The X-Axis – 26 May 2013
This week: some anthology filler, a crossover issue, the X-Men are going to fight Dormammu any time now, and inter-title continuity shows up where I’d least expect it.
A+X #8 – So yeah, this book is still going.
Leaving aside the dubious commercial wisdom of trying to sell an anthology title to today’s readers, you would think that A+X‘s broad remit at least provided it with a fair opportunity to do something entertaining. In theory, the only requirement for an A+X story is to fill half an issue with a team-up between two heroes, with one being primarily associated with the Avengers, and the other being primarily associated with the X-Men. Given the vast number of characters in either camp, that’s a huge number of combinations.
So in theory you can do stories that play off the Avengers/X-Men divide, or you can just find characters who have something interesting in common, or something that makes them an interesting contrast. It doesn’t have to be anything particularly weighty – in fact, since it’s perfectly plain that nothing “important” is going to happen in this book, it’s fine for the best that it goes the other way and revel in its pointlessness. Or it could take some creators with unusual styles and give them a few pages in which to go nuts.
That being so, why do we keep getting stories like the two that show up here, in which character A and character B engage in all-purpose banter while beating up a villain selected at random from the Official Handbook? Yes, granted, it’s got good artists – Salvador Larroca on the lead strip and the underrated Reilly Brown on the back-up – but it doesn’t give either of them anything very interesting to draw.
Gerry Duggan’s Spider-Woman/Kitty Pryde does at least come up with a coherent reason to put the two together – Spider-Woman and Lockheed are both associated with SWORD, and so when she calls in Lockheed, Kitty comes along for the ride. But it doesn’t head anywhere beyond a generic encounter with some villains fighting over a macguffin, in which it’s initially meant to be important to stop the Absorbing Man touching the macguffin, and then, out of nowhere, it turns out not to be important at all. As a story, it’s a complete mess, and while it’s got a few good jokes in it, it’s nowhere near funny enough to get by on that alone.
Christopher Hastings, the creator of Adventures of Dr McNinja, does a Hawkeye/Deadpool story which consists almost entirely of an action sequence in which, for no reason that is ever really explained, the duo team up to rescue a chef from Captain Barracuda, one of the, uh, lesser Lee/Kirby creations of the Silver Age. This actually works a bit better, because it dispenses with any pretence of plot and relies entirely on energy. And it does have one really great joke, with Deadpool firing trick boxing-glove arrows that bounce harmlessly off opponents. Before blowing up. But again, it’s not a story.
Even if you assume this book is content to be a lightweight comedy title – and that would be fine – the joke of the stories being completely vacuous wore thin about nine months ago. If this is the best Marvel can (or are prepared to) do with the book, they should cancel it.
Uncanny Avengers #8AU – An Age of Ultron tie-in that actually advances the main plot! I imagine this to be unusual, though I don’t know for sure, since I haven’t been following the crossover. The first two issues looked really quite dull, and since it was obviously going to end with the cosmic reset button, I didn’t feel any particular compulsion to stick around and see how it got there.
The current state of play, it seems, is that Wolverine has gone back in time to kill Hank Pym before he created Ultron, and this has had all sorts of knock-on effects that have apparently resulted in Morgan Le Fey ruling the world. Since Uncanny Avengers is presently in the middle of a Kang storyline, and his whole gimmick is time travel, it’s unusually well placed to work the crossover into its story.
Even so, Remender chooses to leave this story off to the side somewhere. It’s effectively a prequel which shows us how Kang raised the young Apocalypse Twins and moulded them into what they are now. Specifically, he brings them to the altered present day timeline in order to make a point, which is basically that he wants to turn them into killers. He claims that this is because they need his held to fulfil their destiny of saving mutantkind; in fact, it seems to be more a case of screwing them up because they would otherwise have gone on to beat him. So the Apocalypse Twins are brought to the present and asked to go and kill Captain America. In this world, he’s a sort of government stooge whose faith in authority is refreshingly unaffected by the rise to power of an evil sorceress – a fun twist on the character.
You may note that there’s nothing about this set-up that really requires the use of the Age of Ultron crossover, but equally there’s nothing to rule it out, and it does at least allow Remender to use members of his regular cast in the redshirt roles. Still, they’re the least interesting bit of this issue, where it feels like Remender is casting around to find something to say about his characters in the alternate-reality framework. The story works far better as a further development of the Twins’ character; the implication is that left to their own devices they would have been both more pleasant and more effective, and so Remender is positioning them quite effectively as tragic villains who are really trying their best to do good. But they’re not completely oblivious to the fact that they’re being manipulated either, so perhaps this is heading towards an ending where the Twins turn out not to be quite as dim as Kang thinks they are. Either way, it’s helping to build a strong hook to the characters that makes the story work despite its convoluted plot.
Uncanny X-Men #6 – Brian Bendis doesn’t like to be rushed, does he? Last issue’s cliffhanger: the X-Men are brought to Limbo and confronted by Dormammu and his demons. And by the end of this issue, they’ve just started the actual fighting. This is going to seem pretty leisurely even in the trade paperback.
Now, that being said, much of what happens in Limbo in this issue consists in establishing that they can’t escape and (unsurprisingly) establishing that the rookies are all terrified. Rather than do the usual story of having them heroically prevail, Bendis takes a different route and has the Stepford Cuckoos use their psi-powers to force them to keep it together – which isn’t as instantly gratifying but does at least fit the idea that this is the morally dodgy X-Men team. That said, the X-Men still don’t seem to have much of a plan here beyond throwing rookies at the demon horde, which plainly isn’t going to get the job done.
And as often seems to be the case with Bendis, the subplots are progressing rather more quickly than the stately main story. We’ve got the introduction of yet another new mutant; this one apparently has the power to control machines by talking to them, though I suppose it’s also possible that his power only allows him to control small electric cars, which would be fabulous. And we’ve got Maria Hill enlisting Dazzler into SHIELD, which is apparently what passes for a strategy on how to deal with mutants these days. Still, at least it puts Dazzler in a role where she can be of use, and it gives Scott’s team a mutant antagonist for their “renegade revolutionaries” schtick without having to use the other X-Men all the time.
It’s also a beautifully drawn issue by Frazer Irving, who really does excel in drawing crazed demons and small electric cars. It’s a bit dark even on the iPad – did this actually work well in print? – but it’s lovely to look at nonetheless. There’s plenty of good stuff in here, and at least this book, unlike All-New, seems to be going somewhere. It’s just going there at half speed.
X-Men: Legacy #11 – You could say the cover is a massive spoiler, but then, even though that thought occurred to me, I assumed it was a coincidence. After all, this is the last book where you might expect to see inter-title continuity popping up. But no, it turns out that the villain of this arc is indeed the Red Skull, complete with his Uncanny Avengers upgrade. It makes sense; Skull has stolen Xavier’s brain, this book is about Xavier’s son, they’ve got a reason to clash. But Legacy normally seems so far off in a little world of its own that it’s not the book I would have expected to suddenly start referencing Rick Remender’s plot.
This issue basically consists of Legion being given a tour of the IBSS facility, in which mutant volunteers seem to be effectively committing suicide by taking a pill that more or less brings about brain death in the course of removing mutant powers. Legion claims to be so concerned about the terrible things he’s going to do when he loses control that he’s still happy to take the pill. It turns out that the Red Skull (and his newfound psychic powers) are behind all the nice people at the facility after all – but the story wrongfoots us, as Legion doesn’t really care. He still just wants the pill. Meanwhile, Blindfold is rounding up a bunch of X-Men that no other title wanted (Pixie? Frenzy? Chamber?!?) to come on a rescue mission.
There are plot problems here. The consequences of the pill are too severe. If Legion’s concern is that he’s going to go mad and do terrible, destructive things with his mutant powers, then it makes sense for him to take a cure that risks horrible side effects. He also specifically claims to be worried that a baddie might use the pill to steal his powers somehow. So (a) why is he still willing to take the pill even after he knows the Skull is involved, and (b) why didn’t he just shoot himself in the head in the first place and save all this messing about with experimental pharmaceuticals? It’s possible that he’s simply bluffing and stringing the Skull along, but Si Spurrier’s stories do have a tendency to be stronger on their themes than their plot logic.
Still, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on that one until we see where this is heading. It’s a nice use of a major villain in a book where you wouldn’t normally expect to see him, and it uses him without compromising the quirky style of this series too badly – if anything, it’s the Skull who gets bent into this book’s format, as Legion refuses to play along with the obligatory battle.
I think I enjoyed A+X a bit more than you did. For the Spider-Woman/Shadowcat story, I saw the “Don’t let Absorbing Man touch the rock” as less of an imperative and more of a Chekov’s gun–once you introduce something like that, it HAS to happen, or there’s no real point to using the Absorbing Man. I was a little annoyed at how the story wrapped up, as it seems to be giving Kitty a power that would wrap up any fight fairly quickly, but considering she’s got her basic mutant power, a pet dragon, ninja skillz, and tech wizardry, I suppose the ship on overpowering Ms. Pryde sailed a long time ago.
As for the B-story, I just liked the fact it was a slightly different take on how characters respond to Deadpool. Usually, any team up featuring him means having a partner that spends a lot of time rolling their eyes or saying variations of “shut up already.” To have Hawkeye just basically roll with it felt kind of novel.
Or to put it a different way: I don’t disagree with an assessment that A+X is filled with lazily-plotted random fights. But for some reason, it doesn’t bother me as much as I vaguely feel it should.
Is Kitty really that overpowered though? I mean, she has ninja training, but it’s not like she can outfight Captain America. She’s a solid engineer, but it’s not like she can keep up with Forge or the Beast, let alone Mr. Fantastic. And Lockheed never really seems to be all that effective in a fight. Granted, I haven’t really read anything with her in it since Excalibur, but the martial arts and electronics skills just seemed to make her feel less one-dimensional to me.
Didn’t Ed Brubaker already do the “famous in the 80’s X-Character joins SHIELD” with Skids in his run on Uncanny? Maybe Skids can join Dazzler’s SHIELD team.
Have the Stepford Cuckoos shown the ability to turn into diamond before? I know they were revealed to be clones of Emma (in the Phoenix Endsong books maybe?), but given that Emma’s diamond form was a secondary mutation brought on by the razing of Genosha, I wouldn’t think the Cuckoos would’ve manifested it yet. (But it’s quite possible there’s some side-story I missed somewhere).
Captain Barracuda!! That’s the villain from the old Human Torch/Iceman Strange Tales story.
I’m not sure if the Cuckoos ever turned fully into diamond, though at the end of Phoenix: Warsong series they “turned their hearts into diamond” to trap part of the Phoenix. I assume if they can do that, they can probably go the full 9. Of course, that book was dreadful (turning their hearts into diamond was supposed to rob them of emotions even though such had never occurred for Emma in diamond form nor do emotions originate in the heart).
Rhuw> I thought the same thing. I guess name value is why they didn’t pull Skids out from wherever she got placed after Brubaker’s run on Uncanny. I guess Dazzler is perennially popular and maybe, just maybe Uncanny is going to build off of the character development that got shoehorned onto her during X-Treme. I think that without that, Dazzler’s very much being written against type.
It’s interesting how the Age of Ultron tie-ins have been handled. For one thing, there have been very few of them. (I count eight — fewer than the issues of the main book!)
For another thing, many of them are actually important to the plots of their parent books:
-The Uncanny Avengers gives background on the villains.
-The Fantastic Four tie-in introduced a plot point that is about to lead to a big story.
-The Ultron tie-in seems like it will lead into the Avengers AI book.
-I haven’t read the Fearless Defenders tie-in yet, but it seems that will be important too.
The other tie-ins that I’ve read were, if not “important,” at least well done. Both Avengers Assemble issues were great. The Spider-Man one was pretty good. I didn’t read Wolverine and the X-Men. Huh, I guess that’s all of them…
“I mean, she has ninja training, but it’s not like she can outfight Captain America”
I’d say between her phasing ability and her ninja skills, she should kick Captain America’s ass. Then again, I think a lot of characters should, too. But Marvel does have it’s policy…
I was pleasantly surprised to see Remender working the “AU” issue into his actual run, and actually doing something interesting with Bendis’s dystopia-by-the-numbers. I still have plenty of doubts about Remender’s long-term plans (Onslaught? Really? Is there no old storyline so shitty that it can’t be hauled out of the closet in the name of misplaced nostalgia?), and god knows he’s not one to go to if you value plotting or characterization more subtle than a sledgehammer, but it’s good to see him try to carry the spirit of his oddball X-Force run on what’s arguably meant to be a flagship title.
As for Uncanny X-Men, I think Paul’s still a bit more glass-half-full on this title than I am. This is supposed to be the “Cyclops’s mutant revolution” book, right? So, um, where, exactly, is Cyclops’s mutant revolution, so far? I have yet to see Scott and company do anything that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for Wolverine, Beast, et al (between fucking around with the timeline, trying to kill children, and mind-controlling each other, Wolverine and company have just as much claim to being the morally dodgy bunch these days). The only thing Scott’s been doing that’s even vaguely revolutionary is, well, running around using the word “revolution,” which makes him about as revolutionary as the latest Silicon Valley executive hawking a new smartphone release.
What we’ve actually seen Scott do, so far: form his team, start rescuing mutants, and… react to a bunch of stuff: to their powers going wonky, to past versions of the X-Men popping up in the present, to Dormammu fucking around with Limbo and Magick. Gathering new mutants is interesting to me (in the abstract, at least, although, in typical Bendis fashion, once the new mutants are there, he hasn’t bothered to develop any of their personalities) – all the rest of it, though, reads as a series of frustrating diversions from the actual premise of the comic: what is Cyclops actually planning to do? What’s his alternative to Wolverine’s approach? What’s the actual content of the “revolution” he keeps talking about?
This is more than just pedantry or semantics – this is pretty essential to the book itself. If I’m going to take the book seriously – and take its companion title seriously, for that matter – I have to believe that what Cyclops is doing is so groundbreaking, so fundamentally at odds with what everyone who’s called themselves X-Men has done before, that it’s split the mutant community down the middle and provoked Beast to risk creating an insane temporal paradox by bringing the Kirby-era X-Men into the present. But nothing Bendis has shown confirms any of that – it’s just Cyclops rescuing mutants from trigger-happy human thugs, which presumably Wolverine and company ought to be doing anyway.
At some point, Bendis will – hopefully, presumably, at some point, maybe twenty or so issues down the line, long after I’ve stopped reading this – give some hint as to what Cyclops’s team is actually trying to do. But in the meantime he’s writing bewilderingly extraneous plotlines about how the Phoenix force fucked up their powers, and a ludicrously forced conflict with Dormammu, a villain who has jack-all to do with the X-Men or mutant/human tensions. And what this reads like is a writer who is either deliberately putting off getting to the premise of his book, or who has actually forgotten what that premise was.
So it reads like a Bendis book,then. Gotcha.
Bendis got kind of meta towards the end of Uncanny, with Maria Hill echoing the common criticism that Cyclops’s revolution isn’t actually doing anything or displaying any particular goals. Unfortunately, my issue must have had a misprint, because instead of then addressing these concerns and establishing that this title does have an actual premise, it ends with Hill recruiting Dazzler.
To be fair though, any serial set in a shared universe is going to be so hobbled that all you can write about is reacting to badguy attacks and paying lip service to making a change. A few comics have tried to actually break free, that Cable and Deadpool title springs to mind, but the juggernaut of a dozen other very similar titles soon crushes any changes made, leaving the character looking ineffectual and the title irrelevant.
There’s other ways to do a comic of course, but nobody ever seems to buy those.
To be fair though, any serial set in a shared universe is going to be so hobbled that all you can write about is reacting to badguy attacks and paying lip service to making a change. A few comics have tried to actually break free, that Cable and Deadpool title springs to mind, but the juggernaut of a dozen other very similar titles soon crushes any changes made, leaving the character looking ineffectual and the title irrelevant.
But Bendis doesn’t have to upend linewide continuity in order to at least give some indication of why the Avengers, Shield, Wolverine’s team, and the governments of the world would all want to hunt down Cyclops’s team – all he would have to do is present Cyclops as having a clearly defined goal which is in some way controversial. Hell, back in the 90s, the X-office managed to do this to some extent with X-Force (although in retrospect, X-Force’s oh-so-controversial tactics – which seemed to amount to “let’s not always sit in one place and wait for the bad guys to attack us” and “let’s wear uniforms with more pouches” – seem hilariously tame by the standards of Headmaster James “I’m the best at what I do, and what I do is for the children, except when it involves killing children” Howlett).
All I’d like to see is (1) a clear articulation of what Cyclops’s team is actually supposed to be doing, (2) why this seems to piss everyone else off so much, in specifics as opposed to vague rhetoric (such as the oft-heard “you’re being just like Magneto!” Um, really? Is anyone on the team planning on stealing a bunch of nuclear missiles anytime soon, because I missed that issue), (3) some actual plot development that builds off the tension of these two things, as implied in the stated premise of the comic, as opposed to, I don’t know, a bunch of really talky issues in which out-of-character Emma Frost fights Doctor Strange villains.
Cyclops stealing nukes to arm himself “for self defence purposes only” (circa mutant genesis Magneto) is a good idea.
The difference between Cyclops doing cover versions of old magneto stories would be that he has already saved the mutants, and has justification to see himself as the messiah, rather than a political hot potato half of them won’t listen too.
Did Kitty & Jessica reference their past together, or has that been forgotten in the mists of time?
I love it when tie-ins to a alternate reality crossover are still able to tell their own stories. Its paying lip service to the marketing department while still furthering the story the reader is invested in. Although tie-ins traditionally give a boost in sales to the ongoing series, so I can see why the publisher would be keen on tie-ins.
> The difference between Cyclops doing cover versions of old magneto stories would be that he has already saved the mutants, and has justification to see himself as the messiah, rather than a political hot potato half of them won’t listen too.
In what way? Most of the pre-M-Day mutants remain depowered, while a load of people who think of themselves as humans have had their lives screwed up by debilitating “powers” (ask Eye-Boy).
As I read X-Men: Legacy, the brain damage is not a side effect of a cure; it *is* the cure. The idea being that if you are unaware that you have a mutant power, you won’t ever use it.
The question of why Legion doesn’t just use a revolver is still valid in that case, although I imagine one could hand-wave that Legion’s personalities would use their powers to interfere with such an obvious and direct threat.
A bigger question is why this particular approach to “curing” mutant powers doesn’t lead one to be especially susceptible to outside manipulation, the one thing Legion seems most concerned about? After all, if your powers work just fine but you are mentally incapacitated, surely an evil telepath will find that an ideal situation to exploit.
“Bendis got kind of meta towards the end of Uncanny, with Maria Hill echoing the common criticism that Cyclops’s revolution isn’t actually doing anything or displaying any particular goals.”
Not only that, but Silver Age Angel echoed a lot of the same points – “where is this mutant genocide I keep hearing about?” Not quite as on-the-nose, but still pretty applicable. It’s the very definition of “tell not show” except the characters haven’t even done it, they’re just saying they will do it.
I think the Dormammu plot this early was a huge mistake; no idea why it couldn’t be saved for later. The whole “our powers are messed up” is a waste of a plot too. We really should be having Cyclops stealing nukes or making his own nation or something by now. Cable did it far better in C&D.
@somebody
He brought mutants back from the brink of extinction and, while acknowledging he isn’t the same Scott Summers, he shows no remorse for all he did and would do it again. To me, a logical next step to that story, if you don’t rebuild him into his “default” self, is to have him believe his own hype when he is clearly going mad.
To be fair – Colonel America in AoU isn’t in thrall to Morgana le Fay, rather le Fay has conquered Europe (what part isn’t ruled by Ares) and is only held back from conquering North America by Tony Stark, SHIELD, and Colonel America’s Defenders. So Steve is still on the “right” side of history, even if the set-up is about as bog-standard and predictable as you could imagine. It’s every alternate timeline story you’ve ever read, chopped up in the blender and poured back as a smooth tasteless puree.
(And, yes, the FEARLESS DEFENDERS issue is also important for that book, by providing an origin for that team’s major adversary – she’s the heretofore unseen offspring of le Fay and Dr. Doom, from their dalliance in the first arc of DARK AVENGERS. About the last bit of continuity I expected to see pay off in 2013, but there you are.)
One clever thing I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else pick up on: Alex gives a speech in this issue that actually pays off on his controversial speech from a few issues ago by having him express the direct opposite sentiment under a radically different situation. I don’t know what the lead-time for comics really is these days, especially an obviously-rushed tie-in like this (look at how dreadful the art is), so I’d be curious as to whether this element was changed / played up / inserted wholesale after the previous controversy.
Also: I skimmed an interview that confirmed that the reason Dazzler is being used in the book is because of her appearances in X-TREME, and that there would be some reference in UNCANNY to the fact that she was significantly changed by that story.
In that case the issue don’t do a very good job of establishing the set-up. If you’re not reading the wider crossover, all you’re told is that “Odin ceded Earth to Morgana Le Fay after Thor was killed.” And since the nature of the America that Cap represents is central to the scenes between him and Havok, I’d sort of assumed that that was supposed to be relevant. If America (for the purposes of this story) is basically the same as normal, what was the point of mentioning Morgan at all?
I wouldn’t expect much out of Scott’s revolution; Avengers vs. X-Men kept telling us the Phoenix Five had created a utopian world, but didn’t bother to show us any of the inevitably messy details.
For me, at least, it takes a lot out of the constant arguments between Cyclops and the other characters about whether the P5’s actions (before the death of Xavier, anyway) were good or bad. We don’t really know enough about most of their actions, and what we did see looked horrifying, but the current Bendis X-books keep showing us ordinary people who seem to think it was all wonderful.
So I wouldn’t expect Scott’s plans for his “revolution” to be detailed at all, either. Bendis has moved beyond books where characters talk about the details of the plot and into books where they talk around the details that the plot never provides.
“If America (for the purposes of this story) is basically the same as normal, what was the point of mentioning Morgan at all?”
Because they are only actually exploring this “brave new world” for a scant couple of issues and since Bendis is far too decompressed a writer to bother with this kind of exposition in the main series, they have to jam this stuff into the sideline crossovers whether its immediately relevant or not.
Bravo, mouse n squirrel…. you’ve summed up so many of my Bendis-related X-Gripes.
Bendis is so bad with team books… it’s almost like there’s too many characters for him to juggle. His Ultimate Spider-Man, Daredevil and Alias read so much better than his Avengers, X-Men and crossover events…. it’s not even funny.
Bendis should be launching Marvel solo characters in their own books, and leave the team books to the pros.
@Bill walko
So by agreeing with moose n squirrel, you’re saying you want Bendis characters to have more pouches?
Revolutionary pouches, Tim.