{"id":233,"date":"2010-02-21T18:43:32","date_gmt":"2010-02-21T18:43:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=233"},"modified":"2010-02-21T21:43:27","modified_gmt":"2010-02-21T21:43:27","slug":"the-x-axis-20-february-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=233","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 20 February 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to another Sunday evening round-up of the week’s comics.\u00a0 Of course, the big news in comics this week is apparently that DC has given some people new job descriptions, but we’ll leave that for the podcast.\u00a0 Just two X-books this week – Uncanny X-Men<\/em> and the final issue of the Psylocke<\/em> miniseries.\u00a0 Why, it’s almost within reason.\u00a0 Don’t worry, though, because it’ll be back to normal next week, with a thoroughly excessive quantity.\u00a0 Meanwhile…<\/p>\n

Battlefields: Happy Valley<\/em> #3<\/strong> – The concluding part of Garth Ennis and PJ Holden’s story about an Australian air crew in World War II.\u00a0 The basic plot is pretty obvious – the crew are on their last mission before completing their tour of duty, except for the new, idealistic, wide-eyed pilot, and you can probably figure out from that where this is heading.\u00a0 The big set piece, unfortunately, isn’t conveyed as clearly as it might have been, and the plot is fairly predictable.\u00a0 But Ennis raises his game with the coda, where any sense of heroism is undercut as the story ends up going unrecognised by an impersonal wartime bureaucracy.<\/p>\n

Black Widow: Deadly Origin<\/em> #4<\/strong> – Paul Cornell wraps up this rather ornate miniseries.\u00a0 The title might lead you to expect a re-telling of the Black Widow’s back story – which would make sense, since Marvel will presumably want some sort of introduction to the character on the shelves in time for the upcoming Iron Man movie.\u00a0 But rather than explaining her history, Cornell seems moe interested in deconstructing the various scattered interpretations of the character over the decades, and seems to take a working knowledge of her background for granted.\u00a0 The common thread ends up being a rather hazy idea about Natasha escaping the shadow of her occasional supporting character Ivan, and a claim that her recent actions have been driven by a common theme of, um, doing good.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s all terribly confused and convoluted, and Ivan’s actions seem terribly contrived.\u00a0 More to the point, it never really manages to get across a coherent vision of the character, which seems to have been the aim.\u00a0 This seems to be more a case of overambition, with the story struggling to digest and present a horde of scattered continuity references, but it never comes together.<\/p>\n

Chase Variant One Shot (Is All I Need)<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong> – Rich Johnston writes a one-shot for Image, with various artists contributing.\u00a0 The high concept is that Chase Variant thinks she’s a genetically engineered assassin who was different from the rest of the batch.\u00a0 In fact, she’s a character in a trading card game, which is why her life consists of seemingly random fighting.\u00a0 So the “story” is accompanied by the card-playing running along the bottom of every page.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s a clever conceit, but it’s a single joke which, by its nature, resists being turned into a story – the very plotlessness and defiance of narrative logic being sort of the point.\u00a0 These three stories seem to have started life as contributions to an anthology, and they’d probably have worked better in that format, where the concept wouldn’t have had to carry a whole issue on its own.\u00a0 It’s weirdly amusing, though.<\/p>\n

Dark Avengers<\/em> #14<\/strong> – Okay, seriously, in what sense is this a Siege<\/em> tie-in?\u00a0 It’s a flashback story taking place before Siege<\/em>, in which the Sentry goes nuts again and Norman Osborn has to talk him down.\u00a0 And it’s well enough written, but how is this any more of a Siege<\/em> tie-in than any other Sentry story published in the last two years?\u00a0 Victoria Hand gets a nice scene at the beginning, Moonstone gets a truly dreadful one later on, and overall it’s okay if you don’t mind the pop psychology of Sentry stories… but so far, there’s no discernible link between any of this and the crossover which it claims to be part of.<\/p>\n

Devil<\/em> #1<\/strong> – Manga creator Torajiro Kishi does an original four-issue miniseries for Dark Horse, intended for the American format.\u00a0 It’s basically a vampire story, although it’s the modern version where there’s a disease going round which turns people into “bloodsucking superhumans.”\u00a0 Takimoto is a police officer who goes around killing the resulting “devils”, while Migiwa is the liberal one who wants to treat it as a public health issue.\u00a0 From the look of it, she will be learning an important lesson about life: some vampires just need shooting.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The art’s great, and the glowing white “devils” are a lovely visual.\u00a0 The story is quite familiar, though, and the mismatched partners are distinctly off-the-peg.\u00a0 It also chews up pages on action sequences, but the art’s good enough that I can let that slide.\u00a0\u00a0Interesting, and it certainly looks good, yet the story doesn’t really hook me.<\/p>\n

Joe the Barbarian<\/em> #2<\/strong> – Okay, then.\u00a0 Joe is having a diabetes-related hallucination, and the idea is that he sees himself on some sort of fantasy quest while trying to get downstairs.\u00a0 The way that the story throws in moments of lucidity gives the whole thing a nicely trippy quality.\u00a0 The star of the show, once again, is Sean Murphy’s art, which builds a beautiful fantasy world from a mixture of common genre tropes and incongruous elements from Joe’s room.\u00a0 It’s basically the idea of presenting an everyday challenge as an epic quest, quite literally so.\u00a0 The concept isn’t entirely original, but the execution is brilliant.<\/p>\n

Psylocke<\/em> #4<\/strong> – Chris Yost clearly understood the need to refocus and redefine Psylocke, a character who’s become hopelessly confused over the years, and so I was hoping that this miniseries would achieve some much-needed remedial work.\u00a0 In the end, the series never quite gets that far.\u00a0 Picking up on a long-forgotten Wolverine<\/em> subplot from the last decade, Psylocke finds out that the guy she’s trying to kill is actually being kept alive so that Wolverine can torment him.\u00a0 So she ends up killing Matsu’o in order to release him, rather than to take revenge on him.\u00a0 And that’s fine – she achieves what she set out to do, but in a way that theoretically gives her some closure and symbolically puts that chapter of her life behind her.\u00a0 The thing is, having done so, she doesn’t seem to be moving on to anywhere in particular, and that’s the missing element that stops it from quite completing the job.\u00a0 That said, it does set the character on the right track, and if Uncanny<\/em> chooses to pick up on this material, it may prove to have done her good.\u00a0 As for the art, it’s decidedly patchy – sometimes it’s fine, if a bit nineties, but sometimes everything’s over-rendered to the point of ugliness, and many of the action sequences are just plain confusing.<\/p>\n

Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #521<\/strong> – Magneto goes up a hill to meditate, while some of the X-Men team up with Fantomex to beat up baddies.\u00a0 Oh, and it looks like Kitty Pryde is coming back.\u00a0 Greg Land’s artwork has certainly been made more palatable by toning down the overly polished and airbrushed feel and making it a bit rougher around the edges.\u00a0 The problem here lies with the villains.\u00a0 Their schtick seems to be that they want to copy mutant powers and make them available to everyone.\u00a0 This idea of democratising superpowers is a reasonably interesting one.\u00a0 Fraction did something vaguely similar in the opening issues of Invincible Iron Man<\/em>, and here he’s basically recasting Grant Morrison’s cultish U-Men as a supervillain team.\u00a0 But they’re a supervillain team without much in the way of personality or presence – the leaders a rather bland smartass, and the rest are pretty much a blank.\u00a0 There’s a decent idea here, and I’m all for Fraction doing more stories along this theme, but these guys just need a bit more charisma.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome to another Sunday evening round-up of the week’s comics.\u00a0 Of course, the big news in comics this week is apparently that DC has given some people new job descriptions, but we’ll leave that for the podcast.\u00a0 Just two X-books this week – Uncanny X-Men and the final issue of the Psylocke miniseries.\u00a0 Why, it’s […]<\/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-233","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\/233","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=233"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":235,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions\/235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}