Wolverine and the X-Men #42 – “Graduated?”
The end of the road, then. It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on Wolverine and the X-Men, which wraps up Jason Aaron’s run with two epilogue issues, in advance of next week’s (!) relaunch with Latour and Asrar.
While Aaron may be sticking around over on Amazing X-Men, which shares a similarly relaxed attitude to sanity, this is more than just creator reshuffling. Despite its name, Wolverine and the X-Men was never really about Wolverine and the X-Men at all. It was about the school. Marvel finally got a book about the trainees to work – albeit by the slightly questionable device of marketing it as something else. Unsurprisingly, the final issue goes for the ever popular graduation day theme – an excellent way of marking a symbolic turning point for some of the characters while leaving the school in place to grind happily on for the next creative team.
The focus is – well, arguably, the focus is on the fact that it’s an artistic jam issue, with contributions from a bunch of artists who have contributed to the series over its run, naturally ending with a couple of pages by original artist Chris Bachalo. The results are a little patchy, particularly on the opening pages, which really do look as though the deadline must have been unreasonably short. But there are some strong sequences in here too, such as a lovely establishing shot of everyone arriving for the graduation ceremony.
In story terms, though, this issue is mainly about Quentin Quire’s horror at the thought of graduation. To him, it signifies that he’s been assimilated and has lost the rebel identity he prizes so much. But ultimately he accepts his award, however ambivalently – and a series of flash forwards to the far future have a still-obnoxious Quentin helping to keep the school going when Wolverine is on the verge of throwing in the towel. Ultimately the series comes down on the side of telling us that Quentin is growing up and deep down he knows this is a good thing, even if right now he sees it mainly as an inevitability he has to come to terms with.
As well as making a nice resolution for Quentin’s arc over the course of this series, it’s a neat metaphor for the wrap-up of the book itself, which often adopted the sort of demented anarchism that he would have approved of. Nobody could accuse Wolverine and the X-Men of lacking its own voice, or of being in thrall to the X-books’ house style. If anything, the biggest question mark over this book has always been its tendency to push absurdity too far and undercut its emotional core. I remain thoroughly unconvinced about the Hellfire kids, for example, who had just drifted too far from any sort of recognisable human behaviour to work as characters even within this book’s frame of reference. And their prominence over the course of this book’s run is a problem.
But thankfully this final issue avoids most of those pitfalls and plays to the elements of Aaron’s run that worked the best. It seems likely that this will go down as one of the more important X-Men runs, if only because of the work it’s done in establishing the tone and style of the school itself, something which seems set to be a feature of the franchise going forward (not least because there’s a school in the movies). Between this and Schism itself, Aaron has left an impact on the X-Men, and one largely for the better. The franchise is certainly in a better state now than it was in the middle of the Utopia phase when everyone was sitting on a rock wondering about extinction. Aaron has brought some joy back to the whole thing.
An aside: as I’ve been switching to digital with each progressive X-book relaunch, this issue also has the dubious distinction of being the last one I’m buying in hard copy. Digital may not be perfect – it still struggles to deal with double page spreads in particular – but the advantages of convenience, portability, easy access to back issues without filling a room with the damn things, and not having any adverts, all comfortably outweigh that. If I really want a permanent hard copy to put on a shelf, I’ll buy the trade – but not on the first release, not at those prices.
Maybe it’s an unfortunate coincidence that my final print issue has a rather obvious printing defect in the form of a dirty great line running across the centre spread. Or maybe it’s just karma. Either way, this is the end of an era in more ways than one.
Print absolutely blows, especially the prices, as well as the prices coupled with the lower quality paper.
Good riddance!
I love digital. Thursday morning I wake up, buy comics and read them before I get out of bed. Oh. Fuck. Yeah.
I really enjoyed this run. Aaron and Remender are the reason why I came back to comics after a few years hiatus. It genuinely put a dampener on my day when I learned Aaron was leaving this title. I’m glad he’s continuing with Amazing, and his Thor is probably my favourite Marvel title at present.
In 2 minds about whether to pick up the next volume. I actually like the new kids, but the title was very defined by Aaron’s voice.
I choose digital now for everything but those books that put “extras” in the print version (saga, fatale/criminal, …).
I get a hefty discount from my store so I’m still buying print copies. I love the Marvel 3.99 digital code, those books get bagged and boarded right away.
If digital went down in price I’d probably give up on buying print also.
I really liked the second to last issue, the one featuring Toad. Poor Toad. “I tried calling Cyclops. Even… Magneto. But they must not have got my messages, ’cause I haven’t heard back.”
Although, man–is there any character in the Marvel U who has had a more radically shifting character model than Toad?
I love print comics, and probably always will. Digital can’t compete with the feel and smell of a new comic in my hands. And there are enough sales around here that I can just wait to get the more expensive issues for 1/2 off cover price. Long live print! 🙂
Also:
“Although, man–is there any character in the Marvel U who has had a more radically shifting character model than Toad?”
Secondary mutation?
“I love the Marvel 3.99 digital code, those books get bagged and boarded right away.”
Ah, yes, the fanboy who buys comics for all the wrong reasons.
The first few issues were great. Then it went a bit nuts. It started to re-discover its original promise toward the end.
Overall, I have mixed feelings about the book. I would say that its treatment of Quire was good on its own terms, but poor in the context of what had gone before. Similarly, characters like Idie and Genesis didn’t behave how we would have expected them to behave based on previous appearances.
Lots of the new characters seemed silly. Shark Girl? Eye boy? Snot? Kade Kilgore? There was zaniness for zaniness’ sake. I expect that they will die in some crossover in 2016 and nobody will notice.
The Quire/Idie romance was a little creepy and so was the bondage costume that 14 year old Idie (who makes Molly Hayes seem mature) wore as the Black Queen of the Hellfire Club. I have not been keeping track but surely Quire is 17/18 at this point?
But we had the Bamfs, space casinos, Kid Gladiator, murderous alien biologists, Krakatoa, Toad and Broo. His Wolverine was fun. The good outweighed the bad.
Schism – on the other hand – was a mess. A good idea executed poorly with nobody but Aaron to blame.
reading something that is designed for paper on any sort of computer screen just does not work for me.
“Ah, yes, the fanboy who buys comics for all the wrong reasons.”
Yes I bag and board my books. I have for 30 years. I have sold exactly 0 of my books in that time. Excuse me for wanting to care for things I enjoy and take pride in.
Take your cynicism and snide comment and just pretend you can’t read my posts. Have a lovely day on your pedestal.
Is there anyone who reads print comics at this point that DOESN’T bag and board them?
Jam issues are those weird things that you know the people involved had a great time making, but those of us expected to pay for the things just get them because it’s just the next chapter.
I stopped bagging and boarding years ago when i bought print.
I also sold almost all of my books (40-50 long boxes equivalent) over last few years.
Amazing to think all of those books would theoretically fit digitally on a hard drive i could keep in my shoulder bag.
@errant razor – Me. And as comics more than 10 years old practically come apart in my hands, I’m starting to think this may be a mistake.
I guess the “finally” is applicable, if we’re just going a couple of iterations back, but it’s not like the junior X-Men concept is historically riddled with flops, especially if we’re looking at the school-focused books. New Mutants and Generation X had nice, long runs. Academy X had a longer run than WatXM and ended with higher numbers in the end without having to double ship (though, admittedly, this is not taking the digital marketplace into account; if one accepts the 15% rule of thumb for digital sales, they’re about even).
Where the trainee concept tended to faceplant was where the junior teams had zero relevance to the main X-Titles. New Mutants, GenX, and Academy all felt as if they were taking place just half a step off from the events of the core X-title, while WatX was at one point advertised as being a core X-Book.
By contrast, Young X-Men was literally a book about the least popular kid X-Men and some overpowered newbies taking on laughable threats that were beneath the paygrade of the real X-Men. Generation Hope had what was perhaps the least-likable main character the franchise had produced in the last ten years taking another group of undeveloped new characters out on adventures that strongly read as being place-holders until the main books got around to the next big event. I don’t see how it came as a surprise to anyone that they sank quickly, let alone performed less well than a book that was initially launched as a flagship title and had Wolverine’s name on the cover.
Sorry, it’s just something that gets under my skin every time someone points out how the junior X-Titles don’t sell.
Anyway, I was another one that bought the first few issues of WatXM and was turned off early on by the uneven tone and Jason Aaron’s weak points as a writer, not to mention the absence and/or character maiming of the junior crew that I did care about. (Seriously, Quire & co graduate to full X-Men status after being at the school for about five minutes, but out of the NXM/GenHope crew, only Pixie makes the cut?) I won’t be picking up the new iteration, as it looks like Latour is picking up where Aaron left off in terms of story beats and general zaniness.
Wow. Young X-Men! I’d forgotten all about that series. The characters created for that book appear nowhere. Graymalkin was seen in WatX issue one and that’s like the last I remember them. It seems to have even killed the characters that had some following like rockslide and anole.
I guess I’d look at WatX as a book I enjoyed but it came close to being dropped around AvX. It did something’s really well like these past to wrap ups but when it missed for me it was a real bad experience. The AvX book with Kitty and Peter was probably the lowest point I had with it.
I was OK with most of the cartoony things this book did (even if I didn’t necessarily like them), except when it tried to really hammer the “this is a real school” idea. Case in point, how is it that someone can graduate without realizing they’re graduating until their name is called during the ceremony? What is graduation even supposed to mean in this setting? I’m hoping LaTour dials the tone back to something more like Claremont and Lobdell had in their student series, which were light while keeping their basic settings grounded.
@Tdubs
The Young X-Men were actually on my mind because I had to reread that run for some RPG research this week. It makes me sad. I actually like most of those kids (Blindfold was the only outlier for me of the established characters) and the book inherited the Academy X numbers iirc, but it really does read like a step-by-step in how to lose an audience in 12 issues or less. Take the least popular characters from a more popular book, repeat the least popular story beat from the previous iteration, neglect to give the book any defining direction, make the cast look like idiots, introduce mysterious, overpowered characters retroactively inserted into the X-Men mythos and let their stories have the spotlight, etc.
It’s certainly not the worst thing I’ve ever seen, but it was a deeply unsatisfying read that reminded me why I left it on the shelf way back when.
In my memory it stands as a attempt to take a good series and add a bump to it from the success of Young Avengers. It had a nice twist in the beginning and the final arc set Sand up as a potential big player. Guggenheim and the art were not bad either. It just isolated itself from what worked and took itself out of the x universe. I picked it up as a whole run for six bucks two years ago, read it all in maybe an hour and didn’t regret it.
“reading something that is designed for paper on any sort of computer screen just does not work for me.”
You must love all those printed advertisements you can see so much clearly on the printed page. I sure hate flipping from digital comic page to digital comic page with no advertisements to break the flow, it’s horrible.
Timing being what it is, there’s a sale on this run over at the ‘Ology. For my part, and having only read an issue here and there in the Panini reprinthology, I liked the bits with Husk and Toad. Aaron’s funny, though.
I’m not sure how you graduate without some kind of accreditation/oversight/exam. Maybe the Jean Grey is one of Pob’s new academy schools, and it gets to make its own rules. Maybe they do some kind of Braddockalaureate.
I used to bag and often board comics. I haven’t for a while. I’ve not been taking care of things as well as I used to, sadly. I rarely minded the adverts, as long as they weren’t inserted into the comics – truth, Harley Davison, etc. – and as long as they weren’t too comicky. Man, when I was a yout’, those ads were a literal metaphorical window into another world. TV shows we didn’t get, Fantastic Four “Tootie Fruitee”-style “candy,” Transformer toys unavailable over here. Kool-Aid. Kool-Aid! I’d heard of it, but never tasted it until Marvel gave it away with issues of Clone Saga Spider-Man! One of my pals was on a year’s foreign study from Georgetown, and for him it was a little piece of home (that he never drank because, ew).
I buy a couple of series on digi now – Captain Marvel, Young Avengers, Wonder Woman, others – but only when the ‘Ology drops the price in one of their regular sales. I’m not sure I value them quite as much as I should – I haven’t been back to read the whole of Wonder Woman, Classic Transformers, the digital code Spideys, etc. since I bought them. I think it’s just that I don’t really set aside time to read as often as I should, and if I’m on the tablet, there’s a good chance I’ll have the sketchpad open. What can I say? Fingerpainting is so much more fun when you don’t have to clean up afterwards.
I still wear the tabard, though. For Hawkeye.
For Hawkeye.
//\H/\\
For the most part I did like this book, although at times I felt like I needed to take Ritalin because so much was happening all at once. After the dour Decimation phase, it was good to have a X-Men book that didn’t take itself to serious and be somewhat fun.
I don’t mind advertisements — after 30+ years of reading comics it’s second nature to skip them. The print/digital divide is certainly at least partly a generational issue, right?
Also, I bag and board comics that I know I’m going to want to keep for the long haul (e.g., Nowhere Men, Saga, Sex Criminals, Young Avengers). I will — and in some cases, already have — reread them again and again. Other series get stashed in a box to give away or sell back. Just wanted to contribute my 2 cents about that.
As long as we’re talking about WATX, though, can we give a big shout-out to Nick Bradshaw? I’d never even heard of him before, and I was blown away by his beautiful artwork. His sense of design was really amazing, and his storytelling was very clear. I hope he draws something else I like/can tolerate soon.
Can we talk about how Anole became chairman of Worthington Industries off panel?
As for digital, I use simple Comic on a laptop and I find the experience pretty enjoyable. I find myself downloading titles to try I wouldn’t otherwise. And some titles, like Private Eye, that are designed for that format are very easy to read. Not to mention, the majority of coloring is done digitally. In fact, increasingly all the artwork is done digitally. I might suggest that books like Saga look better on the screen as a result.
Now that the New York Times has abandoned “pages” in its online edition, and gone fully into scroll mode, isn’t it time that digital comics be designed that way?
No reason it can’t be a left-to-right scroll, instead of a top-to-bottom scroll.
@joseph
I could swear I remember a scene where the current flower child version of Warren realized he was useless as a businessman and basically said “I don’t wanna be boss anymore – you do it” to whomever happened to be standing nearest at the time. I may be completely imagining that, though.
@zzz, I remember a board room scene but I dont remember Anole becoming the boss. Reminds me of when Sunspot was shuffled into limbo late in x-force.
Speaking of Angel, haven’t seen him do much lately.
Thinking about it these last few days, the Legacy stories dealing with Rogue and the kids were actually quite decent. I’d like to see a junion title by Mike Carey. Ideally not set at the school.
Speaking of Sunspot, I was surprised to see him explicitly referred to as “invulnerable” in this week’s Avengers AI. Wasn’t his deal that he was strong but NOT invulnerable? Did that change at some point?
And Comixology just showed the down side to digital comics.
Email notice of a security breach, with a request for users to set new passwords.
Except… I now apparently don’t have a Comixology account anymore. Asked it to reset my password, and never got the email with the reset link. (The site gives you a message saying that the email has been sent to the supplied address, but it gives that message regardless of whether or not you give a valid email address.)
So, unless their security breach has led to their password reset service breaking, I can only assume that my account has been stolen. Luckily, I hadn’t actually bought anything from Comixology yet, and only had a catalog of free titles, but yeah…
EDIT: Okay, it looks like the reset service *is* running slow. I finally got a reset email. Except I guess it was for the first attempt from about an hour ago, before I tried a second time, as the provided link is expired.
So maybe in another hour I’ll get the link from the second attempt, and maybe it will work.
But still, a definite minus on the digital side of comics.
That’s a minus for digital anything. But that’s the world we live in now.
@Jerry Ray
He should have some type of invulnerability. I mean, otherwise, he’d smash is own fists to pulp every time he punched stone or steel. It’s kind of tricky in his case…
Sunspot got a major powerup way back in the 90s. He’s been super-tough, flying and shooting energy ever since.
Loved Young X-men and Academy X. Wished this series had thst feel or at least made the students look like teenagers and not like 9 year olds, blech.
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