Uncanny Avengers vol 1 – “Counter-Evolutionary”
First of all, no, that’s not a typo. This is volume 1 – the second volume 1, even though it features a creative team that worked on the previous run. And if everything is getting a fresh #1 after Secret Wars, it will presumably be the only volume 1 of the second run, to be followed promptly by a third volume 1. This is confusing. I was tempted to call it volume 6 but (a) that’s not the title, and (b) volume 6 should logically be Axis, which wasn’t billed as an Uncanny Avengers collection at all.
Oh well. Bitching about the numbering helps me get through a paragraph before turning my attention to the more important point, which is that this book completely lost my attention somewhere along the line.
I keep genuinely forgetting that this volume of Uncanny Avengers is coming out. It shows up in my Comixology subscription and I think “oh yes, that”. And then I read it and realise that I can’t remember what happened in the previous issue, and I don’t really care either. And then it hits me again that I’ve just turned through half the pages and didn’t really take any of them in either.
So let’s read this arc again and see if it works any better in one go.
The book picks up after Axis, where Wanda and Pietro learned that they weren’t Magneto’s children after all. Rick Remender does his best to present this as a world-shaking revelation for them, though if you know their history, he’s really overplaying it a bit. “What if one day you awoke to discover your entire life was a lie?” asks Pietro. This probably plays better the less you know about continuity, since the unfortunate reality is that not only did they only learn about Magneto in adulthood, but this is at least the third time the characters have learned that their real father is somebody else. You’d think they’d be used to it by now.
Of course, we all know why this is being done. It’s because the characters are in the unusual position of being included in both the Avengers and the X-Men movie licences, and since Marvel (understandably) care far more about the Avengers version, they want to detach the characters from Magneto. That’s fair enough from a business standpoint, but who really wants to see these two characters do this same story yet again?
God, I’ve lost interest already and I’m only on page 5.
So anyway. Wanda and Pietro are looking for answers from the High Evolutionary, since he figures into their origin story. And so they’ve travelled to the latest version of Counter-Earth in the hope of questioning him. Counter-Earth is still filled with humanoid animals “evolved” by the High Evolutionary, though as we find out, the Evolutionary is in the habit of purging the planet and starting over from time to time.
Meanwhile, because Wanda and Pietro just left without explanation, Rogue has rounded up a few Avengers to go after them – the Vision, Dr Voodoo, the new Captain America, and the recently-inverted Sabretooth (on the grounds that they need a tracker, which apparently is beyond the magic guy). This at least gives us the chance to see how Remender thinks an inverted Sabretooth should be written, and broadly, the answer is that he behaves exactly the same as before, except without the murderous impulses. So he’s still pretty obnoxious, but co-operative. As is so often the way, their journey to Counter-Earth leaves them scattered, so everyone has a separate plot thread converging.
The overall theme, however, is about the Evolutionary’s periodic slaughter of his people as he keeps wiping the slate clean and starting from scratch in an attempt to get it right this time. And there is indeed a wonderful lack of empathy in the Evolutionary’s farewell speech to the current population, in which he laments their failings, blames himself, and concludes with “Say your goodbyes and accept my gratitude for the lessons you have taught me.” Unsurprisingly, this peaceful view of matters is not shared by his creations, but there’s not a great deal they can do about it.
That sequence is pretty great. But otherwise, while there’s a lot going on in this story, not much of it is very interesting. There’s a fairly generic rebel cell led by the Evolutionary’s son trying to rescue as many as they can, and get rid of the High Evolutionary for good. There’s a robot called Eve who’s set up as an immediate and largely unearned love interest for the Vision, in some sort of side experiment by the Evolutionary. Dr Voodoo spends a lot of time talking to the dead. Rogue has Simon Williams’ mind removed from her, in what feels like it ought to be a bigger deal but largely gets lost in the shuffle.
The explanation for Wanda and Pietro is basically to credit them as creations of the High Evolutionary, and to introduce a third character called Luminous who’s supposed to be an improved version with both their powers, but is basically just a one-dimensional stormtrooper. In fairness, in an attempt to avoid us having to into this mire in future, the story has them as children who were experimented on by the Evolutionary and then returned to their natural parents when they were judged as failures – so apparently they’re not real mutants, and their birth parents were the Maximoffs after all. That at least gets us to a point where they have a vaguely stable origin story and are largely freed up from links to other characters.
It’s all a bit of a mess. The continuity fix is largely a case of stripping parts out of Wanda and Pietro’s origins while leaving the core intact. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t make for a very interesting story in itself. And after the Evolutionary’s petri-dish idea of society is set up with such a strong opening, the series simply deteriorates into filling time until the heroes are ready to join forces and fight him. Which they do, and then everyone goes home. Presumably the Evolutionary is being set up for a return match in future, but I can’t say I’m looking forward to it.
It doesn’t work as an Avengers story. Remender is notionally introducing a new team here – for a book which is about to be rebooted yet again anyway – but most of the characters have nothing to do, and the structure requires them to be kept away from the core cast to boot. Voodoo is reduced to performing plot mechanics. Vision at least has a sub-plot, but one that feels like it’s wandered in from a knock-off Ultron story and been pressed into service to give him something to do. Cap’s involvement serves no discernible purpose whatsoever – he gets separated from the group and turned into a brainwashed soldier, and just stays that way for the rest of the story until he’s casually cured in an epilogue. If that’s all you had for him to do, leave him at home and give the pages to somebody else.
Acuna’s art is colourful and some of the initial Counter-Earth sequences are strikingly done, but for the most part this arc is overcomplicated and underdeveloped. Sometimes a re-read of a story that bored me to tears on first reading reveals points of interest that weren’t apparent in monthly instalments. Not this one. It’s a dud.
Just once I’d like a character whose biological parentage has been called into question by some sort of retcon to react by deciding that it doesn’t much matter to them and that they’re just going to carry on as normal rather than turning the whole thing into some sort of epic quest.
With Wanda and Pietro, in particular, the “who cares? We’ve done this before, we’ll do it again, and it doesn’t fundamentally change who we are” reaction would be both sensible and refreshing.
I suppose it doesn’t help that the High Evolutionary has never been an especially compelling character. Once the novelty of animal-people wears off, as it does within a few pages, he’s just an especially aimless variety of mad scientist. (Well, when he’s not some 1970s writer’s way of setting up clunky allegories for the Christian deity, anyway.) Worse, he flags up the inaccuracy of comic book ideas of “evolution:” speciation doesn’t have “levels,” it’s just about what works in a given set of selection pressures.
I wonder if part of the problem with the book as a whole is that nearly every member of the cast comes across more as gimmicky flotsam than as a workable character. The Vision has never really come back from John Byrne’s “just a toaster” storyline in the late 80s, Brother Voodoo and the current Captain America are currently best known as temporary stand-ins for more established headliners (and Voodoo doesn’t even have that going for him anymore), Inverted Sabretooth is by definition in the middle of a gimmick arc, and the Scarlet Witch has always struggled with being little more than a plot device.
I would agree that they’ve wasted the Vision. They put a teenage version on a team with his won children and did nothing at all to explore that situation, and now they’ve brought him back into a team with the woman who is both his ex-wife and his murderer, and they’re doing nothing with that either. Dull.
His own children, that is.
I think the “he’s an MP3 player” bit in…. was it Mighty Avengers?…. went more for “toaster” partisans than the “he’s a person” view.
At first I was disappointed that they weren’t declared the Whizzer’s kids and then I remembered that might be annoying in the long run to attach them to WWII heroes.
Who are his kids again? Do they still have each 1/5 the soul of a demon-man character? Master Pandemonium?
Speaking of comic book cliches I’d like to see subverted, I’d really love a scene where someone sits down Apocalypse, Sinister, and/or the High Evolutionary and explain what evolution actually means and that the idea of “ultimate evolution” is nonsense, preferably with passages from Darwin. (Granted, you don’t really want to go in that direction, because it’s opening the door for a discussion on how “evolved” mutants are.)
The High Evolutionary has been a disappointment to me after they retconned his origin to include Sinister. So now, he’s got Sinister’s tech hand-me-downs–and Sinister inherited them from Apocalypse, who in turn borrowed his from Kang and the Celestials. While he’s a little different by being more associated with the Avengers (and probably predates both?), the connection really drove home for me how he’s a blander version of their schticks.
So High Evolutionary got his stuff from a bad guy who hides out in orphanages and picks on children but he’s a bad guy whose arch-nemesis is Thor and he builds planets on a casual whim.
Geez
Why don’t they just announce Wanda and Pietro as Inhumans and just get it over with? Or whatever they’re going to call mutants in the MU movies…
Hey, this is still more elegant than the efforts to square Quake with her TV counterpart:
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2015/06/27/making-quake-an-inhuman-and-changing-her-name-to-skye-in-the-comics/
So High Evolutionary got his stuff from a bad guy who hides out in orphanages and picks on children but he’s a bad guy whose arch-nemesis is Thor and he builds planets on a casual whim.
Even worse, they retconned the Jackal from Spider-Man so that it was he, not the H.E., that successfully invented cloning. The H.E. just didn’t want to admit that one of his techs had done something he couldn’t, so he booted the Jackal.
This means that the H.E. not only got his gear from a Victorian lunatic who operates on a hilariously smaller scale, but that he was later outdone by a college biology teacher who doesn’t seem to know what an actual jackal looks like and loses to Spider-Man.
Chris, the kids turned out to be Wiccan and Quicksilver Junior — or whatever his name is — in the Young Avengers and there was some Pandemonium involvement but I forget the exact details.
That doesn’t sound like anything I want to read.
I remember something about Vision Boy being Iron Lad. or Kid Kang?
This means that the H.E. not only got his gear from a Victorian lunatic who operates on a hilariously smaller scale, but that he was later outdone by a college biology teacher who doesn’t seem to know what an actual jackal looks like and loses to Spider-Man.
I can’t even.
I think Iron Lad kills Kid Vision at some point and someone’s like “why don’t we rebuild him?” and someone else says “maybe it’s better this way, since his girlfriend Stature is also dead now”
Sort of. The future Iron Man was young Kang; he left his armour behind when he returned to the future and it downloaded the Vision’s memory.
So in this explanation for Wanda and Pietro’s parentage they don’t mention Magda? I wouldn’t really expect them to, actually, since she would be pretty hard to explain away.
So I’m hoping that with this latest relaunch of Marvel we see them stop attempting to make some of these books work. The multiple attempts to launch Secret Avengers (which had every volume fail in its execution) and Uncanny Avengers need to end, the concepts don’t work.
Why they decided to launch this book only to immediately stop it makes no sense ( one of the things that I believe caused Wolverines to be a mess also.) Ince Uncanny X-Force ended Remender has been off in his stories for Marvel.
In all the decades of Marvel piling retcons atop retcons, nearly every geneticist in the Marvel Universe has been revealed to have known or worked with one another.
The High Evolutionary didn’t just get help from Mr. Sinister, HE was also instructed and supplied by the Inhuman Phaeder. And HE had a few partners and assistants over the years including Horace Grayson, the Moloids, Jonathan Drew, and Miles Warren. But Phaeder and his Inhuman/Deviant hybrid son Maelstrom also provided information to Warren, Dr. Hydro, and Wladyslav Shinski and Arnim Zola of The Enclave (which created Adam Warlock). Shinski was also the mentor of Arnim Zola and warned him to stay away from the HE.
The Moloids were created by the Deviants, the same race as Maelstrom’s mother, who were of course the rivals of the Eternals, both of whom were created by the Celestials. The Celestials’ equipment was then utilized by Apocalypse who also used it to transform Essex into Mr. Sinister. And when Magneto created Alpha, the Ultimate Mutant, he used equipment belonging to Maelstrom and Phaeder.
I love reading this review and also the comments. You guys are like seriously great.
I too have been very disappointed in the latest Uncanny Avengers. When the series started, it quickly became one of my favorites, and had an old-school but fresh take that by and large was really exciting to look forward to. This latest volume, not so much. I guess even those old-school comics had some clunkers, too.
I’m OK with the Evolutionary as a Big Bad, though, because of the more thematic/metaphorical aspects he can bring to a story. It doesn’t really matter that his science isn’t going to supplement my college textbook… but it should fit a superhero story about raised stakes, aiming high, learning about yourself, etc.
I’m wondering if the real lesson for the editors/creators, though, is that Remender works better on solo book titles, like Captain America, and not sprawling casts that need equal weight to all the players.
Now I want a story where a villain excitedly declares that the world is finally “MINE ALL MINE!” and a mass of supervillain scientists descend from the rafters demanding he pay royalties for using their patents.
Actually, wasn’t there a She-Hulk story recently where her formerly supervillain-ish client was claiming that Tony Stark stole his patent? Tony’s basically a supervillain with better PR.
Also, to bring it back to the book at hand, I’ll give Remender credit for picking villains–Red Skull, High Evolutionary, the Apocalypse Twins, once you tie them to Kang–that would theoretically be of concern to Avengers and X-Men, even if the results are frequently underwhelming.
Considering the twin legacies that the Avengers and the X-Men share, and some subplots I read in the original Avengers title in the early 1970s, I think Uncanny Avengers is long overdue.
It’s just that it didn’t turn out so well.
This comic probably would have worked better in the year 2005 or some pre-Bendis era or in the pre-decompressed era of writing comic books.
That said, the first two arcs were good, whether I liked the second one or not.
Mind you, before we counted Hickman’s 77 issue plus arc, I thought the Apocalyse Twins/Kang story was long for a single story.
Anyway… sometimes a comic book series not selling does not mean that the idea for the series is bad; it just means the commercial audience might be too small. That’s sad, but it happens…. a lot.
I love reading this review and also the comments. You guys are like seriously great.
Also: thanks
“Hey, this is still more elegant than the efforts to square Quake with her TV counterpart”
Yikes! That was…not good.
“Why don’t they just announce Wanda and Pietro as Inhumans and just get it over with? Or whatever they’re going to call mutants in the MU movies…”
@wwk5d – I suspect this will be part of a Post-Secret Wars crossover between Uncanny Inhumans, Uncanny Avengers, and Inhuman (if it returns) that will run for three months and have to bookends.
If Wanda and Pietro wanted paternity answers they should have gone to Maury Povich instead of the High Evolutionary.
The important question: was Bova in this story? Or is she still dead (i think she’s dead)
I think the last time we saw Bova was in Mighty Avengers during Dark Reign. She was still alive then.
Bova was killed about a year ago, in a High Evolutionary storyline in the most recent volume of New Warriors.
– New Warriors Correspondent Al
Well that sucks. I always liked Bova and felt she was one of those truly innocent characters who would never come to harm.
truly innocent characters who would never come to harm
Like Uncle Gwen or Ant-Man’s kid.
The whole who are Wanda and Pietro’s parents didn’t really get answered at all. I thought the Maximoffs were still given the twins by the HE after he took them from their parents. Is Magda still their mother? Vision says he knows but couldn’t hurt Wanda that way. MArvel said we would know who their parents are after the first issue but we didn’t
Like Uncle Gwen or Ant-Man’s kid.
Now I want a Spider-Man variant who really does have an Uncle Gwen. “If I hadn’t let that Goblin-masked burglar escape the wrestling studio because he was Harry-jane Osbrant’s insane dparent, the Goblin would never have broken into my house and thrown Uncle Gwen off the top of our house, causing me to accidentally snap my uncle’s neck with my webbing.
“That fall was totally survivable! No wonder Aunt May Jonah Jameson hates me so much! Maybe if I capture Doctor Shocktopus, Kravulture, the Sand Lizard, Venomysterio, the Scorpmeleon, and the rest of the Syndicate Six I can make it up to her. And someday I’ll even bring down the Green Demohobgoblin, even if it means exposing the truth about to the world!”
After the first eye-rolling volume and the awful AXIS, what was anyone really hoping from this series anyway?
I stopped buying this series after Axis. I really enjoyed it up until the end of the Apoc Twins saga, but axis just felt like Remender’s interest was elsewhere.
Actually, it’s worth noting that once it became apparent where Hickman was going (leading to the reboot) I started looking for jumping off points. I ditched Thor, for example, after original sin, because I didn’t want to buy 6 or 7 issues of Lady Thor and then have the whole thing rebooted into nothingness. I wonder if there was a noticeable sales decline once Secret Wars was announced. Did other people do what I did? Paul? Anyone?
Sales charts at The Beat note that “final issues” at Marvel have risen in sales.
it’s worth noting that once it became apparent where Hickman was going (leading to the reboot) I started looking for jumping off points. I ditched Thor, for example, after original sin, because I didn’t want to buy 6 or 7 issues of Lady Thor and then have the whole thing rebooted into nothingness.
The Amazing Spider-Man is filled with them.
My favorite is still selling the marriage to Satan.
The ending to Superior Spider-Man is the most upbeat jumping off point.
Pursuit is tied with ASM 700 for the least upbeat jumping off point.
Which is a better jumping off point for X-Men? Avengers vs X-Men or House of M?
Or is there one during the Fraction run?
The Fantastic Four now has a jumping off point every time they switch writers…. that’s hilarious. No wonder the title is so easily cancelled. I’m not entirely certain how many people stayed on from writer to writer.
Which is a better jumping off point for X-Men? Avengers vs X-Men or House of M?
Age of Apocalypse was my jumping off point. It was for the best.
My recent jumping off points:
Marvel
— Doctor Strange sells his soul (or tries to) in Hickman’s New Avengers, despite coming straight off of a storyline elsewhere where he’d supposedly learned not to do stupid crap like that out of desperation
— Miles Morales’s mother is killed off.
— The X-Men somehow end up in a ludicrously staged running battle with a motorcycle-riding Empath; also, Maddy Pryor is back for some reason and tricks Cyclops into psychic sex with her or something because…she’s evil?
— Hickman leaves Fantastic Four
— Warren Ellis leaves Moon Knight
— Jason Aaron leaves Wolverine
— Warren Ellis leaves Secret Avengers
— Dan Slott and Marvel start promoting Spider-Verse as the next big story for Peter Parker
— Axis #1 turns out to be even worse than I had expected
DC Comics
— For everything except Batman, Flashpoint
— For Batman, the end of Snyder’s “Zero Year” storyline.
I think I agree with all of those, although I’ll add that the jumping off points for Iron Man and Avengers seem to be where Kurt Busiek leaves….
and maybe my Wolverine jumping off point is…. when he loses the metal?
Or Origin. I might have stopped caring right before Origin.
Fatal Attractions does make a good endpoint. Magneto loses it; Colossus defects; Wolverine is killed and Professor X reacts by killing Magneto and leaving him a vegetable.
I think my jumping off point from being a regular X-Men reader was Chuck Austen’s Maximus Lobo storyline. Avengers was Avengers Disassembled (though Hickman eventually brought me back in).
Remender hasn’t been as good since he told readers to drink Hobo piss. It’s like his “Tiger Woods driving into the tree” moment.
According to Bleeding Cool the Remender era of Uncanny Avengers has ended.
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2015/06/29/uncanny-avengers-relaunches-with-gerry-duggan-and-ryan-stegman-marveloctober/
House of M is more of a start than an ending. Sure, it starts a story that’s a bad idea which inevitably closes off story opportunity rather than opening them up, but they got 7 years out of it. Plus, the X – line just before that definitely hadn’t had an end point – Claremont’s final run on Uncanny ended with the HoM tie-in, Whedon’s Astonishing was mid-run, and Milligan was still ongoing on adjectiveless. AvX is much more of a concluding point.
More generally for me, the end of Apocalypse: The 12 is where it stops feeling like the X-Men I was used to. Not that the story in any way turned out how it should have, but that (and search for Cyclops as an epilogue) was what I regard as the ultimate end of the real Apocalypse, and the send-off for Jean and Cyclops having been kind of forced back into action for one last hurrah. And Cable’s mission was done. And Wolverine got his Adamantium back.
Wow, you whiners are so proud of yourselves for the comics you’re not reading.
Not to be The Guy who busts in with self-promotion, but the way evolution works in the Marvel Universe is something I’ve actually been fascinated with for decades, and I’ve written about it before:
http://whenwillthehurtingstop.blogspot.com/2012/02/descent-of-man-longtime-readers-and.html
Jaime, yeah it does get a little “Dad hasn’t like the X-Men since 2000” in here sometimes…..
There was a House To Astonish podcast many moons ago where the joke was that the old truism “Every comic is someone’s first” has now been replaced by the observation that every comic is now someone’s last.
And that is both a funny joke and a sad truth.
Given that, and given that the ongoing serial is winding down, or wound down, deliberately or not, it’s best to figure just where this ongoing “story” terminates in a way that is most satisfying for us readers.
Promoters talk about an issue as a “jumping on point” as if the contemporary premise is that some comics cannot be “someone’s first” without turning someone off.
So this turn on it is brilliant. “jumping off points”
I’d like to think that there are a couple of scenarios for Spider-Man to have a happy ending.
I think Fatal Attractions or Apocalypse: The Twelve are both good endings.
and we move on to dedicate our fun time to stuff that interests us more, by and large.
you know I don’t think the Hulk gets a happy ending. That seems too bad.
“it’s best to figure just where this ongoing “story” terminates in a way that is most satisfying for us readers.”
You’re (allegedly) an adult. If you want to stop reading, stop reading (and stop whining).
And stop whining about the people who are whining…
Wow, you whiners are so proud of yourselves for the comics you’re not reading.
You’re (allegedly) an adult. If you want to stop reading, stop reading (and stop whining).
Aaaand… Jaime’s being a dick again. What’s new?
We also had those “Marvel: The End” series, some of which were very good and some of which weren’t. The Hulk story that inspired the whole thing worked very well — and definitely wasn’t a happy ending — as did the equally grim Punisher: The End by Ennis. A lot of them were just “distant future” stories without any real attempt to sum up the themes of what went before, though.
And I think that’s the key: a good “last story” probably can’t tie up decades of dangling plots, but it should achieve some kind of thematic closure or feel like a final statement. With Spider-Man, I’m not sure what that would be. Is his story about taking on responsibility and earning a reward, or is it about the idea that living up to one’s responsibilities has to be done without any reward?
And then there are characters like the Fantastic Four, where I’m not sure what would work as a satisfying final story. Unsurprisingly, most of Marvel’s attempts at a “last” FF story have been of the “and the adventure continues” sort, whether that means handing off to the next generation or just some sort of “eternal exploration” thing where they all fly off happily into space or something.
Hickman, for what it’s worth, is pretty clearly a huge fan of the Alex Ross/Jim Krueger Earth X stuff, or at least he keeps bringing in elements from it in a lot of his work. The Hydra creature from that series turned up in Secret Warriors, for example, and the whole “Terrigenated population” thing is straight from Earth X. He’s also used the “Earth is a Celestial egg” and a variant of “Franklin Richards usurps Galactus’s role.” And Secret Wars is, of course, a lot like Earth/Universe/Paradise X’s use of all the alternate reality characters.
Okay. So “Fatal Attractions” is probably the best Jumping Off Point for Magneto.
“Apocalypse: the Twelve” is possibly the best Jumping Off Point for Cable and the X-Men.
Which is the best Jumping Off Point for X-Force and X-Factor?
I like this game. We need to think of more characters and franchises to do it with.