All-New X-Men vol 5 – “One Down”
Well, more or less. The fifth All-New X-Men collection actually starts with issue #25, the jam issue, which we’ve covered already. But after that, it’s the four-part Brotherhood storyline, which finished this week.
Taken at face value, this is a straightforward story where the Brotherhood – the future version introduced in “Battle of the Atom” – attack the X-Men’s headquarters, try to kill them all, and fail. It’s interwoven with some flashbacks (or should it be flash forwards?) to the Brotherhood’s back story, which principally serves to establish that the Brotherhood is really just Charles Xavier Jr and Raze, with everyone else having been under Xavier’s mental control all along.
Xavier’s motivation is apparently to take revenge on the X-Men for what he sees as the disrespectful writing of his father out of history. At times, though, he seems to be claiming that this is also to do with fixing the problems caused by the Silver Age team to the present (even though his father was dead before that happened). All this, he somehow believes will be achieved by getting rid of Jean. As I’ll come to, though, a degree of slipperiness in Xavier’s thought processes might well be intentional here. Raze’s position seems a little more straightforward: he seems to just hate the X-Men and want an opportunity to cause all manner of chaos.
Basically, though, this is an extended home invasion story. It’s one of Brian Bendis’ better attempts at an action-driven story – never really his forte – even if some of the mind control details in the final chapter are a bit garbled. And Stuart Immonen does some quality work on the fight scenes and the Brotherhood besieging the X-Men’s base (even if, once the action gets inside, he faces the common problem that an all-grey converted military installation just isn’t all that visually interesting). Still, it would be hard to claim that the attack itself was a great story in its own right, or that it really needs to run to four issues.
Let’s take a step back, though, and ask where Bendis is going with all this. After all, it’s not as if he’s the sort of writer who’s ever seemed particularly interested in doing multi-issue fights as an end in itself.
The high concept of All-New X-Men is that the Silver Age X-Men are brought to the present day, and are appalled by seeing how the world has turned out. As of course they should be. The Professor is dead; Scott killed him; Jean is dead and (sort of) responsible for genocide; Hank is a giant blue ape; Warren is a grinning idiot; and Bobby… well, things actually turned out okay for Bobby, but there’s plenty left for the X-Men to be horrified by. Plus, it’s not as though the X-Men seem to have made any real headway in their goal of co-existence between humans and mutants. It’s not a happy picture.
This is an inversion of a well established superhero trope in which the heroes witness a dark and depressing future and resolve to make sure it never happens. Normally that’s presented as the right and proper thing to do. But here, the heroes are from the past, and the timeline they ought to want rid of is pretty much the last 40 years of published history of the Marvel Universe. Plainly, this complicates matters, but only because we’re attached to the Marvel Universe; logically, it’s hard to see how that ought to make any ethical difference. And the Brotherhood, by introducing an actual future time frame, are there to hammer home the equivalence. What makes “our” present any more “real” than theirs?
There are two core themes at play here, the first being fate or destiny or whatever you want to call it, and whether our heroes can (or should) escape it. And indeed this arc begins and ends with characters talking about whether Jean can escape her destiny of becoming Phoenix, going mad, committing genocide, and ultimately dying. Leave aside the arguments about whether Jean was technically Phoenix; the retcon which brought her back was intended, in a roundabout and elaborate way, to preserve the validity of Phoenix being in some sense Jean, so Bendis isn’t straying too far from the intent of earlier stories here.
The second is the threat to the timeline itself, and by “the timeline” what we really mean is “continuity”. At best it’s a thinly veiled metaphor. If the X-Men return to their own time and set about trying to alter history – as the shape of a story like this would normally demand – then the history of the Marvel Universe is rewritten and continuity runs into a ditch. But if they don’t return to their own time then the result is even worse, because history collapses into a horrendous paradox: they have to return or the entire history of the X-Men vanishes. And in that case, who brought them to the present day?
The early issues of the series see everyone assuming that Xavier will simply erase the X-Men’s memories when they go home, in order to preserve the integrity of continuity. But the series has been going out of its way to make that option less and less viable, partly by giving Jean new powers, and partly by having the characters from the future state outright that the Silver Age team were never sent back. They seem to have just kept on ageing long beyond the point where they could be sent back to pick up their lives where the left off – leaving a massive, unanswered continuity hole at the centre of that future timeline.
One school of thought just dismisses the whole problem with the stock explanations about divergent timelines that were traditionally wheeled out by Mark Gruenwald in the 1980s Official Handbook. But this won’t work. It’s patently clear that Bendis is working on the model that there’s a single timeline here, and that changes to the past can alter the future. We’ve been shown that on panel, with the present day Cyclops briefly vanishing in “Battle of the Atom” when his younger self was apparently killed, and with the Brotherhood in this story rewriting their own timeline by leaving messages for themselves in the future, so as to learn from mistakes they haven’t yet made. And again, this is entirely consistent with earlier X-Men stories; the end of the Kulan Gath story explicitly has time being altered in this way, and numerous other stories, principally “Days of Futures Past” and its sequels, implicitly assume that history can be changed.
Besides, you can’t make the collapse of continuity into the focus of your story and then resolve the problem simply by disavowing the plot’s assumptions as to how time travel works. So let’s take Bendis’ time travel ground rules at face value and see where he might be going with this.
One possibility is very obvious. All-New X-Men is one of a number of stories in recent years that have gone out of their way to stress the damage that has been done to the timeline. Next year’s “Time Runs Out” event is presumably the climax of these threads, and Marvel have at least been hinting that it’s a reboot – or, at least, some sort of opportunity to rewrite and streamline Marvel history. At the very least, it seems clear that we’re meant to be entertaining the possibility that this is the direction.
There’s much to be said for a reboot, frankly. The Marvel Universe is now dragging decades of continuity behind it, which gives most long-running characters horrendously convoluted histories full of dead ends and repetition. Whole swathes of characters have back stories tied to countries that don’t even exist any more. Magneto’s connection to the Holocaust, wonderful idea though it was, can’t remain viable forever, as the events start to approach the edge of living memory (not least since his back story also calls upon him to be a contemporary of Professor X, who in turn has increasing problems justifying a stint in the army so that he can be in the Juggernaut’s origin story, since the US hasn’t had a draft in decades… and so on). The Marvel Universe isn’t going away any time soon. At some point the sticking plaster is going to have to be ripped off.
And there are more than a few dated ideas that could advantageously be deleted. The Celestials were a perfectly sound idea for Eternals, but incorporating them into the mainstream Marvel Universe means that any story which wants to explore the potentially fruitful topic of the origin of life on Earth is stuck with the facts that (a) it’s been largely explained already, and (b) the explanation is a Kirby take on von Danekenism, and thus parted company with the zeitgeist decades ago.
But reboot have their own problems, principally how to preserve the readers’ attachment to the characters. That’s one’s a discussion for another day. A less significant, but still serious, problem is to how to make a story out of perhaps the most blatant editorial intervention. DC has plenty of experience in this field, and Marvel is in the happy position of being able to learn from their mistakes. Reboot plot devices arbitrarily tagged on to unrelated stories – not entirely satisfactory. Stories that are actually about the reboot – arguably worse. I know Crisis was much loved back in the day, but it had the advantage of novelty to go with its epic scale. At the very least, the cosmic villain with abstract motivations who nearly destroys everything, with the heroes saving the day by salvaging a revised version of the Earth, has been emphatically done.
So what about a story where you set up the destruction of the timeline as a positive choice, or at least play up the positive effects? Instead of being just a glaring rewrite of history, you try and cast it as a second chance? It might work. And I increasingly suspect that that’s where we heading.
Viewed in that context, the Brotherhood’s primary function is simply to exemplify the increasing collapse of continuity itself – in the sense of narrative logic – within the Marvel Universe. They already come from a completely paradoxical timeline – one where the Silver Age X-Men never got sent home, yet the X-Men still existed. Their strategy is to keep sending themselves messages in the past – and by the end of this arc they’re even re-writing the messages. Their main target seems to be killing Jean Grey, which will plainly just result in an even more glaring paradox than the one that already exists.
So, you might reasonably ask, if this future timeline has such an obvious (and plainly intentional) paradox in it, why hasn’t continuity collapsed already? Part of me wonders whether the thinking here is a little bit meta. The timeline is viable for as long as the continuity is viable – that is, literally for as long as the setting continues to somehow hang together as a context for stories. And it remains viable by continuing to give the appearance that it could all be sorted out somehow, even as an increasing number of characters assure us that it won’t be. The future literally is less important because the readers think of it as somehow more provisional (a logic which, if followed through, would mean that there actually is something more fundamentally wrong with altering the Marvel Universe’s past than its future). The point of collapse is being staved off… for now. And of course it only needs to be staved off until next year’s crossover.
This is getting speculative. But the Brotherhood certainly are intended as emblematic of the story itself falling apart – which might explain why they take the form of such flagrantly unlikely characters as a child of Professor X and Mystique, two characters who have no apparent reason to meet for coffee let alone to procreate. If the grand scheme of All-New X-Men is indeed a slow build to the point where the characters can no longer maintain the pretence that continuity is salvageable, much of what is happening with the Brotherhood and with the X-Men themselves makes reasonable sense.
None of which ultimately changes the fact that this is a four issue home invasion story that could probably have been done perfectly effectively in three. But there are definitely points of interest in the wider series, as it seems increasingly likely that it’s intended not simply as a medium term visit from the past, but as something that poses a more fundamental challenge to the whole history of the X-Men.
On a meta level, it will mean the X-Men once again being tacked on to an Avengers storyline and being subject to the consequences of that storyline. Somewhere in the late 90s, I might have momentarily felt bad that the X-offices and Avengers-offices were separated by an imaginary wall and events would never cross over. I wish I could bring past me into the future now to see what terrible horrors my desires have wrought on the X-Men line here in the future.
I expected a review of a rather incoherent story, but I got something else instead.
Great read!
The idea of a reboot leaves me cold. I guess if it’s done with a coherent plan I could be ok with it. The reboot DC gave me just leaves me bitter as the stories that were dear to me are just cast aside. I just don’t like the thought that as a long time reader I’ll be left with the writers setting up the stories I know with a wink here comes Dark Phoenix but wait till you see this twist (like Star Trek into darkness). In the 30 years I’ve been reading I haven’t felt bogged down by the past and that we still get some new great stories.
The thing that concerns me about actual reboot is that I’m fairly sure it would result in turning the 616-verse into the Ultimate Universe 2.0. Not an appealing prospect. If it’s less a proper reboot and more an exercise in simply tightening up some aspects of canon that haven’t aged well, though? I can see that being all right.
I don’t really think reboots solve the problem of rehashes, since every example I can think of either a) leaves in and endlessly refers back to the classic storylines no one wants to discard; or b) kicks off with writers directly rehashing the stories they like.
The other issue with reboots is that they tend to age badly, leading to an accelerating cycle of reboots; the idea of “updating for today” tends to make stories into time capsules in ways that earlier, less self-aware storytelling sometimes doesn’t.
I find that post-reboot storytelling paradoxically seems to lean heavily on the reader’s familiarity with what has gone before rather than on the opportunity to actually shake thing sup and scrape away the barnacles. There’s always this odd scramble to bring in the major elements and characters, and often to do so either incompletely or with an obligatory twist. The obligatory twists tend to be poorly thought-out and rapidly reversed.
The incomplete or casual reintroductions, though, are worse. They operate under the assumption that the readership is expected to have a sense of the reintroduced character already, so the writer doesn’t bother actually developing or writing them. The New 52 has been especially bad in this regard, but post-Crisis DC did plenty of it as well. Such reboots don’t erase continuity baggage and trivia, but rather evacuate the weight of storytelling and leave *only* continuity-as-trivia or continuity-reference-as-writing behind.
Even one of the gold standards for most modern readers, Byrne’s Man of Steel is in retrospect stuffed with homages and references, such as its almost note-for-note retelling of the 1950s Bizarro introduction story and the two-parter that exists entirely as an homage to the “mummy” episode of the 1940s Fleischer cartoon.
The best option is usually the reboot/revamp, as with George Perez’s Wonder Woman. That one was so successful that the character has really never been the same, and he changed not only WW’s characterization but also her basic premise in some rather profound ways. Everything from her rogues’ gallery to her interactions with other characters became fundamentally different.
The thing is, as with Starman and Manhunter and other successful “different, refined” reboots, it worked because the older version of the character was not merely shopworn but was frankly being ignored over in a dusty corner. (DC was publishing Wonder Woman in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but does anyone remember a thing about the book in that period?)
In these cases, you’re essentially getting a new character with the patina of an established (but actually contemporaneouly rewritten) history, the bets of both worlds.
But this only works with characters who are undeniably failing in their pre-boot incarnations; when it’s applied to characters with an established fanbase, the effect is usually the aforementioned pandering rehash syndrome. Rebooting Wolverine’s history might get rid of Romulus, but it will also mean a writer coming up with some new daft “convoluted conspiracy origin” on the grounds that Wolverine is supposed to have one. Reboots usually don’t break bad patterns; they more often cement them.
My problem with reboots is that there are essentially two ways of doing them. The first is what produced the Ultimate line, or even X-Men Forever (well, in its own way), or some of the MAX books: a “reboot” whose essential premise is changing the rules of the game. Characters are reimagined and dead actually stay dead (though the Ultimate universe is being flippant with this as of late). Ultimate in its heyday actually did a good job of reintroducing characters, as well as killing characters off and making it feel important, at least until Ultimatum and things started to go off the rails. But what’s important about this type of reboot is that it has to occur with the main universe continuity to go off of. In this sense (much like the Star Trek film franchise), it’s not like Ultimate comes into play without continuity, but actually relies on the entire continuity of the 616 universe as a point of difference. I think that, as far as early Ultimate X-Men went, it resulted in some interesting reimaginings of characters.
Then there’s the New 52, which has produced some stellar titles but which, overall, isn’t coherent enough to sustain the mid-level books (JLI, JLA, Scott Lobdell’s horrific Teen Titans, and so on). To me, this is because the New 52 was a reboot of the universe that did away with continuity primarily for the ability to gradually, over time, reintroduce the same characters with slightly altered background stories but overall, not much different. If you look at all the big titles (except for perhaps Wonder Woman) in the New 52 lineup, this is essentially what has happened. It’s new adventures, but with the same cast of characters slotted into the same roles, with minor changes to their stories, but overall not the type of modernizing effect that one might expect (and, as the original article argues, is the kind of modernization that is needed for the X-Men; though I feel weird that everyone keeps talking about Professor X like he’s still alive. Was I the only person that read Uncanny Avengers?).
To me, frankly, this reeks of lazy writing. and it feels like a way of recycling the original DC continuity where what changes about the characters is that, for many newer generations of readers, it’s just that they’re “new to them.” One could argue that this is the whole reason why Geoff Johns’ forced return of Hal Jordan and Barry Allen were easily accepted as well. I think overall, it stinks of a DC that is incapable of having interesting ideas for how the universe is defined, and I can only hope that Marvel doesn’t follow suit.
To clarify my earlier response, I change my mind. The reboot of Star Trek is more like the New 52 when I think about it, given Star Trek Into Darkness. That said, I also think it was probably a bad idea to discuss a real-life franchise, which as more pragmatic concerns behind it (because I think that Paramount would have some insurance problems with the geriatric crew of the original series going on action adventures).
To me, frankly, this reeks of lazy writing. and it feels like a way of recycling the original DC continuity where what changes about the characters is that, for many newer generations of readers, it’s just that they’re “new to them.”
The thing is,t his pretty much happened after Crisis, too. Even the vaunted Ultimate Universe went that way as soon as Jeph Loeb started writing the Ultimates, but the seeds were planted as far back as Bendis’s short-lived Ultimate Team-Up title that existed almost entirely to populate the UU with classic Marvel characters, many of them not terribly distinct from the originals.
I haven’t been reading any Marvel books anymore (except now Nightcrawler) but I have sort of been following things via Previews and your reviews and I began wondering months ago if Marvel was heading towards hitting the reboot button. I was even chatting it up with the guy who sells me the few remaining books I buy.
Given how someone here had mentioned that Bendis wanted the editor in chief job my thought on the whole thing was that when it happens bendis would then be writing All the new first issues of the major books, setting the tone of ‘His’ new marvel universe then take over the chief editor’s position and continue to steer things the way he wants them to go.
Hence he would finally leave his mark on comics in a way no one could ever ignore or forget.
Or I’m just being paranoid.
The thing is,t his pretty much happened after Crisis, too. Even the vaunted Ultimate Universe went that way as soon as Jeph Loeb started writing the Ultimates, but the seeds were planted as far back as Bendis’s short-lived Ultimate Team-Up title that existed almost entirely to populate the UU with classic Marvel characters, many of them not terribly distinct from the originals.
Clearly, Bendis aside, the plan should be to not let DC writers touch reboots.
Doing away with Magneto’s back-story would completely destroy the character. Without the motivation of seeing his family killed and living the nightmare of realizing what humanity could do to those it deemed “different”, would leave Magneto as a loony, ranting super-villain again.
Van Daniken is outdated? Someone did not watch the Prometheus movie! he he
I’ve always enjoyed the original DC Crisis. It seems to me like it opened up a golden age of comic stories for DC, back in the 1980s. I don’t think there were any DC titles launched after Crisis, and before the early-1990s, that I disliked. It seemed to be a time where creativity was allowed.
The exact opposite of the “New 52” relaunch, which seems like an excuse to let editors take a heavy-hand on all of DC’s books, and squash creativity.
I originally thought, hearing about “Marvel NOW”, and the end of Avengers vs. X-Men, that the Marvel reboot was happening at that time, caused by the Phoenix. I thought that All-New X-Men, when I first heard about it, was going to be about rewriting the past so-many dark years of X-Men continuity and starting fresh.
You know, I feel like for the most part Marvel can still get away with not having a reboot. DC for that matter, too. Editors just need to make up some ground rules and stick with them. Example: imply ages, but don’t mention them. Use vague expressions in reference to time (“that was a long time ago” instead of “15 years ago”). Don’t use real life figures (presidents, celebrities, etc.) and avoid real life events. If Marvel kept with this strategy, even dated stories can be glossed over and summarized for continuity’s sake in modern events. Plus, it’s easier for a reader to overlook styles of dress or political undertones or technology changes than it is specific dates, times, ages, etc.
And hell, even major events that sucked but had long term repercussions can be moved away from. “Hey, remember that time the X-Men and Avengers went to war for a couple of weeks? Crazy. Yeah, they made up after a while and we all moved on.”
DC has been doing reboots because they believed that sales were falling because their readers were ageing and newer readers didn’ pickup where the old generation left of because of too much background continuity. While it’s true that the baggage of continuity is annoying to new readers (i know it because i did have a hard time getting into the x-men universe in the 90’s), it’s not the real problem.
DC may gain a few readers temporarilly by rebooting the universe and then quickly loose them but Marvel does the same by publishing #1 issues all the time and seems to offer a little more creative freedom and favourable working conditions to their creators so in my opinion, they make better comics that have more chances of keeping any new readers they get.
Marvel seems to be aware that younger people have many new options of entertainment and that they choose those options rather than comic books so Marvel comics have been trying to mature with their readers for many years now and keep the old readers for as long as they can. That why they have never made any major reboots. Sure they made things like “One More Day” but they did have a creative reasoning behind it and even though i dislike that story, i like what came out of it and i am now a Spider-man reader because of this. But the Spider-man thing is a discussion for another time.
I don’t think that Marvel would be willing to reboot their universe. Their whole attitude so far seems to show that they want to keep their past stories intact and just fix or ignore the stories that are universally hated or the ones that are inconvinient for their future plans.
Right now, we can’t really know what their future plans are so we can’t really guess how they plan to get there. However, in the review and the posts before mine, we can see a lot of problems with the current status qwo, namelly the ages of characters like Magneto, the X-Men themselves etc. Assuming they want to keep those characters alive and in circulation, it’s understandable that they would want to fix those things, preferably without resorting to a full on reboot.
My speculation is that this is the reason why they brought the young X-men into the present and they could possibly try to bring more young versions of characters from the past to replace the current “old” ones. They wouldn’t want to do another Magneto clone saga (read Joseph) or change his backstory or just kill him off, they would want to keep him in circulation for a long time so doing that would solve a lot of their problems. Plus they could do heroic sendoffs to the old versions. But as I said, this is just a speculation, without knowing what their thinking is, we can’t guess their plans are. Whatever happens, let’s hope it leads to good stories but Marvel is one of the few companies that I have some faith in. (and if you hear my rants about Ubisoft in my youtube channel, which is http://bit.ly/1zxcSPV , you will see that I’m not all that friendly towards big corporations that create entertainment media)
“The thing is, as with Starman and Manhunter and other successful “different, refined” reboots, it worked because the older version of the character was not merely shopworn but was frankly being ignored over in a dusty corner. (DC was publishing Wonder Woman in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but does anyone remember a thing about the book in that period?)”
Part of That was when WW was set during WWII and they created Baron Blitzkrieg.
I would argue that Starman was so great because it built on continuity but not at the expense of the characters. Ted was hardly stuck in a dusty corner. He was an important supporting cast member.
(Disclaimer: i wrote a starman zine back then.)
“DC has plenty of experience in this field, and Marvel is in the happy position of being able to learn from their mistakes.”
You’d think so, but then look at the approach they took to Spider-Man’s “Brand New Day.” It gave them the result they wanted, but the methodology used to get there was “the worst of both worlds” as you described it in your review at the time.
I’d be fine with a reboot if I were confident that Marvel could pull it off without making continuity even more confusing.
I would argue that Starman was so great because it built on continuity but not at the expense of the characters. Ted was hardly stuck in a dusty corner. He was an important supporting cast member.
To clarify, I meant that Starman and WW worked because the prior handling of the characters had left them off to one side, so the new, fresh, interesting reboot didn’t have anything much to displace. Ted Knight was awesome, but it helped a lot that there was no well-established take on him before that still had a vocally loyal audience. Same with Wonder Woman, a character who had, by the 1987 reboot, been creatively flailing for some years.
It’s not “50 years of continuity” that makes characters convoluted. You pick and choose what you need for the story at the time and go from there. What makes things convoluted is using the same characters in multiple titles simultaneously while making little to no effort and making sure they’re handled consistently. Or reusing the same titles themselves with no overt connections between them. Reboot or no, I really don’t see Marvel trimming the line to avoid such things or making an effort to “stifle a creator’s vision” in the name of consistency.
A reboot could solve the problem of character inconsistencies stemming from Marvel’s tendency to allow the tail to wag the dog when it comes to adaptations, at least for a bit. But then the movie continuities will reboot and Marvel will end up with a whole new batch of contradictions.
“The incomplete or casual reintroductions, though, are worse. They operate under the assumption that the readership is expected to have a sense of the reintroduced character already, so the writer doesn’t bother actually developing or writing them. The New 52 has been especially bad in this regard, but post-Crisis DC did plenty of it as well. Such reboots don’t erase continuity baggage and trivia, but rather evacuate the weight of storytelling and leave *only* continuity-as-trivia or continuity-reference-as-writing behind.”
This is exactly why the New 52 utterly killed my interest in the DCU (I went from reading about half the line a year ago down to 2 now; the collapse came quickly). I’d read a story, and see a C-list character I knew, and not know what I was supposed to “know” about them — does, say, this version of Plastique have a romantic history with Captain Atom, or some back story in a New 52 title I didn’t read, or is it a totally fresh start (until some writer starts winking at the old-universe trivia again)? And, ultimately it doesn’t matter, because the writer didn’t feel the need to make the character inherently interesting beyond the trivia.
There was a time I really grooved on that kind of referential, see-how-things-are-NOW thing, but the Ultimate Universe eventually wore me down on that, and it even ruined ST:ID for me a little bit.
Reboots will end up referencing the previous continuity, at least in the Big Two where there is not much hope for a continued, central editorial voice. Sooner or later the short-term appeal of bridging back to past tales will take hold.
For a couple of decades now I have felt that the best approach to the need to keep continuity manageable, at least in DC (and now in Marvel as well) is to stop attempting to have the cake and eat it too.
Embrace the need for a full reboot every seven to ten years or so. Make it an explicit feature of the fictional universe that people age in a chaotic, inconsistent way that diverges from that of the real world. Have Order and Chaos duke it out in some crossover once or twice per decade to create both drama and a clear reason for arbitrary changes without the continuity itself becoming a distraction from engaging stories. Establish pocket universes and have characters jump into and out of them as the narrative demands, so that the Punisher may act in a world with no Avengers, and the Red Hulk can follow his story to its logical conclusion. Have Captain America and Nick Fury actually die and be rebooted in different, less contradictory forms.
In short, forget about attempting to present the Superboy Prime Punch school of reboots with a straight face – or, coming back to Marvel, don’t get caught up in storylines such as Age of Ultron that attempt to be “smart” and end up just being frustrating and contradictory – and let the tools be just tools. Since the books are getting new #1s all the time anyway, make a good thing out of it: have the stories finish. Limit the useful life of characters to five years or so. Create new ones to tell new stories.
As things stand now, the meta-commentary may already have gone front and center, at the expense of the supposed narrative proper.
“Given how someone here had mentioned that Bendis wanted the editor in chief job…”
I don’t know why someone here would have said that; Bendis has said many times that he has absolutely no interest in being an editor of any kind, much less Editor in Chief.
Could you imagine Marvel Publishing with Bendis as Editor in Chief? The guy can’t even keep his own stories straight!
There’s two big problems with reboots of whole universes I’m seeing, reading responses.
1.)It takes for granted there are a lot of new readers wanting to jump in to comics. This seems to not be the case for at least a decade now. Not really.
A reboot can alienate old readers, something that Marvel and DC don’t want.
At the same time, if DC decides to re-do, say, Batman’s origin from scratch for new readers, I think it will upset a lot of their ling-time fans, who will complain they’ve seen this story two dozen times before.
If DC gets really brave and decides to change an iconic origin story, this will upset fans even more, and risks destroying the character.
2.)Established characters with limited shelf lives are problematic. For more minor characters, it’s fine. Otherwise, you’re destroying the life-blood of the company.
Look at Marvel and DC, how many popular characters do either have who were created post-1970s?
Marvel’s last hit character was Dead pool from 1990.
Basically, Thunderbolts is the only newer Marvel title launched after 1980 that managed to have any staying power.
The companies aren’t creating, and the fans aren’t interested, in newer characters.
Without characters like Wolverine and Iron Man (etc.), there’s a question if the big corporations can make their profits.
Batman and Superman go a long way towards subsidizing DC’s entire line of comics, I believe.
These are problems I don’t believe can be fixed in 2014. Comic books are really a niche market. I don’t think there are many potential readers out there for comic companies to hook. The boom period was based around speculators wanting to make money.
It’s a very incestous market. Trying to get X-Men fans to read Spider Man. Trying to get Marvel fans to read DC.
This reviewer went through great pains to give Bendis the benefit of the doubt on a garbled, terribly written, hardly thought out “story.”
Could have just said “this boring junk makes no sense” if he/she wasn’t interested in being nice about it.
What an awful story. Bendis, loo up the words “goal” and “motivation” and start applying the meanings to your characters.
If there is going to be a reboot, I want to see an end for the existing versions of these characters.
“which might explain why they take the form of such flagrantly unlikely characters as a child of Professor X and Mystique, two characters who have no apparent reason to meet for coffee let alone to procreate. ”
I’ve only seen the scene in a preview, but Mystique gave birth to the child as Moira right? So did she use that form to trick Charles into fathering the child at some point? Did she (or Bendis) forget that she killed Moira a few years earlier? (it’s been at least a year in Marvel time since Morrison’s run began)
As things stand now, the meta-commentary may already have gone front and center, at the expense of the supposed narrative proper.
To which the rejoinder is that meta-commentary is all you have left when characters have been around so long that they’re basically creatively exhausted.
Reboots don’t solve that problem, though, for the reasons we’ve all been discussing. The real question is about how to launch new characters successfully, something the BIg Two really don’t know how to do anymore precisely because their relationship with their core audience demands (and has been taught to demand) familiarity. More broadly, they’d much rather have a franchise that goes on and on than a finite series, to the extent that they turn self-contained, creator-driven properties like Watchmen, The Sandman, and The Sentry into ongoing franchises. (I fear for Miracleman.)
Even when the superhero publishers reach out to the art comix community, where the demand for idiosyncratic or finite storytelling is more properly served, they tend to end up with enjoyable but ultimately self-referential gag strips like DC’s Bizarro Comics HCs and Marvel’s recent Strange Tales anthology that riff on the characters rather than with bold new takes.
The other reason indie creators at the Big Two tend to play with the old toys in largely familiar or merely
“meta” ways is that they know better than to do otherwise. A lot of the problems we’re discussing are inseparable from the creators’ rights movement, in which artists and writers quite sensibly conclude that it’s stupid to create new characters or even new concepts and storylines without ownership and direct profit-sharing.
Even if DC and Marvel *wanted* to revitalize their properties or launch new ones to get some fresh ideas in the mix, how many people are willing to sell their original material to someone else? The reason most creators do Big Two work is either to fund independent work (i.e., Warren Ellis and Matt Fraction) or to indulge their own nostalgia. (Again, this explains why indie creators at Marvel and DC mostly want to write throwback stories such as the recent Marvel Knights X-Men and Spider-Man miniseries.)
So the BIg Two, I think, are understandably timid about or unable to invest fully in radical reboots or new IP. It says a lot that the central goal of the New 52 was arguably less about rebooting and more about reconsolidating the superhero properties of spinoff imprints under the DC umbrella.
This may be why a lot of the reboot-oriented stories tend to be about brand consolidation; Crisis on Infinite Earths was used to formally bring in the Charlton characters and more fully integrate the Fawcett and Quality IP, Age of Ultron ended with Angela coming into the Marvel Universe, and the soft reboot of the Ultimate Universe was a crossover with the main Marvel Universe as well. Brand consolidation and maintenance probably looks like the only dependable strategy they have in the current marketplace.
how did xavier even have a kid with Mystique? isn’t he paralyzed from the waste down
Maybe Raven felt so bad about his death that she stole his genetic material and impregnated herself so she could bear his child. Because comics.
According to a Hulk comic I read last week all you need to do is lick a man’s cheek and then you have a baby.
Any frisky Alsatians in the X-Men books lately?
//\Oo/\\
I think he just lost the use of his legs. Paraplegia doesn’t mean no sex.
This review has given me the impression that Bendis may well be doing a time travel story that he can hit the magic reset button on when it finally ties itself into one almighty knot of contradictions, and that he can then say ‘I’ve been foreshadowing this for years’. But that then raises the question of what the point of All-New X-Men was in the first place. To stretch a Time Crisis series out over 3 years rather than 12 issues?
A reboot is a TERRIBLE idea. Omar Karindu’s first post says everything about why that is.
They can easily come up with something to happen to Magneto that explains his longevity, if needed (it isn’t needed though – he was regressed to a baby years ago, so his age hasn’t needed to make sense since then). I also don’t see the problem with character’s ages generally – using the old 4-5 real years is about one Marvel year rule makes the O5 about 30. Yes, they’re not teenagers any more. If that’s supposed to make them unrelatable to younger readers or something, then I’m baffled at the success of RDJ as Iron Man.
If they want to shake things up so that new stories don’t keep relying on the same characters and settings forever, kill some off and have the deaths stick. Forever.
X-Men has needed new villains for a long time, and I thought the ending of AvX paved the way for them. Instead, we got Sabretooth and Mystique again, and villains from the future. That is a lack of creativity, but it’s not down to convoluted continuity.
The story that got me into X-books in a major way was Age Of Apocalypse. I had no idea who Dead Man Wade was, or Exodus, or who Nate Grey was a version of, or the previous importance of the M’Kraan crystal…and finding out all those things afterwards was great fun. Tremendously easier to do now, too.
As I always say in these types of conversations, I just wish Marvel writers (and fans) would leave the past alone – refer to the broad strokes in character histories, ignore specific time references and stories best left forgotten, and try not to think about it or explain it all too much. Yes, the whole universe unravels if you look at things too closely, but people can’t seem to resist picking at the seams.
I’d much rather have a continuity that makes sense on a week to week basis (consistent status quo for characters appearing in multiple titles) than worry about figuring out how old characters are supposed to be.
“kicks off with writers directly rehashing the stories they like.”
Like the last Star Trek film. The next one will probably be a remake of the “Mirror, Mirror” episode.
Some of what we’re discussing as a “bug” is surely a “feature” for the comics publishers. A reboot isn’t supposed to clear away dead wood and give us fresh new stories and characters. Those don’t sell, and the Big Two know it. Comic buyers today are men in their 30s and 40s, maybe older, who buy titles they have followed since childhood.
The publishers make their money by selling increasingly expensive paper products to this graying, dwindling audience. They can’t really get new readers in appreciable numbers, but for a while they can shuffle around the existing readers: get more of them to read Batman or Avengers, for example. The goal is to get the existing readership to pay more: but Avengers now, as well as X-Men, and pay a higher cover charge for both books.
A reboot is a means to that end: it creates the illusion that more titles “matter” and aren’t stuck in a rut, and if you have any fond memories of earlier stories or versions of the characters, you have to tune in to see how they’re brought back. The nostalgia and repetitiveness isn’t a defect, it’s the selling point.
Marvel’s ongoing continuity is already trading on the built-up goodwill readers have toward decades-old characters and stories. A reboot would be just another attempt at doing the same thing more effectively.
Considering how clear it is that Bendis is re-writing these stories at nearly the last second (compare what happens in the stories to the solicits), I think assuming he has a long-term plan is being overly generous. I still think he had the idea “hey, let’s bring the O5 into the present day” and thought he could just write stories about them without any clear end in sight.
There have been exactly TWO continuity reboots of mainstream superhero universes, and somehow every nerd here thinks those are the only ways reboots can possibly pan out. Jesus Christ.
It does seem that that Bendis is writing with his eye on the Big Picture-i.e. the next awful, giant crossover-and that’s why he pays so little attention to the details and the quality of the stories that get him there. He’s only interested in the overall idea for the next Big Event, and the interim questions of what stories to tell between events are just tiresome distractions for him.
I know Marvel’s been mucking about with the timestream a lot lately. I hope that if they do write a big crossover that does a full or partial reboot, or even just a big crossover that resets the status quo, it’s written by Remender or Hickman, and not by Bendis. I’m just fed up with putting up with his mediocre stories for the purpose of getting to the big event.
If they decide on a reboot, i don’t want the story to be some cataclysmic universe-wide story about the timeline being destroyed or any crap like that. I’d much rather marvel let characters’ stories come to a natural conclusion. Let’s see a final showdown between Magneto and the X-Men, let’s have SpiderMan retire knowing he’s made uncle ben proud, etc. Then we can start new stories from scratch
There have been exactly TWO continuity reboots of mainstream superhero universes, and somehow every nerd here thinks those are the only ways reboots can possibly pan out. Jesus Christ.
You’re thinking of Crisis on Infinite Earths and Flashpoint, but forgetting the partial reboot Zero Hour, the various “Ultimate” and “All-Star” and other spinoff universes that function as reboot testing grounds, and both Valiant Comics reboots.
More tot he point, it’s more accurate to think of Crisis in particular less as a reboot and more as a bunch of reboots, since there were in retrospect a number of editorial miscommunications and a lot of solo creators doing their own thing.
By the by, it’s great to see you’re still getting along alright so many years after Malcolm Tucker got the sack.
I’m with paul here – it feels like the 616 is overdue a clear out and a reboot could do the job, if handled well. To make it work, however, you’d have to de-clutter a lot of stuff that appears to be making a lot of money right now (see the multiple Avengers titles and the state of the X universe). How do you get back to the core characteristics of these franchises and establish simple, compelling propositions that we can base new stories on without cutting lines back and, presumably, leaving cash on the table?
This is the problem that DC singularly failed to solve with the New52, so they’ve ended up with an even more confused universe that’s even more dependent on the main characters than it was.
One answer might be to take the big books weekly or at least bi-monthly. Marvel produce the same amount of work, and hopefully generate ther same amount of revenue, but keep the de-cluttering and focus.
@Omar – Let’s not forget Heroes Reborn
Actually, i think marvel would prefer we did forget it…
In all seriousness, though, Marvel has been attempting reboots in different ways for decades, with varying levels of success. If you look at sales, though, you’ll see that, aside from a short term bump early on, they don’t make a difference. Marvel in the mid-00s showed with the success of things like New Avengers, Civil War, Brubakers Cap, etc, that peoplevwill but comics if the stories seem interesting (but leave when they turn out to suck). Continuity isn’t a problem if handleld correctly. Readers just want good stories
“There have been exactly TWO continuity reboots of mainstream superhero universes…”
You don’t see the whole Ultimate Universe as a rebooted Marvel? That did all the rehashing people are talking about?
“How do you get back to the core characteristics of these franchises and establish simple, compelling propositions that we can base new stories on without cutting lines back…”
Cutting the lines back is what they should really do, if they genuinely want to streamline continuity. I agree that fewer titles more often would work.
@jpw — I too would rather see a natural progression and aging of the superheroes, and replacements brought in organically. But that’s proven to be beyond the abilities of Marvel & DC. They can’t let legacy characters go, because they can’t come up with adequate replacements. Therefore, they resort to various reboots which only make matters worse in the long run.
I kind of like the “soft reboot” approach where origin stories and key continuity moments are retold every ten years or so with updated details, and then those updates are interwoven into the contemporary continuity. But that’s hard to maintain line-wide, and writers often get confused about which origin details are currently the canonical ones. Also, readers get persnickety about their favorite trivia becoming outdated by a quiet slight of hand.
“Doing away with Magneto’s back-story would completely destroy the character. Without the motivation of seeing his family killed and living the nightmare of realizing what humanity could do to those it deemed “different”, would leave Magneto as a loony, ranting super-villain again.”
This is presuming that you need Magneto to be a white European in any reboot. Nowadays, he could hail from nearly any part of the world that has experienced ethnic cleansing or genocide. I really think one of the best things about a reboot could be overhauling the massive race and gender inequities the comics inherently have as a result of the time periods that many iconic characters were introduced. I mean, I’m ready for a female Thor or an African Magneto.
A female Thor or an African Magneto would not be Thor or Magneto. Or at least, they’d be different enough that you’d have to ask why not just make new characters with similar themes.
That said, I rather like the female Thor in Earth X, but that was just Thor after Loki had got one up on him/her.
Magneto needs the Holocaust because the reader needs the Holocaust. If Magneto had survived the Armenian genocide, I don’t think it would have the same effect on readers.
Yeah, I think rebooting every few years would be a good idea, much like how it’s handled with the cartoons/movies. It’s a good way to keep the characters in circulation without weighing them down with years of history. I don’t think too many people would get upset with the prior history being done away – those stories still exist, they’re still valid, just for a different version of the character.
@Niall — I agree that an African Magneto is not Magneto, and they should just introduce a new character with similar themes. I disagree that a genocide other than the holocaust could not be made to resonate with readers. That’s what a good storyteller can do.
They should let Magneto age out and die, and introduce a Very Powerful Mutant survivor of the Ugandan genocide, or one who was a leftist rebel fighting against the repressive regime and government death squads in Guatemala. It doesn’t have to be genocide that motivates him/her to be a mutant separatist, after all.
Other genocides than the Holocaust don’t resonate because everyone is familiar with the Holocaust. That’s the big one. That’s the yardstick all others are measured by. That’s the one that has a built-in shorthand that gets the point across without having to spend every other issue reminding the reader which atrocity or another he suffered at the hands of.
Just make WWII and the Holocaust in the Marvel U have happened in 1985. Is that more or less comfusing than changing origins to other, nearer real-life events?
What I think (or at least hope) Marvel is doing here is an expanded retelling of Jim Starlin’s “Marvel: The End” from ten years ago with a proper set-up and pay off. What’s going on right now is touching on a lot of the same beats from that story — there’s a lot of time travel contributing to a major problem, there’s a fundamental flaw in the universe (multiverse now) that the heroes actions have exacerbated over the years, and Thanos is to play a pivotal role in acting as the healer who will fix it (Starlin’s “Thanos Annual” from a couple months back established that Thanos is to play a significant role in what the Living Tribunal called an upcoming “universal transmutation”).
That story even touched on Paul’s wish for the Celestials to be removed with some (possibly) tongue-in-cheek allusions to such a notion, with Thanos erasing the nearly omnipotent Celestial Order race (not to be confused with our nearly omnipotent race of space giants called the Celestials) from history, and with the only individual for Thanos to have killed in battle when all of the 616 Marvel Universe came after him being a lone Celestial (of the space giant variety).
It just seems like Starlin’s story is being revamped, set up with proper plot seeds and sufficient time, expanded to the whole Marvel Multiverse, and finally with some elements borrowed from DC’s multiversal crisis stories added into the mix.
If ever Marvel is going to do this reboot thing, it should be now. I just hope that with the current upcoming event being given the proper set-up and pacing — that Starlin’s story wasn’t given — we can see it lead to the results promised. “Marvel: The End” was referenced as canon only twice that I know of outside the event’s mini-series, and both of those times were written by Starlin himself early in Thanos’s own ongoing series.
None of the effects of the story seemed to stick — namely, that Thanos sacrificed his own existence to fix the universal flaw which allowed for the revolving door for dead heroes. Such resurrections have just kept on happening, and even Thanos himself was alive again very shortly thereafter.
The longest lasting effect of the whole thing was that Thanos finally fully accepted his role as a force for good in the universe, which carried over into his ongoing series. Of course, later writers and editors have disappointingly tried to skim over that as well until Starlin set things back on their proper course with the recent “Thanos Annual” and, presumably, the upcoming “Thanos: The Infinity Revelation” graphic novel as well.
Time will tell if we are, indeed, looking at a reboot, and I think we will know very soon — when the next issue of “New Avengers” (#21) comes out in a little over a week, actually. If the Illuminati do finally cross the irreversible moral event horizon they’ve been approaching throughout Hickman’s time on the book, I think we will be looking at a scenario that demands a reboot for those characters.