We’re now three quarters of the way through September, and once again I’m going to split the reviews into two.  I didn’t actually pick up that many DCU titles from week three, but there’s a veritable ton of X-books, and they include the big events in Schism.  So we’ll cover the X-books today, and tomorrow I’ll come back to Batman, Blue Beetle and Wonder Woman, along with Jay Faerber’s Near Death and the relaunch of Ultimate X-Men (which isn’t part of the line proper, and besides, it helps balance out the posts).

Fear Itself: Uncanny X-Force #3 – There’s a certain degree of event pile-up going on with the X-books right now.  This week features two “Schism” books as well as two Fear Itself tie-ins, which doesn’t exactly seem like the best way to sell either story as a big deal.

X-Force is one of the books that got to duck the crossover, so its tie-in has been shunted into this  three-issue miniseries by Rob Williams and Simone Bianchi.  As we’ve come to expect, it’s way off on the margins of the story proper.  The villain here, Jonathan Standish, isn’t directly connected with the Serpent at all.  Instead, he’s an apocalyptic evangelical Christian who’s convinced that the end times are upon us, what with everything that’s going on in the other Fear Itself stories.  Specifically, he’s convinced that the Serpent’s henchmen are there to gather souls for Satan, and so he’s trying to “save” as many souls as he can by hurrying people on to the afterlife whether they like it or not.

That’s a nice enough idea for a villain in this sort of story, and from there the series basically becomes a case of X-Force chasing around Standish’s henchmen in an attempt to hunt him down, all leading to an overwrought climax in which Standish heads to New York with a homemad psychic bomb in an attempt to kill everyone within a 25 mile radius.

Actually, this final issue does have a glimmer of a point beyond that.  Standish’s argument is based in part on the old standby that superheroes cause more trouble than they solve; there are no good guys, just a bunch of people fighting one another.  That’s a stock motivation for Marvel Universe villains, but Williams seems to be trying to play it off against X-Force’s position as the black ops team.  The story even seems to hint that on a metatextual level Standish is clearly right; the ordinary people of the Marvel Universe really do exist as just a backdrop for chaos.  Without superheroes, he says, “we could’ve told our own stories.”

Which is kind of a nice idea, but it’s not really developed much further than that.  Instead, we get an awful lot of X-Force trying to stop Standish’s bomb from going off, in a rather contrived action set-piece where everyone seems to assume that the bomb will go off if it’s hit too hard, even though it’s not an explosive, and everything we see kind of suggests that the thing is pretty much invulnerable.  If you were feeling charitable, you could read this as an illustration of the sort of thing Standish is complaining about, but even then it’s a bit awkward.

On the other hand, we’ve had lovely art from Simone Bianchi in this series – there’s a real focus on storytelling that wasn’t always apparent in his earlier work, and it makes his art so much stronger.  And the final panel is a nice, quirky little anticlimax, which I liked for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on.  As crossover tie-ins go, this has been solid enough, but it’s nothing to go out of your way for.

Generation Hope #11 – For a change, Marvel scheduling has got it right, by shipping this issue in the same week as Schism #4.  That issue, which I’ll come to below, sees Cyclops and Wolverine finally come to have the big argument; this issue has much the same events from the perspective of Hope and her team, deciding whether they’re going to stick around to fight alongside Cyclops.

An odd thing about this week’s stories is that so far, this schism pretty much consists of Wolverine versus everyone else.  Aside from Laurie, everyone wants to stay and fight – but this story mirrors the main schism with Laurie and Hope.  The difference is that, as a result, this issue also brings out the running subplot about just how much influence Hope has over her team (and how much she realises it).  This is the closest we’ve come to Hope explicitly and deliberately overruling someone’s will, which begs the question of where the team dynamic goes from here.  And for the first time, the other kids on the island show up to query why the Generation Hope cast never interact with them.  There’s something Not Quite Right about Hope’s role in the group, and it’s nice to see that still being developed, as the wider crisis brings it to a head.  While it’s undoubtedly a close part of the crossover, this is first and foremost an issue about developing the intra-group storylines.

Conventionally, Scott’s “stand and fight” approach ought to be the more sympathetic and heroic-looking one – there are some unusual reasons why that might be different here, which I’ll come to later when I talk about Schism.  At any rate, this story seems to be going out of its way to avoid falling into the one-sidedness that marred Civil War.  The whole thing seems to be presented so as to maximise our sympathy for Laurie.  It’s not Hope, but Kenji, who puts forward an argument for the other side.  Admittedly, there’s a two-page monologue from Pixie near the end, about the seriousness of the decision, which doesn’t really work – granted that she’s meant to be on painkillers, she comes across as weirdly spacey in a way that undercuts the scene.

But overall, it’s a strong character issue that dovetails the crossover skilfully into its ongoing storylines, to their mutual benefit.

Uncanny X-Men #543 – Meanwhile, over in Fear Itself, it turns out that the X-Men’s tie-in has some lasting effects for the title after all.  This is the climax of the arc (and I’ll probably come back to it in another post), and it turns out that the idea of Colossus as the new Juggernaut is going to stick.  Quite where that leaves Cain Marko after the crossover is over, I’ve no idea, but that’s a potentially interesting story in itself – particularly since this issue goes to some lengths to stress that being the Juggernaut doesn’t just ramp up your power levels, it changes the way you see the world, and not for the better.

The Juggernaut, whoever they may be, ends up convinced of the glory of destruction, and struggles to remember why they ever thought differently.  That doesn’t mean that Peter turns into a raging lunatic or anything; he’s still recognisably the same person, but one whose attitudes have been forcibly shifted in a way he no longer quite understands.

I like this idea.  Quite aside from the fact that a full-scale story arc in one of the core titles ought to have consequences, it’s nicely played as a tragic sacrifice of a part of Peter’s soul, and it sets up a new direction for the character.  Frankly, Peter has been spinning his wheels ever since he was brought back from the dead in the service of nostalgia.  He became one of a number of characters (like Iceman and Gambit) who hang around on the fringes of the cast, not because the writers had anything to do with them, but because their presence legitimised the book as an X-Men comic.  And that’s fine up to a point – the big guns in the Avengers usually serve a similar function – but if he’s to be anything more than that, Peter really did need a fresh idea and a genuinely new direction.

The epilogue scene is also interesting, with Scott calling Sadie on having considered the Juggernaut’s offer at all, and pretty much threatening to kill her if she crosses the X-Men again.  This is Scott as outright political radical; having alienated pretty much the entire US government, he’s now burning bridges with the one official he actually got on with, and presumably this plays into his post-Schism philosophy.

This issue’s leaden, oddly proportioned cover art is not much of an advertisement for the art of Greg Land.  The interior art is significantly better, and the Juggernaut-on-Juggernaut action scenes are really quite good.  Mind you, there’s an Emma/Namor scene where the coquettish overacting is truly excruciating, and the Scott/Sadie sequence at the end is visually flat – there’s a subtle difference between “hard to read” and “blank”, and he doesn’t quite have it.  Nonetheless, the writing is good enough that the scenes still largely work.  Good issue.

Wolverine & The Black Cat: Claws II #3 – But this is terrible.  After a promising first issue, this has turned out to be a truly dreadful miniseries.

Sometimes, when faced with a really bad comic, I try to imagine what the one-line pitch must have been.  Often, if you strip away everything else, you can find a vaguely promising idea which was smothered by bad execution.  But really, there’s nothing here.  What we have here is a sequel to a miniseries not many people remember, attempting to follow up on the flirtation between the two leads from that mini, and then randomly throwing in a trip to Killraven’s world and back.  Nothing of particular interest happens in Killraven’s world, unless you think that the mere appearance of those characters is exciting in itself.

It’s the sort of story where villains actually say things like “You lowly Earth scum will never leave this ship alive!!”  Having the characters acknowledge that they’re talking in cliches does not alter the fact that they’re talking in cliches.  The plot doesn’t even make sense – our heroes return to the present day and stop Arcade from getting the time-travel device in the first place, which would logically seem to invalidate the entire series, but for some reason apparently doesn’t.

There are a couple of nicely drawn panels here and there, but the bottom line is that this is a comic with delusions of charm.  Avoid like the plague.

X-Factor #225 – Picking up from the end of the Point One issue, where the woman living in Madrox’s old family home was murdered at the end.  The local cops find Madrox’s business card on her, and so X-Factor end up going down to investigate.

This series seems to be weirdly drifting in the direction of the supernatural, which isn’t a direction that greatly interests me.  I suppose it does connect in a way with the storyline about Layla bringing Guido back from the dead without a soul, and potentially sets up routes which could be used to resolve that plot if need be… but yeah, we seem to be getting an increasing number of generically evil magic-themed villains, and that’s not really a hook for me.  The cliffhanger falls flat, too – if it wasn’t for the little X logo, I wouldn’t even have recognised that it was the end of the story.

Leonard Kirk is on art for this storyline, and for the most part it’s good work.  There’s some slightly sketchy and inconsistent bits, which make me wonder what the deadlines were like – but when he’s doing emotion, he does it brilliantly.  He’s doing great work here bringing life to a story which doesn’t altogether grab me on its merits.

X-Men #18 – Part three of the FF/Skull the Slayer arc, and it’s indifferent at best.  There’s one idea I like in this book – the alien leader literally bonding with the land that he conquers.  Otherwise, it’s all stock retro-fantasy armies, squabbling with the guest stars, Doom turns out not to have switched sides after all (as if anyone ever really thought something like that would happen outside the FF’s own title), and Lee Forrester is inexplicably being reworked as Shanna the She-Devil in perhaps the least demanded piece of fan service in history.

Even the idea I like is wonkily presented.  Doom delivers a little speech pointing out to the baddies that there’s no point capturing the gateway unless they have a power source to use with it.  Not a problem, says the leader, who then demonstrates his wholly unrelated powers.  It’s a scene that ought to lead into Doom patiently reiterating his original point, or at least rolling his eyes at the stupidity of these people, but no, apparently the power demo scene constitutes an answer to the problem, in some wholly inexplicable fashion.

This one is completist-only territory.

X-Men: Schism #4 – And so, at least, we come to the big fight.  It’s now clear what Jason Aaron’s been doing in terms of set-up over the last few issues.  He needs to raise the global political temperature (however awkwardly) so that the X-Men can’t simply leave and set up another Utopia somewhere else.  He needs to get the X-Men scattered around the world fighting Sentinels so that Cyclops and Wolverine have to defend Utopia helped only by the kids who ought to be non-combatants.  And he needs to set up some sort of conflict between Scott and Logan based on (a) the whole non-combatant issue, and (b) how far you view Utopia as an end in itself.  (And we’ll politely ignore the Atlanteans, other than paying lip service to their existence, because they don’t fit the narrative and it was a bad idea to have them there in the first place.)

Having set up all that, Aaron can then unleash a giant robot to destroy Utopia, and stand well back.  Fortunately, that giant robot can’t fly, so what we get in this issue is basically Scott and Logan arguing about what to do, while an enormous metaphor wades over the horizon towards them.   This could have been corny as hell, but I think it works.  There’s a nice sense of looming menace here, and since the robot is simply set to attack Utopia, not the mutants themselves, the question is finally posed: how far are the X-Men willing to go to defend their pathetic little rock?  Are they going to throw even less experienced kids into the fray, or are they going to simply leave?

As I noted above, normally Cyclops’ “stand and fight” philosophy would come across as the more heroic.  But, even though almost everyone in this book is on Cyclops’ side, I think it manages to avoid that problem.  Perhaps the key point is that while, in theory, we ought to want the X-Men to defend Utopia, in reality it’s a phase of X-Men history which has been largely unsuccessful both creatively and commercially.  Frankly, I doubt there are that many readers out there desperately rooting for the status quo not to change.  There’s more to it than that, though.  Scott is fighting for Utopia as the mutant race’s line in the sand; if they run this time too, what does the future hold for them?  To Logan, Utopia was only ever a means to an end, and when the chips are down, it’s just a bloody rock.

There is, admittedly, a problem with casting Wolverine in this role.  For years, he was the X-Man most associated with leading teenage sidekicks into battle, first with Kitty and latterly with Jubilee.  Now he’s the one arguing that they should be kept out of the field at all costs.  This is a bit awkward, and it’s probably something that somebody should be raising with him.  The simplest explanation would be to link Wolverine’s change of heart to the current storyline in his own title, but nothing has been done in Schism to set that up as a factor.  This is precisely the point where referencing another title would help – it would bolster Wolverine’s motivation in this book and show that the story in the other book had consequences, and frankly, that would make it worth doing even if Aaron didn’t intend them to be related.

But, after three issues of groundwork, we have now clearly defined the argument – is Utopia worth fighting for? – and that’s an argument I’ve wanted to see the characters have for a while now.  I’m happy with this.