The X-Axis – 10 March 2013
Quite a lot to get through – though for once, that’s mostly because I’ve still got three titles to cover from last week. Also, it’s Titles Beginning With A week!
A + X #5 – Quite the random selection this time, as the book seems to be broadening its already broad agenda to “any two characters as long as one of them’s associated with the Avengers titles and the other is associated with the X-Men titles.” So in the lead slot we’ve got Iron Fist and Doop by Kathryn Immonen and David Lafuente, while the second story, by Kieron Gillen and Joe Bennett, has Mr Sinister crossing paths with Loki.
Iron Fist and Doop, then.
It says here in my Big Book of Received Wisdom that Kathryn Immonen is awesome, and there’s certainly a lot of her stuff I’ve liked. But sometimes she produces things like this – off-the-rails craziness that really isn’t on my wavelength at all. It’s not so much that it’s pointless surrealism; I’ve got no problem with that. It’s more that it feels like it’s meant to be a freewheeling manic comedy romp, and doesn’t pull it off. Sometimes there’s not really much you can say about this kind of story, beyond “Well, it didn’t make me laugh.” And it didn’t. But on top of that, it’s a story that makes you work hard to follow it, and there’s no real pay-off for that effort.
I mean, yes, points to Marvel for allowing creators to go nuts on what would otherwise be a truly banal anthology title. It’s the sort of story that I’m all in favour of – in theory. In practice, it completely loses my interest by about halfway through.
The back-up is a rather more conventional affair, even to the point of tying up a stray plot thread: what ever happened to those Asgardian samples that Dr Doom picked up during the J Michael Straczynski run? The story here is essentially about Loki trying to get his DNA (or, well, whatever it is) out of Doom’s hands, and trying to manipulate Sinister accordingly. But mainly that’s a device to let Gillen play two of his more distinctive villains, and their worldviews, against one another. Understandably enough, the story’s sympathies lie with Loki – after all, if Sinister’s ultra-determinist philosophy is correct, the implications are pretty depressing. Gillen’s take works because of the nagging doubt that, even so, Sinister might be right, so Loki’s dismissal of it can be read as either reassuring or a terrible error – and both possibilities are left open.
In amongst all that, they also fight some flesh monsters.
Age of Apocalypse #13 -“Prelude to X-Termination”, says the cover banner, as this book starts to gear itself up for the Cancelled Comics Crossover Cavalcade to come. Incidentally, Marvel haven’t exactly done a stellar job of promoting this thing in the comics themselves. The back of the book tells you that the crossover begins in X-Termination #1, and there’s a house ad which tells you where to find parts 3, 4, 5 and 6, but rather brilliantly Marvel have omitted to tell readers where part 2 is. (It’s in Astonishing X-Men #60.)
You’ve got a whole bloody “next issue” page at the back that you’re using to show some fairly generic cover art. Would it be that hard to hype the crossover?
Anyway, despite that “prelude” banner, the vast majority of this issue is further epilogue to the series proper, as we skip ahead several months to find that Penance is now ruling as a benign monarch (a threatened civil war which one suspects would have been the theme of the book’s second year having conveniently not emerged after all), and the surviving humans are setting up a new society in Hawaii. Prophet finally gets to spell out his back story and philosophy, other characters are checked in on, and that’s pretty much your issue.
There are, however, three pages of subplot in which Nightcrawler and Mystique discuss how he can get back to his own world. That’s your prelude. Ironically, this “prelude” banner doesn’t appear on Astonishing X-Men #59, even though it was also solicited as a prelude, and actually is one. Strange how these things work.
All-New X-Men #8 – Angel finally gets an issue, in which he hangs around with his modern day counterpart and ends up fighting Hydra, all the while trying (and failing) to get a straight answer to the entirely reasonable question: what the hell has happened to you? It’s taken long enough to get to this point – I’d have thought this should have been a bigger reveal when the Silver Age X-Men first came to the present day. But at least it’s getting a reasonable amount of prominence now.
It gets that against the backdrop of a ten page fight scene against passing baddies, admittedly, and these things aren’t always Bendis’ best work. He’s often not great at figuring out things for his combatants to do besides “hit/shoot, repeat.” This one is better laid out than usual, perhaps because it takes a bit more effort to figure out what two Angels are actually going to do about a bunch of heavily armed maniacs.
Once that’s out of the way, though, the book rather unexpectedly spends its last few pages driving forward its overarching plot. First of all, this is where the rest of the superheroes find out that the X-Men are screwing with the timeline, which isn’t a big thing, but it’s a box that needed to be ticked. And second, we get something much bigger: Warren complaining that he wants to go home, and Jean openly intervening telepathically to change his mind.
Bendis isn’t writing characters who are particularly recognisable as the Silver Age characters, so much as he’s projecting back from the adult characters. But as I’ve said before, I don’t have a major problem with that; and part of the threat of this storyline ought to come from the fact that all sorts of things could go horribly wrong if the original X-Men go through life-changing experiences here that are just going to screw up the timeline beyond repair. In that context, the possibility that the X-Men have created a monster works as a story, though we’ll have to see whether Bendis can really come up with a convincingly explanation for Jean’s singularly uncharacteristic lack of ethics here.
Astonishing X-Men #59 -As mentioned, this actually is an issue of prologue for the “X-Terminaton” crossover, since the main plot is Wolverine enlisting the X-Men to help track down the AoA Nightcrawler. Somewhat improbably, the story wants us to believe that Wolverine is so angry about Nightcrawler’s betrayal of X-Force that he might attack him on sight, which I don’t really buy. But there’s some nice stuff in here about Kurt mooching around looking in on people he knew in his own world and watching from afar as they seem to be having a much better time on this one.
I’ve no idea what’s up with the cover, mind you. It’s a picture of Northstar with glowing white eyes, and there are three red diagonal lines across it that I guess are supposed to be symbolic claw marks, but what it’s got to do with anything in the comic, I haven’t got a clue.
Cable & X-Force #5 – A downtime issue at the end of the first arc, which I believe will also be rounding out the first trade paperback. This is where we finally get to the point of why the team are sticking together: they’re all still on the run from the authorities after their first mission went wrong, and in the meantime Cable is persuading them that he needs more help to deal with his other apocalyptic visions.
There are some fairly obvious arguments going the other way, and in fairness, the story is more than willing to tackle them as well. Dr Nemesis not unreasonably points out that their first mission was an utter disaster, which is hardly a good omen for doing more. Dennis Hopeless still has a shaky grasp on the character – while I can easily see him being the one to voice those arguments, I’m not sure I buy him being so openly playful with Forge (he’d want to, but he’d affect to be above it), nor being won round just by the prospect of playing with fun toys. Quite honestly, at this stage I’m not sure what he’s bringing to the team that Forge doesn’t already provide.
Meanwhile, true to his word in the previous issue, Colossus decides to just turn himself in. Again, it’s a questionable role for him, given that he’s the one who went AWOL after Avengers vs X-Men only a few months ago. But there it is, and if you can ignore that consideration, I guess it kind of works; you can see Colossus as a character who might try to get his life back on track in this kind of way. (And it does make sense that he’d hand himself over to a foreign government, rather than the USA.)
The book has plenty of ideas about its characters; not all of them are entirely convincing. Still, now that we’re past the initial set-up, it does feel like Hopeless has a story he wants to tell, which goes a long way towards buying him goodwill.
Gambit #9 – I read this nearly a week ago and quite honestly I can barely remember what happened in it, which isn’t a good sign, is it? Let’s see… oh yes, Gambit goes searching for Joelle, and tracks her down to the latest version of the Bar With No Name. This Marvel Universe staple has traditionally been just an underground bar for supervillains, but the idea this time is that it’s doubling as a fashionable nightclub, which… surely begs questions of why it isn’t getting raided all the time, if the rest of the punters really are just ordinary civilians, but what the heck.
At any rate, it makes for a nice gag: the bouncers are checking names against the Most Wanted List rather than the Guest List. And this series has gone badly enough for Gambit so far that it turns out he’s actually on it. In fact, plenty of the career criminals in the Club are perfectly happy to see Gambit there, because in their eyes he’s not a superhero so much as a thief who does a bit of political activism on the side.
That aside, it’s the usual deal: Gambit goes on a half-baked raid of the club, gets himself into all sorts of trouble, and improvises his way out. This is a book which is not afraid to a have a schtick, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I’m not so impressed by the cliffhanger which claims to reveal Joelle’s actual motivations, since they’re not very inspired; hopefully it’s a double bluff.
X-Treme X-Men #11 – A book desperately racing to complete its storylines before cancellation hits, let’s be blunt. Much of this issue ties up the two-parter with the fascist world, which doesn’t do much more than gesture in the direction of more interesting themes before it has to move on. The cover suggests that the focus of this issue was, at one point, supposed to be Dazzler hooking up with the team’s version of Cyclops; that gets about a page. And then at the end, in an epilogue drawn by a different artist, it turns out that they haven’t killed all ten Xaviers after all, because two of them turn out to be alive and… yeah, it’s all awfully rushed, and the subplot about the floating-head Xavier having some sort of ulterior motive for sending the team on this mission seems to have gone completely out of the window. The nature of the book’s initial storyline made it inevitable that a truncated wrap-up would involve some very accelerated storytelling, but it isn’t doing the end product any favours.
enjoyed Sinister vs Loki. Didn’t bother reading the other story in A+X.
Since it’s not a podcast week, just wanted to throw out how much I enjoyed Helheim from Oni, by Cullen Bunn and Joelle Jones.
A large number of nightclubs are run by organised crime. It makes money laundering easy, as well as meetings of all sorts that might be conspicuous otherwise. Bikie-run nightclubs in particular are bound to have wanted crims lurking around in them. But they don’t get raided much, I suppose it’s just a lot of effort and bad will from the legit patrons for an uncertain outcome.
Point taken, but I did enjoy Doop and Iron Fist. I’ll admit it was confusing, perhaps due to the visual storytelling, but still enjoyable. I like the direction A+X is taking.
I feel the same way about Immomen’s writing, to be honest. There’s some good ideas, but they tend to get buried in the execution. In this particular case, it doesn’t help that I haven’t really cared for Doop as a character or even a one-note joke since way back in X-Statix.
The AXM cover left me baffled as well. At first glance, I thought it was going to be a call back to the whole business with Northstar being killed by Wolverine and resurrected by the Hand, but no, the interior is pretty action-free.
Not that I’m complaining about the story — I didn’t buy Wolverine’s anger toward AOA!Crawler either, but I liked the character moments overall, still think Jean-Paul and Kyle’s DOMA storyline is working out alright, and I’m really warming toward Liu’s Iceman (don’t even say it). I’m hoping that the cross-over will bring in some action-type heroics though; those really are a weak point of this book.
I don’t get the appeal of Immonen’s writing. Everything I’ve read from her has been cutesy, contrived, annoying, and often confusing.
Maybe it’s the premature activation of YoungJean’s telepathy that’s made her so ruthless? Not only did she have this power forced upon her without Xavier there to train her, but the first minds she read with it were the present-day X-Men, with all their baggage. That’s bound to screw anyone up.
“In fact, plenty of the career criminals in the Club are perfectly happy to see Gambit there, because in their eyes he’s not a superhero so much as a thief who does a bit of political activism on the side.”
That’s a nice idea, actually; I quite like that. And it goes some way toward further differentiating the X-Men themselves from normal superheroes.
“it does feel like Hopeless has a story he wants to tell, which goes a long way towards buying him goodwill.”
When I realized I was making this sort of statement, that was when I realized it was time to stop buying Big 2 superhero stuff and just keep up with what’s happening via the web. Says a lot about the power of the monthly reader/collector mindset that I could have let the bar get that low.
Maybe in the absence of stern Professor X to guide her, teen Jean is acting/doing as he often did in the start?
Further to Nitz the Bloody’s comments on Jean, young Jean also comes from the time where Professor X was frequently messing with people’s minds (her own, Hank’s parents, the Blob and his circus for examples) so I’m not surprised that she’s just doing what her mentor would do with his same powers “for a greater good”.
I absolutely loved Immonen’s Hellcat miniseries but I will admit there’s a goodly amount of time I have no idea what’s going on with her writing.
On the other hand, that does serve to make some of her titles more interesting when someone else putting out a similar story niche would put out something much more generic. (She did the Pixie miniseries right?)
That said, I think the problem is that a lot of the time she’s paired with equally kinetic artists who would be just as hard to follow sometimes.
Also when she was on Runaways which they canceled mid-story I thought at the very least she did seem to be taking it in a direction I preferred to the previous writers after BKV (and maybe Whedon).
Similar to the X-Termination promotion, I noticed with the Bat-titles that some labelled as Death of the Family tie-ins or lead-ins were tenuously connected, while others were definitely related and weren’t included.
So now I can tell AXM is happening after the last arc of Uncanny X-Force, but is there anything to place the Karma/wedding issues either before or after AvX?
Good point, since back in those days Professor X used his mind-wipe powers with such giddy aplomb, you’d think he was a member of the Men In Black.
I like the idea that Jean’s stunt was just a natural reaction to seeing Xavier use his powers that way all the time, but – especially given the other characters’ reactions to it – I’d bet money the real explanation is that Bendis doesn’t realize (or has chosen to ignore) that this version of Jean shouldn’t have any connection to Dark Phoenix whatsoever.
I figured that Jean’s personality shift can be explained by the massive information overload dumped on her a few issues ago – including two deaths. I can imagine that would be pretty heavy and shift one’s outlook.
Well, if Marvel ever wants to a “Flaspoint” style retonning of their status quo, they could always make the younger X-men the “real” X-men…
Will Dazzler be appearing in All-New, All-Female X-Men squad?
Not sure if it’s a rumor, or something he has confirmed, but it seems like Dazzler will be joining Uncanny X-Men at some point. She’s one of Bendis’ favorite characters.
As to that Dark Phoenix thing, ZZZ, though originally Jean was possessed, then later was replaced, but in Grant Morrison’s run it was always her destiny to have the power of the Phoenix.
Is it that difficult to figure out why Jean’s ethics are out the window? She’s a teenager; her and her teammates bought into Xavier’s philosophy because they were sold on the idea that it would lead to a bright future. It clearly didn’t. Kids aren’t born moral, and teenagers are as mutable as modeling clay.
I find it pretty funny that the “All New” cast is supposed to be the good guys trying to bring down their ruthless “Uncanny” counterparts. I mean, young cyclops & ice men aside, they all act like a bunch of assholes… And Jean just went full villain here. Sorry, but “I want really bad to fight these other guys everyone is saying are evil but that aren’t actually doing much of anything” REALLY doesn’t excuse mind rape – and if the rest of the team don’t throw her down the brig next issue, I’ll have to assume she’s manipulating them, too.
“I’ll make our future selves stop being amoral antiheroes if I have to mind rape everyone who has ever trusted me in order to do it!”
I can definitely see the argument that Jean is just following the Professor’s example. None of the teen X-Men seemed to think that Xavier *wouldn’t* wipe their memories as soon as they returned to the past. On the other hand, none of the teen X-Men are acting much like the Silver Age versions, and I don’t have much faith in Bendis on this.
Jack- you’re taking for granted that we’re supposed to view the All-New cast as the good guys and the Uncanny cast as the bad guys. That’s plainly incorrect. Both groups are just mutants in a really complicated position.
Agree totally on Immonen. She’s the biggest Hellcat supporter in comics today, and I’m a big Hellcat fan, so I end up reading a lot of her stuff. I appreciate what she does. I also wish I liked it.
“Both groups are just mutants in a really complicated position.”
Trapped beneath Bendis’ pen and unable to escape?
The problem I have with ANX is that the setup is just right for a lot of navel-gazing, and BMB is not really taking advantage of it. This is a title that should be dealing with the “Where are we now and how did we get here,” by showing how the O5 perceive and react to the current setup, as well as the reverse. The next issue should have a scene that goes something like this:
Storm (or Kitty or whoever): Jean we need to talk.
Jean: I know you think what I did was wrong, but I don’t care.
Storm: That’s not what I have to say. Sometimes it’s OK do do what you did. (GIve examples from continuity). But you have to be prepared to take the consequences in lost trust, harming your friends etc. etc. You also have to exercise better judgement about when to take those chances.
Jean: I don’t care.
Storm: That’s the other problem. You’re taking this too lightly, and we’re all scared of what’s going to happen when you get really, really powerful and don’t have the restraint and judgement that the older you had.
That gives a chance to reflect on how the moral stance of the X-Men has changed over time vis-a-vis the use of power.
It also gives a chance to articulate what, exactly the X-Men think is the status quo regarding the relationship of JG and the Phoenix. (FWIW, I think her power is like Rachel’s — an affinity for the Phoenix force — only more so).
THat’s the kind of thing this setup is good for, but they’re not really doing it very well.
I know it sounds like I’m calling for more “talk” in a Bendis book, and that’s likely to elicit groans from a lot of people. But really I’m calling for a different kind of talk: something with substance, rather than just banter. Sure the scene with Kitty and Bobby was funny, but it highlights the problem: it’s the same old conversation we’ve been reading for years and we all know what’s being said. Go ahead and make the joke BMB, but then give us a better alternative.
“I know it sounds like I’m calling for more “talk” in a Bendis book, and that’s likely to elicit groans from a lot of people. But really I’m calling for a different kind of talk: something with substance, rather than just banter.”
Yes. My biggest concern about Bendis’ Avengers was not the dialogue tics, the way various cast members were used, or any of the usual Bendis complaints. Rather, I could never really shake the feeling that it wasn’t _about_ anything.
I read the latest ANXM last night, and was struck by the lack of depth in a multi-page conversation between old-Angel and young-Angel. It was just Bendis-fluff banter, with nothing of substance actually said. It’s really frustrating.
No review of AGE OF ULTRON, Paul? Yeah, I know it’s not, strictly, an “X-Book” per se, but it will be tying in with several of them. You guys must be saving it up for the next podcast, then?
All-New X-Men = Seinfeld 2013.
“Yes. My biggest concern about Bendis’ Avengers was not the dialogue tics, the way various cast members were used, or any of the usual Bendis complaints. Rather, I could never really shake the feeling that it wasn’t _about_ anything.”
That’s an excellent point about Bendis’s writing. Back when Powers started out, it was about celebrity and how normal people would react to superhumans. His more recent stuff, though… things just happen. It’s just fluff.