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Feb 24

X-Men #1-5

Posted on Thursday, February 24, 2022 by Paul in x-axis

X-MEN vol 6 #1-5
“Fearless”
Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artists: Pepe Larraz (#1-3), Javier Pina (#4-5)
Colourists: Marte Gracia (#1-3), Erick Arciniega (#4-5)
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Jordan White

That’s kind of a guess, actually. The solicitations for the first trade paperback have it covering issues #1-6. But issue #6 isn’t labelled part of “Fearless” and seems to be the start of a new arc. So, I’m going to figure that the first TPB is actually meant to be issues #1-5, whatever the solicitations say. Because that would make some kind of sense.

Ish.

When I think about the first few issues of Gerry Duggan’s X-Men, two main things spring to mind. One is the art. I love the art. I enjoyed Pepe Larraz’s work on House of X, and he’s great here too. That low-angle establishing shot of the Treehouse in issue #1 is fabulous, but so is the body language in the exchange between Cyclops and Ben Urich that follows. It really gets the sense of both characters dancing around the topic. His action scenes are dynamic, but the parade of aliens in Gameworld is full of invention. Dr Stasis’s weird suburban home is suitably creepy (the pallid colouring helps there too). Issue #3 is mainly a big pointless fight, but at least he brings the crazy animal soldiers.

Larraz only draws the first three issues, but Javier Pina’s work on issues #4-5 is pretty sound too. The panels of Nightmare skipping across New York’s rooftops which his cloak trailing as smoke behind him are lovely; the scale in astral Jean dwarfing Nightmare is wonderfully done. Issue #5… yes, okay, that’s more of a straight fight issue, but it still looks good.

So the art is earning its keep. The story isn’t so satisfying. This volume of X-Men was launched at an awkward time, coming after Jonathan Hickman had finished his run, and at a point where everyone knew he was leaving, but at a stage where he was still writing Inferno. That causes a few problems. A lot of the appeal of the Hickman run is the sense of a big picture; as I’ve said before, he got away with an awful lot because he was very good at assuring the reader that it was all heading somewhere. Little of Hickman’s run really works without that wider context (the Vault arc being the main exception). So if you’re telling the audience that, actually, on reflection, we’re doing something else… well, there’s a bit of work needed to shore up the sense that this is still heading somewhere, and that we aren’t just pulling the plug a third of the way through a story.

Ideally, then, this book would hit the ground running and start setting a good strong agenda for the future. But it’s kind of hard to do that when Inferno is still to come out and the big turning point hasn’t been reached yet. With hindsight, quite a few books feel like they were marking time between “Hellfire Gala” and Inferno waiting for the next season to begin. X-Men was one of them – technically it was the only X-Men book, yet it still felt like the B-title.

If X-Men has a high concept idea, it’s that the X-Men have set up in New York rather than in Krakoa, and they’ve become more of an outreach project trying to bridge the gap with the outside world. Which is fine, but it’s not really the focus of these first issues. You can see how it’ll become more of a focus in the future, with the second arc seeing Cyclops stuck in an unwanted new identity to indulge the Quiet Council’s obsession with keeping resurrection secret. There’s some groundwork laid for that, and a definite chance for this book to find its feet in the next arc. Dr Stasis is being built up as a villain in the background; so to a lesser extent is Feilong.

But the A-plot of these opening issues is… fight of the month, basically. A bunch of alien gamblers send random stuff to attack the Earth, and the X-Men fight it. Two issues of variation on that, and it comes off as just random nonsense; there’s no terribly clear reason why these guys are specifically X-Men villains, or what any of it has to do with this book. Issue #3: the High Evolutionary shows up to have an issue long fight scene and then leave some directions for the future plot. Issue #4: a completely unrelated story about Nightmare, tying in loosely to Death of Dr Strange, but still inexplicably billed as “Fearless, part 4”. Issue #5: let’s fight the Reavers while reminding ourselves that Polaris is cool, actually.

If there’s a unifying thread to all this, it’s not leaping off the page. A lot of it, frankly, just feels like extended fighting to fill the pages while the book is waiting for more important plots to come to the boil. The Gameworld thread just kind of disappears. There are some good character moments in passing but not much sense of an overall team dynamic. I’m honestly not sure why Sunfire is even in the book. I get why they wanted to follow up on Synch and Laura from the previous volume, but does any team really need two characters with the power to copy other people’s powers?

It’s very nice to look at it, and from panel to panel it’s very dynamic. But it feels arbitrary and directionless. And in the transition out of the Hickman era, that’s the last message the X-books wanted to be sending.

Bring on the comments

  1. Si says:

    The cover image above, that’s a homage to the death of Phoenix, X-Men #137, right? If so, why?

  2. Skippy says:

    I bounced off this book early on. I thought the first issue was a pretty decent Power Rangers story, and the second didn’t change my mind. It is very beautiful, but £4 is £4. I might catch up with it on Unlimited eventually.

    I assumed, from my initial impressions, that Marvel wanted an X-Men book that is more straightforwardly superheroic, kept apart from the often morally-murky Krakoa milieu? Even though the current Avengers book is already filling that bombastic heroics niche? But I don’t think that’s what made any version of the X-Men popular.

  3. GN says:

    Paul> That’s kind of a guess, actually. The solicitations for the first trade paperback have it covering issues #1-6. But issue #6 isn’t labelled part of “Fearless” and seems to be the start of a new arc. So, I’m going to figure that the first TPB is actually meant to be issues #1-5, whatever the solicitations say. Because that would make some kind of sense.

    I believe there’s been a mistake of some kind in the titles of the last two issues. They were going for a unique look for the issue 6 title (which dropped the ‘Fearless’ bit and the recap title) but when it switched back for X-Men 7 and 8, I think the intern (or whoever fills in the credits) forgot to put in the ‘Fearless’ arc title. But that’s just my personal theory.

    Based on what I understand from an interview Duggan did early last year, the first arc (Fearless) actually comprises of the first twelve issues, divided into two trades. So the TPB solicitation is not necessarily wrong. It’s all one big story arc, but the story arc is told as one-and-done issues that rotates the focus on different team members.

    This first story arc ends with X-Men 12. This will be followed by a Hellfire Gala in June (just a one-shot this time and not a crossover event) where the ‘Year 2’ X-Men team, who will take over from X-Men 13 onward, will be revealed.

    So the structure of this book is Hellfire Gala (June 2021), twelve issues featuring the Year 1 team, Hellfire Gala (June 2022), twelve issues featuring the Year 2 team, Hellfire Gala (June 2023), twelve issues featuring the Year 3 team, and so on. Jean Grey and Cyclops will remain as the team leaders throughout the different iterations, since (in-universe) it’s their project to begin with.

    I’m not sure how long this concept can last as a book, but I think Duggan can get it to at least 36 issues, which means at least 3 iterations of the team.

  4. GN says:

    I think the reason this book seems quite unfocused is because Duggan is keeping the ‘one-and-done’ nature of the Hickman run but is combining it with the traditional action-superhero story normally done in multi-issue arcs. So it’s a hybrid approach that doesn’t entirely work.

    With regards to the first twelve issues, here’s how I think Duggan envisioned it:

    X-Men 1 – Team Introduction (everyone combines their powers to defeat the Mind Reaver)

    X-Men 2 – Sunfire focus issue (he destroys the Annihilation Wave) + Shiro’s Gala speech

    X-Men 3 – Set-up issue: The High Evolutionary alerts the team to Gameworld and Dr Stasis

    X-Men 4 – Jean Grey focus issue (she defeats Nightmare) + Jean’s Gala speech

    X-Men 5 – Polaris focus issue (she defeats the Verendi Reavers) + Lorna’s Gala speech

    X-Men 6 – Set-up issue: The introduction of Captain Krakoa + the establishment of Phobos Base by Feilong

    X-Men 7 – Cyclops focus issue (he saves a baby from the Stasis Chimeras) + Scott’s Gala speech

    X-Men 8 – Synch focus issue (he defeats M.O.D.O.K.) + Everett’s Gala speech

    Looking at the upcoming issues (spoilers for the solicitations, btw):

    X-Men 9 – ORCHIS (probably the Rogue focus issue with Rogue’s Gala speech)

    X-Men 10 – Lady Deathstrike (probably the Wolverine focus issue with Laura’s Gala speech)

    X-Men 11 – The Space Team (Jean Grey, Rogue, Polaris, Wolverine) face off against Cordyceps Jones in Gameworld

    X-Men 12 – The Home Team (Cyclops, Synch, Sunfire) face off against Dr Stasis in New Jersey

    The X-Men 12 plot is just my speculation, but it sort of makes sense based on how the team is divided.

  5. Si says:

    Is Avengers doing bombastic heroics? I’ve lost interest, but last time I looked they were mostly dealing with rival frenemy groups around the globe and fighting each other. I don’t think they ever punch Ultron until he stops trying to take over Manhattan or anything.

    X-Men is probably the only group book doing anything remotely traditional right now.

  6. Mike Loughlin says:

    If Pepe Larraz draws a comic, I like Javier Tina’s art as well. I’m fairly easy to please on the story front. Keep me entertained and I’m on board.

    That said, I find Duncan’s writing frustrating. He has an opportunity to explore what a public X-Men team means in the Krakow era, and we get the X-Men hosting barbecues. He has the opportunity to explore the character dynamics of this unwieldy team, and he doesn’t. How do Synch & Wolverine relate? How does Wolverine feel about Polaris using her body against her will? How does Jean feel about Synch using her power to mind wipe Ben Urich? What does Rogue think about… anything?

    Duggan likes having the X-Men fight, but hasn’t gone much deeper. He writes a lot of mono!ogues, but no real conflict. This title hasn’t been bad so much as underdeveloped.

  7. Redd Dayspring says:

    I think there are other things at play besides plot. The book reminds me a lot of Justice League Unlimited. We rarely see any life outside of costume and they have various threats that keep an episode or issue going while a sub plot builds in the background. I think if you’re coming to this book for plot that i can see that being frustrated but the character work has been really enjoyable. Not every book has to move the chess pieces.

  8. Mike Loughlin says:

    Redd Dayspring: glad you’re enjoying the series, and you raise a good point about A plots and B plots. I think Duggan is building to something in the subplot, especially the Dr. Stasis material. I want to see more character interactions, however, and more ramifications of the team members’ decisions.
    I’m also wary because storylines in Duggan’s Marauders went nowhere. Hopefully, this series will come together in a more satisfying manner.

  9. Ceries says:

    Feilong is a weird as hell character. He’s a descendent of Nicola Tesla out to prove his worth as a human in a mutant’s world, except also he’s a mixed-race Chinese billionaire for some weird Yellow Peril messaging, and he gets into a turf war with Sunfire (explicitly acknowledging that hey, a Chinese villain fighting a Japanese hero who once wore literally the imperial battle flag over territorial claims is historically fraught and then just immediately refusing to examine that at all). I guess, given Duggan’s track record with Asia, I should probably be glad it wasn’t even worse, but I’m mostly left deeply confused at what he thinks he was saying with this character.

  10. Chris says:

    I don’t get that at all with Feilong. I read it as Sunfire used to be a Japanese nationalist and is now a mutant nationalist. Feilong is a representative of the supposedly-obsolete human race (claiming Phobos in the name of all humanity and not China). If anything, Feilong is the hero. In this light, Sunfire hasn’t changed at all, while Feilong is a representative of a new post-national humanity wanting to embrace a future for all mankind, not just one ethnic-nation (like Sunfire). Is this subtext purposeful on Duggan’s part? Probably not. I’m continuing to read Feilong as the hero though.

  11. Si says:

    Feilong really strikes me as a Silver Age Action Scientist like Reed Richards or Hank Pym, which would make him absolutely the hero and the mutants the villains, if the setting was slightly different.

  12. Josie says:

    I know some will swear by his Uncanny Avengers (which I have not read), but I have never considered Duggan to be a writer worth a damn and I don’t know why anyone would willingly pick up a book with his name on it, unless motivated by other curiosities.

    He’s not Howard Mackie or Chuck Austen bad, but he distinctly reminds me of writers of the ’90s who had no clear purpose to their scripts.

  13. […] Paul O’Brien reviews the awkward beginnings of Gerry Duggan, Pepe Larraz, Javier Pina, et al’s X-Men #1-5. […]

  14. Rybread says:

    @Josie Do people actually swear by his Uncanny Avengers? (That’s not me doubting you, just me in disbelief because I dropped that book almost immediately and can’t imagine what anyone saw in it). As you said, he’s not Austen level bad, but everything he writes just leaves me cold. I was pleasantly surprised by the first year or Marauders but then that went off the rails as well…

    @Ceries I mean, you’re not wrong per se, but I also wouldn’t go into an X-Men comic expecting a thoughtful examination of real-world geopolitical tensions. It’s just not the genre and, quite frankly, I think we’re better off without the likes of Duggan and Howard delving into that territory.

  15. Josie says:

    “Do people actually swear by his Uncanny Avengers?”

    I’ve seen people in these comments (not on this particular thread) claim this. All I know is that book featured Deadpool, and his solo Deadpool was godawful, so that was an immediate turnoff.

    “everything he writes just leaves me cold”

    It feels like he’s cashing in a paycheck. There’s nothing on the page of anything I’ve read that suggests he has any enthusiasm for these characters.

  16. Uncanny X-Ben says:

    Are people big on his Uncanny Avengers, or the Remender version?

  17. Ceries says:

    Rybread: Yes but the thing is that Duggan not only invokes that history explicitly, his take on it is completely incoherent and makes no sense. It feels like he’s trying to say something but I have no idea what.

  18. Josie says:

    “Are people big on his Uncanny Avengers, or the Remender version?”

    I don’t think anyone is big on Remender’s Uncanny Avengers anymore. Which is a shame, as it had a lot of good ideas, good art, and a solid premise. But it was just a clusterfuck of plotting. And then came Axis, then the awful and aborted second volume.

  19. Krzysiek Ceran says:

    In my mind it’s about half of a good run, except there’s no halfway point that marks when it turns bad – it’s good and bad from the start.

    (Obviously I mean the first volume, and obviously Axis is horrible).

    There’s good and great art. There’re good ideas. There are poor ideas (Havok’s m-word speech) that led to good stuff (Kitty’s answer in Bendis’s run – I’m not saying the speech was amazing, just that it was interesting to have such a strong in-universe rebuttal).

    But there’s also stuff that’s just mediocre, weighted down by poor execution. The character interactions never worked for me – feral Rogue, indifferent Scarlet Witch, acting like she is being forced to apologize for a social media meltdown and not, you know, mass depowering that led to mass casualties. Or the Havok/Wasp romance, out of nowhere, going nowhere (rest in comic book limbo, forgotten Katie Summers).

    But the secrets tearing the team apart – Logan’s X-Force coming into light or Thor’s drunken decision-making, even though the latter is a continuity implant – that stuff’s good. And this was the run that made me appreciate Daniel Acuña’s art.

    Going back to execution, there actually is a point I’d point to as the start of the run becoming mostly bad, and it’s Earth’s destruction. Obviously from that point on we’re just waiting for somebody to go back in time and reverse it, but Remender spins a whole new act of the story while we wait – and it was too long and not nearly interesting enough.

    Also, by that point, it was at least the third time Remender has done the same shtick – where an epic story gets shunted into an alternate reality for a prolonged period of time right before the finale (there was AoA in Uncanny X-Force, and some bad robot future related stuff in Secret Avengers… and then there was another bad future in Uncanny X-Force, with magistrate Psylocke, and then the whole inversion in Axis is basically the same trick – though Axis was later, obviously). I had a strong feeling of repetition by that point.

    And it was supposed to be a flagship title, but it never was. Other then Kitty’s rebuttal, the Unity Squad’s existence didn’t matter outside of that title – which wouldn’t be a problem, I love self-contained runs, but then it ends with Axis splashing over everything and it just doesn’t work. And is generally horrible.

    And it has characters going ‘Magneto, you monster! By killing the most evil nazi in the universe you’ve become just as evil as him!’, and I just… why?

  20. Josie says:

    I’d argue that all the villains in Remender’s Uncanny X-Force were poorly served. They’re not uninteresting in general, and it’s not like Remender can’t write a good villain. But they’re so far removed from the protagonists, and their plans are so lofty as to be frequently incoherent. There’s no way to connect with them, or at least appreciate their ambitions, in the same way as Archangel, Dark Beast, evil Iceman, or hell even Daken.

    What can Uncanny X-Force do against Archangel? They can stab him to death.

    What can the Uncanny Avengers do against the Apocalypse Twins? Hell if I know.

  21. Josie says:

    I’ll go a bit further.

    The fact that all the villains in Uncanny X-Force were stabbable served the stories, because the stories were rarely about whether X-Force COULD kill them but whether they SHOULD kill them.

  22. Omar Karindu says:

    Josie said: The fact that all the villains in Uncanny X-Force were stabbable served the stories, because the stories were rarely about whether X-Force COULD kill them but whether they SHOULD kill them.

    And there’s the rub: that’s a dilemma that can’t work for Uncanny Avengers, since it’s, well, the Avengers, not a black ops X-team.

    Remender sort of tried to force those kinds of choices, though: should the Unity Squad help Kang undo the timeline, given what it will cost? Should Magneto kill the Red Skull?

    But those weren’t posed as serious moral questions reflecting the protagonists’ consciences in Uncanny Avengers, as they were in Uncanny X-Force. They were just treated as plot gimmick questions with plot gimmick consequences.

    I keep circling back around to the idea that what Remender is best at doesn’t fit very well with grandiose, epic plotting or with big-name, traditionally “heroic” protagonists.

    That said, I don’t know what kind of stories the Unity Squad idea was good for in the longer run. Their power levels mean that they have to fight big, epic villains, so the villains will tend to the epic and impersonal.

    My take is that the book couldn’t be about its overt villains, but about the way the Unity Squad s working in a system that won’t support them. So you have them doing standard Avengers missions, but the real threats are anti-mutant protestors, government sandbagging, and divisive media narratives.

    Remender had a good underlying idea, especially in the first arc: give them threats they can’t beat by punching hard. But his idea was to bring in villains that outpower the team and make physical stuff meaningless. Maybe the real answer was to create the kinds of antagonists where punch-ups or even “hero vs. villain” dynamics are simply irrelevant.

    Something in the vein of Claremont’s plans for characters like Valerie Cooper or Bendis’s plot mechanics around Matt Murdock being outed by the tabloids might have worked better as the book’s through-line, with the supervillain fights being the routine day-to-day stuff.

  23. Skippy says:

    Isn’t “working in a system that won’t support them” kind of what Duggan’s UA run was about, ironically enough?

    I read it last year, liked it okay. Probably would not have bought it monthly. Duggan’s take on Cable was memorable, and I remember enjoying the Pymtron story; it had been a while since I’d seen Ultron used as anything other than a generic robo-bad guy.

  24. Josie says:

    Following what Omar said, one big question about the Unity gimmick, which Remender attempted to tackle, is do you make the villains a combination of X-Men villains and Avengers villains, like the protagonists themselves? Because if you just do one or the other, you run into two issues:

    1. If the Avengers have in the past taken down Avengers villains by themselves, what do they need the X-Men there for?

    2. If the X-Men haven’t taken down Avengers villains before, why is this suddenly in their interest?

    Maybe something like a teamup between the Hellfire Club and the Masters of Evil/Thunderbolts could’ve been something. I dunno.

    A lot of Marvel villains suffer from the Spider-man rogues problem: almost none of them have a personal grudge against the heroes; the heroes just get involved after the fact and foil the villains’ plans.

    I guess another thing that made Uncanny X-Force so good is that the villains were rarely straightforward villains. They were evil as hell, but conceptually not irredeemable.

  25. Omar Karindu says:

    Josie said: 1. If the Avengers have in the past taken down Avengers villains by themselves, what do they need the X-Men there for?

    2. If the X-Men haven’t taken down Avengers villains before, why is this suddenly in their interest?

    To the first question, I’d say the idea is that the Unity Squad is a specific roster, not “every Avenger plus every X-Man.” So it’s quite possible that, say, Ultron or Graviton or whoever would still be a challenge for them.

    For the second question, i think that’s the hook. For some of the X-folks on the roster, fighting standard villain is basically a PR exercise, not so far from, say, the X-Men turning up to fight the Mole Man early in Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men.

    More generally, as heroes, they surely share some ideals, like saving people’s lives from a visible, immediate threat in front of them. If Zodiac had shown up in Salem Center and started vaporizing people, I don’t think most X-Men teams would just sit back and think, “not our problem; let’s wait for the Avengers to show up and take care of this”

    So you’d have the intra-team conflict of some of the characters taking the fight with those villains as serious and important, with others seeing it as this thing they have to do to play to the cameras and improve human-mutant relations, or maybe to solidify their place int he team so they can push for more politically risky missions against other forces.

    And you’d have the external threat of, say, the media turning around and no covering these battles the same way they cover “standard” Avengers battle, or singling out mutant members of the teams as “weaker contributors” and what not.

    And then you have the whole problem of Wolverine, and the team’s political or anti-mutant enemies leaking all sorts of nasty stuff about his past actions.

    And in the meantime, maybe you’ve got challenges like the team being split on how to shut down something like Weapon Plus with a real split between “patiently gather evidence and expose them” vs. “charge in and shut them down, political fallout be damned.”

    It’d be interesting to see which Avengers — maybe Captain America? — would see this as a justified action and which members — Iron Man? As a twist, maybe Havok? — would see the best path forward as leaning on government, proving it’s there int he press, and so forth using the Avengers’ prestige. Would any of the traditional Avengers characters just not be able to wrap their heads around the idea that government-sanctioned genocide is going on right under their noses? (Thor might be thick enough to believe this.)

    Basically, you make it a book about how damned difficult actually achieving the Unity Team’s remit would be, while showing the majority of the characters as thoughtfully trying to find a real, good way forward, even if they differ strongly on how to do that.

    Remender was trying to do that in various ways, most blatantly with Rogue’s characterization, but I think he went sort of over-the-top and wrote her as someone who thought she was there to tell off the Avengers at every possible opportunity while Havok was positioned as a reasonable liberal alternative.

    I don’t buy the Avengers being blinkered enough to not, say, have some celebration of mutant icons in place before the roster went public. And I don’t buy X-Men characters participating in a Unity Team to begin with if they see the Avengers as that hopelessly blinkered.

    I’d rather have seen a clash of methodologies and a concern about how to move the bigger social structure, not a clash of actual goals or a lot of sniping about the Avengers not caring or the X-Men being too radical, which is what we got when we weren’t getting absurd stuff like the Earth blowing up or the red Skull mind-controlling the planet.

  26. Omar Karindu says:

    Maybe the easiest way to put it is this: I’d have liked a version of Uncanny Avengers in which we got the sense the Unity Squad members had sat down and figured a few things out about what they wanted to do and who wanted to do it before their first press conference.

  27. Josie says:

    When I was young, I had a concept for a comic that poked at one of the biggest logic holes in the Marvel Universe: why is it that X-Men are hated for being born with powers but the Avengers are celebrated for having them?

    So a possible Uncanny Avengers story is Gyrich, with the backing of some nefarious source, successfully runs a propaganda campaign to demonize all superheroes the way that mutants are demonized, and the Unity Squad ends up having to be a covert unit that somehow manages to foil this campaign.

    Eh. I dunno.

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