RSS Feed
Dec 29

Avengers vs X-Men: Axis

Posted on Monday, December 29, 2014 by Paul in x-axis

I already wrote about this series halfway through its run, and not much has changed since then (and, as previously noted, we’re behind in the reviews department) – so this is one I can probably keep short.

For the assistance of anyone stumbling upon this post years after the plot has faded from memory, Axis is the lynchpin series of a three-month crossover in which the Avengers, the X-Men and a bunch of random villains team up to fight the Red Skull, and can only defeat him by using magic to invert the morality of everyone in the area.  So the Avengers and the X-Men are both evil now and they have a big fight and the villains stop them because they’re heroes now and basically everything is back to normal at the end except for a few characters who aren’t.

It doesn’t really work.  Axis is plainly a transition between the two volumes of Uncanny Avengers, and its biggest problem is that the inversion concept is a cute little gimmick that might have worked just fine in single arc of a few issues.  Instead, it’s been pumped full of steroids and forcibly converted into a multi-title crossover, and the idea just won’t bear that weight.  It’s simply not interesting enough.  That’s why it’s precisely well suited for a single arc; it looks more interesting than it really is, and if you get out after a couple of issues, you leave ’em wanting more.

You might think that that would only be a problem for the tie-ins, rather than the core series itself.  But the overexposure of the idea drags down the original story too.  And besides, as I wrote about with Death of Wolverine, the way a story is presented and promoted is all part of the storytelling these days, because it primes how the reader reacts.  The inversion gimmick is silly, and it belongs in a camp, fun little piece, if you’re going to do it at all.  When it’s forced to be Big and Important and World Changing, it’s not up to the job.

Not that all that much actually changes as a result of Axis – again, presumably a result of its origins as a transition arc in Uncanny Avengers.  Yes, Iron Man gets a revamp, but we all know he’ll be reset in the end.  Sabretooth and (less expectedly) Havok also remain changed.  Evan turns into Apocalypse and vanishes from the story about halfway through the final issue, after somehow becoming the only character to restore his normal personality by force of will – something which I was initially tempted to write off as contrived drama, but could just about be justified as a mirror of his normal angst point, surrendering to his inner evil nature.

But am I interested in where any of these characters are going?  Not really, no – which brings us to the other problem with Axis.  If you’re going to do the inversion schtick as anything more than a short term gimmick, it’s essential that the characters still somehow feel like themselves.  That’s not easy, but it’s the challenge you take up by writing the story.  And pretty much none of the characters felt recognisable at any point, resulting in several issues of everyone acting wildly out of character for reasons that can’t be ascribed to any sort of conventional motivation.

With minor exceptions, everyone who gets inverted ends up as either a one-dimensional villain or a one-dimensional hero.  So not only are they not their regular characters, they’re not really any other sort of character either.  They’re pod people.  And this doesn’t seem like a promising – or even viable – starting point for any kind of storytelling with the characters who remain inverted.  What will happen in practice, of course, is that later writers will simply ignore the ravings of Axis and treat the inversions of these laggards more subtly.  They’ll have to, because the characters are unusable otherwise – and indeed the epilogue with Sabretooth seems to suggest some backing away towards a more rounded character.

A bit of a write-off then – which is a shame, as Uncanny Avengers has done some good stuff in the past.  But like I say, this would probably have worked better as a gaudy confection in a single title.  It’s a gimmick, and it should never have been pressed into service as a crossover premise like this.

Bring on the comments

  1. Paul F says:

    I haven’t read Axis, but the way people are talking about it reminds me of Shadowland, which would have worked okay as an arc in Daredevil, but made for a terrible crossover event.

  2. Odessasteps says:

    I gave up after issue one and this series really did was gum up books i like, like mighty avengers.

  3. Chris McFeely says:

    People talk about “event fatigue” and the like, but AXIS seemed to be a case of it actually being true. Because HOO-boy, NOBODY seemed to care about this one.

  4. Paul says:

    Spider-Verse has done well, so I don’t think it’s a lack of interest in events as such. I think it’s more a case of too many events too close together, plus a gimmick that didn’t capture the imagination.

  5. Tdubs says:

    I think everyone reading Spider-verse believes that there will be some consequences coming out of it. the books in the spider line are all part of it and the story spread out into miniseries. The X-Men, Avengers and Hulk are supposed to be big parts of this story and we can’t get tie-ins or miniseries. We got hobgoblin and carnage. This event is a dud to me like fear itself. Bad news for Marvel all their big name writers have turned in subpar events for the past four years.

  6. Living Tribunal says:

    As long as readers support ($$$$$$) this kind of drivel from the Marvel, they will keep cranking it out. Only when the next “event/crossover/mind boggling cluster muck” sells at a mere 40,000 copies will Marvel hget the message.

  7. Dazzler says:

    “As long as readers support ($$$$$$) this kind of drivel from the Marvel, they will keep cranking it out. Only when the next “event/crossover/mind boggling cluster muck” sells at a mere 40,000 copies will Marvel get the message.”

    I don’t think this is true. I think any one low-selling event would just drive Marvel to try to make the next event bigger and splashier. I reckon it would take a very long string of failed events for Marvel to stop producing them. Don’t hold your breath.

  8. Luis Dantas says:

    Didn’t Tom Brevoort say a couple of years ago or so that Marvel attempted to run a year without an event and saw the sales go down for that?

    One should not expect a company to voluntarily choose to earn less money than it could for no clear reason.

  9. Jamie says:

    I can’t decide whether Axis was better or worse than Original Sin. Both were garbage.

  10. Chris McFeely says:

    The arse totally fell out of Original Sin after a promising start, but it was BIG, and there were lots of good tie-ins, and people were TALKING about it. Nobody’s talking about Axis. It’s been a quiet fart in the night.

  11. Lawrence says:

    I was kind of wondering if Havok staying inverted was a last minute change. They have evil Havok going to Cyclops at the end giving him a hug, and while I understand why in a perverse way it works for Havok’s character, I’m not sure why Cyclops would be ready to welcome an evil Havok with open arms.

    I know Cyclops is all morally ambiguous now, but when he got inverted he was evil. So based on the story’s logic, shouldn’t “normal” Cyclops be capturing Havok to make sure he doesn’t try to set off another human-killing bomb?

    I wonder if Bendis wanted to use the character and Remender begrudgingly wrote him out, but as a friendly “fuck you” he decided, ” Fine take Havok. But now he’s evil.”

  12. The originally Matt says:

    Well. Yes. Uncanny X-Force and Uncanny Avengers have been pretty well my favourite titles while they were running. But Axis? Yeah….one arc of Uncanny Avengers would have done it fine. Maybe 2or 3 tie ins like Magneto, Iron Man and Mighty Avengers. but when Hobgoblin AND Carnage have their own miniseries?

    In a year that has already seen banner events like Original Sin, Death of Wolverine and Spider-Verse? We probably didn’t need this as well. As noted in an above comment, no one was making any noise about this, seemingly for good or ill.

    What Paul says about packaging I feel is pretty spot on. I bought 2 issues of tie ins. The Magneto issue, since it filled a gaping hole in issue 2 or 3 or whenever, and the first issue of Revolations or whatever that mini was called. And my god that was a waste of $5.

    Now that I think about it, would this comic have been better served as a x-over between uncanny avengers and uncanny x-men rather than a sprawling line wide thing?

  13. K says:

    Re: Lawrence

    Isn’t Bendis already the sole writer who has the power to ignore any obstacles to his use of characters he wants? Up to and including death.

  14. Kenny says:

    According to an interview with CBR, Remender himself had planned to write it as a four or five-issue arc in Uncanny Avengers, but then he went to creative retreat where the idea picked up steam when he mentioned it to the editors.

    I’m thinking he’d have been better off sticking to his original plan and not saying anything.

  15. bad johnny got out says:

    Spoilers?

    Bendis just this month gave his Time Bubble Girl a backstory which parallels, a little too neatly, Havok’s current case of the child-lost-in-the-timestream blues. Conveniently enough, Time Bubble Girl has also had a big crush on Emotionally Unobtainable Cyclops. Taken together, this probably finalizes Alex and Janet’s divorce.

    Hard to say whether Bendis had this plotted out in advance, or whether he’s improvising.

    Bendis does seem to be The Man at Marvel these days, but not even the mighty Bendis could prevent Logan from going *poit* right when he was in the middle of a major storyline, just because he “died” or something over in some other miniseries, jeez.

  16. Dasklein83 says:

    I really enjoyed the first three issues of Axis. After that, the book went to hell.

  17. Bob says:

    It seems like the purpose of Marvel’s recent events had been to drag the Marvel Universe closet to the movie universe. Infinity gave us more Inhumans. Original Sin effectively destroyed the remaining old-school SHIELD characters still around. Axis changed Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch to… something. I’m suprised this wasn’t mentioned in the review.

    I’m not tired of events. I like events. I’m tired of BAD events.

  18. Jerry Ray says:

    Man, Axis was bad, and kind of incomprehensible aside from the broadest strokes. Sadly, so was Original Sin. Marvel’s now putting out event minis that make Secret Wars look like Watchmen – surely there’s a backlash coming?

    For what it’s worth, Death of Wolverine (which I only just got around to reading) was better than I expected it to be – it was at least competent. It’s absolutely bizarre that the previous series was all about Wolverine losing his healing factor and angsting over being merely mortal, LIKE EVERY ONE OF HIS SUPERHERO FRIENDS who manage to not die, and then he dies in some other story entirely. At least Soule put some effort into explaining why losing the healing factor was particularly bad for Wolvie – otherwise, I was just like “can it, Hawkeye manages to stay alive somehow…”

  19. Living Tribunal says:

    So was House To Astonish – Episode 128 the last one of its kind? It has been 5 to 6 months with no new episode.

  20. Paul F says:

    @Living Tribunal: It’s on hiatus as Al has a baby to take care of.

  21. Chief says:

    Luis Dantas says:
    December 30, 2014 at 1:38 AM
    “Didn’t Tom Brevoort say a couple of years ago or so that Marvel attempted to run a year without an event and saw the sales go down for that?

    One should not expect a company to voluntarily choose to earn less money than it could for no clear reason.”

    I’m not so sure about that, when was the last year Marvel didn’t do a line-wide event?

    2005 – HOM
    2006 – Civil War
    2007 – WWHulk
    2008 – Secret Invasion
    2009 – ???
    2010 – Siege
    2011 – Fear Itself
    2012 – AVX
    2013 – AOU
    2014 – Original Sin/Axis

    I guess 2009 didn’t really have one? However you did have all that Dark Reign crap spewing over the entire line. Does that count?

    Before that you would have to go back to 2000-2005, which was a VERY different Marvel. The new regime, creator-driven Marvel which swore off crossovers and let the individual titles breathe. That seems like ages ago now. Those days were not without their flaws, but I really miss early 2000’s Marvel. I dropped out completely around Secret Invasion and I’m probably never coming back unless the regime completely changes. I don’t even recognize what’s being published now.

  22. Suzene says:

    There is, sadly, a part of me that hopes post-Secret Wars Marvel is the sort of convenient clean break point Nu52 was. But we’ll see how that all falls out. If nothing else, it’ll probably wipe out the two monthlies I’m still reading.

  23. chief says:

    I just a want an X-Men book that features X-Men doing X-Men things. Same with Avengers. And streamline the entire line. And get rid of Bendis.

    I’m so desperate I would actually welcome John Byrne coming in and nuking everything back to the good old days.

    Sigh, one can dream.

  24. Evil Havok is a well used trope – post Siege Perilous, Age of Apocalypse and then the one he replaced in that terrible Mutant X series. Yawn.

  25. Chris says:

    Chief’s list is sadly incomplete

  26. Let’s play a game–which character/book suffered most from inclusion in Axis? Magneto’s solo book lost a lot of momentum and Evan’s apocalypse transformation didn’t do any favors, but personally, I think it’s Captain America. For a lot of people not reading the main book, this might be the first glimpse they’ve had of Sam in the role, and I think it’s a little too early to do a “hero turns evil” story with a hero who hasn’t been in the spotlight long enough yet. (Yes, Wilson’s been around for a long time, and yes, most people probably know him from the movies, if at all, but it still felt weird to me, especially in Captain America and the Mighty Avengers.)

  27. Brian says:

    Paul F: “It’s on hiatus as Al has a baby to take care of.”

    So…put a bunch of new comics in front of Paul and Al’s new babies on video camera, let the little ones slobber, droll, and gnaw on them, and then interpret their reaction to the brightly-colored pages as a “review” for their father to parse in BABIES TO ASTONISH!!!

  28. Chief says:

    Chris says:
    December 31, 2014 at 7:44 PM
    Chief’s list is sadly incomplete

    Hmm, did I leave something out? I wasn’t going to include stuff like Shadowland, Spider-Island, Chaos War, etc since they stayed somewhat confined to their own books (with some exceptions). I was thinking along the lines of the CRACK THE INTERNET IN HALF type stuff that everyone has to participate in.

  29. Jamie says:

    “I’m not tired of events. I like events. I’m tired of BAD events.”

    You hear that, everybody? You’d better produce comics that Bob thinks are good, or else.

  30. Brian says:

    House of Bob! World War Bob! Bob-Island! Avengers Vs. Bob! Bob Invasion! Bob Itself! Chaos Bob! Original Bob!

  31. Brian says:

    (To be fair, if Marvel announced that the next mega-crossover was called “Avengers versus Bob,” who amongst us wouldn’t immediately perk our ears up and wonder what the hell was going to happen next?)

  32. Jason says:

    2009 had Utopia, War of the Kings, Necrosha, Fall of the Hulks, and Messiah War as crossovers

    Honestly. it’s no surprise that their sales fell with no event. The event is extra books published. People can’t go to a movie that was never filmed, they can’t read a book that was never printed. Minis are usually arely longer than the minimum run of a launched and cancelled comic

  33. Living Tribunal says:

    @ Paul F: Thanks for the response. Any idea when Al (and you) will be good to go?

  34. The original Matt says:

    Also missing from that list of crossovers was Second Coming and Infinity.

  35. The original Matt says:

    And seeing that HoM was 10 years ago makes me feel old.

  36. jpw says:

    Wow, you’re right. House of M was in 2005. I can’t believe the internet has been broken in half for a full decade.

  37. Neil Kapit says:

    I love how the only reason Sabretooth and Havok kept their inversions was because they happened to be standing next to Iron Man when he put up his anti-inversion shield.

  38. Mory Buxner says:

    Chief, the “year without events” that Brevoort referred to was the 11 months between the end of Siege in May 2010 and the beginning of Fear Itself in April 2011.

  39. Mory Buxner says:

    I’m fascinated by the string of crappy crossover events at Marvel lately. Age of Ultron, Infinity, Original Sin, Axis. All by writers I admire, all very clearly defined by the authorial vision of those writers, all dull and meandering. I hate to say it, but maybe a little more editorial interference and groupthink might have done these stories some good. In my view Avengers vs. X-Men and Civil War both seemed little less personal, and ended up being more engaging, than the recent crop. My theory at the moment is that for one person to steer the ship on a line-wide event is a full-time job, whereas these writers have had other comic writing on the side, so they end up having to cut corners creatively. Maybe not editors, then – maybe they just need talent who isn’t otherwise occupied.

  40. Joseph says:

    “Well. Yes. Uncanny X-Force and Uncanny Avengers have been pretty well my favourite titles while they were running. But Axis? Yeah….one arc of Uncanny Avengers would have done it fine. Maybe 2or 3 tie ins like Magneto, Iron Man and Mighty Avengers. but when Hobgoblin AND Carnage have their own miniseries? ”

    What does it say that Hobgoblin and Carnage minis were 2 of the better things that came out of AXIS?

    I can’t say I’m nostalgic for the early 00s. Aside from MOrrison’s run on X-men and maybe Wedon’s run on Astonishing X-Men, Marvel wasn’t exactly at its peak then.

    Overall I have to say Marvel’s put out its share of topnotch books in the last two years, and as an X-reader all the more impressive as books starring characters I’d never cared about at all, especially Daredevil, Hawkguy, She-Hulk, Silver Surfer, Journey into Mystery, Thor, Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel…

  41. The original Matt says:

    I’d say it says exactly what Marvel NOW! said. Character or story driven and mostly self contained books do better than EVENTS!!

    Disclaimer: I know those minis were tie ins, but I read the main mini without ever feeling like I was missing anything but not buying a hobgoblin tie in. I assume they would be more character exploring titles.

    I do agree with what you’re saying about marvels recent output. 2013 was a golden year for marvel as far as I’m concerned.

  42. Nu-D. says:

    Marvel needs to understand that some of those low-selling titles are being bought by readers like me, who only buy titles that don’t participate in events and crossovers. I read Hawkeye and Ms. Marvel and X-Factor because they’re self-contained. I’ll put up with a two-title, four issue crossover; but I’ll drop a title before I’ll buy a 12-issue crossover just to keep following it.

    I don’t know if there are a lot of us out there, but there are some; Marvel looses sales when they try to drag us into these events. They need to have a consistent set of titles that are independent and self-contained to capure my dollar.

  43. Thom H. says:

    @Nu-D.: I agree 100%. And it’s difficult to find that kind of title. Many get subsumed into the crossover madness, while others get cancelled because of low sales. It’s too bad because I think there could be a lot more excellent series like Daredevil or Hawkeye or She-Hulk on the stands if creators were given books that weren’t hijacked every few months by line-wide events.

  44. Jamie says:

    “Marvel looses sales when they try to drag us into these events”

    Every single sales chart shows they gain sales when they tie into events.

  45. Leo says:

    “Every single sales chart shows they gain sales when they tie into events.”

    While it’s true that they sell better during the event, it’s because there are followers of the event that buy those issues and rarely return after it, while regulars of the series get turned off because the series they love gets sidetracked and they are being forced into buying issues that have nothing to do with the series they love

  46. Pete says:

    I wonder what happened to Ahab. He is probably in the Vault.

  47. Jamie says:

    “While it’s true that they sell better during the event, it’s because there are followers of the event that buy those issues and rarely return after it”

    Which tends to keep those books going X amount of issues more than they otherwise would.

    “while regulars of the series get turned off”

    There is no proof of this, sorry. The sales numbers continue the same trend after the tie-ins that existed before, usually with a small upwards bump.

  48. Reboot says:

    > Which tends to keep those books going X amount of issues more than they otherwise would.

    In many cases, in “the operation was a success but the patient died” fashion (i.e., at the cost of whatever was distinctive or laudable about the book outside the event. I haven’t been reading Magneto, but Paul’s comments in his review of the second TPB of that series suggest that is a good example).

  49. Luis Dantas says:

    @Jamie: immediate numbers are not all. By relying so much on events, both Marvel and DC are unavoidably attracting readers who like to read them (for whatever reason) while pushing away those who do not.

    After 29 years since the first two line-wide events, many of them with several events in each company (sometimes symultaneously), those who care more about the characters or specific books than about events have all but been driven away completely. The end result is that Marvel and DC are now reliant on events and have trouble finding a market for a book on its own merits.

    But I guess that is good news from Image, Dynamite, Dark Horse and IDW.

  50. Luis Dantas says:

    @Reboot: that was particularly clear for Wonder Woman. She had exciting, inovative and well-written stories that were uncerimoniously disposed of without much of a resolution for an entirely forgettable crossover with the Superman books as part of Infinite Crisis.

    They might as well have cancelled the book once and for all.

Leave a Reply