The X-Axis – 14 October 2012
Crossover season is virtually over, and we’re now moving into the epilogue phase where the next stories are set up. Once again, that results in Marvel swamping the market this week, so let’s get to it…
Age of Apocalypse #8 – Anyone care? Really? Oh, alright.
This isn’t a bad issue, to be honest. Prophet and his crew have gone to Latveria in search of the notebooks of Reed Richards, which they hope might contain some clue to defeating Weapon X. Unfortunately, the notebooks don’t exist any more, and Dr Doom has his own plans for how to keep the mutants at bay until he can make his own plan for saving the world. That plan basically consists of trying to steal Weapon X’s power for himself on the logic that, hey, he’s bound to be an improvement, right?
Reasonably enough, the X-Terminated aren’t so sold on that idea, though it does raise a reasonably interesting point about the direction of the series. What exactly are the title characters trying to achieve, considering that their side has so comprehensively lost the war? In what possible future is it not going to be dominated by mutants, given their numbers? They can maybe get rid of the particular people in charge, but any sort of pro-human agenda has become little more than academic.
That’s a fair enough angle to explore with these characters; one of this book’s problems is the apparent sheer futility of everything that’s going on, and at least David Lapham seems to be trying to meet that problem head-on. Often, sweeping these problems under the carpet is far less effective than putting them front and centre and making them the centre of the story. And while having the title characters outwit Dr Doom risks overplaying it, I think you need that sort of thing in order to give the reader any sense of hope that they might achieve something given the ridiculous odds that the series has set against them.
But I still feel there’s something missing in the characters – they’re a bit samey, and it’s rather hard to connect with any of them. There’s something in terms of emotional connection that’s not working here, and that leaves it a story that has some interesting ideas but never quite hits home.
AvX: Consequences #1 – This truly is an epilogue to AvX, in that it’s charged with shoving various elements into their new positions, and establishing elements of the new status quo. That sort of thing doesn’t always make for a great story, and the plot here is indeed rather bitty – very broadly, it’s that the Avengers are still hunting down the remaining members of the Extinction Team, and Wolverine is asked to try and get Cyclops to help, since it might at least help reduce tensions to get them off the streets.
Still, Kieron Gillen breaks it down into a collection of pretty strong scenes. Granted, a couple of them feel like they’re straining to accommodate the ideas that they’re supposed to be setting up. Wolverine shows up at Wakanda unannounced and is surprised to learn that he’s unwelcome. A prison warder helpfully explains his new technology which is triggered by mutants using their powers – even though that has no apparent relevance to his prisoner, Cyclops, whose powers are always on.
But I do like the way the story writes Cyclops as a prisoner, stoically putting up with his martyrdom, but finding himself treated simply as a common prisoner rather than the epic figure he’d presumably like to think of himself as. Wolverine gives a rather good speech explaining why he doesn’t want to talk to Scott – which makes it work all the better when he does. And it’s got art from Tom Raney, who’s always solid – though he struggles mightily with the movie-influenced redesign of Captain America’s costume, which looks frankly horrendous on paper. A live-action costume needs to add detail to stop the thing looking like a glorified wetsuit, but when you try to copy all that detail back onto the printed page, you completely lose the simplicity of the design and make him look like he’s hired his costume from a Hallowe’en store.
First X-Men #3 – This actually isn’t too bad if you think of it as a self-contained retro team book; it’s when you try to relate it to any sort of X-Men continuity that it starts to feel terribly awkward. It’s positioning Wolverine in a leadership role he didn’t grow into for years; it misses any recognisable version of Sabretooth by a mile. But its internal logic isn’t so bad, and there’s a nice idea with the villain, Virus, who hasn’t got much sympathy for his fellow mutants because even they regard non-humanoid mutants as monsters. Taken entirely on its own terms, it’s fair to middling, but it’s still not making a compelling case for its existence.
Uncanny Avengers #1 – Is this an X-book? I guess it is.
Well, this is a gathering of the team issue, more or less – though Rick Remender also gets the plot under way, as the Red Skull unveils his plan to deal with the unwanted resurgence of mutants. The high concept here is that Captain America has decided that, as a public relations exercise following Avengers vs X-Men, they need an Avengers squad with a bunch of X-Men on it, led by Havok, of all people. In Cap’s mind, this is apparently going to do wonders for the image of mutants.
I can’t help thinking there’s a reason why Captain America is a superhero and not a PR consultant. With this sort of logic, he’d probably be advising the BBC to commission a new series of Clunk Click for primetime. But hell, it’s the premise, so let’s shrug our shoulders and accept it.
You might query how this can possibly be a long term concept for an ongoing series. But the answer is that it doesn’t have to be – they can always relaunch it after a couple of years. And it’s a good idea to use Havok in this role; while he himself was barely in Avengers vs X-Men, the character’s always been defined to some extent by his feeling of being overshadowed by his older brother Cyclops as a leader and hero. Now that Cyclops has fallen spectacularly off his perch, Havok is in one sense free of that shadow, but in another just finds himself trying to live up to the example that Cyclops himself ultimately failed to realise. That’s a good direction for the character, though you do wonder how he’s really going to be positioned as the team leader if this squad is truly going to have Captain America, Thor and Wolverine as regular characters.
The rest of the core cast would seem to comprise Rogue and the Scarlet Witch, who immediately get down to squabbling over the death of Charles Xavier. This doesn’t really work for me. It’s a take on Rogue that seems entirely at odd with anything that’s been done with her in X-Men Legacy over the last few years, and on top of that, she’s surely the last character who ought to be in a position to criticise a new arrival for a dubious past. In fact, it’s pretty hard to think of an X-Men character less suited to the role she’s asked to play here.
The Red Skull is an interesting choice of villain, and I’m intrigued to see how Remender is going to reinvent him. His initial plan certainly makes for a shocking cliffhanger – of the “no, really, did they just do that?” sort – but given the strength of his work on X-Factor, I’ll give Remender the benefit of the doubt that there’s more going on here than just shock tactics. (Besides, it does kind of make sense, as well as verifying Xavier’s death about as thoroughly as you’re ever going to get it verified.)
The thing with the Red Skull is that he is literally a relic of another era. He was created as a Nazi villain when Nazis were actually topical. Later writers have tended to veer between treating him as just generically evil, or playing up the Nazi angle, which has been anachronistic for decades. To make him work, you need to find a way of bringing him up to date, and I don’t think simply making him a neo-Nazi is the answer. If Remender is going way over the top with the Skull’s scheme here, he is at least presenting him as a character who’s way over the line, and that’s something you don’t get so often with villains these days.
John Cassaday’s work generally hits the standards of prettiness you’d expect, even if some of it’s a little looser than his earlier art. He makes rather fewer concessions than Raney to Cap’s movie costume (and all the better for it). I’m decidedly less sold on his Havok redesign, which takes the basic elements of the Neal Adams costume and makes them less interesting.
Still, it’s a flawed but generally promising first issue. If there are bits that don’t quite work, it does at least hit the ground running with those that do.
Wolverine #314 – Cullen Bunn and Paul Pelletier return, in a story that quite plainly picks up where they left off and politely ignores the mysterious waste of trees in the middle. Wolverine still has permanent gaps in his memory, and Melita Garner is not best pleased that he no longer remembers her at all. But instead of following up directly on that idea, Bunn gives us the ever-popular Woman From Wolverine’s Past enlisting him to help find “the Dreaming Maiden”, who they apparently encountered at some point in the past. The resulting story features Wolverine and Vanessa discussing this old mission, which they apparently both remember perfectly, without ever really explaining it to the readers.
The exposition in this story is so sketchy that I initially thought it was a deliberate (and rather clever) inversion of Wolverine’s memory loss – this time, the characters know far more than the reader. Actually, though, I have a sinking feeling that the exposition is just hopelessly lacking. Elsa Bloodstone shows up as a guest star and the story doesn’t really bother explaining who she is either. And it seems this Covenant bunch have turned up once before, in a story Bunn wrote for the Point One issue of the Captain America And… team-up book. If anyone actually read Captain America and Namor #635.1, perhaps they can let me know whether the story makes any more sense with that knowledge; as it is, it’s kind of a string of things happening for reasons that aren’t really being explained to the reader. And I’m honestly not sure whether that’s deliberate.
Wolverine and the X-Men #18 – Back at the crossover, this issue takes place simultaneously with Avengers vs X-Men #12, but its main focus is on events at the school. Idie is suddenly acting rather strangely thanks to a new (and naturally suspicious) church that she’s made contact with. Broo investigates and basically finds out that it’s a scheme by the Hellfire Club. And all this is intercut with another chance to enjoy AvX #12.
I’m not quite sure the intercutting works here. It seems as though Aaron is trying to set up some kind of parallels between the big epic finale and the comparatively low-key stuff at the school, but I don’t think it comes off. After all, it’s not like AvX #12 was designed with this in mind, nor does it make prominent use of any of this book’s cast. But it does allow Aaron to play off the rebirth of mutants against a genuinely surprising ending.
Granted, it’s surprising in part because it would seem to result in a bunch of character-development subplots being cut off abruptly. So abruptly, in fact, that I’m not sure I buy it, no matter how clear the art seems to be. Then again, Idie’s sudden conversion to amorality – which doesn’t seem to be imputed to mind control as opposed to manipulation – also seems tremendously rushed, as if the series needed to get its plot to this point to coincide with the end of the crossover, and only belatedly remembered that it hadn’t done the build with Idie in earlier issues. A slightly confusing and not entirely successful issue.
X-Men #37 – The end of Brian Wood’s run is a very strange anticlimax, and I can’t quite tell whether it’s a rush to clear decks before leaving the book, or a deliberate choice. Wood says he was hired to write eight issues, so presumably it’s the latter, but it does make for a curious resolution.
Basically, Pixie talks to the one surviving proto-mutant; Storm decides to have all the proto-mutant DNA samples destroyed; and Colossus grumbles about Storm’s priorities. And then the storyline just kind of ends, with everyone a bit unhappy and not a tremendous amount having been achieved. It’s beautiful, of course, and some of it’s very nicely dialogued, but I really don’t get what Wood was going for here.
I suspect it all loops back to my old complaint that I don’t buy into the importance of the proto-mutant DNA in the first place. There’s something of a suggestion in here that other characters are also querying whether it was worth going after in the first place, but that only works if you buy into the story’s implicit assumption that everyone will start off thinking that of course it must be important. I never did; so the vague hints at a reversal fall flat, if that’s even what the story was going for.
Uncanny Avengers thus far feels like an X-Men book with Captain America and Thor on it. I’m very iffy about the “feel” of the book. It doesn’t have a very strong sense of identity yet. But I’ll give Remender another issue or so to fix things.
“But hell, it’s the premise, so let’s shrug our shoulders and accept it.”
That’s something I’ve applied to quite a few series over the last few years. Then again, Uncanny X-force turned out to be a pleasant surprise, so who knows?
I’ve thought for some time that there was potential in seeing Red Skull grapple with the idea of Mutants. After all, Homo Superior should theoretically inherit the earth because of its genetic advantage; that lines up pretty well with the ideology of the Skull’s youth. But of course it’s another ball game when the evidence points to you being the genetically inferior one…
Magneto, of course, would just HAVE to make an appearance in any such story.
Red Skull was the primary villain in the X-Men 1999 Annual.
I enjoyed Uncanny Avengers well enough, but it felt like an odd choice for the flagship book for Marvel NOW! A funeral for a character who died in an earlier story seems like an odd place to make a fresh start for new readers.
And on some level, it feels like a book that’s about nothing so much as the particulars of the Marvel Universe itself. To the uninitiated, there’s no obvious reason why superheroes born with their powers and superheroes who acquired them elsewise wouldn’t have been working together all along.
In my most cynical moments, I’m inclined to think Marvel’s idea of new readers are people who read some of their titles, but not others. “You know who would like our Avengers books if only they gave them a chance? People who read our X-Men comics!” “That’s funny, because I was just thinking that people who read Avengers comics would love our X-Men comics.” And so the chocolate peanut butter cup, er, Uncanny Avengers was born.
In the review of Uncanny Avengers, I believe you were referencing Remender’s work on X-Force (as X-Factor is PAD’s baby), right?
Just a minor annoyance I have with Uncanny Avengers is why Cap chooses Havok. Yes he was not involved in AvX but he WAS a mutant terrorist and leader of the Brotherhood. Now a character like Iceman, original X-man and the only one that’s not turned evil would be a perfect choice.
Perhaps the mutant DNA was important because it shows that mutants keep showing up
“Is this an X-book?”. I think this question has added importance, as I can’t work out what the ‘main’ X-book is for those who’ve decided not to get “All New”. Is this the replacement for Uncanny X-Men? I’ve heard there’s one more unannounced X-book coming…
Thought Casssaday’s art was noticably weaker than on Astonishing X-Men. Also thought Wolverine giving Charlie’s eulogy was, well, just more of there being too much Wolverine. Bobby? Hank? Storm?
Will Remender bother with any background on how Red Skull is back?
See Havok is the only character I could see joining the Avengers, mainly from his stint on the government sanctioned 90’s X-Men. His “mutant-terrorist” time was all Dark Beast Brainwashing. I have much more of a problem with Rogue being on the team, in terms of females a more media friendly (Dazzler, M, pre-divorce Storm) or government related (Wolvesbane, Polaris, Skids agent of SHIELD) X-Woman would have been a better fit. The same with Wanda, if you want to show that not just X-Men but Mutants are good people wouldn’t you have picked Firestar/Beast/Justicee over the woman who nearly wiped out a minority group.
He’s said in interviews that it’s a clone dating from 1943 (yes, I know).
Wasn’t there already an AoA version of Dr. Doom established in the original Age of Apocalypse crossover – one who never actually became Dr. Doom, just as Donald Blake never became Thor, Tony Stark never became Iron Man, etc., spent most of his time hanging around other would-have-been Marvel characters and being mildly snotty but helpful, and never had ambitions to rule the world, since it had already been conquered? Where exactly is the new Age of Apocalypse title, which presumably is still taking place in the same universe as the original story, coming up with another Doom who had a career as a supervillain and a nemesis of Reed Richards?
The same way “AoA Blob” is in Uncanny X-Force despite being killed off in the Alpha issue that kicked off the AoA to start with? Namely, there’s been no attempt to make AoA continuations sync up with the original.
Doesn’t it seem odd that Cap needs “X-Men” on the Avengers, when you already have Beast and Storm on the team, right?
It seems like there have been mutants on the Avengers going all the way back to Wanda and Pietro joining in the first roster change.
And did they kill of Avalance in issue 1? Couldn’t tell.
“A funeral for a character who died in an earlier story seems like an odd place to make a fresh start for new readers.”
True, but at this late date, I think we can dispense with the polite pretense that any of these reboots and relaunches are aimed at attracting the near-mythical “new readers” in any significant way – rather, they’re clearly aimed at drawing back lapsed readers of one sort or another.
Most of the line-ups on these new books are like they just threw darts randomly at a wall full of characters. There is an air of desperation about this whole line-wide relaunch.
The idea of Havok, not only being team-mates with Thor & Cap, but actually leading an Avengers, is well, quite bizarre. His new costume is atrocious as well. I looked at the cover and thought it was that Protector guy.
I was wondering if anybody will do anything with the 3rd Summers brother, the crazy space bloke.
Admittedly the final page made me go ‘woah’, and it’ll be interesting to see what is done with the Red Skull. Surely it can’t be worse that Dell Rusk.
I liked Uncanny Avengers and AvX Consequences, in a way, because it really hit home how depressing AvX ended up being (in-storyline-wise). Xavier’s dream was for mutants and humans to peacefully co-exist, but that kinda got left by the roadside with “no more mutants” – hard to co-exist when once side doesn’t exist period. I think Remender hits a good beat by having Havok point out that Cyclops basically said “not on my watch” and went full-tilt protecting his people. In the end, he brought his people back, but at the cost of killing a bunch of innocent humans and putting mutants squarely back into “hated and feared”. Not quite up to the Magneto standard, but certainly closer to that than Xavier. Xavier dies pointlessly. His death solves nothing – it’s not a glorious sacrifice that wins the day, there’s no martyrdom that proves his dream should succeed – he just dies. His #1 student is now seen by the world solely as a mass murderer supervillain. Mutants are still hated and feared, back to square one. Magneto is back on the run (and I won’t be surprised if he ends up back in supervillain status either). At the end of the day, it’s a lot of tragic loss of life and trust for no gain. And I kinda like that.
As for the issues themselves…
Uncanny Avengers: I originally was gonna skip this, but I’ve really liked Rememder’s work on Uncanny X-Force so I’ll give it a chance. And as far as I can tell, it is supposed to be the new main X-Book with Uncanny ending.
Overall, it’s good. I agree that it’s hard to buy Cap’s take on why Havok should be used, but he’s an underused character so I don’t mind him getting a shot. Wolverine is used well (Remender has a good hold on him from UXF). The Rogue/Wanda scene felt really out-of-character though. I think the Red Skull makes for a good opening villain, though I’m hoping there’s more depth than just shock value (ala Skinless Man).
Cassaday’s art… really good on the faces, but boy do the full-body shots look bad. Havok in-uniform in particular was painful to see.
AvX Consequences: I’m definitely glad Gillen got to write this, since he had the best stories – by far – of the AvX stuff. He’s got a really good take on Cyclops here. The idea of the humans beating him down by making him not-special is a good one. I’m not sure if there will actually be anything important coming out of this 5 issue arc, as it could easily just be “Cyclops in jail”, but I’m willing to pay to read that anyways.
WATXM #18: At the other end of the spectrum is this book. I’ve given it a chance, but I think I might end up dropping it. A lot of it has just been too silly (though this issue tried to be much darker), and I don’t really like any of the characters. I like Kitty, and Warbird, and uh… that’s it. Wolverine is Wolverine, Iceman and Beast are basically the forgotten window dressings they’ve been in all books for so long, and the students are all annoying. Quentin Quire is all of the non-interesting parts from Morrison and none of the good ones. Idie is annoying as all heck. Genesis, Angel and Kid Gladiator are gone. And Broo… well, he’s gone now too. The Hellfire Club make for poor villains.
Apparently the news is that Uncanny X-Force will continue as a team under Psylocke, while Cable will get his own X-Force consisting of Domino, Colossus, Forge and Dr. Nemesis. I like the character lineups of both, we’ll see how they turn out with new creative teams.
Last note… I’m really tired of Wolverine being shoved down our throats. It’s one thing when he’s in every issue, because you can avoid him by just not buying those comics, but having him suddenly pushed into the roles of 1) schoolteacher, 2) the recipient of Xavier’s dying words, and 3) the guy who gives the eulogy at his funeral is just too much. It’s starting to feel like the cartoon Wolverine and the X-Men, which, while very well done in most respects, also pissed me off because it put Wolverine front and center as the #1 best student EVER!
Can I just say again how terrible and ridiculous the Hellfire Babies are on every level? There is, in the immortal words of Nigel Tufnel, a thin line between clever and stupid, and Jason Aaron is terribly eager to dive across it.
Surely it can’t be worse that Dell Rusk
Oh, but that was by Geoff Johns, and Geoff Johns is a genius writer!
What a pile of cack Red Zone was.
Why is Magneto on the run again? Didn’t he spend most of the crossover squatting in a cellar or something?
@MattC: Broo’s shown up in preview art for future issues of WaTXM, so he’s not captal-D dead. Bet a brood dealing with a perforated skull isn’t a pretty thing, though.
moose n squirrel: “True, but at this late date, I think we can dispense with the polite pretense that any of these reboots and relaunches are aimed at attracting the near-mythical “new readers” in any significant way – rather, they’re clearly aimed at drawing back lapsed readers of one sort or another.”
Fair enough, but even for lapsed readers spending that much time on what is essentially an AvX epilogue seems like an odd place to start. Of course, maybe it only seems like an AvX epilogue because I read AvX. But I expected the book to hit the ground running a bit more than it did.
Please tell me Elsa brought her shovel along.
Having not read it, the funeral of xavier can make for a good start point. Lapsed readers returning and new reader only familiar with the movies see the funeral, and know straight away they are moving into new territory.
I’m confused as to why Magneto is on the run–wasn’t he with the Avengers & X-Men fighting Cyclops in AvX #11? Then he just disappears, along with some of the X-Men–the hell?
And Jason Aaron should really stop shoving the Hellfire Brats down our throats; just kill them all already.
“And Jason Aaron should really stop shoving the Hellfire Brats down our throats; just kill them all already.”
Preferably off-panel.
They mentioned that Magneto and Danger were on the lam and they wanted to bring them in because of their Extinction Team connections – which doesn’t really make sense by itself, since Storm and Psylocke were also Extinction Team members who didn’t go Phoenix.
Maybe it’s just because of Magneto’s past history and they freaked out after he ran? It’s quite possible that Magneto disappeared first, and the Avengers figure he wouldn’t do so without having some sort of dangerous motivation. And I’m pretty sure during the last run there were scenes mentioning that Magneto was still wanted by the authorities, but it wasn’t worth tweaking Cyclops over it. Now that Cyke is in jail, well…
Um…wouldn’t Storm be a much, MUCH more plausible choice for “leader” of Uncanny Avengers. Like say, Storm? Now that she can be something other than Black Panthers arm candy, she has a perfect excuse for throwing herself full-throttle in super-hero work. Besides didn’t a recent issue of X-factor (The Banshee issue) protray Havok in a not-so flattering light where this was concerned (with him having a mini-breakdown after an argument with Monet. Not exactly someone leading with confidence there.)
Besides, it wouldn’t surprise anyone if Alex was just a figurehead and Captain America and turns into the de facto leaders (Since one of those above mentioned people just recently had a HUGE BLOCKBUSTER FILM, I’m sure it’d would just a sheer coincidence if that happened, eh?)
Don’t worry about the details of Magneto’s current status. If it’s not explained in the actual comic, then I’m sure it will all be revealed in an off-hand tweet from Brevoort.
i like avx consequences (aside from the art, which i find hideous), but i think it left some fundamental questions unanswered. how exactly does the ‘repowering’ work? do ex-mutants (like jubilee or dani) get their powers back? or have random humans become mutants? does age play a role, or does it only affect teenagers? how do those new mutants feel about this? i really think this should have been clarified and explored.
also, what is storms status?
uncanny avengers feels a little off to me. i will stick with it for now, especially since remenders work on x-force has been so good (and that series also started as ‘just another x-team’).
i like the take on havok, but his new costume is hideous (very mexican wrestler), and yeah, i dont see him giving orders to cap, wolverine, and thor.
storm, beast, and perhaps firestar would have been good characters for this team, no? and given that they are playing up havoks past with x-factor, valerie cooper would have made sense, too. rogue seems out of place, and out of character.
i do like the red skull as the villain, though. and that last page is pretty killa.
on W&tXM: i like what they are doing with idie; i think people who have been brought up to equate morality with religion are an interesting subject to explore.
i agree that the intercutting doesnt work. i would have preferred to spend more time with the kids at (and before) the dance. xaviers inner monologue feels out of place, since he hasnt been presence in this series so far. im also not sure about husks subplot.
wait, angel is part of the battle roster? isnt that completely out of character?
“Um…wouldn’t Storm be a much, MUCH more plausible choice for “leader” of Uncanny Avengers.”
Well, she was in the Extinction Team, I guess.
I assume Magneto’s on the run because the X-Men are no longer in a position to shelter him from charges over all those things he did as a supervillain. It certainly can’t be because of anything he did in the course of AvX, where he did nothing worse than any other X-Man.
“i like what they are doing with idie; i think people who have been brought up to equate morality with religion are an interesting subject to explore.”
I roll my eyes every time Idie shows up. Idie does not act like someone who’s been brought up to equate morality with religion – she acts like a defective robot. I know plenty of very conservative, right-wing religious people – they’re my relatives – and as loopy as their beliefs are, they still act like ordinary human beings when it comes down to it – going to a church or a temple once a week isn’t a magical form of mind control that turns you into one of the creepy kids from Village of the Damned. And when religious belief conflicts with real-world experience, actual people experience that conflict as doubt and uncertainty – they don’t do what Idie does, namely, blithely accept that they’re “monsters” and encourage/demand others to call them such as well. I had the same problem with Wolfsbane, who (at least in her early appearances, before Warren Ellis’s Excalibur run) seemed like a caricature of a religious believer written by someone who had never much experience with the actual phenomenon of religious belief.
Religion is a profoundly problematic, corrupt, and corrupting institution, but it’s also a fairly complicated and contradictory one, and you can’t honestly portray it without understanding what attracts people to it – and keeps them in it – in the first place. Religious institutions manage to provide material benefits to their adherents – if they didn’t, they wouldn’t exist for long – among the most important of which is a sense of community. So you take a character like Idie, who has been expelled from her community – the root, material basis for her religious belief – and put her in another community, one which will accept her for the very thing that her old community rejected her. What happens then? In the real world, with real human beings, those old beliefs start to fade – this is why so many kids raised in conservative religious families drop their beliefs when they go to college; they’re now part of a world that doesn’t require that belief, so the belief becomes redundant. This is even more the case for people whose religions have told them all their lives that something is deeply wrong with them – that just by being gay, for instance, they’re corrupt and shameful. When removed from that environment and that influence, those beliefs begin to lose their hold.
Which is what should happen to Idie – if she were being written as though she were an actual person. But like most of the cast of Aaron’s book, she’s not even a rough approximation of a character, but a vehicle for cheap jokes and shock gags.
I totally forgot that Idie was intended to be religious. Moose n squirrel is right, she doesn’t act like a religious person, she just acts like a robot attempting to ape humanity and failing.
The last page of Uncanny Avengers may very solidly confirm Xavier’s current status as a corpse, but I can easily see how you get from the Red Skull’s current plan to resurrecting Xavier in some form.
Having not read it, the funeral of xavier can make for a good start point. Lapsed readers returning and new reader only familiar with the movies see the funeral, and know straight away they are moving into new territory.
I think a lapsed reader seeing that a founding X-Man had totally genuinely for real been definitely killed would think “Oh, business as usual then. I give it six months.”
Did you give up reviewing Ultimate X-men? I couldn’t find a review after the first issue from last year.
The last page of Uncanny Avengers may very solidly confirm Xavier’s current status as a corpse, but I can easily see how you get from the Red Skull’s current plan to resurrecting Xavier in some form.
That was my thought exactly. After all it was only a few crossovers ago that Xavier was shot in the head and had a whole ongoing devoted to putting his brain and mind back together again. Plus Xavier has been a clone for something like 30 years, and the Skull has mucked around with cloning before. It’s all too easy. I’m just glad that Jean is still dead and they are sticking to that (time travel doppelgängers aside).
Oh and how can we forget, the last time Phoenix killed Xavier, Charles woke up on Muir Island in someone else’s body. I knew Last Stand would come in handy for something one day.
My bet would be that the resurrection of Charlie would involve the mind infinity gem. Didn’t Charles hide it in his, now dead, mind?
I actually enjoyed Rogue calling out the Scarlet Witch on her BS.
Sure my mind is clouded by a frothing hatred for Wanda, enough so to disregard any recent development on Rogue’s part but it thought it was good that a character who was/is a poster child for unwanted mutation calls out Wanda on the No More Mutants thing.
Incidently, during the epilogue’s sanctimonious character assassination on Cyclops (for the record, I always thought the “A vs X” conflict could be summed up as “pig-headed self-rigteous bullies vs fanatical cultist wannabes” despite the fact that we’re clearly suppose to root for the bullies), has anyone in the comic mentioned the idea that Wolverine was going to kill Hope. Or is that something that readers are expected to dispose of in the Black Hole of Dropped Subplots, despite it not happening that long ago (part of me suspects this is the REAL reason the crossover was stretched to 12 issues: so short-term memory will take care of the “inconviences”.
Speaking of the Scarlet Witch, didn’t fellow-team-member Wolverine try to kill HER too? (and too be fair to Wanda, people have been basically bad-mouthing her for about 7 YEARS now. She certainly hasn’t “gotten away” with her actions with her reputation unscathed.)
Don’t all Marvel crossovers now begin with Wolverine wanting to kill a fellow hero? Thus proving his importance to the Marvel Universe; nothing happens unless Logan tries to kill one of his friends.
Honestly, Rogue giving Wanda crap seems so at odds with her history, I wonder if that isn’t the point. Self-loathing is a recurring theme for Remender in both Uncanny X-Force and Venom – it’s not hard to see this as Rogue projecting.
Also, Wolfsbane seems like a very different case than Idie, from what I understand. Wolfsbane was raised in a verbally and emotionally abusive environment where giving into any form of temptation was seen as an affront to God and evidence that she was a horrible monster, a situation that was aggravated when she found out that she was a werewolf with extremely violent urges. Even though Moira adopted her while she was fairly young, that’s still a lot of psychological damage to have to undo.
Maybe they can plug the extradimensional severed Xavier head from X-Treme X-Men onto our dead Xavier’s body.
The thing that struck me as oddest about AvX Consequences was Wolverine saying “No one had open arms like the Wakandans.” He must have meant in the sense that no one has a budget surplus like Greece, or possibly he meant “open arms” as in “unrestrained weapons use,” because the Wakanda I’m familiar with has a tradition of welcoming foreigners that makes the border between North and South Korea look like the border between North and South Dakota*.
*(for non-Americans, this would be a border guarded by a sign informing you that you’re about to cross it and saying flattering things about the state you’re about to enter)
Well, he was hiding out there with the Avengers during the recent crossover. I assume he means it was welcoming TO HIM.
The irritating thing about Wanda is that there’s little to no explanation for why she’s getting a pass after years of being a crazy fugitive who tried to rewrite reality multiple times to kill people, help her family take over the world, and exterminate a sentient species. And to the extent that there was any attempt at such an explanation – the hastily slapped-together package of retcons that was “Avengers: Children’s Crusade” – every other writer and editor at Marvel seems to have forgotten it, given that that story didn’t just absolve Wanda of guilt, but vastly de-powered her, which is wildly at odds with the portrayal of her as being crazily overpowered in AvX.
Taibak: “Wolfsbane was raised in a verbally and emotionally abusive environment where giving into any form of temptation was seen as an affront to God and evidence that she was a horrible monster, a situation that was aggravated when she found out that she was a werewolf with extremely violent urges.”
Yes, she was never meant to be a typical Presbyterian. From her first page it was clear she’s had years of abuse that made her that way.
However, she was never violent or animalistic. That came later, when some gifted writer looked at the character and thought, “now what makes her interesting, what makes her stand out from all the other animal-people? I’ll get rid of that.”
First X-Men #3 – I am real disappointed with Neal Adams here. The art is just hard to look at. The story is lacking as well. I am glad that this is not part of “main” Marvel continuity because that means I can just stop with this one.
Uncanny Avengers #1 – I want to love this one. I am a huge fan of Uncanny X-Force and Remender. And I am also a huge Havok fan (#HavokTheBetterSummers) but somethings just aren’t working for me. One, Havok’s costume. Horrible. Two, the issue just didn’t have that epic impact I wanted it to. Which really scares me about the upcoming All-New X-Men title. But I am still going to give this title a couple more issues.
Wolverine and the X-Men #18 – I am still truckin’ along with this title. I am a big Bachalo fan and am all for the X-Men staying at the school.
X-Men #37 – I like the proto-mutant concept but it needs something big if they want to continue it. Now that Uncanny X-Men and X-Men Legacy are over, this title needs to get on the ball. Fast!