The X-Axis – 25 July 2010
This is the weekend of the San Diego Comicon, but to be honest, I usually just wait until the dust has settled and read the round-ups then. However, I see Marvel have announced Generation Hope, an ongoing series which sounds like it’s the latest incarnation of Generation X. I’m not… altogether sold on that title, which makes it sounds like a teenage version of the Alpha Course, but it’s written by Kieron Gillen, so there’s a pretty strong chance it’s going to be great.
The same article also features the horrifying words “four Wolverine titles”, but it turns out that that’s counting the Daken and X-23 books. The two actual Wolverine titles, from the sound of it, are the relaunched Jason Aaron title, and something called Wolverine: The Best There Is, presumably the replacement for Wolverine: Origins. Charlie Huston and Juan Jose Ryp are an interesting choice of creative team and the series might well be decent, but considering how Wolverine: Weapon X stumbled out of the gate, I can’t help wondering if Marvel are massively overestimating what the market will support.
Anyway. Quiet week for X-books, quiet week for major releases generally…
Amazing Spider-Man #638 – The first part of “One Moment in Time”, the story nobody wanted to see! Now, I think the Spider-Man books on the whole have been vastly improved by the revamp of a couple of years past. But the decision to include an in-story explanation for the change in history has created an awkward dilemma. At some point they needed to address the question of what happened instead of Peter marrying Mary Jane, since it’s important to the history of both characters. It’s an open sore in continuity which had to be dealt with sooner or later. It doesn’t follow, however, that anyone particularly wants to read that story. After all, it’s not like “One More Day” was any good.
So by writing this story himself (and drawing the framing sequence) editor-in-chief Joe Quesada isn’t grabbing the glory so much as taking the flak, and I suspect he’s well aware of that. What you actually get in this story is a framing sequence with Peter and Mary Jane talking about old times – in which Peter may be wildly off model, but the acting is frequently great, with Quesada showing that he can still do emotion better than most. That’s followed by what can only be described as a revised version of Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21, the wedding story itself. It’s a modified reprint (including some 14 pages of the original), which basically takes advantage of the “race to the church” structure of the plot to nudge things the other way and send the story off the rails without too much effort.
I don’t recall the solicitations making clear that there would be quite so much reprinted material in this issue, but to be fair, it’s a 42-page story (plus a 2-page back-up) priced at $3.99, so it’s not like they’re charging extra for the reprinted pages. It’s actually more enjoyable than I was expecting – which is to say that I was braced for something as ponderously awful as “One More Day”, while this is passably entertaining with its interpolations of the original issue, and Marcos Martin’s art on the additional sequences. Still, it remains more of a necessary explanation than a story – though that may have been inevitable.
Battlefields #8 – This is the middle chapter of “Motherlands”, the sequel to Garth Ennis’ earlier story about female Russian fighter pilots in World War II. While Ennis loves his war stories, they do tend towards exercises in male bonding. A female protagonist necessarily moves him away from that, and what Ennis seems to be mainly interested in here – aside from a fairly familiar “getting over the death of a loved one” story – is writing a military force which, for a change, isn’t exclusively male. As a character, Anna’s not much different from Ennis’ usual male leads, but then arguably, nor should she be; it’s the relationships with the other characters that change. Ennis isn’t always as convincing doing romantic subplots, but it’s good to see him varying the formula.
Dark Wolverine #88 – The “Dark Reign” stuff is over, the relaunch isn’t for another couple of months… let’s do a crossover with Franken-Castle. If you haven’t been reading Punisher, well, it’s gone completely off the deep end of late. They did a Dark Reign tie-in story where Daken showed up as a guest star, killed the Punisher, and chopped him up, only for a bunch of old horror characters to revive him as Frankenstein. No, really. It’s drifted a bit from the “vigilante who shoots drug dealers” routine.
Now, plainly, Franken-Castle is stark raving mad, though part of the joke is to play it dead straight and commit wholeheartedly to the concept as if it were utterly normal. When he shows up as a guest star in another book, though… you’ve got a bit of a tone clash, let’s say. This issue starts off as a standard Daken story – he’s in Japan looking to replace the Muramasa Blade with another weapon that can kill Wolverine. So presumably that’s going to be the subject of his next arc. And then the Punisher shows up looking to kill him. Cue big fight. It comes off as a grinding gear change. I can’t quite figure out whether the creators think Dark Wolverine is already a crazy romp along the lines of Franken-Castle (it isn’t), but I can’t help feeling Daken really needs to react to Frank as something much, much stranger, instead of making a passing reference and taking it in his stride. Maybe they’re trying to play it straight, but it feels more like a standard Punisher guest appearance that pays lip service to the current direction.
New Mutants #15 – One of those “before we were so rudely interrupted” stories that you sometimes get in the aftermath of a crossover. Zeb Wells and Leonard Kirk bring the title characters back into the series, and pack them off on holiday to get to know one another again. Which is for the best, because Wells is good at the character details, and the team dynamic ought to be the thing that makes this series stand out from the other X-books. Our new villains are, from the look of it, a bunch of soldiers who’ve only just managed to get back to Earth after being teleported to Limbo by Magik a good while ago. They’re partly demonic. They’re a bit mad. And they’re out for revenge. They’re a great idea for a bunch of New Mutants villains, since (a) they’ve sort of got a point about Magik, and (b) the visual of a bunch of half-demon soldiers is enjoyably ludicrous. This should be a fun story. Minor glitch: the story also uses Pixie, but doesn’t seem to have noticed that she and Magik sort of reconciled at the end of the Hellbound miniseries, which undercuts the end of a story that only just finished. Still, plenty to like here.
Welcome to Tranquility: One Foot in the Grave #1 – Gail Simone writes a sequel to her cancelled WildStorm series about a superhero retirement village. I could have sworn the WildStorm universe had had an apocalypse or something, but evidently not in this series, and thank heavens for that. This is actually a direct continuation of an earlier plot, with the mayor having dubiously achieved an acquittal on the murder charge thanks to a lack of direct evidence and his world-famous reputation as a hero. As before, this series works by striking an odd balance between small-town drama and superhero trappings, in a way that’s often explicitly absurd – such as the defence lawyer wearing a cape and mask over his suit. Tranquility takes the utterly bizarre and makes it normal, simply by making sure that everyone’s so bizarre that the baseline of weird shoots up – easier said than done, but Simone can make this sort of thing work. Artist Horacio Domingues seems to be principally emulating the style of the earlier series rather than imposing his own identity, but for a sequel, that may be for the best.
X-Factor #207 – Another book returning to normal after the “Second Coming” crossover (though X-Factor at least continued to feature its core cast). The Baron Mordo subplot is tied up and seemingly brushed aside in the opening pages, in a slightly awkward way, but the issue moves on to start a new arc where the team get hired to retrieve an ancient magical artefact for a client whom we all know is Hela, but they don’t recognise. Given the character who returns to the cast at the end of the issue, I suspect this isn’t quite the random guest appearance it first seems. It’s a bit unfortunate that the cover completely blows Hela’s identity, but then I suppose it doesn’t hugely matter. The tension here isn’t that we don’t recognise Hela, it’s that X-Factor don’t recognise her. Also in this issue: another completely random guest star who you wouldn’t expect to see in this book (but then, as the semi-detached X-book, X-Factor is best placed to make use of the resources of Marvel’s New York City), and some deep and meaningful conversation between Rictor and Shatterstar. There’s something about that relationship that isn’t quite working for me at the moment – I think perhaps it’s a vague sense that Peter David is advancing a carefully thought out argument rather than just writing them as a couple. Then again, Shatterstar’s such an odd character that his romantic subplots probably shouldn’t come naturally to him, and maybe that’s where the slightly stilted feeling comes from.
I enjoyed much of Morrison’s run, but if you look back at it, I think you’ll see that it really wasn’t all that. Outing Charley was long overdue. He has a knack for creating new young mutants who were interesting. The most exciting thing about the run was the sense of change that came from knowing he had enough weight as a creator to make things happen that would be allowed by what was a notoriously conservative editorial office.
But a good chunk of what he did does not really qualify as brilliant. Mutant explosion, secondary mutations, the return of Cyclops (done before him but for him), X-Corp offices everywhere suddenly – these were lazy hand-waving just to put the book where Morrison thought it should be. I’d include the destruction of Genosha in this category but it was earned and had to be done.
He gave the impression of a superstar guest who thought his greatest contribution would be kicking over all the familiar set pieces and leaving to great applause. For every great thing he did, there was a handful epic misfire. Weapon Plus, Magneto going out a drug addled joke, the White Phoenix Room, the new Shi’ar Imperials – did he not realize that these elements were just confusing already confusing concepts? Did Weapon X really need an immortal, snortable baddie at the center of it?
Judging him by the craziness of his ideas and the size of his balls alone, you will always end up with a positive impression of his run. But if you judge him a steward of the franchise, honestly he’s batting about .200 which is average – not exceptional.
Kid Zemo
Weapon Plus, Magneto going out a drug addled joke, the White Phoenix Room, the new Shi’ar Imperials
All these things were awesome. Fuck, drug-crazed Magneto was the last iteration of Magneto I found interesting or tolerable in any form; ever since, no one’s done anything with Magneto other than have him stand around and do the “is he good? is he bad? ehh? can you tell?” business again, while barely bothering to even attempt to make a case for the character’s relevance.
Awesome as in ‘totally insane, really ballsy, and completely out of left field’? Absolutely, I agree wholeheartedly.
Awesome as in ‘totally appropriate, logically consistent with what came before, and leaves the line better in the long term’? No, on all counts.
A lot of what Morrison did was part of realizing his vision of what the X-Men should be. He may be right that Magneto is over and I certainly wouldn’t argue that anything that’s been done with him since has justified the reversing of the story, but does he not understand that the way he killed off Magneto was unsatisfactory and would HAVE to be reversed?
Magneto should go out big, not chumpy. Writing him out chumpy made sure the death would not stick, because it is not a satisfactory resolution to his story. For as awesome as it supposedly was, it drastically missed the dramatic resonance required. I feel the same about Sabretooth but we’re talking about Morrison here, not Loeb. Weird that they made the same miscalculation.
Oh, and having Wolverine come out of nowhere and pop his claws into Magneto as the killing blow is lame and places him on par with Lobdell in Eve of Destruction just a few years earlier, not in some other league.
Kid Zemo
Magneto went out “chumpy”? Because I remember Magneto brilliantly infiltrating the X-Men, and then tearing New York the fuck apart in that story, so I’m not sure how that’s true.
One of the major points of Morrison’s run were that Xavier and Magneto represented outdated ideals and no longer had a place in the contemporary mutant discourse. Magneto’s ultimately shown that he was much more powerful in death, as a symbol, than he was in life (“the best thing you ever did was die”); and actually, this is absolutely fitting for Magneto. From as early as X-Men #1, Magneto’s status as a symbol has stood at odds with the man himself several times, and the “Magneto was right” t-shirts underscored that nicely.
I also disagree that Morrison didn’t do anything particularly impressive. Following Claremont, nobody did anything but emulate him (and I sincerely don’t think there was actually a single great X-Men comic between the end of Claremont’s run and the beginning of Morrison’s). Morrison essentially redefined and purified the entire franchise. He took the aspects that worked, repaired them and updated them, and he tossed the aspects that didn’t. The mutant explosion, mutants as an object of cultural fascination (rather than hatred), the uniforms, the school (as an actual school), the Phoenix, Xorn/Magneto… I think was Morrison did with the X-Men was really important.
I thought Morrison’s run was hit-or-miss, but Magneto “brilliantly infiltrating the X-Men” was actually my biggest problem with it, because Morrison basically informed us that Magneto’s ruse was brilliantly executed without ever actually showing it to be so. He simply declared that the X-Men fell for it (or, more to the point, wrote it as though even he, the author, was unaware that Xorn wasn’t what he seemed) even though it made no sense. These are supposed to be smart, savvy characters who’ve known – and even lived with at times – Magneto for years, possess superhuman senses, are well aware that there are many shapeshifters and illusionists among their enemies, and have been shown to be slow to trust anyone in the past.
It requires us to believe that Magneto can not only speak flawless Chinese and English with a flawless Chinese accent; and make himself appear to be decades younger and a different ethnicity (sure they never saw his face, but did no one ever see his skin? You can’t get a job in an American public school district without someone seeing enough of your skin to give you a hepatitis vaccination; you’d think the X-Men would be even more cautious); and disguise his smell, voice, build, and posture well enough to fool Wolverine; but it requires us to believe the X-Men never noticed that their resident healer didn’t actually have healing powers and weren’t even slightly on edge about the fact that this mutant whom Cerebro had never somehow never noticed before was conveniently immune to telepathy.
But the worst part was how, once Magneto revealed himself, everyone kept saying “We should have known – that ‘miniature sun for a brain’ thing didn’t even make sense!” I’m sorry, but using “comic book science” as a handwave to have characters accept random nonsense without question and then later informing us that, no, it was just random nonsense and they were stupid for not realizing it – that’s just dirty pool.
I do think some of Morrison’s stuff WAS good, but that little bit just rankled me.
I’m not a big Morrison fan, I think he’s very Emperor’s New Clothes, but I liked his X-Men run apart from Weapon Plus (Bachalo totally miscast for a start, maybe would’ve worked if he was still drawing like he did in early Gen X/Death minis) and Here Comes Tomorrow, which I thought was genuinely awful. I even liked Kordey’s art.
I still want a “Magneto was right” T-Shirt though. I loved that.
I actually got a “Magneto was right” t-shirt off ebay. I loved it, as only some people get the reference. Then it got wrecked in the wash (it was pretty cheap). Sad face!
I really loved Morrison’s run (the Jean vs Emma issue is a classic for one), and I agree that he gave the X-Men a much needed house cleaning. However the Xorn reveal, though kinda cool, didn’t make much internal sense, and I also didn’t like the way he treated minor characters with casual disregard (killing off Darkstar, some off-character moments for M and so forth). But I can overlook them for the bigger picture and the fact that overall it was a fanastic run (go back and look at Austen writing concurrently for the dross we had to put up with!).
What was worst of all though is just how quickly the editorial staff reversed EVERYTHING (“Xorn wasn’t Magneto at all!”) with no proper explanation. Insulting to the readership.
I was actually okay with the Xorn reveal. He didn’t actually do anything as Xorn that Magneto could have done by manipulating nanites with his powers of magnetism (and we also saw what appeared to be a destructive aspect of his powers during the fieldtrip story, which is also obviously well within his capabilities). And Xavier couldn’t read his mind, because he was “blinded by the sun beneath [his] mask”, but could supposedly see “a radiant star of pure thought,” which is something I accept that Magneto could manage to project.
Is Magneto knowing or being able to learn Chinese improbable? Sure, but it’s not impossible. Wolverine’s having been unable to sense him is really the only argument that I would agree presents a plothole.
Ah, I mean none-sentinels.
Uh… Nano-sentinels.
I’ve always said, given the times that these things were released, that Morrison should have been on Ultimate X-men, and Millar should have been on New X-Men. Morrison could have done all his crazy world changing mutant stuff, which was the best aspect of his run, without needing a House Of M to undo it. It was always going to need to be undone, given the shared universe.
Why was House Of M needed, exactly?
Mutant culture being what it was under the Morrison run, and Marvel’s desire to return to the “status quo” every few years.
Kind of hard to return to the classic X-men setup with where Morrison had taken us.
Marvel don’t like to move forward. So the used HOM to take it all the way back. In fairness, HOM sucked, and they went too far back, but magic is more reader friendly than genocide to get mutant numbers under control.
Switching Mark Millar with Morrison on New X-Men wouldn’t have worked at all, as Millar has admitted that when he was assigned Ultimate X-Men he knew next to nothing about the franchise, as he never read X-Men comics before. Ultimate X-Men had definite flaws (as Paul pointed out numerous times over the years) that would have been exacerbated if he had to work on the main series. Plus it’s doubtful Millar could’ve given the book the same conceptual shot in the arm it needed at that precise moment in time as Morrison did.
and something called Wolverine: The Best There Is, presumably the replacement for Wolverine: Origins. Charlie Huston and Juan Jose Ryp are an interesting choice of creative team and the series might well be decent, but considering how Wolverine: Weapon X stumbled out of the gate, I can’t help wondering if Marvel are massively overestimating what the market will support.
Huston’s Wolverine book is a twelve-issue run — and he finished the last script something like a year ago, so presumably it’ll be a pretty self-contained story (I think Marvel’s press release said forward-looking, no more playing around in Wolverine’s past) that more or less does its own thing.
“Wolverine’s having been unable to sense him is really the only argument that I would agree presents a plothole.”
So the only reason why you can’t believe Magneto was able to mask his scent is because of the unbelievably over-powered Wolverine?
Okay, Millar on NXM may have well sucked. Much of his Ultimate run did. I just would have loved to have seen Morrison playing in a field that didn’t have the shared universe so he could’ve really gone over the top with his world changing mutant stuff. No HOM needed.
Millar in the Ultimate verse was one of the main reasons Ultimate X-men and The Ultimates were sooooo popular during the time. Let’s not forget that Ultimate X-men was selling just as much, and sometimes more, than the majority of the X-books out at the time precluding “New X-men.” You might not like his stuff personally, but the numbers and fan love isn’t on your side. That said, I would hate to see Millar writing a mainstream X-book because it is apparent he barely knows anything about them as seen in his “Old Man Logan” stuff, which was full of errors (Jubilee being the last surviving mutant in Wolvie’s rage… even though the art showed her as dead twice, iirc, etc.), and he seems to get off more on pushing the boundaries and speeding through plots rather than making great use of the stuff he’s given (rape being his most used device these days).
HoM was a ridiculous story and the only good that came out of it were some of the later minis that fleshed out the world (Why? Dunno). Even worse is the fact the X-offices never made the most of it, rarely followed up on any of the depowered characters outside of a mini here and there, and some odd character moments involving Iceman and Lorna, and it really got tiresome after about a year because you could tell the writers had no idea where to go… and still don’t to this day. The mutant pool did need cleaning though, I suppose… I just wish it didn’t take an AVENGER EVENT to do so.
“he seems to get off more on pushing the boundaries and speeding through plots rather than making great use of the stuff he’s given (rape being his most used device these days).”
In what exactly?
Rape was a device he used in both Old Man Logan (implied between Hulk and She-hulk) and Ultimate Comics: Avengers (except in that series, he added in a scene involving a baby being tossed out a window). Rape is actually a common theme for this writer, and if you google him, you’ll find out more than you ever want to know, including people claiming his writing has racist undertones because of comments he makes like:
“While down at the shops, I saw a black guy with [Down syndrome]. Amazing, as this is something my friends and I had queried for years. Is DS genetically localized to Caucasians. Yes, I’m now about to waste 20 mins phoning a couple of my pals to say so, but now me appetite has been whet and I’m curious if there are any Chinese or Indian Downs Syndrome people out there. Given that Scotland is almost entirely white my chances of seeing one here are slim, but I’m certainly on the look out now.”
“I pitched this to DC for a laugh years back. The idea was that, like Death of Superman, we had Rape of Wonder Woman; a twenty-two page rape scene that opened up into a gatefold at the end just like Superman did.”
Because rape is funny… and a plot device he uses frequently for whatever reasons(See: Apollo in “Authority”). That’s all I’ll say about that. I’ll leave you to google if your curiosity is wet.
As far as blowing up the X-Men a la Avengers Disassembled, and as divisive as Morrison’s New X-Men evidently was, I’d much rather take lessons from the latter than the former.
I don’t see a need to smash the status quo and rebuild the franchise from the ground up, but I would like to see an editorial commitment to No More Events for a couple years, and just let each book set up and tell a complete story on its own terms, without having to worry about being sucked into mega crossovers and events. Let the writers work out smaller crossovers with each other if the stories they’re telling organically call for them, but otherwise let’s stop the string of new status quos and event, the bumping from Messiah CompleX to Manifest Destiny to Utopia to Nation X to Necrosha to Second Coming, and just let each book have its core cast of characters doing its own thing for a medium- to long-term.
A while back, I read Millar’s Ultimate X-Men in trades, and then I read the first few trades of his Ultimates run (as I recall, Ultimates 2 was coming out verrrrry slowwwwly, so I decided just top wait for the next trade and never got back to it), and I really enjoyed them. X-Men was pretty fun (haha, except for the extended torture scenes), and I thought Ultimates was pretty damn good at the time, even.
I also liked Kick-ass when it started. And I started reading 1985 and Fantastic Four and Old Man Logan too, and pretty much all of these series seemed promising to me for a minute and then went way downhill very fast. And even understanding how all of these books were connected, I mean, the whole exercise was so pointless it didn’t even matter. He happened to be writing all of these books, so why not go to lengths to connect them to make no real point?
After I decided I was done with all of these books, I still decided to grab the first issue of Nemesis, which was lame enough I didn’t feel the need to go further.
I guess my point is, yeah, Millar is not so great.
@mastadge (“I would like to see an editorial commitment to No More Events for a couple years, and just let each book set up and tell a complete story on its own terms, without having to worry about being sucked into mega crossovers and events.”)
Well, there is this comment from Joe Quesada: “The Heroic Age started with a manifesto that came from doing a lot of big company-wide crossovers…and we just needed to get off that treadmill. It felt like we were just feeding the beast: one big event, then another big one, and then it became a matter of diminishing returns. So the challenge was to take the individual books and see each of them as an individual franchise. The idea is that while we may not have one big tentpole event, we’ll give you ten great stories to choose from. It gives our talent a chance to breathe a little bit, too.”
Thank you, Mr. Quesada for allowing your talent to breath and laying off the events by publishing 106 “Shadowland” tie-ins, 83 X-Men vs. Vampire tie-ins, 19 Deadpool on-goings, 47 Wolverine comics, and 13 Rulk/Hulk/Shulk titles.
Finally, the poor sods can breath!
Well, that’s the thing – every superhero suddenly has or has become part of a “Family” so they can have crossovers within themselves.
“Thank you, Mr. Quesada for allowing your talent to breath and laying off the events by publishing 106 “Shadowland” tie-ins, 83 X-Men vs. Vampire tie-ins, 19 Deadpool on-goings, 47 Wolverine comics, and 13 Rulk/Hulk/Shulk titles.”
Hahaha. Fair enough.
I’m just going to point out that the sense of smell, olfactory senses, and whatnot, are electromagnetic phenomena.
So yes, MAGNETO could jam that.
Or he could alter it, whatever.
The Chinese accent was the only problem I would have….
But he did go out incredibly chumpy… he got killed in five pages, yes?
“The Chinese accent was the only problem I would have”
He was talking through an enclosed metal helmet, he probably sounded somewhat like Darth Vader, anyway.
sense of smell, olfactory senses, and whatnot, are electromagnetic phenomena.
The nerve impulses, sure, kind of. But the actual initiators of those sensations – i.e.: wee lumps of Magneto sloughing off his Montalbán butt, flying through the air and getting lodged in Wolverine’s hairy hairy beak – aren’t.
(I mean, at the subatomic level, eehh ~)
You’d need to be giving it GATTACA to hide the lifetime of ozone-stank and new potato that Magneto must’ve accumulated.
NOT THAT I WANT TO THROW FUEL ON THE FIRE.
//\Oo/\\
Hi Paul,
I couldn’t find an e-mail contact here, so am resorting to this. I sent you comic review book a few years ago, and would like to have a word with you about participating in a possible new edition. Please e-mail if you’d be interested.