{"id":1971,"date":"2013-06-09T19:33:28","date_gmt":"2013-06-09T18:33:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=1971"},"modified":"2013-06-09T19:33:28","modified_gmt":"2013-06-09T18:33:28","slug":"the-x-axis-9-june-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=1971","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 9 June 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s one of our rare quiet weeks! \u00a0(Well, there’s the\u00a0Wolverine: Season One<\/em> graphic novel, but I don’t review those. \u00a0Not in the week of release, at any rate.)<\/p>\n

All-New X-Men<\/strong><\/em> #12<\/strong>\u00a0– Apparently someone’s decided that it’s time to start pushing the\u00a0Uncanny Avengers<\/em> team into the other X-books, since they show up in two of this week’s titles. \u00a0All-New<\/em> has them show up to speak confront the remaining Silver Age X-Men (plus Kitty and Wolverine), whom you might recall them blasting out of the sky in the previous issue. \u00a0But this is a Brian Bendis comic, so once the very expensive aircraft has been wrecked, everyone can settle down to some Very Important Talking.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The main focus of what follows is on Cyclops having a touching reunion with his brother Havok, and Marvel Girl going predictably nuts over the Scarlet Witch still being accepted as a hero. \u00a0Neither of these seems to advance the plot appreciably in any way, as the story ends with the X-Men going off to fight Mystique’s crew, which is exactly what they were going to do at the end of issue #11 anyway. \u00a0The more substantial story advancement is over in the subplot, where Mastermind makes clear that she believes Mystique has a more ambitious agenda than merely accruing vast amounts of money, and Mystique more or less confirms it.<\/p>\n

Though it’s a very well drawn issue, and the brothers’ reunion has a lot going for it, this issue suffers from the main problems that continue to plague\u00a0All-New X-Men – <\/em>the pace is glacial, and the characters have to act in awkward ways to make key scenes work. \u00a0It’s not just the Avengers gratuitously attacking last issue for the sake of a cliffhanger; that’s hokey, but people have been doing it for decades. \u00a0More to the point is that the ensuing conversation between X-Men and Avengers features no fewer than three key sequences that depend on characters remaining inexplicably ignorant of things they surely ought to know.<\/p>\n

Scott has somehow failed to learn that his brother is (a) alive, (b) was in the X-Men, and (c) is now leading an Avengers team, even though Alex isn’t even maintaining a secret identity and is giving press conferences. \u00a0Has nobody mentioned this to him? \u00a0Has he not\u00a0asked<\/em>? \u00a0Jean has to be shocked and outraged about the whole\u00a0M-Day thing, but how on earth have they managed to live with the X-Men for any length of time without somebody mentioning one of the biggest historical events of the last few years? \u00a0And Scott somehow\u00a0still<\/em> doesn’t believe that Mystique is a baddie, even though the X-Men ought to have tons of material to show him. \u00a0Bendis wants Scott to be fighting Mystique’s corner within the team, which is a fine idea, but he’s given Scott no sensible reason to do so, and no ammunition, so whenever the topic comes up, he looks like a complete moron.<\/p>\n

The slow pacing might be exacerbating these problems. \u00a0The time to have Scott, Jean and the Others Who Don’t Get Anything To Do reacting to the biggest events of the last few years was issue #3, at a push. \u00a0Here they are, still learning things that even the readers have known from day one,\u00a0in issue #12<\/em>. \u00a0I get the desire not to have them reacting to everything all at once in the opening issues, but if you want to drag out their learning process a bit longer, you can’t have them living with the X-Men. \u00a0You need to keep them away from the source of information.<\/p>\n

It’s not that the actual scenes are bad, it’s that they’re coming at the wrong point in the series, and the logical underpinning isn’t there. \u00a0This doesn’t seem uncommon where Bendis is concerned; he’s a writer mainly interested in the big emotional beats and, by all appearances, rather less bothered about the connecting tissue that gives them context. \u00a0And while that’s a perfectly sound order of priorities, there’s still a balance. \u00a0 A lot of what happens in this series is good in theory, but it hasn’t been structured very well at all.<\/p>\n

Cable & X-Force<\/strong><\/em> #9<\/strong> – How odd. \u00a0This issue does have the advertised story – Hope goes on the run to try and help Cable, and the\u00a0Uncanny Avengers<\/em> team try to catch her. \u00a0And it’s drawn by regular artist Salvador Larroca. \u00a0But instead of being by regular (and solicited) writer Dennis Hopeless, it’s by Frank Tieri, a name I don’t think we’ve seen at Marvel in quite some time. \u00a0It doesn’t seem to be an outright filler story, though, so much as a self-contained chapter of the larger plot. \u00a0Marvel’s website is still listing Hopeless as the writer of the next issue, so it seems to be a rare case of a fill-in\u00a0<\/em>writer. \u00a0(And by the way, Marvel’s website is a lot more navigable than it has been in the past. \u00a0Looks like you can actually find stuff there\u00a0without<\/em> resorting to Google these days.)<\/p>\n

It was always clear that we were going to get back to Hope’s story, and what happens here is much as you’d expect. \u00a0She isn’t happy being stuck in the suburbs with her foster parents, the Avengers politely try to tell her that she’s going back there, and (since there wouldn’t be much of a story for future issues otherwise) she comes out on top. \u00a0It does what it needs to do.<\/p>\n

It doesn’t read, though, as if Tieri is particularly familiar with Hope. \u00a0Having any character reference the “these are not the droids you’re looking for” bit from Star Wars<\/em> is a bit hokey, but particularly so for Hope, who if anything ought to be the one person in the room who doesn’t get the joke. \u00a0And unless I’m very much mistaken, Hope’s power is to copy the powers of other mutants who are nearby, not just other mutants who she met earlier in the day. \u00a0(Wasn’t there an\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> cliffhanger where she was teleported away from the rest of her team, with the idea that that instantly depowered her?) \u00a0These are more editing problems than faults on Tieri’s part, but they do give the impression that he isn’t up to speed on the character. \u00a0Oh, and if she’s planning to go on the run, you’d think she’d be drawn with a bag of some sort. \u00a0Hope’s nothing if not practical, but it doesn’t exactly take a survival expert to figure out that a change of clothes might come in handy.<\/p>\n

Still, Tieri makes a reasonable stab of trying to use his guest stars effectively by having Hope try to play up the tensions over Havok’s improbable status as an authority figure in a team filled with far more established heroes. \u00a0And it does the job of advancing the wider series plot. \u00a0But even if the problems I’ve mentioned are mere glitches in the wider scheme of things, they’re too prominent to let the story be anything more than okay.<\/p>\n

X-Factor<\/em> #257<\/strong> – The cover bills this as “The End of X-Factor, part 1 of 6”, but it seems that “The End of X-Factor” isn’t a storyline so much as a bunch of issues that will wind up in the same trade paperback. \u00a0This is a Jamie and Layla story, so presumably the remaining issues will catch up on the rest of the cast before everyone gets together one last time at the end. \u00a0(Right?)<\/p>\n

Jamie is still stuck as a silent demon after the Hell on Earth War, and, well, by the end of this issue he’s\u00a0still<\/em> stuck as a demon – which is another reason why I assume we’ll be seeing him again. \u00a0He’s wound up in Marrakesh where a couple of locals have mistaken him for a genie and are trying to use him as a source of mystical power to bring a loved one back from the dead. \u00a0Layla shows up expecting a straightforward retrieval, but it seems that Jamie actually does work as a source of mystical power, so it all goes a bit wrong.<\/p>\n

(Part of this doesn’t\u00a0entirely<\/em> make sense, by the way. \u00a0In the timeline Layla “knows” about, it seems Jamie wasn’t a demon – but in that case, it’s not clear what the story would actually have been, since he wouldn’t have been of interest to the two locals in the first place.)<\/p>\n

The result is basically a “be careful what you wish for” story, and I suppose the wider idea is that Layla is meant to (but doesn’t) learn that she ought to be careful about how far she pushes her attempts to cure Jamie. \u00a0But there’s an optimistic note too, since Jamie’s behaviour suggests he’s still in there somewhere. \u00a0It’s a change of pace and scale from the previous story, but it does feel like a bit of a detour for a series that only has six issues to go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s one of our rare quiet weeks! \u00a0(Well, there’s the\u00a0Wolverine: Season One graphic novel, but I don’t review those. \u00a0Not in the week of release, at any rate.) All-New X-Men #12\u00a0– Apparently someone’s decided that it’s time to start pushing the\u00a0Uncanny Avengers team into the other X-books, since they show up in two of this […]<\/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-1971","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\/1971","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=1971"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1974,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1971\/revisions\/1974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}