A mostly quiet week, but we do have the X-books’ first full-length Infinite book…<\/p>\n
Astonishing X-Men<\/strong><\/em> #64<\/strong> – Given that\u00a0Astonishing X-Men<\/em> doesn’t sell that well, and is sitting out the big autumn crossover, it’s hardly a surprise to learn that the book is being cancelled in October. \u00a0Originally conceived as a flagship vehicle for top name creators,\u00a0Astonishing<\/em> long-since ceased to be anything of the sort, and basically continues to exist through sheer inertia. \u00a0Rich Johnston is reporting that they’re going to relaunch it, which is depressing but hardly surprising.<\/p>\n The lynchpin of Marvel’s publishing plan at the moment is the over-extension of the X-Men and Avengers brands, both of which are seeing their names attached to books only tenuously related to the actual team (Secret Avengers<\/em>,\u00a0X-Treme X-Men<\/em>), or even wholly unconnected (Avengers Arena<\/em>). \u00a0The number of X-Men books these days is excessive; the number of Avengers titles verges on the ludicrous. \u00a0It’s impossible to believe that editorial genuinely think this is a particularly good idea; in fact, the tenuous content of some of these books strongly gives the bizarre impression that editors mandated to produce Yet Another Avengers Book are trying to get around that problem by simply attaching the Avengers name to anything they think they can get away with, rather than\u00a0actually<\/em> produce Yet Another Avengers Book. \u00a0The inevitable result is to dilute the brand, something that you’d have thought the corporate guys might understand, given that we’re talking about Disney and Warner Brothers here. \u00a0But apparently not. \u00a0It all has the distinct feel of a crash waiting to happen. \u00a0Or maybe they just figure it can’t really damage the brand with the people who count the most – the general public who go to movies, watch cartoons and buy merchandise for their kids – because they aren’t reading the comics anyway.<\/p>\n Astonishing X-Men<\/em>, to be fair, is not one of the more egregious examples of this phenomenon; it really is just Yet Another X-Men Book, with a marginally different cast from the rest, and a shortlived gesture in the direction of a street-level theme that didn’t last very long. \u00a0What they’ll attach the name to next, heaven only knows.<\/p>\n So what about this issue? \u00a0Well, Iceman’s odd behaviour is indeed all down to picking up a fragment of Apocalypse’s power in the Age of Apocalypse, something that recap pages have been cautiously tiptoeing around to avoid making it ridiculously obvious where this is going. \u00a0In itself, that’s not a hugely interesting story; on a plot level, it becomes a repeat of the X-Men having to find a way of containing Apocalypse’s power, which is precisely what the last storyline was about too.<\/p>\n But Marjorie Liu’s not that interested in the plot details either. \u00a0She understands that one thing the X-Men do well is character-driven melodrama writ large, so this is really a story about Iceman’s psychological crisis. \u00a0It’s a crisis that happens to manifest in him nearly wrecking the planet because he’s being corrupted by a vastly powerful thingummajig, but it’s all about that nonetheless. \u00a0The story’s maybe a little too blatant in spelling this out, but there’s a nice idea here about the little Iceman copies being the uncorrupted remnants of his normal personality trying to get his loved ones to safety, even though they know it’s ultimately a futile gesture because the planet’s going to die anyway.<\/p>\n It’s yet another story where Mystique serves as the villain – she seems to be everywhere just now, and I’m still not altogether sure how much of that is co-ordination and how much is\u00a0lack<\/em> of co-ordination. \u00a0I’m not sure Marjorie Liu gets the character; I’m not convinced that Mystique would want to go anywhere near the Apocalypse power given what she must know it would do to her mind. \u00a0There’s room for argument about just how far Mystique cares about anything beyond the accumulation of personal power, but most of the interesting interpretations of her character at least have her believing<\/em> that she stands for something; I don’t buy her being stupid enough to think she can control the power, or nihilistic enough to want power at the cost of the annihilation of the self.<\/p>\n Gabriel Hernandez Walta continues to impress on art. \u00a0Until this arc, he’s generally come across as a character artist with a lo-fi sheen, but having been called upon to draw massive ice giants towering over New York, he turns out to be really good at both scale and atmosphere. \u00a0If parts of this issue are reminiscent of John Romita Jr, that’s no bad thing.<\/p>\n Uncanny X-Men<\/strong><\/em> #8<\/strong> – I could have sworn the previous issue seemed to end with Magik separated from the rest of the group and off in the past with Dr Strange, but evidently that didn’t last too long. \u00a0She’s back already, as Bendis picks up instead on a completely different plot thread: the X-Men dutifully shrug their shoulders and return Fabio to his family, as he demanded last issue. \u00a0The idea here is that even though Fabio doesn’t want to be in the X-Men, and the X-Men don’t want to make him stay, the mere fact that he’s now connected with them makes him automatically of interest to S.H.I.E.L.D. \u00a0So they’ve probably ruined his life and there’s not much to be done about it at this stage.<\/p>\n One likely outcome is that this is heading towards Fabio ending up back with the X-Men – after all, it was never very likely that Bendis would have included him to date just as a red herring – but if so, the interest is mainly in how he’s going to feel about that. \u00a0If Fabio had ended up with Wolverine’s crew, he’d probably have been okay; they’re at least operating legally. \u00a0But Cyclops and co are cheerfully bouncing around the world recruiting kids at their most vulnerable, and while they\u00a0can<\/em> opt to go home, that’s only going to take them so far. \u00a0In the first instance, though, we’ve got Fabio recruited as an informant by Dazzler, which makes sense; then again, we all know it’s not likely that everything’s going to work out swimmingly with the government, given the way they’ve generally been written in this book.<\/p>\n Chris Bachalo returns to art for the start of the new arc; he draws a largely unrecognisable Dazzler, but that aside, it’s some of his clearer work. \u00a0The sequence with David testing his control over machines in a car park is particularly well done; stationary objects making noise isn’t an easy thing to sell on the comics page, but Bachalo gets it across very effectively here.<\/p>\n Wolverine<\/strong><\/em> #6<\/strong> – As mentioned last time, issues #5-6 may be billed as a two-part story, but they’re not. \u00a0They’re parts 5 and 6 of a six-part story, labelled separately for some reason (presumably to do with justifying the change of artist, since it’s hard to see any other logic). \u00a0Just to hammer the point home, this is where we actually get an explanation of what the controlling consciousness thing is – somewhat out of the blue, it turns out to be a colony of microbial thingies from the Microverse.<\/p>\n I’m not entirely convinced that works. \u00a0Granted that Cornell has clearly set up the idea that it’s an alien consciousness (since it seems unfamiliar with human behaviour), and granted that the Microverse is just an exotic version of that, there’s something a little awkward about the big explanation turning out to depend on a piece of Marvel continuity that, so far as I can remember, hasn’t been mentioned before in this arc. \u00a0The story wrongfoots us nicely by introducing the Microverse as a potential route of escape from the Helicarrier, but it still feels a bit too much as though a key plot element is careering in from left field in the final act.<\/p>\n Still, it’s a nice enough idea that the microbes are looking to escape the Microverse and set up a new life for themselves on Earth, where they can infect the human race and live happily ever after. \u00a0And it works to have them declare Wolverine a kindred spirit, on the grounds that they were created as a biological weapon, and he’s kind of like that too, right? \u00a0There’s also a nagging suspicion that we aren’t done with this plot just yet – after all, we still haven’t found out why the Watcher was showing up in earlier issues, and the microbes’ parting revenge attack doubles as the lead-in to the next arc.<\/p>\n The art’s solid but not up there with Davis (to be fair, that’s par for the course in fill-in work); the story works but feels a shade underwhelming in its revelations. \u00a0But like I say, there’s presumably more to come here.<\/p>\n Wolverine: Japan’s Most Wanted<\/strong><\/em> #1<\/strong> – The first full-length – and full-price – “Infinite” comic, which is basically a comic intended to be read in Comixology’s Guided View mode. \u00a0Marvel are by no means the first people to experiment with this – DC are trying it as well, and Reilly Brown’s\u00a0Power Play<\/em> similarly played with the possibilities. \u00a0 If you’ve ever tried reading comics in Guided View, you’ll know that sometimes it’s a bit of a mess because the rhythm of the page layout is lost, but sometimes it generates unexpectedly striking effects by cutting between full-page images. \u00a0Often a page with a routine or actively confusing layout can be outright improved by Guided View forcing its way through the clutter.<\/p>\n The challenge is to harness those effects for deliberate storytelling, which is an area where we’re feeling our way. \u00a0I do believe that there are genuine possibilities here that make it more than just a gimmick, but there’s going to be a phase of trial and error while creators get the hang of it. \u00a0This issue, for example, certainly goes out of its way to use the technology, with lights flashing on and off from panel to panel, and so forth. \u00a0There’s also a degree of adding elements to the page one click at a time, which is more of an old standard for digital, and not something I’m so fond of. \u00a0(DC’s Batman 66<\/em> seems to like this one, sometimes making you click through the appearance of several speech balloons in a row; I’m not convinced about leaving the art static for that long.) \u00a0And a couple of times the image turns out to be the right-hand side of an extended panel that pans left when you click – that’s kind of confusing, because I don’t think you can drop the left-to-right paradigm that quickly, particularly when some images still have multiple panels on screen.<\/p>\n But fades to black work nicely, as do sequences of variations on the same panel that would have looked static on the printed page. \u00a0An entire screen just showing a lit match works far more effectively as a beat than a single panel on a crowded page would have done; you could never justify giving that a splash page in print, for reasons of space, but you can do it here. \u00a0There’s a lot of clicking to do here, though, and if this sort of thing takes off you have to wonder whether Comixology is going to end up having to introduce a “slideshow” option to advance automatically without you having to manually click after every panel. \u00a0Look at the closing sequence, which cuts back and forth between the cliffhanger and the story title – it’s obviously influenced by film editing and it’s a good idea in theory, but the practical reality is that you have to tap the screen five times just to get through the title, and the repeated clicking feels too obtrusive. \u00a0Maybe that’ll fade with familiarity.<\/p>\n It’s written by Jason Aaron and Jason Latour, with conventional but sound art by Yves Bigerel and Paco Diaz. \u00a0The story’s pretty basic – it’s Wolverine being drugged and made to kill someone, which is going to make him (obviously) Japan’s Most Wanted – but then the focus of this first issue kind of has to be on the visual storytelling in order to sell the concept.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A mostly quiet week, but we do have the X-books’ first full-length Infinite book… Astonishing X-Men #64 – Given that\u00a0Astonishing X-Men doesn’t sell that well, and is sitting out the big autumn crossover, it’s hardly a surprise to learn that the book is being cancelled in October. \u00a0Originally conceived as a flagship vehicle for top […]<\/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-2028","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\/2028","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=2028"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2029,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2028\/revisions\/2029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}