only revealed to be his agents in the final chapter – are initially introduced as the Phoenix Corporation, a mysterious corporation which appears from nowhere overnight and hijacks worldwide broadcasts to make inspirational speeches about how the Phoenix is the spirit of life and creativity within us all.  As a side note, this take on the Phoenix is actually not a bad idea.  It’s basically how the Phoenix was portrayed in early stories before the Dark Phoenix storyline.  And it allows Edan Younge, as the Corporation’s “CEO”, to argue that it’s the X-Men that corrupted the Phoenix – which plays into his argument that Quire should leave, and his own personal backstory of trying to achieve his own redemption by helping to redeem the Phoenix.  The theory is highly questionable, but it’s something that Younge and Quire could plausibly take seriously, which is good enough for the story.

But the corporate angle is dropped like a stone after a single issue, never to be mentioned again (until Quire inherits the Corporation in the closing pages of issue #6).  For the rest of the story, the outfit is presented simply as an Askani church.  The entire Corporation angle is a red herring that goes nowhere, despite initially seeming like a major theme.  This is just bizarre.  Instead, Younge claims that if Quire accepts him as a mentor, he’ll be able to deliver the human race as followers.  How?  Because he’s going to make the human race love the Phoenix.  And… how?  The story does nothing to back up this implausible claim (save perhaps for a single panel of exposition in issue #2), but it seems to want both Quentin and the reader to take it seriously – otherwise Younge’s pitch to Quentin is mere babble.  Are we supposed to take it that corporations who hijack everyone’s TVs are loveable?  If so, the story is at right angles to reality.

Third.  The reveal doesn’t quite click as an explanation of everything that came before, which is a problem when your story is built around the resolution of a mystery.  It needs to be properly satisfying, and it isn’t.  We establish (up to a point) why older Quentin wanted to change the past, but not how he managed to suddenly make a whole corporation/church appear.  Younge’s motivations actually do make reasonable sense under scrutiny – we’re never actually told why he wanted to help with this scheme, but it fits with his own agenda of purifying the Phoenix from the X-Men’s influence, so fair enough.  But Faithful John, who attacks the school to try and kill Evan, and serves as the story’s secondary villain, is another matter.  His motivation is supposedly to stop Apocalypse from ravaging his future.  But since Apocalypse just reincarnates, killing Evan won’t actually stop him – something which is inherent in the whole point of Evan’s character, and is explicitly flagged up in issue #6, where we establish that older Quentin had the far more sensible idea of just chucking the guy in cold storage.  Killing Evan does make sense if your aim is simply to alter Quentin’s personal history.  But why does John care about that?  We’re never told.

Fourth.  The emotional weight of the final issue is apparently meant to come from the idea that the future Quentin’s actions cost him his relationship with Idie, and the suggestion that his desire to reverse that is more about ego than about her.  This is fine as an idea, but the story never really establishes the context for it to work.  In particular, it never shows why the fight had such an impact on Idie in the first place, and the plot keeps Idie herself separate from Quentin (and Evan) for the whole story.  Since she’s central to the climax, the story then strains to find things for her to do, and largely fails – her role is to be stroppy while participating in the defence of the school against Faithful John, but she doesn’t actually do anything to mark her out from the pack.  The obvious solution here would be to have cut the subplot where Fantomex emerges as Evan’s great defender, which merely retreads angst that he’s worked through already, and to give that role to Idie.  Instead, she has nothing to do, and she feels consistently out of character to boot.  (Who on earth looks at Idie and decides that her defining character trait is stroppiness?)

Fifth.  Once older Quentin’s plan is exposed, the story has nowhere to go but still needs a proper finale, so it suddenly swerve into “he goes mad”.  Aside from being a tedious cliche, this bit makes very little sense, since it has the older Quentin demanding that people kill him in order to “break the cycle”.  But to the extent that that means anything at all, surely you’d have to kill the younger Quentin, not the older one, in order to break any cycle.  Since younger Quentin points this out, it can’t really be called a plot hole; but when your finale comes down to a mad character doing crazy things because he’s mad, the story has gone off the rails a bit.

Even if you look past all that, you’ve still got an uninspiring start for the new series.  Latour makes a relatively muted impact here; despite being given the now obligatory #1, this reads like the first issue of a new writer taking over an existing series with stories in progress.  The main change of tone (other than the excessive complexity) is to tone down the more demented aspects of Jason Aaron’s stories, which is understandable enough since he was way out on a limb, but also steers the book much closer to the other X-Men titles.  And of course the central story and theme – time travellers trying to escape their destiny at the cost of messing about with the time stream – is already being done to death in All-New X-Men.  It’s a very odd choice for a first storyline (unless it’s intended to feed back into Bendis’ storylines in due course, which is not inconceivable).

In fact, the story does set up some potentially interesting directions for Quentin and (to a lesser extent) Evan.  For all the story’s talk of hope and self-belief, the reality is that we’re clearly shown a future timeline in which Evan will eventually become Apocalypse and Quentin will get the Phoenix force and go mad.  That leaves Quentin with a reasonable motivation to try and change his fate; the idea of becoming Phoenix is alarming to him both in terms of the practical implications, and also in terms of the way it would subsume him into the X-Men’s canonical big concepts.  A future self who reports years of chafing at his marginal status in the X-Men hardly fits with his self-image, and there are things to be done with that – even if the general theme remains very close to All-New.

But that aside, it’s a story of ideas that don’t quite fit together, told as confusingly as we’ve seen in years.  It’s an almighty slog for far too little reward.

Bring on the comments

  1. Leo says:

    When I ready the first issue, my first thoughts were “oh, they’re bringing the Phoenix back so soon? Either way, this seems interesting, i want to see how it continues”. At the next couple of issues, I keept my interest, thinking it would all come clear soon enough, but the truth is that it all went down hill after the first issue. And when I read the last one, i thought that this story needed more space, to be clearer. And though that could be true (the last two issues read extremelly rushed) and the art didn’t help making them more comprehensible, I now realise it just was a badly told story.

    It’s not a bad story per se, it could work but it was complex enough to warrant more planning, proper pacing, more explaning, much better art and maybe more issues.

    In the art department, the last issue was unreadable. if we took each panel out of the comic, it would look ok, but in sequential form, it failed miserably at letting us follow the flow of the story. the faces were all over the place, the ages of the heroes were as well (compare the first and the last issue and tell me how old Quentin is supposed to be).

    All in all, I am dissapointed by this ark. Thank God i didn’t spend time to read it twice. I did read a couple of the issues a second time (while waiting for the next issue to come out) but other than that, I won’t read it again

  2. FallenAngel says:

    Yeah, I got confused because it looked like there was a plot about a corporation basing itself around the Phoenix in issue #1, and then it turned into a story about the Askani.
    I was interested in the story-line, but had no idea where it was going.

    Part of the confusion for me, also, was that I kept mistaking Edan’s name with Evan. It’s probably not good to name two such important characters with such similar names. When you’re reading the book monthly, and forget details like “who is Edan?” in between, you start to read “Edan” as “Evan”, which makes it all the more confusing.

  3. Kenny says:

    Isn’t the storyline called “Tomorrow Never LEARNS”?

    That said, I’m finding this new volume of “Wolverine and the X-Men” too convoluted and bland to properly enjoy. I miss the silliness of when Jason Aaron wrote it.

  4. Luis Dants says:

    Is it just my twisted mind, or does it truly look like Wolverine barely registered in that story?

  5. Paul says:

    @Kenny: The issues give the story title as “Tomorrow Never Learns”, the trade paperback title is listed as either “Tomorrow Never Leaves” or “Phoenix Corporation”, depending on where you look.

    @Leo: I wasn’t going to take up time with the fill-in art on the final issue, but I agree that it doesn’t work. The sequential storytelling problems may be a result of what the artist was asked to draw, to be fair to him. But when I first read the opening pages (and noted the opening caption saying that we were in the future) I genuinely assumed that we were looking at Quentin and Idie in middle age, not as time-travelling teenagers. When your characters don’t even look within two decades of the right age, AND you’re doing a scene where a character meets his older self, you’ve got a problem.

  6. Suzene says:

    Yeah, gave the first issue a shot and ditched it by the second. As pointed out in the review, the X-Men are really doing time travel and predestination to death lately (not just in ANXM, but we’re still dealing with BOTA fallout in both camps), I didn’t find Latour’s take on any of the characters terribly interesting, the Phoenix never seems to leave, there was just no real hook to the tale unless you were already deeply invested in Quire, Evan, and Idie, and Fantomex as a teacher at the school is still an idea that’s ridiculous in all the wrong ways (and made more so for the fact that he booted Gambit out of the JGS for being a thief just prior).

    But the sales are already below those of the previous volume, so I guess not many readers were enchanted with the new direction either.

  7. Oscar says:

    i too got lost.

    After such a dire first arc, i can’t see this run lasting.

    I’m hoping that rather than being cancelled, someone will evolve this book into a New X-Men book. with Idie, Quire, and Evan in the cast as well. It seems that the seeds for a book like that are being planted in X-Men anyway.

    There is nothing wrong with having a junior X team book, but i feel that in the last 20 years its only been done right but the original bachelor/lodbell generation x run, and Kyle and Yost New X-Men.

  8. Magnusblitz says:

    I think there’s definitely some decent ideas in here, but the execution was horribly lacking. As Paul points out, a lot of this is due to just shoddy writing, with far too many extra characters (was Eden Younge really necessary?) and red herrings. Want to tell a story about Future Quire deciding he should rewrite the past to keep Idie? That sounds fine, but focus on that. Instead, it all gets info-dumped in the last issue rather unceremoniously.

    As a side note, I would also say it fails because neither Quire nor Idie are really interesting characters here, and Evan gets shunted off to the side as more of a plot device than a character.

  9. Suzene says:

    @Oscar – I think Gen Hope would at least have a place as an interesting story among the various junior X-Men incarnations if Marvel hadn’t stumbled at launch and flinched at closing.

  10. Niall says:

    A story about Quire, Evan and Idie’s futures could be interesting, but this story was – as Paul notes – confusing as hell.

    I like the idea of the boys who will turn into Phoenix and Apocalypse growing up as friends and being doomed to kill each other but this story was a mess.

  11. Nemo says:

    Aside from the story being unintelligible, I just didn’t care enough to invest and try to make sense of it.

    And Idie was written wildly out of character throughout the whole thing.

    Just terrible.

  12. The original Matt says:

    I want to like this. I thought about dropping the title at the end of the last volume, but I became invested in the characters. I like the kids. I’m happy to have Eye-Boy and Shark-Girl in my life. I really want to see where they take Evan.

    I’m also idiot enough to not drop the title after this first arc, even though I really should. The thing is, though, if this title doesn’t sell, those characters will probably be taken behind the barn and shot. If I “vote with my wallet”, I can’t be sure I’m voting against the title itself, and not the characters.

    And please get some decent fucking art on here. Please?

  13. I stopped after the first issue, because I was so disgusted by how completely Latour seemed to misunderstand every single character (most of whom I was a fan of from Aaron’s run) and where they were in their respective arcs. Based on this review, I’m really glad I didn’t stick it out.

  14. halapeno says:

    “The thing is, though, if this title doesn’t sell, those characters will probably be taken behind the barn and shot.”

    Better hope Kyle and Yost don’t get near them, then…

    Kyle: “Let’s kill Wallflower!”

    Yost: “Great idea! How does she die?”

    Kyle: “I think someone should shoot her!”

    Yost: “Brilliant!”

    Kyle: “Now let’s kill Jay Guthrie!”

    Yost: “Great idea! How does he die?”

    Kyle: “He gets shot!”

    Yost: “Genius! Oh, I got an idea too! Let’s kill Quill!”

    Kyle: “Great idea! How does he die?”

    Yost: “Somebody shoots him!”

    Kyle: “Brilliant! Oh, I got one more! We kill Boom-Boom, but then later we time-travel back and undo it. That’ll be an unexpected twist!”

    Yost: “That’s a fantastic idea! Okay so how does she die?”

    Kyle: “She gets shot!”

    Yost: “I fuckin’ love collaborating with you, man!”

  15. Dave says:

    I haven’t got the trade of Battle of the Atom yet, so I don’t know/remember if it had come up there, but how is the Phoenix force around when AvX killed it?
    Does anyone else find it deeply unsatisfying that killing Apocalypse isn’t an option now because he’d just resurrect? Wasn’t he trying to take Strye’s body in Cyclops & Phoenix (and shown to have a history of body-swapping) to avoid actual death? Didn’t he go into deep sleep at the end of (the originals as) X-Factor, and then again after X-Cutioner’s Song, to avoid dying? The character is now broken. And now the Phoenix is going the same way? (If it wasn’t there already). Or is there some kind of point about how Apocalypse and Phoenix are destined to oppose each other ’til the end of time?

  16. The original Matt says:

    Well, I’m sure there is some meta-point, but until now were the Phoenix and apocalypse ever enemies?

  17. The original Matt says:

    Oh, and the Kyle/Yost dialogue was great.

  18. Jamie says:

    “I’m also idiot enough to not drop the title after this first arc, even though I really should. The thing is, though, if this title doesn’t sell, those characters will probably be taken behind the barn and shot. If I “vote with my wallet”, I can’t be sure I’m voting against the title itself, and not the characters.”

    Yep, you’re an idiot.

    They’re fictional goddamn characters. They’re only as good as their creators. They’re not intrinsically interesting.

    You only like them because of previous writers. Those writers are gone. Get over it.

  19. Jamie says:

    “how is the Phoenix force around when AvX killed it?”

    Because it’s a goddamn phoenix. It comes back (unfortunately).

  20. Dave says:

    “…until now were the Phoenix and apocalypse ever enemies?”

    Rachel as Mother Askani was opposing Apocalypse in the future.
    AoA Jean in Uncanny X-Force was fighting death seed powered conquerors with the Phoenix force, iirc – though it confuses me what the significance of death seeds to Apocalypse is really supposed to be.

  21. joseph says:

    The bampfs’ design were totally off on this book as well.

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