Marvel’s new line of graphic novels is an odd beast. \u00a0After all, everything gets collected in trade paperback\u00a0format anyway. \u00a0So what makes a graphic novel different from a trade paperback collection of a four or five issue arc?<\/p>\n
At one time, the answer would have been that\u00a0a graphic novel was liberated from the requirements of monthly serialisation. \u00a0Collections of single issues from the 1980s or even 1990s\u00a0read<\/em> like collections of single issues, dutifully pausing near\u00a0around page 3 or 4 of every story to recap the plot for new readers. \u00a0But\u00a0writing for the trade has become so commonplace, and the traditional aspects of serial storytelling\u00a0have become so unfashionable, that\u00a0the differences have largely been eroded.<\/p>\n The graphic novel is nonetheless seen as a prestige format,\u00a0even if that’s more symbolic than due to any actual difference\u00a0of content. \u00a0Hence we have here an outsize hardback by Mike Carey and Salvador Larroca which is nothing if not keen to generate a sense of occasion.<\/p>\n The high concept is pretty much self-explanatory: all the humans in the world suddenly disappear, leaving only the mutants. \u00a0The X-Men must sort it all out. \u00a0So we have a massive\u00a0premise straight out of the Silver Age; we have\u00a0the two X-Men factions teaming up for the first time in ages; we have a rare story that tries to get\u00a0all<\/em> of the X-Men involved, even the likes of Triage and Tempus; and just in case you weren’t feeling enough sense of occasion,\u00a0an alternate reality Phoenix turns up at the end to hit the cosmic reset button.<\/p>\n It’s a story that’s working damned hard to appear important, even though\u00a0it faces the difficulty of being a firmly in-continuity story (Nightcrawler’s there,\u00a0young Cyclops isn’t, Magneto’s split from Scott’s team) that can’t actually do very much to advance the\u00a0stories of individual X-Men. \u00a0That’s hardly fatal; God Loves Man Kills<\/em>\u00a0had so little plot impact that it was about twenty years before it was even established to be in continuity. \u00a0But people were still talking about it as a classic twenty years later\u00a0because it was a\u00a0really strong self-contained story that got to the core of what the X-Men were about, particularly in Chris Claremont’s interpretation.<\/p>\n It’s hard to imagine “No More Humans” having that sort of impact. \u00a0The\u00a0idea of what the mutants do when the humans disappear sounds like it ought to be a really solid\u00a0X-Men premise,\u00a0and it’s\u00a0certainly a good\u00a0strong springboard. \u00a0But\u00a0the story ends up juggling a large cast and dealing with the plot mechanics of putting the world to rights, more than it really gets to grips with the idea of what a human-free world might be like. \u00a0There’s a neat development of the premise by suggesting that the\u00a0largely-vacant Earth will become a refugee camp for mutants from other dimensions, but the story never gets to grips with anyone trying to build\u00a0a new society in the ashes, or obvious questions such as “what do we do with all those empty cities”, “who’s\u00a0going to grow the food” and “what are we going to do all day now there’s nothing on television”? \u00a0Given that the story\u00a0was always obviously heading for the cosmic reset button – which is no criticism in itself – I’d rather have seen it chase the “no more humans” premise a little further down the line, instead of spending quite so much\u00a0time on\u00a0baddie-hunting.<\/p>\n None of which is to deny that it’s a solid piece of work; Carey knows how to put a story together, Larroca has always been an impressive superhero artist, and his\u00a0art reads well on this scale. \u00a0But it wouldn’t have seemed particularly out of place as five issues of\u00a0Amazing X-Men<\/em>. \u00a0There’s one page which sticks out as\u00a0seeing Carey stretch his wings a bit – a montage of Phoenix reading everyone’s minds and\u00a0the thoughts\u00a0appearing as stream of consciousness sentence fragments rather than the more\u00a0conventional thought balloon contents. \u00a0For the most part, though, it’s a strong\u00a0X-Men story but not one that\u00a0can quite live up to the sense of occasion that it’s trying\u00a0to generate.<\/p>\n Perhaps the biggest surprise here is the choice of villain – Raze, from the future Brotherhood who were introduced in\u00a0“Battle of the Atom”. \u00a0Oddly, instead of appearing here alongside his cohorts, he’s used as a freestanding villain who suddenly goes up the scale\u00a0to “massively genocidal” – even if plot necessity precludes him actually being\u00a0able<\/em> to wipe out the human race. \u00a0If one thing from this story does stick in people’s minds, it’ll be\u00a0the re-branding of Raze as an A-list villain, something that it sells remarkably well. \u00a0His role here could easily have been generic but Carey\u00a0gets over the idea that this guy isn’t so much anti-human, as\u00a0psychopathically indifferent to everything\u00a0and everyone outside his tribe. \u00a0He kind of works here, and the X-Men are overdue to refresh the list of\u00a0A-list villains (something that’s largely absent from\u00a0the core books).<\/p>\n This would have been – is, in fact – a good five issue arc. \u00a0The format may work against it, raising expectations of something more than that; and the book’s attempts to live up to those expectations don’t always help it either. \u00a0Did the final act\u00a0really<\/em> need a Phoenix? \u00a0But leave the format\u00a0out of consideration and it’s a\u00a0fun story\u00a0that offers the rather\u00a0gentler fan service of simply bringing all the X-Men together to take on a great big\u00a0baddie. \u00a0It’s been\u00a0surprisingly long since we did that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Marvel’s new line of graphic novels is an odd beast. \u00a0After all, everything gets collected in trade paperback\u00a0format anyway. \u00a0So what makes a graphic novel different from a trade paperback collection of a four or five issue arc? At one time, the answer would have been that\u00a0a graphic novel was liberated from the requirements of […]<\/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-2539","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\/2539","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=2539"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2540,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2539\/revisions\/2540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}