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Nov 4

Battle of the Atom

Posted on Monday, November 4, 2013 by Paul in x-axis

I usually put the issue numbers in the post titles, but they won’t really fit here, will they?  So (deep breath) – X-Men: Battle of the Atom #1-2, All-New X-Men #16-17, X-Men #5-6, Uncanny X-Men #12-13, and Wolverine and the X-Men #36-37.

This is what you might call an old-school crossover.  What Marvel usually do these days is to have a core miniseries, and a bunch of other stories taking place against the backdrop of that core story.  But this is a ten-part serial running through four different titles and two bookends over the course of two months.  The way we used to do things, back in the day.  “The day”, in this context, being the 1990s.

There’s something a bit odd about the very idea of a crossover like this, isn’t there?  Back in the innocent days of yore, a crossover was an exciting event when different characters crossed paths.  Hence “cross over”.  The Avengers meet the Defenders!  Superman meets Batman!  You know, that kind of thing.  And here we are now with a crossover between the X-Men, the X-Men, the X-Men and the X-Men.  What’s the point of that?

This brings us back to the recurring question for the X-books these days: given that financial considerations evidently mandate that there must be this volume of X-Men comics (for surely nobody actually thinks there’s a creative argument for it, whatever people are obliged to say publicly), how do you strike a balance between making them all X-Men comics but allowing them independence?  Marvel’s solution has two main strands.  First, create spin-off books that in a prior era would have been called something else, but call them “The X-Men” anyway.  Hence All-New X-Men (which is really about the time-travelling original team) and Uncanny X-Men (who would once have been X-Force, though of course that name’s now taken – twice).  Second, create books that are defined more by their creative voice than by their cast or notional premise.  Hence X-Men comics by Jason Aaron and Brian Wood, to sit alongside the two Bendis titles.

So what, then, is the point of a crossover between these four titles?  For it to really mean anything, it would need to come across as some kind of collision of the different creative voices on the various titles, wouldn’t it?  At the very least, some kind of meeting of previously separate plotlines?

Well, if that’s your test, “Battle of the Atom” fails it.  This is essentially an All-New X-Men storyline sprawling into the other titles for two months.  The basic plot is as follows: the modern day X-Men are reminded of the damage they’re potentially doing to the timeline when Silver Age Cyclops nearly manages to get himself killed in battle.  The Silver Age team are prevailed upon to go home.  As the argument continues, a bunch of X-Men from the future show up to try and convince them.  Young Scott and Jean go on the run, and eventually seek refuge with adult Scott’s renegade version of the X-Men.  Meanwhile, it turns out that the future X-Men are actually impostors, being a group who were cast out of the “real” X-Men, so the proper future X-Men come back to try and help sort everything out.  Much fighting ensues, in the course of which we discover that the timeline is so screwed up that the Silver Age X-Men apparently can no longer be sent home, at least until something unspecified is done to resolve matters.  After that big revelation, more fighting ensues until the story is over.  Then, in the epilogue, the Silver Age team (and Kitty as their mentor) defect en masse to Scott’s side, disgusted by the lack of support they’ve had from Wolverine’s side.

If all of that sounds like a remarkably slight plot for ten issues, well, yes, it wouldn’t have worked over the course of a year.  But one thing that tends to get overlooked with these crossovers is that they increase the pace of a story from monthly to weekly, and that in itself changes the way you can approach things.  Extended fight and chase scenes become a lot more acceptable in this context, because the reader is still experiencing story progression far faster than in a typical monthly story.  I’m fine with that; stories absolutely should tailor themselves to the pacing of their shipping schedule, because it has such an impact on the audience experience.

Nonetheless – this is an All-New X-Men storyline.  It’s all about time travel, it’s all about the Silver Age team’s presence in the present day, it’s all about what those characters choose to do.  The Uncanny guys get a degree of prominence because the final defection plays into their schism.  And the other two books… well, they’re left to try and find space for themselves around the edges.  In practical terms this means that the future X-Men get to include characters designed to show that Shogo and Quentin Quire will be important.  All well and good, but it doesn’t change the fact that this story doesn’t belong in those books.  The result is not a crossover, simply a two-month expansion of Brian Bendis into extra titles, with hired hands picking up the slack on the books he can’t do.  (And, with scheduling a must on this kind of book, the art gets notably fill-in-y as the story goes on.)

Judge it as a weekly storyline for the Bendis X-Men, though, and there’s a decent amount of entertainment to be had here.  There are good ideas in here, such as the impostor X-Men apparently being led by a version of Silver Age Jean Grey who never went home; the idea that the Silver Age team are now trapped in the present and doing potentially horrible damage to the timeline, which seems a logical development of the central premise (as well as playing into the running event-story theme that something’s up with Marvel time generally); and Rachel Grey getting a role as one of the few characters to stick up for the Silver Age team, since she can hardly complain about somebody else deciding to emigrate to a new time period and stay there.  (Besides, if everyone else is that adamant that the kids should go home, what does that say about how they feel about her presence?)

But, like a lot of Bendis stories, there’s also more in the way of promising foreshadowing than satisfactory plot.  It’s never really clear quite why the impostor team are so keen to send the teen X-Men back; their motivation appears to be some sort of disillusionment related to the assassination of the first mutant president, but quite what that has to do with sending the Silver Age team home is not obvious.  More egregiously, the climax of the story really comes with the revelation that the original team can no longer be sent home.  But that plot point is placed with a whole act still to go, leaving the remaining issues to fill time with a rather pointless battle that feels entirely tacked on.  The biggest plot point of the whole affair – the original team jumping sides – is relegated to a closing epilogue in the second book-end.  The notional climax of the storyline is a bit of a void.

I’ve read a lot worse, though, and the pacing of a weekly storyline covers up a multitude of sins.  As crossovers go, it’s really not bad, and it does set up some interesting material for the Bendis books.  As for the other two titles, they’ve essentially experienced a two month hiatus.

Bring on the comments

  1. D. says:

    You are way too generous to this crossover.

    None of the characters had sensible motivations, except perhaps Rachel Grey. I have no idea why the future Brotherhood came back in time, especially since their arrival actually disrupted their notional goal. But we were never told why they care if the O5 go back or not — i.e. what impact the O5 will have on the future. We never are told what the schism was between the future X-Men and the future Brotherhood. The dialogue is nonsensical and excessive. Kitty’s motivations are bizarre, unexplained, and, especially at the end, totally disproportionate.

    I missed a good chunk of X-Men comics in the mid-late 1990’s (some notorious for being awful), but this was far and away the worst X-Men story I have ever read.

  2. Odessasteps says:

    I was enjoying this, for the most part, until the last issue.

    Admittedly, i am a sucker for time travel and alternate versions of characters. I loved seeing grown up molly.

    But the finale didnt do anything for me. Didnt like the token deaths. Didnt like kitty jumping sides (turning heel?)

  3. Reboot says:

    There’s a basic structural problem with the idea that this is the real future, Gruenwaldian rules do not apply, as they’re currently pushing – it’s far too far away. If they want to push that (not helped by events in Cable & X-Force), it needed to be the near-future. Something they could potentially catch up to within the next couple of years.

    Setting the “future” as a point decades away where most of the present cast are dead? Pointless in that context.

  4. The original Matt says:

    As far as the crossover went, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a lot more than I’m enjoying infinity, for example. I don’t like the O5 idea to begin with, and I feel like a this story should have happened by ANXM issue 3. But then, I’m not reading ANXM, and knowing what I know about Bendis, the time lapsed between issue 1 and the crossover was probably breakfast to lunch on the same day. My last comment perhaps says more about the current storytelling style than it does about the story, but really, who would ever think that moving the O5 into the present day for ANY amount of time would be a good thing, but after a day, send them home.

    It’s an interesting idea to do the time travel story in reverse, but if Scott not killing off Charles was their goal, why not just time travel back to the point where Scott did kill Charles and teleport him out of the way. (Aside from a good chunk of fandom NOT wanting to revisit AvX). Things get a bit more in depth if you say jumping back in time and killing Scott at that point would have been a better idea. It creates a power vacuum, and another leader would rise in his place. So what’s the alternative? Bring O5 Scott forward so that he can see what he becomes and stop that from happening? Now we’re damaging the time stream.

    Fun crossover, but still not sold on the concept.

  5. Reboot says:

    > It’s an interesting idea to do the time travel story in reverse, but if Scott not killing off Charles was their goal,

    It wasn’t. Beast was dying, and he did it as a passive-aggressive F-U to adult-Cyclops. (Young Beast helped fix his older self, but by then blue-Beast had decided showing teen-Jean her future was a good idea, and she refused to go back thereafter and forced the rest of the team to stay with her.)

  6. joseph says:

    Except Bendis says this was Jason Aaron’s baby, noting that Marvel mistakenly but Bend is on the cover of BotA #2.

    But yes a bit of a mess but set up the dynamic for each book well. The bamfs and Nightcrawler story, Shogo, the need to overcome the Schism, the problem.with Shield having Sentinals.

  7. Kenny says:

    I think Marvel screwed up the cover of the finale. I enjoyed this story for the battle scenes, but things were waaaaay too decompressed and low on plot. I get the feeling if the writers had compressed more, then we could have heard more on plot, as well as on character motivations.

  8. mrsandman says:

    I missed part 9 of the story, but have this to ask. If the original 5 could not go back home and the time stream is so screwed up, did we get any explanation for why both future teams time traveled with any difficulty? I doubt it, but shouldn’t the current overall time being broken plotline in Marvel be recognized and not just randomly used as convenient?

  9. Thom H. says:

    It’s the Time Trapper.

  10. wwk5d says:

    It’s Glorith pretending to be the Time Trapper.

    So basically, we got a reshuffling of a few member here and there, and no real resolution one way or the other. Sounds typical of what to expect from the line these days and from some of the “talent” involved.

    For fcuk’s sake, just send the O5 home already and be done with it.

  11. Michael says:

    This crossover did entertain me – but when it was all said and done, it was completely unsatisfying. Every issue seemed to bring up another question that characters would speak about amongst each other without getting to the point, or the meat of the matter. They kept talking AROUND issues so the questions would just linger there. If you really look at it, BOTA was nothing more than 10 part prelude to other stories somewhere down the line – because it certainly didn’t give the readers any answers to a multitude of questions – in fact, we had more questions tacked on to the original questions by the time the story closed.

  12. ZZZ says:

    This crossover managed to hit a couple of pet peeves of mine:

    1) We get over a dozen future X-Men and Brotherhood members and NOT A SINGLE ONE of them isn’t either the descendant of an existing character or an older version of an exsiting character. Considering how much trouble the X-Men went through to allow new mutants to be born, you’d think one of them would have been concerned that apparently at some point soon they stop finding new mutants altogether.

    2) All comic book writers officially need to stop having characters from the future travel back to the present to fight heroes for reasons they insist the heroes would agree with if they knew about them but they JUST CAN’T TELL THEM ’cause of reasons and stuff. Or, you know, go ahead and do that but actually TELL THE READER what the reason is. I’m pretty sure it won’t screw up the future if I know what the future X-Men don’t want to tell the present X-Men about. (It’s especially frustrating considering that one of the reasons the original five don’t want to go home is that they’re afraid Professor X will wipe their memories of the future – you can’t establish that telepaths can erase memories then have multiple powerful telepaths insisting that they can’t share vital information.)

  13. Suzene says:

    I tend to agree with Reboot so far as this event having no real sense of immediate relevance. A co-worker and I were comparing pull-lists, and I explained that I’d dropped X-Men for the duration of BOTA because these far-flung future type stories are inherently low-stakes. They’re overblown What-Ifs. Definitely not interested in investing in eight extra books to follow it, and why buy two chapters of ten?

  14. Si says:

    Has there ever been comic that introduced a kickarse veteran character from a future version of the team visit in his timemobile, then later had the same character be reintroduced to the team but as a rookie kid from the present?

  15. Adam Halls says:

    @Si

    I can think of a few similar examples

    Runaways shows us a future where Victor La Mancha is an Avenger who then betrays and kills them all before introducing us to modern day Victor

    Avengers Forever showed us future Avengers Genis Vell bonded with Rick Jones which was something that hadn’t happened in the here and now and eventually did leading into Genis’ own Captain Marvel series.

    Bill Willingham’s Elementals did a flash forward issue that showed the team split into various different fueding factions and introduced a few new characters who would then start appearing in the regular series from that point on but this was all shortly before the first volume cancellation

  16. kingderella says:

    I enjoyed the crossover just fine. I would rate it below “Messiah Complex” and “2nd Coming”, but above “AvX”.

    I don’t particularly mind that the plot is contrived and full of holes, or that “XM V4” and “W&tXM” have their stories pointlessly disrupted, although I recognize that those are valid criticisms.

    What I do mind – and I’ve had that problem with almost every single crossover since “Messiah Complex” – is that very little actually happens. I’m ok with all the running around, but a little more substance would be nice.

    Young Jean Grey changes her mind after a telepathic encounter with “Xorn”, because… “something terrible will happen”. The O5 can’t go back to the silver age, until… “something unspecified happens”.

    That’s clearly just writers making it up as they go along, and doesn’t inspire much confidence. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for the writers to come up with a half-decent long-term plan and plant the clues accordingly, instead of those obvious plot place-holders.

  17. @ZZZ: I wouldn’t have minded if your first point was expanded into the point of the crossover–that the X-Men’s infighting extends into the future and makes them unattractive to new mutants, to the point where they can only fill out their ranks by constant, incestuous side-switching. Anyone with any real interest in peaceful coexistence between mutants and humans quietly stayed away from them and got on with it years ago. It’d go well with Xorn-Jean’s speech over how idiotic Cyclops and Wolverine were.

    …Although given the main X-stories of late, it’d also be a little on the nose.

  18. LiamKav says:

    I was gonna suggest the Marvel UK Transformers title, but I forgot about Target: 2006. Still, I’d have been curious in a storyline that introduced Rodimus Prime before Hot Rod.

  19. Nimmy says:

    As joseph said, it is NOT a Bendis crossover, it’s actually a Aaron crossover

  20. dlpulver says:

    One minor element in the crossover is the subtle redemption of Illyana.

    She actually comes across as Most Valuable Player, exposing the imposter x-men via her own time jump, and then performing some significant role in the final fight. Then she gets a tender moment with future version of Colossus and mourns his death, potentially altering her relationship with present version, which ended harshly.

    It also looked like Kitty noticed this; while it isn’t too emphasized, her embrace with Illyana at the end and willingness to jump teams suggests a renewal of their long-dormant friendship, and a possible added motivation for Kitty switching over.

  21. Nick says:

    The thing about this crossover that made the least sense to me is that any of the characters would be surprised that SHIELD is building Sentinels. I mean Magneto and Cyclops (who just recently took over the world) are still running around and making threats about a Mutant Revolution, so of course the government is going to build Sentinels. (Not that this is necessarily a good idea, as Sentinels really haven’t been effective since Claremont was on X-Men.)

  22. The original Matt says:

    Was it supposed to be the new mutant from part 1 that killed off president dazzler?

  23. Reboot says:

    > Has there ever been comic that introduced a kickarse veteran character from a future version of the team visit in his timemobile, then later had the same character be reintroduced to the team but as a rookie kid from the present?

    Vance Astro from the (original) Guardians of the Galaxy and Vance Astrovik/Marvel Boy/Justice comes close – Astro deliberately activated his younger self’s powers prematurely to force him to live a difference life (rather than spend a thousand-year journey in stasis because they didn’t have FTL travel, only to find they invented FTL not long after he left and they were there waiting for the ancient relic!)

    > Then [Magik] gets a tender moment with future version of Colossus and mourns his death, potentially altering her relationship with present version, which ended harshly.

    She deliberately tortured HIM though. It’s not her that needs to forgive.

  24. moose n squirrel says:

    “it is NOT a Bendis crossover, it’s actually a Aaron crossover”

    No, it’s Bendis all the way, regardless of whatever the promo material has said. Bendis’s fingerprints are all over it: entire issues in which the “action” consists entirely of characters standing around and talking to each other, a plot structure that involves characters running back and forth from different locations to obscure the fact that nothing much is really happening, character motivations which remain vague to the point of being nonexistant throughout the storyline. Hell, the first significant “fight” in the crossover is really just a couple telepaths talking snottily at each other. The only thing it’s missing is a conference room scene where all you see is various people’s cropped talking heads.

  25. moose n squirrel says:

    A couple random notes:

    – Without meaning to, Bendis has turned Maria Hill into kind of a hopeless putz. Take twenty Bendis-written Maria Hill scenes, and nineteen of them will basically be Maria Hill going “Awww, no, super-people! I’m so bad at dealing with super-people!” right before super-people fuck her shit up. Now, I’m not saying I mind this, exactly – in fact, I think “Maria Hill, over-promoted super-bureaucrat” has a certain appeal to it. And it explains so much about SHIELD if it’s run by incompetent government appointees and nepotism beneficiaries rather than singularly-devoted super-spies.

    – There’s an exchange at the end of the crossover, where Wolverine says something to Cyclops like “Oooo, I’m gonna see you behind bars!” I don’t think Bendis was trying to get me to the revelation that Wolverine is a cartoon bumpkin sheriff, but kudos for making that one happen anyway. You’ll get those Duke boys yet, Logan!

    – The effort to give Evil Kid Xavier a wheelchair of his very own felt hilariously forced. I hope the next time he shows up, he gets miraculously healed, so he can get paralyzed again in his third appearance – truly living up to his granddad’s legacy!

  26. Matt says:

    “… As for the other two titles, they’ve essentially experienced a two month hiatus.”

    I only read Wolverine and the X-men and this was the reaction I had to the event. I groaned and accepted that the story I had been following had been put on hold.

    I did read the two BOTA Wolverine and the X-men issues, I didn’t have a lot of trouble following what was going on, but Lord it was tedious.

  27. The original Matt says:

    I was really expecting Amazing X-men to be launched out of the crossover as well and, it kind of… wasn’t?

    Not that I’m really complaining, but yes, I was expecting nightcrawler to return in part 6 or 7.

  28. Master Mahan says:

    Regardless of what the official line is, this was clearly Bendis’ baby. I can’t imagine why Jason Aaron would write a crossover and make it all about Bendis’s characters, using Bendis’s subplots, in Bendis’s style, with no impact on any comics but Bendis’s.

  29. Billy says:

    @mrsandman

    Time being broken is being recognized in Guardians of the Galaxy, playing into its current plotline. It is being presented as some major event, something that would cause Starlord to ask Thanos for advice, and the “straw that broke the camel’s back” when it came to how other spacefaring races saw Earth.

    Of course Guardians of the Galaxy is a Bendis book. So it is an event of galactic importance, that only is relevant in books that have Bendis’ name on the cover.

  30. Wire says:

    “Of course Guardians of the Galaxy is a Bendis book. So it is an event of galactic importance, that only is relevant in books that have Bendis’ name on the cover.”

    To be fair, Mark Waid’s Indestructible Hulk is also dealing with the whole “Earth is in deep too-doo with the rest of the time/space continuum” business.

    On the one hand, I agree with the criticism that it’s silly for Events of Galactic Importance™ to be addressed in some books in a shared universe while completely ignored by others. On the other hand, the whole every book in the line has to tell stories related to one big event model gets old in a hurry – see Civil War and Dark Reign.

    The bit of inter-title non-continuity that’s been bugging me the most lately, though, is I could swear that in the last issue of Uncanny Avengers I bothered with before conceding that Ilife is too short to look at a single panel more of Daniel Acuna’s art, the HQ of SWORD was crashing into the atmosphere and being destroyed. Yet in the couple of pages of Infinity that I glanced at, there it was nice and unharmed in space.

    Maybe there was an explanation for that – I wouldn’t know, since I gave up on one of the titles and didn’t even bother with the other.

  31. Cory says:

    Jason Aaron did foreshadow the future X-Men’s arrival in WaTXM a while back in the time capsule ish, after the Dog Logan storyline, but I have a feeling even if a “past, present, and future X-Men collide 50th Anniversary spectacular” was his baby that Brian Bendis completely hijacked it. Remember the kickass “things to come” promo with old ‘n balding Logan traveling back in time, hooked up to an oxygen tank, trying to protect what looked like the son of Iceman and Shadowcat? Well, it seems like that storyline’s been a bit abandoned, though everything else in the promo has come to pass. Hell, they even broke up Iceman and Shadowcat before that storyline could really take hold in two lines to each other. “You suck!” “Nuh-uh, you!” Blah…

  32. Niall says:

    This was a nice crossover. I use the term nice, because while it was entertaining and there were seeds planted and hints given, little meaningful happened.

    What Bendis and co. managed to do well, was re-position Silver-Jean. After seeing her future Xorn incarnation, you look at her slightly differently.

    I presume that we didn’t hear much about the future X-Men split because that is being saved for a future future-brotherhood plot.

    The Wolverine/Cyclops split is running out of steam. Wolverine is starting to look like a proper tit.

    One question: Why did Magik bring Silver- Iceman and Silver-Beast to the future with her? And if Magik can time travel so easily, why doesn’t someone try to get her to bring the Silver Age X-Men home? And isn’t that kind of power just a little bit too much for any single character? (I lied about having one question).

  33. The original Matt says:

    The peak was destroyed in Uncanny Avengers 7 or so by a celestial spacecraft. It then turned up a month later in Avengers. I think in infinity they have it a hand wave comment of “so we built it better” or something.

    Was it a celestial space craft that destroyed the peak? Memory is getting a bit fuzzy here. Because I’m not remembering the celestials appearing in uncanny avengers after that.

    I really feel like this UA arc has gone on a bit too long. Although I love uncanny x-force, I did read it all in one hit when the series wrapped up. Did any of those arcs feel dragged out like this?

  34. ASV says:

    Beast and Reed Richards at least can time travel at will, so adding Magik to that list doesn’t seem to make things any worse. Time travel in the Marvel universe is completely broken as a plot device.

  35. The original Matt says:

    Beast and reed at least need tech to do it. You can write it out as an option easier than magick just willing herself through time.

  36. Brendan says:

    @ ASV, you now have me quietly hoping this ‘Time is Broken!’ plot from the Age of Ultron is Marvel’s attempt to address how time travel is barely workable in-continuity.

    And the rate this X-Men story is going, I will not be shocked if the answer to why the O5 can’t return to the silver ages is ‘Dire Wraiths.’

  37. DP says:

    Magik’s time travel has always been like Dr Who’s tardis. It hits the target sometimes, but it seems to have rather poor aim when she tries to do it deliberately.

    I imagine no one would want to use it to reliably avoid time paradoxes.

  38. Mike says:

    T.O.M. – this UA story HAS gone on way too long. Each month when solicitations roll around, it’s like “STILL?”. When you know you are at least another 3 months out and the story is still going on – and it’s already been what, three, four, five or more months?

  39. Steven Grant says:

    I don’t read many Marvel comics these days but thought I’d check this one out. Would’ve been nice if it had actually had some sort of, you know, point. Would’ve been nice if someone had actually explained a) where Xavier Jr. came from; b) why one group of future mutants thought the future was so damn terrible while another dug it no end & what we saw of it looked lovely (as opposed to every other Marvel future subset of Hell On Earth); c) what the future Brotherhood expected to gain from their shenanigans; c) why sending the originals back to 19?? failed for no discernable reason (unless we take wild, unsubstantiated speculation as gospel truth); and I’m sure there are other things I’ve already forgotten.

    I’m officially sick to death of the now incredibly repetitive gimmick of “I, the villain who believes I’m the hero, will show you what “they” really think of you by unleashing masses of “their” weapons on you when they haven’t.” Why is this bit of inane sophistry seized on so often these days? “See, they’re trying to kill you all, except they’re not, it’s just me showing you they could, so get ready to die because if you don’t I expect you to blame the whole incident on them.”

    You mention the point of the story is the originals all jump ship to Cyclops’ team. But they don’t. Kitty goes there, because she doesn’t want to be on Wolverine’s team anymore (though exactly what she’s so pissed off about kind of gets lost in all the hubbub, & I didn’t go back to see what she was complaining about, all I remember is how nobody trusted her or listened to her. How could they over all that cacophony? The originals don’t go to be with Cyclops or Magneto, they go to be with Kitty. So even that “point” is pretty moot.

    I understand now I misunderstood the objective of the story to be returning the originals to their proper place in time & unraveling the implicit mess their absence from the timeline past that point creates. From what I read the objective was Brownian motion. Now I’m assuming, given the masses of time knots Marvel’s tying across their line, that somewhere following Infinity in The Line Wide Crossover That Never Ends there will be a subset dealing with modern Marvel time hash. From the way things are building their only option by then will be Crisis On Infinite Marvel Earths.

  40. Steven Grant says:

    Oh, yeah, one last thing: it’d be nice if this vast array of oppressed mutants could act like adults once in awhile instead of complete ******* babies all the time… That was the main thing I came away from Battle Of The Atom with: not one of them is capable of mature thought or strategic action… Just react, react, react programmatically & get pissed off when you don’t get the desired end instantly…

  41. The original Matt says:

    19xx? Surely it’d be 2000 by now?

    Mike: did uncanny x-force feel like this? I read it in bulk once the series wrapped up and loved it, but I can imagine the dark angel saga feeling this bloated monthly.

  42. moose n squirrel says:

    The Angel Saga did feel a lot like this, but it helped that it came pretty far into the series’ run, and saw a number of shorter, smaller-stakes stories before then. I think part of what’s offputting about UA is that they’re doing their equivalent of the Dark Angel Saga – their big, definitive, “epic” arc – arc the second story in the run, which is going to make the series as a whole feel more bloated.

  43. Thom H. says:

    It also helped that the Dark Angel Saga was pretty much non-stop amazing storytelling with beautiful art. It was the final arc of Uncanny X-Force that seemed to take 800 years to finish, partly because it just wasn’t that interesting to begin with.

  44. jay says:

    I’m officially dropping all Bendis-written Marvel titles. Every title’s a waste of $4, with useless dialogue, and little story progression. Not worth my time.

    I enjoy Jason Aaron’s x-books. Marvel’s wasting his talents by having him plod thru Bendes’s not-so-well-thought-out plots.

  45. The original Matt says:

    I read Bendis books in serial from secret invasion, through dark reign. God that was painful. I like his avengers run (until heroic age) but its written for trade. No way in hell am I buying his X titles at full price.

  46. Matt C. says:

    “The Angel Saga did feel a lot like this, but it helped that it came pretty far into the series’ run, and saw a number of shorter, smaller-stakes stories before then. I think part of what’s offputting about UA is that they’re doing their equivalent of the Dark Angel Saga – their big, definitive, “epic” arc – arc the second story in the run, which is going to make the series as a whole feel more bloated.”

    While I agree that UA feels a bit bloated because it’s getting epic too soon, do note that the Dark Angel Saga started with issue #10. Not really that far in.

    The BOTA crossover was absolute dreck and incredibly disappointing. I was hoping for a definitive ending regarding the Original Five (either sending them back on their way, or having them somehow replace their current counterparts). Instead, nothing changes. The only new character we get is Kymera, probably because she could easily exist in the current 616 universe without any explanation. I’m really disappointed that they got rid of Xorn Jean, would’ve been an interesting way to re-introduce an adult Jean, but with a new interesting character twist. Instead we get a bunch of issues of non-explained motivations and nothing happening. Kitty’s heel turn out of nowhere at the end was the exclamation point.

  47. Arndt says:

    The time/space continuum collapse is covered in

    Superior Spider-Man
    Uncanny Avengers
    Hickman Avengers
    Hickman New Avengers
    Cable and X-Force
    Indestructible Hulk
    Bendis Comics

    Am I missing any? It’s a little hard to care.

  48. Adam Farrar says:

    Either Remender is losing his ability to write short stories or he doesn’t have an editor who is willing to reign him in. His stories used to be stories that had an epic scope but flew by but over the course of Uncanny X-Force his stories began to bloat and drag. UX-Force told five stories in its first ten issues, The Dark Angel Saga in its next ten, three stories in six issues, and then Final Execution in the last ten issues. During his Secret Avengers run, Remender essentially told two stories: three issues of AVX between fourteen issues of the Descendants.

    He started Uncanny Avengers with a four issue story and now we’re ten issues into this (including 8AU) story with at least another three issues (through January’s #16). This story started in March!

    As has been said, if the story used its pages we wouldn’t necessarily complain about the length but most of the story has been characters explaining or debating what other characters said or did. The heroes have exercised and traveled around to see destruction and survived a few attempts on their lives but what else? The villains have been mostly sitting around and talking amongst themselves for several issues. There are several characters (heroes and villains) who didn’t appear in this issue but we did get several pages of LAFFS with Hearing-Damaged Captain America hanging out while Wasp and Havok flirted (which I don’t find interesting or believable).

    I just wanted to see Remender follow up with Warren Worthington’s kids in a fun time travel adventure. I got everything but the “fun.”

  49. Jon Dubya says:

    “Bendis Does Time-travel” pretty much garenteed that I would be skipping this crossover. Since the big “climax” is Kitty and the 05 (God, it sounds like a Motown group) defecting to Scott’s team, it sounds like I didn’t miss much.

    “(Besides, if everyone else is that adamant that the kids should go home, what does that say about how they feel about her presence?)”

    That they wouldn’t miss her much. After all, Rachel has had extremely long absences from the books (like YEARS at a time) without any of the X-Men doing more than shrugging (her lengthy disappearance during Mutant Massacre, Exaclibur 75, and New Starjammers rose nary a concern about our barely-tolerated starchild.)

    Actually now that I think about it Rachel DID try to go back to the (or at least “a”) future during the Excalibur storyline and was then unceremoniously dumped back here after a decade. So it wouldn’t be that hypocritical of her if she did try to shoo the O5 back home.

  50. The original Matt says:

    Adam Farrar pretty much nailed the uncanny avengers problem. It’ll read great in one sitting, no doubt, but for a story that’s been going since march, we should be a lot further along. This is the kind of book that’s using its page count, but not keeping an eye on its shipping schedule. I’m assuming this story should have been done with prior to both infinity and battle of the atom. There will certainly be continuity glitches if it comes afterwards.

    The first arc was tight and restrained. Each issue got us from point A to B. Then the current arc has a break point to come out over 2 collections. One issue ended with wolverine impaled by daken, and it’s not followed up with in the next issue. This is weekly shipping schedule storytelling on a monthly schedule. It was my favourite title at marvel NOW! launch, but I just want it to get a fucking move on now.

    (I still can’t say marvel now. I have to do the Paul and Al “marvel NOW!”, even when I just read it in my head.)

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