Uncanny & All New X-Men Annuals – “The Secret Life of Eva Bell”
Filling in what happened to her when she got separated from the trainee X-Men during their visit to Tabula Rasa, “The Secret Life of Eva Bell” is billed as comprising this year’s Uncanny X-Men and All-New X-Men annuals. Which is interesting in itself, because while Eva is certainly part of the Uncanny cast, she emphatically isn’t part of the All-New X-Men cast – at least, not as anything more than a background character. Nor do any of the All-New regulars crop up here.
This could of course be a symptom of Marvel’s somewhat random approach to annuals. But in this case I’m inclined to think it’s intended to draw our attention to the bigger picture that the story implies.
It’s a simple story. Separated from the others, Eva discovers that she can time-travel when panicked. Cue half an issue of the usual guest stars, it being an unwritten rule that despite the vastness of time and space, if you are going to randomly bounce around time and space, you simply will meet the Rawhide Kid. Eventually she winds up in the 2099 universe where she gets taken in as an apprentice by Magik, who has somehow wound up as Sorcerer Supreme.
At which point the story deviates sharply from the template with the causal caption “Seven years later…” Eva simply stays in the 2099 universe, remains Magik’s apprentice, has a husband and daughter, and decides that she doesn’t want to leave. Unfortunately, getting caught up in a big mystic fight results in her being scared into another time jaunt which (back on the usual plot) results in an encounter with Morgan le Fey in the distant past. That’s a bit of an afterthought. By the time Eva steers her way back to the 2099 universe, she discovers that her time travel has altered history – her family don’t exist any more, and Magik has been replaced as Sorcerer Supreme by the unlikely candidate of Tony Stark, who finally helps her get home. This, of course, sets Eva up for her plot role in the current Uncanny arc, as her vastly enhanced time travel abilities are revealed.
Andrea Sorrentino’s artwork has some lovely, imaginative effects for the time travel sequences, and I’ll come back to those. But it also scores on quickly establishing the atmosphere of new settings, and on bringing some delicacy to his figures that humanises the characters. Which is good, because the biggest problem with this story is that Eva herself is likeable enough, but a bit of a cipher. Aside from a rather sweet flashback to her with her child, she pretty much gives us the generic “confused and upset” reactions throughout the story, and there’s something deeply implausible about the idea that she simply slips back into the X-Men. Granted, Scott did pick up on her ageing, but shouldn’t everyone have realised immediately that something drastic had happened?
It’s hard to tell whether this is dodgy writing or simply an illustration of how wonky and dysfunctional Scott’s team must be. They’re really not a family; they’re a bunch of people who’ve wound up in a room together. There’s also something quite odd about the idea that she’d want to try to fit back into her old role, but then this rather flimsy set-up is the closest thing to familiarity that she has available to her.
Even so, if this story was relying simply on its underplayed emotional impact, I don’t think that’d be enough to carry it. But there’s also a distinctly meta angle going on here. Obviously, Bendis has been coming back to time travel repeatedly over recent years, with All-New X-Men and Age of Ultron, and with the now firmly established idea that there is something wrong with the nature of time. This is plainly building to something – frankly, All-New often feels like it’s marking time waiting for that Thing to happen – and as I’ve pointed out before, it’s very obviously the sort of Thing that could be used for a bit of rebooting or continuity revamping if one were so minded.
It’s interesting, then, to see Eva’s time jumping repeatedly rendered by showing the panels themselves disintegrating. Time travel is often a vehicle for some degree of narrative incoherence, with writers having to walk a fine line and find precisely the right degree of not quite making sense. The fun of time travel paradox stories is that they teeter on the brink of not working, and that the narrative structure papers over the (visible) logical cracks. But this is a story fairly evidently presented as the breakdown of the comic page itself – and if that’s what you want to emphasise, then yes, it does make sense to choose the old faithful guest stars and position this explicitly as a jaunt around the wider Marvel Universe, rather than one around space and time.
Because consider the implications of this story’s worldview for All-New X-Men, the book whose title it carries. Forget the fact that it doesn’t match up with earlier stories about time travel – it’s Bendis’ rules, and he can point to the “time is broken” stuff as a get out of jail free card. For present purposes, Bendis is clearly envisioning a single timeline which is in flux and which can be altered by time travel. People who are out of time, like Eva, are particularly prone to muck up the timeline. By travelling into the future, spending an extended time there, and then going back into the distant past, Eva apparently triggers a butterfly effect that wipes out the history that she remembered. In however hand-waving a way, the story is essentially telling us that Eva’s personal history cannot be bound by what she experiences in the future, and that anything she sees in her trip to the future is rendered merely provisional the moment she travels back in time again.
And where does that leave the Silver Age X-Men? If they don’t go back where they belong, the Marvel Universe collapses in a paradox. But if they do, according to this story, the Marvel Universe collapses anyway, because from their perspective the present MU becomes a provisional future that can be altered by the butterfly effect. (The same way, after all, that characters from the present day timeframe always behave when they return from a future they don’t like.) So the pretty strong implication for Bendis’ other title is that continuity is indeed profoundly screwed, and something pretty drastic is going to have to happen. It’s hard to think that we aren’t supposed to be drawing these conclusions.
Throw in that dimension of the slow burn towards the pay-off of Bendis’ long-term time travel plot, and I think this one comes off. Quite how you pay this off at this stage without doing the collapse of the Marvel Universe, I’m not sure – but that’s a prospect I’m actually pretty relaxed about.
To be fair, Eva Bell made her debut in the first story arc from All-New X-Men, so it’s not a complete disconnect between the titles in that regard.
^That’s a good point. And perhaps a very relevant one, as to how all of this fits together.
This is plainly building to something
That’s what we thought about Bendis’ Avengers too, and it, er, didn’t.
Paul, I can’t believe you’re being tricked into getting excited about a Bendis set-up when you know that the execution will crash and burn in an incoherent, unfulfilling mess by 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through. You really should know better by now.
“…it being an unwritten rule that despite the vastness of time and space, if you are going to randomly bounce around time and space, you simply will meet the Rawhide Kid.”
The last constant in a universe whose timeline is broken!
What errant said. Hey, at least Marvel’s PR machine can claim they laid the groundwork to whatever that Thing Bendis is supposedly building to…
This would be the same thing that Hickman is building too, right? Or at least similar. Or at least, I’ve been operating under the impression they are paying off during the same event.
Well Eva has just time travelled back to see Professor X in order to get him to change what he does with the Superpowerful New Mutant in the current Bendis arc, which raises questions about if she can bring the New X-Men home.
So Marvel is gonna mess up their totally messed up continuity some more?
I think I’m pretty fine with that.
this rather flimsy set-up is the closest thing to familiarity that she has available to her.
I haven’t been following Eva’s career very closely, so perhaps I’ve forgotten, but didn’t she leave Australia on good terms with her family? Wouldn’t it make more sense for her to go home to visit mom after her traumatic adventures, rather than to Cyclops’ bunker full of unfriendly and dangerous strangers?
Might as well have a little caption box in the corner that says:
“Confused? Don’t be! Pick up SECRET WARS in 2015 and all will be revealed! Really, we mean it this time! – Smilin’ Stan”
Between this stuff, the Hickman AVENGERS, Spider-Verse, even AXIS, they might just as well have hung out a GONE FISHIN’ sign for the whole line until then.
I wonder if the Stepford Cuckoos are masking Eva’s aging from everyone except for Scott.
Given Bendis’ ticks I am waiting for an in story joke in which someone asks ‘how many time travelers does it take to send five mutants home’. The punchline is pickup Secret Wars by Hickman and Ribic to find out!
kelvingreen says:
“This is plainly building to something
That’s what we thought about Bendis’ Avengers too, and it, er, didn’t.”
Yes. Paul must know that just because you’re being obviously lead to expect something doesn’t mean it’ll turn out to be true, or competently executed.
Seems to me that Bendis is following Hickman’s Avengers (which I’ve enjoyed quite a bit) as well as Remender’s Uncanny. We’ll see if Bendis has plans to pick up on the Havok storyline. But ultimately I don’t have much faith in getting a coherent tying together of plot threads. More likely Secret Wars will hit and most of the dangling plus will just vanish.
I’m starting to get more nervous that this will go the way of Bendis’ Avengers. It ended up being one more random thing after another.
They want you to think Secret Wars will explain everything, but really it will just end with all the characters being put in helmets with one giant eye and Hickman becoming EIC.
If you take a look at Bendis’s first post-Siege Avengers arc, Age of Ultron, All-New X-Men and these two recent X-Men annuals as a single tapestry, one thing is quite obvious: he really has no idea how to write coherent time travel stories, and keeps using the “time is broken” concept as an excuse for those inconsistencies.
Worst of all, this bullcrap idea that the future where Eva got married and had a child doesn’t exist anymore is completely at odds with the concept of Marvel’s multiverse, where all possible timelines co-exist as parallel dimensions.
I think there is a lot wiggle room with how to interpret the story. Obviously the explanation that Stark gave that her family is gone is silly considering the way time travel is treated in the Marvel U. However, you could interpret it to mean that Stark doesn’t properly understand what is happening. You could interpret it to mean that her family no longer exists in the 616 universe but that they still exist in an alternate universe which Eva’s powers can’t reach. Or, you could interpret it to mean that the old Gruenwald rules of time travel no longer apply because “time is broken.” I am optimistic that all of this will lead into a hard reboot in Secret Wars in which elements of the dead universes of Battleworld are merged with the existing 616 timeline (and so I have a clean jumping off point from 20 years of monthlies).
As for Bendis’ Avengers, if you stop after Siege it’s really not that bad upon rereading. The whole run built to Siege and it was clear that he had no ideas when he stayed on the books afterwards.
Somewhere Marvel have gone on record saying that how time is broken is that divergent timelines no longer happen. I believe this was a reveal in Age of Ultron maybe.
But, y’know, alternate timelines existing is the key point of Hickman’s storyline culminating in Secret Wars 2015, and of Spider-Verse. And whatever we get afterward – be it a hard reboot, a soft reboot that merges stuff like Miles Morales into the MU or “everything basically goes back the way it was” – I can’t imagine that we’ll end up Crisised down to One And Only One Timeline. DC only lasted two or three years before they started poking loopholes in that with ‘pocket universes’, Elseworlds and so on.
Given how over in Avengers we have pulled a time-jump where the status quo obviously has been altered in a way which makes it imperative that it be reset, the writing about a continuity reset has been pretty obvious lately. The whole “time is broken concept” has been repeated both in X-Men and Avengers comics a lot of times over the last years and if we take a reset as the ultimate goal Marvel is pursueing now, even the character assassination of many of the core characters of the MU over the last years (Illuminati, now the Inversion) makes sense.
Maybe they want us to welcome a reset by making the entire universe so grimdark that it looks like the best option. I just hope they don’t involve Mark Millar.
“But if they do, according to this story, the Marvel Universe collapses anyway, because from their perspective the present MU becomes a provisional future that can be altered by the butterfly effect.”
Wait, doesn’t the annual already contradict that idea?
Eva starts in the present. She goes to the future, spends years there and has a family. She goes to the past and does something. She ‘returns’ to the future, to find it is a different future. Then she simply returns to the same present that she initially left.
So whatever she did in the past, while it changed her 2099 life, it apparently had zero effect to the present day.
If anything, this story seems to enforce the idea that present-day Marvel is (for no logical in-universe reason) immune to such change even when futures can be altered.
Eva is a wanted felon in Australia now, for associating with the X-Men and time freezing the Avengers. I can’t remember but I think she had a fallout with the family in that story too.
The best thing about Bendis’ X-run has been Magik. He’s got a deft handle on her old 80s personae with a new tweak to make her a little colder (in line with Wells’ amazing New Mutants run) and a little more Russian, which makes sense if you consider two childhoods raised there before demon meddling.
I was disappointed in the end of Bendis’ Avengers run too, but sometimes, like say ALIAS his build-ups can be amazing.
I think we’ve seen some sign of coherent build-up with Magik, Limbo, Dr Strange, and Dormammu (sp?)… clearly the Demon Lord’s attack on Magik early in Uncanny is connected to her interactions with Dr Strange now (though in the past, sorry, I just confused myself)… I think we might get something cool still, could go either way. But I remain cautiously optimistic.
The Black Vortex will likely figure into it all as well.
Which reminds me . . .
Did Magik ever try to bring the New X-Men home?
I’m starting to hope the end of Secret Wars brings back Jack Kirby as God from the Waid/Weiringo FF run. Like it turns out he took a long lunch and everything went haywire in his absence, and then he pulls out an eraser and starts setting up the post-Crisis MU.
@Niall… no, you got me there, she has only used her time travel powers to visit Dr Strange and the few hops in BotA…
I miss the House to Astonish podcasts….
So let me get this straight: The original X-Men are “trapped”in the present living in a building with 2 characters who can travel to their era (or close to it).
Eva is a wanted felon in Australia now, for associating with the X-Men and time freezing the Avengers. I can’t remember but I think she had a fallout with the family in that story too.
OK, maybe. But I still think that the first thing you do when you get back from a 10-year trip through time where you lost your family is go check in on mom and tell her how much you love her.
@Naill
Well, originally the X-men didn’t want to force them back to their own time if they didn’t want to, but then during Battle of the Atom when they tried to send them back for some reason Beast’s time machine wouldn’t allow them.
While it might be sloppy, I think Bendis thought by showing one time machine not working people would just infer no time travel method would work on the O5.
I’m still waiting for the six-issue epic that ends with the revelation that the Rawhide Kid is really an omniversal temporal nexus.
Bendis writes time travel like Chuck Austen wrote romance.
I’ll be damned! Jaime adds something to the conversation for once, and I agree with him.
Oh no, Jamie doesn’t like how Bendis writes time-travel. Bendis better start catering all his titles to you!
The truly sloppy part is that Magik had already taken Beast ad Iceboy into the future. So the block on time travel is incredibly plot specific.
Also, if I’m Eva Bell then the first thing I do after getting back is yell at Cyclops & Magik for putting her in that position. What happened to her is almost the exact reason why they have a danger room.
“Oh no, Jamie doesn’t like how Bendis writes time-travel.”
I am perfectly fine with Bendis being a shit writer. I don’t buy his books.
“They want you to think Secret Wars will explain everything, but really it will just end with all the characters being put in helmets with one giant eye and Hickman becoming EIC.”
Well, at least it’d be a more literate sort of not making sense!
“Did Magik ever try to bring the New X-Men home?”
“So let me get this straight: The original X-Men are “trapped”in the present living in a building with 2 characters who can travel to their era (or close to it).”
Alright, whose turn is it to time-drive the kids home tonight!?
“I’m still waiting for the six-issue epic that ends with the revelation that the Rawhide Kid is really an omniversal temporal nexus.”
RAWHIDE KID: SLAP FABRIC-OF-SPACETIME
@Jamie
I really don’t give a shit what you claim to not be buying (but probably still are).
Thanks for telling me what you don’t care about. I can’t wait for you to share the rest of the list.