{"id":2624,"date":"2014-07-12T12:33:57","date_gmt":"2014-07-12T11:33:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2624"},"modified":"2014-07-12T12:33:57","modified_gmt":"2014-07-12T11:33:57","slug":"all-new-x-men-vol-5-one-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2624","title":{"rendered":"All-New X-Men vol 5 – “One Down”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, more or less. \u00a0The fifth\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em>\u00a0collection\u00a0actually starts with\u00a0issue #25, the jam issue, which we’ve covered already. \u00a0But\u00a0after that, it’s the four-part Brotherhood storyline, which finished this week.<\/p>\n

Taken at face value, this is a straightforward story where the Brotherhood – the future version introduced in “Battle of the Atom” – attack the X-Men’s headquarters, try to kill them all, and fail. \u00a0It’s\u00a0interwoven with some flashbacks (or should it be\u00a0flash forwards?)\u00a0to the Brotherhood’s back story, which\u00a0principally serves to establish that the Brotherhood is really just Charles Xavier Jr and Raze, with everyone else having been under Xavier’s\u00a0mental control all along.<\/p>\n

Xavier’s motivation is apparently to take revenge on the X-Men for what he sees as the disrespectful writing of his father out of history. \u00a0At times, though, he seems to be claiming that this is also to do with fixing the problems caused by the Silver Age team to the present (even though his father was dead before that happened). \u00a0All this, he somehow believes will be achieved by getting rid of Jean. \u00a0As I’ll come to, though, a degree of slipperiness in Xavier’s thought processes might well be intentional here. \u00a0Raze’s position seems a little more straightforward: he seems to just hate the X-Men and want an opportunity to cause all manner of chaos.<\/p>\n

Basically, though,\u00a0this is\u00a0an extended home invasion story. \u00a0It’s one of\u00a0Brian Bendis’ better attempts at an action-driven story – never really his\u00a0forte – even if some of the mind control\u00a0details\u00a0in the final chapter are a bit garbled. \u00a0And Stuart Immonen does some quality work on the\u00a0fight\u00a0scenes and the Brotherhood besieging the X-Men’s base (even if, once the action gets inside, he faces the common problem that an all-grey converted military installation just isn’t all that visually interesting). \u00a0Still, it would be hard to claim that the\u00a0attack itself was a great story in its own right, or that it really needs to\u00a0run to four issues.<\/p>\n

Let’s take a step back, though, and ask where Bendis is going with all this. \u00a0After all, it’s not as if he’s the sort of writer who’s ever seemed particularly interested in doing multi-issue fights as an end in itself.<\/p>\n

The high concept of\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> is that the Silver Age X-Men are brought to the present day, and\u00a0are appalled by seeing how the world has turned out. \u00a0As of course they should be. \u00a0The Professor is dead; Scott killed him; Jean is dead and\u00a0(sort of)\u00a0responsible for genocide;\u00a0Hank is a giant blue ape; Warren is a grinning idiot; and Bobby\u2026 well,\u00a0things actually turned out okay for Bobby, but there’s plenty left\u00a0for the X-Men to be horrified by. \u00a0Plus, it’s not as though the X-Men seem to have made any real headway in their\u00a0goal of co-existence between humans and mutants. \u00a0It’s not a happy picture.<\/p>\n

This is an inversion of a well established superhero trope in which the heroes witness a dark and depressing future and\u00a0resolve to make sure it never happens. \u00a0Normally that’s presented as the right and proper thing to do. \u00a0But here, the heroes are from the past, and\u00a0the timeline they ought to\u00a0want rid of\u00a0is pretty much the last 40 years of published\u00a0history of the Marvel Universe. \u00a0Plainly, this complicates matters, but only because we’re attached to the Marvel Universe;\u00a0logically, it’s hard to see how that ought to make\u00a0any ethical difference. \u00a0And the Brotherhood, by introducing an actual future time frame, are there to hammer home the equivalence. \u00a0What makes\u00a0“our” present any more “real” than theirs?<\/p>\n

There are two\u00a0core themes at play here, the first being fate or destiny or whatever you want to call it, and whether our heroes can (or should) escape it. \u00a0And indeed this arc begins and ends with characters talking about whether Jean can escape her destiny of becoming Phoenix, going mad, committing genocide, and ultimately dying. \u00a0Leave aside the arguments about whether Jean was technically Phoenix; the retcon which brought her back was intended, in a roundabout and elaborate way, to preserve the validity of Phoenix being in some sense Jean, so Bendis isn’t straying too far from the intent of earlier stories here.<\/p>\n

The second is the threat to the timeline itself, and by “the timeline” what we really mean is “continuity”. \u00a0At best it’s a thinly veiled metaphor. \u00a0If the X-Men return to their own time and set about trying to alter history – as the shape of a story like this would normally demand – then the history of the Marvel Universe is rewritten and continuity runs into a ditch. \u00a0But if they don’t return to their own time then the result is even worse, because history collapses into a horrendous paradox:\u00a0they\u00a0have<\/em> to return\u00a0or the\u00a0entire history of the X-Men vanishes. \u00a0And in that case, who brought them to the present day?<\/p>\n

The early issues of the series see everyone assuming that Xavier will simply erase the X-Men’s memories when they go home, in order to preserve the integrity of continuity. \u00a0But the series has been going out of its way to make that option less and less viable,\u00a0partly by\u00a0giving Jean new powers, and partly by having the characters from the future\u00a0state outright that the Silver Age team were\u00a0never<\/em> sent back. \u00a0They\u00a0seem to have just kept on ageing\u00a0long beyond the point where they could be sent back to pick up their lives where the left off – leaving a massive, unanswered continuity hole at the centre of that future timeline.<\/p>\n

One school of thought\u00a0just dismisses the whole problem with the stock explanations about divergent timelines that were traditionally wheeled out\u00a0by Mark Gruenwald in the 1980s\u00a0Official Handbook.<\/em>\u00a0 But this won’t work. \u00a0It’s patently clear that Bendis is working on the model that there’s a single timeline here, and that changes to the past can alter the future. \u00a0We’ve been shown that on panel, with the present day Cyclops briefly vanishing in “Battle of the Atom” when his younger self was apparently killed, and with the Brotherhood in this story rewriting their own\u00a0timeline by leaving messages for themselves in the future, so as to learn from mistakes they haven’t yet made. \u00a0And again, this is entirely consistent with earlier X-Men stories;\u00a0the\u00a0end of the Kulan Gath story explicitly has time being altered\u00a0in this way, and numerous other stories,\u00a0principally “Days of Futures Past” and its sequels, implicitly\u00a0assume that\u00a0history can be changed.<\/p>\n

Besides, you\u00a0can’t make the collapse of\u00a0continuity\u00a0into the focus of your story and then\u00a0resolve the problem simply by disavowing the\u00a0plot’s assumptions as to how time travel works. \u00a0So let’s take Bendis’ time travel ground rules at face value and see where he might be going with this.<\/p>\n

One possibility is very obvious. \u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> is one of a number of stories in recent years that have gone out of their way to stress the damage that has been done to the timeline. \u00a0Next year’s “Time Runs Out” event is\u00a0presumably the climax of these threads, and Marvel have at least been hinting that it’s\u00a0a reboot – or, at least,\u00a0some sort of opportunity to rewrite and streamline\u00a0Marvel history. \u00a0At the very least, it seems clear that we’re\u00a0meant to be entertaining the possibility that this is the direction.<\/p>\n

There’s much to be said for a reboot, frankly. \u00a0The Marvel Universe is now dragging decades of continuity behind it, which gives most\u00a0long-running characters horrendously\u00a0convoluted histories full of dead ends and repetition. \u00a0Whole swathes of characters\u00a0have back stories tied to countries that don’t even exist any more. \u00a0Magneto’s connection to the Holocaust, wonderful idea though it was, can’t remain viable forever, as the events\u00a0start to approach the edge of living memory (not least since his back story also calls upon him to be a contemporary of Professor X, who in turn has increasing problems justifying a stint in the army so that he can be in the\u00a0Juggernaut’s origin story, since the US hasn’t had a draft in decades\u2026 and so on). \u00a0The Marvel Universe isn’t going away any time soon. \u00a0At some point the sticking plaster is going to have to be ripped off.<\/p>\n

And there are more than a few dated ideas that could advantageously be deleted. \u00a0The Celestials\u00a0were a perfectly sound idea for\u00a0Eternals<\/em>, but incorporating them into the mainstream\u00a0Marvel Universe means that any story which wants to explore the potentially fruitful topic of the origin of life on Earth is stuck with the facts that (a) it’s been largely explained already, and (b) the explanation is a Kirby take on von Danekenism, and thus\u00a0parted company with the zeitgeist decades\u00a0ago.<\/p>\n

But reboot have their own problems, principally\u00a0how to preserve the readers’ attachment to the characters. \u00a0That’s one’s a discussion for another day. \u00a0A less significant, but still serious, problem is to how to make\u00a0a story out of perhaps the most blatant editorial\u00a0intervention. \u00a0DC has plenty of experience in this field, and Marvel is in the happy position of being able to learn from their mistakes. \u00a0Reboot plot devices arbitrarily tagged on to unrelated stories – not entirely satisfactory. \u00a0Stories that are actually about the reboot – arguably worse. \u00a0I know Crisis<\/em> was much loved back in the day, but it had the advantage of\u00a0novelty to go with its epic scale. \u00a0At the very least, the\u00a0cosmic villain with abstract motivations who nearly destroys everything, with the heroes saving the day by\u00a0salvaging a revised version of the Earth, has been emphatically done.<\/p>\n

So what about a story where you set up the destruction of the timeline as a positive choice, or at least play up the positive effects? \u00a0Instead of being just a glaring rewrite of history, you try and cast it as a second chance? \u00a0It might work. \u00a0And I increasingly suspect that that’s where we heading.<\/p>\n

Viewed in that context, the\u00a0Brotherhood’s primary function is simply\u00a0to exemplify the increasing collapse of\u00a0continuity itself – in the sense of narrative logic – within the Marvel Universe. \u00a0They already come from a completely paradoxical timeline – one where the Silver Age X-Men never got sent\u00a0home, yet the X-Men still existed. \u00a0Their strategy is to\u00a0keep sending themselves messages in the past – and by the end of this arc they’re even re-writing the messages. \u00a0Their main\u00a0target seems to be killing Jean Grey, which will plainly just result in an even more glaring paradox than the one that already exists.<\/p>\n

So, you might reasonably ask, if this future timeline\u00a0has such an obvious (and plainly intentional) paradox in it, why hasn’t continuity collapsed already? \u00a0Part of me wonders whether\u00a0the thinking here is a little bit meta. \u00a0The timeline is viable for as long as the continuity is viable – that is, literally for as long as the setting continues to somehow hang together as a context for stories. \u00a0And it remains viable by\u00a0continuing to give the appearance that it could all be sorted out somehow, even as\u00a0an increasing number of characters assure us that it won’t be. \u00a0The future literally is less important because the readers think of it as somehow more provisional (a logic which, if followed through, would mean that there actually is something more fundamentally wrong with altering the Marvel Universe’s past than its future).\u00a0 The point of collapse is being staved off\u2026 for now. \u00a0And of course it only needs to be staved off until next year’s crossover.<\/p>\n

This is getting speculative. \u00a0But the Brotherhood certainly are intended as emblematic of the story itself falling apart – which might explain why they take the form of such flagrantly unlikely characters as a child of Professor X and Mystique, two characters who have no apparent reason to meet for coffee let alone to\u00a0procreate. \u00a0If the grand scheme of\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> is indeed a slow build to the point where\u00a0the characters can no longer maintain the pretence that continuity is salvageable, much of what is happening with the Brotherhood and with the X-Men themselves makes reasonable sense.<\/p>\n

None of which ultimately changes the fact that this is a four issue home invasion story that could probably have been done perfectly effectively in three. \u00a0But there are definitely points of interest in the wider series, as it\u00a0seems increasingly likely that\u00a0it’s intended not simply as a medium term visit from the past, but as something that poses a more fundamental challenge to the whole history of the X-Men.<\/p>\n

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

Well, more or less. \u00a0The fifth\u00a0All-New X-Men\u00a0collection\u00a0actually starts with\u00a0issue #25, the jam issue, which we’ve covered already. \u00a0But\u00a0after that, it’s the four-part Brotherhood storyline, which finished this week. Taken at face value, this is a straightforward story where the Brotherhood – the future version introduced in “Battle of the Atom” – attack the X-Men’s headquarters, […]<\/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":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2624","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\/2624","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=2624"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2642,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2624\/revisions\/2642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}