{"id":2622,"date":"2014-08-04T23:35:47","date_gmt":"2014-08-04T22:35:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2622"},"modified":"2014-08-04T23:36:42","modified_gmt":"2014-08-04T22:36:42","slug":"uncanny-avengers-vol-4-apocalypse-twins-ragnarok-now-avenge-the-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2622","title":{"rendered":"Uncanny Avengers vol 2-4 – “Apocalypse Twins” \/ “Ragnarok Now” \/ “Avenge The Earth”"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been some time since we checked in with\u00a0Uncanny Avengers<\/em>. \u00a0But then, it’s been some time since\u00a0Uncanny Avengers<\/em>\u00a0finished a story. \u00a0These three volumes collect a story\u00a0– not a multi-story arc, but a single story – that began in issue #5 last April (actually an epilogue in vol 1),\u00a0and ran without interruption until issue #22 last week.<\/p>\n

This is a story\u00a0pitched unequivocally at an epic scale. \u00a0Multi-book crossovers aside, I can’t remember the last time we had a single story of this length. \u00a0Picking up stray plot threads from his\u00a0X-Force<\/em> run, Rick Remender starts relatively small, then dials up the scale\u00a0to breaking point and beyond.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is Remender’s Kang story, with all the circular logic and time travel that that implies. \u00a0Here’s the bare bones. \u00a0Back in\u00a0X-Force<\/em>, Archangel (as the new Apocalypse) had two children who were\u00a0taken off by Apocalypse cultists. \u00a0Apparently,\u00a0had Kang\u00a0not got involved, the Twins would have\u00a0emerged as the protectors of mutantkind to defeat Red Onslaught in the upcoming\u00a0Axis<\/em> crossover. \u00a0They then go on to block Kang’s conquest of the world. \u00a0Having been unable to erase them from history, Kang comes up with a plan to abduct them as babies and raise them himself, in an effort to shape their whole worldview.<\/p>\n

The result is that the Twins – though they hate Kang and consciously\u00a0distrust him\u00a0– still end up convinced that humans will always hate mutants, and that the only\u00a0permanent solution is segregation. \u00a0So they’re going to rapture all the mutants up to a spaceship and take them to start a new life somewhere else. \u00a0Problem solved, as far as Kang is concerned. \u00a0Unfortunately,\u00a0Kang has pushed the Twins a bit far, so they add a further stage to the plan: destroy the Earth,\u00a0purely to\u00a0spite Kang. \u00a0So the Twins travel\u00a0to the present, set up a barrier to prevent time travel\u00a0(so\u00a0Kang can’t interfere),\u00a0and kill a Celestial using a magic axe that Thor stupidly enchanted as a youngster, in order to bring the wrath of the space gods down on earth.<\/p>\n

The Avengers Unity Squad are supposed to be stopping all this,\u00a0but\u00a0turn out to be as dysfunctional\u00a0as ever, and eventually implode completely when\u00a0X-Force’s\u00a0murder of the\u00a0earlier child Apocalypse comes to light. \u00a0The\u00a0Avengers\u00a0fail to get their act together, the mutants are duly raptured, and the Earth is destroyed. \u00a0Five years down the line, the surviving Avengers finally manage\u00a0to turn off the Twins’ time travel blocker, which allows Kang to finally enter the story directly. \u00a0Kang sends the Avengers’ minds back to their present-day bodies, and the Avengers save the world using Kang’s plan. \u00a0Kang tries a power grab to gain the power of a Celestial himself, but gets thwarted and driven into retreat. \u00a0There’s a lot more to the details – including a lot of character work for the team members, and a whole subplot about the Legion of the Unliving – but this is the general thrust.<\/p>\n

It’s tempting to suggest that where some people are writing for the trade, Rick Remender has started writing for the omnibus. \u00a0\u00a0But\u00a0that would be unfair. \u00a0In fact, when you re-read it as a whole, it becomes obvious just how far this story is written for the single issues. \u00a0Despite the length of the story, it’s hardly stretching out its plot – if anything, it’s overcomplicating things at times in order to make sure it fits a big moment into every issue. \u00a0\u00a0And\u00a0where many writers increasingly seem to assume that readers have the previous ten issues committed to\u00a0memory (as if they had only just read the whole story in one sitting), Remender is at pains throughout this story to keep reiterating crucial plot points. \u00a0It’s not full-bore plot recaps, but it’s a story that keeps pausing to jog the reader’s memory in a way that’s\u00a0become somewhat unfashionable.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0story’s epic scale, then, is\u00a0no mere artefact of decompression. \u00a0Were it not for the already protracted length, in fact, it might have benefited from decompressing a little bit more;\u00a0it’s often\u00a0epic in a writerly\u00a0way more than a visual one, with the art\u00a0grinding away on the detailed plot mechanics\u00a0where other stories might have made more room\u00a0for big widescreen moments. \u00a0I wonder whether\u00a0Daniel Acuna is the best fit for a story like this, given that he’s always struck me as better on the small scale; but his\u00a0remit here largely calls for clarity\u00a0in a complex story,\u00a0and he delivers on that,\u00a0as well as bringing some life to characters who could easily have got lost in the welter of plot points.<\/p>\n

And Remender probably doesn’t want this story to have too much room to breathe, given that it’s an exercise in continually building the tension\u00a0up to the destruction of Earth. \u00a0That said, there’s also some fiddly stuff that feels like it’s there to\u00a0keep the heroes occupied\u00a0until the earth gets destroyed, or which just seems a little bit overcomplicated – much of the stuff with the Legion of the Unliving in\u00a0vol 2, or the Twins’ rather odd\u00a0powers that rarely\u00a0play into anything, or a point about the timeline dividing into seven futures which I can only assume is going to pay off down the road. \u00a0There was\u00a0room to play with there.<\/p>\n

So what was the point of all this? \u00a0On the face of it, the moral which the story keeps hammering again and again is that the\u00a0humans and the mutants need to work together\u00a0if they’re going to\u00a0save the world. \u00a0So “we’re better working together”, then. \u00a0And indeed,\u00a0Remender duly repeats that theme at various levels: the\u00a0Avengers and the X-Men, the humans and the mutants, even the Twins themselves (who are more powerful as a duo).<\/p>\n

But you don’t do a year-plus storyline just\u00a0for that. \u00a0After all,\u00a0in itself, it’s not a moral so much as a genre convention. \u00a0And more to the point, the heroes already know that humans and mutants should be working together. \u00a0This is not a lesson they need to learn. \u00a0It’s literally the point of their team.<\/p>\n

Besides, that basic lesson wouldn’t have\u00a0much to do with Kang, who is after all the main villain of this story. \u00a0The Twins destroy the Earth, but they’re\u00a0still ultimately just pawns in his scheme. \u00a0There’s a distinct implication that but for Kang’s interference they might even have turned out as heroes; they would\u00a0at least\u00a0have saved their people from what’s coming in\u00a0Axis<\/em>. \u00a0But Kang has\u00a0deliberately screwed them up in a way that they can’t think past, even when they’re aware\u00a0of the problem.<\/p>\n

Kang, like the Red Skull in the first volume, is\u00a0serving here simply as an opposing force. \u00a0Remender has\u00a0pretty much zero interest in him as a\u00a0fully rounded character, and quite right too. \u00a0Kang is not a compelling villain because of his rich inner life (not that\u00a0the approach hasn’t been tried). \u00a0As a person, he’s a one-dimensional conqueror. \u00a0Rather, the hook with Kang is the kind of threat he\u00a0presents. \u00a0We covered this territory a few weeks back in relation to\u00a0All-New X-Men,<\/em> but at root, Kang represents a threat to the\u00a0story itself. \u00a0He\u00a0can alter his own past with apparent impunity; and his solution to any problem he faces is to go back and change history.<\/p>\n

There’s an obvious meta reading of characters like Kang, which I think actually is tacitly present\u00a0in the story itself. \u00a0Although what Kang does is\u00a0called<\/em> time travel, the reality of what he does is to\u00a0step outside the story and mess\u00a0about with the\u00a0narrative itself. \u00a0What he does screws with the rules of cause and effect that\u00a0normally form the ground rules for storytelling. \u00a0He’s a threat to the internal logic of stories who potentially renders everything meaningless. \u00a0Partly, that’s a source of\u00a0existential horror; but\u00a0another\u00a0major part\u00a0of the appeal\u00a0of time travel paradox stories is precisely the fact that they don’t make sense when judged by strictly conventional standards. \u00a0The fraying of the story at the edges is the frisson. \u00a0Kang’s function is simply to personify that (and thus avoid the problem\u00a0All-New\u00a0<\/em>currently has,\u00a0as a superhero comic\u00a0where the main threat is vague and abstract).<\/p>\n

Incidentally,\u00a0Kang’s speech in the final chapter about his sense of honour dovetails rather neatly with this reading. \u00a0According to Kang, the reason why he doesn’t just go back and guarantee his own victory is that he feels obliged to\u00a0ensure that his opponents are defeated by their own choices. \u00a0So, for example, he could<\/em>\u00a0go back, steal the scroll with\u00a0Odin’s anti-Celestial\u00a0spell, and make his own magic axe – but\u00a0it’s much better to trick Thor into doing it. \u00a0Even better, he does so by posing as\u00a0Loki<\/em>,\u00a0out of all the potential candidates –\u00a0making sure that Thor knows perfectly well there must be an ulterior motive.<\/p>\n

Kang behaves in this way because of the practical limit on what he can do: he can rewrite the story, but it has to remain in some sense a story. \u00a0“Kang wins, the end” is not a story. \u00a0All this, I think, is tacitly understood by readers in order for the likes of Kang to function as\u00a0villains at all. \u00a0So while he’s not subject to the ground rules of the story itself, he’s still subject to wider underlying ground rules, and that’s why he can ultimately be beaten.<\/p>\n

But I digress. \u00a0Returning to the “working together” theme:\u00a0this is not a story about how the heroes learn to put their differences aside and working together. \u00a0It’s a story about how\u00a0the heroes, despite being well aware that they ought to put their differences aside and work together,\u00a0prove\u00a0unable to do so. \u00a0They only manage it at the end because Kang nudges them in the right direction, and their victory there is subverted by having to follow Kang’s plan, and by needing to rope in the dementedly anti-mutant Sentry to do the heavy lifting. \u00a0And by the fact that all they do is kick the problem down the road a bit, by having Thor kill Celestial #2 in pretty much the same way that the Twins killed the first one, presumably guaranteeing that Celestial #3 will be showing up in the not too distant future. \u00a0It’s far from a convincing win for the good guys; it’s a scrape by.<\/p>\n

So, if we tie all this together, is the idea that\u00a0the\u00a0Apocalypse Twins\u00a0can’t escape from the worldview Kang ingrained into them, even though they know they can’t trust him, and by analogy\u00a0humans and mutants\u00a0can’t co-operate because\u00a0merely being conscious\u00a0of a history of mutual distrust is not enough to overcome that ingrained distrust? In which case\u00a0Kang, as the manipulator\u00a0on the cosmic scale of the story, is standing as a metaphor for those forces on the smaller scale.<\/p>\n

Cutting against that are character arcs for the Avengers themselves which seem designed to tie the group together in future and\u00a0work towards them becoming a proper team (in which case the book’s wider thesis is presumably “it’s easier said than done, but we’ll get there in the end”). \u00a0Remender’s take on Rogue is dubious in terms of the way the character’s been written in the last few years, but\u00a0if you’re willing to look past that, she works in her role as the loose cannon who despises Wanda\u00a0and isn’t that keen on any of the rest of the Avengers either. \u00a0The final issue interposes her as a blocking character between Wanda and Simon,\u00a0in a way that locks the trio together for a while. \u00a0Havok and Wasp are left with memories of five years in a delete\u00a0future in which they got married and had a kid, who is still apparently with Kang,\u00a0no doubt to be rescued in future stories. \u00a0There’s strong character work in these issues, even if I’ve largely skipped over it in this\u00a0review.<\/p>\n

(Sidenote: the kid doesn’t\u00a0entirely make sense. \u00a0Why do Alex and Janet have a child in a timeline they’re proposing to delete? \u00a0Kang claims that he manipulated them into having the child so that he could use her as leverage to force\u00a0them to play along with his plan. \u00a0But\u00a0how did he do that, exactly? \u00a0Particularly as\u00a0the time travel barrier would have prevented him travelling to the point where she was conceived?)<\/p>\n

It’s a long, long story in monthly form – probably too long. \u00a0In that sense it reads better as a collection. \u00a0I was certainly tiring of it a while before it reached the end. \u00a0But on re-reading the whole story and thinking it over a bit\u2026 it’s grown on me. \u00a0There are some ideas in here beyond the\u00a0mere scale, and beyond the superficial moral that it seems at first glance to be pushing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been some time since we checked in with\u00a0Uncanny Avengers. \u00a0But then, it’s been some time since\u00a0Uncanny Avengers\u00a0finished a story. \u00a0These three volumes collect a story\u00a0– not a multi-story arc, but a single story – that began in issue #5 last April (actually an epilogue in vol 1),\u00a0and ran without interruption until issue #22 last […]<\/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":[1,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2622","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=2622"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2683,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2622\/revisions\/2683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}