The X-Axis – 20 January 2013
Okay, so let’s take stock… I’ve still got several of last week’s books to do, which I didn’t get around to reviewing during the week. And as for this week’s books, so far I’ve only read the ones that I’m buying digitally. (That leaves X-Men #40 and X-Factor #250 to be picked up later, basically.) Still plenty to cover right now, though…
Age of Apocalypse #11 – Marvel have confirmed that the book is officially being cancelled with the “X-Termination” crossover, and while “cancellation” is a relative concept these days – another run of X-Men? Really? – a quick glance at the sales figures, not to mention the sudden haste with which it’s moving to wrap up its storylines, rather suggests that the book is genuinely being put to sleep.
What we have in this issue is more sudden acceleration towards the climax. All things considered, the pacing has worked out surprisingly well; though things are plainly being brought forward, David Lapham still has enough space here to avoid any feeling that the finale is too shockingly abrupt, and after all, it’s likely that he always had a contingency plan in the event of the book being canned after a year.
One problem he does seem to struggle with a little is finding a way for this story to feel like a resolution for any of the individual members of the X-Terminated, whose individual character arcs were evidently planned to run over a much longer period. But the issue offers a clever way of getting rid of the Shadow King, and a nice sense of the whole thing building to a climax of heroic sacrifice, with an effective cliffhanger that suggests Lapham genuinely may be willing to blow up his whole cast for an appropriately nihilistic “victory.”
All-New X-Men #6 – Cripes, this book doesn’t have a release schedule so much as a bombardment. We’re now into the second arc of the series, though it’s also only the second day – the pacing here only works because the book is shipping so frequently.
Such a rapid schedule also means we get a different artist for the new arc. It’s David Marquez, who’s previously worked on Ultimate Spider-Man. His style is maybe a little heavier on detail than Stuart Immonen’s, maybe a little more conventional in layouts, but it shares a similar cleanness, and he’s good with character emotion – making him a good choice for a book as talky as this one.
The issue barely advances the plot at all; there’s a definite sense that Bendis is concerned as much to re-establish his premise for the benefit of trade readers. So the focus here is on young Jean starting to make friends with Kitty and Storm, and on Scott exploring his new world and having his first fight with Wolverine. Warren gets a brief segment to meet up with his (as ever, disturbingly chipper) modern self, and the others… well, they don’t get a look in, really.
If you’re prepared to overlook the continuity issues about when and how Jean found out she was a telepath, Bendis writes her quite well, and does a good job of repositioning her as a rookie rather than a returned legend. His take on Scott is more questionable; it’s fair enough that at this point Scott’s mainly just going to be reacting in a baffled way to what he’s done, but I don’t really get the sense that any of Scott’s original personality underlies those reactions. Bendis has some good ideas here about putting Scott in the rebel role while casting Wolverine as authority figure, and about Scott losing his authority as leader now that everyone knows how he turned out; but early Scott’s personality is all about brooding guilt and responsibility, and I just don’t buy him reacting to this by going off to be rebellious instead of being overcome by horror at what he’s supposed to have done. Perhaps he would; there’s a case to be made that once Scott is rejected as leader, he’s also freed from the sense of duty that drives him in the early issues, but I don’t think Bendis makes that case very convincingly here.
First X-Men #5 – The final issue of the miniseries, and I’m afraid this one goes firmly in the “let us never speak of this again” file. As a story on its own terms, First X-Men is more or less passable, but the problem is that it doesn’t want to be taken on its own terms. Pretty much everything that happens in this concluding chapter is supposed to get its weight from offering a new explanation for history; the book positively demands to be viewed in the context of X-Men continuity. Yet it doesn’t really work in that context.
The basic idea is that Wolverine’s makeshift team of mutants pretty much collapses under a serious challenge, and it all goes horribly wrong – thus explaining why we’ve never heard of these guys again. Most of them wind up dead. But they do at least take most of the anti-mutant government guys with them. And as a result of this fiasco, we’re asked to accept that Xavier is inspired to open his school; Magneto is inspired to start the Brotherhood; Wolverine is so depressed by his failure that he signs up for Weapon X; and Sabretooth is so traumatised by the death of his new girlfriend that he’s set on the course towards being a bad guy.
And with the arguable exception of Magneto realising that the time has come to set up a mutant team, none of that works. Even if you want to shoehorn it into continuity for literal purposes, it doesn’t fit any of the characters’ overall arcs. Xavier already has a story where he’s inspired to use his powers for good: it’s the one where he meets Amahl Farouk and learns about evil mutants. Wolverine’s never previously been shown as having signed up voluntarily for Weapon X, and I’m pretty sure the titular Barry Windsor-Smith story expressly shows that he didn’t (in the very scene which this story appears to be echoing). And a ton of stories have shown Sabretooth as a vicious murderer long before we get to this point.
The “everything you know is wrong” idea can work if the new version of history actually makes sense and seems to be more interesting, but this just doesn’t – it’s a story that isn’t especially interesting in its own right and it doesn’t appear to work as a contribution to wider continuity either. The art is often quite good in a histrionic way, though even there it feels rushed at times. On the whole, though, the series is a dud.
Savage Wolverine #1 – Ah, the Frank Cho book.
It’s better than I feared. Some of what Cho is trying to do here – quite a lot of it, in fact – works. Some of it doesn’t quite land. And some of it is just tedious fan service, though that’s less prominent than you might imagine.
The high concept is set up very well. There’s an island in the Savage Land which has some sort of technology-dampening field on it. A SHIELD survey group, which has Shanna the She-Devil aboard for no apparent reason other than that the story simply must have a girl in a leopardskin bikini, approaches the island and promptly drops out of the sky. Everyone is stuck there and the rest of the group have all been killed off apart from Shanna. Building a raft doesn’t work: you get attacked by sea creatures. So to get off you’ve got to find the dampening thingy and shut it down. Then one day Wolverine also lands on the island, and has no idea how he got there. They team up.
That’s a perfectly fine premise, depending on how long Cho actually wants to run with this. And there’s plenty here to remind us that Cho’s a good artist who doesn’t get by solely on T&A – the panel of a confused Wolverine waking up on the ground is beautifully done, and there are some nicely physical actions scenes too. Visually, it’s very good.
Still, there’s no getting away from the fact that your reaction to this book will be unavoidably informed by your tolerance for gratuitous T&A; we all know why Frank Cho is drawing a Shanna the She-Devil story, and it’s not because anyone thinks she’s an interesting character with a devoted fan base. A fascinating editorial at the back – not credited to Cho, it should be said – offers the intriguing suggestion that the story’s strength lies in taking stock pulp elements and putting a twist on them: “the damsel isn’t as in distress as you thought she’d be; the natives aren’t as clueless as they’re usually portrayed.”
They might have a point about the natives, but this is a bizarre reading of Shanna’s role. Now, I’ve not got much time for her as a character. She’s a thinly veiled knock-off of Sheena The Jungle Queen who had a short-lived book in the 1970s and has subsequently stuck around in the unrewarding role of “person to whom Ka-Zar can deliver expository dialogue”. But she’s not a damsel in distress. She’s the female counterpart of Tarzan – a “jungle girl”, as they’re often called. So there ought to be nothing remotely surprising about the fact that she can look after herself in a jungle. And there isn’t.
And to be fair, the story itself doesn’t really seem to think that there is, so the editors may be misreading Cho’s intentions here. Still, there’s something about Cho’s whole approach to the character (and the approach of the editors who commissioned him) that makes me deeply uncomfortable. Sure, the combination of “strong female character” and “unrelenting fan service” is deeply embedded in the whole jungle girl archetype – but that’s why I find the whole genre vaguely creepy and unpleasant in a way that the story plainly doesn’t intend.
Wolverine and the X-Men #23 – Final part of the “Murder Circus” arc, a storyline which is doubtless going to divide readers according to their level of tolerance for absurdity. Wolverine and the X-Men pushes that boundary more than most X-Men books, and that’s fine; it sets its baseline for weirdness at “really quite high” and has fun from there. That’s why the Hellfire kids largely work for me in this book in a way that they didn’t in Schism; they were jarringly out of line in a regular X-Men crossover, but they’re pretty much within the usual range of insanity in this book.
Still… Frankenstein running a circus full of zombie clowns. There’s something about that that doesn’t quite click for me even within this book, and I can’t entirely figure out why. I think it may be that the story is trying to revel in their absurdity while also trying to make them a vaguely creepy threat, and it doesn’t quite manage to achieve both.
Or maybe I just don’t like circus stories. Never have, really. Could just be that.
There are some plot points here of wider importance – more of Idie’s corruption (which isn’t quite working for me, since it’s hard to buy a character change being motivated by quite such absurd plot elements), the introduction of an unlikely ultimate villain who makes a degree of sense given all those Bamfs that have been around since issue #1, and some serious attempt to give Max a personality of his own beyond just being another of the Hellfire kids. That last one actually does work for me; the other two Hellfire boys do need to be a bit more distinct, and by their standards this story is almost sensible. Mind you, I wonder whether two issues wouldn’t have done to hit the points here; three issues of circus-based mind-control seems a bit much.
Or, like I say, maybe it’s just that I don’t like circuses.
Totally agree on the circus story. For me, Wolverine & the X-men has been fantastic at times, and at others just okay, but I hated this arc. It’s not that it’s any more absurd than the others, so maybe it is just the circus thing.
Though I liked this last issue more than the first two. I think it’s because in the first two, almost none of the regulars do anything. In a book with a cast as big as this, that sticks out.
Or maybe it’s just that I was relieved that the arc is over.
The best ever treatment that Shanna the She Devil (and Ka-Zar, for that matter) has received was in the Bruce Jones/Brent Anderson Ka-Zar series from the early 80s. Jones & Anderson portrayed both characters as complex and interesting people with one of the most mature & adult relationships seen in comics up to that time.
But as far as I know, for some baffling reason Marvel has never bothered to collect that series. I guess they don’t automatically hear cash registers when they think “Ka-Zar collection” but if they ever wanted to revive interest in the character, that would be an excellent place to start. That series read like Moonlighting three or four years before Moonlighting debuted, with the added benefit of dinosaurs and Hell-themed amusement parks.
I think I’m off of Wolverine and the X-Men. I’ve been enjoying it, but not enough to justify $8 a month on it. More power to Aaron for tackling the Draco head on, though. That takes guts.
In other news, Scott Snyder’s Batman has devolved into straight up torture porn. This issue was made even worse by the fact that Bruce Timm was in line in front of me at the comic shop, so I was reading it with visions of Batman the Animated Series fresh in my head.
Even X-Factor can have off arcs. When Wolverine and the X-Men has TWO bad arcs in a row…THEN we should start to worry! Glad I never picked up “First X-Men.” I don’t mind “Age of Apocalypse” getting cancelled so much, as it always seemed like a secretly limited series with ongoing numbering, but I’m annoyed “X-Treme X-Men” v2 is getting the axe as well. It’s just getting good! And I like it far more than what X-Men: Legacy has become. I no longer pick up that title.
“tackling the Draco head on”
Oh, that’s a shame. I always had dreams of a story where that was raised and somebody says “Hahaha, no. Where’d you get that idea? Oh a demon told you? Wow. Oh and it was backed up by a mercenary terrorist … Hey I represent the prince in Nigeria, and he needs to get a large volume of money out of the country …”
I enjoyed Shanna in the Waid/Kubert brief Ka-Zar series in the (late?) 90s.
Although the Bendis book was okay this week, I don’t think any of these week’s X-books were as entertaining as Daredevil or Hickman’s Avengers book.
Paul, are you going to be getting/reviewing that issue of (Adjective) Spider-Man where Superior Spidey meets/fights the X-Men?
For some reason, Circus stories became the fodder of filler issues. Both New Mutants and Generation X had fill in circus stories. Okay, those are the only two I can name off the top of my head, but I have a feeling there are more. I guess my point is I have no point.
@Wire: The problem these days would be Bruce Jones as much as Ka-Zar. He’s not well-loved by readers after his initially promising Hulk turned out to be a riddle wrapped around an enigma wrapped around a missing core plot, and the miserable ruin he made of Greg Rucka’s Checkmate title soon afterwards seems to have sealed his reputation among superhero fans.
He’s a bit like Paul Jenkins that way, a writer who’s done excellent character work on one or two series only to inexplicably become much, much worse as a writer on everything afterwards.
@Max: There’s a whole Marvel subgenre of “the Circus of Crime is touring the area” filler stories. J.M. DeMatteis and Steve Gerber got decent material out of it in Ghost Rider and Howard the Duck, but the rest of the time it’s awful. All of these probably stem from Stan Lee’s bizarre fixation on circuses.
“Spider-Man where Superior Spidey meets/fights the X-Men?”
I think I saw that in a preview somewhere. Spidey beating the crap out of Wolverine is entertaining. But the whole bit where he talks the psychic out of looking inside his head is the kind of writing that really gets under my skin. The whole “make everyone else really stupid to make the central character seem smart” thing (I’m sure TV Tropes has some clever term for it, it’s commonplace enough). I mean is being sued by masked guy who won’t reveal his identity actually any kind of threat? Especially since Wolverine would recognise him in an instant anyway if he happened to pass Parker on the street. But no, in a world that was invaded by shape shifters a few days ago Marvel time, the cagey guy acting out of character can totally talk members of the most possessed sueprteam in the world into taking his increasingly agitated word for it that he’s legit.
The reveal at the end of WatXM looks like it’s going to do something that always bothers me in genre fiction: presenting the reader with something ridiculous, assuring the reader that it’s not ridiculous and they should accept it, and then later coming back and saying “how could you accept that? It’s so ridiculous?” In other words, if you tell us the X-Men’s home is infested with semi-intelligent, mischievous gremlins but the intelligent, experienced adventurers aren’t particularly concerened about it, it has to actually be nothing to be concerned about. You can’t say “that thing that any rational human being would have been alarmed by but the X-Men just took in stride for no reason we ever explained aside from the fact that it was clearly intended as just background wackiness? Yeah, it wasn’t just background wackiness and they totally should have been alarmed. But they’re still smart.”
I’ve liked Shanna in a few things, but the problem is that you never know which Shanna you’re going to get. Sometimes she’s a female Tarzan, sometimes she’s the Jane to Ka-Zar’s Tarzan; sometimes she’s easygoing and friendly, sometimes she’s basically a Klingon in a fur bikini; sometimes she’s Ka-Zar’s clingy soulmate, sometimes she’s a sullen loner; sometimes she’s a blonde, sometimes she’s a redhead. Half the time it comes across like the writer didn’t know she was a pre-existing character and the only reason there’s any correlation at all between her appearances is that the name “Shanna the She-Devil” pretty much screams “Jungle Girl.”
“presenting the reader with something ridiculous, assuring the reader that it’s not ridiculous and they should accept it, and then later coming back and saying “how could you accept that? It’s so ridiculous?””
Ah yes, another thing I loathe in writing, breaking your own “world” rules. It ruins all suspension of disbelief. And for a title that relies on so many levels of disbelief suspension, they really can’t risk bringing their whole house of cards down. Next thing people will be wondering why a psychopath is running a school at all*, and whether we really should accept that people can have super powers, and those weird drawings with all the writing in circles near their faces, how unrealistic is that? And what do you mean 50th Street, New York City, that’s just a made-up city for the sitcoms, like 555 phone numbers. This whole thing’s a sham!
*yes, all headmasters are, I know.
“presenting the reader with something ridiculous, assuring the reader that it’s not ridiculous and they should accept it, and then later coming back and saying “how could you accept that? It’s so ridiculous?””
My favorite: “Xorn has a star for a head”
I thought Morrison actually managed to pull that one off, since the clues were laid that hint we shouldn’t just accept it, but you have to be careful not to return to that well too often.
So how exactly were FIRST X-MEN and “Sabretooth Reborn” published within just a couple months of each other? I know the Loeb story was at least presented in terms of possibly misdirection, but if we accept FIRST at face value the whole premise of the first story is obviously a lie. But if we just assume that neither story actually happened then it works just fine.
@Tim: Well, how exactly did ‘Sabretooth Reborn’ get published, period?
@ZZZ: Fair point about the Bamfs, but we’ll see where it goes.
Bruce Jones’ Ka-Zar was a very nice series, with some good Brent Anderson art. Which at the end crashed and burned spectacularily.
Shanna is a hard character to do, as she basically is even more a copy of a copy then Ka-Zar. So it is no wonder she is written all over the place.
But I don’t have any problem with the “Jungle Girl” topic, I like this kind of Pulp ridiculousness, I always liked Cho, so I guess this could be fun. Of course only if Cho isn’t replaced on the art by #3, as it is the rule nowadays.
Also detest Circus stories though. They should have been retired after 1950 or so.
Maybe there should be a Cable story where the team raids a circus, shoots up all the freaks in face paint, and it really is just a circus. Then the president gives Cable a medal and everyone cheers him.
I’m a little confused with what people are considering continuity problems with All-New X-Men. Most of the criticims seems to be focused on Jean’s telepathy and Scott and Jean’s relationship. We all know Xavier shut Jean’s telepathy down after her little friend got hit by a car. As I recall, he did it with a series of psychic circuit breakers. He did the same thing in the the Dark Phoenix saga, and the circuit breakers broke afer the trauma of seeing Scott cut down. Couldn’t the same thing have happened here? Blue Hank shows up, says the future is awful, and Scott’s a terrorist? I think that’s pretty traumatic. Bendis probably could have written it a bit better, but I stil think it’s more or less passable. Bendis also knew Scott and Jean weren’t dating, because Scott wrote the letter at the end of issue 1. A few issues later, Jean says she is dead and/or dating a terrorist. I took that to mean that she is now aware of the future, and will be involved off and on with Scott for the rest of her life. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are dating now. Really, I think the only thing Bendis blew was Warren’s lack of reaction to Scott and Jean being together, but hey, that could have happened off panel. Anway, I have been utterly shocked by the quality of All New X-Men. I was expecting a train wreck, and I got a really pleasant suprise.
The problem isn’t so much that Jean’s telepathy emerges, it’s that she doesn’t seem to have known about it. That implies she’s forgotten her origin story which is entirely about the shock of discovering her powers and her withdrawal from the world afterwards until Xavier comes to help her recover.
Well how old was she in her origin story with the dead bff. Plus Xavier was pretty mind-wipey back then.
Jean was 10 in her origin story (coincidentally, I read the version of it in Bizarre Adventures last night). It’s said that Xavier treats her for years before inviting her to join the X-Men, so I can’t see him mind-wiping her of the original incident.
Oh, I totaly buy her forgetting her origin story. Didn’t that nut make Hank’s parents forget him for a while? He could have easily removed the memory of being inside Annie’s (?) mind, while alowing her to remember the death itself. Besides, if you are setting up pyschic blocks, the blocks are more likely to last if the victim doesn’t know he or she is being blocked. He could even have built in a trap door, so that when her powers had kicked in on his schedule, she remembers Annie. However, since they came back before Xavier intended, she hasn’t remembered Annie yet. Odds are Bendis and his editors didn’t consider any of this, but it’s easy enough to no-prize away.
@Max
On the star for a head thing, Morrison never came back and said “How can you accept that?”
Yes, it was silly. But while Magneto eventually reveals that it was him all along, you never really get the idea that a Marvel character under Morrison *couldn’t* have a star for a head. Heck, that was the same run that had aliens, mutants with super powers, twins fighting to death in the womb, a psychic entity that is reborn after dying, and all the rest.
I’d assume that Morrison did intentionally pick something out there, though. And then he gave the X-Men enough reason to believe Xorn was real. The negative was that it was so out there an idea that it turned some readers off. I thought it was horribly stupid at first. Then I figured it was a sham. Then I thought it was horribly stupid when it was “proven true” with Xorn removing his helmet at the end of the annual (and wondering why it didn’t maim, irradiate, or burn everyone near him when he did so.) But, of course, the helmetless shot was there for a reason, to give the X-Men themselves more evidence that Xorn was real, and to accept him walking around in a sealed containment suit the rest of the time.
On the topic of minor errors in All-Star X-Men, I wish Bendis would at least a vague idea of what time he’s writing the young X-Men as being from. I can easily buy Scott not knowing about smart phones, but bottled water’s been pretty common for decades. I have trouble believing there’s more than a 20 year gap between the young original X-Men and the current versions, so, for me personally at least, if Bendis wants to write the youngsters as being from before the 1990s, it would be nice if he’d at least say so, so we can just grudgingly get over it and stop wondering if the little anachronisms are screw ups or some kind of clues.
@Billy – Right before revealing himself as Magneto (at least until that was retconned), “Xorn” said “A man in an iron prison, a star for a brain? I kept thinking it was too obvious but still you missed it.” It may not have been Morrison’s intent to say that a star-brain was ridiculous – it could well be that in Mossison’s opinion star = magnetism is a natural connection he expected other people to make and he was writing Magneto as saying “I can’t belive you didn’t realize it was me” – but it’s pretty easy to see how that could be taken as “Xorn” saying “how could you have bought such an implausible story?”
Doesn’t Marvel have a 10-15 year sliding scale? At the earliest, the team Bendis brought back would be from 1997, so they’d probably be a bunch of Dawson Creek-watching bubble-gum-pop music loving teens.
And if josh was writing, they could all be Buffy fans, esp jean.
Who’s Josh?
Marvel and DC have a sliding scale, but they’ve never been specific about it. Being vague about it has usually worked to their advantage. Usually, except for maybe Kevin Smith’s Green Arrow and All New X-Men,they try not to draw attention to it.
@ZZZ
I took that as two things.
One, Morrison thought there were enough clues to Xorn being Magneto that people could figure it out. For those readers, it would be a “Yep, you guessed it right!” moment.
Two, Magneto is egotistical and wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders. He’s playing it up as more obvious than it really was. Magneto was careful to put enough “evidence” into an already strange world to make Xorn believable. There was all the work in the Chinese facility, the rigged key, the light from the helmet removal, the “healing”, everything. Magneto went through plenty of effort to sell the idea of Xorn to the X-Men (and Morrison was carefully selling the idea to readers), so it wasn’t a serious “…and you were so stupid that you believed it?” moment to me.
And the “iron prison” bit in particular goes with your comment about realizing it was Magneto… If that scene was supposed to be a knock at the readers for believing the “star for a brain” part in general, then why include the perfectly plausible “iron prison” part? The idea that an iron prison would be some obvious clue only works for the Xorn reveal to be Magneto, not for it to discredit the whole idea that a character could have a star for a brain.
But how does it work in a post Morrison world? When reading later stories that have to gloss over Morrison I think of it as Xorn was really Xorn but then impersonated Magneto for his grand plan and not think about it too much. Or “boy, marvel fucked that up”.
In terms of reading the Morrison run on its own. It’s Magneto, and now he’s dead.
Since I brought this monster of a topic up I might as well chip in.
The weird thing about post the Morrison Xorn retcon is that if Xorn was really always Xorn pretending to be Magneto pretending to be Xorn (….reads that again… yeah…. wow…) then how does it explain Xorn taking his helmet off? If Xorn really did have a star for a head, just as his brother had a black hole for a head, how exactly was Xorn running around with a head that looked liked Magneto’s head… which I think we can all agree doesn’t look like a star.
Si: You say that as a joke, but I could really see that working as a short Deadpool story. Probably a one to two page silent backup story.
I hadn’t really thought much about what time period these “original X-Men” might currently be from, as that sliding timeline stuff has always been a bridge too far for me to care about.
I think it works better if they’re actually from the 60s, and if you want to No Prize how that actually works, there’s precedent (though admittedly I can’t remember exactly where right now) for stuff happening at different times in different timelines/universes. So I suppose you could just say that these X-Men were plucked from a timeline/universe where the X-Men formed in the 60s. That causes other problems, but none any worse than the usual mess of contradictory rules in Marvel time travel stories…
@Jerry Ray — “So I suppose you could just say that these X-Men were plucked from a timeline/universe where the X-Men formed in the 60s. That causes other problems, but none any worse than the usual mess of contradictory rules in Marvel time travel stories…”
Actually, it solves a lot of problems. (1) It explains why the continuity details don’t mesh with what we “know” about them. (2) It allows them to get pulled from the past without changing the present. (3) It allows them to stay permanently, or go back without a mindwipe, without causing paradox problems. And (4) as per your suggestion, it allows them to be from the 60’s even though the 05 from 616 should be from the mid to late ’90’s by now.
So Beast forgot to carry the one, and he went to the past of MU 743, instead of 616. Problem solved.
@Jerry Ray – That’s what I meant by “wondering if the little anachronisms are screw ups or some kind of clues.” Scott not knowing what bottle water is – like Jean not knowing about her telepathy – SHOULD be a clue that they’re not “our” original X-Men (and they wouldn’t even have to be from the 60s – they could just be from a world where bottled water never caught on for some reason). But it’s entirely possible that Bendis does intend them to be the 616 X-Men and just forgot that bottled water was common in the 90s or doesn’t have a clear idea in his head of when they’re from and keeps thinking of them as being from the 60s. It would be nice to at least have enough context to be able to tell clues from mistakes.
Max… That’s exactly why I said “not think about it too much”. Cause it’s Xorn pretending to be magneto who was pretending to be Xorn. Because… Yeah. I know, it makes no sense. Marvel really should have vetoed the decapitation scene and all would have been okay?
@The original Matt
Post-Morrison doesn’t really matter. It was brought up over whether or not it was an example of a writer presenting something outlandish, having everyone treat it as normal, and then the writer suddenly going “What? How could you believe something so outlandish?”
Others felt that is what Morrison did. I disagreed.
The state of Marvel afterwards doesn’t really matter. Particularly since Marvel, not Morrison, is responsible for that state. While he is out there, the idea of Xorn is within the bounds of the Marvel universe, which has had equally weird but accepted designs. Xorn really becomes such a mess because of things Marvel did in (unnecessary) reaction to Morrison’s run. Instead of just riding it out, Marvel put giant spotlights on Morrison’s run as “unacceptable” with their hamfisted attempts to publicly rewrite it.
Everyone keeps talking as though it would be a great thing if the original team was from a different timeline, because it would make everything compatible in terms of continuity, but there’s some real weight to the argument that making it compatible robs the story of all its stakes. If we don’t believe that this team is the same one that turns into our present day X-Men, then what’s the point? It’s just another disturbing parallel universe story. They have to be the same team in some meaningful way for the book to make narrative sense.
Billy, when reading the Morrison run I take it at face value. Magneto had an old school convoluted scheme that worked. It worked because he went about things in a subtle manner, and when he started blowing things, people realised an actual revolution kind of sucked, because blood and war.
When reading beyond the Morrison run, like getting to house of m and The new avengers arc that followed it up, we just kind of go “well, it was Xorn pretending to be magneto pretending to be Xorn and so magneto is still here and look shiny, now read your laser eye balls story.”
And didn’t another Xorn show up at some point? (Not the energy matter Xorn in the new avengers arc, either)
I agree with Thomas. If they are not the original X-Men we know and love, then it doesn’t matter if they get hit by a truck tomorrow because the timeline will march with or without them, and they will go down as a footnote in Marvel History.
Also, just to be clear, there seem to be two different Xorn conversations going on at the same time. The first is ” did Morrison present Xorn as something outlandish, and then suddenly pull an about face and question how you could you believe something so outlandish?” and the second is “How does Xorn make sense in light of the post Morrison era retcons”.
My answer to the first is “depends how you look at it.” My answer to the second is “I don’t know, and I’ve read the darn things!”
@Thomas
If the time-traveling X-Men are the original “real” X-Men, then what stakes can the story really have?
Marvel has three choices.
Marvel can avoid any changes, which makes what happens in the currently storyline ultimately meaningless.
Marvel can make minor retcons and alter the reasons behind later classic stories. This serves little long term purpose and ultimately just makes history more convoluted. I’d include characters wanting to change the future but failing to do so in this category as well.
Marvel can make major retcons. This would annoy some of the fan base, and will only really matter if Marvel continues to hammer “This is (now) what really happened!” until both readers and new writers accept it as the status quo. This can range from immediate major changes to the current Marvel universe (The classic X-Men go back in time, and suddenly Scott Summers never teamed with Magneto, was never involved with the Phoenix Five, never stayed with Emma after Morrison’s run, and hey, look! There’s Jean Grey alive and well!) through the retcon history that just hangs around because Marvel wouldn’t let parts of it go and to the retcon history that is almost immediately forgotten and/or ignored. (Deadly Genesis, First X-Men, Wolverine Origin, etc… Maybe some stuff sticks, it gets mentioned in handbooks and such, but it isn’t on writers minds when writing new stories.)
I seem to be in the minority when it comes to really enjoying the latest Wolverine & the X-Men arc, but I liked it quite a bit. I have a fondness for some of those old Circus of Crime stories (particularly the Roger Stern GHOST RIDER and Steve Gerber HOWARD THE DUCK issues that used them to spectacular effect; seriously read Ghost Rider # 72-73 and tell me you don’t think the Clown is a great character, I dare you!).
As for Aaron bringing back Azazel, I’ve been expecting this ever since “First Class” had him as one of the Hellfire Club.
A note on the bottled water thing: I’ve heard a number of people flipping out about this, and saying it doesn’t make sense, but I’ve been working in various shitty retail jobs forever, and I can tell you that while bottled water existed as a thing in 1997, it was not the ubiquitous product it is today. In the late 90s, bottled water – at least in the US – was a niche product, marketed mainly as something to grab on your way to or from the gym, or as a healthy alternative to soda, and there were maybe one or two brands to choose from in any place that sold it. Now, if you go into any CVS or supermarket, you’ll see whole cases devoted to various different brands, flavored varieties, bullshit specialty bottled waters that are marketed as being more upscale than “regular” bottled water, etc. This is a real transformation that’s taken place, and it’s one that someone working in retail over the course of the last decade could see happen gradually.
All of which is to say that I thought Bendis’s joke here – that Cyclops sees all the water in bottles in this dystopian future and assumes that some horrible ecological catastrophe must have taken place – was pretty funny.
Sorry toask this so late (I’ve been behind on my reading) but there was one other continuity bit that I think doesn’t track. Kitty goes on at some length about how Jean was tough on her, but taught her about psi-powers. Can that be right? Without looking it all up, I thought I remember Kitty joining the team after Jean seems dead, then being with the X-Men while Jean’s in X-Factor and then being off to Excalibur and semi-limbo when Jean came back to the team. Did Jean and Kitty have any real relationship and wouldn’t Xavier have had to do most of the teaching? It might be a little nit-picky (assuming I’m remembering the chronlogy correctly), but if the whole issue is going to be character building conversations, I’d like them to actually make sense for the charcaters.
Yeah, Kitty wouldn’t have learned about psi-powers from Jean. From Xavier, definitely,and from Rachel, maybe. Why the discrepancy? Because it’s Bendis!
Kitty meat Jean (Phoenix) briefly at the beginning of the Dark Phoenix Saga. They didn’t meet again until late in the Excalibur run, sometime in the 70’s I think, or even until UXM 303 at Illanya’s funeral. In the interim, Kitty trained with Xavier and Rachel extensively.
Even after they met, they never really served together very much. I’m sure that there’s an argument that they trained together off-panel, but that seems a little preposterous. By the time they met, Kitty was a very experienced and senior X-Man, with lots of psychic training.
I always took the “Iron Prison/Star for a Brain” reference from the Magneto reveal as being both a magnetic reference AND a Holocaust reference (locked away behind bars and marked with a Star of David as he would have been).
Re: the original X-Men, my reading is that they’re from the 60s/70s, when bottled water wasn’t ubiquitous. (Bottled water certainly existed, but as moose n squirrel points out, it wasn’t super widespread until relatively recently). I think reading Teen Cyclops’ scene as anything more than a “time traveller confronted by something different” joke is stretching, especially since it immediately follows the cell phone. This isn’t to say that they end up saying these aren’t really the 616 Teen X-Men – but if that’s true, I don’t think this is a clue to that.
After the first issue of the circus storyline in WAXTM, I made the decision to drop it after #25. I share Paul’s automatic disdain for circus stories, and it also had a lot of other things I didn’t like (Hellfire brats, a random villain in Frankenstein’s Monster with no real connection to the X-Men, a story focusing on the students while the X-Men are in the background, etc.) Issue #23 in particular was bad because the art started to fall apart, I found several scenes confusing because the artist drew Frankenstein’s Monster and the witch almost identically.
Of course, WAXTM #24 felt like a completely different comic and pretty much gave me what I want from an X-Men comic – focus on the X-Men, and as real people/characters rather than Superheroes Making Stuff Go Pow. Make up your mind, Aaron!
Maybe Kitty learned about psi-powers from Jean during the six month gap ten years ago, just before Kitty was abducted by the Neo. There’s nothing to support this but there isn’t anything that doesn’t say it couldn’t have happened either….
It could work.
@Thomas: Two comments.
(1) If they’re not our O5, then it doesn’t matter to the O5. Who it matters to are the present X-Men. Cyclops gets reminded of who he was. Logan gets to see Jean. Bobby sees how far he has come, etc.
(2) You also fall into the fallacy that the publishers and writers frequently fall into: if it doesn’t have a long-term effect on the franchise, then it doesn’t “matter.” If it’s a good story, write it. Even if it doesn’t “matter” in the long term of continuity. Remember when Storm stabbed Callisto? Or when Kitty joined the Morlocks to marry Caliban. Those stories are hardly referenced anymore. Did they “matter?” At the time, somewhat. Now, not so much. Were they great comics? Abso-frickin’-lutely.
@Max — I don’t buy it. Kitty spent a lot of time training with Xavier, and BFFs with Rachel. Moreover, Logan trained Kitty to fight off psychic possession with focus in Kitty Pryde and Wolverine. It just doesn’t make sense for Kitty to credit Jean with training her in yoga-style focusing techniques.
Having never thought much about it, I always assumed Marvel’s sliding scale thing meant that “the 60s” was 15ish years ago for these characters, in terms of modernity and style and technology etc, and that the world just changed more quickly in the 616. Not that the stories from the real 1960s are suddenly set in a realistic 1997. I mean, a year of issues don’t seem to show us a year of time passing within a comic.
Anyway from the comments it sounds like I had the wrong idea, but that’s why the All New concept didn’t seem weird to me at all.