{"id":1123,"date":"2011-11-06T19:22:33","date_gmt":"2011-11-06T19:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=1123"},"modified":"2011-11-06T22:27:17","modified_gmt":"2011-11-06T22:27:17","slug":"the-x-axis-6-november-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=1123","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 6 November 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

The “Regenesis” relaunch is now well and truly underway, with three of the regular X-titles starting their new arcs this week, including core title Uncanny X-Men<\/em>. \u00a0Elsewhere… well, there are a few other new titles, and a bunch of more diverse stuff sitting the pile I haven’t read yet. \u00a0Busy week.<\/p>\n

Avengers Academy<\/em>\u00a0#21<\/strong>\u00a0– By Marvel’s standards, this deserves some sort of award for restraint. \u00a0It is indeed the start of a new direction for the series – relocating to California, adding two new regulars, and expanding the supporting cast dramatically. \u00a0But while there’s a big sign on the cover saying “1st Issue of a New Era”, they haven’t renumbered it. \u00a0Astonishing. \u00a0Has somebody finally figured out that that stunt only works if you use it sparingly? \u00a0Seems unlikely. \u00a0Maybe it was an oversight.<\/p>\n

Regardless, Avengers Academy<\/em>\u00a0is worth a passing mention because it’s written by Christos Gage, who’s soon to take over X-Men Legacy<\/em>. \u00a0While it’s never been a big seller, it is one of Marvel’s most consistent team books. \u00a0Gage certainly knows how to juggle a large cast and make sure they all have something to do; and the original characters who make up the student body are all nicely rounded personalities with strong individual concepts. \u00a0The series has a very well judged blend of classic Marvel tropes and fresh characters to experience them. \u00a0Granted, Gage is writing one of the low-end X-books where he’ll be working in the margins of other peoples’ stories, and granted, his Brood arc on Astonishing X-Men<\/em>\u00a0was nothing special… but I have hopes for him as a regular writer.<\/p>\n

The two new additions to the cast are Lightspeed and what seems to be a new White Tiger. \u00a0(Though quite what happened to the last one, who was in the supporting cast of Daredevil<\/em>\u00a0only a year or so back, isn’t even touched on – did I miss something?) \u00a0The Tiger’s role seems to be as the stroppy, preachy character, and we’ll see how that goes. \u00a0As for Lightspeed, I think a lot of writers have struggled to figure out what to do with the Power Pack characters now that they aren’t children any more – which, after all, was their central hook. \u00a0While Julie’s shown up in a few stories in recent years, she’s drifted into a role where her lack of direction was<\/em>\u00a0the direction, and that’s not a long-term solution. \u00a0Here, her role seems to be as the interloper in the group, who’s trying very hard to be nice to everyone, but whose years of experience mean she really isn’t on a level playing field with the others.<\/p>\n

As for the broader decision to expand the cast and allow lots of obscure teenage heroes to appear in supporting roles… I have some doubts about that. \u00a0It seems like it could lead to the same lack of focus that caused problems in Uncanny X-Men<\/em>\u00a0over the last few years, though this issue restricts the wider student body to cameo roles, and the book makes it abundantly clear that the focus remains on the core group. \u00a0Regardless, fans \u00a0of Marvel’s more traditional team books should love this series, and this is a very good jumping on point.<\/p>\n

Heart<\/em>\u00a0#1<\/strong>\u00a0– A four-issue miniseries about an MMA fighter from Blair Butler and Kevin Mellon. \u00a0Since it starts with a flash forward, we know that it’s basically the story of Oren Redmond’s transformation from cubicle worker to low-rung mohawked fighter. \u00a0The subtext, judging from the first issue, seems to be to question just how much of an improvement this actually is.<\/p>\n

While plenty happens in the first issue – an extended fight sequence and an explanation of how Oren got into MMA in the first place – it does come across more like the first 26 pages of a graphic novel than as an instalment in its own right. \u00a0And the plot is pretty unsurprising; there are no dramatic twists, merely a dutiful chronicling of Oren’s gradual transformation. \u00a0Then again, it doesn’t feel like there are meant<\/em>\u00a0to be great moments of drama. \u00a0It seems to have been conceived more as a character study of a typical fighter on the foothills of the MMA circuit, and judged on that level, it’s got a lot going for it. \u00a0The character’s voice rings true, the opening fight is well choreographed to get across the key point about Oren getting lucky when he really didn’t deserve to win, and Mellon’s black and white art is both striking and atmospheric. \u00a0It’s probably something that will read better in the collection, but it does have plenty to recommend it.<\/p>\n

New Mutants<\/em>\u00a0#33<\/strong>\u00a0– The first “Regenesis” branded issue is a transition story, as the New Mutants decide where they stand on the whole split. \u00a0Of course, we already know – Cannonball and Karma gowith Wolverine, and the rest stay behind. \u00a0So wisely, the book doesn’t dwell on that, so much as on the New Mutants’ position within Cyclops’ operation, as Abnett and Lanning take the opportunity to give the book a rather more clearly defined role. \u00a0While they’re keeping the plot-engine of having the New Mutants chase down the X-Men’s loose ends, the team are now positioned as the group who didn’t wholeheartedly align themselves with either side. \u00a0They don’t want to go back to the school, but they don’t embrace Cyclops’ separatist tendencies either. \u00a0So the upshot is that while they still run clean-up missions for Cyclops, the New Mutants have left Utopia and set up shop in San Francisco proper.<\/p>\n

That’s a good move for the book, I think. \u00a0The series has always faced the nagging problem of defining its premise. \u00a0In the original run the New Mutants were the X-Men in training. \u00a0But by now, they’re the characters who used to be in the original class, and who graduated years ago, and it was only the characters’ shared history that kept them as a unit within the larger population of Utopia. \u00a0Now they’re set more clearly apart from the rest of the mutant community, and that should help to sell the idea that this is fundamentally a series about a group of friends caught up in the fringes of mutant politics. \u00a0They’re also the mutants who live in the real world, which gives their book a distinct role – yes, technically<\/em>\u00a0the same could be said for X-Factor, but it’s hardly emphasised in the same way that Abnett and Lanning seem to be planning here.<\/p>\n

David Lopez draws this issue; I’ve loved his work on Mystic<\/em>, which also finishes this week, and his nice clean lines are a good fit for this series too. \u00a0He’s tweaked Cypher’s character design to make him more distinctive (and play up the non-combatant, non-athletic angle), but I think it works. \u00a0I’m not so sure about his Warlock; the character doesn’t easily fit into Lopez’s style, and I don’t think he’s cracked the problem yet. \u00a0But on the other hand, he’s an artist who can be trusted to pull off a conversation scene viewed without dialogue through a window, and you can’t say that about everyone working at Marvel these days.<\/p>\n

It’s an issue rather light on plot, and I’d rather have seen a little bit more done to set up the mission for next issue, but on the whole it’s a successful story.<\/p>\n

Six Guns<\/em>\u00a0#1<\/strong>\u00a0– This five-issue miniseries (though it’s an offbeat Marvel comic in 2011, so perhaps we’d better see that “five” as provisional) is essentially meant to be an update of some of their western characters, relocated to modern-day Texas. \u00a0I’m probably not the target audience for this, since the western genre has always left me kind of cold, and something about the premise feels a bit gimmicky to me. \u00a0Most of Marvel’s western characters weren’t particularly well defined to start with, and once you transplant them to a different setting, what’s really left besides the name? \u00a0Can the western genre meaningfully be transplanted to the modern era, shorn of its frontier context, or do you just end up with a rural version of noir?<\/p>\n

Andy Diggle and Davide Gianfelice’s first issue introduces three characters – Tarantula (presumably loosely based on the Phantom Rider villain), Black Rider (whose series ran for several years in the early 1950s), and Tex Dawson (originally the Western Kid, now a Texas Ranger). \u00a0Quite what any of them gain from their links to the earlier characters, I don’t know – the source material is thunderously obscure, and it’s hard to imagine that many readers will have more than a passing familiarity with the names, if that. \u00a0The first issue certainly sets up a serviceable killing\/revenge plot, and visually it’s well handled – Gianfelice can pull off a good car chase, which is notoriously harder than you’d think in comics.<\/p>\n

But there’s nothing especially western about it, and it ends up feeling to me more like a fairly typical action\/noir comic. \u00a0It does that well enough, and fans of the genre may want to check it out, but I don’t think it’s likely to have much broader appeal than that.<\/p>\n

Uncanny X-Men<\/em>\u00a0#1<\/strong>\u00a0– “Brand-new ongoing!” proclaims the cover, as if there had been some sort of break since the final issue of the last series.<\/p>\n

In some ways, Kieron Gillen has the bigger challenge in writing this side of the team. \u00a0Not only is Wolverine’s splinter faction the more naturally sympathetic, but at first glance the remaining X-Men are simply continuing on the status quo of the last few years, just with slightly fewer people. \u00a0One of the key tasks for this first issue was to convince me that that’s not the case, and that the schism has changed things for this book too.<\/p>\n

And it succeeds in that. \u00a0With almost all the kids gone (and the few that remain being treated as military cadets), the X-Men seem to have abandoned all pretence that they’re running some sort of refuge where people can live normally. \u00a0They’re a little separatist clique who are convinced that somebody’s got to do the hard work of protecting the remaining mutants, even if Wolverine and his bunch can’t be bothered. \u00a0And they’re now quite openly going out of their way to take advantage of the way they intimidate ordinary humans – they’re still superheroes, but in part so that they can make a show of force and remind everyone to get off their lawn.<\/p>\n

This also means (at long last) a return to a defined team roster, which should go a long way to alleviating the lack of focus which has plagued this book over recent years: Cyclops, Storm, Colossus, Magneto, Emma, Danger, Namor, Magik and Hope. \u00a0That’s a team of ridiculously overpowered heavy hitters, and deliberately so. \u00a0It’s also a group packed with people with a track record of very dubious judgment, Storm being perhaps the only clear exception. \u00a0Most of them are ex-villains and at least one is borderline insane. \u00a0Of course, at this stage in the story, they’re not<\/em>\u00a0clearly in the wrong, but the nature of the set-up means the story has to at least raise questions about whether they’re going too far. \u00a0A bigger difficulty may be making the group sympathetic, given that Cyclops has rarely been a character that people can root for, but Storm, Hope and (to a degree) Colossus ought to be able to serve that role.<\/p>\n

There’s also another reason why the schism affects this book, which is actually best focussed in the recap page over in X-Men<\/em>\u00a0#20: Utopia’s whole purpose is to represent mutants, yet the mass defection fundamentally undermines Scott’s claim to do so. \u00a0He no longer has a clear mandate, and he’s responding to that by doubling down on his most controversial policies. \u00a0This cannot end well – but it could be a good story.<\/p>\n

The actual story in this first issue – aside from introducing the new team and their redefined relationship with San Francisco – sees Mr Sinister return, to do… well, something… with the Dreaming Celestial. \u00a0Sinister’s a tricky character; he started off genuinely mysterious in the late 80s before descending over the course of the following decade into a rather incoherent and arbitrary mess with vague and ill-defined goals. \u00a0It doesn’t help that he’s still saddled with the extraordinarily melodramatic name and character design that were originally intended to play into Chris Claremont’s concept of a supervillain as conceived by a child. \u00a0On the other hand, what we do<\/em>\u00a0know clearly about Sinister is that he’s interested in the direction of evolution (for some reason) and he thinks that mutants play a key part in that, so he ought to be very concerned about many of the same things that bother Cyclops. \u00a0Visually, Sinister’s latest overhaul has more than a dash of\u00a0V for Vendetta<\/em>\u00a0about him, particularly in the opening pages where he’s randomly killing tourists with a sword, but whether that’s got any significance remains to be seen.<\/p>\n

His actual plan in this story is characteristically obscure, and I suppose one factor here will be how much you trust Gillen to have an actual answer for once. \u00a0Granted, the track record of Sinister mysteries making sense is not a good one. \u00a0But I do trust Gillen on this, partly because he’s got a solid track record, but also because the cliffhanger elevates the story from random attack to “what the hell” – it’s such an odd cliffhanger that it has to be heading somewhere.<\/p>\n

Carlos Pacheco is a great superhero artist – rather more conventional than Chris Bachalo on the sister title, but he really does know how to pull off an action sequence and breathe some life into his characters. \u00a0He does a great job with the montage sequences too, since he knows how to do a single panel that suggests a whole scene. \u00a0It’s also nice to see some thought being put into the design for Utopia, such as the X-Men’s meeting room; it’s past time the artists agreed on a look for the place beyond “utilitarian”. \u00a0The Juggernaut\/Colossus design still needs a bit of refinement; there’s something about it that still looks odd to me. \u00a0And there’s some stuff with little cubes that isn’t as clear as it might be. \u00a0But that final double page spread is excellent, and overall, it’s a very nice looking comic.<\/p>\n

Inevitably this is both a darker book than Wolverine and the X-Men<\/em>, but only up to a point. \u00a0There are still some nice moments of comedy in this book, the X-Men have not turned into a paramilitary squad, and Sinister’s plan is completely demented. \u00a0It’s got a trickier concept to pull off, but it’s off to a good start.<\/p>\n

X-Men<\/em>\u00a0#20<\/strong>\u00a0– Oh, X-Men Team-Up<\/em>\u00a0is still going. \u00a0This arc’s guest star: War Machine. \u00a0Judging from the cast, it seems this may be one of the places where the B-listers on Cyclops’ side end up – in this case, Psylocke, Jubilee, Warpath and Domino.<\/p>\n

The story here has the X-Men chasing down some second-hand Sentinels that are changing hands in one of the many fictitious eastern European states that must make pub quizzes so troublesome in the Marvel Universe. \u00a0Demonstrating a shaky grasp of how these things work, this one is supposed to be somewhere near Romania but has a name ending in -stan, which, uh, no. \u00a0Perhaps Americans don’t see a problem with this, but honestly, to me, it rings embarrassingly false. \u00a0It’s like having an Arab country bordering Denmark.<\/p>\n

Anyhow, if you can leave that aside, and you don’t mind the fact that two rusty old Sentinels are meant to be a major threat in this story even though they were a throwaway background threat in Schism<\/em>\u00a0just a couple of months ago, this is serviceable enough. \u00a0Will Conrad’s art is really quite good, and he sells the Sentinels rather well; done in the right style, their lumpen designs can be turned to looming advantage, and this is a good illustration. \u00a0As usual, Gischler gets the voices of the characters, and it’s nice to see him picking up on the Colossus\/Juggernaut idea from Uncanny<\/em>. \u00a0But the villains don’t have much in the way of personality, and the story is merely okay. \u00a0It’s fine for what it is, but it’s really a book for completists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The “Regenesis” relaunch is now well and truly underway, with three of the regular X-titles starting their new arcs this week, including core title Uncanny X-Men. \u00a0Elsewhere… well, there are a few other new titles, and a bunch of more diverse stuff sitting the pile I haven’t read yet. \u00a0Busy week. Avengers Academy\u00a0#21\u00a0– By Marvel’s […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1123","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\/1123","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=1123"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1125,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1123\/revisions\/1125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}