{"id":2588,"date":"2014-06-21T15:51:22","date_gmt":"2014-06-21T14:51:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2588"},"modified":"2014-06-21T15:51:22","modified_gmt":"2014-06-21T14:51:22","slug":"uncanny-x-men-vs-s-h-i-e-l-d-uncanny-x-men-19-22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2588","title":{"rendered":"“Uncanny X-Men vs. S.H.I.E.L.D.” – Uncanny X-Men #19-22"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a writer who chooses to work mainly in\u00a0the superhero genre, Brian Bendis never seems\u00a0all that interested in having a well structured plot. \u00a0First and foremost he’s\u00a0interested in\u00a0his characters, which is\u00a0fair enough. \u00a0His\u00a0actual stories\u00a0can often end up as rather meandering, or as sketchy gestures to provide\u00a0his characters with busy work\u00a0between conversations. \u00a0His rambling\u00a0Avengers<\/em> run is pretty much the epitome of this.<\/p>\n

So “Uncanny X-Men vs S.H.I.E.L.D.” is fairly unusual for a Bendis story, in that it sees a bunch of story threads being drawn together in a clear attempt to resolve\u00a0numerous plot points at once and create a Big Climax. \u00a0And what do you know, it largely works. \u00a0Largely – and with one glaring exception that brings me back to the point\u00a0above.<\/p>\n

For the entire run of\u00a0this series, Cyclops’ team have been harassed by Sentinels who pop up to attack them\u00a0whenever they show up in public. \u00a0Cyclops (wrongly, but not unreasonably) suspects SHIELD are\u00a0behind it, or at least turning a blind eye. \u00a0Maria Hill knows she isn’t behind it, but isn’t exactly confident that SHIELD has nothing to do with it either. \u00a0Meanwhile, Mystique has kidnapped Dazzler, and taken her place as a SHIELD agent\u00a0(an imposture no doubt helped enormously by the fact that this is a Bendis comic,\u00a0so that she is never actually called upon to demonstrate her non-existent light powers, merely to talk at length). \u00a0Dazzler is being kept prisoner in Madripoor where she’s being used to\u00a0create MGH to power up de-powered mutants like the Blob. \u00a0Magneto’s\u00a0gone off on his own to investigate what’s happening in\u00a0Madripoor. \u00a0And Hijack has been kicked off the team for being a useless prat.<\/p>\n

That’s a lot of plot threads, all of which come to a pretty neat conclusion in this story. \u00a0And at least when you read them as a whole,\u00a0these last few issues\u00a0are nicely paced\u00a0when it comes to dovetailing things together. \u00a0Everyone\u00a0ends up gathering at the proper X-Men’s school – Cyclops because he thinks the Beast might be behind the Sentinels, SHIELD because they’re going after Cyclops, and Hijack because he’s trying to redeem himself by offering himself up as a student to the branch of the X-Men he can still get in touch with. \u00a0And Magneto rescues Dazzler and turns up with her at the end too. \u00a0Chaos duly ensues, the villain is exposed and defeated, Hijack gets his big moment of redemption (though he remains essentially a well-meaning bozo who happened to have the right powers for the moment), Dazzler switches sides to rejoin the X-Men, and so forth.<\/p>\n

All this is\u00a0quite well done – and it turns out that there\u00a0was<\/em> a point to kicking Hijack off the team beyond his own short-term storyline, namely that the plot needs him to be out of the way before the Sentinels start developing ways of counter-measures to everyone’s powers. \u00a0Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to show up at the end and save the day. \u00a0So, fair enough.<\/p>\n

True, the whole thing makes SHIELD look like the Keystone Kops\u00a0– but\u00a0unless it’s their series, SHIELD pretty much\u00a0are<\/em> the Keystone Kops. \u00a0That’s the\u00a0age-old curse of being characters without your own book, who can never get to overshadow the stars. \u00a0You are going to\u00a0end up looking like losers who need to be bailed out by the real heroes. \u00a0SHIELD have been a clown show in the comics for thirty years; Bendis is hardly the first offender here. \u00a0Maria Hill, admittedly, is starting to seem a problematic character – she’s meant to be the hypercompetent\u00a0ice queen archetype, but since\u00a0stories rarely afford her any opportunity to actually\u00a0be<\/em> competent, she\u00a0ends up as simply someone who yells\u00a0a lot. \u00a0You could be forgiven for thinking that her talents might better suit her to a junior management role in a call centre. \u00a0But this isn’t ultimately the X-Men’s problem; in the context of this book, SHIELD are indeed just the foils.<\/i><\/p>\n

And true also, Dazzler’s arc is a bit\u00a0minimal. \u00a0Since she spends\u00a0most of the story unconscious, there’s no real opportunity for her switch of sides to mean anything; of\u00a0course<\/em> she doesn’t want to work\u00a0for Maria Hill, who, as aforementioned, is\u00a0a shouty nitwit. \u00a0The real problem here is that she never had an adequate motivation to work for SHIELD in the first place, and thus has\u00a0needs no great\u00a0motivation to\u00a0stop. \u00a0But that’s\u00a0pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things.<\/p>\n

And\u00a0yes, there’s also some remarkably clumsy storytelling\u00a0where the story reveals that the X-Men’s powers are being affected by nano tech. \u00a0The problem here is that\u00a0Bendis is running two different “powers not working properly” arcs\u00a0at the same time – the one that was attributed to the Phoenix at the start of the series, and one from a few issues ago which affected\u00a0everyone<\/em>\u00a0in the\u00a0cast\u00a0whenever the Sentinels were around. \u00a0I’m\u00a0pretty<\/em> sure that the resolution here is intended to relate only to the latter, but it’s not made explicit, and the confusion I’ve seen online is both understandable and entirely predictable. \u00a0There’s no reason why this couldn’t have been cleared up\u00a0in dialogue.<\/p>\n

But the big issue here is with the reveal of the Dark Beast as the villain behind the Sentinels. \u00a0If that seems to come out of nowhere – well, yes, it does. \u00a0Entirely. \u00a0And then he’s abruptly killed off within a few more pages. \u00a0This doesn’t work\u00a0at all<\/em> as the resolution for a major plot thread, and I\u00a0strongly suspect the reason is that Bendis simply isn’t that interested in it as a plot in its own right.<\/p>\n

The point he’s trying to make – I think – is that\u00a0this plays into the idea that it’s worryingly plausible that the\u00a0real<\/em> Beast could have been behind the Sentinel attacks. \u00a0After all, he hates Scott (both for turning the X-Men into a paramilitary travesty and for killing Xavier); he has access to the technology; there was some evidence suggesting the Sentinels were really on an information gathering mission instead of seriously trying to kill\u00a0Scott’s team; and he’s done some seriously erratic things lately, like\u00a0screwing up the timeline to make a point. \u00a0So the idea that he\u00a0might have been behind this wasn’t completely\u00a0off the wall, at least from Scott’s point of view. \u00a0And the point of bringing out the Dark Beast is to reiterate the plausibility of Hank being behind it. \u00a0So it’s meant to play into a much longer storyline of Hank becoming dangerously erratic.<\/p>\n

But you can’t do that – you can’t build up something as a mystery for the better part of\u00a0two years and then not have\u00a0the reveal work as a story in its own right. \u00a0And it\u00a0doesn’t<\/em> work as a story in its own right because Dark Beast has no sensible motivation here. \u00a0His stated motivation is that he’s dying from all the experiments he’s carried out on himself, and he hates Scott. \u00a0But these are largely\u00a0reflections of Hank’s feelings towards Scott; they\u00a0don’t have much to do with the Dark Beast’s own established motivations, which are largely about pursuing knowledge\u00a0with disregard for ethics, and acquiring a position of personal influence, preferably as a power behind the throne. \u00a0He never cared about the X-Men; he has no reason to be particularly bitter towards Scott, and certainly not for the reasons Hank does. \u00a0And on top of all that, his reveal is treated as an anticlimax and his story swiftly tied up\u00a0almost immediately thereafter.<\/p>\n

So yes, that doesn’t work\u00a0in the slightest. \u00a0It’s the point at which I groaned heavily and resumed reading with a sigh. \u00a0But it’s in the middle of a story that otherwise builds pretty nicely to a more effective climax than I often get from Bendis; certainly a story with a reasonable amount going for it, despite the major problem at its centre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a writer who chooses to work mainly in\u00a0the superhero genre, Brian Bendis never seems\u00a0all that interested in having a well structured plot. \u00a0First and foremost he’s\u00a0interested in\u00a0his characters, which is\u00a0fair enough. \u00a0His\u00a0actual stories\u00a0can often end up as rather meandering, or as sketchy gestures to provide\u00a0his characters with busy work\u00a0between conversations. \u00a0His rambling\u00a0Avengers run is […]<\/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-2588","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\/2588","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=2588"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2590,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2588\/revisions\/2590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}