X-Men Blue #10-12: “Toil and Trouble”
With Secret Empire out of the way, X-Men Blue returns to its storylines in progress. We’re not quite pretending here that Secret Empire didn’t happen; the plot point of Scott and Jean’s mental link remains, and gets followed up. But quite how it came about, we’re not talking about. The really awkward stuff, it seems, we’re just going to ignore. It’s the “No Man’s Land” solution, as I suspected.
So instead, this is mainly a Beast story, as Cullen Bunn continues to follow up the storyline established by Dennis Hopeless on All-New X-Men about Hank’s dabbling in the occult.
The basic idea is pretty sound. Unable to compete with the scientific advances that have been made since his own time, Hank is drawn to magic simply because it can restore his status as a holder of esoteric knowledge. It’s not about power, but simply soothing his ego. Of course, characters who go down this sort of route are asking for trouble, and while Hank may know more about magic than anyone else in the regular cast, he’s still just an enthusiastic amateur by the standards of real magicians. So this is all going to go badly wrong.
Fair enough. This three parter is, I guess, meant to keep things ticking over, and to bring a new character into the regular cast. In his pursuit of magical knowledge, Hank is taking lessons from the Goblin Queen of all people. That’s more through desperation than stupidity, in fairness. Even so, she predictably betrays him and uses him to open a bunch of portals in the X-Men’s Madripoor home, through which she brings a bunch of Goblin Queens from other dimensions and a bunch of alternate X-Men who are already under her control. Cue fighting, which largely means Scott and Jean beating a tactical retreat and then returning with the help of the Raksha (the local vigilante superteam from a few issues back).
And, you know, it’s okay. Whether in writing or art, there’s not much going on in terms of style to leave an impression. It’s decently paced, it looks fine, but it all feels a bit interchangeable. To be fair, there are two different artists working on this three parter – Giovanni Valletta on part one, Douglas Franchin on parts two and three. Valletta’s work has a bit more kick to it, but given that he came on halfway through, who knows how long Franchin had for these issues. They’re entirely solid, at any rate.
The plot, on closer inspection, is a bit ramshackle. We’re mainly interested in Hank, and the Goblin Queen is just here as a foil. So her plan seems to be nothing more than to cause a bit of gratuitous chaos, and to bring some alternate versions of herself to Earth because… she feels like hanging out with them, I guess. It’s not exactly complex, but it’s the sort of thing that can work as a chaotic villain for other characters to bounce off. But the story starts off telling us that Hank is somehow under her control, only to turn around at the end and decide that, no, he isn’t.
I get the idea, I suppose. Hank has to save himself and reject the temptation of staying with Madelyne. We’re probably meant to see this as some sort of turning point in his story. The problem is that there’s a chunk of plot in the middle where Madelyne has already betrayed him, and isn’t obviously holding out the hope of any sort of hidden knowledge, but Hank is just acting like a transformed demon and siding with her anyway. And then… he’s just kind of not, and he’s rejecting her, and so on. It’s an awkward transition and it doesn’t really work. From the way the rest of her henchmen are behaving, the idea is meant to be that they aren’t actually being mind controlled, they’re just desperate in one way or another, and hoping that she’ll deliver on promises to them. But that doesn’t really come across in anything that happens with Hank.
Instead, it’s a dynamic that gets shunted over to one of her other alternate-universe X-Men, namely Bloodstorm. Yes, from Mutant X. Or another version of the same character, at any rate. This is the vampire version of Storm, and her story is clear enough: she’s there hoping to be cured of vampirism, and even though she realises that Maddie is stringing her along, she can’t quite bring herself to turn on Maddie just in case she’s wrong. That’s a nice enough idea, particularly given that it’s only used for two issues. For some reason Maddie’s treatment of Hank is the last straw for Bloodstorm, though that’s a bit harder to follow; the idea is probably meant to be that seeing Maddie manipulate Hank convinces Bloodstorm that she’s being treated the same way, but that’s not really how it plays out on the page.
Bloodstorm seems to be sticking around, which is a weird choice. With Jimmy Hudson already added to the cast, this seems to be expanding the concept from “extra versions of the Silver Age X-Men” to “duplicate X-Men more generally”. If that is the direction, I’m not convinced. But we’ll see where it’s going.
Oh yes… Jimmy. To keep the focus on Hank, the plot packs him and Angel off back to Colorado to investigate Miss Sinister’s experiments. This gets a fair amount of page space over the three issues, but it really boils down to establishing that she’s doing some sort of evil experiments based on the DNA of the Ultimate Universe’s unique, man-made mutants; part of that involves doing unspeakable things to the Blob; and the word “mothervine” crops up a bit. It never really seems to dovetail with the A-plot in any particular way, but it keeps up the momentum for that storyline.
Overall, it’s fine. It feels like it’s heading somewhere, which is worth a lot; and the destination still feels like it could be interesting. But the details of how we’re getting to that destination aren’t bringing out all the potential here.
Marvel sure does know how to water down their characters.
It wasn’t enough that there were multiple people going around as Spider Man, in one form or another.
Now, we need to bring in all sorts of alternate universe versions of characters.
“Hey, do you love Wolverine? Well, you’re going to love having four different versions of Wolverine!”.
I’m sure no one thought that we actually needed a second version of Storm, especially considering how badly the original has been used in the past few years.
It’s like marvel puzzle quest, with its 4 wolverines, 5 spideys, 3 venom, etc.
Now I’m imagining a line wide crossover where a mysterious new super villain goes around manipulating events so that various incarnations of the same hero stand side by side and vanish.
I kind of feel that if you can’t do a story with just the original five X-Men, even if they are five American WASPs, there’s not much point in having this title at all.
Wolverines was only a little ahead ahead of its time. Soon Marvel will achieve the dream — complementing having Logan on every team by having a team made up entirely of versions of Logan.
What I find funny is that “younger versions of existing characters plucked from an alternate past” was exactly the same premise of “Teen Tony” from Avengers “The Crossing.” What a great idea that was.
And honestly, I’m surprised anyone really gives a crap about the original X-Men. They have historical significance, sure, but they still sucked. The stories were mostly mediocre to crap even by Silver Age standards, and the book finally got cancelled. Even the original X-Factor series didn’t get good until they replaced the whole cast.
I know I’m a broken record, but it’s a damn shame that the X-kids from New/Young/Generation Hope/etc. have all been shunted to the background so we can get the umpteenth status quo of Jean being afraid of the Phoenix, Cyclops struggling with responsibility, etc. etc. ETC.
Vo0rd 99, they already DID have a team of all Logans during the Exiles run.
It’s simply not right to compare this original X-Men story to the Teen Tony story.
That was just about the nadir of comic books.
At least the teen X-Men were main characters in comic books back in the 1960s.
Tony Stark was a man in his 30s when he became Iron Man. There was no history of Tony Stark as a teenager fighting villains before that horrible, horrible story.
I’m sorry. Nothing can ever get that bad, I don’t believe. Even Chuck Austen or Howard Mackie never reached such absolute levels of pure trash.
Comparing a mediocre story that isn’t quite working, but at least the creators are trying, to an abomination that no one should ever attempt to read, I just will not accept.
” With Jimmy Hudson already added to the cast, this seems to be expanding the concept from “extra versions of the Silver Age X-Men” to “duplicate X-Men more generally”.”
I’m reading the UK reprints, which are currently in the period where the All-New X-Men comprised the four of the Time Flung Five, X-23/Wolverine, Genesis and Idie. So back then it was “duplicate X-Men and villains and also Idie for some reason”. (I remain convinced the original plan was to replace Jean with Hope, but they decided that was maybe a tad obvious.)
I only said it was the same premise. The same stupid idea. I wasn’t likening the quality of “The Crossing” stories to the quality of X-Men: Blue stories (not that I’ve read any of them).
And Tony never having operated as Iron Man while still in his teens wasn’t solely what made Teen Tony a stupid idea.
But with all that said, Blue remains the best mutant team book that’s being published right now. I have hopes for Generation X and Soule’s Astonishing is interesting, but so far Bunn’s the best of the bunch.
Yeah, i know I’ve said it before, but I absolutely hate the multiple versions of different characters just wandering around, bumping into each other, jumping through different realities as though this is a completely normal way for things to be. It destroys any semblance of the MU and its characters being relatable to real life.
Blue the best mutant team book?
Someone’s not reading Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
The other thing about characters like Bloodstorm and, most likely, Hudson is that they just kind of reinforce the notion of the book being rather low stakes. But maybe that’s just because I can’t get invested in the 05 anyway, and still think the story should have been centered on the emotional impact they had on the originals (such as in the Iceman solo).
Also, Bob is not wrong about IDW’s TMMT being the best mutant team book currently on the racks.
I think they sort of worked when Bendis was writing them (before everything meandered into a non-conclusion), and I quite liked their relationship with Kitty Pryde.
I’d also be prepared to say a few words in favor of Cyclops in Champions. A book which generally feels like a person of, well, the age of Mark Waid trying to write teenagers. But Scott is rather good in it. There’s something effective about taking a character who’s so defined by the X-books and saying, hey, what’s it like for him to have friends who *aren’t* mutants and to show off his personal qualities in a context where things aren’t so [expletive deleted] grim all the time.
But in general, I think there are a couple of things that are problematic with the O5. One of them is what Si mentions above – they are terribly WASP characters, created in the Silver Age, who just wouldn’t be anything like that if they were created nowadays. This makes the “nostalgia for a simpler, more virtuous time” that’s built into them a little bit poisonous.
Another problem is that there are too many of them. There’s one distinguishing story here, and it’s that of the innocent young person who encounters the tarnished, corrupt world of their future self. That’s a good story, and more than that, it’s a good X-Men story: it’s a nice little variant on the standard-issue X-Men future dystopia, one in which the present *is* the future dystopia.
But you don’t need five characters to tell that story. Any one of the five will do. You have to find something that makes them worthwhile for storytelling as individual characters.
Scott and Jean sort of work, because of Dark Phoenix and the way in which Adult!Cyclops became the central character in the overall X-line in recent years. Plus the situation gives some extra interest to the classic “will they, won’t they” romance. Bobby has been given some extra interest by revealing that he was gay, although arguably that’s already served its most interesting purpose by serving as a catalyst for his adult counterpart’s transformation
But Hank and especially Warren are horribly surplus to requirements. Hank had a halfway decent case when it looked as if his future self had broken time by bringing him back, although this is basically just Dark Phoenix, and we already have Jean. I am not convinced that making Hank a sorcerer is really a solution – it’s a superficial move that essentially just has him sit down in a different chair in a superhero universe. And Warren is basically the unbelievably bland boyfriend of a far more interesting character.
I am generally against killling off characters – they’re somebody’s favorite, and no-one will ever believe that it will stick. But I would definitely kill off Warren as serving no useful storytelling purpose. And I would probably kill off Hank, too, despite my affection for the character,
And that’s the opinion of someone who, thanks to Dez Skinn’s views about what should be reprinted, actually fell in love with the original X-Men before serious exposure to what sane and normal people think of as the real X-Men. If I think the O5 aren’t working, that’s a problem.
It’s not that I think there’s anything inherently wrong with the time displaced original X-Men. I just think that you should either tell a story about the original 5, just them, with as big a supporting cast as you like, OR you can have a team of assorted young X-Men. It’s when you try having a foot in both boats that the entire purpose of the comic comes into question.
I do think there’s no end to the stories you can tell about teenagers trying to get out of their parents’ shadows, carve their own identity in the world. It’s even more interesting if the parent figures are actually the future characters themselves. But you can’t tell that particular story with Storm-but-she’s-a-vampire. What is she pushing against?
Alternately, a comic with just a group of underused characters with whatever motivation you like can work, allowing for the poor market. But then why have the original 5 muddying things up?
The third option is just do something else entirely. Cyclops can be in Champions, Marvel Girl in X-Men, Icemanboy can be in the solo, and the others can fade into limbo or whatever. Then you can use the free title to tell the story of Colossus and his plucky apprentice Negasonic Teenage Warhead or something.
Moo: What I find funny is that “younger versions of existing characters plucked from an alternate past” was exactly the same premise of “Teen Tony” from Avengers “The Crossing.” What a great idea that was.
The idea goes back further than that. Keith Giffen and the Bierbaums did the exact same idea during their late 80s-early 90s, “Five Years Later” run on Legion of Super-Heroes. It spawned the first iteration of spinoff title Legionnaires starring the younger, teenage versions of the Legion.
The third option is just do something else entirely. Cyclops can be in Champions, Marvel Girl in X-Men, Icemanboy can be in the solo, and the others can fade into limbo or whatever.
I basically agree, but I think there are a couple of other options.
1) I think there’s room for a team of all young mutants that includes one and only one of the O5. It’s the same basic logic that each member of a team book has to bring distinctive storytelling possibilitiies to the table. So you could inject say, Jean into a team composed of Laura, Rockslide, Anole, Hellion, and Idie and designate Jean as The One Who’s Wrestling With The Fact That She’s From The Past.
2) I think there’s value from a shameless shipping perspective to keeping Scott and Jean around each other, especially if they don’t actually get together. Yes, it’s soap-opera angst — this is the [expletive deleted] X-Men. It’s classic soap-opera angst.
Admittedly, my view on this is probably slanted by the fact that I would go to my grave in defense of the position that Scott and Jean in the original run is the single most plausible version of the “Two people are madly into one another, but neither will say because each thinks that the other can’t possibly be into them” romantic subplot that is so frequent in early Marvel. Because (a) they’re supposed to be teenagers, and this is exactly how teenagers behave and (b) Scott really does have good reasons for believing that he might be an unattractive romantic possibility, and he habitually behaves like such a grim, humorless, bastard that it’s quite believable that Jean thinks that he doesn’t like her very much.
(Worst example? Possibly Janet Van Dyne [“How could he be interested in a flighty socialite like me?”] and Hank Pym [“How could she be interested in a fuddy-duddy scientist widower like me? She’s so with it!”] — although admittedly Janet has what Jean [and Jane Foster] do not, a personality.)
Looking at the comments here about the O5 all being WASPs, I’m starting to think people are going insane about diversity.
Having more ethnicities, sexual preferences, gender identities etc. In books is good but that doesn’t make having a book where all of the characters are of one ethnicity bad by default. It’s not even problematic. In some cases, it actually makes sense.
If you had, say, a Scottish team book, it’d be odd if you had a black character, a Jewish character and 2 asian characters on the team given Scotland’s demographics unless there was some sort of explanation for it. Does that mean that having a Scottish team of X-Men would be problematic?
Okay, so we’re now saying that five random American teenagers all happening to be WASPs is perfectly plausible because there’s a lot of white people in Scotland.
There’s more to the cultural politics of representation than demographic accuracy. It’s worth providing minorities with images of heroes who look like them, and worth providing majorities with heroes who don’t, for reasons that have nothing to do with looking up the exact demographic percentage of people of Bangladeshi descent in Peebles.
But in any case, the O5 aren’t Scottish, they’re American, and, you know, huge multicultural country with a specific problematic history of defining WASPiness as unmarked generic Americanness and vice versa. I’d argue strongly that it’s not a problem in their original context, in which the X-Men are young adults at a tony prep school in upstate New York in the early ‘60s. They should be damn WASPy – it would arguably be occluding their privilege to represent the original X-Men as including minorities (even in the subtle way in which Ben Grimm was being coded as Jewish while not being officially Jewish).
This does start to become a problem the moment they become a metaphor for minorities (with the introduction of the Sentinels), because then the absence of actual minorities starts to look dubious – it’s hard to argue for inclusiveness on the level of metaphor if you’re excluding on the literal level. And it’s a real problem if you’re using them in 2017’s America – much less white, and much more sensitive about representation, for reasons which have to do with a specifically American history of representing American heroes as default white.
A team of Scottish X-Men would be exotic and different in this context – not quite the same thing to begin with, whatever their ethnic make-up. Although I will say that one of the things that bothers me about the Claremont/Davis Excalibur, more than it did at the time, is that now that I live in America – I’m from Ireland – I see the extent to which the twee, “‘ello, ‘ello, ‘ello,” version of Britain that it trades in is closer that I realized to Americans’ serious beliefs about what Britain is like. Blame PBS. Do not get me started on what BritBox encourages Americans to think British culture consists of.* So, yes, I would view a Scottish X-Men with some trepidation, although thanking my stars that at least they weren’t Irish, in which case they would all be from some tiny little village and also members of the IRA.
*Endless documentaries about the royal family.
“Okay, so we’re now saying that five random American teenagers all happening to be WASPs is perfectly plausible because there’s a lot of white people in Scotland.”
1. They’re from some undefined time in the past. The Marvel timeline is wonky but they act like they’re from the 1960’s rather than 1990s which would make more sense given their reactions to the modern world. In the 60’s, wasn’t circa 85% of the US population counted as white? If anything the more problematic point should be that 80% of the team are male given that statistically having 20% of the team female is less statistically likely than having an Asian person on the team. Hell, in the mid-1990’s, the population statistics were still something like 75% white.
2. If you’ve read Runaways, there’s a funny Nico quote when she talks to Alex:
“I don’t know Alex, these “disguises” make us look like those politically-correct, multi-ethnic gangs that only rob people in bad TV shows.”
There’s a really weird tendency to throw diversity into unlikely scenarios – like what Nico describes.
If you set a story about 5 friends in Green Bay where about 80% of the population is White, 4% African American, 4%, 0.5% Asian American, 4% Pacific Islander and 4% Native American, it just seems crazy to have a team made up 5 people from each ethnicity. Even though you can say that if you wanted to represent all of the different backgrounds within the city, in reality there’s a lot of geographical concentration and informal segregation. It sticks out as artifice.
Now thankfully the X-Men have a pretty natural way to have representative casts due to the nature of mutation and the fact that they operate a boarding school where people can come from all around the world yet for some reason they mostly come from the US – must be something in the water.
But the point is, it is perfectly okay to tell a story with a team that is not ethnically diverse. It’s nice when it’s done and easy to do with the X-Men but in the same way that you can have an all-black team (Black Panther & the Crew), a team made up mostly one ethnicity (Ultimates/FF) or a diverse team (Champions), people don’t need to be afraid that they’ll catch Trumpism from reading a copy of X-Men Blue because it doesn’t even have a token ethnic minority character.
“In which case they would all be from some tiny little village and also members of the IRA.”
And red-haired alcoholics.
More seriously:
“There’s more to the cultural politics of representation than demographic accuracy. It’s worth providing minorities with images of heroes who look like them, and worth providing majorities with heroes who don’t, for reasons that have nothing to do with looking up the exact demographic percentage of people of Bangladeshi descent in Peebles.
But in any case, the O5 aren’t Scottish, they’re American, and, you know, huge multicultural country with a specific problematic history of defining WASPiness as unmarked generic Americanness and vice versa.”
I agree with all of this.
I don’t know exactly when it happened but it feels like at some point in the past 5 years, we went from a point where introducing characters who are under-represented in mainstream comics became a good thing to a point where some people seem to disapprove of books that do not do these things. Then you’ve got the knuckle-dragging loons who whinge when books like America or Ms Marvel come out.
Can’t we just read the bloody books and judge them on their art, plot, characterisation and even their message?
“This does start to become a problem the moment they become a metaphor for minorities (with the introduction of the Sentinels), because then the absence of actual minorities starts to look dubious – it’s hard to argue for inclusiveness on the level of metaphor if you’re excluding on the literal level.”
Exactly. The X-Men, more so than most superhero teams, should make an effort to include minorities (and underrepresented groups in general; Singer got a lot out of the mutants = queer metaphor) because without that resonance, they’re just another superhero team whose members share the same basic origin story. It’s the second X-Men generation that rocketed them into popularity and part of that success is that Claremont made all he could out of a team whose members were from all around the world.
I would rather enjoy it if they made an effort to have more mutants from different countries and used it to explore different cultural attitudes towards mutants as a way of exploring different attitudes to various minority statuses, the different forms of oppression, fetishisation, etc. They tried it a little with Idie but didn’t do it very well.
The greatest attempt to do the mutant metaphor well wasn’t an X-Book or even a comic or comic book movie but Wild Cards.
@Person of Con
Marvel as a company looked at Morrison’s X-Men run, which featured one of the best portrayals of mutants as a functional actually representative minority, and decided that there were now too many mutants to be able to use them to tell stories about minorities. And that the solution was to reduce the total number of mutants to around 200.
@Billy — that’s certainly true. Morrison offered a blueprint on how to make the metaphor resonant in a way that would actually provide real world commentary, and Marvel ran in the other direction as fast as they could.
@Billy @Person of Con:
Thirded.
I feel that the conservative turn post-Morrison may have been one among a number of factors that helped push the X-line into comparative irrelevance by the mid-2010’s. The strength of Whedon’s Astonishing run as an exercise in nostalgia covers the fact that being an exercise in nostalgia is a problem for the X-books in itself in a way that it’s maybe not for, e.g., Superman. There’s been some great stuff in the X-books since then, but it’s always felt as if the training wheels are still on.
That being said, I think it’s not easily separable from the overall phenomenon of the end of Jemas era, when books were encouraged to do their own thing irrespective of what was happening elsewhere, there were no line-wide crossovers, etc. Arguably you could only ever have had Morrison’s New X-Men in an era like that.
And there were downsides. The same era brought us Chuck Austen. It all depends on *who* you tell “Do whatever the [expletive deleted] you like,” to.
Austen wasn’t the “do what you will” writer; he was the “traditionalist” writer chosen after Joe Casey crashed and burned. Casey was the real “be careful who you allow free reign” example. Austen was sort of like Frank Tieri: someone brought in to do stock action and soap-opera plots who turned out to be incompetent even at that.
To some extent, the conservative turn post-Jemas was really just Joe Quesada taking the reins, and then setting about restoring lots of things to his nostalgic vision of the Bronze Age.The X-Men and Spider-Man got it the worst, but we also got some truly lousy Iron Man stories out of it.
But the X-Men also suffer from something that’s driving the debate here: it’s hard to explain why you’d *need* mutancy as a metaphor now that there’s a wider understanding of diversity and a growing demand for direct representation of real-world minorities.
Now, if you want a story about coming out, you simply have a character come out as gay, for example. So, for Iceman, the subtext of Iceman’s central scene in X2: X-Men United is now just the text of the current Iceman series.
This doesn’t mean there’s no value in the use of mutancy-as-metaphor, but it does mean that writers have to be smarter about what they metaphorize and why.
Morrison was on the right track with “mutant culture” and hyperbolized stuff about performing minority status or combatting appropriation, and there was some merit in Whedon’s “cure” plot before that was tossed out in favor of reenacting 1980s-era Claremont themes and plots.
And that’s the real problem: no one assigned to the X-books seems to know what the purpose of telling an X-Men story is in the 2010s. Other books are tackling minority representation. And there’s no film revenue in it. What have they got except fannish pastiches of the book’s glory days, turning the “hated and feared” metaphor up to 11, or “shock” status quo shakeups?
It really says something that so many of the most distinctive X-books of recent memory were things like Jason Aaron doing an exaggerated comedy version of the “school for superheroes” idea and folks like Peter Milligan, Rick Remender, and Marjorie Liu doing deconstructive takes on the iconic elements, character archetypes, and stock plots.
X is eating itself.