The X-Axis – 14 July 2013
A mostly quiet week, but we do have the X-books’ first full-length Infinite book…
Astonishing X-Men #64 – Given that Astonishing X-Men doesn’t sell that well, and is sitting out the big autumn crossover, it’s hardly a surprise to learn that the book is being cancelled in October. Originally conceived as a flagship vehicle for top name creators, Astonishing long-since ceased to be anything of the sort, and basically continues to exist through sheer inertia. Rich Johnston is reporting that they’re going to relaunch it, which is depressing but hardly surprising.
The lynchpin of Marvel’s publishing plan at the moment is the over-extension of the X-Men and Avengers brands, both of which are seeing their names attached to books only tenuously related to the actual team (Secret Avengers, X-Treme X-Men), or even wholly unconnected (Avengers Arena). The number of X-Men books these days is excessive; the number of Avengers titles verges on the ludicrous. It’s impossible to believe that editorial genuinely think this is a particularly good idea; in fact, the tenuous content of some of these books strongly gives the bizarre impression that editors mandated to produce Yet Another Avengers Book are trying to get around that problem by simply attaching the Avengers name to anything they think they can get away with, rather than actually produce Yet Another Avengers Book. The inevitable result is to dilute the brand, something that you’d have thought the corporate guys might understand, given that we’re talking about Disney and Warner Brothers here. But apparently not. It all has the distinct feel of a crash waiting to happen. Or maybe they just figure it can’t really damage the brand with the people who count the most – the general public who go to movies, watch cartoons and buy merchandise for their kids – because they aren’t reading the comics anyway.
Astonishing X-Men, to be fair, is not one of the more egregious examples of this phenomenon; it really is just Yet Another X-Men Book, with a marginally different cast from the rest, and a shortlived gesture in the direction of a street-level theme that didn’t last very long. What they’ll attach the name to next, heaven only knows.
So what about this issue? Well, Iceman’s odd behaviour is indeed all down to picking up a fragment of Apocalypse’s power in the Age of Apocalypse, something that recap pages have been cautiously tiptoeing around to avoid making it ridiculously obvious where this is going. In itself, that’s not a hugely interesting story; on a plot level, it becomes a repeat of the X-Men having to find a way of containing Apocalypse’s power, which is precisely what the last storyline was about too.
But Marjorie Liu’s not that interested in the plot details either. She understands that one thing the X-Men do well is character-driven melodrama writ large, so this is really a story about Iceman’s psychological crisis. It’s a crisis that happens to manifest in him nearly wrecking the planet because he’s being corrupted by a vastly powerful thingummajig, but it’s all about that nonetheless. The story’s maybe a little too blatant in spelling this out, but there’s a nice idea here about the little Iceman copies being the uncorrupted remnants of his normal personality trying to get his loved ones to safety, even though they know it’s ultimately a futile gesture because the planet’s going to die anyway.
It’s yet another story where Mystique serves as the villain – she seems to be everywhere just now, and I’m still not altogether sure how much of that is co-ordination and how much is lack of co-ordination. I’m not sure Marjorie Liu gets the character; I’m not convinced that Mystique would want to go anywhere near the Apocalypse power given what she must know it would do to her mind. There’s room for argument about just how far Mystique cares about anything beyond the accumulation of personal power, but most of the interesting interpretations of her character at least have her believing that she stands for something; I don’t buy her being stupid enough to think she can control the power, or nihilistic enough to want power at the cost of the annihilation of the self.
Gabriel Hernandez Walta continues to impress on art. Until this arc, he’s generally come across as a character artist with a lo-fi sheen, but having been called upon to draw massive ice giants towering over New York, he turns out to be really good at both scale and atmosphere. If parts of this issue are reminiscent of John Romita Jr, that’s no bad thing.
Uncanny X-Men #8 – I could have sworn the previous issue seemed to end with Magik separated from the rest of the group and off in the past with Dr Strange, but evidently that didn’t last too long. She’s back already, as Bendis picks up instead on a completely different plot thread: the X-Men dutifully shrug their shoulders and return Fabio to his family, as he demanded last issue. The idea here is that even though Fabio doesn’t want to be in the X-Men, and the X-Men don’t want to make him stay, the mere fact that he’s now connected with them makes him automatically of interest to S.H.I.E.L.D. So they’ve probably ruined his life and there’s not much to be done about it at this stage.
One likely outcome is that this is heading towards Fabio ending up back with the X-Men – after all, it was never very likely that Bendis would have included him to date just as a red herring – but if so, the interest is mainly in how he’s going to feel about that. If Fabio had ended up with Wolverine’s crew, he’d probably have been okay; they’re at least operating legally. But Cyclops and co are cheerfully bouncing around the world recruiting kids at their most vulnerable, and while they can opt to go home, that’s only going to take them so far. In the first instance, though, we’ve got Fabio recruited as an informant by Dazzler, which makes sense; then again, we all know it’s not likely that everything’s going to work out swimmingly with the government, given the way they’ve generally been written in this book.
Chris Bachalo returns to art for the start of the new arc; he draws a largely unrecognisable Dazzler, but that aside, it’s some of his clearer work. The sequence with David testing his control over machines in a car park is particularly well done; stationary objects making noise isn’t an easy thing to sell on the comics page, but Bachalo gets it across very effectively here.
Wolverine #6 – As mentioned last time, issues #5-6 may be billed as a two-part story, but they’re not. They’re parts 5 and 6 of a six-part story, labelled separately for some reason (presumably to do with justifying the change of artist, since it’s hard to see any other logic). Just to hammer the point home, this is where we actually get an explanation of what the controlling consciousness thing is – somewhat out of the blue, it turns out to be a colony of microbial thingies from the Microverse.
I’m not entirely convinced that works. Granted that Cornell has clearly set up the idea that it’s an alien consciousness (since it seems unfamiliar with human behaviour), and granted that the Microverse is just an exotic version of that, there’s something a little awkward about the big explanation turning out to depend on a piece of Marvel continuity that, so far as I can remember, hasn’t been mentioned before in this arc. The story wrongfoots us nicely by introducing the Microverse as a potential route of escape from the Helicarrier, but it still feels a bit too much as though a key plot element is careering in from left field in the final act.
Still, it’s a nice enough idea that the microbes are looking to escape the Microverse and set up a new life for themselves on Earth, where they can infect the human race and live happily ever after. And it works to have them declare Wolverine a kindred spirit, on the grounds that they were created as a biological weapon, and he’s kind of like that too, right? There’s also a nagging suspicion that we aren’t done with this plot just yet – after all, we still haven’t found out why the Watcher was showing up in earlier issues, and the microbes’ parting revenge attack doubles as the lead-in to the next arc.
The art’s solid but not up there with Davis (to be fair, that’s par for the course in fill-in work); the story works but feels a shade underwhelming in its revelations. But like I say, there’s presumably more to come here.
Wolverine: Japan’s Most Wanted #1 – The first full-length – and full-price – “Infinite” comic, which is basically a comic intended to be read in Comixology’s Guided View mode. Marvel are by no means the first people to experiment with this – DC are trying it as well, and Reilly Brown’s Power Play similarly played with the possibilities. If you’ve ever tried reading comics in Guided View, you’ll know that sometimes it’s a bit of a mess because the rhythm of the page layout is lost, but sometimes it generates unexpectedly striking effects by cutting between full-page images. Often a page with a routine or actively confusing layout can be outright improved by Guided View forcing its way through the clutter.
The challenge is to harness those effects for deliberate storytelling, which is an area where we’re feeling our way. I do believe that there are genuine possibilities here that make it more than just a gimmick, but there’s going to be a phase of trial and error while creators get the hang of it. This issue, for example, certainly goes out of its way to use the technology, with lights flashing on and off from panel to panel, and so forth. There’s also a degree of adding elements to the page one click at a time, which is more of an old standard for digital, and not something I’m so fond of. (DC’s Batman 66 seems to like this one, sometimes making you click through the appearance of several speech balloons in a row; I’m not convinced about leaving the art static for that long.) And a couple of times the image turns out to be the right-hand side of an extended panel that pans left when you click – that’s kind of confusing, because I don’t think you can drop the left-to-right paradigm that quickly, particularly when some images still have multiple panels on screen.
But fades to black work nicely, as do sequences of variations on the same panel that would have looked static on the printed page. An entire screen just showing a lit match works far more effectively as a beat than a single panel on a crowded page would have done; you could never justify giving that a splash page in print, for reasons of space, but you can do it here. There’s a lot of clicking to do here, though, and if this sort of thing takes off you have to wonder whether Comixology is going to end up having to introduce a “slideshow” option to advance automatically without you having to manually click after every panel. Look at the closing sequence, which cuts back and forth between the cliffhanger and the story title – it’s obviously influenced by film editing and it’s a good idea in theory, but the practical reality is that you have to tap the screen five times just to get through the title, and the repeated clicking feels too obtrusive. Maybe that’ll fade with familiarity.
It’s written by Jason Aaron and Jason Latour, with conventional but sound art by Yves Bigerel and Paco Diaz. The story’s pretty basic – it’s Wolverine being drugged and made to kill someone, which is going to make him (obviously) Japan’s Most Wanted – but then the focus of this first issue kind of has to be on the visual storytelling in order to sell the concept.
I hope they keep some of this cast when Astonishing relaunches. If nothing else, a street-level book starring People Not Currently In Every Other Damn X-Title is a selling point for me.
I think someone should start a Tumblr just to record all the almost-not-quite-sort-of-euphemisms that Marvel has concocted to get around mentioning Baron Karza by name. (They could do a similar one for Fu-Manchu.) The recent MINIMUM CARNAGE crossover had the same problem.
I think if dilution of the titles was going to be a problem, it would have been one years ago. You can argue that it killed Deadpool, but then how long would that trend have lasted anyway? It’s been decades now of all the big properties supporting multiple lines, and conversely Wolverine has been in multiple groups for many years, and they just keep chugging along. Sure it continues to snowball, but I’m thinking there is no critical mass to reach.
One obvious route to go with for an Astonishing relaunch would be to have all the more cosmic/spacey X-stories there. Have SWORD show up regularly…basically like the Breakworld arcs and chunks of Gillen’s Uncanny.
It could also be used as the place to tie the X-Men into the Marvel Events. Going back to the idea of ‘this is where the X-Men show that they’re super-heroes’.
Dave says:
July 15, 2013 at 11:14 PM
“…It could also be used as the place to tie the X-Men into the Marvel Events. Going back to the idea of ‘this is where the X-Men show that they’re super-heroes’.”
That role seems to have been subverted by Uncanny Avengers on the Wolverine side and hard to justify on the Cyclops side…it doesn’t like like Slim has any interest left in being a super-hero.
Anybody know (or can speculate) whether that Wolverine online comic will eventually be collected in print? I’m afflicted with X-Men Completism, but have no interest in getting into online comics.
“The inevitable result is to dilute the brand, something that you’d have thought the corporate guys might understand, given that we’re talking about Disney and Warner Brothers here. But apparently not. It all has the distinct feel of a crash waiting to happen.”
It’s like the 90’s never left, isn’t it? In that case will we be seeing our relaunched Astonishing X-Men wrapped in a die-fold gold-foil holographic cover ( I WOULD say complete with super-kewl XTREME! costumes redesigns from Lifield and Lee, but DC seems to have already embarked upon that strategy.)
The use of the phrase “big autumn crossover” has me worried. I dropped Astonishing when it got involved in a crossover with some books I didn’t care about. I never really got into DC, but I gave them another look recently, and gave up on the idea without buying anything when I found out that pretty much every book they were putting out was part of a crossover.
Admittedly this lack of loyalty probably puts me outside the Big Two’s target audience, but I do wonder whether these endless crossovers do actually help sell books.
Jerry Ray: The Nova AvX infinite comic is in print in the hardcover, and I think the GOTG prologues are in a print collection, so they can turn up as physical editions.
i think the idea is that magik is seeing past dr. strange on a regular basis, the way a normal person would see a therapist. and since she apparently can teleport through time effortlessly, theres no reason for her not to stay an active x-man in the present.
i wonder why cyclops wouldnt at least mention the jean grey school to fabio, as an option. in fact, i still kind of wonder why theyre recruiting young mutants at all.
on a different note, i dont think that the brand getting diluted is that much of a problem. however, the deluge of material, together with the constant relaunching and renumbering, does make x-men comics as a whole completely inaccessible for anybody who isnt already a reader. im convinced its this impenetrable way of publishing rather than continuity-heavy stories that keep readers away.
I’ve been away from comics for five years or so, but I was a diehard reader since the 70’s previously. And I knew my xmen lore through and through. I only recently gave the titles a look again and I’m completely lost. I can’t tell where the avengers end and the xmen begin. The books seems largely indistinguishable from each other. I’ve decided not to bother. And I’m a veteran reader. I can’t even imagine being a genuinely new reader trying to make heads or tails of the books in 2013.
“i wonder why cyclops wouldnt at least mention the jean grey school to fabio, as an option. in fact, i still kind of wonder why theyre recruiting young mutants at all.”
I kind of wonder why Cyclops and Co. are doing anything they’ve done so far. Their mutant “revolution” has been completely non-existent and so far has apparently consisted of 1) breaking Cyclops out of jail, 2) recruiting some random mutants, and 3) destroying Limbo, entirely by accident.
I can see the “our powers are broken” plotline working as an “the emperor has no clothes” idea, but you still need to make them emperor first. Having their powers break before they get the chance to do anything is silly and leads to a meandering plot like this. Nothing is happening in this or All-New… at least All-New should be wrapped up/get a new direction after the crossover. Can’t wait for Bendis to be off these books.
I was never an X-Reader, but after reading Avengers vs X-Men I have been reading both All-New and Uncanny as soon as they are released.
I’ve always been an Avengers fan, and I would say part of the allure…especially since Bendis started New Avengers is that those comics felt like they “mattered” in the overall storyline of the Marvel Universe.
Now that Bendis is writing All-New and Uncanny they feel like they’re essential as well. I wonder if that was Marvel’s marching orders when placing him on the titles?
Regardless, I am loving the heck out of both of them with the small exception of Jason Statham Magneto redesign.
A ‘non-existent’ mutant revolution?
Sounds about right for the star pupil of Charles Xavier, world’s least pro-active rights campaigner.
How many issues is the wolverine digi comic meant to run? I’m buying it, but I’m also assuming its a mini. Unless its top notch work I doubt I’ll support it past the first arc.
Apparently, Japan’s Most Wanted is a 13-issue weekly series (to be followed consecutively by three more series in the same format).
When Bendis started up on Avengers it felt like they “mattered” because they were the central characters of the major event stories. Honestly, though, after Seige I think that allure was well and truly done with, and the name Bendis is enough to turn me away from a series. I was over him once we got to Secret Invasion (when it was very apparent that the story the book had been building too since its inception was a dud) and after Seige I would have been more than happy to see him depart, as he would have neatly wrapped his stories up. However, he stuck around for some lacklustre crap, and now he’s on 2 X-titles. I don’t read those titles, so I can’t honestly feel they matter too much. I can read a synopsis when
When Bendis started up on Avengers it felt like they “mattered” because they were the central characters of the major event stories. Honestly, though, after Seige I think that allure was well and truly done with, and the name Bendis is enough to turn me away from a series. I was over him once we got to Secret Invasion (when it was very apparent that the story the book had been building too since its inception was a dud) and after Seige I would have been more than happy to see him depart, as he would have neatly wrapped his stories up.
However, he stuck around for some lacklustre crap, and now he’s on 2 X-titles. I don’t read those titles, so I can’t honestly feel they matter too much. I can read a synopsis when the inevitable event rolls around and 2 paragraphs will no doubt cover that combined 40 issues when battle for the atom happens.
In short: Bendis has good ideas but crappy execution and can’t pace comics to make each issue count.
Oops….
Sorry about that. Dunno what happened there.
Let me state that despite my cynicism for Marvel’s publishing strategy, I rather enjoyed Astonishing #64. “Iceman isn’t living up to his full potential” has been such a recurring subplot that it’s almost become a cliché. Now we FINALLY have a storyline with such a “be careful what you wish for” display of Bobby’s potency that seems like it could be the “definitive” Iceman story of epic proportions. Unfortunately, because it’s happening in the “C-list” book (that they’re inexplicably relaunching) none of Iceman’s “badass” moments will matter how or be referenced elsewhere once this arc is done. You know like how he got hundreds of people killed and all.
By the way Thor’s appearance may seem a bit random here, but it’s actually a nice call-back to a similar plotline that happen in Thor’s book in the 80’s that was woven throughout the rest of the line (Being “important” his storylines get to be referenced in other books. The X-Men’s contribution is around the Dire Wrath/Life death period.)
Also Dark Beast on the potty and Iceman crushing Logan with his toe. Hee!
@Jon Dubya:
This is probably too much to hope for, given the usual Marvel editorial practices, but Thor’s appearance also builds well off of a recent A+X story where he eventually accepts Iceman as more than just a careless jokester.
Also, back in the first run of X-Factor – when it was still about the five original X-Men coming out of semi-retirement – Iceman got his powers increased to dangerous levels by Loki as part of some nefarious plot or other (something to do with Frost Giants). For the longest time after that he always wore a big Kirby-tech-looking belt that dampened his powers to keep basically what’s happening right now from happening. That eventually either got cured or forgotten about. But it’s yet another Iceman/Asgard connection.
“since she apparently can teleport through time effortlessly”
Yeahhh… Just try to square that away with time travel as used in Age of Ultron.
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