THE BLACK VORTEX!  Its cosmic tendrils bring corruption and devastation wheresoe’er they wind!

THE BLACK VORTEX!  Its thirteen chapters offer a glimpse into the abyss of eternity!

THE BLACK VORTEX!  Playing goth, industrial and darkwave; women enter free before midnight.

Once the X-books got to dominate crossovers, or even skip them entirely, but today things have changed.  And so here the X-Men find themselves as junior partners in a thirteen-part crossover that in fact only includes three X-books – All-New X-Men #38-39, and Cyclops #12.  The remainder of the story wends its way through two book-end one-shots, Guardians of the Galaxy #24-25, Legendary Star-Lord #9-11, Guardians Team-Up #3, Nova #28, and Captain Marvel #14.

Precisely what the X-Men are doing here at all is not 100% clear.  Kitty Pryde has a reason to be here, because she already doubles as part of Star-Lord’s supporting cast.  Yet the rest of the All-New X-Men cast could scarcely be called vital to the plot.  The plot does things to some of them, so it’s not a skippable arc for All-New readers.  But the X-Men could be pulled out of the story entirely and not a great deal would change.  For that matter, so could most of the individual Guardians.  It’s really a Star-Lord and Kitty story that’s grown arms and legs.

Chapter 1 begins with a flashback that establishes the origin of the Black Vortex.  Twelve billion years ago, for reasons the story never returns to, the people of planet Viscardi inexplicably had a Celestial standing around ignoring them, and apparently stopping them from developing interstellar flight.  A woman called Gara has a good yell at the Celestial to complain about this situation, and specifically to complain that the Celestial doesn’t seem to understand that they long to leave their world, “drea[m] higher than your grasp”, and “know the cosmos”.  Of course, people who speak to Celestials should be careful what they wish for, because the Celestial responds by creating the Black Vortex, a mirror that turns people into cosmically powered-up versions of themselves.  This seems like a tremendously useful thing, so naturally everyone submits to it, goes mad, and tears the planet apart, leaving Gara as the last survivor of her race.  So we’re establishing pretty early that submitting to the Black Vortex is probably a bad idea.

Meanwhile, Star-Lord and Kitty discover that the Vortex has fallen into the possession of Star-Lord’s arch-enemy and dad Mister Knife, who is using it to power up his henchmen (but evidently has more sense than to use it himself).  I like the name Mister Knife, by the way.  For one thing, it doesn’t sound like the stream of random characters that aliens normally get as names.  And for another, before he was Mister Knife, he was J’Son, which is just terrible.  Mister Knife is also trying to persuade Thane to submit to the Vortex – you know, Thanos’ son.  All this feels very much joined in progress, and quite what Knife is up to with Thane is never particularly clear.  I assume it was all set up in earlier issues of Star-Lord, but re-establishing it for the benefit of crossover readers wouldn’t have hurt.

Anyhow, Star-Lord and Kitty steal the Vortex halfway through chapter 1, and then enlist the X-Men and the Guardians to help them keep it safe.  So that’s your crossover.  Cue the running around.  The bad guys come after them, and by the end of the opening chapter, Gamora has already submitted to the Vortex to obtain the necessary power-up to fight back.

Chapter 2 sees our heroes run away with the Vortex to engage in some intensive conversation about whether more of them should use it in order to power themselves up.  It’s a Bendis issue – did I mention?  In fact, as a starting point, this is a perfectly reasonable argument.  It’s obvious to us that the Black Vortex must be a bad thing, because (a) we’ve seen the flashback, (b) we know how these stories work, (c) identity-subverting transformations are always sinister, and (d) it’s called the Black Vortex, for Christ’s sake.  But Gamora seems fine, they could use the power to take on Knife’s guys, and there’s a pretty reasonable split between the moral purists and the more military-minded or simply pragmatic characters who see a useful magic trinket that shouldn’t go to waste.  And so Beast (the adult version) submits too – which again makes sense, because he’s a bit desperate for some cosmic insight that might help him unscramble the damage he’s done to continuity.

Chapter 2 ends with a really badly executed cliffhanger that looks as though everyone has been transformed by the Vortex, but turns out just to be everyone looking in the mirror.  Partly, this is visually confusing; partly, what’s actually happening is so anti-climactic that it doesn’t even register as a likely reading.

Chapter 3 sees Angel sign up for the power-up too – yes, this conversation basically extends through an issue and more, because they’ve got thirteen issues to fill.  Beast and Angel look decidedly sinister in their powered-up forms, and are starting to ramble about the magnificence of the cosmos and such forth.  So, you know, it’s pretty obvious where this story is going: power corrupts, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, yadda yadda.  At any rate, having set up the premise, it’s now time to start filling those pages.  So the heroes fight among themselves, and then the baddies come after them, and the three powered-up guys take the Vortex and leave.

From here – and yes, I know there’s ten chapters to go – there’s quite a bit of running around.  The heroes are hiding from the bad guys.  The Kree steal the Vortex, so the three powered-up guys go after them to get it back.  Power levels fluctuate wildly according to the demands of the plot – if the Vortex needs to get captured the cosmic heroes can be beaten by some random Kree soldiers, otherwise they get very angry and can tear planets apart single-handedly.  Something or other is going on with Thane and Knife but like I say, nobody ever bothers to explain their relationship to X-Men readers, so I’ll assume it doesn’t matter.  And in the manner of crossovers that need to find busy work for a large cast, our heroes split up to deal with assorted troubles.

Occasionally Venom gets a line of dialogue and reminds us that he’s in the Guardians of the Galaxy these days.

And there’s a genuinely important bit for X-Men readers where, after much cosmic contemplation on the issue, cosmic Beast verifies that continuity is indeed irretrievably broken.  This has nothing in particular to do with the Black Vortex plot, though – in fact, it’s positively counter to the Black Vortex plot by implying that Beast already did far worse damage before the Vortex got anywhere near him.  So the story ends up moving on.

The Vortex is stolen again.  Nova has it for a bit.  Hala gets destroyed.  Nova takes the Vortex home to his family for tea because we’ve reached an issue of his series and he has to get the spotlight for a few pages.  He nobly resists the temptation of the Vortex.  The baddies get the Vortex back and Thane gets powered up, which I’m sure I’d care about if anybody had bothered to explain to me who the hell he is.

And then, somewhat randomly and out of nowhere, in Chapter 9 Mister Knife covers the planet of Spartax in amber and gives it to the Brood as a present, so that they can try to infect everyone on the planet with Brood eggs.   The deal is apparently that the resulting Brood army will conquer planets for Knife in return.  This now becomes the main threat for the rest of the story, and the focus switches pretty much entirely to rescuing the population of Spartax.  Star-Lord gets a really bizarre speech in which he acknowledges that the Vortex is a curse and laments ever having stolen it from his father in the first place – which rather overlooks the fact that if they hadn’t stolen the Vortex, surely Knife would have just got to the same basic plan a bit quicker?

The final issue of Cyclops crops up here, and we’ve talked about it before – it wants to play its final issue as Cyclops’s coming of age, and so it goes completely against the entire thrust of the story to date, and has Cyclops submitting to the Vortex as a heroic move where he overcomes fear.  Iceman and Groot tag along for the power-up as well.  But with the very next chapter, it’s Captain Marvel, and of course she bravely resists the temptation, in the latest iteration of a scene that the crossover is beating to death.

Ultimately, in the manner of big crossovers, there is an enormous fight.  The remaining heroes have to decide who should use the Vortex one last time to save Spartax.  Eventually Kitty does it because she doesn’t want to and is therefore the least corruptible – the old “the only person you can trust to run the universe is the person who doesn’t want the job” routine.  Kitty’s cosmically-enhanced phasing powers free Spartax, and then we get an epilogue in which most but not all of the powered-up heroes give up their powers, which nobody had previously suggested was an option.  We’re told that this will still have unspecified consequences, but none are immediately in evidence.  Then Gara – remember her? – carts the Vortex away for future sequel use.

And… that’s it.

Hold on.  Until the Spartax-in-amber thing showed up in chapter 9, wasn’t this story about a cursed power-up trinket and characters deciding whether to submit to it?  Because a bunch of characters did submit to it, and by all appearances, nothing much happened, other than they got more powerful.  And while the cosmic characters were acting all distant and weird during the story itself, the ones who choose to retain their new powers at the end (like Warren and Kitty) seem to be back to their normal personalities anyway.

So it all feels as though the story kind of lost interest in the whole Black Vortex thing about two thirds of the way through, or simply didn’t have a pay-off for it and transitioned into the amber stuff instead.  And sure, Kitty phasing a planet free from amber is a nice visual, but the whole thing wraps up with epilogues setting up for sequels, and Kitty giving us a monologue about how Earth is in space too.  Since when was this story about the artificiality of the distinction between home and abroad?

At thirteen issues – longer than the entire run of one of the participating titles – this is far too long.  It’s really a Star-Lord arc that needed some guest stars in order to have people to power up, and certainly the finale is all about Peter and Kitty.  For the rest of us, there are a couple of vaguely interesting ideas in here, but a lot of repetitive corridor-running to kill time, building to a final third that’s pretty disconnected from the first two.  While it’s more coherent than crossovers of its scale tend to be, you’d struggle to say it managed to tell a satisfying story that rewards its sprawl.