More catch-up, more new books…

AvX: Versus #5 – Considering that it literally is just a bunch of fight scenes – and you can’t accuse Marvel of false advertising on that one – it’s remarkable that this book has sold as well as it has.  I can only assume that the upcoming anthology A+X is the result of somebody lobbying to keep the book around.  In a way, this makes sense.

Of course, the problem is that AvX: Versus mostly hovers somewhere between tedious and utterly pointless, because writing a remotely interesting story based entirely on a fight scene is not easy, and frankly, pure undiluted action sequences don’t play to the strengths of a lot of these creators.  I’m reminded somewhat of the “Nuff Said” month from a few years back, where creators were asked to do entirely silent issues for a month.  Gimmicky as it was, the limitations should have been an interesting creative challenge.  For the most part, the results showed that the creators were simply defeated by them.  AvX: Versus has had much the same problem.

This issue’s first story – Hawkeye versus Angel, by Matt Fraction and Leinil Francis Yu – is an utter misfire.  It’s not very interesting as a fight scene to start with, but the major problem is that nobody seems to have told Fraction or his editor anything about the Angel’s current status.  Understandably looking for some sort of hook to hang the thing on, Fraction opts for class war.  If you’ve got to come up with some sort of personal friction between these two, that’s not a bad idea.

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Before anyone asks, yes, you’re right – I’ve still yet to get around to reviewing X-Factor, X-Force, Gambit, New Mutants and Age of Apocalypse.  Might get to them during the week, or else I’ll catch up on them when the next issue comes out.  In the meantime, let’s cover the most recent X-books.

And don’t forget it’s a podcast weekend – the latest episode is just one post below.

Astonishing X-Men #53 – Lordy, this storyline is interminable.

Leave aside the high-profile gay wedding from issues #50-51, and this storyline has been built around a mystery: who’s the villain responsible for mind controlling people to attack the X-Men, and why are they doing it?  This was never a particularly interesting mystery, since the X-Men get attacked by people all the time, almost as if it were some sort of genre staple or something.  You need something a bit more.  And the storyline hasn’t had it.

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Continuing our catch-up programme, here’s the other X-Men titles that shipped over the last few weeks…

Astonishing X-Men #52 – With the big publicity event completed, the series gets back to dealing with the main storyline.  Which isn’t necessarily for the best, because the actual story – heroes are attacked by people manipulated by anonymous mind-controller – isn’t actually all that interesting.  This issue shifts the emphasis to Karma and covers events from her perspective.  As you undoubtedly figured out for yourself, she hasn’t really turned evil (and the book clearly doesn’t really expect you to have thought otherwise).

Writer Marjorie Liu’s angle on Karma is that she’s kind of buckling under the pressure and wants out, which both seems to come out of nowhere, considering that Karma hasn’t been much used recently, and also isn’t especially interesting.  There’s some good dialogue in her scenes with Kitty and Logan, but no particularly memorable ideas to underpin it all.  Couple that with a generic villain doing manipulative things that aren’t especially interesting for reasons that aren’t really hinted at, and you’ve got a story that’s almost instantly forgettable.  The art’s perfectly sound, and Gabriel Hernandez Walta’s flashback scenes have some very nice moments, but there’s really nothing much going on here.

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I’ve got several weeks of comics here to work through, so covering them all in one go isn’t really an option.  Let’s start off with the backlog of AvX tie-ins that have come out since last we spoke…

Avengers #28-29 – Brian Bendis has developed an odd approach to crossovers on the Avengers titles.  Instead of trying to continue any ongoing stories, he more or less seems to put everything on hold in favour of a string of one-off stories, either filling out the background, or just… filling the pages, sometimes.  These two issues are certainly written in the margins of the crossover, but they’re also entirely self-contained, with no attempt at any flow between them.  It’s an unusual way for an ongoing series to deal with crossover events.

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