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Jan 23

The X-Axis – 23 January 2011

Posted on Sunday, January 23, 2011 by Paul in x-axis

It’s a pretty good week for new books.  From the X-books, we’ve got the conclusion of the “Wolverine Goes to Hell” arc in Wolverine #5, the launch of Kathryn Immonen and Phil Noto’s Wolverine & Jubilee miniseries, a very strange Darwin story in X-Factor #214, and X-Men Legacy #244, in which some minor characters fight a giant astral squid.  Plus, the final issue of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, and the debut issues of Daredevil Reborn, Infinite Vacation and Memoir.  Shame we’re not doing a podcast this weekend, actually.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 #40 – The main storyline for Joss Whedon’s notional eighth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer actually ended last issue, so this is more of an epilogue designed to tie up loose ends and signal the direction of Season Nine.  For, yes, there will be a Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 9 in the not too distant future.

Now, I’ve rather been losing patience with this series, which seemed at times to have lost touch with what made Buffy work in the first place, in favour of a lot of globetrotting and warmongering that wasn’t all that successful.  Interestingly, Joss Whedon’s closing editorial suggests he tends to agree with some of those criticisms.  “I was so excited to finally have an unlimited budget that I wanted to make the book an epic,” he says, “but I realised along the way that the things I loved the best were the things you loved the best” – the characters.    And indeed, this issue seems to be setting us up for a much more low-key Season 9 with a much more restricted central cast, something that can only be for the best.  The remaining characters are relocated to San Francisco, lots of magic-users have been depowered as a result of last issue’s destruction of the Enormously Important Macguffin, and some of the ones who remain aren’t very happy about Buffy wiping out so much of the world’s magic.  It’s not a reset button – the change of location and the embittered ex-followers are enough to avoid that – but it’s a back-to-basics approach which is very welcome at the end of a series that laudably tried to stretch the format with mixed success.

It also turns out that one of Whedon’s main aims for this series was, of all things, to try and reconcile Buffy the Vampire Slayer continuity with the sci-fi spin-off comic Fray (the question being, given how the TV show ended, why are there no slayers left in Fray?).  Technically that’s a valid question but it does feel like a loose end rather too minor to merit such extended attention.  Still, the practical effect – somewhat to my surprise – is a final issue that pretty much convinces me that Season 9 will be much more to my tastes than Season 8.  I was planning to jump off after this issue.  He’s got me reconsidering now.  Damn you, Whedon.

Daredevil: Reborn #1 – The problem with Daredevil is that he’s been literally written into a corner.  For the last quarter century, he’s been on a treadmill where writer after writer destroys his life (and his mental health) and then rebuilds it again.  Brian Bendis, during his run, went for the next logical step by having the courage to follow through with the story and definitively wreck the character, exposing his secret identity in a way that’s going to be very hard for any future writer to retract.  Of course, anything’s possible in the Marvel Universe – Captain America, Spider-Man and Iron Man have all regained their secret identities by hand-waving magic – but that sort of story doesn’t really fit with Daredevil, and it would invariably come across as a case of raising the white flag.

So, with last year’s Shadowland storyline, Andy Diggle took the other route by hurling the character even further off a cliff, bringing us to a point where at least some sort of scorched-earth rebuilding exercise can begin.  Personally, I’d have liked to see the character put on the back burner for at least six months or so, rather than racing him straight back into circulation, but that’s not the way Marvel work these days.

Considering that it’s coming off an event mini, this issue is a sharp change of pace.  Matt is wandering around the wilderness, and eventually comes upon a desert town which has obviously got Secrets.  He’s not Daredevil any more, and he’s minded to just move on, but the locals recognise him as Matt Murdock, so that might not be an option.  It’s all quite low key, and (as yet) open to the objection that Matt’s basically just wandered into an arbitrary story – it’s not terribly clear how any of this is going to tie in to the presumed goal of rehabilitating the character for future use.  Still, there’s three issues to draw all that together.  As it stands, lovely art by Davide Gianfelice, who gives the book a nice open feel that emphasises the change of setting, and a well-told story.  Is it heading anywhere beyond that?  Tough to call.

The Infinite Vacation #1 –  Nick Spencer is something of a breakout writer at the moment; he’s got a fair bit of work coming out through Marvel and DC, including his well-received Jimmy Olsen stories, but he’s also got some more unusual books over at Image, most notably Morning Glories.  A while back, he also wrote Existence 2.0, in which a man finds his mind trapped in the body of the hit man who just killed him.  Al and I reviewed the first issue for the podcast and weren’t entirely convinced – as I recall, it was a good idea, but it felt like it was trying too hard to be edgy.

Well, Infinite Vacation takes Spencer back to a somewhat similar theme of life-swapping, but with rather more success.  This one is high concept, to put it mildly.  In a world – well, in worlds – where parallel universes are common knowledge, the Infinite Vacation offer the unusual service of allowing you to visit, or trade lives with, your own counterparts in other worlds, all through the medium of an eBay style iPhone app.  Mark is a particularly enthusiastic customer, but remains strangely dissatisfied with his lot.  Oh, and also, his counterparts seem to be winding up dead a lot.

It’s a nice central conceit, and I like the way Spencer simply presents it as a well-established fact of life.  Admittedly, there are bits of it that don’t quite make sense.  What happens to the people whose lives you take over?  Do they swap with you?  Do they head further up the chain?  And if you take over their lives, don’t you take over their property – so how are you paying them?  All of this might get covered in due course, and to some extent the book’s entitled to a bit of artistic licence to make the premise work, but still, the set-up needs to make a degree of internal sense.

That said, it’s a strong idea, and there some neat little details in the execution.  Somewhere out there, in an infinite universe, one of your counterparts works for Infinite Vacation Customer Service Department… dealing with other versions of you.  And Christian Ward’s art is excellent – bold, vibrant stuff which humanises the story at the same time as being dizzyingly abstract when it needs to.  It’s a really striking book, with some interesting ideas about finding meaning in a world of literally infinite possibilities.  One to watch.

Memoir #1 – A miniseries by Ben McCool and Nikki Cook, which I guess fits somewhere along the mystery/horror spectrum.  Ten years ago, the entire population of  the small midwestern town of Lowesville woke up with no memory.  Journalist Trent MacGowan visits to do an anniversary piece, in search of a story.  There are, needless to say, secrets.  The hook’s quite good, but the execution isn’t altogether convincing.  The book opens with MacGowan doing a TV interview seemingly to promote the fact that he’s planning to write the story; quite why this is supposed to be newsworthy in its own right is altogether unclear, and the sequence comes across as clunky exposition.  MacGowan also seems to end up in the town with no apparent plan beyond wandering around and hoping to stumble upon something that might fill a few paragraphs.  It all feels a bit shapeless.  Then again, the closing pages set up an interesting idea by refocussing attention on what everybody forgot, and Cook’s black and white art is compelling.

Wolverine #5 – So that’s the end of the “Wolverine Goes To Hell” arc, a story idea which makes some sense in terms of the way Jason Aaron’s been developing the character, but probably didn’t need to be shoehorned into a three-book crossover.  Fortunately, nothing that happened in Daken or X-23 was particularly relevant to the plot of this book, so we can take it on our own terms.  In Hell, Wolverine is reunited with his father (that’d be the groundskeeper from Origin, who was implied to be Wolverine’s biological father before), who’s terribly proud of all he’s achieved – though not for the right reasons.  Wolverine gets out of hell, the demon gets exorcised from his body… yeah, it’s a bit of an anticlimax, to be honest.  The story gets away with it to some extent by telling us that the Red Right Hand group never expected Wolverine to get stuck in Hell forever – this, apparently, was just their opening salvo.  And Aaron does make a point of selling this as a traumatic experience which should have a lasting effect on him.  Fair enough, and I’ll re-read the whole arc to see how it reads in one go.  But this issue feels a bit “Okay, time for Wolverine to leave hell now”, without quite building in the way you’d like.  The back-up strip this issue, which shows exactly how Wolverine ended up in hell in the first place, is mainly tying up the loose ends, but it does have some beautiful artwork by Jason Latour.

Wolverine and Jubilee #1 – If the only lasting consequence of “Curse of the Mutants” was to turn Jubilee into a vampire, at least they’re following up on it.  Despite the title, this is mainly Jubilee’s story, with Wolverine as the main supporting character.  Actually, there are enough other cast members floating around in minor roles that the story could quite happily have been run as an issue of X-Men.  The basic set-up is that the X-Men, tolerant as ever, are trying to help Jubilee come to terms with being a vampire, because hey, if they drug her up enough and give her enough blood, it’ll be okay, right?  Strangely enough, being a heavy sedated vampire doesn’t altogether appeal to Jubilee.

Now, the whole X-Men versus vampires thing was a bit of a damp squib over in X-Men, but Kathryn Immonen’s found a good angle here.  The X-Men, being the heroes, are dealing with the situation by trying to give motivational speeches about making the best of things, and assuring Jubilee, in the face of all logic and common sense, that they’ll find a way forward.  (“If you want to go to college, you can go to college…  We’ve been helping people deal with unusual changes in their personal lives for quite a while now.”)  Is this laudably stubborn determination, or just plain stupid?

Immonen’s always an interesting writer, but some of her previous minis have hit levels of quirk that may limit their appeal.  This one, however, ought to go down well with X-Men fans generally; it’s closer in tone to regular X-Men stories, she’s got a handle on the characters, and she’s got a good premise.  Some of the supporting cast are a little shakier – Rockslide seems to have gained 30 IQ points and a clue, most notably.  Phil Noto’s art is consistently excellent; the issue is a great example of how an artist who’s mastered body language can transform a story.  (I read this back to back with X-Men Legacy, which might explain why that leapt out at me…)

Even if the vampire angle doesn’t appeal to you, this is a good X-Men story.

X-Factor #214 – A Darwin solo story, because this is the sort of book where you get more panel time if you leave the team.  Wandering through the desert, Darwin… well, either has a hallucination or stumbles into a really weird limbo town where a sheriff claims to be keeping the whore of Babylon prisoner, and waiting for the end of the world.  A thoroughly strange issue, but since hallucinations in comics are never just hallucinations, it’s a pretty safe bet that it’s full of groundwork for the next major storyline.  As I said about the last issue, Darwin’s a tricky character who didn’t really click until recently, but Peter David’s recent tweaks have finally found an angle that may be working.  With the plot essentially an extended dream sequence, Darwin has to carry a lot of weight in this story, giving the audience something to hold on to, and it pretty much works.  It helps, of course, that the book is witty enough to keep its surreal excursions readable.

X-Men Legacy #244 – In which, as mentioned at the outset, some secondary characters fight an astral squid.  This is a single issue story before “Age of X” starts next month, and presumably it’s some sort of lead-in, though quite how it connects is decidedly opaque.  Blindfold is having cryptic premonitions of catastrophe again, and something nasty is coming.  Also, there’s an astral squid around, for some reason.  Cue the fighting.  While it might make more sense with hindsight, judged in isolation, it’s not one of Mike Carey’s better issues; it’s basically a lot of ominous build for something unspecified to come.  This month’s guest artist is Harvey Tolibao; his work is quite stylish, and he does well when it comes to visualising weird stuff.  The odd light effect on the last page is rather good, too.  But he’s not so great when it comes to drawing characters – they’re all clearly recognisable, but there’s a lot of blank faces and generic poses here, which lets the book down.

Bring on the comments

  1. kelvingreen says:

    Captain America, Spider-Man and Iron Man have all regained their secret identities by hand-waving magic – but that sort of story doesn’t really fit with Daredevil, and it would invariably come across as a case of raising the white flag.

    The irony being that Mephisto is more closely associated with Daredevil — he’s actually appeared in DD stories, for one thing, and they have the thematic link of both pretending to be the Devil — than he has ever been with Spider-Man.

  2. Alex says:

    — depower lotsof people

    — move cast to san fran

    Does joss think he is still writing an x book?

    Buffy season eight, to me, became nothing more than officially sanctioned fan fiction. Glad to see it go.

  3. Shadowkurt says:

    “Rockslide seems to have gained 30 IQ points and a clue, most notably.”

    I have already suspected that Santo is smarter than he seems, but enjoys playing along with the stereotype of the big, dumb brawler. Now he’s got somewhat of a crush on Jubilee, he just dropped the act.

  4. Niall says:

    To be fair, being smarter than he seems (or indeed gaining 30 IQ points) still wouldn’t make him smart.

    Hopefully, he’ll be developed into a more rounded character in this series.

  5. Over on his blog, Peter David says that this issue of X-Factor was originally supposed to be a crossover with the Dark Tower franchise, but the right approvals couldn’t go through in time; that may explain some of its odder aspects.

  6. Michael says:

    I think Brubaker already retracted Matt’s outing in his run, or at least gave him enough plausible deniability that the average man on the street isn’t sure if he’s Daredevil or not.

    I think the astral squid in X-Men Legacy was supposed to be a red herring; we’re supposed to think it was the big threat Blindfold was seeing on the horizon, and then on the last page she goes, “Oh, shit, that wasn’t it at all,” and the sky goes white, and then Age of X happens. If nothing else, the issue was a neat peek into her head.

  7. errant says:

    so 3 books where characters are investigating a weird town with secrets or strange goings on? 2 at least.

  8. sam says:

    As I remember Paul commenting at the time of Bendis’ original Daredevil outing story, the implication of that story was that Matt Murdock’s Daredevil identity had been a street rumor for a long time, and was suddenly made explosive news by leaks from a federal investigation. However, the government could never prove definitively that he was Daredevil, and he used his legal skills to force everyone to act like he wasn’t.

    The ethics of that situation were exceedingly murky, and to my mind much more interesting than Shadowland in terms of exploring the dark side of Matt’s character. But as a result of this, I could easily see a writer having Murdock go to court with suddenly-discovered evidence “proving” that he is not and has never been Daredevil. That would put the genie back in the bottle, leaving Matt’s friends and supporters free to believe he’s not, with his enemies certain he is and inflamed by his hypocrisy. Could be an interesting dynamic.

  9. Suzene says:

    “The basic set-up is that the X-Men, tolerant as ever…”

    Ah, yes. The X-Men. The group that’ll take in Sabretooth and Mystique, but kick out their own if they get depowered.

  10. ZZZ says:

    This issue of Legacy wasn’t a roaring success, but it did address an issue that maybe didn’t cry out for addressing but was at least worth a nod if they had an issue to kill before a big event: If some major nonsense is about to go down, why wouldn’t Utopia’s resident precog notice?

    The answer being a reasonably logical: She did, but..

    1) Blindfold is miserable about actually communicating her visions with people.
    2) There are enough ticking time bombs on the island that knowing something is about to happen is like knowing there will probably be a crime committed in Gotham City on any given day (this was my favorite part of the issue – wish they’d spent more time on this and less time on the squid). And…
    3) There actually was something nasty lurking around the island so to the extant that the X-Men were aware that Blindfold was on to something, they think it’s been resolved (which answers the related question: “Can the X-Men possibly be stupid enough to just dismiss something a precog says?”)

    So I’m guessing nothing that happened in the issue will seem any more important after Age of X (aside from nebulous comments making more sense), but the issue was related to Age of X in the same way that the comics that showed what Kitty Pryde or Sue Storm were doing during Secret Wars were related to Secret Wars even though they didn’t involve heroes and villains fighting on Battleworld.

  11. Andrew J. says:

    Throwing my own two cents in, this Legacy issue did three things:

    1) set up Age of X by explaining how it comes about; something about holes in dimensions left about by Emplate (which makes that story more than just a nifty little nostalgia piece)
    2) re-establishes the running plot about Blindfold and her long-lost brother (presumably the person she was looking for the whole issue)
    3) forshadows an upcoming plot involving Gambit and Sinister lurking inside of him

  12. David Aspmo says:

    kelvingreen says: “The irony being that Mephisto is more closely associated with Daredevil — he’s actually appeared in DD stories, for one thing, and they have the thematic link of both pretending to be the Devil — than he has ever been with Spider-Man.”

    Mephisto wasn’t the one who reinstated Spider-Man’s secret identity.

  13. acespot says:

    “Mephisto wasn’t the one…”

    right, that was Joe Quesada

  14. Aaron Thall says:

    Wait… Mephisto ISN’T Quesada?

  15. alex says:

    I will still take Karl Kesel’s light-hearted DD run over anything from the Bendis/Mack/Bru era.

  16. “Mephisto wasn’t the one who reinstated Spider-Man’s secret identity.”

    At the beginning of OMD part 4, Mephisto offers a deal to Peter Parker. At the end of the issue, Peter’s identity is secret again. That’s all readers were left with until a year or two later when they tried to re-retcon that.

  17. Chief says:

    “At the beginning of OMD part 4, Mephisto offers a deal to Peter Parker. At the end of the issue, Peter’s identity is secret again. That’s all readers were left with until a year or two later when they tried to re-retcon that.”

    Wait, they did away with the Mephisto thing already? I don’t pay any attention to Spider-Man books anymore, can someone please explain?

  18. Paul says:

    The current version of events is that Mephisto had nothing to do with restoring Spider-Man’s secret identity. That was done by the Illuminati during the gap before Brand New Day, basically through magic.

    “One Moment In Time” clarifies that Mephisto’s only change to continuity was to derail Peter from making it to the church, leading him and Mary Jane to belatedly decide that they’ll cohabit rather than getting married. Thus, read all stories with cohabitation substituted for marriage.

  19. kelvingreen says:

    Ah, see I stopped reading with “One Moronic Day” or whatever it was called, so I missed out on the Illuminati angle.

    I say “missed” in a figurative sense, obviously, although there’s something quite endearing about the way Marvel have — in “fixing” it — made things even more complicated and nonsensical. It’s like Xorn all over again.

    Still, my original point holds. Mephisto — for example — could restore Dardevil’s secret identity without it seeming too odd, because the characters have a previous association.

  20. The original Matt says:

    So they retconned the retcon? Must have come up with that at the annual “how can we make things even more confusing” meeting.

  21. David Aspmo says:

    It was made clear from the beginning (or close to the beginning) of “Brand New Day” that Mephisto was never supposed to have been responsible for Peter’s renewed secret identity; just as it was made clear early on that Mephisto wasn’t responsible for Harry being alive again.

    It is true, though, that at the end of “One More Day” Marvel seemed to be perfectly happy to let people think those two things were both Mephisto’s doing. Apparently this was because it allowed them to just get on with BND without getting into the proper explanations, but I think whatever they gained by that probably wasn’t worth creating such a negative misconception that persists to this day.

  22. Paul C says:

    Who then, was responsible for Peter Parker losing his organic webbing and other added powers he gained during that rubbish ‘The Other’ arc?

  23. Chief says:

    “Who then, was responsible for Peter Parker losing his organic webbing and other added powers he gained during that rubbish ‘The Other’ arc?”

    I don’t know if that was ever explained. From the way I understood (could be wrong), he still has it.

    That’s another HUGE problem I have with the new setup, they acted like the marriage was the real problem, but all the other crap they’ve piled on the character in the last decade is still there. The spider-totem nonsense, Gwen & Norman’s twins, The Other, etc.

  24. Jerry Ray says:

    Hopefully they’re just dismissing most of the JMS run as a bad dream, never to be mentioned again. I’m totally OK with that – I don’t even need an in-continuity explanation.

  25. The way I read it, Mephisto rewrote reality so that Harry’s death had been faked by Norman and Mysterio, rather than it just being coincidence that Norman and Mysterio faked Harry’s death all along and he happened to reappear just as Pete’s marriage got erased. That is, Mephisto was responsible for the retcons, but did it through others.

    Though I suppose that leans towards the meta a bit and starts turning Mephisto into the Spider-Man editorial team.

  26. Baines says:

    The stuff JMS said had Quesada intending Mephisto to be the solution to everything. The marriage, revealed identity, Harry being alive again, Gwen being alive again (which Quesada was talked out of), everything… Harry being alive again was even described as the extra penalty for Peter making a deal with the devil. Of course JMS painted Quesada as a man who didn’t really care about how all the stuff actually happened, he just wanted it done and handwaved away (and thus “It’s magic” was born). The only important thing was to get rid of the marriage and turn Parker back into a young loser, because that’s what sells Spider-Man!

    The writers tasked with writing post-Mephisto books had … well … the task of writing post-Mephisto books. I saw it as little surprise that they started filling in the details on their own. That seems to be Marvel’s standard operating procedure for big events, a vague “big picture” event is established with no hard details, and all the writers are left to fend for themselves in how to interpret even the most basic of elements. (What did “No More Heroes” actually do to the mutant gene? What did the SHRA actually allow? What did House of M do? Etc… All their big events have writers contradicting each other in ways that imply basic required details were never established even for the people expected to write the stories.) Beyond that, some of the people writing Spider-Man had opinions that conflict with Quesada’s reported beliefs.

    The idea that the current status and explanations were what were always planned certainly conflicts with what JMS himself said at the time of the event. He’s the one who, when faced with a lot of desired changes, came up with a “linchpin” theory to explain them all as the result of a single act, only to have (according to him) it shot down by Quesada because Quesada didn’t want readers to feel the last few decades of Spider-Man didn’t happen. I think JMS also said that it was at least implied to him that the Mephisto deal would undo the Stacy twins (a storyline that had already annoyed him when Quesada changed the father from Peter to Norman), only to be later told that it wouldn’t.

  27. Baines says:

    Suzene said: “Ah, yes. The X-Men. The group that’ll take in Sabretooth and Mystique, but kick out their own if they get depowered.”

    Yes, that is why I had to laugh when, reading the recap/set-up first page for Wolverine & Jubilee, I hit the line “Never known to turn down one of their own, the X-Men welcome Jubilee to Utopia.”, considering they were quite willing to kick out without any say both students and faculty who weren’t mutants after Decimation. Sorry you don’t have a home because you’ve been living here for the last two years, but we’ve already changed the locks on the doors and everything left in your bedroom will be donated to Goodwill. If you aren’t off our lawn in five minutes, we’re calling the cops, so get out of here you deadbeat.

  28. “It is true, though, that at the end of “One More Day” Marvel seemed to be perfectly happy to let people think those two things were both Mephisto’s doing.”

    Exactly the point.

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