“Uncanny X-Men vs. S.H.I.E.L.D.” – Uncanny X-Men #19-22
For a writer who chooses to work mainly in the superhero genre, Brian Bendis never seems all that interested in having a well structured plot. First and foremost he’s interested in his characters, which is fair enough. His actual stories can often end up as rather meandering, or as sketchy gestures to provide his characters with busy work between conversations. His rambling Avengers run is pretty much the epitome of this.
So “Uncanny X-Men vs S.H.I.E.L.D.” is fairly unusual for a Bendis story, in that it sees a bunch of story threads being drawn together in a clear attempt to resolve numerous plot points at once and create a Big Climax. And what do you know, it largely works. Largely – and with one glaring exception that brings me back to the point above.
For the entire run of this series, Cyclops’ team have been harassed by Sentinels who pop up to attack them whenever they show up in public. Cyclops (wrongly, but not unreasonably) suspects SHIELD are behind it, or at least turning a blind eye. Maria Hill knows she isn’t behind it, but isn’t exactly confident that SHIELD has nothing to do with it either. Meanwhile, Mystique has kidnapped Dazzler, and taken her place as a SHIELD agent (an imposture no doubt helped enormously by the fact that this is a Bendis comic, so that she is never actually called upon to demonstrate her non-existent light powers, merely to talk at length). Dazzler is being kept prisoner in Madripoor where she’s being used to create MGH to power up de-powered mutants like the Blob. Magneto’s gone off on his own to investigate what’s happening in Madripoor. And Hijack has been kicked off the team for being a useless prat.
That’s a lot of plot threads, all of which come to a pretty neat conclusion in this story. And at least when you read them as a whole, these last few issues are nicely paced when it comes to dovetailing things together. Everyone ends up gathering at the proper X-Men’s school – Cyclops because he thinks the Beast might be behind the Sentinels, SHIELD because they’re going after Cyclops, and Hijack because he’s trying to redeem himself by offering himself up as a student to the branch of the X-Men he can still get in touch with. And Magneto rescues Dazzler and turns up with her at the end too. Chaos duly ensues, the villain is exposed and defeated, Hijack gets his big moment of redemption (though he remains essentially a well-meaning bozo who happened to have the right powers for the moment), Dazzler switches sides to rejoin the X-Men, and so forth.
All this is quite well done – and it turns out that there was a point to kicking Hijack off the team beyond his own short-term storyline, namely that the plot needs him to be out of the way before the Sentinels start developing ways of counter-measures to everyone’s powers. Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to show up at the end and save the day. So, fair enough.
True, the whole thing makes SHIELD look like the Keystone Kops – but unless it’s their series, SHIELD pretty much are the Keystone Kops. That’s the age-old curse of being characters without your own book, who can never get to overshadow the stars. You are going to end up looking like losers who need to be bailed out by the real heroes. SHIELD have been a clown show in the comics for thirty years; Bendis is hardly the first offender here. Maria Hill, admittedly, is starting to seem a problematic character – she’s meant to be the hypercompetent ice queen archetype, but since stories rarely afford her any opportunity to actually be competent, she ends up as simply someone who yells a lot. You could be forgiven for thinking that her talents might better suit her to a junior management role in a call centre. But this isn’t ultimately the X-Men’s problem; in the context of this book, SHIELD are indeed just the foils.
And true also, Dazzler’s arc is a bit minimal. Since she spends most of the story unconscious, there’s no real opportunity for her switch of sides to mean anything; of course she doesn’t want to work for Maria Hill, who, as aforementioned, is a shouty nitwit. The real problem here is that she never had an adequate motivation to work for SHIELD in the first place, and thus has needs no great motivation to stop. But that’s pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things.
And yes, there’s also some remarkably clumsy storytelling where the story reveals that the X-Men’s powers are being affected by nano tech. The problem here is that Bendis is running two different “powers not working properly” arcs at the same time – the one that was attributed to the Phoenix at the start of the series, and one from a few issues ago which affected everyone in the cast whenever the Sentinels were around. I’m pretty sure that the resolution here is intended to relate only to the latter, but it’s not made explicit, and the confusion I’ve seen online is both understandable and entirely predictable. There’s no reason why this couldn’t have been cleared up in dialogue.
But the big issue here is with the reveal of the Dark Beast as the villain behind the Sentinels. If that seems to come out of nowhere – well, yes, it does. Entirely. And then he’s abruptly killed off within a few more pages. This doesn’t work at all as the resolution for a major plot thread, and I strongly suspect the reason is that Bendis simply isn’t that interested in it as a plot in its own right.
The point he’s trying to make – I think – is that this plays into the idea that it’s worryingly plausible that the real Beast could have been behind the Sentinel attacks. After all, he hates Scott (both for turning the X-Men into a paramilitary travesty and for killing Xavier); he has access to the technology; there was some evidence suggesting the Sentinels were really on an information gathering mission instead of seriously trying to kill Scott’s team; and he’s done some seriously erratic things lately, like screwing up the timeline to make a point. So the idea that he might have been behind this wasn’t completely off the wall, at least from Scott’s point of view. And the point of bringing out the Dark Beast is to reiterate the plausibility of Hank being behind it. So it’s meant to play into a much longer storyline of Hank becoming dangerously erratic.
But you can’t do that – you can’t build up something as a mystery for the better part of two years and then not have the reveal work as a story in its own right. And it doesn’t work as a story in its own right because Dark Beast has no sensible motivation here. His stated motivation is that he’s dying from all the experiments he’s carried out on himself, and he hates Scott. But these are largely reflections of Hank’s feelings towards Scott; they don’t have much to do with the Dark Beast’s own established motivations, which are largely about pursuing knowledge with disregard for ethics, and acquiring a position of personal influence, preferably as a power behind the throne. He never cared about the X-Men; he has no reason to be particularly bitter towards Scott, and certainly not for the reasons Hank does. And on top of all that, his reveal is treated as an anticlimax and his story swiftly tied up almost immediately thereafter.
So yes, that doesn’t work in the slightest. It’s the point at which I groaned heavily and resumed reading with a sigh. But it’s in the middle of a story that otherwise builds pretty nicely to a more effective climax than I often get from Bendis; certainly a story with a reasonable amount going for it, despite the major problem at its centre.
“Maria Hill, admittedly, is starting to seem a problematic character – she’s meant to be the hypercompetent ice queen archetype, but since stories rarely afford her any opportunity to actually be competent, she ends up as simply someone who yells a lot.”
I always thought this was meant to be her characterisation: she’s Not Nick Fury, who doesn’t even know what’s going on within S.H.I.E.L.D. most of the time and is hypercompetent as long as nothing remotely unexpected happens, at which point she loses it.
Ah, see what you’re doing there is taking into account Dark Beast’s prior characterisation; Bendis cares not one jot about what went before so I’d imagine in his mind it makes perfect sense for Dark Beast to have the motivations he does because to him the character didn’t exist Before Bendis™.
Really disappointing Bendis would kill off Dark Beast in such a casual manner. Dark Beast has gotten some decent storylines the last few years, and the parallels you could do with the real Hank could be very interesting.
I hope it’s a death that was left fairly open, so the inevitable resurrection could be sooner than we’d think?
I got the distinct impression we were being set up for a different villain entirely earlier on, given the prominent green and purple coloring used whenever they showed the Mystery Sentinel Maker, since those colors were previously been tied to a rotten offshoot of SHIELD by Bendis.
But I somehow doubt this was another “who’s Ronin” situation where Bendis had to change the reveal for editorial reasons, so I guess the coloring was just a coincidence. Really, no matter who it was, the suddenness of the reveal and Bendis’s utter disinterest in that part of the plot would have kept it from working all that well. It may as well have been a generic, rogue SHIELD agent like Stephen Lang back in the 1970s for all it mattered.
You could be forgiven for thinking that her talents might better suit her to a junior management role in a call centre.
Apparently Marvel Studios agrees with you on this.
And yes, you’d think if Dark Beast were going to turn up in this run, it’d be in All-New X-Men where the heroes and the recurring villains are already alternate-reality X-Men.
Bendis’ X- Men has been 1000% less of a train- wreck than expected. I call that a win and pray for the day Hickman takes the X-Books over.
Let me get this straight. There are five main plots that are resolved in this story. (1) Wonky powers (2) Mystery Sentinels (3) Dazzler/Mystique/SHIELD (4) Magneto/Madripoor/Dazzler (5) Hijack.
You’ve identified a major problems with he resolution to all five of these plots, yet somehow still come to the conclusion that this was a pretty good book? Your expectations must be very, very low.
Aside from the train wreck of a plot, there’s also the terrible, no good, very bad dialogue: Magneto does not say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Cool it with the guns!” Erik Magnus Lensherr simply does not say that. I don’t care if Bendis wrote it on a piece of paper and printed it 100,000 times over, that collection of words never came out of Magneto’s mouth.
For all of the reasons you wrote above, and many more, this was some of the worst X-Men … well… ever. At least Chuck Austen’s plots made sense; this is incoherent.
Mystique must have done a really, really poor job hiding Dazzler, considering a) detective mastermind Fredrick “The Blob” Dukes could find her; and b) it never seems to have occurred to her to move Dazzler after The Blob found her, to a safer location.
The Dark Beast reveal was just stupid, for all the reasons everyone’s listed. Even Cyclops’ dialogue makes it sound like no one cares: “Oh, it’s that Dark Beast you from the Age of Apocalypse.” “Oh, the mailman was late today.” “Oh, we’re out of milk.”
And there’s enough wiggle room for this to be interpreted either way, but between the tech “years ahead of what they have now” and the description of Dark Beast as an older version of Hank (which I suppose he would be, given when he entered Marvel U proper) following Hill’s time travel rant, a part of me suspects that Bendis thinks Dark Beast is from an alternate future, which is not really the case.
Was Ronin changed for editorial reasons?
At the time, popular consensus seemed to be that Bendis changed Ronin’s identity because everyone in the world knew who his “secret” character was from the very start.
(This idea was aided by the final reveal being a bait-and-switch “you never guessed her identity” character who *didn’t work* for established information and scenes.)
Can I get something clear here? In the same family of titles we had original Beast, Dark Beast, 60s Beast, and alternate future Beast all at the same time? It’s bad enough that so many versions exist in the same setting at all, I can only assume they’re actively trying to repel new readers at this point.
Name a coherent Chuck Austen X-Men story. I dare you.
Was Ronin changed for editorial reasons?
Ronin was supposed to be Daredevil and it was supposed to be a mystery but then Quesada gave an interview to USA Today and gave away the character’s identity.
(I also remember seeing some preview pages from an anthology with the then-New Avengers team and Daredevil out of the Ronin costume but I don’t think it ever got published, or if it did that story didn’t appear in it.)
There was an argument within Marvel editorial about whether to carry on as planned or change Ronin’s identity; given the cack-handed reveal it’s clear that the latter camp won that argument.
My favourite part of the whole thing was when they did the exact same story again a few months later as if the first one hadn’t happened.
Can’t really agree more. I was actually seriously flabbergasted by how enjoyable this story was, and how well it all worked, even the action was pretty good, and the couple of JGS characters seemed IN CHARACTER and not Bendis-Speak drones. Then the villain reveal came, and kinda sank the whole thing.
“Name a coherent Chuck Austen X-Men story. I dare you.”
I can’t think of an actual coherent Austen story, per se, but I would submit that his extended Juggernaut plot line actually worked pretty well. He had a decent approach to the character that he managed to keep consistent over his entire run (as opposed to his nonsensical handling of Polaris, Iceman, etc. etc.)
Austen’s Juggernaut was a guy who realized he’d been a jerk his entire life and was trying to make amends, both by being a friend to fish-boy Sammy Pare and by doing his best to not let down Havok, who was the Summers brother who was willing to trust him. Then in the end, he had to face the reality that having good intentions still didn’t make the world behave nicely.
So credit where credit is due – Austen’s X-Men run was pretty abysmal, but I think he did good with Juggernaut. Heck, even Juggernaut’s ridiculous bedding of She-Hulk was consistent with Juggernaut’s character. It was completely off-model for She-Hulk, but yeah, Juggernaut would’ve tapped that if he was given the chance.
I would have to classify myself as one of the lunatics who prefers Austen to Bendis. At least stuff HAPPENED in Austen comics. Ridiculous, nonsensical, WTF stuff, but they were at least events tied to some conception of a plot. You could look back over an Austen storyline and shake your head in disbelief at the horrific train wreck, but in my mind that’s much more preferable to looking back over 10 issues of a Bendis “story” and realize all that happened was nine issues of people talking about buying a ticket for the train and one issue where the wreck happens off screen somewhere.
Bendis plots are every bit as incoherent as Austen plots, but since he can rarely be bothered with actually placing the elements of those plots on the page, he doesn’t get busted for it as often.
For the life of me, I couldn’t stay focused or engaged with Bendis’s Avengers. His X-Men on the other hand? I don’t know. It’s a train wreck, but at least it’s a fun and interesting train wreck most of the time. Some very major plot points don’t work (i.e. Dark Beast, Magneto, Dazzler, etc.) but it’s never the end of the world because Bendis just moves right along. I just hope his run comes to a close sometime in the near future. It would probably work best as an obscure and quirky era in the team’s history that helped distance itself from the fall-out of Avengers vs. X-Men. In the long run and on re-reading it doesn’t sit well. Be initially… it’s like popcorn. Too much is gross. Too little leaves you wanting. Just enough is cheap fun.
Chuck Austen’s Juggernaut storyline overall was…meh. I think it might have seemed better than it actually was due to everything else around it being such utter crap.
” I got the distinct impression we were being set up for a different villain entirely earlier on, given the prominent green and purple coloring used whenever they showed the Mystery Sentinel Maker, since those colors were previously been tied to a rotten offshoot of SHIELD by Bendis. ”
Isn’t that plot taken from Bendis’ year on Ultimate X-Men with Finch?
I… Don’t quite remember how that plot played out now. Wasn’t it Dick Cheney?
(I do remember Dubya being played as a well meaning goof, which, when combined with his evil staff doing evil things, was probably pretty close to the money.)
To be fair, green and purple is the generic comic book bad guy color scheme. I don’t know if it’s the “rotten offshoot of SHIELD” that you’re thinking of, but I’m pretty sure H.A.M.M.E.R. wore green and purple because they were run by Norman Osborne, who wore those colors as the Green Goblin (and he wore them because they were the generic villain colors, in contrast to the generic hero colors, red and blue, which Spider-Man wore).
@Nu-D: I would be willing to bet you good money that the “Cool it with the guns” line was an error of word bubble placement/direction, not characterization. It was probably supposed to be Dazzler speaking. The previous page also has a word bubble pointing to Cyclops that I’d wager is supposed to be coming from Hank (the one starting with “Miss Hill, I will do everything in my power…”).
Bendis… I’ll never understand the longevity and success of a writer who has proven so consistently incompetent at simple plotting. And he even teaches a college course in writing! I’m baffled that he keeps getting work – and high profile work at that. Are the majority of comics fans really interested in characters talking at each other for 20 pages a month in repetitious dialogue, with no plot movement or character development?
And three words about Chuck Austen: Exploding. Communion. Wafers. Nuff said.
Austen’s plots were dumb, and his characterization was atrocious, but they at least had a coherent logic. When Polaris went loony, you understood why she did it, even if it was over-the-top.
Here we have Dark Beast coming up with an incoherent scheme totally unrelated to his character, and revealed from a puff of smoke.
First, in the last issue, when the Helicarrier attacks, suddenly Hank says, “I know who’s behind the malfunctioning powers!” Now Paul has pointed out that there appear to be two separate “malfunctioning powers” plotlines, but that’s totally unclear. I’m not sure if it’s clear to the characters either. I suspect that after Bendis reads the internet comments, he’ll try to clear it up in the next issue; that seems to be his MO.
Now, what is it about the attack of the helicarrier that provides a revelation about the malfunctioning powers? How can it? They are coincidental (literally, co-incidents; happening at the same time with no causal relationship). Bendis explicitly states that the helicarrier attack is coincidental, because the mystery villain state’s he’s just taking advantage of an opportunity, and that this was not planned. (And he can, on a whim, remotely take over the helicarrier with no prior planning).
Furthermore, there has been absolutely nothing prior to this incident to suggest that the screwed up powers were caused by any villain at all; no indication that it was some part of a plan. Up until now, everyone thought it was a side-effect of the Phoenix Five (which never made sense either, but that was the in-universe theory). So suddenly, the helicarrier attacks, and Hank comes to the realization that there actually is a villain behind a totally unrelated plot, and he knows who that villain is.
And then the reveal: there’s absolutely nothing predictable about who that villain was. Nothing. Dark Beast was not a technology-buff, he was a geneticist. He has no connection to Cyclops. He has no connection to SHIELD, or to Sentinels or to any of this. So tell me, how did Hank make this deduction? By the magic of Brian Bendis’ pen, that’s how.
None of this makes any sense. It’s incoherent in a way that even Chuck Austen’s plots were not. Austen was actually working from a plan–albeit a bad one that didn’t understand the X-Men or the characters. I believe that every Bendis issue is ad hoc, written in response to the online criticism of the previous issue. “Oh shit, there’s a plot hole; I’ll explain it away with some dialogue in the next issue.”
My hypothesis is supported by a several things including the unusually large number of solicitations for Bendis stories that don’t match the stories that are eventually published, and his tendency to have very abrupt changes in direction for his plots, characters and even the overall setup of a title (ANX has drifted really far from the original remit). Bendis introduces plot elements and then drops them in the next issue. What happened to Cyclops/X-23? What happened to Angel leaves the O5? Why resolve ALL of the outstanding plots in Uncanny in one issue? Because there’s no plan here; it’s just shit.
What’s particularly sad is that so many of these plot elements have been used before, in Grant Morrison’s excellent plotline “Imperial.”
There we have the X-Men secretly infected with nano-sentinels and becoming more and more ill, loosing their powers, and we have a surprise attack from an ally (the Imperial Guard) under control of a villain. But Morrison built it up well over issues, and when Hank discovered it, it was because he found the nano-sentinels and deduced the identity of the villain. The moment of attack was planned, not coincidental. When the reveal came, you could go back and see how much sense it made from the beginning.
None of that is present here.
Another thing. Why did he end the Dazzler/Mystique plotline here? Dazzler get’s rescued, healed, demands loud music, and then…doesn’t do anything at all. She doesn’t even use her powers. Nothing. Why not leave Dazzler in Madripoor to be rescued during the next arc? Why not leave Mystique inside SHIELD? There’s a whole other plot here with Mystique, and half of it is dropped for no reason. (There’s still her role in Madripoor to resolve). But her infiltration of SHIELD and kidnapping of Dazzler has no payoff at all. It just ends.
It seemed like a rushed ending. Perhaps that is related to the Original Sin tie-in.
Dark Beast is an interesting character, but that did not seem to be Dark Beast. His motivations and dialogue seemed all wrong. I don’t know what they were thinking, but within the context of the story, the reveal was a little bit “meh”.
Dark Beast is dead? Good. Now maybe we can get away with never hearing about the Age of Apocalypse again.
To be fair, green and purple is the generic comic book bad guy color scheme. I don’t know if it’s the “rotten offshoot of SHIELD” that you’re thinking of, but I’m pretty sure H.A.M.M.E.R. wore green and purple because they were run by Norman Osborne, who wore those colors as the Green Goblin (and he wore them because they were the generic villain colors, in contrast to the generic hero colors, red and blue, which Spider-Man wore).
My guess had actually been that it was Norman, since Bendis writes Norman as a guy whose rises to power by scapegoating others, Bendis’s Norman has a weirdly high level of public and political support, Norman is capable of building gadgets like the Blockbiuster Sentinal,Norman has ties to SHIELD through HAMMER, and Bendis-Norman’s authoritarianism-plus-PR shtick would have worked well in an X-book.
Plus, the solicitations kept claiming this was a villain not usually associated with the X-Men.
But then Norman turned up in Dan Slott’s Spider-Man stuff instead and meanwhile the X-book seemed to keep hinting that no one at all knew about these new Sentinels, so I think it did become clear that my weird guess was just plain wrong.
the solicitations kept claiming this was a villain not usually associated with the X-Men.
One more data point supporting my thesis that Bendis is plotting these issues ad hoc, month-to-month. Dark Beast is only associated with the X-Men.
In support of the Norman Osborne idea, the Axis event recently changed the Green Goblin to the Hobgoblin because apparently there are other plans for Norman.
Osborne would also have had motivation following on from the Dark Reign crossover and there would be a good reason for him to be able to take command of Shield materials.
Wasn’t there an image floating around of an unused villain from Bendis’ Avengers run that was going to finally turn up here? I remember him vaguely looking like Mysterio, even the fishbowl helmet and green/purple outfit.
Errant razor, I believe that was actually supposed to be a member of the New Avengers. And it was more than just something out of a sketchbook, the character actually showed up on one of the variant covers. The Indexes explain it as a yet intervened character, not sure if there was ever a plan beyond the character design.
And count me as a fan of Dark Beast. I think the character suffers from a lot of knee-jerk reactions. You know, the types who think everything from the nineties sucked. They see an alternate timeline evil version of a character from 1995 and immediately red flags go up. But I actually think a lot of cool stuff was done with Dark Beast over the years,and he was very distinct from 616 Beast. Bendis killing off a character in a backhanded way doesn’t surprise me. He treated Alpha Flight like they were a team who only had one previous appearance in a New Warriors Annual
sorry, “yet unrevealed” character
Just a fun thought. Maybe Bendis is just trying to draw a lot of his plots to a close because he’ll be wrapping up his run soon? There is a tendency for his runs to end right after crossovers and we have one in process and another coming up fast.
My problem with characters like that is that they’re kinda lazy. You want to create a character who is Hank McCoy, but evil? Create somebody new who reflects Hank’s character and, ahahaha, “themes.” Don’t just give us Mirror Universe Hank.
Oh! I know. Give us “Beauty.” If you’re going to be literal about it, give us “Beauty.” A female scientist who, I dunno, experiments on herself and others, for whom knowledge is as much a tool to be used as it is a thing to value for its own sake. Someone for whom the experiments keep working, until they don’t. Somebody impossibly, even supernaturally attractive, who people just plain cannot not love.
Hey, has Beast ever met Toxie Doxie, or whatever she was called?
//\Oo/\\
Dark Beast’s motivations could have been tied into the Phoenix corruption as well… he might have wanted samples of PForce contaminated cells, and the effects post-possession.
I keep feeling like eventually we’ll get to a point where we see all these little time gaps with Tempus and Magik, looping the inevitable end of his epic to the start… it’s odd, no matter how I feel about his run, Magik is one of my all time favorite characters, so I can’t help but love it for her stature… but yeah, Dark Beast was an odd choice.
When Hank realized he knew who it was, it was kinda the obvious choice, Dark Beast, I held out a little hope it would be a classic villain scientist to tie it in with All New somehow but yeah… sorry, rambling…
Dark Beast was one of The Dark X-Men, so Osborne could still be behind this…. right?
@Matt Craig,
There was a miniseries, Beauty and the Beast, back in the X-Factor era. I never read it, so I don’t know if Beauty was a “Dark Beast” type. I do like your idea, though.
The problem with creating or bringing in a new amoral geneticist for the X-books is that they’re already swimming in them: you’ve got Sinister, Dark Beast (assuming he doesn’t stay dead), Sugar Man, Dr. Phillip Moreau of the original Genosha (if he’s still alive), and Pandemic from Mike Carey’s run. And probably more I’ve forgotten about, like the inane Dr. Payne from that bizarre crossover between Peter Milligan’s X-Men and Reginald Hudlin’s Black Panther.
“the solicitations kept claiming this was a villain not usually associated with the X-Men”
Bendis was talking a lot about that back when the title first launched… and then the team fought Dormammu in Limbo. I assumed that’s the character he was referring to.
This arc’s ending reminded me of that Simpsons episode where the kids get stuck in a parody of Lord of the Flies, only for it to suddenly end with an anticlimactic voiceover by James Earl Jones. “And then in the end the villain turned out to be… oh, let’s say, Dark Beast.”
No one reading this really thinks Bendis has a plan, right? I mean, I read his Avengers run, for a while, at least. Fool me into reading a couple dozen issues of superheroes arguing with each other over breakfast using all the same dialogue tics once, shame on you. Fool me into reading a couple dozen issues of superheroes arguing with each other over breakfast using all the same dialogue tics twice, shame on me.
Nu-D and Matt Craig, the “Beauty” in the BEAUTY AND THE BEAST mini-series was actually Dazzler….
Who had no interaction with either Beast character at all in this story.
Gah
I’m really surprised that anyone could find this to be anything other than utter dreck. There’s just so many problems with it…
– Dark Beast being the villain behind it all, as mentioned, makes no sense and is out-loud groan-worthy. There was absolutely nothing that hinted at him being involved, he gets revealed and then immediately dies “because he’s been experimenting on himself.” What?? Not to mention that the art is so unclear (we see his eyes looking through his broken helmet, at most) that if the dialogue didn’t spell out who it was, the reader would have no idea.
– The broken powers/nanotech thing. Paul seems to think that it was intended to be two separate arcs, I’m pretty sure it was one and the same. While the Phoenix was mentioned as a theory behind the broken powers early on, it was also quickly squashed (partially because Magneto was affected, whereas as far as we know, Namor wasn’t). There’s also the fact that Colossus was infected over in the X-Force book, despite being nowhere near Cyclops and company over here. So I don’t think it had anything to do with Sentinels… it’s just, well, that’s the only time the X-Men use their powers (except Magik’s teleporting, which was cured). In the end, the broken power arc goes nowhere, has no payoff, and makes no sense (when did Dark Beast infect them??)
– As others mentioned, the dialogue. People have long pointed out that Bendis has a problem with making everyone, especially the female characters, sound the same. But it’s especially horrendous with Magneto in this issue.
– The Dazzler/Mystique plotline also goes absolutely nowhere, except as a way to get Dazzler onto Cyclops’ team.
– The story isn’t even told in an organic way. Beast “figures out” who the mystery villain is, then spends the entire episode shouting I KNOW WHO THE MYSTERY VILLAIN IS instead of, you know, actually telling everyone who it is.
I think the only excuse you could put forth is that Bendis is stretched writing so many books and is rushing everything, but Uncanny is supposed to be a flagship title and deserves a lot better. I can’t wait until he’s gone, though it seems like that time will be a long time coming.
@ Nu-D
Dude. Quality rant.
To quote Jesse Pinkman, “HE CAN’T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT!!!!”
It’s a shame Bendis is writing this book. The premise (Scott’s new, shady x-team and post-Phoenix status quo) has a ton of potential, were it in capable hands (in contest to All New, which screams “bad, convoluted idea” no matter who is writing it). Upon learning that this would be s Bendis book, i decided to pass. based on the comments here, all of my fears about this book were correct.
Dark Beast never made a ton of sense to me. The whole idea behind the Age of Apocalypse was that these were the same people, only with different histories. Logan might have one hand, a new codename, and be dating Jean Grey, but he’s still a gruff loner. Cyclops was raised by Mister Sinister, but he’s still mopey and withdrawn, etc. Then you have Hank McCoy, who has gone from being a perfectly nice bloke to Josef Mengele with fur.
Dark Beast is a decent enough character, if only because he benefits from the main version’s decades of solid characterization by virtue of being “Beast but evil”. Lord knows he’s more interesting than Sugar Man, Holocaust, or 95% of Nate Grey’s appearances.
—
I’m very glad the “Mystique has replaced Dazzler” long-term plot point has been resolved. A shapeshifter infiltrating SHIELD by impersonating someone on a long-term basis would be a perfectly fine story. The trouble is that Dazzler has fucking superpowers, and Mystique can’t duplicate those. The result is that Raven looks like an idiot for not replacing one of the many, many human SHIELD agents she could duplicate perfectly, and SHIELD looks like a bunch of mouthbreathers for not noticing Dazzler doesn’t have powers.
I believe that every Bendis issue is ad hoc, written in response to the online criticism of the previous issue. “Oh shit, there’s a plot hole; I’ll explain it away with some dialogue in the next issue.”
That is exactly what he does; during the Ronin debacle he had characters spouting almost word-for-word what people were saying on forums.
Wasn’t there an image floating around of an unused villain from Bendis’ Avengers run that was going to finally turn up here? I remember him vaguely looking like Mysterio, even the fishbowl helmet and green/purple outfit.
Oh yes, the chap from Finch’s New Avengers #1 cover. Yes, that was the original Ronin design, except now they’re saying it wasn’t and his return is all part of a long-running plan from 2004. Bollocks.
@ o-Matt, thanks. I was trying hard to strike the right balance between “reasoned critique” and “heated derision.” I hope it came out just right.
Bendis introduces plot elements and then drops them in the next issue. What happened to Cyclops/X-23? What happened to Angel leaves the O5? Why resolve ALL of the outstanding plots in Uncanny in one issue? Because there’s no plan here; it’s just shit.
Don’t forget the big one: The O5 dying will erase their present-day counterparts and will presumably need to be sent back at some point, but no one blinks at O5-Cyclops jaunting off into space indefinitely and the Uncanny team in general doesn’t seem to pay much attention to their time-jaunting guests.
“My problem with characters like that is that they’re kinda lazy. You want to create a character who is Hank McCoy, but evil? Create somebody new who reflects Hank’s character and, ahahaha, “themes.” Don’t just give us Mirror Universe Hank.”
Age of Apocalypse gave us Mirror Universe Everyone, more or less.
What was surprising about Dark Beast surviving is that it wasn’t telegraphed or foreshadowed at all. That may make it seem like a last-minute editorial decision (and it probably was), but it did create potentially interesting stories. That one Mark Waid-written issue, X-Men Unlimited #10, really made use of the potential, as Dark Beast basically stalks everyone from Beast’s childhood in order to usurp Beast’s identity. That plot ended up not really going anywhere, but that one issue was pretty striking.
The Dark Beast stuff from Uncanny X-Force was good too, and the Endangered Species story wasn’t bad.
There are no bad characters, just bad stories, and Dark Beast has been in a surprising number of good ones.
Remember, when Maria Hill was introduced she was supposed to have been deliberately tossed into a role way above her skill set by some unknown parties (I think it was implied the Skrulls for Secret Invasion, but that makes even less sense since they could’ve put a Skrull in). She was meant to fail. But, like several other aspects of Bendisplot, it just went away with no explanation (Danielle Cage having Skrull green eyes, the Skrull super-soldiers who originally took Iron Man powering up to a level he’d never done before to defeat getting taken out by everyone in minutes at the end, etc.)
I always couldn’t ignore the fact that Maria Hill and Victoria Hand were proven to be craven and incompetent to the point of murderousness, proven time and again wrong but STILL graned positions of authority where they could screw up again, and their creator is married to a woman named Alisa.