The X-Axis – 9 June 2013
It’s one of our rare quiet weeks! (Well, there’s the Wolverine: Season One graphic novel, but I don’t review those. Not in the week of release, at any rate.)
All-New X-Men #12 – Apparently someone’s decided that it’s time to start pushing the Uncanny Avengers team into the other X-books, since they show up in two of this week’s titles. All-New has them show up to speak confront the remaining Silver Age X-Men (plus Kitty and Wolverine), whom you might recall them blasting out of the sky in the previous issue. But this is a Brian Bendis comic, so once the very expensive aircraft has been wrecked, everyone can settle down to some Very Important Talking.
The main focus of what follows is on Cyclops having a touching reunion with his brother Havok, and Marvel Girl going predictably nuts over the Scarlet Witch still being accepted as a hero. Neither of these seems to advance the plot appreciably in any way, as the story ends with the X-Men going off to fight Mystique’s crew, which is exactly what they were going to do at the end of issue #11 anyway. The more substantial story advancement is over in the subplot, where Mastermind makes clear that she believes Mystique has a more ambitious agenda than merely accruing vast amounts of money, and Mystique more or less confirms it.
Though it’s a very well drawn issue, and the brothers’ reunion has a lot going for it, this issue suffers from the main problems that continue to plague All-New X-Men – the pace is glacial, and the characters have to act in awkward ways to make key scenes work. It’s not just the Avengers gratuitously attacking last issue for the sake of a cliffhanger; that’s hokey, but people have been doing it for decades. More to the point is that the ensuing conversation between X-Men and Avengers features no fewer than three key sequences that depend on characters remaining inexplicably ignorant of things they surely ought to know.
Scott has somehow failed to learn that his brother is (a) alive, (b) was in the X-Men, and (c) is now leading an Avengers team, even though Alex isn’t even maintaining a secret identity and is giving press conferences. Has nobody mentioned this to him? Has he not asked? Jean has to be shocked and outraged about the whole M-Day thing, but how on earth have they managed to live with the X-Men for any length of time without somebody mentioning one of the biggest historical events of the last few years? And Scott somehow still doesn’t believe that Mystique is a baddie, even though the X-Men ought to have tons of material to show him. Bendis wants Scott to be fighting Mystique’s corner within the team, which is a fine idea, but he’s given Scott no sensible reason to do so, and no ammunition, so whenever the topic comes up, he looks like a complete moron.
The slow pacing might be exacerbating these problems. The time to have Scott, Jean and the Others Who Don’t Get Anything To Do reacting to the biggest events of the last few years was issue #3, at a push. Here they are, still learning things that even the readers have known from day one, in issue #12. I get the desire not to have them reacting to everything all at once in the opening issues, but if you want to drag out their learning process a bit longer, you can’t have them living with the X-Men. You need to keep them away from the source of information.
It’s not that the actual scenes are bad, it’s that they’re coming at the wrong point in the series, and the logical underpinning isn’t there. This doesn’t seem uncommon where Bendis is concerned; he’s a writer mainly interested in the big emotional beats and, by all appearances, rather less bothered about the connecting tissue that gives them context. And while that’s a perfectly sound order of priorities, there’s still a balance. A lot of what happens in this series is good in theory, but it hasn’t been structured very well at all.
Cable & X-Force #9 – How odd. This issue does have the advertised story – Hope goes on the run to try and help Cable, and the Uncanny Avengers team try to catch her. And it’s drawn by regular artist Salvador Larroca. But instead of being by regular (and solicited) writer Dennis Hopeless, it’s by Frank Tieri, a name I don’t think we’ve seen at Marvel in quite some time. It doesn’t seem to be an outright filler story, though, so much as a self-contained chapter of the larger plot. Marvel’s website is still listing Hopeless as the writer of the next issue, so it seems to be a rare case of a fill-in writer. (And by the way, Marvel’s website is a lot more navigable than it has been in the past. Looks like you can actually find stuff there without resorting to Google these days.)
It was always clear that we were going to get back to Hope’s story, and what happens here is much as you’d expect. She isn’t happy being stuck in the suburbs with her foster parents, the Avengers politely try to tell her that she’s going back there, and (since there wouldn’t be much of a story for future issues otherwise) she comes out on top. It does what it needs to do.
It doesn’t read, though, as if Tieri is particularly familiar with Hope. Having any character reference the “these are not the droids you’re looking for” bit from Star Wars is a bit hokey, but particularly so for Hope, who if anything ought to be the one person in the room who doesn’t get the joke. And unless I’m very much mistaken, Hope’s power is to copy the powers of other mutants who are nearby, not just other mutants who she met earlier in the day. (Wasn’t there an Uncanny X-Men cliffhanger where she was teleported away from the rest of her team, with the idea that that instantly depowered her?) These are more editing problems than faults on Tieri’s part, but they do give the impression that he isn’t up to speed on the character. Oh, and if she’s planning to go on the run, you’d think she’d be drawn with a bag of some sort. Hope’s nothing if not practical, but it doesn’t exactly take a survival expert to figure out that a change of clothes might come in handy.
Still, Tieri makes a reasonable stab of trying to use his guest stars effectively by having Hope try to play up the tensions over Havok’s improbable status as an authority figure in a team filled with far more established heroes. And it does the job of advancing the wider series plot. But even if the problems I’ve mentioned are mere glitches in the wider scheme of things, they’re too prominent to let the story be anything more than okay.
X-Factor #257 – The cover bills this as “The End of X-Factor, part 1 of 6”, but it seems that “The End of X-Factor” isn’t a storyline so much as a bunch of issues that will wind up in the same trade paperback. This is a Jamie and Layla story, so presumably the remaining issues will catch up on the rest of the cast before everyone gets together one last time at the end. (Right?)
Jamie is still stuck as a silent demon after the Hell on Earth War, and, well, by the end of this issue he’s still stuck as a demon – which is another reason why I assume we’ll be seeing him again. He’s wound up in Marrakesh where a couple of locals have mistaken him for a genie and are trying to use him as a source of mystical power to bring a loved one back from the dead. Layla shows up expecting a straightforward retrieval, but it seems that Jamie actually does work as a source of mystical power, so it all goes a bit wrong.
(Part of this doesn’t entirely make sense, by the way. In the timeline Layla “knows” about, it seems Jamie wasn’t a demon – but in that case, it’s not clear what the story would actually have been, since he wouldn’t have been of interest to the two locals in the first place.)
The result is basically a “be careful what you wish for” story, and I suppose the wider idea is that Layla is meant to (but doesn’t) learn that she ought to be careful about how far she pushes her attempts to cure Jamie. But there’s an optimistic note too, since Jamie’s behaviour suggests he’s still in there somewhere. It’s a change of pace and scale from the previous story, but it does feel like a bit of a detour for a series that only has six issues to go.
Ah, X-factor is one X-book I’ll definitely miss. Kudos to PAD for staying on the title this time and be willing to work around all the various x-crossovers.
Tieri wrote the recent Space Punisher series for Marvel. I don’t think it sold very well.
With All-New X-Men, is it possible that the idea is the other X-Men are purposefully keeping the original kids in the dark about events (other than the Cyclops-as-revolutionary stuff that they are theoretically trying to prevent) so as to minimize disruptions to the timeline when they inevitably go back?
So I don’t recall Alex and Scott having a great relationship. In fact I would see Alex’s main motivation as leader of a mutant avengers team being to spite Scott. What should have been this big emotional moment only served to show me how out of character I feel these people are.
I don’t see how you realistically could keep them in the dark about something like that once you’ve decided to let them stay in the present at all. The working assumption for the characters from day one seems to have been that their memories must get wiped when they return to their time, since otherwise there would already be an enormous paradox.
If the Silver Agers are only from “10 years ago,” they can do a simple google search to see what has happened since they came from the past.
The title design for Cable and X-Force makes it look more like X-Cable and Force.
Another problem I had with that issue is, quite simply, the portrayal of The Purple Girl as an incarcerated villain. Traditionally, she was a hero. The last we saw of her, she was first working against Canada’s Unity Party, and then brainwashed into being part of the Canadian Alpha Strike team. None of that exactly screams “villain” to me. Plus, I don’t think “Pace Federal Penitentiary” is Canadian…
So how exactly did Purple Girl go from being a misguided, brainwashed hero in Canada, to being a imprisoned villain in America? Usually Frank Tieri’s better about this sort of continuity blip.
Tieri tried to kill Purple Girl off in Weapon X; she was saved due to a coloring error. Maybe he just doesn’t like her. 😉
While I agree that the O5 not knowing things they ought to know is a plotting problem, the fact remains that the book has been *so* slow that we are still on literally day 4 or 5 of the arrival of the O5 into this timeline. So there is a way of explaining that they haven’t gotten all the necessary information yet.
Although logically Kitty should be sitting them down with tapes of the X-Men history ASAP, so that they don’t blunder into every mistake they possibly can make.
Weirdly, the first time I read All-New I thought that the young X-Men had been told about M Day (I thought I remembered that happening on-panel; I think I was misremembering a scene where they were told about AvX) and that discovering that Wanda constantly thinking about M-Day was just the last straw that pushed Jean over the edge (basically I read all her “She killed us all and you let her be an Avenger?” talk as accusations and incredulity, not revalations and surprise – I feel like we’ve seen countless scenes in the past with Magneto in the Scarlet Witch role where it was clear that the person attacking him wasn’t just finding out about his crimes).
It wasn’t until I re-read the scene after seeing Paul’s review that I caught the Beast reacting with surprise to Jean’s statements about Wanda. What that says to me is that the scene would have worked just as well – with, literally, only one or two speech bubbles needing to be changed – if Bendis had assumed the kids did know about it, since nothing really read wrong to me when I thought that was the case. If he he really felt Jean being surprised was necessary, he could have just said the kids knew about M Day but not that Wanda was responsible, or that they’d been told that Wanda wasn’t in control of her actions only for Jean to discover that she felt guilty about it and considered it her own fault.
I certainly hope that Bendis has the kids ask sooner rather than later why Wanda gets a chance to redeem herself but Cyclops doesn’t, considering that he has a much stronger argument for outside influence than she does. But I have the suspicion that either this won’t be brought up again for ages or that it will be something the kids let simmer and only discuss among themselves to create conflict, and not mention it to the older X-Men until one of them spits it out angrily while storming off to leave the mansion.
“I certainly hope that Bendis has the kids ask sooner rather than later why Wanda gets a chance to redeem herself but Cyclops doesn’t, considering that he has a much stronger argument for outside influence than she does.”
Because Wanda didn’t kill anyone when she went crazy?
*cut to the graves of Agatha Harkness and Jack of Hearts*
Well, anyone important.
Lots of mutants, including students at the school and Magma’s bf, died when Wanda decided to depower the majority of mutants on Earth, and she’s indirectly responsible for the ones who committed suicide out of despair or were killed by bigots once they were easy targets. If we’re comparing episodes, she has way more blood on her hands than Cyclops.
Jack of Hearts got resurrected in some Marvel Zombies miniseries a year or two ago.
-Information no one cares about
It seems to me that Jean was being somewhat (albeit unknowingly) hypocritical in her condemnation of Wanda. Does anyone remember the late, great planet D’Bari and its FIVE BILLION broccoli-headed aliens wiped out by Jean “Dark Phoenix” Grey? And yes, I am fully aware that that Dark Phoenix wasn’t really Jean – “She” was the Phoenix Force who had embodied itself as an absolutely-identical copy of Jean Grey, including her memories and personality. And let’s not forget that the Exiles once encountered an evil Phoenix who actually WAS Jean Grey (without any external cosmic force acting on her).
As the saying goes, “People who live in glass X-Mansions shouldn’t use their telekinesis to throw stones.” If some future issue features Jean going ballistic again, I can only hope that there will be somebody present who can suggest that she pry into his/her mind to look up the meaning of the word “D’Bari.” Cue horrified silence on Jean’s part.
“”With All-New X-Men, is it possible that the idea is the other X-Men are purposefully keeping the original kids in the dark about events (other than the Cyclops-as-revolutionary stuff that they are theoretically trying to prevent) so as to minimize disruptions to the timeline when they inevitably go back?””
Why would they even CARE if there’s a disruption to the timeline? Time travel doesn’t have retroactive changes on the timeline in previous X-Men stories, it just generates a new timeline. The worst thing that could happen is the five teenagers return home to live their lives while screwing up less than their 616 counterparts, and the X-Men continue on with their lives completey unaffected.
I’m pretty sure Scott didn’t find out his brother was alive/where he was for a long time in the original series. So he wouldn’t have had any reason to ask about him or assume he was an X-Man.
I find it ridiculous that Jane is shocked that everyone is OK with Wanda being an Avenger despite her recent past, when she already knows her future self became Phoenix and killed millions.
Bendis does not even pay attention to the things he wrote.
Also, Wanda didn’t kill Agatha Harkness. The implication was that Harkness had never actually returned to life after she was killed by Salem’s Seven back in the 1980s; all later appearances starting with John Byrne’s resurrection of her were actually Crazy Wanda using her Crazy powers to talk to herself via Agatha. Children’s Crusade may screw up that timeline, but I recall Bendis and maybe Brevoort implying the above interpretation in some interviews here and there.
“Lots of mutants, including students at the school and Magma’s bf, died when Wanda decided to depower the majority of mutants on Earth, and she’s indirectly responsible for the ones who committed suicide out of despair or were killed by bigots once they were easy targets. If we’re comparing episodes, she has way more blood on her hands than Cyclops.”
Although Cyclops has a lot more than just Xavier’s blood on his hands; Matthew Risman and all the people X-Force killed were a direct result of his orders and his forming of a kill squad.
(And yes the Purifiers were contemptible human beings, while those Wanda killed were mostly innocent, but Wanda wasn’t in her right mind and Cyclops was.)
Granted, Cyclcops is morally responsible for the orders he made to the X-Force group. But if we start going down that road, Wolverine’s hands are particularly bloody, and the Avengers and X-Men by association, given that they let a fairly unrepentant murderer hold prominent positions on their teams. It’s what happens when you let that whole “heroes don’t kill” thing fall to the wayside.
And for the time paradox stuff, judging by Age of Ultron 9, Bendis is going by a different set of rules than the “time travel creates alternate timelines” version: “Time is an organism. It’s a part of us. It lives and breathes and every time you travel through it, you rip it… If you keep doing what you’re doing it, you will eventually kill it.”
I wouldn’t think Cyclops would have any guilt over any Purifier deaths.
“And for the time paradox stuff, judging by Age of Ultron 9, Bendis is going by a different set of rules than the “time travel creates alternate timelines” version: “Time is an organism. It’s a part of us. It lives and breathes and every time you travel through it, you rip it… If you keep doing what you’re doing it, you will eventually kill it.””
That’s stupid if you’re writing X-Men though, and have Rachel Grey, Bishop, X-Man, and Cable all running around at this very moment, each from their own separate alternate universe created by a single deviation from the 616 timeline (and when all of those timeline except for AoA still exist). And this is effectively the same book as Uncanny, which has in its cast a woman who can freeze time, and Magick, whose power is time travel. If Bendis wants to do a time travel storyline with those kind of consequences, he should be doing it in the Ultimates.
I think Bendis may have said Age of Ultron will be changing time travel in the marvel u going forward or that someone will be explaining why divergent time lines are not happening now.
Something about ANXM that’s been bothering me for a while: if Scott, Magneto, and Emma are so worried about the original team wandering around in the present day, why don’t they just /send them back/? Bendis is doing a Limbo storyline in Uncanny and everything. They could open up a portal beneath Jean’s feet and be done with it, but instead we just get Scott and Magneto wandering around agitated and telling the kids to go home or face dire consequences.
Omar, it seems Marvel thinks Wanda killed Agatha:
“Agatha became Franklin’s permanent governess afterwards, eventually giving up her own life twice, finally at the hands of her own student: the Scarlet Witch.”
from http://marvel.com/universe/Harkness,_Agatha#ixzz2VmyNXMGI
I seem to remember Agatha showing up a bunch during DeFalco’s Fantastic Four (after Byrne brought her back in WCA), so it’s not as if she only interacted with Wanda and her hands-of-Master-Pandemonium-babies 🙂
The entire Wanda/Agatha thing is just another of those convenient “oh I don’t care/know/forgot about that” bits that Bendis peppers his entire Marvel oeuvre with.
Considering that in “Avengers Disassembled” there’s clearly more than just Wanda involved in the last page of Avengers #500 (and that second mouth is not Agatha), I cast my vote for rewrite (as in maybe originally Pietro was going to be involved also) or writing flub. It can go either way, but the beginning doesn’t seem to match the end in just those four issues.
I figure the same will go for pretty much anything he does with the X-Men.
The rule that all time travel creates an alternate timeline was dropped years ago and even Claremont never paid any attention to it. See the end of the Kulan Gath story for a direct example, but it’s implicit in everything he did with Rachel’s timeline too. At any rate, by this point it’s been very clearly established that time travel can alter history, at least sometimes.
Not only that, Agatha Harkness showed up in a few issues of SILVER SURFER in the late 90s, and helped resurrect the Surfer after he had been killed for some reason or another and Mephisto was trying to use the circumstances of the Surfer’s death to resurrect himself (he was dead himself for a hot minute following the end of the second GHOST RIDER series). Which leads me to believe that it really was Harkness, because I have a hard time believing that a mere reanimated corpse or whatever could resurrect the Silver Surfer while also fighting Mephisto for the fate of the world.
I am surprised that more people – or rather, no one – ever mentions the fact that Wanda was being controlled by Dr. Doom, and that M-Day was his sole responsibility, and that this was unambiguously corroborated in CHILDREN’S CRUSADE. It seems like more people would be upset about that, and yet the only person in the entirety of the Marvel Universe who wants to hold Doom accountable for the events of Avengers Disassembled or M-Day is freakin’ Scott Lang. Even the five original X-Men could probably have a better time understanding Wanda’s predicament if they just said, “Doom was responsible,” since he is certainly someone they would be familiar with, even if I don’t believe they had personally encountered Doom yet in their timeline.
Sorry, how can 16-year-old Jean Grey feel any kind of ownership or remorse for the actions of the cosmic clone of a possible future self? If I was shown that in my future I become a horrible mass murderer of broccoli people, I would double-down my commitment not to do such thing, and feel no remorse. I certainly wouldn’t feel like I was guilty of having done something that I had never done.
I see no hypocrisy for Jean judging Wanda — at least in that regard. Wanda killed millions. Li’l Jean just celebrated her sweet sixteen. The worst thing she’s ever done, as far as I can recall, is snub a 14-year-old Iceman with a crush on her.
Now as to Wanda’s actual culpability — that’s a different question. But Jean’s just getting her info from Wanda’s feelings on the matter, so she might not have a full picture.
“I am surprised that more people – or rather, no one – ever mentions the fact that Wanda was being controlled by Dr. Doom, and that M-Day was his sole responsibility, and that this was unambiguously corroborated in CHILDREN’S CRUSADE.”
I would be surprised, too, except that I doubt Bendis bothered to read Children’s Crusade, or even skim the Wiki synopsis. And if Brian Bendis isn’t aware of it, it’s not in his book, and if it’s not in his book, it’s not Important, is it?
Similarly, I doubt Bendis has put more than five minutes’ worth of thought into how time travel works in his books. Age of Ultron reads as gibberish – boring gibberish – in large part because it’s a time travel story written by someone who can’t be bothered to make time travel make sense, or to provide a dramatic reason for using it. But that’s Our Bendis! Bendis, in the immortal words of Honey Badger, don’t care! Bendis don’t give a fuck! Now you’ll take your thirty Xeroxed talking Wolverine heads stuttering back and forth to each other, and you’ll like ’em!
Well said, moose n squirrel. Well said.
Right — Bendis has actually been pushing “time is an organism” since the first arc of the Heroic Age Avengers relaunch, but upon examination the phrase appears meaningless. I also doubt Rick Remender is going to pay much attention to it in Uncanny Avengers.
Since Bendis has trouble with the basics of plot mechanics, don’t you think it’s asking a bit much for a coherent presentation of time travel rules or theory?
I didn’t understand why they had to explain who Mystique was to the Avengers side of the Uncanny team, Thor and Cap, erm she’s been around a while and I’m sure they’ve heard of her if not met her…especially since they’ve been team mates with Ms Marvel for years.
Not to mention the fact that Mystique used to be a top U.S. government operative from her time with Freedom Force….
Mystique’s Brotherhood also fought the Avengers in Rogue’s first appearance, which was their second appearance as a team.
Freedom Force also fought (and beat) both the East and West Coast Avengers teams at the same time.
Ugh, Hope Summers! (That’s my basic reaction to the character now.) Now that she’s fufilled all the checkpoints for her “Macguffin on legs” personal story arc can they PLEASE kill this bitch off in their by-now obligatory overwrought “event” books (you know like they do with more established and interesting C-listers)?
Hell, even if Cap didn’t remember Mystique from the time she sicced Rogue on him, Rogue’s on Cap’s team now; If your teammate’s foster mother is a supervillain, you look her up.
can they PLEASE kill this bitch off
I have no idea why people say comics culture is sexist.
Can we give Hope Summers to Peter David? Her and Layla Miller would make amazing frienemies!
moose n squirrel says:
June 11, 2013 at 5:10 PM
can they PLEASE kill this bitch off
I have no idea why people say comics culture is sexist.
jeez, seriously!
it’s 2013 & i have no idea how to properly quote people on a message board. sorry people.
OK, that did sound rather horrible of me so I apologize for the tone of my previous post.
Everything around the “please kill her” part of my post still stands though as I still find Hope “The Messiah” Summers a rather annoying and useless character.
Nah, you were right the first time. She is kind of a bitch. Ya know? I mean, it is one of her defining peronality traits. Same as Cyclops being an asshole for the last 5 years or more. And Wolverine being a douche for at least 10.
I don’t know, I could see some good character potential for Hope as a messiah whose fulfilled her entire purpose and now needs to figure out where to go next.
“She is kind of a bitch. Ya know?”
I don’t. Please explain how her characterization necessitates criticism for being female.
Generic All-New X-Men review:
In spite of last issue’s dramatic cliffhanger of [INSERT DRAMATIC CLIFFHANGER HERE], this issues boils down mainly to conversations. The characters are forced to act either uninformed or idiotic in order to make the dialog work, particularly [JEAN/SCOTT PICK ONE], while Hank and Bobby contribute nothing but quips. The pace is absurdly slow, and seeing the original X-Men react to things is getting old. There are some interesting ideas here, but they’re just not being realized.
Be fair, Master Mahan, eventually there’l be a review about how a fight scene boils down to [PET CHARACTER] using [ARBITRARY POWER] to hastily end the battle in a tremendously anticlimactic way, rendering all the protracted setup rather moot.
The annoying part is that Alias, Daredevil ,and Pulsewas mostly much better than what he does now on every level, but now even his work on solo characters — see Moon Knight — seems to get infected by the diminishing returns of his team books.
I get the sense that he’s stretched too thin plotting and scripting multiple books (or *any* ensemble book); I’d much prefer him as an “architect” or “creative director” removed from the day-to-day except for a nice, noirish solo title of his own. Maybe something starring Jessica Jones and Luke Cage?
Actually, maybe the real problem was his transition from stories about a character to stories about The Marvel UniverseTM
“I don’t. Please explain how her characterization necessitates criticism for being female.”
It doesn’t. Quicksilver is a bitch too. And Northstar. And Empath. Being a bitch, as a personality trait, is genderless.