One day late, and there’s an awful lot to write about here.  Loads of Avengers vs X-Men tie-ins bloated the line last week, but for a change the publicity centres on a book that’s sitting the crossover out…

Astonishing X-Men #51 – Yes, it’s the much-hyped gay wedding issue.  I now pronounce you man and supporting character.

As I said last time, if you leave aside the promotion and focus on the actual story, this is quite the odd little arc.  It has two distinct threads which, so far, appear to be wholly unrelated to one another.  There’s Northstar proposing to his boyfriend to demonstrate his commitment and set up their wedding in this issue.  And then there’s the mystery villain mind-controlling villains and getting them to attack the heroes.  It’s there to provide the obligatory action, but thus far it’s had no apparent connection to the wedding story – except on the purely mechanical level of having Northstar and Kyle get caught in the crossfire.

Nor does that story actually get resolved this issue – instead, it largely goes on hold for a month in order that we can do the wedding, though Marjorie Liu does take it forward by trying to push the idea that the villain is in fact Karma.  I’m really not sold on this side of the storyline, which thus far boils down to random low-rent villains attacking.  Presumably Karma’s being mind-controlled in turn, so “revealing” her as the villain doesn’t actually take us anywhere; and within the context of this arc, I don’t think Liu has really done enough with Karma to explain why we should care about her involvement anyway.

So much for that.  What about the wedding?  Considering the way that this story has been promoted by Marvel – not to mention the rather odd appearance at the end of the issue of a one-off advertisement for the welcoming nuptial services of the Office of the City Clerk of the City of New York – it is difficult to shake the suspicion that this issue started life as a press release and worked backwards from there.  But then any gay wedding story would have to work hard to escape that aura.  The first time you do anything of this sort, the novelty factor tends to overwhelm everything else.  The main point of the story is simply the fact that it’s being done at all.  You have to work through a phase of “Look, we’re controversially doing THIS!” before it becomes sufficiently familiar to build a wider range of stories around it.

Given that, Liu takes the sensible approach of playing it straight; there are no melodramatic twists, merely a bunch of characters gathering for a wedding and having some gentle conversation beforehand.  There’s no need to play up the gay angle, since by force of novelty, it’s inevitably going to dominate the issue regardless.  Instead, it’s mostly people musing about the value of commitment.  If you’re buying this story for the gay wedding – which is the idea, after all – then a gay wedding going more or less smoothly is what you get, for some fifteen pages.  The only sequence that really plays up the Topical Issue is a two page scene where Warbird politely and respectfully informs Northstar that she doesn’t believe in gay marriage and won’t be attending.  It’s a perfectly okay scene, though it has to be said that Warbird – a relatively new character who’s mainly been treated as a comic relief character’s sidekick and doesn’t even come from this planet – is a very safe choice for the role.  Dramatically, it would have been more interesting to give those opinions to a more established character, but it would also have been more risky in terms of audience response, and (a better reason for not doing it) it would have put more emphasis on a scene that’s really only there as a polite concession to the existence of people who haven’t come round to the idea yet.

Mike Perkins’ relatively photorealistic art is a good fit for this sort of material, though there are a couple of slightly weird facial expressions in there, and by god do his characters’ suits need pressed.  Still, you’ve got to like the attention to detail in moments like Northstar and Kyle lifting off the ground together, which looks at first glance like they’re both flying (it wouldn’t really work if Northstar was just hauling him by the neck), but on closer inspection has Kyle perching on Northstar’s shoes.

As will be obvious, I think there are inherent limitations in what you can do with stories of this sort at this point in what I shall call the Controversy/Publicity Cycle.  Given those limitations, the result is reasonably decent, though you’ve got to suspect that people will look back on it as a charming artefact of the time.

Avengers Academy #32 – “Avengers vs X-Men” really isn’t that overblown as a crossover – after all, X-Men and Astonishing X-Men are sitting it out entirely, as are most of the lower-tier X-books – so it’s something of a surprise to find Avengers Academy embarking on a second tie-in storyline.  Then again, it’s also one of Marvel’s lower-selling titles and, frankly, it could probably use the help.  On the positive side, Christos Gage has once again come up with a story in the margins of the crossover that delivers the promised tie-in but keeps the focus firmly on his cast and the strengths of this series.

The tie-in here is that the Phoenix Five – the five X-Men empowered by the Phoenix Force – are going around destroying military hardware and anti-mutant military hardware in particular.  And so Emma Frost turns up at the Academy to obliterate Juston Seyfert’s Sentinel.  Wisely, however, Gage puts the focus here not on his guest star, but on X-23, who’s in the regular cast.  For those of you who don’t remember Juston Seyfert, he was the lead character of the short-lived Sentinel series from the Tsunami imprint, who found a wrecked Sentinel in the woods and reprogrammed it.  Not unreasonably, X-23 is also wondering quite why a boy and his pet genocide machine are hanging around the compound.

There are plot holes here – even given Juston’s overriding directives, why isn’t the Sentinel at least trying to apprehend mutants?  Did the Academy staff not check its programming, or did they simply not care? – but the basic idea is strong, with X-23 coming round to recognise Juston’s irrational attachment to his Sentinel and empathise with it.  That’s a good X-23 story, it’s a strong use of Juston as well, and while it doesn’t need the crossover to work, it plugs in quite happily.  Everyone wins.  If there’s a criticism to be made here, it’s that some of the regular cast are getting shouldered aside, but the story is well suited to the crossover, so I’ll let that slide, for now at least.

Avengers vs X-Men #6 – So, the Phoenix Five now have the power of the Phoenix and they’re using it to become the Authority…

…

Um…

…

Hold on.  The X-Men are trying to turn Earth into a Utopia.  And obviously, it’s a “power corrupts” deal (it wouldn’t be much of a story if it was just the vastly powerful X-Men demonstrably making the world a better place for the remainder of the running time).  And a brief sequence in which the Scarlet Witch has a vision of the Phoenix destroying the original, Silver Age line-up of the Avengers will only fuel speculation that this whole thing is heading towards some sort of reboot.

But.

Wasn’t the whole point of the Phoenix coming to Earth supposed to be that Cyclops thought it was going to save the mutant race and bring them back from the brink of extinction?  I mean, that was kind of the plot driver for the whole series to date.  That’s why the X-Men were fighting the Avengers over Hope in the first place.  And now they’ve got the Phoenix power.  And are they using it to do anything at all to avert the near-extinction of the mutant race and restart mutant births?  On the face of it, no.  Is any character querying this obvious yet wholly unexplained change of priorities?  Once again, on the face of it, no.

Given the build-up to this point, you can’t gloss over a plot point like that.  But that’s exactly what this issue tries to do.  It’s a sudden swerve to the left that tries to ignore the central premise of the first act, and that just won’t fly.

New Avengers #27 – More flashback.  The red-head girl has a mysterious confrontation with the Phoenix and disappears.  End of flashback.  Hope speaks to Spider-Man and is inspired by the old power/responsibility motto.  That’s basically it.

To be fair, in the context of the crossover as a whole, three issues just to set up the idea that Iron Fist might be quite important is probably about right, and hell, it’s something to do with the New Avengers issues.  Some of the art’s quite nice.  The bit with Spider-Man at the end’s quite good.  But Hope’s written as a cipher, and there’s not a great deal here that I remotely care about.

New Mutants #44 – Meanwhile, outside the crossover, we have a comic that’s just doing its own regular stories!  Those are the Defenders on the cover (two of whom are also in the Avengers, because Marvel teams are very incestuous these days), and they’re evidently our guest stars for this arc, but the emphasis is firmly on the regular cast.  Basically, the Defenders drop by the alert the New Mutants that something reality-warping and very important is about to happen to them.  Hopefully they’ll sort it out for themselves within 72 hours, whatever it turns out to be, or otherwise the big guns from the Defenders will have to pop back and deal with it, which sounds like it might be a bit of a sledgehammer affair.  So probably best if the New Mutants can deal with it themselves.  Whatever it turns out to be.

In what is presumably an example of editors not talking to one another, since it seems most unlikely to be an unadvertised crossover, the issue then regrettably goes on to duplicate the “is Karma taking over people’s minds” storyline from Astonishing X-Men.  Talk to one another, guys!  Fortunately, it then settles into a rather more effectively creepy sequence of time going wrong and weirdly inexplicable things happening, pitched nicely at just the right level of arbitrary oddness.

Oh, and the comedy old woman who lives next door is back, with more stew.  The jokes with her are nicely paced but I can’t help feeling they’re played awfully broad compared to the rest of the book.

Secret Avengers #28 – Back in the backwaters of the crossover, still ploughing through a plot line all the other books long since abandoned, Secret Avengers is doing a story about the Phoenix attacking the Kree home world and facing the outer space team.  Um, before the other outer space story in Just Plain Avengers, where the same team fights the Phoenix again and Noh-Varr turns on the team…

Tasked with doing something off entirely peripheral to the crossover proper, Rick Remender and Renato Guedes deliver something relatively self-contained, with the focus being on an appropriately campy religious leader (“Minister Marvel”) trying to bring the Phoenix to his home world for cultish reasons.  The recently revived Captain Marvel naturally gets to sacrifice himself so that he can inspire Carol Danvers into launching a new solo series.

It’s a reasonable idea in theory, but Guedes’ art isn’t to my taste; as with his work on Wolverine, there’s something a bit flat about it that just misses the mark.  And perhaps more to the point, it’s a story that spends a lot of time telling us how awesome Captain Marvel is rather than putting forward any particularly convincing explanation for why I should agree, other than a fairly standard piece of heroic sacrifice.  I often have this feeling when Captain Marvel gets dusted off; he comes across as a generic hero who happens to be Kree and of whom the creators are inexplicably fond, presumably because they remember his 1970s series where I can only assume he was somehow more interesting.  You know, beyond the fact that “he’s an alien”, I’m not sure I could even tell you what the core concept of the character is.  Perhaps one day a writer will remember to tell me.

Uncanny X-Men #14 – This is bannered as an “Avengers vs X-Men” crossover, and from the look of it the arc as a whole will justify that.  But this issue is in fact the beginning of a second Mr Sinister arc, and doesn’t feature the X-Men at all.  Instead, Mr Sinister and his society of other Mr Sinisters have set up their own London “deep beneath the Earth’s surface”.  This story is about one of the Mr Sinisters who fancies himself a radical journalist, hoping to get an audience with the main Mr Sinister so that he can try to change him – by force, if necessary.  It’s not the villainy and world-conquering that bothers our current hero so much as Sinister’s current conviction that everything is mechanical and pre-ordained, which leaves no place for free will.

As you can imagine, despite the crossover connection (and it does have one, namely the plan that Sinister outlines near the end), this is much more in the vein of Kieron Gillen’s regular issues.  It’s a story about free will and whether rebels are a part of the system whether they like it or not – and how you should deal with the possibility that everything is preordained.  Dustin Weaver produces some beautiful artwork which nails the aesthetic of an all-Sinister version of London.  And the cliffhanger is a lovely idea that brings the whole thing back into the crossover fold while still keeping faith with what’s come before.  It’s a great return to form for the book after a couple of issues of more conventional crossover material, and hopefully the rest of the arc will be able to keep this up despite the demands of the crossover context.

Wolverine #308 – Well, Wolverine breaks his conditioning and defeats Dr Rot and his weird henchmen, which is all pretty much as you’d expect.  However, there’s a twist – one which will hopefully be reflected to some extent in other books, since it’s the sort of thing that ought to be – which is that in healing himself from Rot’s mental interference, Wolverine ends up rebuilding bits of his memory from scratch, and forgetting great chunks of stuff, such as the identity of supporting characters.

Now, we’ve been here before with Wolverine having bits missing from his memory.  It was a long-running storyline for ages back in the 80s and 90s.  But since the gaps in his memory this time are shown to be much more recent, it looks as though we’re not simply hitting the reset button; it seems to be more a set-up for a story about how much of your personality is formed by your experiences and what difference it makes if you no longer remember them.

Paul Pelletier’s art captures the dementedly off kilter bad guys very nicely, and I think this pulls back a bit from last issue’s mistake of making Rot too logical and conventional.  The sense of madness is presented more effectively here, at the same time as pushing a central theme of malleable identity that seems to work for Cullen Bunn’s wider direction.  Overall, a good storyline, which wraps up a stray plot line while setting something up for Bunn’s future stories – which we’ll apparently get to once the Sabretooth thing is out of the way.  (God help us all.)

X-Factor #238 – Basically a set-up issue, with the cast splitting into groups to pursue their own little stories.  Rahne is going looking for her missing demon child with Rictor and Shatterstar in tow.  Madrox wants to go back and investigate the weirdos in Seattle.  And Siryn and Havok are investigating a serial killer whose modus operandi looks awfully like Siryn’s.  Lots of conversation, lots of set-up.  Fortunately, that’s the sort of issue that plays to Peter David’s strengths.  Artist Paul Davidson doesn’t seem quite so comfortable with page after page of people talking in offices, and there are some rather generic backgrounds and expressions that feel a little underwhelming.  Still, he’s better when the story gives him a bit more to work with, as in the opening couple of pages, and his art is never less than okay.