How stupid is too stupid?<\/p>\n
It’s a question that’s come up a lot ever since Schism, <\/em>where\u00a0Jason Aaron introduced the current version of the Hellfire Club – a quartet of evil twelve-year-olds who seized control of the Hellfire Club and moved on to become the main villains of\u00a0Wolverine and the X-Men<\/em>. \u00a0These characters don’t work. \u00a0But why not?<\/p>\n Characters like the Hellfire brats are often defended with the logic that if you can accept superheroes, you ought to be able to accept pretty much anything else. \u00a0This is a lousy argument. \u00a0For one thing, X-Men is certainly based on an utterly absurd premise, namely that random mutation would throw up incredibly specific and workable superpowers. \u00a0But the Hellfire brats are a different sort of implausible; they’re psychologically implausible, even by the operatic standards of the genre. \u00a0And for another, “Could this logically exist in the Marvel Universe?” is a poor standard to apply. \u00a0Pretty much anything can exist in the Marvel Universe; it doesn’t follow that they belong in any given story.<\/p>\n All that being said, there are certainly precedents for the X-Men taking a headlong diversion into the downright wacky – Arcade or the X-Babies, for example. \u00a0But they were used for occasional comic relief in “change of pace” stories. \u00a0 The list of ludicrous major villains who actually worked pretty much starts and ends with Mojo, and even he was used mainly in comedy stories and given an undertone of being sinisterly Other.<\/p>\n The problem with the Hellfire brats, then, isn’t so much that they exist, as that they’ve been cast in the role of this title’s Big Bads, when really they’re only fit for comic relief. \u00a0Thirty-five issues into this series, I still don’t see anything that makes them function as proper personalities, even by the exaggerated standards that go with the territory. \u00a0Kade oscillates wildly between a generic evil schemer and a comedy young teenager, with occasional clumsy attempts to give him depth by having him whimper that daddy didn’t hug him. \u00a0Wilhelmina is a one-note joke character. \u00a0The other two are cyphers.<\/p>\n And the school they set up in this arc is much the same. \u00a0It’s so absurdly over the top, even by the very generous standards of the genre, that it’s simply impossible to take it seriously\u00a0as<\/em> a school. \u00a0It’s fine as a setting for a comedy story, and the first issue of the arc works just fine on that level. \u00a0But when Jason Aaron tries to make the kids or their school function on any other level than as a gag, the whole thing falls apart. \u00a0And it certainly seems like this is\u00a0meant<\/em> to function on some other level. \u00a0A big chunk of part 3 is devoted to Idie’s narration comparing the worldview of the two schools. \u00a0And that falls completely flat. \u00a0The Hellfire Academy is surrealist nonsense; no recognisable human thought lies within.<\/p>\n We’re left with five issues of chaos, some of which is very funny, but it never comes together as a story. \u00a0The Club has its own school; it seems to be tormenting pupils and eventually using the Siege Perilous to transform them into powered-up super villains. \u00a0The X-Men spend a few issues tracking the school down, then find it, then\u00a0show up and smash it up. \u00a0The story’s designed to give Quentin Quire an opportunity to play hero by having him put himself in harm’s way to rescue Idie and Broo; it sort of works on that level, but the attempts to pair him with Idie run up against the problem that Idie long since left Planet Anything I Can Relate To and was last seen passing Pluto at high speed.<\/p>\n There are other odd and unsatisfying features in the final issue quite apart from all this. \u00a0Kade seems to think that he’s won, but it’s never remotely clear why. \u00a0Perhaps this is hinting at some even more byzantine master plan still to come, but god preserve me from another Kade Kilgore story. And Toad seems to reset Husk to her normal personality by just tearing off layers of skin until he reaches the real her – other than a throwaway line in chapter one where she wondered whether she could tear her way down to her soul, there’s been nothing to set this up as a possible resolution, and it seems a staggeringly weak way to pay off a subplot that’s been running since the series began.<\/p>\n I’m generally all in favour of\u00a0Wolverine and the X-Men<\/em>‘s embrace of wackiness, because it gives the book a unique voice, and because Aaron usually manages to balance it with some sort of emotional core that anchors the story amidst the nonsense. \u00a0The Hellfire kids have always been the exception to that rule, and unfortunately a whole story arc about them turns out to be the same problem writ large. \u00a0There’s certainly a lot going on in this arc, it’s just that beyond the gag level, not very much of it works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How stupid is too stupid? It’s a question that’s come up a lot ever since Schism, where\u00a0Jason Aaron introduced the current version of the Hellfire Club – a quartet of evil twelve-year-olds who seized control of the Hellfire Club and moved on to become the main villains of\u00a0Wolverine and the X-Men. \u00a0These characters don’t work. […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2087","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\/2087","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=2087"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2152,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2087\/revisions\/2152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}