“Muertas” is a storyline that starts off strongly and ends up as a bit of a mess all round.<\/p>\n
Even the titling suggests confusion. \u00a0Issue #7 clearly gives the title as “Muertas, part 1 of 6”. \u00a0But issue #10 – sorry, “issue #10.NOW” – which ought to be “Muertas, part 4”, is instead titled as “Ghosts, part 1”, despite being manifestly a middle chapter, apparently for no reason other than to justify the dodgy promotion.<\/p>\n
It starts with a decent idea, though. \u00a0Ana Cortes, a rich Colombian teenager, gets hold of the disembodied consciousness of Lady Deathstrike. \u00a0Before anyone asks, I couldn’t remember where she died either, and an explanation might not have gone amiss. \u00a0(As best I can figure, it’s meant to be\u00a0Uncanny X-Force<\/em> #5.1, where she escaped X-Force by uploading her consciousness to the internet – she’s appeared elsewhere since, but if she’s a downloaded consciousness these days, I guess there’s no reason why there can’t be several of her.)<\/p>\n Cortes plans to download Deathstrike’s mind into herself, so that she can become an Awesome Supervillain. \u00a0And she does. \u00a0The resulting Deathstrike – a mix between the original character and a thrill seeking idiot teenager in Day of the Dead makeup – starts trying to pick up further upgrades so that she can be More Awesome. \u00a0She ends up learning about Arkea, from the book’s opening storyline, and decides that Arkea would make a wonderful upgrade. \u00a0That, of course, doesn’t work out well for her at all, as she finds herself under the thumb of a destructive cosmic weirdo.<\/p>\n This is all quite good. \u00a0The new Deathstrike is a clever (yet reversible) way of livening up a staid character – I could see someone getting plenty of interesting stories out of that set-up. \u00a0There’s something genuinely interesting about Cortes’ self-destructive willingness to damage her own identity for the sake of entertainment. \u00a0And there’s a time-honoured classic story here about Cortes learning too late to be careful what she wishes for. \u00a0It ought to work.<\/p>\n It doesn’t, mainly because the story loses its focus. \u00a0It drifts away from Ana towards a range of less interesting ideas. \u00a0Once Arkea shows up, Deathstrike gets pushed towards the margins, not just of her group, but of the narrative. \u00a0And Arkea isn’t very interesting – she’s a one-dimensional killer. \u00a0That’s not necessarily a bad thing when she’s used as a foil, and having her as someone for Cortes to bounce off could have been fine. \u00a0But what actually happens is that Cortes has her big moment of redemption in part\u00a0five<\/em> and commits suicide, in a gesture whose contribution to the X-Men’s eventual victory is at best marginal, meaning that she shuffles off stage before the story even reaches its climax. \u00a0And before the potential in the character had been properly realised.<\/p>\n On top of that, the story increasingly gets sidetracked into Deathstrike and Arkea’s efforts to recruit a new Sisterhood, as a force to take on the X-Men. \u00a0These characters are clutter. \u00a0Two are introduced with great fanfare and then simply\u00a0leave<\/em>, without doing anything – one wonders if their introduction into the series was accelerated in the spurious belief that it might somehow justify that #1 on the .NOW issue. \u00a0The fact that Arkea feels the need to recruit the likes of Selene only serves to undermine her status as a supposed global threat. \u00a0And they’re a bizarrely random bunch anyway; even leaving aside the fairly obvious decision that they should be all female as a counterpart to the team (a decision which sits oddly with the book’s general approach of treating the stars’ gender as a non-issue), a team that features Madelyne Pryor, Typhoid Mary and the Enchantress feels like it’s been compiled by flicking through the Official Handbook at random.<\/p>\n At any rate, they’re a distraction from what ought to be Deathstrike\/Cortes’s story. \u00a0She’s the one with a proper emotional arc here, and she ends up feeling like a subplot. \u00a0There’s a reasonable story in here trying to get out, but it needs a lot fewer characters, and a lot more emphasis on Cortes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Muertas” is a storyline that starts off strongly and ends up as a bit of a mess all round. Even the titling suggests confusion. \u00a0Issue #7 clearly gives the title as “Muertas, part 1 of 6”. \u00a0But issue #10 – sorry, “issue #10.NOW” – which ought to be “Muertas, part 4”, is instead titled as […]<\/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-2454","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\/2454","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=2454"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2455,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454\/revisions\/2455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}