Right! \u00a0Back to business as usual!<\/p>\n
And after a couple of quiet weeks, this time it’s the inevitable deluge…<\/p>\n
Age of Apocalypse<\/em> #12<\/strong> – Just another two issues to go, and those are both part of the\u00a0X-Termination<\/em> crossover. \u00a0As I recall, the previous issue seemed to make the pacing work for it, at the cost of de-emphasising some of the individual cast members’ storylines. \u00a0With this issue, though, David Lapham appears to be back to trying to get through loads of outstanding plots in the time available. \u00a0Logan has been defeated, at least in the sense that he no longer has Apocalypse’s power and he’s sane again. \u00a0But of course that doesn’t just lead to his military apparatus vanishing, so the government is still pretty much in control. \u00a0So what we get is an issue that reads like it started life as the idea for a second year of stories, with Monet emerging as the rival leader figure now that she’s got some chance of coming out on top. \u00a0At around the same time, we’ve also got Graydon Creed confronting his father, Goodnight being exposed within the Hellfire Club (the actual role of which has never really been made terribly clear), and the scientists wondering what they’re going to do with the power of Apocalypse that they’ve managed to harness with their Big Machine. \u00a0There are a lot of threads being drawn together here, as is inevitable when a series with longer term plans is being wrapped up, and in one sense Lapham is handling them all well – but it’s hard to shake the feeling that these are storylines which were intended to play out at a much, much more leisurely pace.<\/p>\n Cable & X-Force<\/em> #4<\/strong> – Effectively the end of the first arc, in that it finishes explaining how the team’s first mission went horribly wrong and why everyone now thinks they’re terrorists. \u00a0(The first trade will actually run up to issue #5, and be rounded out with the material from the\u00a0Marvel Now: Point One<\/em> one-shot.) \u00a0There are a couple of interesting ideas in here: the book does a nice job of selling that the whole mission has gone spectacularly wrong, which is a pleasant change from the usual hypercompetence of this sort of team. \u00a0And I quite like the idea that Cable’s team are appear to be taking the flak for all this because the actual explanation would be even more damaging in terms of anti-mutant sentiment. \u00a0Though it really doesn’t make sense for Colossus, of all people, to be the one who advocates turning themselves in to the authorities – he’s the one member of the team who was on the run to start with.<\/p>\n The main problem with this series is that it’s just a bit sluggish. \u00a0It’s taken four issues to set up a premise that most of the promotional interviews succeeded in explaining perfectly adequately in a couple of sentences, and it really should have been possible to get to this point much more quickly. \u00a0And Salvador Larrocca is drawing much of the book with the same layout of five horizontal panels to a page, a style that I’ve always found painfully boring.\u00a0 Besides, it’s one thing to do this if you want to establish a rhythm in order to break from it later, but why the hell is this book doing it during the fight scenes too? \u00a0It’s unfortunately appropriate for the book, though – the story could be good in theory, but in practice it’s rather flat.<\/p>\n Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #1<\/strong> – After the race to get through the first volume of\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> before officially starting on the sister title, we finally get to the relaunch of\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em>, the book about Scott’s team. \u00a0And Bendis, bless him, starts off this issue by re-establishing the premise, because presumably there might be people reading this book who aren’t reading the other one. \u00a0Seems terribly unlikely to me, but he’s probably right to err on the side of caution.\u00a0 (Perhaps more to the point, there might be people buying the collections who read this one first.)<\/span><\/p>\n So, here’s what happens in this issue: a mystery man shows up at SHIELD wanting to talk to Maria Hill, and gives her all sorts of information about Cyclops’ X-Men in the form of an enormous infodump. \u00a0Even Hill has to point out that for the most part, she’s just being told stuff that’s in the papers. \u00a0There’s also a flashback to one of the recent outings for Scott’s team in which, you guessed it, they show up to rescue a mutant whose powers have just emerged. \u00a0I get that this is the premise of the series, so it’s fair enough to do it in the first issue to establish the format, but I hope we’re going to start getting a bit more variation in what Scott’s team are up to – though at the same time it does make sense to keep them clear of conventional supervillains who would detract from the revolutionary vibe that the book is going for.<\/p>\n And then at the end we find out who the mystery man is, which is The Twist. \u00a0It’s a twist that I guessed on page three (and which Bendis has to cheat to preserve at one point, by having the mystery man refer to himself in the third person), but that’s fine; it suggests an intriguing direction that makes sense, and even if you see it coming, the confirmation still works as a pay-off.<\/p>\n That said, let’s be clear that I’m giving this issue a bit of leeway because I’m prepared to accept that it needs to repeat the job of re-establishing the concept, and it seems to get that over and done with here. \u00a0If you aren’t feeling so tolerant, you may consider that there’s a lot of repetition here of stuff we’ve seen in\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em>, married to essentially one plot development (albeit a major one) and some new costumes. \u00a0And you could also make the point that the book remains terribly vague about what Cyclops’ “mutant revolution” actually entails, and what really makes it different from the other X-Men – other than a greater willingness to rescue new mutants from the authorities by force.<\/p>\n Oh yes, the redesigns. \u00a0Chris Bachalo is the artist on this book, and he’s been allowed to revamp the character designs. \u00a0I like the issue, on the whole – it’s nice and clear, which isn’t always his strength, and (unlike the book just mentioned) it makes good use of varied page layouts for pacing. \u00a0Dropping Cyclops’ visor, which really is as close to iconic as anything in the X-books besides the X-logo itself, is a bold move, but replacing it with a red X keeps the key point of obscuring Scott’s face. \u00a0Plus, there’s an obvious storyline justification that Cyclops needs a visible excuse for why his optic beams are behaving differently. \u00a0Magneto in white is an interesting spectral presence; I’m not so sure, though, about Emma in black, or Magik with a Stupidly Large Sword. \u00a0Granted that Bachalo’s got the sort of style that can carry that sort of exaggeration, I’m not sure the Soulsword is the sort of prop you can\u00a0casually redesign in this way (or one that you should, anyway).<\/p>\n A good first issue if you’re willing to be charitable about the repetition from\u00a0All-New<\/em>. \u00a0I am, though a nagging voice tells me that maybe I shouldn’t.<\/p>\n Wolverine and the X-Men<\/em> #25<\/strong> – The big number #25 on the cover and the updated cast list at the back suggests that somebody sees this as a big anniversary issue, but the actual story is a little more business as usual: Wolverine takes some of the kids to the Savage Land on a survival trip which he sees as a team-building exercise. \u00a0The opening scenes have him putting it over to them as a genuinely life-threatening experience, but if you’re the sort of reader who finds this book a little over the top, it’s worth noting that, based on his conversation with Beast later in the issue, it’s pretty clear that he’s winding them up. \u00a0(Though Quentin Quire appears to take him at face value – you could see that as an inconsistency or as a case of Quentin being a little more gullible than he’d like to think.)<\/p>\n The story, naturally, is that Wolverine sets the kids loose in the jungle intending to keep an eye on them from a discreet distance, but then a baddie shows up, which means that the kids are genuinely on their own. \u00a0And the focus of the issue is firmly on the kids rather than the X-Men proper – the actual fight with said bad guy won’t be along till next month. \u00a0There’s a neat feint with Quentin attempting to rise to the challenge of leadership and actually giving some perfectly sensible directions to the squad, only to be utterly ignored because everybody thinks he’s an idiot. \u00a0Idie’s character seems to be dialled back a bit after the rather extreme way she’s been written of late; the stuff with the Hellfire Church didn’t really ring true, so it’s a relief to see her being reined back from that.<\/p>\n Ramon Perez is the artist on this issue, and it’s entirely solid work with enough of a cartoony edge to fit the book. \u00a0You do have to wonder, though, whether this book is starting to lose its visual coherence with all the artists who are passing through it; it’d be nice to get a bit more consistency going.<\/p>\n X-Men<\/em> #41<\/strong> – The “final” issue before the book relaunches with, uh, the same writer as before. \u00a0We’re really stretching the definition of “final” here, even by Marvel’s standards.<\/p>\n To commemorate this unmonumental event, we have a cover by Adam Kubert with X-Men past and present, and a fill-in story by Seth Peck, Jefte Palo and Guillermo Mogorron, which serves to introduce a new Freedom Force who will doubtless never be heard of again. \u00a0Not an awful story by any means, but certainly the most blatant exercise in page-filling the X-Men have seen in quite some time.<\/p>\n X-Treme X-Men<\/em> #10<\/strong> – Another book heading for cancellation and, in its own way, racing through plots. \u00a0So this issue mainly serves to sketch out the back story of the Civil War version of Cyclops (who was introduced two issues back but hasn’t had much panel time yet), before moving on to the latest version of “the team travel to a new world and fight an evil version of Professor X” – a format which really is proving to be even more repetitive than the old\u00a0Exiles<\/em> stories, which at least allowed for its team to travel to new worlds and do different things.<\/p>\n This evil version of Professor X appears to be a Nazi, though some fairly clear hints are dropped that, since this is an alternate reality and all, our heroes shouldn’t necessarily be assuming that the local version of the Nazis are necessarily such bad guys. \u00a0If that’s really where they’re going then best of luck next issue in trying to pull that one off without being horrendously offensive. \u00a0If not… well, it’s not the most inspired of evil variants, is it? \u00a0It’s audacious, but only in that “they’ve got to be kidding, surely” way. \u00a0But then this is Greg Pak, a writer who knows better than to just go for shock value, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for now that he knows where he’s going with this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Right! \u00a0Back to business as usual! 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