This week: some anthology filler, a crossover issue, the X-Men are going to fight Dormammu any time now, and inter-title continuity shows up where I’d least expect it.<\/p>\n
A+X<\/strong><\/em> #8<\/strong> – So yeah, this book is still going.<\/p>\n Leaving aside the dubious commercial wisdom of trying to sell an anthology title to today’s readers, you would think that\u00a0A+X<\/em>‘s broad remit at least provided it with a fair opportunity to do something entertaining. \u00a0In theory, the only requirement for an\u00a0A+X<\/em> story is to fill half an issue with a team-up between two heroes, with one being primarily associated with the Avengers, and the other being primarily associated with the X-Men. \u00a0Given the vast number of characters in either camp, that’s a huge number of combinations.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So in theory you can do stories that play off the Avengers\/X-Men divide, or you can just find characters who have something interesting in common, or something that makes them an interesting contrast. \u00a0It doesn’t have to be anything particularly weighty – in fact, since it’s perfectly plain that nothing “important” is going to happen in this book, it’s fine for the best that it goes the other way and revel in its pointlessness. \u00a0Or it could take some creators with unusual styles and give them a few pages in which to go nuts.<\/p>\n That being so, why do we keep getting stories like the two that show up here, in which character A and character B engage in all-purpose banter while beating up a villain selected at random from the\u00a0Official Handbook<\/em>? \u00a0Yes, granted, it’s got good artists – Salvador Larroca on the lead strip and the underrated Reilly Brown on the back-up – but it doesn’t give either of them anything very interesting to draw.<\/p>\n Gerry Duggan’s Spider-Woman\/Kitty Pryde does at least come up with a coherent reason to put the two together – Spider-Woman and Lockheed are both associated with SWORD, and so when she calls in Lockheed, Kitty comes along for the ride. \u00a0But it doesn’t\u00a0head<\/em> anywhere beyond a generic encounter with some villains fighting over a macguffin, in which it’s initially meant to be important to stop the Absorbing Man touching the macguffin, and then, out of nowhere, it turns out not to be important at all. \u00a0As a story, it’s a complete mess, and while it’s got a few good jokes in it, it’s nowhere near funny enough to get by on that alone.<\/p>\n Christopher Hastings, the creator of\u00a0Adventures of Dr McNinja<\/em>, does a Hawkeye\/Deadpool story which consists almost entirely of an action sequence in which, for no reason that is ever really explained, the duo team up to rescue a chef from Captain Barracuda, one of the, uh, lesser Lee\/Kirby creations of the Silver Age. \u00a0This actually works a bit better, because it dispenses with any pretence of plot and relies entirely on energy. \u00a0And it does have one really great joke, with Deadpool firing trick boxing-glove arrows that bounce harmlessly off opponents. \u00a0Before blowing up. \u00a0But again,\u00a0it’s not a story<\/em>.<\/p>\n Even if you assume this book is content to be a lightweight comedy title – and that would be fine – the joke of the stories being completely vacuous wore thin about nine months ago. If this is the best Marvel can (or are prepared to) do with the book, they should cancel it.<\/p>\n Uncanny Avengers<\/strong><\/em> #8AU<\/strong> – An Age of Ultron tie-in that actually advances the main plot! \u00a0I imagine this to be unusual, though I don’t know for sure, since I haven’t been following the crossover. \u00a0The first two issues looked really quite dull, and since it was obviously going to end with the cosmic reset button, I didn’t feel any particular compulsion to stick around and see how it got there.<\/p>\n The current state of play, it seems, is that Wolverine has gone back in time to kill Hank Pym before he created Ultron, and this has had all sorts of knock-on effects that have apparently resulted in Morgan Le Fey ruling the world. \u00a0Since\u00a0Uncanny Avengers<\/em> is presently in the middle of a Kang storyline, and his whole gimmick is time travel, it’s unusually well placed to work the crossover into its story.<\/p>\n Even so, Remender chooses to leave this story off to the side somewhere. \u00a0It’s effectively a prequel which shows us how Kang raised the young Apocalypse Twins and moulded them into what they are now. \u00a0Specifically, he brings them to the altered present day timeline in order to make a point, which is basically that he wants to turn them into killers. \u00a0He claims that this is because they need his held to fulfil their destiny of saving mutantkind; in fact, it seems to be more a case of screwing them up because they would otherwise have gone on to beat him. \u00a0So the Apocalypse Twins are brought to the present and asked to go and kill Captain America. \u00a0In this world, he’s a sort of government stooge whose faith in authority is refreshingly unaffected by the rise to power of an evil sorceress – a fun twist on the character.<\/p>\n You may note that there’s nothing about this set-up that really\u00a0requires<\/em> the use of the Age of Ultron crossover, but equally there’s nothing to rule it out, and it does at least allow Remender to use members of his regular cast in the redshirt roles. \u00a0Still, they’re the least interesting bit of this issue, where it feels like Remender is casting around to find something to say about his characters in the alternate-reality framework. \u00a0The story works far better as a further development of the Twins’ character; the implication is that left to their own devices they would have been both more pleasant and more effective, and so Remender is positioning them quite effectively as tragic villains who are really trying their best to do good. \u00a0But they’re not completely oblivious to the fact that they’re being manipulated either, so perhaps this is heading towards an ending where the Twins turn out not to be quite as dim as Kang thinks they are. \u00a0Either way, it’s helping to build a strong hook to the characters that makes the story work despite its convoluted plot.<\/p>\n Uncanny X-Men<\/strong><\/em> #6<\/strong> – Brian Bendis doesn’t like to be rushed, does he? \u00a0Last issue’s cliffhanger: the X-Men are brought to Limbo and confronted by Dormammu and his demons. \u00a0And by the end of this issue, they’ve\u00a0just<\/em> started the actual fighting. \u00a0This is going to seem pretty leisurely even in the trade paperback.<\/p>\n Now, that being said, much of what happens in Limbo in this issue consists in establishing that they can’t escape and (unsurprisingly) establishing that the rookies are all terrified. \u00a0Rather than do the usual story of having them heroically prevail, Bendis takes a different route and has the Stepford Cuckoos use their psi-powers to force them to keep it together – which isn’t as instantly gratifying but does at least fit the idea that this is the morally dodgy X-Men team. \u00a0That said, the X-Men still don’t seem to have much of a plan here beyond throwing rookies at the demon horde, which plainly isn’t going to get the job done.<\/p>\n And as often seems to be the case with Bendis, the subplots are progressing rather more quickly than the stately main story. \u00a0We’ve got the introduction of yet another new mutant; this one apparently has the power to control machines by talking to them, though I suppose it’s also possible that his power only allows him to control small electric cars, which would be fabulous. \u00a0And we’ve got Maria Hill enlisting Dazzler into SHIELD, which is apparently what passes for a strategy on how to deal with mutants these days. \u00a0Still, at least it puts Dazzler in a role where she can be of use, and it gives Scott’s team a mutant antagonist for their “renegade revolutionaries” schtick without having to use the other X-Men all the time. It’s also a beautifully drawn issue by Frazer Irving, who really does excel in drawing crazed demons and small electric cars. \u00a0It’s a bit dark even on the iPad – did this actually work well in print? – but it’s lovely to look at nonetheless. \u00a0There’s plenty of good stuff in here, and at least this book, unlike\u00a0All-New,<\/em>\u00a0seems to be going somewhere. \u00a0It’s just going there at half speed.<\/p>\n X-Men: Legacy<\/em> #11<\/strong> – You could say the cover is a massive spoiler, but then, even though that thought occurred to me, I assumed it was a coincidence. \u00a0After all, this is the last book where you might expect to see inter-title continuity popping up. \u00a0But no, it turns out that the villain of this arc is indeed the Red Skull, complete with his\u00a0Uncanny Avengers<\/em> upgrade. \u00a0It makes sense; Skull has stolen Xavier’s brain, this book is about Xavier’s son, they’ve got a reason to clash. \u00a0But\u00a0Legacy<\/em> normally seems so far off in a little world of its own that it’s not the book I would have expected to suddenly start referencing Rick Remender’s plot.<\/p>\n This issue basically consists of Legion being given a tour of the IBSS facility, in which mutant volunteers seem to be effectively committing suicide by taking a pill that more or less brings about brain death in the course of removing mutant powers. \u00a0Legion claims to be so concerned about the terrible things he’s going to do when he loses control that he’s still happy to take the pill. \u00a0It turns out that the Red Skull (and his newfound psychic powers) are behind all the nice people at the facility after all – but the story wrongfoots us, as Legion doesn’t really care. \u00a0He still just wants the pill. \u00a0Meanwhile, Blindfold is rounding up a bunch of X-Men that no other title wanted (Pixie? \u00a0Frenzy? \u00a0Chamber?!?<\/em>) to come on a rescue mission.<\/p>\n There are plot problems here. \u00a0The consequences of the pill are too severe. \u00a0If Legion’s concern is that he’s going to go mad and do terrible, destructive things with his mutant powers, then it makes sense for him to take a cure that\u00a0risks<\/em> horrible side effects. \u00a0He also specifically claims to be worried that a baddie might use the pill to steal his powers somehow. \u00a0So (a) why is he still willing to take the pill even after he knows the Skull is involved, and (b) why didn’t he just shoot himself in the head in the first place and save all this messing about with experimental pharmaceuticals? \u00a0It’s possible that he’s simply bluffing and stringing the Skull along, but Si Spurrier’s stories do have a tendency to be stronger on their themes than their plot logic.<\/p>\n Still, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on that one until we see where this is heading. \u00a0It’s a nice use of a major villain in a book where you wouldn’t normally expect to see him, and it uses him without compromising the quirky style of this series too badly – if anything, it’s the Skull who gets bent into this book’s format, as Legion refuses to play along with the obligatory battle.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week: some anthology filler, a crossover issue, the X-Men are going to fight Dormammu any time now, and inter-title continuity shows up where I’d least expect it. 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