The X-Axis – 1 October 2011
If you’re looking for the podcast, it’s one post below. Meanwhile, once again, I’m going to split the X-books off from the rest of the new launches in an attempt to keep these reviews within some sort of manageable size…
Astonishing X-Men #42 – The final chapter of Christos Gage and Juan Bobillo’s inexplicably scheduled “Meanwhile”, which has been running in alternate issues between chapters of Daniel Way’s wholly unrelated Monster Island arc. For the life of me, I still can’t figure out why somebody thought that was a good idea, particularly in the title whose whole selling point is supposed to be that it has self-contained stories. (You just need to remember only to buy every second issue.)
I’m going to have to try and make time to re-read this arc, to see if the plot actually hangs together when you read it in one go. The final issue kind of gets by on momentum, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it doesn’t entirely make sense, and that plot points from earlier issues have been quietly shoved aside now that they’ve served their function.
Storm, Colossus, Beast and Agent Brand have all been infected by the Brood, which leaves Kitty and Lockheed to try and save the “newborn Brood” who’s relatively nice. You’ll recall that the set-up in earlier issues was that, for ecological reasons, the Brood can’t just be wiped out, even though they’re murderous lunatics. So the plan is to somehow use the anomalously compassionate infant to alter the rest of the species instead… somehow.
And by the end of this issue, I’m really none the wiser about how the X-Men actually achieved anything along those lines. The upshot is that the X-Men fight back against the Brood influence, the Brood agree to go home, the X-Men are cured, and SWORD is left to look after a bunch of Brood embryos who’ll presumably grow up to be raised differently… and do something or other. I get the feeling that what Christos Gage really wanted to do here was write a story about Kitty and Lockheed having to race around a space station protecting a quirky alien baby, and in order to justify all that, he’s ended up constructing an entire storyline with no clear way of resolving it. It’s all a bit unsatisfactory.
Still, there’s some fun running-around-corridors stuff. And the art seems to fit the tone of the story better than in earlier issues, with the Brood infant itself having a nice spindly look to it, teetering somewhere between cute and ugly. I’m still not entirely sold on Bobillo’s Brood, or his odd rendering of the Beast (if you’re going to do a story where the characters are physically transformed, possibly best if they’re vaguely on-model to start with), but the storytelling in this issue is pretty good. It’s a superficially decent issue, but I have a sinking feeling it’s going to collapse on a second read.
New Mutants #31 – More of the book’s “Fear Itself” tie-in arc. Following last issue’s detour to Hell-with-two-L’s, this time the team finally arrive in Hel to lend Dani a hand. Unfortunately, Dani has already been eaten by a monster (which the art last issue kind-of-sort-of managed to convey, but not as clearly as you might want). But luckily, this being a mythological kind of realm, being eaten whole by a monster does not necessarily portend anything worse than a re-enactment of Jonah.
There’s a nicely done flashback to the Serpent’s defeat the first time round, but for the most part this is an extended action issue and it’s hard to avoid a sense that this storyline is being dragged out to make it fill a trade paperback. Do we really need a whole issue just to cover “the team show up, Dani escapes and is reunited with them, and everyone regroups at Hela’s citadel”?
The selling point here is really David LaFuente’s art, which, as previously noted, won’t be to everyone’s taste. Frankly, this issue is a bit hit and miss. The character design for Bonegrinder is inspired; the double-page spread of the Serpent’s first defeat is excellent; but there are also a couple of incredibly sketchy panels that make you wonder how hard the deadlines were pressing. It’s never a good sign when virtual stick figures are talking. I’m also not sold on LaFuente’s habit of doing sequences with no panel divisions at all, or panels laid out in weird, chaotic patterns; a lot of the time it just obscures what’s happening. But on the other hand, his characters are wonderfully expressive, he does the best Warlock in years, and the closing panel is perfect. On the whole, I like what he’s doing here, but I’m sure it will divide people.
Wolverine #16 – So, Jason Aaron has spent a year tearing down his lead character and taking us to a place where Wolverine has thrown in the towel, given up, and gone to sulk in the mountains. Obviously he can’t stay there. The question is, how does Aaron write his way out of the corner? More precisely, does it feel like the start of a new cycle? Or does it just feel like a backtracking anticlimax?
Unfortunately, the answer is emphatically “backtracking anticlimax”, as Aaron resorts to the old standby where Wolverine stumbles upon some villains who need beating (which even he acknowledges to be an unlikely coincidence), and then has a bunch of friends show up to encourage him to come home. Which he does. And that’s basically it.
Which might still have been fine, if there was any sense that Wolverine had been changed by his experiences and was going to come back a changed man, or even a man who was going to try to change. And I think Aaron was going for that, but he doesn’t land it, perhaps because the story is missing any concrete sense of how Wolverine will be different this time round. There’s an odd closing segue to a battle-scarred Wolverine on Utopia which only really makes sense if you recognise it as leading into Schism #1, and perhaps that’s what Aaron had in mind: Wolverine’s experiences in this arc justify the stance he’s taking in that book, explain why it’s coming to a head now, and reconcile any inconsistencies with his behaviour in the past. But if that’s the idea, it’s been downplayed to the point of invisibility in Schism, and it’s only vaguely alluded to here.
There’s some very nice art from Goran Sudzuka, and I like the minimal, stark colouring of the snow-bound scenes at the start. The talking head cameos from other characters are well drawn as well, even if they do veer a bit close to Bendis territory. The weirdos getting children to fight wolves… that hovers on the brink of being too broad, but I think the art pulls it off. There’s good stuff in here, and the story could very well work better in hindsight if later issues can provide the sense of a fresh start which is missing here. The fundamental problem, I think, is that for this story to work, it needed to hit “new day dawning”, and it misses and hits “here we go again”. That can be cured by later issues; let’s hope.
Wolverine: The Best There Is #10 – No sign of this in the December solicitations, I see. Has it been canned with issue #12? It wouldn’t surprise me, since it sells in the same range as Heroes for Hire. Can’t say I’ll miss it, either.
But in fairness, this is one of the book’s better issues. Issue #9 may have been a tiresome exposition-fest, but it does bring Charlie Huston to a nice scene to start this issue. Wolverine and two obscure 70s space-opera characters, Monark and Paradox, are supposed to be going after Contagion, the villain from the first arc. Wolverine’s been infected by something horrible; Monark has to cure him with his nanotech powers; so far so routine. But the bit with Monark’s body starting to dissipate from the effort, and Paradox hugging him as he reboots, really does work; perhaps because it’s one of the moments where the book stops trying to be edgy and just allows some emotion to show through.
And there’s another strong sequence near the end, where the heroes confront Contagion again and Juan Jose Ryp draws a very good slo-mo silent action sequence – again, not one that plays into the book’s gimmick, but just a nice piece of visual storytelling with some dynamic panels. Beneath it all, there’s a half-decent book trying to get out here.
The fact remains, though, that Wolverine: The Best There Is is a title which gets better the further it strays from its remit – which would suggest that the book remains essentially misconceived. And the closing pages don’t really work; I have no clear idea what Contagion is doing to Paradox, and as hooks go, “Come back next month for me to deliver an expository monologue” is not the best. But there’s something to this issue, I’ll give it that.
X-Men Legacy #256 – The Grad Nan Holt storyline is starting to come together. So far, we’ve had two bunches of crazies shooting at one another in vastly counterproductive ways; with this issue, Mike Carey give us the reason why. As you could probably have guessed from Havok and Polaris’ behaviour in the last issue, mind control is involved – but I like the idea that Friendless is just having to nudge the leaders and everyone else kind of goes along for the ride.
On the other hand, this still isn’t Mike Carey’s best work on the title, by any means. Friendless’ origin flashback lays it on with a trowel, and I’m not sure how it fits with the Grad Nan Holt’s supposed status as a slave race prior to their rebellion. The news that there are “close to a billion people” on the space station seems to come entirely out of nowhere; where the hell are they all? The freebooters don’t seem to be here for any reason other than to let Mike Carey write them again before he leaves the book. And it ends with one of those “the only way to save the world is by doing something unbelievably dangerous and contrived” scenes where the strings are all too obvious.
But the freebooters do get some nice dialogue. Magneto and Polaris get some promising scenes where Carey manages to work in some of the subtext from their underdeveloped relationship. Frenzy’s being used well. And artist Steve Kurth is having a good month, even though somebody really needs to tell him that the Shi’ar have feathers, not hair. All in all, it’s okay; but it’s not at the level we know Carey can reach.
The 12th issue of Wolverine : The Best There Is is running a month late, so maybe they’re having a skip month in December to account for it.
IIRC, the scripts for the first 12 issues of Wolverine: The Best There Is were submitted together from the start. So if it is finished, I think it’s mainly a matter of just having told the story it set out to tell.
However, there was some ambiguity in the November solicits for issue #12. In the early X-Men only solicits “preview”, it was clearly labeled as a final issue.
http://ifanboy.com/articles/first-look-november-x-men-solicitations-from-marvel-comics/
In the final, full solicits for the whole Marvel line, it was described as the finale of the opening arc and the bold “Final Issue” was gone.
http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=34012
Make of that what you will.
Wasn’t Wolverine:TBTI announced as a maxiseries to start with?
It’s always been solicited as an ongoing.
They could indeed be taking a month to catch up. But it’s not a book that sells very well (nor does it get especially good reviews), and twelve issues would be a standard point for the current arc to wrap.
“But if that’s the idea, it’s been downplayed to the point of invisibility in Schism, and it’s only vaguely alluded to here.”
Back in the days of footnotes, all that we would’ve seen would be a throwaway line in Schism where someone says “Why is this bugging you so much Logan?”, to which he’d reply “Maybe I’m just seein’ the world diff’rently these days, bub.*”
*For details, see recent issues of Wolverine.
It’s a brave new world out there.
Trying again without the supporting links so that it actually goes through…
IIRC, the scripts for the first 12 issues of Wolverine: The Best There Is were submitted together from the start. So if it is finished, I think it’s mainly a matter of just having told the story it set out to tell.
However, there was some ambiguity in the November solicits for issue #12. In the early, X-Men solicitation “preview”, issue #12 was clearly labeled as a final issue. In the final, full solicits for the whole Marvel line, it was described as the finale of the opening arc and the bold “Final Issue” label was gone.
Make of that what you will.
I’d like to know why Marvel scheduled two Wolverine arcs that are essentially “Wolverine gets his ass pounded flat for a year and a half”. And why they were both nasty, terrible, and repellent.
Marvel has had so much trouble coordinating things behind the scenes for ages now. 2 long, similar themed Wolverine stories happening at the same time? Not that surprising.
True, this may not be Carey’s best story, but I will miss him on Legacy. I wonder if they will change the title once he leaves?
I wouldn’t mind if WTBTI was canceled. One less Wolverine title wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Also, Astonishing is pretty much the X-men Unlimited of this decade…Marvel really needs to trim the X-line down. Focus on quality, not quantity…but I doubt that’ll happen.
When folks noticed that WTBTI was missing from the solicits, I noticed a few people saying on Twitter that it was always meant to be a 12-issue series. If that was the case, they kept it pretty quiet.
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Poor Havok and Polaris. They must be the weakest-willed ninnies in comics history, since the two of them are constantly being mind-controlled by some baddie or another.
Had Chuck Austen been a good enough writer to understand that he was writing Lorna as a psychotic loon back when he was “writing” the X-Men, he’d have made it a plot point that the psychic toll of constantly having her mind taken over was what was behind her bizarre behavior. But being able to recognize that he was writing Lorna wildly out-of-character would have been asking a bit too much of poor Chuck – he was just writing her as one of the three female types he understands to exist – mother, whore or shrew.
But really, I’d like to issue a challenge to all future writers at Marvel – let’s see if you can go, I don’t know, 10 or 20 years without having poor Alex Summers and Lorna Dane get their minds taken over, okay? I like those crazy kids and I’m getting kind of tired of it.
Now, getting back to my untimely kicking around of poor Chuck Austen (even though he’s been gone for half a dozen years, it really doesn’t get old) can someone please ret-con away the whole “Polaris is Magneto’s daughter” BS? That was another nugget of idiocy Austen contributed to the mythos for no clear purpose, so someone please make it go away. Or at least do something interesting with it? You know, make it amount to something besides Polaris and Magneto having to refer to each other as “Father” and “Daughter” every time they see each other now?
Agreed on all fronts to that! The only light at the end of this tunnel is that Havok & Polaris will be back on X-Factor where they belong.
“can someone please ret-con away the whole “Polaris is Magneto’s daughter” BS? That was another nugget of idiocy Austen contributed to the mythos for no clear purpose”
I thought Morrison did that. Inadvertently. In New X-Men #132. “Dad, oh my dad!” Crap research on Morrison’s part.
Isn’t that what they have editors for?
Actually I think Havok being mind-controlled so easily isn’t as out-of-character as one might think. Keep in mind that a plot point for the character for years is “Havok feels ‘inferior’ to his older brother.” Even when we led the New Starjammers (in some of the three or four miniseries he starred in), that ol’ standby came up . Someone dealing with that type of insecurity tends to be easily sucumbed to outside influence (that is how a lot of mind control works in comics doesn’t it. Playing on doubts and uncertainty.) Not to mention that Havok didn’t exactly “win” many of those battles either. I’m sure that doesn’t help his state of mind.
@ The original Matt – Very true. Mike Marts was the editor and he was terrible. Not just for the Polaris thing either. He let a number of glaring mistakes/inconsistencies slip through while he was editing the X-Men books.
The art on New Mutants has been convoluted at best. Yeah, the expressions are stylised and good, but hard on the narrative is certainly hard on the eye, I agree.
I was thinking the potential for Dani to walk away as a full-fledged Valkyrie again, outta this Fear Itself tie in, was a good thing to watch out for, but realised they screwed that up in the Dark Reign, and it’s not going to happen, so I kinda want it to be done with so we can move on to good business.
I think the latest round of Polaris is Magneto’s daughter started before either Morrison or Austen were on the books. Wasn’t it in one of those Magneto mini-series in the late 90’s where he was ruling Genosha?
@ errant
I think they played around with that, but it was never established. I don’t think Morrison ever intended it to be something major, he just used her in one appearance since he liked to throw in 60s X-men silver age references…well, the ones he liked, anyway. And you could always fan wank away that Lorna was crazy delusional in the issue he wrote, since she had just emerged from the rubble in the Genosha (which was what, a year and a half after Genosha was destroyed, our time?).
It was Austin who took that and ran away with it…and wrote a really bad version of Lorna. I get what he was trying to do, but he just isn’t good enough of a writer to do that, and as somebody else said, when it comes to women, they are usually mother, whore, or shrew…
“I don’t think Morrison ever intended it to be something major”
Neither did I, which is why I attribute it to poor/no research on his part. I believe Morrison was under the impression that Lorna actually WAS Magneto’s daughter and therefore didn’t give her “Dad” dialogue a moment’s thought.
Leaving Polaris aside, he had Feral turn up as a member of X-Corporation when the last anyone saw of the character, she’d sliced Siryn’s throat. Yet there she was alongside her sister and Warpath with no explanation given as to when/how/why she ended up back with the good guys. Likely because Morrison was oblivious to any of this.
And when it came to the introduction of Damien Wayne in his Batman run, Morrison said the following:
“I didn’t actually read [Son of the Demon] before I started writing this. I messed up a lot of details, like Batman wasn’t drugged when he was having sex with Talia and it didn’t take place in the desert. I was relying on shaky memories.”
Par for the course for Morrions. I like his work generally, but he’s a lazy researcher (although his editors should shoulder the blame in these instances).
Whoops, that’s “Morrison” not “Morrions.”
Brian Woods is rumored to be working on a Wolverine comic (due to a poster with claw marks and his name). So perhaps the plan is for him to take over Wolverine: The Best There Is after Huston?
Hey Paul, you’re famous!
http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=2734283773701136760&postID=5481656862418957441
I’m really late to this conversation and nobody’s gonna see this comment, but-
I didn’t get the impression Morrison meant to suggest that Lorna was really Magneto’s daughter, just that she was kind of nuts following the massacre on Genosha. And although Austen’s version of Lorna was totally unacceptable, I really like that it led her to the version we saw in Peter Milligan’s X-Men. He kept her crazy, and it was one of the only things that really worked during his X-Men run.
That said, very glad to see the two of them returning to X-Factor. Sort of can’t believe it.
The most basic saneness in behalf of this is heating the zephyr from the hot ra, the dirt, the occasion can also be convenient atmospheric fronts and more.