Hey, six issues of Revenants! \u00a0You know, the story we started back in issue #1!<\/p>\n
The pace of\u00a0Uncanny X-Force<\/em> might charitably be called stately. \u00a0It’s not “decompressed” in the classic sense; plenty happens. \u00a0But much of what happens is layers of complication that drag out a fairly basic plot way beyond its natural lifespan. \u00a0We’re now a year into the title’s life, and not only are we still on the first storyline, but the titular team hasn’t even formed yet! \u00a0And they’re being cancelled in a couple of months!<\/p>\n It’s not even paced for the trade. \u00a0In fact, it’s wildly inconvenient for the collected editions, which end up splitting this story over two volumes. \u00a0(Volume 2 has the three-issue Psylocke\/Fantomex interlude, while volume 3 will include the entirety of the upcoming “Vendetta” crossover. \u00a0And yes, anyone who’s buying both this book and\u00a0Cable & X-Force<\/em> in the trades will have the inestimable privilege of buying the whole crossover twice.)<\/p>\n There are points of interest here, to be sure. \u00a0Adrian Alphona pops in for most of an issue, to deliver some lovely art on Spiral’s extended flashback. \u00a0Though there are\u00a0four artists on this arc – the others being Dexter Soy, Ramon Perez, and Phil Briones – which means any sort of consistent style is out the window, even though the overall standard is solid enough.<\/p>\n And the first couple of issues actually do something with the idea of the Revenants being everyone’s dark psychic shadow, rendered as versions of the heroes designed to make them feel like underachievers. \u00a0So Puck’s duplicate is tall and has a full head of hair, among other things.<\/p>\n But there’s simply no getting away from the main point to be taken from this storyline, which is that it’s inordinately long and doesn’t have the content to justify it. \u00a0The Revenants aren’t\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0complicated an idea; they’re humanity’s dark twins. \u00a0To the extent that this story does anything with that idea, it’s all at the start, and it’s the sort of thing that, back in the day, would have made for a one-issue story with D’Spayre as the villain. \u00a0Even that theme largely gets lost as the story progresses, and we end up with one of my pet hates – a story in which, in order to save the day, the heroes must do something utterly arbitrary, Because Magic.<\/p>\n In this case, Cassandra Nova is trying to bring about the “Great Corruption”, in which the world is flooded with Revenants. \u00a0Once she’s got things under way, this can only be stopped by the killing of a telepath before the moon turns completely to blood, Because Magic. \u00a0It’d be one thing if this had some sort of thematic resonance, but it really doesn’t. \u00a0It’s just a random thing designed to present the heroes with a goal and an ethical dilemma – one which the story then gets out of extremely cheaply, by having Psylocke turn Cassandra into a human by God Knows How, and then killing her.<\/p>\n Yes, there are a few nice ideas about the characters floating around here – but the core story is nowhere near strong enough to sustain such an inordinate length. \u00a0The Revenants are just not that interesting, and the story largely uses them as generic invaders anyway. \u00a0It’s a shame, since this book was doing some good stuff with Psylocke in the Fantomex interlude that preceded this arc. \u00a0But after slogging through another few months of this, I can’t honestly say I’ll miss it when it goes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hey, six issues of Revenants! \u00a0You know, the story we started back in issue #1! The pace of\u00a0Uncanny X-Force might charitably be called stately. \u00a0It’s not “decompressed” in the classic sense; plenty happens. \u00a0But much of what happens is layers of complication that drag out a fairly basic plot way beyond its natural lifespan. \u00a0We’re […]<\/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-2068","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\/2068","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=2068"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2332,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2068\/revisions\/2332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}