{"id":2078,"date":"2013-11-04T22:26:06","date_gmt":"2013-11-04T22:26:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2078"},"modified":"2013-11-04T22:26:06","modified_gmt":"2013-11-04T22:26:06","slug":"battle-of-the-atom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2078","title":{"rendered":"Battle of the Atom"},"content":{"rendered":"

I usually put the issue numbers in the post titles, but they won’t really fit here, will they? \u00a0So (deep breath) –\u00a0X-Men: Battle of the Atom<\/em> #1-2,\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> #16-17,\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #5-6,\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #12-13, and\u00a0Wolverine and the X-Men<\/em> #36-37.<\/p>\n

This is what you might call an old-school crossover. \u00a0What Marvel usually do these days is to have a core miniseries, and a bunch of other stories taking place against the backdrop of that core story. \u00a0But this is a ten-part serial running through four different titles and two bookends over the course of two months. \u00a0The way we used to do things, back in the day. \u00a0“The day”, in this context, being the 1990s.<\/p>\n

There’s something a bit odd about the very idea of a crossover like this, isn’t there? \u00a0Back in the innocent days of yore, a crossover was an exciting event when different characters crossed paths. \u00a0Hence “cross over”. \u00a0The Avengers meet the Defenders! \u00a0Superman meets Batman! \u00a0You know, that kind of thing. \u00a0And here we are now with a crossover between the X-Men, the X-Men, the X-Men and the X-Men. \u00a0What’s the point of that?<\/p>\n

This brings us back to the recurring question for the X-books these days: given that financial considerations evidently mandate that there must be this volume of X-Men comics (for surely nobody actually thinks there’s a creative argument for it, whatever people are obliged to say publicly), how do you strike a balance between making them all X-Men comics but allowing them independence? \u00a0Marvel’s solution has two main strands. \u00a0First, create spin-off books that in a prior era would have been called something else, but call them “The X-Men” anyway. \u00a0Hence\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> (which is really about the time-travelling original team) and\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> (who would once have been X-Force, though of course that name’s now taken – twice). \u00a0Second, create books that are defined more by their creative voice than by their cast or notional premise. \u00a0Hence X-Men comics by Jason Aaron and Brian Wood, to sit alongside the two Bendis titles.<\/p>\n

So what, then, is the point of a crossover between these four titles? \u00a0For it to really mean anything, it would need to come across as some kind of collision of the different creative voices on the various titles, wouldn’t it? \u00a0At the very least, some kind of meeting of previously separate plotlines?<\/p>\n

Well, if that’s your test, “Battle of the Atom” fails it. \u00a0This is essentially an\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> storyline sprawling into the other titles for two months. \u00a0The basic plot is as follows: the modern day X-Men are reminded of the damage they’re potentially doing to the timeline when Silver Age Cyclops nearly manages to get himself killed in battle. \u00a0The Silver Age team are prevailed upon to go home. \u00a0As the argument continues, a bunch of X-Men from the future show up to try and convince them. \u00a0Young Scott and Jean go on the run, and eventually seek refuge with adult Scott’s renegade version of the X-Men. \u00a0Meanwhile, it turns out that the future X-Men are actually impostors, being a group who were cast out of the “real” X-Men, so the proper<\/em> future X-Men come back to try and help sort everything out. \u00a0Much fighting ensues, in the course of which we discover that the timeline is so screwed up that the Silver Age X-Men apparently can no longer be sent home, at least until something unspecified is done to resolve matters. \u00a0After that big revelation, more fighting ensues until the story is over. \u00a0Then, in the epilogue, the Silver Age team (and Kitty as their mentor) defect\u00a0en masse<\/em> to Scott’s side, disgusted by the lack of support they’ve had from Wolverine’s side.<\/p>\n

If all of that sounds like a remarkably slight plot for ten issues, well, yes, it wouldn’t have worked over the course of a year. \u00a0But one thing that tends to get overlooked with these crossovers is that they increase the pace of a story from monthly to weekly, and that in itself changes the way you can approach things. \u00a0Extended fight and chase scenes become a lot more acceptable in this context, because the reader is still experiencing story progression far faster than in a typical monthly story. \u00a0I’m fine with that; stories absolutely should tailor themselves to the pacing of their shipping schedule, because it has such an impact on the audience experience.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless – this is an\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> storyline. \u00a0It’s all about time travel, it’s all about the Silver Age team’s presence in the present day, it’s all about what those characters choose to do. \u00a0The\u00a0Uncanny<\/em> guys get a degree of prominence because the final defection plays into their schism. \u00a0And the other two books\u2026 well, they’re left to try and find space for themselves around the edges. \u00a0In practical terms this means that the future X-Men get to include characters designed to show that Shogo and Quentin Quire will be important. \u00a0All well and good, but it doesn’t change the fact that this story doesn’t belong in those books. \u00a0The result is not a crossover, simply a two-month expansion of Brian Bendis into extra titles, with hired hands picking up the slack on the books he can’t do. \u00a0(And, with scheduling a must on this kind of book, the art gets notably fill-in-y as the story goes on.)<\/p>\n

Judge it as a weekly storyline for the Bendis X-Men, though, and there’s a decent amount of entertainment to be had here. \u00a0There are good ideas in here, such as the impostor X-Men apparently being led by a version of Silver Age Jean Grey who never went home; the idea that the Silver Age team are now trapped in the present and doing potentially horrible damage to the timeline, which seems a logical development of the central premise (as well as playing into the running event-story theme that something’s up with Marvel time generally); and Rachel Grey getting a role as one of the few characters to stick up for the Silver Age team, since she can hardly complain about somebody else deciding to emigrate to a new time period and stay there. \u00a0(Besides, if everyone else is that adamant that the kids should go home, what does that say about how they feel about\u00a0her<\/em> presence?)<\/p>\n

But, like a lot of Bendis stories, there’s also more in the way of promising foreshadowing than satisfactory plot. \u00a0It’s never really clear quite why the impostor team are so keen to send the teen X-Men back; their motivation appears to be some sort of disillusionment related to the assassination of the first mutant president, but quite what that has to do with sending the Silver Age team home is not obvious. \u00a0More egregiously, the climax of the story really comes with the revelation that the original team can no longer be sent home. \u00a0But that plot point is placed with a whole act still to go, leaving the remaining issues to fill time with a rather pointless battle that feels entirely tacked on. \u00a0The\u00a0biggest<\/em> plot point of the whole affair – the original team jumping sides – is relegated to a closing epilogue in the second book-end. \u00a0The notional climax of the storyline is a bit of a void.<\/p>\n

I’ve read a lot worse, though, and the pacing of a weekly storyline covers up a multitude of sins. \u00a0As crossovers go, it’s really not bad, and it does set up some interesting material for the Bendis books. \u00a0As for the other two titles, they’ve essentially experienced a two month hiatus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I usually put the issue numbers in the post titles, but they won’t really fit here, will they? \u00a0So (deep breath) –\u00a0X-Men: Battle of the Atom #1-2,\u00a0All-New X-Men #16-17,\u00a0X-Men #5-6,\u00a0Uncanny X-Men #12-13, and\u00a0Wolverine and the X-Men #36-37. This is what you might call an old-school crossover. \u00a0What Marvel usually do these days is to have […]<\/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-2078","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\/2078","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=2078"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2254,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2078\/revisions\/2254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}