The X-Axis – 8 April 2012
Well, after all the hype, we’ve finally reached Marvel’s big event of the year. Also available in exciting “augmented reality!” Yeah…
But first!
Age of Apocalypse #2 – I’m still not really sold on this book, but it does have something. In theory, there’s some potential in doing an inverted Marvel Universe where the mutants are all lunatics and in control, while the human villains become the plucky underdogs whose anti-mutant agenda becomes utterly reasonable. And I like the use of the depowered Jean Grey and Sabretooth, who end up stuck with the human resistance – though it’s perhaps surprising that they don’t get more to do, given that they’re among the book’s most recognisable established characters.
Perhaps more importantly, there’s also some sense in this issue that David Lapham is simply having fun with the inverted-world set-up and the casual lunacy of the villains, which implies that the book isn’t going to be the ponderous exercise in mock-seriousness that I’d feared.
On the other hand, it’s still a book with a large cast of mostly interchangeable characters, and that’s a problem. There’s not a huge amount to distinguish the members of the X-Terminated, and Wolverine’s forces are likewise decidedly similar to one another. If the fun of alternate reality stories is seeing variations on familiar characters, then for that to work, the characters need to be distinctive in their own way, and thus far, that remains decidedly lacking. What actually distinguishes Fiend from Deadeye, for example, aside from the fact that they’re wearing slightly different costumes? What does Donald Pierce bring to the cast? I genuinely couldn’t tell you, and two issues in, that’s not a good sign.
Avengers vs X-Men #1 – Or A vs X, Round One, as the cover has it. Personally, if I was positioning this as something to appeal to lapsed readers, I’d be putting the advertised title prominently on the cover, but so be it.
I have a healthy scepticism about the merits of event crossovers. Nor does it inspire much confidence that each issue of the book is being written by a different one of Marvel’s “Architects”, which is surely just a fancy way of saying it’s written by committee. But this was a pleasant surprise. It’s not going to win any Eisners, but it’s a nicely direct first issue which sets up the idea and gets to the point far more quickly than I was expecting.
Nova crashes on Earth to warn the Avengers that the Phoenix is coming. Everyone knows it’s likely to destroy the world. Wolverine tells the Avengers that the host is going to be Hope. Meanwhile, Hope is also starting to manifest the Phoenix effect. The Avengers show up on Utopia to discuss what to do about Hope. Cyclops has convinced himself that when she becomes Phoenix, she’ll save the mutant race. Cue the fight. None of this will come as any sort of surprise if you’ve read the hype (or, to be fair, if you’ve read the main X-Men stories in the last five years). But the book bashes through the set-up swiftly instead of dragging it out in the way I’d expected. That’s fine by me, not least because it means Marvel have actually been hyping the hook of act one, and the actual story remains largely unspoiled.
There are still some issues here. The story skirts over the whole question of why Hope is manifesting the Phoenix effect before the Phoenix has got here, which is surely likely to be a point of confusion for readers new to the concept (not least because it makes little or no sense, even if there’s something of a precedent for it in earlier X-Men stories). And the story seems to ignore the fact that Hope already had the Phoenix effect at the end of the prequel series Avengers: X-Sanction. But on the whole, not a bad start at all. Certainly the strongest opening we’ve had for a Marvel event mini in quite some time.
For those of you with expensive gadgets, there’s also a back-up story in the “Infinite Comics” format (which, to be fair, can be bought separately), and some gimmickry with the Marvel AR app.
“Infinite Comics” turns out to be essentially comics designed for reading in the Guided View format, using many of the same tricks as Reilly Brown’s Power Play – for example, repeating variations of the same pages on multiple pages to take advantage of the dissolve effect, or using the pull-back-and-reveal facility that isn’t available in regular comics. The story is simply Nova’s crash-landing from his perspective, but it is a good use of the Guided View format, and rather pretty to boot.
The Marvel AR thing is pure gimmickry. I dutifully tried it out; it involves pointing your phone at the page and then squinting at some animation while trying to hold your phone steady. I gave up halfway through and deleted the app. It’s a complete waste of time and I have trouble believing it’ll repay the investment in digital content that it’ll require. My guess is, it’ll be dead in six months.
New Mutants #40 – The culmination of the Ani-Mator storyline, as Abnett and Lanning become the latest writers to grapple with the question of how you dramatise Cypher’s power to understand things. Most of this issue essentially consists of the merged Cypher/Warlock fighting the Ani-Mator creature in the real world, intercut with them discussing matters on (I guess) the astral plane. So if you like fighting and you like exposition, this is the comic for you. Normally this wouldn’t work very well, but in this case, it does kind of succeed in conveying what Cypher’s actually doing. And they’ve got Leandro Fernandez on art, somebody who can pull off extended conversation scenes and make them interesting. It helps that he does a decent Warlock, a character many artists continue to struggle to render in their own style.
All that being said, the resolution is a bit hand-woven, with Cypher coming up with a rather new agey solution and it just kind of somehow working. That’s a bit of an anticlimax. But there’s a very nice coda playing up the idea that Cypher’s claim to have come to terms with his fear of the Ani-Mator is all a bit too convenient. Not a perfect issue but there’s more good than bad.
Wolverine and the X-Men #8 – Chris Bachalo returns for an odd little issue that doubles as an epilogue to the “space casino” stuff while also throwing in a self-contained story in which Sabretooth goes after Abigail Brand in an attempt to get under the Beast’s skin. This looks to be driven by scheduling considerations, as there’s a month to fill before the Avengers vs X-Men crossover arc begins – though strangely, the story doesn’t get Wolverine out of his wheelchair in time for the crossover. Presumably that gets wrapped up pretty quickly next issue, as he looked fine in Avengers vs X-Men #1 itself.
The kids going off into space for a second stab at the space casino is a fun little equine, though it actually only gets five pages, in which the main thing achieved is actually to advance the development of Genesis’ character. It strikes me that between Genesis and Broo, this series has two characters on a rather similar arc – nice kid with deeply buried violent tendencies that might end up taking over – and that’s got to be deliberate.
Most of the issue, though, is given over to Sabretooth fighting the Beast in space, as Sabretooth tries to expand his usual modus operandi – kill Wolverine’s girlfriend – to the rest of the team. If the idea is to set up Sabretooth as a recurring villain for this series, it works pretty well, though it’s odd to see Aaron writing Sabretooth as essentially a henchman in this book when he was presented as a new crime lord over in Wolverine just a couple of weeks ago. It doesn’t feel like the same take on the character, unless the idea is that Sabretooth is actually working an angle against his employers in the Hellfire Club – in which case the Wolverine arc makes sense as oblique foreshadowing.
Bachalo’s art is visually interesting as ever. That said, clarity in storytelling has never been his strong suit, and the climax of this issue’s battle suffers from requiring just a little too much effort to figure out what’s actually happening. It’s not impenetrable, but it’s not instant, and that detracts from the scene; by the time you’ve figured out the idea, the momentum is lost. (And this is why “art that makes the reader work” is usually a bad thing in action sequences.) Three characters in identical spacesuits; no very clear explanation of how Hank propels himself back to the space station; it’s not quite right. Still, a decent issue on the whole.
Wolverine and the X-Men: Alpha & Omega #4 – After a slightly sluggish opening issue, this has turned out to be a rather good series. This is the chapter where the penny drops and it becomes obvious how Brian Wood is going to write Quentin out of the corner he’s been painted into: having gone into the Construct to try and get things back on the rails, Quentin discovers that he’s not as good at this as he thought he was, and his control over the thing is actually rather limited. And now he’s stuck inside, which means he’s going to have to team up with Wolverine and Armor. If they’ll have him.
That seems to point towards a finish where Quentin does something sufficient heroic, or at least apologetic, to redeem himself in part. But the issue also ends with a more interesting cliffhanger in which, having no other idea of how to get out of the Construct, Quentin simply conjures up a giant off switch and invites everyone to press it and hope for the best. It’s a fairly safe bet that they’re not all going to die in a spin-off mini, but that doesn’t stop it being a more intriguing way of getting to the inevitable resolution. Wood certainly gets Quire’s character, as a brat with delusions of grandeur who isn’t fundamentally a bad person, but tends not to realise that he’s gone way over the line until it’s way too late to turn back. There’s a lot to be done with that version of Quire and I’d be happy to see Wood write him again.
X-Club #5 – I’ll have to go back and re-read this mini, since I suspect it’s one of those books that, read in a single sitting, will turn out to have all its plot threads dovetail more effectively than it seemed the first time round. It does manage to bring all of its diverse plot threads to a conclusion and (more or less) link them all together – though the stuff about mutagenics in the sea does feel a bit tacked on, and its resolution is equally casual. I may come back to this for a more detailed review, but for now, I like Si Spurrier’s update of the old mad scientist archetype, and I think he’s the only writer in quite some time to really have a handle on Madison Jeffries character that goes beyond “stuttering weirdo”. His Dr Nemesis is a little over the top even for Dr Nemesis, but the general idea is right, and at least the starfish running gag is kept to sensible limits this month.
As for Danger, I can still take or leave her, and I’m not entirely sold on doing stories about pregnant robots anyway. There are also some rather hamfisted “power of love / power of spirituality” moments shoved into this final issue that don’t quite work, and feel like they’re there to try and redress some sort of argument about science and spirituality that the series wasn’t really developing in the first place. The stuff with Madison and Danger is at least earned by his storyline in the earlier issues; Kavita receiving divine inspiration from looking at waves is rather out of left field, though it would have been an interesting beat in a different story. Still, a fun little series.
Regarding the AR app, if you double tap the screen when the “content” loads you can move your device away from the comic; I’ve seen people complain that you have to stay stood over your comic shaking your iPad or whatever about but it isn’t as cumbersome as that.
Still completely pointless, though.
Is it just me or does the first issue feel likethe beginning of a cyclops heel turn?
Well, the last five years have felt like a slow Cyclops heel turn.
Not having a smart phone I found the AR logo to be a pointless distraction to the art. I’d go as far to say it spoiled the entire issue for me. I did type in the code from the back of the issue, took 40 minutes to find where they put the downloaded file, and spent five seconds flipping through the exact same pages I had just read. I wish they had just given out regular copies of the book, and then done a Variant AR copy.
Since W&XM #8 ends with Angel handing the Ultron-esque doohickey that Beast needs to fix Wolverine’s legs over to Wolverine, I expect that Aaron just didn’t feel the need to show them actually fixing him – they have what they need, so it’ll happen.
[That said, the thought occurred to me throughout the issue of why they didn’t just fillet out the bent bones. Sure, the replacements wouldn’t be adamantium, but the way Wolverine’s healing factor has worked for years now is that the bones would certainly regenerate, and he’d get back on his feet.]
Why would the Phoenix Force have to go anywhere–travel anywhere within one dimension–to manifest its power? If you assume that, like practically any deity, it exists in hyperspace/outside the space-time continuum, then it can appear wherever it pleases, as quickly as it pleases. The only purpose of the Nova-Avengers material appears to be to get the Avengers involved.
If the writers dealt with the Phoenix Force as a sentient entity with specific goals and interests, then the storyline would be dramatically different. But the material wouldn’t exist, either.
SRS
It seems to me that neither Marvels various Earth mythology ‘gods’ nor most of the ‘cosmic’ godlike characters like Galactus, the Celestials, etc. have ever been portrayed as having the ability to appear wherever they please, as quickly as they please. Since you certainly aren’t basing that opinion on the extensive real-world research on deities’ relationship to hyperspace, I’m not sure why this portrayal would suddenly present a problem.
It seems to me that neither Marvels various Earth mythology ‘gods’ nor most of the ‘cosmic’ godlike characters like Galactus, the Celestials, etc. have ever been portrayed as having the ability to appear wherever they please, as quickly as they please.
If a being exists as psionic energy, then it “thinks” itself from point to point. Trying to impose a speed limit on that materialization/dematerialization is senseless.
SRS
With regards to Avengers vs X-Men…just switch your brain off and enjoy the ride. Same with WATXM.
I admit, I don’t grasp the whole Phoenix thing, even though I’ve been there since the very beginning. But questions arose for me – as you brought up, why has Hope been manifesting the Phoenix effect; why is Scott so certain that the Phoenix will rejuvenate the mutant line instead of destroy the earth; why are the Avengers so sure the Phoenix will destroy the Earth when it was just here a few years ago trying to re-animate Jean and didn’t destroy the Earth; if the Avengers have been looking for the return of the Phoenix since Jean was the Phoenix then why haven’t they bothered with any of the numerous other Phoenix manifestations throughout the years; why did the Avengers seem to suggest that once the Phoenix found a vessel that it would THEN destroy the Earth when it was already shown casually destroying worlds on its way there; which leads to why it even NEEDS a vessel and why one from Earth; and why was Wolverine talking like the death of the Phoenix on the moon many a year ago practically destroyed Scott – when Scott went right on to Lee, then Mady, then Jean herself who wasn’t really dead and then later died AFTER Scott cheated on her??? The story in and of itself was certainly dramatic, but for long time readers, hunks of history were left out or glossed over to make sure the dramatics worked just right (accurate or not) and there were some large leaps in deduction in order to set up the opposing sides.
Has Nova made landfall yet in AvX? I stuck it out through the first 80 or so pages of him streaking across the sky while various Avengers circled around him, then got up to go watch my cat shed his winter coat.
I exaggerate, of course, but not by much. AvX #1 did nothing to stop me rolling my eyes at the idea of Bendis having anything to do with an “epic event.” We get several pages of OOOO! BOFFO ACTION!!! featuring the illustrated equivalent of a Michael Bay action scene, requiring all of 3 seconds reading time to dispatch the first quarter of the comic, yet paradoxically still seeming to drag on forever.
And once it’s over with, it really has nothing major to contribute to the plot – if an action sequence is going to take up that much space in a comic, it really ought to be essential to the story. But honestly, the same thing could’ve been accomplished by Nova just showing up and saying “Guys, we got trouble”.
But that would’ve meant there’d be more pages for Bendis to fill in the comic with such things as plotting and character development, and since he really only has the most tenuous grasp on either it’s much easier to just write: Pg 4: Avengers look up. See something in sky. Pg 5: Avengers fly up to investigate. Pg 6 – 34: individual Avengers fly around object in sky. Stretch this out as far as you can, please”
In Cyclops’ case, he has been told by his son, who has knowledge of the future, that Hope will be a saviour. Which makes his behavior a bit more rational.
That mini ended two issues too soon. I really wanted to see X Club 7.
Re – Why doesn’t Phoenix just teleport to earth?
This is a universe where the ‘gods’ generally set about solving their problems by beating each other up and generally acting like omnipotent Francis Begbies.
Yes, I wish the more powerful beings were a bit more thinky thinky too but then we’ve got the TPBs of Sandman, Lucifer etc. to keep us happy.
Oh yeah, that thing Angel hands over IS the same thing we saw briefly in a broken state at the start of the issue, isn’t it? I should have realised that, though I don’t think the earlier scene really flagged up to me that I should be remembering what the prop looked like. Anyhow, I honestly didn’t recognise it. I figured it was going to be explained in the next issue.
(And yes, it should probably have occurred to me that that was the only thing it logically could be in plot terms. Except, I guess, it hadn’t been established that the kids actually knew the macguffin was needed or what to look for. And I have a suspicion I may be starting to read this book in the expectation that it isn’t really going to make sense.)
I think the are was really bad in terms of story telling Paul. Was Angel not in earshot of wolverine and beast as they talked? I thought that is what lead to Angel’s attempt to heal him by “laying hands”. Plus the time shifts really don’t help.
Sorry fat fingers caused me to type are not art.
Marvel bans helpful footnotes from most of their comics now because they supposedly ruin the flow of the stories.
That fucking AR logo in AvX pulled me out of the story more than a footnote EVER has.
My main quibble with AvX: the Phoenix has never been presented as a force that just randomly shows up and blows up planets. It was corrupted by the Hellfire Club, but generally it’s pretty benevolent, isn’t it?
Well, the Shi’ar’s reaction to the Phoenix in the original storyline undoubtedly presents it as a well known and terrifying destroyer of worlds. But it has to be said that later stories tend to undermine or contradict this. (For example, if Jean was Phoenix’s first host, as per Alan Davis’ Excalibur, how did Phoenix acquire its rep with the Shi’ar?)
Does the Phoenix need a host to destroy things? Davis’s Excalibur run also implied that it was pretty freakin’ powerful before it made contact with the original Feron and that it was able to go toe-to-toe with Galactus while its host was comatose.
Alan Davis’ Excalibur had Feron I, a contemporary of Merlyn and Necrom, as the Phoenix Force’s first host. Necrom hurt it and drove it away, and it got lost for a long time before coming back to Earth and running across Jean on the infamous shuttle flight.
Talibak – as I recall, it wasn’t *SENTIENT* until its’ encounter with the original Feron. More like the cosmic equivalent of plankton. Lots of energy tied up in it, little or no direction.
And then it went toe-to-toe to with Galactus by basically causing a lot of future stillbirths/failed conceptions that should have happened, because it raised the entropy of the universe by acting as a sentient force.
I have mixed feelings on the AR thing. The concept seems sound. The execution may need more work. I, imagine, it would, probably look a bit more impressive on a larger screen (i.e. iPad). I don’t own one of those. I did download the app to my iPhone for the sake of trying it out. For me, there were some pages that seemed to take forever to work. I found myself twisting in turning the phone all over the place before the code, finally, triggered. I failed to grasp the “double tap” thing. Perhaps I’ll try that per Matt’s suggestion. I’m willing to try the app on a few more comics to see if it grows on me.
@Jnuke
I thought modern comics frown on footnotes because they work badly with trades. They don’t want a trade paperback collecting issues 1-6 of a series to have a footnote saying “* As seen in issue #2” in reference to something that happened 30 pages ago in that very book. And as for things that happened a long time ago, they’d rather you buy whatever the most recent collection or omnibus or masterwork edition that’s still in print is than go track down a back issue they won’t see a dime from.
I guess they could just excise those from the reprints, but I’d always heard that was the reason they don’t use footnotes much anymore. (I guess even if they can remove them, it’s easier – and cheaper – not to have to.)
Which makes me wonder if the AR logos will be removed from the eventual AvX trade, and how long any online content will remain available.
Two things that kind of struck me
1. Thor almost never shows up for these things except maybe in the last issue. He barely even appeared in Fear itself, now that I think about it.
2. Apocolypses powers are actually kind of weird and gross if he isn’t wearing his big suit of armor.
I’ll be interested to see if Marvel do pull the trigger and bring Jean back.
I miss footnotes. It’s even worse with TPBs, because you can be reading these things 10 years later and not know what they are referencing.
Off the top of my head example, when the New Avengers go to Shingen’s house and confront the Samurai, Logan has previously encountered him and severed his hand. It’s a plot point during this entire scene, and a footnote saying “It happened in Wolverine: Origins” would be helpful. In the individual issues, the can have it say “Wolverine: Origins issue#4” or whatever, and then in TPB format say “Wolverine: Origins Vol 1: Drawn out crap of Logan’s past (again)” or whatever the bloody thing was called. Seriously, it’s advertising for the rest of your comics.
Somewhat thankfully, Bendis got around that by having the characters constantly mention “Secret War, Civil War, House of M” etc. As jarring as it is to see the characters call a storyline by it’s name, at least we knew what stories to look for. I know I would’ve apprectiated “Elektra is leading the Hand now*” (*see Wolverine: Enemy of the State for details) rather than have to get online and ask people where this happened.
Oh… and why the hell is there a WATXM mini series coming out alongside the regular series? The regular series is 8 issues old. Was there really a story that HAD to be told in mini alongside it? We couldn’t wait and have it in the regular? Or make the regular a bi-weekly comic to accomodate it if it absolutely HAD to be done before the AvX crossover?
Different writer, different tone. It doesn’t need to exist, no, but sticking it in the regular series would be the worst of all options – they either make it separate, or they don’t bother.
[And no, I have no problems with the “don’t bother” option.]
@Original Matt
There’s also the distinct possibility that the miniseries began as “Untitled Brian Wood Wolverine mini” and that as it got closer to becoming a published reality, it was decided that linking it to WatXM would give it a sales boost.
Hang on… I thought unborn life was just the Phoenix’s power source. If memory serves, in the actual fight, it just beat on Galactus with large amounts of telekinetic force.
And, just to clarify, the reason Galactus was in a weakened state for that battle had more to do with the Phoenix stopping him from chowing down on the planet and recharging.
Brad, I’m glad I wasn’t the only one bored to death by the Nova/airplane crash/Avengers scene. Dragged on forever. Which makes for a strange partner to the rest of the issue, which as Paul says, does pretty much roll right through the setup into the main plot right away.
I’m interested to see where Cyclops goes. He’s definitely sounding like Magneto now and the writers directly pointed that out.
On the note of WATX: does Angel still have his healing blood? If so, has anyone told him? Just wondered after seeing his attempt to lay on hands.
Also, seeing the comments on this blog about the Phoenix’s muddled history led me to go back and read summaries of the Phoenix/Jean/Madeline arc. Dear lord does that sound like a hot mess of some terrible retcons.
Oh, and what is up with Angel’s wings? I know in X-Force he was shown to be able to switch between his normal wings and his metal ones (when switching between normal and Horseman versions, skin and all), but when he was reborn he looked like he went back to his normal wings. The art in WATX makes him look like he has metal wings, but they’re drawn very differently from his Horseman wings. Some weird hybrid?
@The original Matt
The problem is (as I understand it) they don’t want you to go looking for a copy of “Wolverine: Origins Vol 1: Drawn out crap of Logan’s past (again)” if it’s out of print and your buying it will just put a few bucks in the pocked of another collector at a convention, but “Wolverine’s Greatest Battles Against People You’ve Never Heard Of” has just hit the stands with that same story reprinted in it. Any specific reference they put in will eventually end up directing you to a product they don’t make anything off of, while getting you to Google “Wolverine Shingen hand” will show you the most recent applicable trade.
(It’ll also explain it for you in general terms too, but if just knowing what happened without actually reading the issue and getting all the details is enough for you, you can generally infer that from context anyway)
…I can understand Cyclops wanting to believe the best of Phoenix… But shouldn’t he also be preparing for the worst? Seriously, that’s leadership 101.
If this story was going to make any sense, the two teams would just work together in the hopes that he’s right while making sure they’re ready if he’s wrong.
Steven: from what I can tell, the only “gods” that can appear wherever they want in the Marvel U are the truly top-of-the-pecking-order cosmic beings, like Eternity, Infinity, and the Living Tribunal, who are all either personifications of abstract concepts or just insanely overpowered heavyweights who erase universes as a regular thing.
And man, Avengers vs X-Men… that really felt… perfunctory. Like Bendis was like, “fuck, time to make the donuts, have to get ’em from A to B, here we go, now they can fight.” Next up: Fraction or Aaron or whoever halfheartedly mashes some action figures together!
The comments on Cyclops make me wonder if this is going to be his Iron Man Civil War style total character derailment moment.
I look forward to a mini in a couple of years time where Emma has to reboot his brain to stop Norman Osborn finding out the locations of the remaining mutants and his character regresses.
Also have to make a comment about New Mutants. Also having been there from the beginning, I’m finding it difficult to get excited by this title. It’s perfectly okay, but I’ve already seen this team form and grow and change and characters die the team break up, and eventually come back and here they are again. But it’s like watching a child grow up and go away and get a job and get married – and then the reset button is hit only this time, there a been there, done that feel particularly knowing that nothing’s permanent, no matter what it is – and we’ve already been ‘there’ with some of these characters.
“The comments on Cyclops make me wonder if this is going to be his Iron Man Civil War style total character derailment moment.”
In fairness, this is on the back of a 5 year build.
Steven,
I have no idea whether or not the phoenix force is made out of ‘psionic energy’, nor do I know how something made out of psionic energy would be able to move or would choose to move. I’m not sure how you think you do know these things. It’s possible that some stories featuring the Phoenix do in fact depict it behaving in this way, or feature statements that it can do this. But many others haven’t, and comparable entities in the Marvel Universe also tend to move through space physically.
The Ed Brubaker Starjammers arc in Uncanny had a whole thing about past Shi’ar Phoenix hosts. Not sure what happened to the Shi’ar guy they introduced who was descended from them. Anything intertwined with Merlyn’s origin is prone to retconning, since there are at least three seperate irreconcilable accounts of what exactly his deal is, in addition to an independant character that may or may not also be him, depending on who’s writing. Plus an Alan Moore written scene where he heavily implies that he routinely lies about what he is to almost everybody, and also links himself to a third character that is almost definitely not him, plus another version of the character that appeared in some of Alan Moore’s Doctor Who stories.
Have people asking questions about Cyclops’ attitude to Hope & the Avengers read X-Sanction? He has been told by a son who has seen the future that the Avengers will try to kill Hope and that she is the future of mutantkind. He has also been shown future Avengers anti-mutant weapons. In that context, his hostility to handing Hope over to the Avengers & his belief in Hope’s ability to control the Phoenix is understandable.
Pity the writers don’t reference this.
Why should they? It has been made quite clear that X-Sanction is a prologue to AvX.
Assuming that IS the case, I’m sure it will come up sooner or later during the event.
You’ve not read PRELUDE TO SCHISM, have you?
niall,
I buy that Cyclops has staked everything he’s done on Hope saving the day. But what I took away from X-Sanction was that the Avengers kill Hope and the world gets destroyed. Bishop said for years that Hope would destroy the world. I don’t know that we’ve actually seen a happy Hope future.
As you say, its a pity the writers can’t have someone articulate what they are doing and why. And as Paul says, who knows if X-Sanction matters at all.
Oh, and finally no matter how Phoenix -as a crazily powerful cosmic entity that travels through the vastness of space – moves around, I assume it’s pretty fast. How is it that Nova – a guy in a rocket suit – got to Earth first?
The power of love Rich!
As for having seen a happy Hope future, we haven’t, but apparently Cable has. Cyclops takes his word for it, which is perhaps not entirely wise, but makes his behaviour more relatable. Outside of that context, Cyclops attitude to Hope seems unreasonable and based on fear and faith. If only in that sense, X-Sanction matters.
I’m not certain that Cable has seen a “happy” Hope based future, either. The implication of X-Sanction (and, for that matter, Bishops visceral reaction to Hope) is that what he has seen is a future without Hope that went horribly wrong.