The X-Axis – 4 March 2012
Well, this won’t take long, will it? After a veritable flood of X-books last week, this time we’ve got just the one – Astonishing X-Men #47. And since I’m kind of busy this weekend, let’s just do that one and be done with it.
This is the final part of Greg Pak and Mike McKone’s alternate-reality storyline “Exalted”. Just to bring you back up to speed: Cyclops has been kidnapped by the X-Men of a parallel world, along with a bunch of other Exiles-style X-Men counterparts. It turns out that this world was permanently damaged in a final battle between the X-Men and Magneto. In order to keep it going, they have a giant plot device – sorry, very important machine – which powers itself by absorbing the energy of mutants. In other words, to keep the world going, they have to keep chucking mutants onto the fire. All of the suitable local mutants having nobly sacrificed themselves already, they’ve started importing from parallel worlds. Because, after all, the X-Men are, in every world, heroes, and will therefore be thrilled at the opportunity to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.
McKone’s art on this storyline is lovely. He’s always a solid traditional superhero artist, but here he’s also contributing some nicely-judged redesigns of the X-Men, all firmly recognisable (frankly, more than you can say for some artists drawing the real versions) but selling the differences without hammering it too much. The schoolboy version of Nightcrawler is a particularly nice one, but there are plenty of good throwaways among the flashbacks setting up the world.
A challenge for writers on the secondary X-Men titles is to figure out what you can actually do with something like Schism when the real storyline is being driven elsewhere, in Uncanny and Wolverine and the X-Men. In this storyline, Greg Pak is taking the oblique approach, by doing a story that tries to address the idea that all the variant X-Men ultimately have something in common, and that this puts the schism with Wolverine’s team into perspective.
My initial reaction on reading this issue was that Pak had tied it all together pretty neatly. The climax is that Cyclops simply refuses to lay down his life for somebody else’s world – becoming the first Cyclops ever to do so, and leaving everyone else baffled at how any version of Cyclops could have gone so far off model as ours. This leads the bad guys to conclude that they’ve stumbled upon a diseased world which can usefully be sacrificed to cure their planet once and for all, and of course the big fight ensues. There’s a really strong central idea in there, about testing whether “our” Cyclops has drifted so far from his original character that he’s become unrecognisable. On that level, it’s one of the strongest Cyclops stories we’ve had in quite a while.
But that said, the more I think about this story, the more I find that it doesn’t quite hold together. There’s a cop-out at the end, where (having defeated the bad guys) Cyclops does offer to stay and sacrifice himself to save their world, only to be forcibly sent home before he gets the chance. I’d have preferred to leave it a little ambiguous. More fundamentally, though, the story only really works if you accept that Cyclops’ refusal is genuinely unexpected. But in fact, the only other prisoners we see are equally uncooperative, and Savior’s whole “police state” set-up rather implies that Cyclops is far from the first one to raise strenuous objections. If Savior genuinely thinks that Cyclops will nobly accept his fate, why doesn’t he just explain everything clearly at the outset? None of these are plot problems as such – they’re easily reconciled by saying that Savior’s simply wrong about Cyclops being such an anomaly. But it’s kind of thematically important that Savior should be telling the truth, I think.
Still, considering that it’s a four-issue throwaway arc, it’s an interesting one, and a clever attempt to approach the books’ current direction from an entirely different angle.
Don’t know what it is about McKone but I’ve just never got on with his art. It all seems to stiff to me. Still different strokes. At least his story telling is better than, say, Whilce Portacio.
Does the story explain why — if they’ve got the ability to kidnap people from other realities — the “villains” don’t just escape their dying world and live elsewhere?
Not explicitly, but presumably they either have no empty world to take them to, or they lack the technology to transport that many people. I’m willing to let that slide on the logic that it’s not hard to think of explanations, and it’s covered by the general assertion that these are the only solutions their scientists could find.
Who would have ever thought we’d have Cyclops solo stories that were interesting!I think that this story makes a good companion piece to Magneto: Not a Hero.
Cyclops and Magneto are two characters who appear to have changed a lot over the years, but what these stories show is that the changes are perhaps less dramatic than they appear.
I personally think that Cyclops has changed a lot more than Magento has. Under Claremont Magento was always written as a “grey” character, neither villain nor a hero.
Cyclops was (with the exception of his leaving his first wife) always a boy scout until Morrison’s run. Morrison changed Scott’s personality drastically.
Now we are at the point where Cyclops has ordered the murder of dozens of humans to further his goals and is the ruler of a nation of mutants. He has basically become Magneto.
Does this world have a multiple man? I do not read this series but seems like an easy fix. or a mr immortal?
Magneto? No. More like Nick Fury. Or Wolverine.
More to the point, the story relies on the proposition that kidnapping people from alternate realities and killing them to keep your world alive can be seen as a morally defensible (and even honorable) act. I’m sorry, that doesn’t work in any universe.
Well I wouldn’t agree with the proposition but a considerable number of people think Hiroshima and Nagasaki were defensible because they saved the lives of allied soldiers. By those standards, killing a few hundred mutants to save 6 billion people is angelic.
@Nick – I wouldn’t agree that Morrison changed Scott’s personality drastically or at all, really. Whedon, IMO, did more to change Scott than Morrison. Scott went from “Xavier would know what to do.” in Whedon’s first arc to a fully confident leader by the final arc.
McKone is an underrated costume/character designer. He did some great stuff on TEEN TITANS. What I like is that he updates, tweaks and modernizes without throwing out the old looks completely. Rather, he BUILDS on them and finds things that work.
So he still retains the personality and look of the character, usually just evolving it into a slightly more dynamic or modern.
Something that I think worked against the story was trying to fit it within the context of the Marvel Universe, especially with all the other alternate universe stories we’ve seen.
We know there are worlds where Cyclops is a villain. If they weren’t going to ask for volunteers, why didn’t they concentrate on finding evil Cyclopes to throw into the furnace instead of kidnapping good ones and assuring themselves they’d be okay with it? Did they try using Havoks? What about Vulcans? Heck, what could they possibly need Wolverines for that couldn’t be accomplished by using Sabretooths (Sabreteeth?).
If it was impossible to modify the machine to accept any energy source other than Cyclops’s optic beams which would allow them to kidnap villains instead of heroes (which is a stretch to begin with, as it’s a hell of a coincidence that they had no choice in what energy source to use but, as luck would have it, they ended up needing one that they could mass produce) why not explore the many, many means people have found on Earth-616 to replicate Cyclops’s optic beams? Couldn’t they use Super-Adaptoids? Mimics? Rogues? Further up the thread, alex garcia suggested using Madrox or Mr. Immortal, and while I’m guessing that they needed specific mutant powers to make the machines work, wouldn’t one Rogue, one Cyclops, and one Madrox or Mr. I do the trick?
You gain a million cool points for saying the plural of Cyclops is Cyclopes. And all the talk about this comic makes it sound really awesome – I haven’t read Astonishing for a long time, but I think I’m going to have to buy it now…
I’ve been reading the x-books for about 20 years at this point, and for whatever reason have always held Cyclops to be one of my favorite characters. Morrison’s run was a clear evolution for Scott, but bear in mind that when Morrison took over Scott had recently returned to the X-men after an extended absence, being merged with Apocalypse during the 12 storyline, which opened up the potential for the rift with Jean and his transition into a different role.
Also anyone else fondly remember the BKV Cyclops mini?
Any particular reason why these people didn’t try to get help from the super genius types of other worlds?
That’s a good point, Joseph. If and when they finally decide to retcon Cyclop’s personality back to how it was in the 80’s, they’ll probably use the Apocalypse storyline to justify it.
It’s always struck me as curious that Professor X has essentially been written out of the X-books (if not the Marvel Universe as a whole). I mean, historically he’s been such a seminal character in the X-franchise – created by Stan & Jack, played by Sir Patrick and all that – that it’s odd he’s no longer around. That absence, more than anything, has been more of a game change than even the major changes to Cyclops – which in itself is a reaction/reflection of the previously stated fact.