Uncanny Avengers vol 2-4 – “Apocalypse Twins” / “Ragnarok Now” / “Avenge The Earth”
It’s been some time since we checked in with Uncanny Avengers. But then, it’s been some time since Uncanny Avengers finished a story. These three volumes collect a story – not a multi-story arc, but a single story – that began in issue #5 last April (actually an epilogue in vol 1), and ran without interruption until issue #22 last week.
This is a story pitched unequivocally at an epic scale. Multi-book crossovers aside, I can’t remember the last time we had a single story of this length. Picking up stray plot threads from his X-Force run, Rick Remender starts relatively small, then dials up the scale to breaking point and beyond.
This is Remender’s Kang story, with all the circular logic and time travel that that implies. Here’s the bare bones. Back in X-Force, Archangel (as the new Apocalypse) had two children who were taken off by Apocalypse cultists. Apparently, had Kang not got involved, the Twins would have emerged as the protectors of mutantkind to defeat Red Onslaught in the upcoming Axis crossover. They then go on to block Kang’s conquest of the world. Having been unable to erase them from history, Kang comes up with a plan to abduct them as babies and raise them himself, in an effort to shape their whole worldview.
The result is that the Twins – though they hate Kang and consciously distrust him – still end up convinced that humans will always hate mutants, and that the only permanent solution is segregation. So they’re going to rapture all the mutants up to a spaceship and take them to start a new life somewhere else. Problem solved, as far as Kang is concerned. Unfortunately, Kang has pushed the Twins a bit far, so they add a further stage to the plan: destroy the Earth, purely to spite Kang. So the Twins travel to the present, set up a barrier to prevent time travel (so Kang can’t interfere), and kill a Celestial using a magic axe that Thor stupidly enchanted as a youngster, in order to bring the wrath of the space gods down on earth.
The Avengers Unity Squad are supposed to be stopping all this, but turn out to be as dysfunctional as ever, and eventually implode completely when X-Force’s murder of the earlier child Apocalypse comes to light. The Avengers fail to get their act together, the mutants are duly raptured, and the Earth is destroyed. Five years down the line, the surviving Avengers finally manage to turn off the Twins’ time travel blocker, which allows Kang to finally enter the story directly. Kang sends the Avengers’ minds back to their present-day bodies, and the Avengers save the world using Kang’s plan. Kang tries a power grab to gain the power of a Celestial himself, but gets thwarted and driven into retreat. There’s a lot more to the details – including a lot of character work for the team members, and a whole subplot about the Legion of the Unliving – but this is the general thrust.
It’s tempting to suggest that where some people are writing for the trade, Rick Remender has started writing for the omnibus. But that would be unfair. In fact, when you re-read it as a whole, it becomes obvious just how far this story is written for the single issues. Despite the length of the story, it’s hardly stretching out its plot – if anything, it’s overcomplicating things at times in order to make sure it fits a big moment into every issue. And where many writers increasingly seem to assume that readers have the previous ten issues committed to memory (as if they had only just read the whole story in one sitting), Remender is at pains throughout this story to keep reiterating crucial plot points. It’s not full-bore plot recaps, but it’s a story that keeps pausing to jog the reader’s memory in a way that’s become somewhat unfashionable.
The story’s epic scale, then, is no mere artefact of decompression. Were it not for the already protracted length, in fact, it might have benefited from decompressing a little bit more; it’s often epic in a writerly way more than a visual one, with the art grinding away on the detailed plot mechanics where other stories might have made more room for big widescreen moments. I wonder whether Daniel Acuna is the best fit for a story like this, given that he’s always struck me as better on the small scale; but his remit here largely calls for clarity in a complex story, and he delivers on that, as well as bringing some life to characters who could easily have got lost in the welter of plot points.
And Remender probably doesn’t want this story to have too much room to breathe, given that it’s an exercise in continually building the tension up to the destruction of Earth. That said, there’s also some fiddly stuff that feels like it’s there to keep the heroes occupied until the earth gets destroyed, or which just seems a little bit overcomplicated – much of the stuff with the Legion of the Unliving in vol 2, or the Twins’ rather odd powers that rarely play into anything, or a point about the timeline dividing into seven futures which I can only assume is going to pay off down the road. There was room to play with there.
So what was the point of all this? On the face of it, the moral which the story keeps hammering again and again is that the humans and the mutants need to work together if they’re going to save the world. So “we’re better working together”, then. And indeed, Remender duly repeats that theme at various levels: the Avengers and the X-Men, the humans and the mutants, even the Twins themselves (who are more powerful as a duo).
But you don’t do a year-plus storyline just for that. After all, in itself, it’s not a moral so much as a genre convention. And more to the point, the heroes already know that humans and mutants should be working together. This is not a lesson they need to learn. It’s literally the point of their team.
Besides, that basic lesson wouldn’t have much to do with Kang, who is after all the main villain of this story. The Twins destroy the Earth, but they’re still ultimately just pawns in his scheme. There’s a distinct implication that but for Kang’s interference they might even have turned out as heroes; they would at least have saved their people from what’s coming in Axis. But Kang has deliberately screwed them up in a way that they can’t think past, even when they’re aware of the problem.
Kang, like the Red Skull in the first volume, is serving here simply as an opposing force. Remender has pretty much zero interest in him as a fully rounded character, and quite right too. Kang is not a compelling villain because of his rich inner life (not that the approach hasn’t been tried). As a person, he’s a one-dimensional conqueror. Rather, the hook with Kang is the kind of threat he presents. We covered this territory a few weeks back in relation to All-New X-Men, but at root, Kang represents a threat to the story itself. He can alter his own past with apparent impunity; and his solution to any problem he faces is to go back and change history.
There’s an obvious meta reading of characters like Kang, which I think actually is tacitly present in the story itself. Although what Kang does is called time travel, the reality of what he does is to step outside the story and mess about with the narrative itself. What he does screws with the rules of cause and effect that normally form the ground rules for storytelling. He’s a threat to the internal logic of stories who potentially renders everything meaningless. Partly, that’s a source of existential horror; but another major part of the appeal of time travel paradox stories is precisely the fact that they don’t make sense when judged by strictly conventional standards. The fraying of the story at the edges is the frisson. Kang’s function is simply to personify that (and thus avoid the problem All-New currently has, as a superhero comic where the main threat is vague and abstract).
Incidentally, Kang’s speech in the final chapter about his sense of honour dovetails rather neatly with this reading. According to Kang, the reason why he doesn’t just go back and guarantee his own victory is that he feels obliged to ensure that his opponents are defeated by their own choices. So, for example, he could go back, steal the scroll with Odin’s anti-Celestial spell, and make his own magic axe – but it’s much better to trick Thor into doing it. Even better, he does so by posing as Loki, out of all the potential candidates – making sure that Thor knows perfectly well there must be an ulterior motive.
Kang behaves in this way because of the practical limit on what he can do: he can rewrite the story, but it has to remain in some sense a story. “Kang wins, the end” is not a story. All this, I think, is tacitly understood by readers in order for the likes of Kang to function as villains at all. So while he’s not subject to the ground rules of the story itself, he’s still subject to wider underlying ground rules, and that’s why he can ultimately be beaten.
But I digress. Returning to the “working together” theme: this is not a story about how the heroes learn to put their differences aside and working together. It’s a story about how the heroes, despite being well aware that they ought to put their differences aside and work together, prove unable to do so. They only manage it at the end because Kang nudges them in the right direction, and their victory there is subverted by having to follow Kang’s plan, and by needing to rope in the dementedly anti-mutant Sentry to do the heavy lifting. And by the fact that all they do is kick the problem down the road a bit, by having Thor kill Celestial #2 in pretty much the same way that the Twins killed the first one, presumably guaranteeing that Celestial #3 will be showing up in the not too distant future. It’s far from a convincing win for the good guys; it’s a scrape by.
So, if we tie all this together, is the idea that the Apocalypse Twins can’t escape from the worldview Kang ingrained into them, even though they know they can’t trust him, and by analogy humans and mutants can’t co-operate because merely being conscious of a history of mutual distrust is not enough to overcome that ingrained distrust? In which case Kang, as the manipulator on the cosmic scale of the story, is standing as a metaphor for those forces on the smaller scale.
Cutting against that are character arcs for the Avengers themselves which seem designed to tie the group together in future and work towards them becoming a proper team (in which case the book’s wider thesis is presumably “it’s easier said than done, but we’ll get there in the end”). Remender’s take on Rogue is dubious in terms of the way the character’s been written in the last few years, but if you’re willing to look past that, she works in her role as the loose cannon who despises Wanda and isn’t that keen on any of the rest of the Avengers either. The final issue interposes her as a blocking character between Wanda and Simon, in a way that locks the trio together for a while. Havok and Wasp are left with memories of five years in a delete future in which they got married and had a kid, who is still apparently with Kang, no doubt to be rescued in future stories. There’s strong character work in these issues, even if I’ve largely skipped over it in this review.
(Sidenote: the kid doesn’t entirely make sense. Why do Alex and Janet have a child in a timeline they’re proposing to delete? Kang claims that he manipulated them into having the child so that he could use her as leverage to force them to play along with his plan. But how did he do that, exactly? Particularly as the time travel barrier would have prevented him travelling to the point where she was conceived?)
It’s a long, long story in monthly form – probably too long. In that sense it reads better as a collection. I was certainly tiring of it a while before it reached the end. But on re-reading the whole story and thinking it over a bit… it’s grown on me. There are some ideas in here beyond the mere scale, and beyond the superficial moral that it seems at first glance to be pushing.
I think that’s my favorite analysis of Kang’s function–and a nice commentary on why Bendis’ time travel stories aren’t quite working for me. The story still ran a bit long for my tastes, but I think I can appreciate it more now.
I’ve got a plot question, though–what happened to the resurrected Banshee? I kind of lost track of him at some point, and it seems kind of a shame if Sentry, Daken, and the Grim Reaper get a pass back and he doesn’t. (Though I suppose it’s depressingly fitting.)
This was a really great analysis of the story. I worry about ascribing too much agency to Marvel’s interest in time travel, though I’d like to hope that there is conscious awareness of what the line is doing as a whole on the part of the X-Office.
It might have been the length or the timing of issues coming out, but I’m trying to put my finger on why this run, and frankly all of Remender’s work that led to this (including his X-Force run), feels so overlooked compared to the equivalent Avengers stories that were running at the time. There are some flaws in the plotting and dialogue work that Remender does that irks me a bit (the whole Rogue vs. Scarlet Witch thing), but there are enough significant players on stage for it to be a big event. Certainly, the length of the story alone speaks to it. Maybe there’s a lot of promotion following the Red Skull arc that I just missed. At any rate, I was curious. It was a good, though overly long, storyline.
Paul, great write-up. I was surprised when you said at the end that it had “grown on you.” It sure sounded like you really liked it.
I changed formats right at the end of Vol. 3 and so haven’t read it in full, but I really loved Vol. 2-3 and am sure I will love Vol. 4 as well. I think this run is definitely on par with Uncanny X-Force writing-wise, but the inconsistent (and sometimes ill-suited) art brings it down a few notches.
I can’t get behind any story that brings back the Sentry.
To clarify, if you think Kang represents a threat to the narrative, then the Sentry and Daken should give storytellers nightmares for years to come.
I think Bendis and Remender have written Daken well, proving that he’s not a bad character when used naturally as a foil for Wolverine. He’s less effective as his own protagonist; Sabretooth suffered from similarly poor character development in the 90s.
I guess I’ve never been totally sure where all the Sentry hate comes from. His original miniseries was great. His appearances in Avengers were boring but the blandness was intentionally misleading.
The Sentry hate comes from the fact that he screws up the nerd tapestry for the people who care about that sort of thing. His “forgotten” presence in Marvel history is an affront to their continuity obsession that can’t be tolerated. I used to know a guy online who just would not shut up about a throwaway line that said Sentry had apparently defeated Galactus at some point. The context or circumstances of that fight have never been revealed, but apparently just the presence of that extra loss on Galactus’s fight card was enough for Sentry to be the worst idea ever.
Short version of the above: Some people have stupid priorities.
I think a larger problem is that many readers remain to be convinced that the concept works as a recurring character rather than a one off story. Put another way, the strength of the concept is arguably too bound up with the original story to lend itself to sequels.
(The strength of the original series being the idea that he was a central part of the MU who was erased from the audience’s memory. That trick can’t be repeated. Without it, the Sentry is just a lunatic Superman knock off, which is fine for the sort of role he plays in this series, but not particularly compelling when he’s front and centre.)
There’s also the way the Sentry tends to break the plot of any story he’s in. Bendis tended to use him in the Avengers titles to arbitrarily resolve the plot, for example.
And then there’s the way his origin story keeps being revised to add a new twist: he’s a forgotten Messiah! He’s really got an Antichrist alter ego! He’s a junkie who drank a super-serum! His blood can make anyone else into a Superman knockoff! He may be God HImself, direct from the book of Exodus!
In the end, there’s just not much of a consistent character there to care about, but at the same time the Sentry’s gimmick and power level make him, by default, the most important character in any plot in which he appears. Sentry stories boil down to being metafictional twists, and after the first such twist the substitute versions really didn’t have the same payoff or significance.
He’s a character who breaks stories, but after the first round, he doesn’t break them in particularly interesting or insightful ways.
As for Daken, he’s one more “dark mirror of Wolverine,” when pretty much every major Wolverine villain — Sabretooth, Omega Red, Lady Deathstrike — is similarly someone with an analogous or tie-in origin who enjoys amoral murder. Once we learned that Logan was willing to kill the kid, Daken stops being much more interesting than, say, Wild Child.
“There’s also the way the Sentry tends to break the plot of any story he’s in. Bendis tended to use him in the Avengers titles to arbitrarily resolve the plot, for example.”
That’s not an inherent problem with the Sentry, though, any more than it’s an inherent problem with Superman. It’s about how you use him.
“In the end, there’s just not much of a consistent character there to care about…”
This is true, but it doesn’t preclude him being an interesting foil for other characters. I think there are ways of using him that work, but not where we’re supposed to care about his feelings.
I’m ages behind on this book, but that is a really encouraging write-up. It’s really refreshing to see an epic long-form story instead of the usual ‘fit x amount of issues into a trade’. It’s also great to hear about that despite the length, the relative lack of decompression, which unfortunately is a bit of plague amount a lot of series these days.
The description on Kang was excellent, and on the whole, I really hope that Remender’s stock keeps growing.
I got pretty fed-up with The Sentry once Bendis kept trying to shoe-horn him into any available Avengers book that he was writing, whereby he was generally incredibly mopey until that one moment he was needed to save the day. Plus his ‘funeral’ issue was one of the worst books I have ever read.
Is The Void still inside Cyclops’ head by the way? Was anything really done with that? Or is that one of the things we are meant to pretend didn’t happen?
I’ve no desire to see Daken back in any form whatsoever, as he just brings back way too many bad memories: Romulus, Jeph Loeb, Daniel Way.
The Cyclops/Void thing has never been followed up (though if you were going to, it sure might be useful to have Sentry around).
Sentry claims in this story that he no longer has the Void in him, but he’s stark raving mad in this story even by his standards, so it’s far from clear that we’re supposed to take him at his word. He seems to believe it, but then he also believes he’s a cosmically appointed protector of mankind against the scourge of mutants.
That’s not an inherent problem with the Sentry, though, any more than it’s an inherent problem with Superman. It’s about how you use him.
I agree that it’s not an inherent problem with the Sentry, and I agree that the character needs to be used as more than a handy plot device or a set of powers (in which case he’s not terribly different than Hyperion, Gladiator, Nefaria, or any of Marvel’s other Superman manques.)
Part of the problem may be the whole “Void” concept, where it’s almost built in to the character that he goes mad and becomes a nigh-omnipotent villain after a while. Oddly enough, he’s the sort of character I think could be served well by Remender given his knack for giving characters distinctive lunacies with a cracked logic all their own, as opposed to arbitrary actions excused by insanity.
I definitely don’t think Bendis was trying to shoehorn Sentry anywhere. In fact, I think the Sentry is really the entire theme of Bendis’ Avengers run in one personified character, regardless of that character’s quality.
The Avengers are too distracted to appropriately care for Scarlet Witch, an unhinged being of immense power who destroys not only the Avengers but nearly the whole mutant race. The Sentry is also clearly unhinged and immensely powerful, so Captain America takes him in to ensure history does not repeat itself. However, the Civil War leaves Sentry in the care of Iron Man, who finds himself too distracted to stop a Secret Invasion, much less tend to the Sentry, who is clearly getting worse. As a result, the Sentry is left in the hands of the worst possible person in the form of Norman Osborn, who subjugates him and pushes him over the edge by killing his wife. In the end, the Avengers must defeat an unhinged being of immense power, and are only able to do so because of Thor, who was missing during Disassembled.
So basically, the Avengers learned absolutely nothing from the Scarlet Witch incident and let history repeat itself. As punishment, Steve Rogers lets all super heroes have free reign and the Avengers get a skyscraper and a mansion. Does this make the Avengers heroes in some way, or are they still the same sheltered club they were before the Scarlet Witch’s rampage? They do manage to defeat awesome threats, but they price is that they too often suffer major losses, and those that suffer the most become awesome threats themselves. This is the same criticism that Wonder Man levies against them in the Heroic Age (the plot of which unfortunately failed to go anywhere interesting) and happens yet again when they do not investigate the Vision’s return thoroughly enough, leading to the Age of Ultron.
Please feel free to disagree with my analysis, but I think that’s some world-class plotting right there.
Well one thing the Sentry had going for him was that he truly was an original idea. A premiere superhero who’d been deleted from memory. There hadn’t been a character like him before.
Oh, except for DC’s “Triumph” character. Who was EXACTLY like him. Even had blonde hair and a blue and gold costume.
So…yeah. Never mind.
“Kang is not a compelling villain because of his rich inner life (not that the approach hasn’t been tried). As a person, he’s a one-dimensional conqueror.”
Paul’s never read Avengers Forever, I take it.
“The Sentry hate comes from the fact that he screws up the nerd tapestry for the people who care about that sort of thing.”
No, it’s because he has no consistent personality, much less a single likable one, and has been used almost entirely as a plot device for every post-Marvel-Knights story he’s appeared in.
I have read Avengers Forever, but I don’t recall it doing anything to convince me that Kang is especially interesting on a human level. He’s functional on that level if it’s what the story calls for, but it’s not what makes him memorable.
Please feel free to disagree with my analysis, but I think that’s some world-class plotting right there.
Bendis certainly pointed out some problems with the Avengers and how they’ve been written in the past, but I think “world-class plotting” really should have the characters either develop and learn based on their experiences or, at the very least, should try to *solve* or *address* the problems the writer points out in the metanarrative.
Bendis never really did that in the Avengers books, any more than he did, in the end, with Daredevil. And with the Avengers, he wrote an ending that was so determined to put all the toys back in the box for the next writer that the real lesson is “things will work out basically OK for the ‘classic’ characters no matter what.”
In other words, he spent over a hundred issues telling us that nobody learns but that it doesn’t matter that nobody learns, while pointing out problems that the architecture of the superhero team book doesn’t really allow a writer to solve.
And Avengers is also where Bendis’s sloppy plot mechanics became impossible to ignore, though they’d been creeping in even in the latter half of his Daredevil run. (“The Widow” and “The Golden Age” both fall back on ad hoc plotting, to the point that the denouement of “The Widow” contradicts a major plan of the arc’s premise.)
Add in his inability to handle ensemble scripting — the team books he works on have uniformly tended to spotlight one character and reduce the rest to a kind of quippy Greek chorus — and it’s hard to see anything about Bendis’s Avengers as masterful.
I have read Avengers Forever, but I don’t recall it doing anything to convince me that Kang is especially interesting on a human level. He’s functional on that level if it’s what the story calls for, but it’s not what makes him memorable.
I suppose that by design most “world-beater” villains work better as drivers of thematic conflict or metanarrative elements than as relatable characters. You’ve got Magneto and Doctor Doom (in the right hands) as counterexamples, but most of the others in that category really don’t. Kang, Apocalypse and his successors, the Red Skull, and others of their ilk really can’t be humanized all that much and keep their roles as outsize menaces. At best they can be ideological fanatics, but quite exaggerated ones who work more as grand political allegories than as human-scale ideologues.
You can have an archvillain who works on the level of relatable or at least vaguely recognizable human behavior, such as the Kingpin or Norman Osborn, but they don’t work terribly well as world-breaking or -changing threats. Even Osborn was basically a really nasty version of someone enforcing the status quo during Dark Reign.
Uncanny Michael: While I agree with you about the overarching theme of Bendis work on the Avengers, the trouble is that the work on the page never reached the heights of the ideas behind it. It works much better in synopsis than it does reading the actual issues.
As for the reason we are here (Uncanny Avengers); by the end of the third arc I was restless, not because I wasn’t enjoying the story, but because I realised the payoff was still some months away. This title would have been much better coming out every 2 weeks. I am looking forward to drilling through it in an afternoon, and I’m genuinely looking forward to Axis.
“but at the same time the Sentry’s gimmick and power level make him, by default, the most important character in any plot in which he appears.”
Yeah, he is a rather annoying paper tiger, isn’t he? If you’ve run of out pages but still need the story to end, just have the Sentry beat up whatever the problem is. If you still have an issue to go, just have someone mess with the Sentry mentally and you can keep treading water on your story.
“The context or circumstances of that fight have never been revealed, but apparently just the presence of that extra loss on Galactus’s fight card was enough for Sentry to be the worst idea ever.”
Well, duh, it’s an extremely lame way to prop up a character. “Drool, fanboys, he whupped Galactus’ ass!”
Granted, he was a pointless paper tiger, until he was punched into orbit by Blue Marvel, which, whatever.
“I have read Avengers Forever, but I don’t recall it doing anything to convince me that Kang is especially interesting on a human level. He’s functional on that level if it’s what the story calls for, but it’s not what makes him memorable.”
Kang is faced with the possibility he will eventually have to become his future self (which, on the face of it, sounds inevitable, doesn’t it?), who, thanks to the magic of fiction, is the guy he’s been warring with all along. So if he can’t beat him, he will literally join him.
He also realized that none of his time travel efforts would be able to avert this eventuality, and all his attempts to prolong his own life, manipulate the multiverse, and find love in the process were all fruitless.
It was about a fictiony bad bad bad guy who realized his entire being would soon be undermined by its very premise.
It was the neverending Kang Dynasty storyline, however, that reverted him back to a one-note antagonist. I never saw the point of what Busiek was doing there, after having told a perfectly good Kang story already in Avengers Forever.
Kang Dynasty might be a good comparison to Uncanny Avengers.
I’m guessing that killing Celestials has become a lot easier given that in the past All the ‘gods’ of earth pretty much couldn’t do anything to them during that long ago Thor run.
If anything, you’d think Thor would have remembered he had a Celestial killing axe during that storline…
Though I’m loving his Image books (Deadly Class especially, Low #1 was great, and syikk giving Black Science the benefit of the doubt), Remender’s style of superhero serial books is perhaps the most consistent and interesting out there. Continuity heavy but accessible, aware of the tropes at work but able to use them and still have something to say. Not quite X-Force but Uncanny Avengers has not disappointed.
@Uncanny Michael
An issue with your analysis of Bendis’s Avengers plotting is that his whole years long run could be as easily explained by saying that Bendis himself was “too distracted to appropriately care”.
Was Bendis trying to make some giant meta-message? Or was it just years of careless seat-of-the-pants bad storytelling? To me, all of the evidence points towards the latter. Bendis can’t be bothered to get even basic characterization right, and can’t even keep his stories in line from issue to issue. With that kind of writing, it is little surprise that characters in his stories spend years repeating the same mistakes, only to end without a long term negative consequence. It isn’t some masterpiece of plotting, it is just the result of lazy, awful writing on a month to month basis.
Prettt much what Billy says above. There’s having disregard for continuity, and then there’s disregard for your own established continuity and plot logic from issue to issue. In the same story arc. That you are writing yourself.
Bendis is a product of his times. He gets to be a superstar comic book writer hecause there are enough internet interviews, discussions forums and social media for him to explain plot points to the reader after he forgot to actually write them.
As I’ve never read any of Bendis’s work but looking in from the outside it looks more like he had and these ‘great’ ideas he wanted to write i.e. lets put Spider-man and Wolverine in the Avengers (but not do anything with them).Except get a sales boost.
He goes from ‘Event’ to Big Event’ to ‘Even Bigger Event’ ad naus and because he’s writing so much he can’t be bothered to worry about the little details because in the end do they matter?
Only sales matter.
I think it’s probable Bendis will be considered the Liefeld of our era by future generations of comic readers. X-Force vol 1 #1 was a huge commercial success, despite the quality of the book.
Bendis honestly lucked up.
He became popular writing books that managed to largely hide his flaws. He was writing solo titles, so his issues with character voices mostly didn’t show. (It didn’t hurt that at the time, the only voice he can write was “new” for a Marvel book.) He wrote a decent amount of new or low profile characters, so his lack of concern for previous characterization didn’t really matter. He was okay at low power level stories, and wrote low power level stories. Etc.
(Even so, Bendis was already getting shaky on those titles that disguised his weaknesses. Even in a solo title, you will eventually notice that everyone speaks the same to the point of dialogue being interchangable and repetitive. His plotting accumulated more holes. As he wrote more stories for a book, he started to have trouble with his own continuity. Etc.)
He was promoted to big mainline team books and events, exactly the kinds of titles that show all his shortcomings. But by that point he’d amassed a good amount of name credit. And he managed to make the jump pretty much straight to writing books and events that would sell regardless of writing. So despite any complaints voiced, both he and Marvel can simply point to sales figures and claim that Bendis is a money making writer. (Even if at least half the writers that Marvel employees would have similar success if they were given years of writing the same major books and events.)
Bringing it back to the review at hand, it sounds well worth the read. I was reading Uncanny X-Force in trade and enjoyed it up to and including the Dark Angel saga. But that Otherworld story, both art and plot, really put me off the book. Now, I’m convinced to finish UXF and give Uncanny Avengers a shot.
“Well one thing the Sentry had going for him was that he truly was an original idea. A premiere superhero who’d been deleted from memory. There hadn’t been a character like him before.
Oh, except for DC’s “Triumph” character. Who was EXACTLY like him. Even had blonde hair and a blue and gold costume.
So…yeah. Never mind.”
Essentially Christopher Priest got screwed by Marvel Comics.
AGAIN.
@Brendan: the otherworld arc was the low point for the otherwise amazing run of Uncanny X-Force. The final arc is long (I think longer than Dark Angel Saga), but is very good.
I’m planning a reread of UXF and then lead into UA. (Probably as a primer ready for Axis)
The read of Uncanny Avengers issue-by-issue is sound, but I can’t help but feel like if I wasn’t already a Marvel reader, much less one of many years who gets all these references, I’d get NOTHING out of this book.
[T]he otherworld arc was the low point for the otherwise amazing run of Uncanny X-Force. The final arc is long (I think longer than Dark Angel Saga), but is very good.
It helps that “Final Execution” really feels like an arc with a second arc int he middle. You’ve got the “new Brotherhood” plotline, but then the story takes a detour into a future setting where the conflict is between the team and their future counterparts.
The Uncanny Avengers arc tried to do something similar with “Planet X” (no, not the one with Magneto on Kick), but because the players in the central conflict were basically the same, it didn’t have the same effect.
And yeah, Neil is (as usual) utterly correct: the second arc relies a lot on Easter Egg plotting. Heck, Kang gathering his army was little more than an excuse for Remender to play with the various established “alternate timeline” characters. In practice they amount to a bunch of generic mooks for the heroes to fight. The first arc, I’ll cut a bit more slack, since the S-Men are new characters and the Red Skull’s threat doesn’t depend on the reader caring about the older-model Onslaught. I actually liked that arc quite a bit.
I’m sure other people have mentioned this, but what was the point of AoU’s “too much superheroic meddling with time travel has caused the universe to break!” story If virtually every flagship line has subsequently involved loads of time-travel? Fantastic Four, New Avengers, Avengers World, Uncanny Anvengers, Spider-Man, loads of X-Men titles, Hulk and shurely loads more I’ve left out have all employed it since that cack-handed event, with no real consequences.
Remender had a lot of plots left over from Uncanny X-Force that he didn’t get to use because they kept giving him new books, and I wasn’t too hot on how he jerryrigged the Descendants plot into Secret Avengers(UXF #5.1 teases a plot that takes place in another book entirely), or Dr. Mindbubble in Captain America…but I actually think the Apocalypse Twins mega-story was improved by carrying it into Uncanny Avengers and giving it a lot more space to avoid being a Dark Angel Saga retread(shoutout to Final Execution). Really enjoyed this; quite frankly, there was no other Marvel book that had me jonesing for the next issue to see what happens next like Uncanny Avengers has this past year.
I mentioned this before upthread, but… anyone remember what happened to Banshee in this arc?
I think we see the Reaper and Daken carrying him off at the end, but I’m not sure if that’s just one of the Apocalypse/Worthington twins.
I assumed Daken and Reaper were carrying the Twins, leaving Banshee’s whereabouts up in the air.
Count me on the “WHERE’S BANSHEE?” bus.
There were so many characters that died in this story and came back. I lost track on whether his horseman death came before or after the time revision.
He’s been one of my favorite characters since the Generation X days. I know they’ve been talking about doing something for the Generation X 20th Anniversary, and it would be great if his return could be a part of it.
How can they bring back Daken and the Sentry but not keep Banshee around?
The last X-Men storyline that was nearly this long?
The Uncanny X-Force storyline up to the end of “The Dark Angel Saga.” Actually, I think it DAS might tie with that XXM storyline that ends with Gambit and Rogue impaled together and Lifeguard as a gold bird (I still enjoyed XXM, but when it was crazy, it was CRAZY).
“…and Lifeguard as a gold bird.”
She looked like Woodstock from the Peanuts strip.
The thing that frustrates me most about this book is that the stated premise was completely lost after the first arc, in favor of this overlong, convoluted, continuity porn continuation of the Uncanny X-Force storyline. It’s a shame, because Remender had some really interesting things to say about the mutant metaphor.
I know Remender gets a lot of shit for the “M-Word” debacle, and given his “hobo piss” response, I can see why. However, when I look closely at Uncanny Avengers, I don’t think he was arguing for an assimilationist melting pot so much as arguing against the inherent shallowness of the X-Men’s message.
This is best seen in the Annual, where Mojo’s “recasting” of the Uncanny Avengers as a high school soap opera makes the Avengers into the Preps and the X-Men into the Greasers. Which is ultimately as close to any real-world minority as the X-Men tend to get, an outsider power fantasy aimed at generally privileged readers who want to do no more than water their toes in the other experience. (I’m thinking of Neil Shmynsky’s critique of the books, how almost all the important characters are either white or white underneath their blue fur, and strikingly attractive too boot. Kind of a “you hate me because I’m so much more talented and beautiful” thing).
Even beyond that, they even have some of the mutant characters with lives outside the X-Men comment on the team’s perversion of Xavier’s message, with Wolverine scoffing at the “Mutant community’ because of how Cyclops used that meme to reinforce his Phoenix cult, or Scarlet Witch dismissing Rogue and the others as “self-described soldiers hiding behind an X, with no care for what it really stands for” (paraphrased).
While I actually think it is kinda cool that subplots can follow writers from book to book…. Englehart and Starlin both did it. So did Busiek to a lesser extent…. Hickman is doing it to an extreme extent….
I don’t like comic book stories to be this long.
I appreciate that it is not actually decompressed. It deserves it’s length and it technically isn’t bad. But I still don’t like it.
What’s worse is…. for a series with this number of issues there have only been two stories.
I was irritated when Fraction’s Iron Man comic had six stories in five years…..