RSS Feed
Mar 27

Uncanny X-Men #19

Posted on Monday, March 27, 2017 by Paul in x-axis

Another year, another relaunch.  Coming off three issues of Inhumans vs X-Men tie-ins, the X-Men titles now find themselves with one issue to call it a day before returning as something else in April.

This is, shall we say, less than wholly satisfactory.  For Uncanny X-Men, the crossover issues had no shared through-line.  They were separate one-shot stories which advanced other storylines from the book but brought them nowhere especially close to resolution.  And indeed, this issue makes no real attempt to resolve them.  It’s a further one-shot in which Psylocke tries to make good on her pledge from a few issues back to hunt down Magneto if he turned on the X-Men.

Where does this leave the rest of Uncanny X-Men‘s storylines?  Well, about halfway through the book, Psylocke gets to spend a few panels telling us what all the rest of the book’s cast are up to now.  In a nutshell, Mystique is off doing Mystique things; Xorn is off doing Xorn things; Sabretooth, M and Fantomex have all wandered off to pursue their private unresolved stories from the last couple of issues; and Angel is going to look after all the “sleeper” mutants.  There’s your wrap-up.

If that’s really intended to serve as the capstone then it’s abrupt, to put it mildly.  But it’s hard to know whether it is – Cullen Bunn is sticking around, to write X-Men Blue.  And while that’s basically the successor title to All-New X-Men, it’s also got Magneto in the cast, so it could well be picking up some of the other storylines that are left dangling.  Who knows?  Who can say?

One way or another, this issue feels like an awkward attempt to impose some sort of resolution on a series that got guillotined.  And it tries to do that by picking up on the running theme throughout the series that none of the other characters entirely trusted Magneto.  It always seemed like only a matter of time before he crossed a line, or manipulated them too far, and they all turned on him.  Because Inhumans vs X-Men saw him ally with Emma Frost to start a war with the Inhumans, that’s the catalyst which brings it all down – but it doesn’t work, because it doesn’t feel like something that emerged from any of the build-up.  It’s an external storyline, so it feels like the book was brought to an end from outside.

Psylocke quit the team a while back, promising to kill Magneto if he went off the rails.  That fits well enough with Psylocke’s current established character, as somebody addicted to violence and susceptible to signing on for anything she can convince herself is a morally legitimate outlet for her impulses.  Having signed on with Magneto for precisely that reason, despite all the glaring warning signs, she’s arguably still driven by the same urges.  Magneto gets a bit of inner dialogue reflecting on whether all of this is less a matter of moral righteousness on Psylocke’s part, and more a case of projecting her own self-loathing.

For that matter, Magneto himself – consistent with Cullen Bunn’s usual take on the character – is simultaneously aware of the moral lines he has crossed, and convinced that it’s demanded by the greater good.  And of course there’s a plausible interpretation where he too is just rationalising an outlet for his mutants-first philosophy.

All this is well and good.  It’s an interesting enough angle on both characters, and it’s a welcome reminder that years of careful rehab have finally salvaged Psylocke from the continuity quagmire and restored her to having a clearly defined, dramatically interesting personality.  But it’s not really enough to justify an issue-long fight scene, however nicely Edgar Salazar draws it.  The entire actual plot of this issue pretty much boils down to “Psylocke shows up to kill Magneto, and does, but after she leaves Elixir and Exodus come along to heal him”.  The second half of that sentence takes the final three pages.  There’s a lot of fighting before then.

Nor is it great as the final issue of a series; we seem to be showing up after the proper story finished somewhere off panel.  This won’t matter quite so much if there are clear plans to pick up the dangling stories – and with Bunn sticking around, there may well be.  But as it stands, the impression is of a book that had longer term plans which never came to fruition because they were derailed by a premature relaunch.  In the bigger picture, I welcome the change of direction, but it feels like there were better ways of drawing a line under this title.

Bring on the comments

  1. Kenny says:

    I kinda feel bad for the creative team of Uncanny. They were doing a wonderful job with intriguing characters and stories I felt had real weight to them, but they were ultimately screwed by the crossover…and their final issue left them with limited options for resolution as a result.

  2. Xercies says:

    I sometimes wonder why anyone would be a mainstream comics writer. You have this idea for a story and it gets ruined by having to write around crossovers and then the series gets cancelled because the line is going into a different direction again. Sometimes feel sorry for them.

  3. Suzene says:

    Bigger paycheck and higher profile. And if you can do even a passable job with company-owned work, despite the constraints, then you have a chance to grow the audience for your creator-owned projects.

  4. Person of Con says:

    Much as I loved the Spurrier X-Force run, I think the “gritty X-team” notion has been getting diminishing returns for a while, and could probably stand to fallow for a bit.

    Granted, you could say the same thing about the whole x-line, but we’ll see.

  5. Brendan says:

    @Person of Contact, giving the ‘gritty X-team’ a rest seems unlikely. Cable’s coming up in the next Deadpool movie as a soft launch of a X-Force franchise. Although I agree with you, that’s no match for the power of ‘synergy!’.

  6. Chris says:

    The original X-FORCE wasn’t that gritty

  7. Paul says:

    Depends what you mean by gritty. In plot terms, they were always the team who resorted to tactics the regular X-Men wouldn’t touch. But in terms of the style of the comic, yes, early X-Force was dayglo neon and deliriously excitable.

  8. Voord 99 says:

    I’m on Marvel Unlimited, so behind.

    But Cullen Bunn’s Uncanny has never grabbed me in quite the way I would expect. Part of it is probably that I just can’t bring myself to care about Psylocke. But really, I’d have preferred more of his Magneto solo title to continuing its themes with these characters.

  9. ASV says:

    The main things that were gritty about original X-Force were that Cable had a ridiculous collection of nonsense guns and that he was a huge asshole.

  10. Voord 99 says:

    Thanks to Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, I read the introduction of Cable in New Mutants for the first time just a few weeks ago, and in 2017 it’s hilarious how Tough and Gritty (and Legendary, although he’s never appeared before) original model Cable is obviously supposed to seem, while not actually being that at all.

Leave a Reply