The X-Axis – 17 July 2011
Well, what an interesting week it’s been. The Murdochs must be praying for the news cycle to move on – where’s a good natural disaster when you need one?
Just in case you didn’t spot the housekeeping notice a couple of posts down, we’re recording the next podcast tomorrow evening, so it’ll be up soon enough. Oh, and as promised last week, I will get around to doing a separate piece on X-23 #12. Not that X-23 ever exactly tears up the comments thread, but the story did read a lot better the second time through, so… we’ll come back to it. Same deal with New Mutants #27, which is the last part of “Unfinished Business”.
It’s the start of Schism proper, following the all-important Prelude to Schism miniseries which has done so much to build goodwill from the fans. More on that below.
Oh, and there’s a couple of first issues from last week that I didn’t get around to reviewing. So we’ll cover them too in this busy, busy week.
All-Nighter #1 – This is a five-issue miniseries by David Hahn (the creator of Private Beach, not this guy), which apparently started life as a Minx commission before getting axed along with the rest of the imprint, and now winds up seeing the light of day at Image. I didn’t know it was a Minx book until I googled it, but it makes perfect sense; it’s about a vaguely directionless teenage girl who’s about to start art school but actually spends her time hanging around at an all-night diner and committing petty crimes. Which is very Minx indeed, isn’t it? Hahn describes it in interviews as “slacker noir”, which is a pretty good description. We might be doing this in more detail on the podcast (or we might not), but suffice to say it’s a good first issue. Even if the story wasn’t originally designed for this format – and the end of issue point does feel a bit arbitrary – there’s plenty of incident here and a strong introduction of a rounded lead. Hahn’s art here is much more angular than I’ve seen it in the past, but it’s a good look for the story, and it plays to his strengths with body language and expression. If you liked the Minx books, you’ll probably find this worth a look.
Daken: Dark Wolverine #11 – Daken continues his efforts to seize control of the Los Angeles underworld. Or that’s the theory. In reality, he’s more interested in these awesome drugs he’s found, which get him high even despite his healing factor. While Heat’s supposed to be highly addictive, it’s not simply a case of Daken getting hooked. The idea is more that he’s bored by how easy things are for him (you and me both, mate), and likes the drug as a novelty and a challenge – the challenge being to plough on with his notional goal of conquering the city, which he doesn’t actually care about that much, all while completely out of his skull. Meanwhile, there’s the obligatory tough local cop investigating him, though she too seems to be more excited by the challenge than actually bothered by anything Daken might be up to.
This is a new direction for a character who desperately needed one, and it’s also a more interesting direction than attempting to humanise him. Instead of trying to convince us that Daken’s got a decent side after all, Rob Williams is embracing wholesale the idea that he’s irredeemable. His approach is to dial back on Daken’s hypercompetence and ability to outwit everyone, by putting the character in a position where he could be undone by his own complacency and overreaching. The two artists are also used well, with Matteo Buffagni’s clear and straightforward work setting the general tone, and Riley Rossmo’s drug sequences going completely off the deep end in terms of lurid colours and general scrawl (but without ever becoming hard to follow). After many months of searching for a hook on the character, this is finally turning into an interesting comic.
Vengeance #1 – Joe Casey’s work for Marvel and DC is never going to reach the demented extremes of his creator-owned work, but it still tends to stand out as eccentric. Despite the title, this is essentially a Teen Brigade comic. Back in the Silver Age, the Teen Brigade were ham radio enthusiasts who used to help Rick Jones track down the Hulk. They’re an early version of the character type that was later reinvented as the plucky hacker, and I would guess it’s the “kids subverting things from behind the scenes” aspect that interests Casey.
Incidentally, this is also a de facto X-book, since the current Brigade includes the depowered Angel and Beak, as well as somebody at least claiming to be Stacy X. (She showed up as a completely depowered character in New Warriors – alongside Angel and Beak, so it’s unlikely Casey’s unaware of it – but she seems to be back to normal here.) Magneto shows up in a major role, and even Sugar Kane, a Britney Spears stand-in from Casey’s Uncanny run, is dusted off for a reprise. The cast of Last Defenders are in here too, as Casey seems to be carving out his own little cult niche of the Marvel Universe.
The main plot of the first issue sees the Brigade rescue a mysterious kid from a decommissioned bunker – from the look of him, a teenage version of Jim Starlin’s none-more-seventies In-Betweener – while the Brigade also fend off Magneto’s attempts to police the mutant population. Much of this is actually a backdrop to set up the mystery of who the lead characters are and what they’re up to, though. Casey’s Magneto is a half a mile out of character compared to the regular X-books, and I can’t quite figure out whether that’s a case of crossed wires or an intentional plot point. A lot of this clearly isn’t meant to make sense in the first issue; a one-page flashback to the Red Skull meeting Hitler has no discernible connection to anything else, for example. But presumably that’s going to become clear in time.
Stories like this stand and fall on whether the pay-off is worth it, and we won’t know that for a while – but Vengeance is certainly an offbeat and more than unusually ambitious superhero comic, and likely to be interesting if nothing else.
Witch Doctor #1 – Ah, high concepts. This is basically House meets Dr Strange meets The Exorcist – in other words, what if you had a guy whose job was to investigate demonic possession and Cthulhu-esque nastiness, but who approached it all in a rigorously scientific, obnoxiously confident way? After all, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to apply scientific method to these things – magic as a story device works precisely because there are rules which have to be discovered.
My main criticism would be that the influences (House in particular) are maybe a little too explicit, but it’s a fun idea, and nicely conveyed in the first issue. There are some great one-liners – “I’ve only seen one case this bad in the literature, and that was in the Bible!” – and inventive use of genre standards; and Lukas Ketner’s art does great demons as well as echoing a vaguely seventies horror feel that works for the book. I have a nagging feeling it might be a one-joke premise, but I’ll try the rest of the series and see how it goes.
Wolverine #12 – In which – you’ll never guess – Wolverine fights some more of the Mongrels, and we watch another flashback to the back story of a member of the Red Right Hand. This one isn’t the relative of a villain; he’s just a madman who blames Wolverine for something plainly outwith his control. While that makes for a nice descent-into-madness angle in the flashbacks, and good fodder for Jason Aaron’s black comedy, I have to say that I think we’ve got the point by now.
By making the members of the Red Right Hand so clearly deluded and wrong – when there must be so many people who genuinely were wronged by Wolverine – Aaron has missed the opportunity to give them nuance. But he must know that; it’s surely a deliberate choice. These guys are a maniac cult and Aaron doesn’t really want to compromise his B-movie vibe by giving us any reason to sympathise with them. If anything, the point of these flashbacks seems to be to erode whatever sympathy we might otherwise have had. I kind of get that, and I see how it fits with the tone of Aaron’s work… but I still think this arc is labouring the point.
X-Men: Schism #1 – And so at last we come to the big X-Men story of the summer, also by Jason Aaron. In fact, on one view, since this leads into an ongoing X-Men series also written by Aaron, it’s effectively the first issue of that book.
But first we must say a few more words about the much (and rightly) maligned Prelude to Schism, a book of which it can truly be said: if you only skip one X-Men series this year, for god’s sake make sure it’s this one. Even read with the assumption that it was heading somewhere, Prelude was a rather boring comic. Now, both Aaron and editor Nick Lowe have seen fit to confirm that the mysterious threat in Prelude is in fact nothing whatsoever to do with Schism, and apparently will not be resolved, either in Schism or anywhere else. It was, in other words, a “Prelude to Schism” solely and exclusively in the sense that that was its title. It’s a random selection of flashbacks making no point in particular, hung on a framing scene that turns out to connect to nothing at all.
Now, as a completist, I would have bought the thing anyway. And ironically, in some ways I’m quite relieved to know I need never think about it again. But readers who bought the thing in the understandable belief that it might be in some way connected to Schism have every right to feel aggrieved.
Lowe, at CBR, responds to the understandable questions as follows:
This is something that I’ve talked about in every interview about “Prelude” that we did. “Prelude” was a thematic precursor to “Schism.” It is not chapter one as far as the story goes. It was very important to us that the story of “Schism” start with #1, but there was a lot of ground to cover to frame the coming events of “Schism.” “Prelude” is about leadership in general and specifically Cyclops’ leadership. It was important to us to have something dealing with that in a small package so readers didn’t have to read the last four years of books to get it all.
This is an ill-advised response. For one thing, blaming the aggrieved customer is never a good idea, even when it’s true. For what it’s worth, I can’t find any interview where Nick Lowe is quoted saying any such thing. The closest I can find is a Tom Brevoort interview on CBR from February where, to give him credit, he did indeed say – some way into a lengthy column primarily dealing with Fear Itself – that:
Paul’s story functions as an overture to the event. It’s not connected so much on a plot level as it is on a thematic level. It sets the table for what’s to come from July to October, which is when the next X-Crisis will hit.
But even the sort of reader who ploughs through CBR articles looking for information about upcoming books – and even today, they’re not all hardcore internet fans, you know – might also have read an interview with Paul Jenkins in March (“X-Men: Prelude” sets the next major X-Men event in motion…” – not a quote from Jenkins, to be fair, but clearly the understanding given to the interviewer); or the promotional article on Marvel’s own website (“…sets the stage for the next major mutant event of the Marvel Universe”); or the solicitations (“Before Messiah Complex came Endangered Species. This is the prelude to the X-Men Event of 2011”).
Incidentally, in his CBR interview, Jenkins suggested that the nature of the impending threat was something he wasn’t allowed to talk about (“I can’t say right now what it is”) – which makes me wonder if it was actually meant to connect to the plot when he wrote it.
At any rate, Lowe’s implied suggestion that readers should somehow have figured out that the mysterious impending threat in Prelude to Schism had nothing to do with Schism, despite the title of the book and the way it was promoted, is little short of extraordinary.
Schism itself is a Jason Aaron story, with the shiny polish of Carlos Pacheco’s art. Cyclops and Wolverine go to an arms control conference where Cyclops tries to deliver an inspiring speech about decommissioning the Sentinels, and ends up in an argument with a thinly disguised Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, before Kid Omega shows up and everything goes to hell. Personally, I think bringing Kid Omega back was a mistake in the first place – it entirely misses the point of his death scene in New X-Men. I’ve seen some negative reaction to the character being used, but he was actually brought back into circulation a while back in Endsong, so that ship’s sailed. Since he’s around, there’s no harm in using him in this role – and, given the depleted set of characters since M-Day, few alternative characters who could have easily served the required role of mutant anarchist.
The other part of the story introduces a new villain – Kade Kilgore, a 12-year-old sociopath who murders his arms dealing father and seizes control of his company. It’s every bit as subtle as it sounds, and a very Jason Aaron concept. In a genre which all too often takes itself far too seriously, Aaron is refreshingly willing to introduce outright absurdity into his superhero comics, and Kade is a definite example of that. I suspect Aaron, like Grant Morrison, sees the more ridiculous side of superheroes as a positive strength to be embraced, and uses them in a way which is likely to be misconstrued as mockery.
But even Aaron only gets away with this stuff because he normally manages to strike a balance between craziness and character, and because he tends to be writing characters like Wolverine or Ghost Rider where his B-movie aesthetic fits well. Tonally, I’m not quite sure this works on the X-Men proper, especially in an “event” mini – the X-Men never actually had many oddball villains, aside from Arcade and Mojo, and my initial reaction is that Kade is jarringly out of place in a series like this. Maybe I’m wrong; perhaps an injection of lunacy is precisely what the X-Men need, and it’s certainly a good thing to see Aaron sticking to his own voice rather than toning down for the crossover. There’s something about the idea I like, if only its unrepentant implausibility – I’m just not convinced I like it here.
While I raised an eyebrow on Aaron’s trademark lunacy showing up in an event book like this, I can’t deny it made it a lot of fun – “I married a Doombot” is a great one-liner, for example.
The first issue of Vengeance mostly confused me, but not in a terrible way. Dragotta’s art was nice at least.
Coincidentally, I read Steve Englehart’s Silver Surfer run today, which concluded with a big fight with the In-Betweener. Very Starlin-y.
The publishers need to stop with having super smart kids being the new fad in comics. Amadeus Cho was fine, Val and Damian Wayne, ok.
But then you’ve got about 6 other smart kids in FF, you’ve got this Kade Kilgore showing up (who also is able to sneak into Utopia to free Quire), on top of Red Robin introducing a 10 year old assassin named Cricket who is apparently an even better fighter than Cassandra Cain, who is pretty much the #1 or #2 fighter in the DC Universe today, it’s making what was once an interesting idea just seem blah. Instead of every Marvel team having a mutant on it in the 90’s, now it’s every team having a wunderkind.
Maybe super kids is someones idea of how to attract kids to reading the books.
And a super smug scientist guy investigating magic sure sounds like dr. Thirteen to me.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Kade Kilgore character. He was entertaining, and that’s all that matters when there’s such a dire need for new X-men villains. His only flaw is that there’s nothing explicitly that connects him to the X-men, or mutants; he could easily be an Iron Man villain as well.
Actually, his connection to the X-men is that he became Black King of the Hellfire Club, which is surprising, because there’s no mutants left who could comprise its Inner Circle, or even non-mutant former members left. One wonders what problems they could possibly have with the X-men.
Er, if the tile is “Prelude to …”, then you can’t blame the readers for thinking it is part of a larger storyline. You can’t expect everybody to read online interviews and find out it isn’t. Either call it something else, or post a comment IN THE COMIC that it hasn’t anything to do with the BIG EVENT itself. Of course, then nobody would buy the damn thing…
Daken does have it too easy. The problem is, when they show him outwitting everyone, especially other established heroes, it’s like they re trying too hard. And it doesn’t make him look all that smart…it just makes everybody else around him just look dumb.
But I didn’t want to revist Poptopia.
I’m really upset about the Prelude situation. Sell me a monstrously boring four issue mini; shame on me. Sell me a monstrously boring four issue mini under false pretense of being related to a story I want to read; shame on you.
I just can’t handle feeling like I’m being laughed at by the editors for buying their work, especially at these prices. I may be a shameless completist, but I’m not a shameless completist who’s too impatient to start waiting for pointless minis to hit the quarter bin.
Pretty sure Stacy X died in that New Warriors book — mostly just remembering that because it was generally agreed that _someone_ had died in a scene, but it was is was so badly told that it took some double-checking to be sure on the if and who. But I’ve got no problem if that’s being ignored. Bonus points if the Austen portrayal gets swept under same rug.
That New Warriors story was absolute rubish. It was insulting that Grevioux and Alonso thought it a great idea to take a bunch of fan-favorite characters, then give them all completely new power sets and personalities and call that a comic book. The faster Casey igores those stories, the better.
the prelude stunt is pretty disrespectful towards readers. what on earth were they thinking.
on the bright side, at least the threat in ‘schism’ seems to be more interesting than ‘somethings coming! it may be too late to evacuate!’. that setup didnt really make sense anyway. they have two mass teleporters (four if you count hope and rogue).
on schism #1: i like that the sentinels are back, but having wolverine and cyclops getting rid of about ten of them in just one panel (granted, its a double splash page, but still) might not have been the smartest move. sentinels need to be written as dangerous and strong, otherwise everybody looks stupid, mutant haters for building sentinels and mutants for fearing them.
Kingderella: I think its entirely fair to have two of the most senior members of the X-Men swiftly deal with a handful (well, technically six) outdated robots without necessarilly limiting the potential danger of Sentinels in general.
The nature of the arms conference setup suggests that many of these countries, including whoever brought some in a truck, have old and outmoded sentinels (akin to the older nuclear and otherwise weapons often called for dismantling at actual conferences) that have simply never been decomissioned. That the artist depicted the classic sentinel design (and, what’s more, the original human sized versions thereof) also suggests that these are shoddy mark I or II sentinels.
To say nothing of the fact that for two hundred people to stop the entire world arsenal of sentinels (most of which are presumably newer and more dangerous models than the ones snuck into the arms conference), those two hundred would all have to be dealing with numbers a lot larger than three a piece in short order.
@kingderella
“the prelude stunt is pretty disrespectful towards readers. what on earth were they thinking.”
I’m pretty sure it involved running to the bank with all the fan’s money while yelling ‘SUCKERS!’ as they disappeared into the distance. This is Marvel, home of the $3.99 comic book, we’re talking about.
On Vengeance: First of all, can we just agree that Ultimate Nullifier is the worst new character in years? Aside from the fact that he’s like some ad rep’s painfully clueless take on what those kids are into these days (I’m almost certain he’s Rastafied by at least 10 percent) the fact that he’s introduced having a threesome with a former X-Man and a pop star before kicking Magneto’s ass until he literally begs for death … this guy HAS to be a parody right? One of those things where a more traditional, established character or his teammates who aren’t trying so hard completely show him up and make him look pathetic by the end of the first arc?
SPOILERS FOR AVENGERS: CHILDREN’S CRUSADE
On the topic of how Stacy-X has her powers back: it’s possible that they’re just ignoring or unaware of the fact that she’s lost her powers, but in the most recent issue of Avengers: Children’s Crusade the Young Avengers restore the Scarlet Witch’s mind and she decides to start repowering the mutants she depowered. So that might be what the deal is with Stacy (though it’s issue 6 of 9, I believe, so the next three issues are just as likely to be about why Wanda’s plans don’t pan out as about how she goes about putting them in to action). Something about Vengeance made me think it was set after Fear Itself (I think there’s a reference to Steve Rogers being Cap again or something) so it might be set after Children’s Crusade too (which was notoriously hard to place in continuity timeline-wise to begin with).
On Schism: One of the things I really did like in Schism was the idea that nations all over the world have stockpiles of outdated Sentinels, who wouldn’t really pose much problem to most of the X-Men but would be a majore threat to untrained or less powerful mutants. It’s like a country being proud of having an air force composed of a dozen American-made fighter jets of a model that the U.S. stopped making in 2003 because all their neighbors only have a half-dozen Harriers made in the 90s.
What I didn’t like was that no one pointed out that it woud be insane to expect anyone to scrap powerful, expensive, advanced weapons that could, with a minor software change, be converted into all-purpose weapons systems instead of specifically anti-mutant one. That’s like expecting a country to scrap all the weapons and vehicles they have depolyed in another country when a war ends instead of just calling them home or sending them someplace else.
If you’re still buying 22-page comics for $3.99, you only have yourself to blame for feeling ripped off.
The “sentinels as nukes” analogy in Schism is a bit strained, to say the least – Aaron goes out of his way to make sure we know that North Korea and Faux-Ahmadinejad are bad-guy weapons proliferators in the Marvel Universe, too, but the primary builder and stockpiler of sentinels (and nuclear weapons, for that matter), as far as I can tell, has always been the US government, who only get a passing mention here. Why make a big deal of the international scale of the conflict when the biggest problem is still the country sitting on the X-Men’s front porch?
I don’t really buy Cyclops’s whole “they fear us even more, now that there’s so few of us we can barely fill a mid-sized school cafeteria” argument, either. One would think that with mutants on the brink of extinction, most of Marvel Earth’s governments would
And yes, presenting sentinels as a dire threat while at the same time showing Cyclops and Wolverine handily scrapping a room full of them really doesn’t work. Which is a shame, because sentinels really haven’t been presented as frightening since back in Morrison’s run.
That said, I liked the general loopiness of this – everything from Quire’s hilarious telepathic prank-pulling (who wouldn’t want to do that to a room full of those people?) to the over-the-top dad-murdering twelve-year-old CEO – as well as the notion that they might be setting Wolverine up to be the dove to Cyclops’s hawk (seems a bit late to be forcing character development down Logan’s throat after a good twenty-plus years of stagnation, but what the hell, it might be worth a shot). The art, though, was kind of wretchedly mediocre – Quentin Quire looks like he’s about thirty-five, and Wolverine looks like someone stapled a doll’s head only a walking barrel. What happened to Carlos Pacheco?
Joseph: They just did a story where the X-Men fought dozens of Nimrods, the most powerful version of Sentinels ever made, and won (not easily, but still). The notion that regular Sentinels, even a great deal of them, is a serious threat at this point is just kind of silly. Not to mention that any such attach on the X-Men would no doubt incite a reaction from the rest of the hero community; in New Mutants they portrayed Steve Rogers as being very much on their side, and Wolverine’s fellow Avengers would mobilize on his behalf.
Considering that the Sentinels that Cyclops and Wolverine wade through are only a little taller than a human being while a few pages later we see someone standing in the palm of a Sentinel’s hand, I think the issue makes it clear that they vary enough in power levels that they can be both cannon fodder and a serious threat, depending on the model you’re going up against. They could stand to mention that there are also many generations of Sentinel with different power levels for the new readers (they mention that North Korea has off-brand Mark I and Mark II Sentinels, but don’t point out that those are like Model-Ts compared to the ones that wiped out Genosha), but I think they conveyed that the ones that got steamrolled are basically the low-powered portable models.
I’m surprised in all the ‘Prelude’ fury no one has said ‘at least it was only 4 issues of unrelated nonsense not 24 issues like Countdown to Final Crisis’
@ZZZ I haven’t been following Children’s Crusade but know the gist of it, like you said it’s issue 6 of 9 and they could reverse what she’s already done by the end of the mini. Wanda’s little stunt killed a lot of mutants is she going to bring them back from the dead?
I get the feeling they (Marvel? Editorial? Quesada? The Man?) want mutants to remain rare because…I don’t know.
I’ve picked up a bunch of other x comics from around the time of Morrison’s run ad been working my way through them. Weird timing with Schism as the Mystique solo series from that era starts with Russia selling a couple of decommissioned Sentinels to Cuba.
The US govt. doesn’t get a “passing mention” in the story as the primary builder of sentinels; the absence of a representative from it speaks volumes.
I agree with ZZZ, too, that there are meant to be varying models of sentinels with varying power levels.
But I think the comment made by one poster here was interesting: why can’t the sentinels be repurposed for other uses? I think that begs a much bigger question, though: what exactly is it about sentinels that make them particularly good at hunting mutants, other than their mutant-finding tech? Some sentinels have been shown to adapt to mutant powers after they first encounter them, but that’s clearly not something that’s really stuck to the concept. Much as I love ’em, and much as I know that asking incisive questions about 1960s concepts tends to be shooting fish in a barrel, maybe they need some reconceptualizing for the 21st Century.
Hellfire Club: I know its inner circle used to be populated by mutants, but the H.C. itself has never had an agenda explicitly mutant-related, has it? Like the Shi’ar Empire and Savage Land, the Club’s just an idea that originated in the book and has sorta stayed with it, right?
The nimrod issue is a fair point (I had considered making mention of it but avoided it for that specific reason). Barring a redux of Genosha and the wild sentinels, I suppose the best way to make a threat of them is to point out that no one has ever bothered to just carpet blast an island off the map before. If this leads to a the world vs. The X-men bit, that is at least feasible in the “nuke the site from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure” approach.
“I don’t really buy Cyclops’s whole “they fear us even more, now that there’s so few of us we can barely fill a mid-sized school cafeteria” argument”
But this is a problem which plagued the X-books for years and made so many plots unbelievable from the beginning. You may fear the biker-gang living in your neighborhood, but on a bigger level – who cares? Groups like the Asgardians or the Hand or a rogue SHIELD have a much more believable danger-potential than those handfull Mutants. Every time I read the “They fear us” speech I put the book back on its rack. It is so silly. M-Day was a terrible idea, it killed the whole persecuted minority angle. Normally terrible ideas just fade into the background, but this was there to stay. I don´t understand why Marvel doesn´t change it back. A post M-Day X-Men would have been a good reason for the re-numbering btw, but not those X-Men against X-Men, which has been done so often.
The Hellfire club needs a re-vamp. It should be interesting to see what this new kid brings to the mix.
I’ve got to second the question – what has happened to Carlos Pacheco’s art? His characters are rounder in appearance, not as detailed, and more crude in their movements (bordering on stiff). Comparing his art today on his art from two years ago is like looking at the work of two different people.
AndyD – history is filled with a perfectly safe majority developing an irrational fear of something that poses them absolutely no threat. Whether its violent video games, rap music, teaching evolution, gay marraige, or Mexican immigrants…never underestimate societies capacity to blame an idea or even an entire people for all the ills of society. I mean, the Jews have been persecuted for centuries, and what the hell did they ever do to anybody except get exiled and move to some new place that they’d just get exiled from a generation or two down the line. The Nazis caused quite stir fanning the flames of our natural tendancy to become aggressivly afraid of arbitraty and harmless things.
And when you think about it, in the MU, mutants have actually been responsible for lots and lots of actual death and destruction, so fear of them isn’t really all that misguided, even if that fear gets unfairly directed at the majority of completely innocent mutants.
I think Pacheco’s work is suffering from the loss of Jesus Merino as his regular inker. Meirno’s become a penciller himself now and if you look at his work, there’s a lot the recognisable Pacheco style in there.
why can’t the sentinels be repurposed for other uses?
The Avengers used them to fight Kang. It didn’t go well.
I’m not sure the Sentinels’ inability to stand up to an armada from the 31st Century (or whenever Kang’s from) is a really fair test of their usefulness…
Adam,
The Sentinels ability to analyse and devise counter-measures to unexpected threats is what makes them better than other big, weapon-laden robots for going after mutants. Not that there’s anything mutant specific about that, being intelligent and adaptable is generally useful.
The Hellfire Club’s Inner Circle has always been after power, and sees super-powered mutants as a resource to be exploited and which competing interests should be denied.
If nothing else, they should make little sentinels that can go after pigeons in the park.
The reason why the Sentinels weren’t any use against Kang was that – as it turned out – Kang had, in one of his many past alter-egos, helped design the technology that eventually became the original Mark I Sentinels. He thereby had installed a fail-safe into the Sentinel operating system that allowed him to take control of any Sentinels used against him.
Which, when you think about it, is as good a reason as any to scrap the program.
“The Sentinels ability to analyse and devise counter-measures to unexpected threats is what makes them better than other big, weapon-laden robots for going after mutants.”
See? This is what I’m talking about. And in SCHISM #1, they fail to come up with an appropriate counter-measure to a set of six knives. 🙂
Seriously, how does a sentinel not know how to stop Wolverine’s claws by now? You’d think a good force field would do.
The last time I remember “regular” sentinels being shown as a major threat – as opposed to Nimrods or Morrison’s “wild” sentinels – was way way back in Uncanny 281, when they wiped out the Reavers and the Hellions and “killed” Jean Grey (for less than an issue). Granted, those sentinels were from the future, but it’s not like they were from a particularly impressive future, and the abilities they demonstrated (adaptation, quick self-repair) should be pretty doable within the context of current Marvel Earth technology.
RE: using Sentinels for other purposes, Wolverine (in the back half of Millar’s Enemy of the State storyline) used a Sentinel to clear out a Hand base. Presumably by resetting it from ‘kill mutants’ to ‘kill zombie ninjas.’
@Si: Now I really want to see the Marvel Universe version of Orkin using tiny Sentinels to hunt cockroaches and termites. (er, Orkin’s a pest control company. Don’t know if they work outside the United States)
It occurs to me that a 12-year-old Black King probably spells the end of the Hellfire Club as lingerie-clad sex club. Dang kids, ruining everything. Now even supervillain teams have to be family friendly.
I’m not saying losing his inker wouldn’t make a difference in Pacheco’s work, but this is a completely different style – his faces, his bodies are different. Everything is much more rudimentary, like he’s regressed to a period before he hit it big with his style. Maybe this is what he feels he has to do to keep on a regular schedule (his previous Uncanny days were marred with two or three issues in a row, followed by an issue or two of fill in art).
He wouldn’t be the first artist to change his style. Salvador Larroca’s art kept getting better and better with his changes, until he took it one step too far and I don’t enjoy his work as much. Keith Giffen’s art was never more beautiful than during his Legion / Paul Levitz days – then he changed it was he went along, making it more angular and sketchy (didn’t like it), then it began to resemble Kevin Maguire’s work (loved it), now we have some sort of rounded off version of Jack Kirby’s work (which I actually kind of like; it’s still energetic and fluid).
I actually think Salvador Larroca got a lot worse for a little while, but I’ve been more impressed with his work on Invincible Iron Man than any of his previous work. (Just wanted to say, because I am digging him a lot.)
Surely the most obvious example of Sentinels being repurposed would be “Onslaught”, where they were sent after all the non-mutant superheros.
Hello There. I discovered your weblog the
usage of msn. This is a really smartly written article.
I will make sure to bookmark it and come back to read more of your useful
info. Thank you for the post. I’ll definitely return.
Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally,
it seems as though you relied on the video to make your point.
You definitely know what youre talking about, why waste your intelligence on just posting videos to your blog
when you could be giving us something informative to read?
Check out my weblog 30th birthday ideas – Edwina,