Yes, it’s a day late. \u00a0Mind you, if I’m being perfectly honest, it’s not the most exciting week of stories anyway…<\/p>\n
AvX: Versus<\/strong><\/em> #4<\/strong> – You can just about see why somebody might have thought an “all fight scene” spin-off book would be a good idea. \u00a0In theory, if you’re creative enough, it gives artists an opportunity to go nuts and have fun for a few pages. \u00a0Frankly, very few of the stories in this book – if “story” is even the right word – have come close to delivering on that. \u00a0This issue has one of the better attempts, with Kaare Andrews showing up for ten pages of Thor versus a Phoenix-powered Emma Frost. \u00a0(She wins, as if you need told.) \u00a0It’s pretty much content-free, but it’s nicely over the top, and hell, it’s Kaare Andrews, who could probably make ten visually interesting pages out of paint drying.<\/p>\n The lead story is another matter. \u00a0It’s Rick Remender and Brandon Peterson doing Daredevil versus Psylocke. \u00a0And what you get there is an adequate trudge through the remit. \u00a0Remender is clearly hunting for ways to make this interesting, but struggling to find many. \u00a0He tries to play up the idea that both characters have a connection with the Hand, but he can’t really do<\/em> anything much with it. \u00a0There’s a theoretically nice idea about Psylocke using flocks of birds to obscure Daredevil’s radar sense, but visually, these things are being done much better in Daredevil’s own book, which actually has a plot. \u00a0And of course the pay-off is the umpteenth “one of the X-Men realises that gee, maybe they’re the bad guys in this” – which just flags up the problem that the crossover as a whole has never given them any adequate reason for failing to spot the point anyway.<\/p>\n Oh, and if you’re wondering why neither telepath manages to win the fight in the first panel, both stories end up giving the same answer to that one – it’s because telepathic contact with the opponent freaks them out. \u00a0Now, sure, fine, you’ve got to engineer an excuse with these things. \u00a0But the same one in both stories? \u00a0Weak. \u00a0And that’s the problem with this book – it\u00a0could<\/em> work, in theory, if you had cartoonists doing something truly wild with the pages, but for the most part it just comes across as lost and confused.<\/p>\n New Avengers<\/strong><\/em> #28<\/strong> – This week’s crossover issue from the other franchise is basically filler. \u00a0The entire plot is Hawkeye, Spider-Woman and Luke Cage held prisoner on Utopia and failing to escape. \u00a0It’s completely skippable so far as the overall story is concerned, but to be fair, it’s not a bad issue on its own terms. \u00a0It’s pretty well paced, the escape scenes make sense. \u00a0It’s going for a sense that the Avengers are fighting on even though it’s become utterly futile, and I think it carries that off. \u00a0The Phoenix Five costumes don’t look at all at home in Mike Deodato’s style, but that’s not really his fault.<\/p>\n In theory the ending is horrifically gimmicky – it’s all a VR simulation – but I think the story gets away with it; the final page loops back to the opening panels, and Bendis manages to sell it as endless torment rather than just “it was all a dream”.<\/p>\n New Mutants<\/strong><\/em> #45<\/strong> – This series is ending with issue #50 as part of the Marvel NOW! promotion – um, is it really\u00a0compulsory<\/em> to write it with the capital letters and the punctuation mark? \u00a0Oh well, it’s your company. \u00a0At any rate, we’re getting another reshuffle and it’s not a huge surprise to see that some of the lower-selling books are on their way out. \u00a0The “Fear the Future” three-parter, of which this is the middle chapter, appears to be trying to draw together some dangling threads from earlier storylines, which at least suggests that writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning have had enough notice to aim for some degree of resolution here.<\/p>\n Basically, two New Mutants from the future – Cannonball and Karma – have come back in time to try and change history, but they’re initially unwilling to explain exactly\u00a0why<\/em>, because we all know what happens when time travellers do something silly like that. \u00a0Eventually Sam relents and gives them kind of an explanation, hinting at what would have happened to the team in the future (on the whole, it doesn’t look too bad for once). \u00a0It seems this is building to a fight with the future version of Cypher, which I guess is meant to pay off his rather odd behaviour since his return. \u00a0The slightly underwhelming storyline about the rock band with a Cthulhu demon in their van also rears its head again here.<\/p>\n It’s basically an issue of shuffling elements into place. \u00a0Moderately interesting in terms of the direction, not particularly memorable as an issue in its own right.<\/p>\n Uncanny X-Force<\/strong><\/em> #27<\/strong> – This storyline is looking like a bit of a dud, unfortunately. \u00a0It’s one of those stories where a bunch of villains have teamed up to go after the heroes for no particularly explicit reason beyond revenge and so forth. \u00a0But who is the mystery villain behind the new Brotherhood?<\/p>\n Well, it’s Daken.<\/p>\n Which… makes sense, kind of, but god, that’s a story I have literally zero interest in seeing. \u00a0Sure, he kind of worked at the tail end of his solo book, but that’s in part because it actually played off his limitations as a character and his failure to properly connect. \u00a0Daken in this role is an utterly boring proposition. \u00a0I can’t remember the last time I read a reveal in a story and had the reaction I did here – a sinking wave of ennui, and the sense of my interest in the whole series ebbing away. \u00a0Yes, with Daken, we have a character who is\u00a0literally<\/em> the exact opposite of exciting. \u00a0He should have the word “Meh” tattooed on his forehead.<\/p>\n Wolverine and the X-Men<\/strong><\/em> #13<\/strong> – This is an AvX tie-in issue, but it’s a smart use of the crossover – which is to say, it uses it as a handy background for what’s actually a character issue focussing on Warbird. \u00a0It turns out that Jason Aaron’s done a rather good slow build with this character, using her background role in the early issues to establish her persona so that it actually means something when we get her back story in this issue.<\/p>\n The idea is essentially that Warbird used to be a basically nice, creative little girl who only pretended to be a violent honourable warrior type in order to get into the Shi’ar cadets, but she’s been doing it for so long now that she’s lost sight of her own identity. \u00a0Warbird’s been a bit of a one-note character up to now, and this cleverly inverts that by establishing that it’s a one-note\u00a0persona<\/em>. \u00a0The reveal works very well; for all the book’s lunatic tendencies and unapologetic exaggeration, which are still present and correct in this story, the character beat still hits home.<\/p>\n In a less prominent way, Kid Gladiator gets a similar treatment. \u00a0He’s been a one-note clown thus far, but when his father Gladiator shows up and gets into trouble against the Phoenix Five, he’s genuinely upset. \u00a0It works all the better for being played in a relatively understated way. \u00a0Artist Nick Bradshaw does a fantastic job on this issue, selling both aspects of the story perfectly. \u00a0His\u00a0Watchmen<\/em> pastiche on the first page is lovely stuff.<\/p>\n If there’s a criticism here – and there is – it’s that by giving Warbird quite such a miserable childhood and horrific cadet career, Aaron necessarily makes the Shi’ar into truly appalling thugs. \u00a0With a story like this, you can’t help wonder why the X-Men would ever put up with these awful, awful people. \u00a0I suppose you could make a case that that problem’s always been there – they’re an imperial race, after all – but it’s been relatively muted, perhaps because their excesses have always come across as genre convention. \u00a0Here, they’re unequivocally a bunch of fascist lunatics (and I’m not sure they’ve ever been presented as quite this violent before), and the X-Men’s tolerance of them starts to look decidedly odd. \u00a0Perhaps that’s the direction, but it feels a little strange here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yes, it’s a day late. \u00a0Mind you, if I’m being perfectly honest, it’s not the most exciting week of stories anyway… AvX: Versus #4 – You can just about see why somebody might have thought an “all fight scene” spin-off book would be a good idea. \u00a0In theory, if you’re creative enough, it gives artists […]<\/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-1489","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\/1489","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=1489"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1490,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1489\/revisions\/1490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}