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Jan 10

The X-Axis – 10 January 2011

Posted on Monday, January 10, 2011 by Paul in Uncategorized

I’ve got a week and a half’s worth of X-books to cover here (thanks to Diamond UK splitting the week-before-last’s shipment in two), and there’s a ton of them… so let’s get to it.  Below the cut: Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine #4, Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis #4, Chaos War: X-Men #1, Daken: Dark Wolverine #4, Generation Hope #3, New Mutants #20, X-23 #4, X-Men Forever 2 #14, and X-Men: To Serve and Protect #2.  Needless to say, we’ll be kind of rushing through some of these…

Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine #4 – We’re two thirds of the way through the series now, and Jason Aaron starts making the transition from seemingly-random insanity to hinting at what’s actually going on.  Which is to say, he brings on the villains who are clearly responsible for it all, and then they cheerfully refuse to explain anything.  Basically, though, they’re a couple of Barracuda-style thugs who’ve stumbled upon some time-travel thingies, and from the look of it they’re using them mainly to have fun and screw with people.  Mind you, Aaron’s making enough of their refusal to properly explain the plot to suggest that there’s more to it than just that.

Not that it really matters, because the bottom line is that this miniseries is a fun romp, as per the advertised purpose of the Astonishing minis.  Whether it’s entirely self-contained, I suppose you can argue about; it doesn’t interact with any other comics coming out at the moment, but this issue involves the time-travelling Spider-Man and Wolverine going into each other’s past.  Wolverine gets to meet Spider-Man during that bit of his origin story when he was a pro wrestler; Spider-Man ends up being dumped into Origin, which isn’t really quite so iconic.  To be honest, I initially assumed they were going for Weapon X, partly because Wolverine looks rather older than I remember him being in that story.  The plot doesn’t greatly matter, mind you; Aaron and Kubert seem to be mostly just dumping something rather silly into the somewhat ponderous Origin (whose digital-painted art style is dutifully mimicked throughout the relevant scenes).

One of Aaron’s strengths as a superhero writer is the willingness to write some utterly ridiculous stories but let the characters take them more or less seriously, and he shifts gear quite nicely a couple of times here – there’s a nice little throwaway bit with Wolverine realising that he’s meeting Spider-Man before he learned his Terribly Important Moral Lesson, which is great, because it brings us back to the characters and makes sure they don’t get overwhelmed by the plot.  Anyhow, another good issue in a very strong mini.

Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis #4 – Christ, is this still going?  And it’s still got another issue to go?  When did the first issue come out?  Hold on, I’ll just check…  May!  May 2010!  And we’re still only on issue #4 of 5!

It’s an old complaint but it’s worth repeating: the schedule is doing this mini no favours whatsoever.  It’s a fairly straightforward story in which the X-Men (i) investigate a spate of weird births in an African village, (ii) discover that they’re not mutants, (iii) squabble with the local authorities, but then (iv) team up to deal with the greater threat, before presumably (v) vanquishing evil to save the day.  Nothing wrong with this as a five-act structure; nothing wrong with this issue as act four, with a well-handled fight scene between the X-Men and a bunch of Furies, lasting… well, all issue.  Kaare Andrews’ work is, as always, beautiful.  But seriously, nine months to get most of the way through a 90-minute movie?  No, no, no.

It’ll make a nice trade paperback, I guess.

Chaos War: X-Men #1 – This is one of many tie-in books to the Hercules miniseries Chaos War, where the basic idea is that the Chaos King – a Japanese god – is trying to destroy reality and a bunch of god-type characters have to stop him (since all the mortals got put to sleep in issue #1).  As part of the series, there’s a subplot about the dead rising, and so we’re getting minis where dead members of the X-Men, Alpha Flight, the Avengers and so on come back for another go around.

Which sounds like quite a nice idea.  Let’s visit a bunch of characters we haven’t seen in a while.  And in the case of the X-Men, that means the people who were left in the Mansion graveyard – Thunderbird, Banshee, Moira MacTaggert, two of the Stepford Cuckoos, and three Madroxes.  (I could have sworn there’s a bunch of nobodies from New X-Men buried under the vegetable patch as well, but even the chaos gods draw the line at reanimating the extras, I guess.)  Consistently with the nostalgic theme, it’s written by Louise Simonson and Chris Claremont, and it’s got some very nice art by Doug Braithwaite.

But there’s a problem: even though Marvel is publishing all these Chaos War tie-ins, the miniseries itself doesn’t seem to provide any role for them.  And so the X-Men emerge from their graves and… er, basically stand around wondering what to do for an issue, hoping that the plot turns up.  It kind of does towards the end, but boy, this comes across as a story without a role.  It’s not Simonson and Claremont’s fault; they dutifully come up with a function for the series, by kind of declaring that something or other needs to be done on Muir Isle which is, honest, terribly important to the main story.  And they try to give the story an emotional hook by having poor swiftly-slaughtered Thunderbird emerge as the group leader, which is quite sweet in a way – it may be 35 years since he was killed off, but he’s finally getting his moment to shine.  (It reads slightly oddly when Banshee’s around, since he’s a more natural leader for the group, but so it goes.)

The art’s great; there are a couple of nice moments with Thunderbird’s character arc and the Madroxes wondering why they’re still separate entities even beyond the grave.  The details are generally pretty good.  But it can’t quite overcome the feeling that Chaos War just doesn’t have a place for it, and the characters are left to wander around hoping something turns up.

Daken: Dark Wolverine #4 – A step up!  Having faked his death last issue, Daken curiously turns up at the Fantastic Four’s doorstep to assure them that he’s not dead after all.  (Actually, the recap page says that Daken didn’t fake his death; rather the impostor Wolverine just let him live, and he’s seizing the opportunity to start a new life.  Can’t say I picked that up from the story, but I’ll take your word for it, guys.)  Now, the first few issues of Dark Wolverine, where Daken sort of ingratiated himself with the FF by persuading them that he might be a potential ally inside the Dark Avengers, were among my favourites, partly because they gave Daken some sort of ambiguity.  There’s a bit of that here as well, though I’m a little less receptive to it now, since the writers have made it so abundantly clear that they think this is just a villain book, in which we’re presumably supposed to admire Daken outwitting the FF.  But yes, it is kind of entertaining on that level, and it’s nice to see Daken interacting with some relatively sympathetic characters who give him the benefit of the doubt up to a point, if only because it’s a break from the parade of murderers and dupes who normally populate the pages of this series.  Giuseppe Camuncoli’s art is also nice and clear, and his minimal angular style is unusual in actually making Daken’s character design look half decent.  A pretty decent issue, all told.

Generation Hope #3 – My main problem with issue #2 was that it didn’t give the main characters enough to do.  With this issue, I can see where they’re going with it: the X-Men set out to take Kenji down, Hope and her group want to save him, conflict.  The title characters get a bit more to do this issue, as a result.  There’s some nice stuff with Laurie, who seems to be the only member of the group not entirely sold on tailing around after Hope, but unable to quite say no either; that should give her a potentially interesting role in the group.  On the other hand, considering it’s the first arc, I’d still have liked to see Gabriel, Idie and Tenon get more to do in this story – yes, Hope’s the title character, and there are good reasons for her to be prominent in the group, but this feels a bit like a Hope solo book with a supporting cast at the moment.  Still, we’re past the opening fight with Kenji now – which might have worked better at two issues – so hopefully we can get to the characters more next time.

New Mutants #20 – This is billed as part 1 of “Rise of the New Mutants”, a two-parter that wraps up Zeb Wells’ run as writer, but it’s really a direct continuation from the previous story, with most of the team prisoners of Project Purgatory, and Magik and Karma making it back to Utopia to rally the rescue party.  I can see I’m going to have to sit down and re-read the whole run once it finishes next month – Wells is evidently going for the big pay-off of his Magik subplot, and that means scenes where people say “Ah, so that’s why you did such-and-such in issue #5″, while I desperately try to remember what the hell they’re talking about.  For all that, though, there’s some great bits in this story – the three demon ambassadors sent to negotiate with Project Purgatory have great dialogue, Dani gets to show off in a lovely subplot, and the build to the X-Men’s rescue party setting off for Limbo (or are they?) is paced beautifully.  Not exactly an ideal place to jump aboard, but that kind of comes with the territory when you’re reaching the climax of a two-year storyline, so you can’t really complain about that.  Leonard Kirk’s art tells a good story, and his Limbo is all the more effective for having a sense of geography.  This has been one of the stronger X-books over the last couple of years, and I’ll miss Wells on it.

X-23 #4 – The obligatory opening crossover out of the way, we begin X-23’s road trip of self-discovery.  Gambit shows up to tail after her, but hey, it’s not like any of the other writers were doing anything with him, and if it wasn’t for people who wouldn’t leave her alone, X-23 wouldn’t have a supporting cast to speak of.  I think he’s a good choice for this book; when you’ve got a main character as taciturn and gloomy as X-23, it really needs a lighter presence to balance her out, and Gambit can do that without overshadowing her.  There’s a nicely meta conceit in here – you might expect an X-23 road trip series to be a load of stories where X-23 meets equally gloomy people and helps out with their problems while Finding Herself.  And Marjorie Liu kind of teases doing exactly that sort of story, with X-23 confidently declaring that this is exactly what she’s dealing with – only to be hopelessly wrong as she gets to deal with a supervillain after all.

I’m in two minds about choosing Miss Sinister as the villain – a character from Mike Carey’s X-Men Legacy run who didn’t strike me as one of the more successful ideas.  But then again, my main reservation about her is that she’s a rather hazily defined character, so it’s equally possible that Liu will be able to take her as a blank slate and do something with her.  She’s certainly at odds with X-23’s rather downbeat, real-world tone (well supported by Will Conrad and Marco Checchetto’s art), but that clash could work in her favour; do you really want to read a whole series of X-23 moping?  On the whole, now that the opening crossover is out of the way and the series is hitting its stride, this is pretty decent.

X-Men Forever 2 #14 – Building to a climax, as Claremont brings all his characters together in Wakanda.  It’s quite good, actually.  The big fight is next month, and on one level this is just an exercise in moving the pieces into place.  That could be very boring, but Claremont livens it up nicely by turning it into a heist issue, with the X-Men breaking into Wakanda and outwitting their way into the heart of the castle.  It’s still basically covering the same plot points, but this way it gets to be entertaining along the way.  Andy Smith’s art is pretty good on the action scenes, sometimes more awkward when he’s asked to draw people talking and giving orders, but fine overall.   One of the stronger issues in a while, I think.

X-Men: To Serve and Protect #2 – It tells you something about the X-Men titles that we can now have an anthology title where the theme is “the heroes actually help somebody for a change.”  Still, loose themes are often the best for these anthologies, and the strike rate on this one is high.  Chris Yost and Derec Donovan’s lead serial, with the unlikely duo of Anole and Rockslide going on patrol in San Francisco to fight low-level crime, is really quite strong; Yost gets the right mixture of obnoxiousness and sympathy with Rockslide, and Anole plays well against him.  They’re both horribly underused characters right now, and hopefully this will persuade somebody to use them more.  Ray Fawkes and Ron Chan have the Stepford Cuckoos (in Manhattan, for some reason) not just defeating but utterly humiliating some bank robbers without breaking a sweat; it’s amusing but kind of overplayed towards the end.  Stuart Moore and Garry Brown do a Colossus/Iron Man team-up, which fortunately turns out not to dwell on the steel/iron similarity, but instead uses Iron Man as the sort of smart-ass foil who ultimately doesn’t know as much as the gentle giant.  Nothing really new, but it’s a nice rapport between two characters who’ve been around for decades but, now I come to think of it, have barely had a conversation before.  And Simon Spurrier and David Lafuente team up X-23 with Ghost Rider in a basically arbitrary fight which is really a device to have X-23 wonder whether she’d like a go with Ghost Rider’s Penance Stare power.  Unless I’ve missed a story somewhere, Ghost Rider seems way out of character, but the central idea’s solid and the art’s got great energy.

Bring on the comments

  1. Andrew J says:

    I thought that “Chaos War: Dead X-men” story was the worst comic I’d read in a long while (I’ve cut back severely, though, so maybe I’ve just raised my standards a bit). It was just terrible. Maybe I was wrongly expecting more.

  2. I didn’t read Chaos War: X-Men, but why would Moira MacTaggert get brought back? She’s not a mutant.

  3. John G says:

    I thought Chaos War: X-Men was the best part of the whole crossover, but then again the main mini has left me completely cold so far.

  4. Daibhid Ceannaideach says:

    Based on Paul’s description, it doesn’t sound like the Chaos War ressurections only apply to mutants – there aren’t that many dead mutants in the Avengers, after all.

  5. Valhallahan says:

    I’m enjoying Chaos War, but the spin-offs looked a bit lacklustre when I flicked through them on the shelves so I haven’t got any. It’s just characters at random who are being reanimated, comparatively few mutants in fact. Mostly Avengers characters and Deities and Alpha Flight for some reason.

  6. Taibak says:

    Am I the only one annoyed that Marvel just did the same basic story with Necrosha?

  7. Chief says:

    Taibak says:
    January 11, 2011 at 5:14 PM
    Am I the only one annoyed that Marvel just did the same basic story with Necrosha?

    And even that was immediately after DC did Blackest Night.

  8. Maxwell's Hammer says:

    I’ve been an X-Men completist for years, and its amazing how I feel zero guilt pangs for skipping this. Mr. Quesada, your Event Fever and $3.99 prices have cured me!!! I owe all my newfound happiness to you!!

  9. “Based on Paul’s description, it doesn’t sound like the Chaos War ressurections only apply to mutants – there aren’t that many dead mutants in the Avengers, after all.”

    Er, she really wasn’t an X-Man either. But whatever. I read the Alpha Flight issue, and the logic behind these “resurrections” is just inane.

  10. Baines says:

    Kind of funny that X-23 gets Gambit following her, considering to me he seems similar to Jubilee, and Jubilee followed Wolverine for years. They both have sparkly exploding powers. (And the videogame X-Men Legends 2 included Jubilee as a playable character because they pretty much just made her a weaker clone of Gambit.) They both had brightly colored overdone costumes. People find both of them annoying.

  11. Archie says:

    I like the X-23 and Gambit pairing. Like you mentioned, he’s a guy who’s capable of bringing a lighter presence to the book, but at the same time, he’s a character who can share X-23’s perspective in some ways that many of the more “straight and narrow” mutants can’t. It’s when Gambit is played as an over-the-top character by the writer that he becomes annoying; in the support role, he’s way more interesting, and Liu seems to have characterized him well so far.

  12. sam says:

    I’m sorry to see Zeb Wells leaving New Mutants. His run has been great and has featured terrific characterization of characters who have been around for a long time but who now seem to lack direction.

    This is the problem of comcs’ approach to the passage of time: the “junior team” grow up, but because the original X-Men are all still active and youthful, the juniors can’t take over for them. So new junior teams come along, the originals stick around, and all these great characters with long histories are adrift.

    Personally, I’d much prefer Cyclops, Beast, and Angel moving on to retirement, and the younger generation taking over. I know it will never happen, because at the first sign of dropping sales every comics company runs screaming back to the classic interpretations of characters.

  13. Alex Holt says:

    Taibak:
    I can see that there is a similarity between Blackest Night and Necrosha – essentially they both boil down to a death themed villain ressurecting dead heroes and villains under mind controll to take over the world.

    It doesn’t really work for Chaos War – which is basically, the universe is getting destroyed, the process of which happens to bring some rather confused dead people back to life, presumably temporarily – it’s not as if they are zombies in either looks or personality.

  14. ZZZ says:

    I actually like the idea that in a world where mythological gods actually exist, in order to destroy the universe, one must necessarily destroy the afterlife, and if the afterlife goes before the living world does, the death stops meaning much. It’s a nice twist to throw in to a comic book apocalypse.

    I just hope the next issue gets around to addressing where Nightcrawler and Jean Grey are right now. I get that they weren’t buried at the mansion, but you can’t tell me that the Madroxes were either – Jamie’s said that he just reabsorbs dead dupes – and it would be nice to at least tell us what’s up with them even if they don’t join up with the group.

    (By the way, I can’t believe no one mentioned the similarity between the big, flaming bird in the sky and another big, flaming bird that’s had a very large signifigance to the X-Men in the past.)

  15. Some of the Chaos Wars spin-offs have been pretty good (though, sadly, not the X-Men one, so far). I liked the Ares one-shot, which has a flashback story of Nightmare trying to broker a deal between the god of war and the god of chaos in order to create never-ending fuel for himself. And the Avengers mini has a lot of good moments; Vision and Captain Marvel act appropriately heroic, and other D-list Avengers–Dr Druid, Yellowjacket, Swordsman, Deathcry–get a chance to make up for their rather ignominious deaths.

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