{"id":1084,"date":"2011-10-09T19:19:31","date_gmt":"2011-10-09T18:19:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=1084"},"modified":"2011-10-09T19:19:31","modified_gmt":"2011-10-09T18:19:31","slug":"the-x-axis-9-october-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=1084","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 9 October 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new month (and a quiet week for X-books, perhaps because they had the good sense to get most of the line out of the path of Schism <\/em>#5)\u00a0means we can get back to the regular format…<\/p>\n

Last of the Greats<\/em>\u00a0#1<\/strong>\u00a0– This is an ongoing series from Joshua Hale Fialkov and Brent Peeples, though the concept doesn’t obviously seem to lend itself to a completely open-ended story. \u00a0Basically it’s one of those “What if superheroes existed in the real world” set-ups, though it’s a bit more high concept than that.<\/p>\n

The Greats are a bunch of Superman-type aliens who showed up twenty years ago and set about making the world a better place, rather in the manner of the Authority. \u00a0Which is to say, while they probably are on the right side of the argument, they’re also doing it by force in a way that isn’t entirely helpful. \u00a0So naturally the humans turn on them and wipe them out. \u00a0Which means that by the time the massive alien invasion shows up, there’s only one of them left, and he’s not all that enthusiastic about leaving the house to help out.<\/p>\n

Not that the Last of the Greats seems to make any real pretence of being a superhero; as he explains it, his family came to earth to get humanity ready for something or other (which everyone else takes to be the invasion, but he never actually says so), \u00a0and he’s rather cynical about the whole enterprise anyway. \u00a0This would be a perfectly good set-up in its own right, though the ending – which I won’t spoil, since it’s basically what the whole issue is building to – is presumably taking the book somewhere else.<\/p>\n

Much of this first issue is taken up with a combination of exposition and set-up for that twist – though the opening two pages also seem to be laying the groundwork for stories further down the line. \u00a0Personally, I kind of saw the last two pages coming, though the ending as a whole does raise some questions about how much of the preceding exposition is actually true.<\/p>\n

More broadly, though, I found the book more interesting in theory than in practice. \u00a0The opening page is just utterly confusing – there’s no consistent landmarks in the backgrounds of the first three panels, and I honestly don’t know what a 9\/11 reference adds beyond misdirection. \u00a0The humans’ attitude to the Greats doesn’t altogether make sense – why are they so awed by the power of people who are apparently not that hard to kill? \u00a0It’s also a book which stands or falls depending on how you feel about the title character, since thus far the supporting cast are functional at best. \u00a0Unfortunately, he’s not really got the charisma to carry a whole series on his shoulders. \u00a0It’s got its moments, and there are good ideas in here, but the execution doesn’t grab me.<\/p>\n

Snarked!<\/em>\u00a0#1<\/strong>\u00a0– Roger Langridge’s all-ages comedy series based loosely on the Hunting of the Snark. \u00a0Or rather, on Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poetry generally, since the stars are actually the Walrus and the Carpenter, who come from a different poem altogether. \u00a0In this version, the Walrus is a conman and the Carpenter is his dimwitted sidekick. \u00a0Meanwhile, the king has been away for months and is long overdue for his return, so the (very obviously villainous) royal advisors are scheming to take control of the country, as long as they can somehow get rid of Princess Scarlett.<\/p>\n

There was a preview issue a few weeks back, but you don’t need to have read it – actually, if anything it begs the question of why some of the characters don’t recognise one another when they’ve already met. \u00a0Yes, this issue starts with the missing-king story already in progress, but that was case with issue #0 as well.<\/p>\n

Roger Langridge has been doing fantastic work for Boom’s all-ages imprint lately – just on a technical level, it’s something of a marvel that he was able to render a recognisable version of the Muppet Show in comics form, complete with inaudible song and dance numbers. \u00a0Langridge is evidently from the school of thought that believes all-ages stories really should be entertaining for adults too – he can’t seriously be expecting modern kids to get references to Pete and Dud, after all – and this is wonderfully enjoyable work. \u00a0I suspect it will\u00a0 find a more receptive audience as a collected edition is out, but there’s no denying that this is a great piece of cartooning from someone who really knows how to tell a story and define a character, not to mention writing a decent joke. \u00a0Genuinely charming stuff.<\/p>\n

X-23<\/em>\u00a0#15<\/strong>\u00a0– Crikey, Marjorie Liu is really dusting off the backwater villains here. \u00a0This is part three of “Chaos Theory”, in which X-23 finds herself helping the FF deal with some sort of cosmic weirdness that’s more in their wheelhouse than hers. \u00a0So last issue brought in the Enigma Force, and this month identifies the villains as the Whirldemons. \u00a0The Whirldemons are about as obscure as it gets – they appeared in a single storyline\u00a0in 1981, and haven’t been seen since.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, somebody at Marvel has evidently figured out that they’re publishing serials, since footnotes seem to be creeping back into use. \u00a0Perhaps Axel Alonso has a less hardline stance on them. \u00a0So this issue dutifully alerts us to the fact that it’s referencing a subplot that hasn’t been mentioned since issue #3. \u00a0And a good thing too, because frankly, what proportion of the readers would ever make that sort of connection unprompted? \u00a0Interestingly, there’s some selection going on; this issue also has a recap of the Enigma Force’s origin story, but that doesn’t get a footnote directing us to the relevant issue (Micronauts<\/em>\u00a0#35, if you’re wondering). \u00a0That makes sense; all the relevant information is repeated here, so why bother directing the reader to a thirty-year-old comic that’s out of print anyway?<\/p>\n

I digress. \u00a0There’s certainly some beautiful art in this issue, and I do like the way X-23 retains her disturbingly unflappable air no matter how insane the situation. \u00a0And in terms of the general shape of the series, it makes sense to bring X-23 back from her world tour and into contact with some more classic superheroes. \u00a0My problem with this story, I suppose, is that it doesn’t really seem like an X-23 story; it feels like she’s wandered into a different comic where she doesn’t really have a place. \u00a0Enough of it is done from her perspective to stop her feeling like a redundant guest star in an FF comic, and there’s some hinting that she has a vital role in this story, but three chapters in, I don’t really have a sense of what that role might be. \u00a0Perhaps it’ll all fit together in the final part.<\/p>\n

X-Men<\/em>\u00a0#19<\/strong>\u00a0– Victor Gischler seems to have no real remit for this series other than to do team-up stories, and admittedly that doesn’t give him a great deal to work with. \u00a0But “Betrayal in the Bermuda Triangle” seems to have been nothing much more than a homage to Skull the Slayer<\/em>, a series that ran for eight issues in the mid-1970s. \u00a0The X-Men and the FF (who really add nothing to this story beyond clutter) team up to answer a rescue message from Lee Forrester and Jim Scully, who have got trapped in the Skull the Slayer<\/em>\u00a0world again. \u00a0The heroes help them fight off an invasion by a bunch of aliens from the original series, and then the two people they were going to rescue… decided to stay after all. \u00a0Achieved an awful lot there, didn’t we?<\/p>\n

Between this and Claws\u00a02<\/em>, we’ve had two recent stories that seemed to serve no discernible purpose whatsoever, other than to indulge in fond memories of characters of the mid-1970s. \u00a0Of course, that’s before most of the current readership was born, so it’s ludicrous to expect these stories to succeed on their nostalgia value. \u00a0There’s no point in dusting off these characters unless you’ve got a story worth telling with them – and while this arc looks suspiciously like a backdoor pilot for a Skull the Slayer<\/em>\u00a0revival, it’s really just a generic superhero\/fantasy blend. \u00a0Bizarre misuse of Lee Forrester aside, it’s not outright bad; it’s just very indifferent. \u00a0Stories like this do not make a good argument for the continued existence of so many X-Men comics.<\/p>\n

X-Men: Schism<\/em>\u00a0#5<\/strong>\u00a0– The final issue, and this is where we get to the eponymous split. \u00a0With hindsight, the title of this series was perhaps a mistake, since the actual schism is something we’ll be seeing in the fallout issues. \u00a0What this series contains is the last straw that leads to the split. \u00a0(And what Prelude to Schism<\/em>\u00a0contained… remains a mystery to all.)<\/p>\n

As a direction for the X-books, I like the ideological divide here quite a bit. \u00a0The Utopia set-up has never really clicked, and on any view it makes it harder to tell some types of stories by isolating the characters from the real world. \u00a0It’s perhaps rather odd that Wolverine alone should be the one to raise the point – to make this work, you really do have to read the series in the light of Jason Aaron’s Wolverine<\/em>\u00a0run, and it would have been smart to make that point more explicit in\u00a0Schism<\/em>\u00a0itself – but it’s also quite right that somebody should be questioning Scott’s all-hands-on-deck policy where there are no longer any non-combatants.<\/p>\n

The story leaves Aaron and artist Adam Kubert with a tricky balancing act for the final issue. \u00a0The real climax of this story is Wolverine leaving and a bunch of people going with him. \u00a0The Sentinel is plainly just a means to that end and a great big metaphor. \u00a0Aaron lays it on a bit thick by having the Hellfire kids watching and making snide comments about “senseless violence”. \u00a0But ultimately the fight does work, because you can read it to fit either side’s point of view. \u00a0For Cyclops, the kids rallied and rose to the occasion, so it was a great heroic stand that proves him right. \u00a0For Wolverine, the very fact that the battle happened at all only goes to show that they’re getting something wrong – and the victory has to be given a slightly hollow feel to make that work.<\/p>\n

Kubert’s work on this issue is great. \u00a0He’s always a good action artist, and I like the way he’s using slightly wonky panels to give energy and urgency to a basically familiar grid layout. \u00a0Since I mentioned on the podcast recently that letterbox panels get on my nerves, it’s worth saying that this is an example of them being used well. \u00a0When they crop up in the fight scene, it’s in a sequence where the panel shape makes sense, and the diagonals keep the tension up. \u00a0He only goes into regular letterboxes later, when he wants the regularity to re-establish a sense of calm, or when he wants to cut between locations in the epilogue.<\/p>\n

Whether we really need Cyclops and Wolverine continuing to fight with one another even when the Sentinel’s on their doorstep… well, that doesn’t really make sense, but I can kind of live with it given superhero comics’ operatic tendencies. \u00a0I see what Aaron was going for; the story beat is meant to be that they’ve allowed it to become personal, and they’re snapped back into getting their heads together when they see the kids charging in to take over from them. \u00a0Still, it’s pushing it a bit.<\/p>\n

And I’m still not sold on the Hellfire kids. \u00a0Thematically, I suppose I can see what Aaron’s going for. \u00a0Wolverine’s objection is to the X-Men putting the kids in the line of fire; the underage supervillains are the dark flipside of that concern. \u00a0That makes some sense, but the X-Men’s students are proper characters (and drawn a few years older), while the Hellfire brats are such broad caricatures that it’s hard to take them seriously at all. \u00a0They’re ridiculous, and I’m sure that’s precisely what Jason Aaron likes about them, but it causes problems when they’re being used as something other than comic relief.<\/p>\n

The other striking thing about this series is that, while we get a pretty thorough explanation of why Cyclops and Wolverine fall out, we don’t get any<\/em>\u00a0explanation of why the other X-Men picked sides. \u00a0There’s just a bunch of characters, mostly the kids, on Wolverine’s plane without explanation. \u00a0Presumably all that’s going to be covered in future issues, but it does make the moment of departure feel a little arbitrary here – especially as the kids seemed to be pretty firmly on Scott’s side in the previous issue.<\/p>\n

Not a perfect series, then. \u00a0But for the most part it works. \u00a0I like the general direction, and I’m glad to see the line moving into a new phase under its new main writers. \u00a0There’s a lot of promise in this set-up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new month (and a quiet week for X-books, perhaps because they had the good sense to get most of the line out of the path of Schism #5)\u00a0means we can get back to the regular format… Last of the Greats\u00a0#1\u00a0– This is an ongoing series from Joshua Hale Fialkov and Brent Peeples, though the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1084"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1086,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1084\/revisions\/1086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}