{"id":2730,"date":"2015-01-09T22:45:40","date_gmt":"2015-01-09T22:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2730"},"modified":"2015-01-09T22:45:40","modified_gmt":"2015-01-09T22:45:40","slug":"uncanny-all-new-x-men-annuals-the-secret-life-of-eva-bell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2730","title":{"rendered":"Uncanny & All New X-Men Annuals – “The Secret Life of Eva Bell”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Filling in\u00a0what happened\u00a0to her\u00a0when she got separated from the trainee X-Men\u00a0during their visit to Tabula Rasa,\u00a0“The Secret Life of Eva Bell” is billed as comprising this year’s\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> and\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> annuals. \u00a0Which is interesting in itself, because while Eva is certainly part of the\u00a0Uncanny<\/em>\u00a0cast, she emphatically isn’t part of the\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> cast – at least, not as anything more than a background character. \u00a0Nor do any of the\u00a0All-New<\/em> regulars crop up here.<\/p>\n

This could of course be a symptom of\u00a0Marvel’s somewhat random approach to annuals. \u00a0But in this case I’m inclined to think it’s intended to draw our attention to the bigger picture that the story implies.<\/p>\n

It’s a\u00a0simple story. \u00a0Separated from the others, Eva discovers that she\u00a0can time-travel when panicked. \u00a0Cue\u00a0half an issue of the usual guest stars, it being an unwritten rule that\u00a0despite the vastness of time and space, if you are going to randomly bounce around time and space, you simply will meet the Rawhide Kid. \u00a0Eventually she winds up in the 2099 universe where she gets taken in as an apprentice by Magik, who has\u00a0somehow wound up as Sorcerer Supreme.<\/p>\n

At which point the story deviates sharply from\u00a0the template with the causal caption “Seven years later\u2026” \u00a0Eva simply stays in the 2099 universe, remains Magik’s apprentice, has a husband and daughter, and decides that she doesn’t want to leave. \u00a0Unfortunately, getting caught up in a big mystic fight results in her being scared into another time jaunt which (back on the usual plot) results in an encounter with Morgan le Fey in the distant past. \u00a0That’s a bit of an afterthought. \u00a0By the time Eva steers her way back to the 2099 universe, she discovers that her time travel has altered history – her family don’t exist any more, and Magik has been replaced as Sorcerer Supreme by the unlikely candidate of Tony Stark, who finally helps her get home. \u00a0This, of course, sets Eva up for her plot role in the current\u00a0Uncanny<\/em> arc, as her vastly enhanced time travel abilities are revealed.<\/p>\n

Andrea Sorrentino’s artwork has some lovely, imaginative effects for the time travel sequences,\u00a0and I’ll come back to those. \u00a0But it also scores on\u00a0quickly establishing the atmosphere of new settings, and on bringing some delicacy to his figures that\u00a0humanises\u00a0the characters. \u00a0Which is good, because the biggest problem with this story is that Eva herself is likeable enough, but a bit of a cipher. \u00a0Aside from a\u00a0rather\u00a0sweet flashback to her with her child, she pretty much gives us the generic “confused and upset” reactions throughout the story, and there’s something deeply implausible about the idea that she simply slips back into the X-Men. \u00a0 Granted, Scott did pick up on her ageing, but shouldn’t everyone have realised immediately that something drastic had happened?<\/p>\n

It’s hard to tell whether this is dodgy writing or simply an illustration of how wonky and dysfunctional Scott’s team must be. \u00a0They’re really not a family; they’re a bunch of people who’ve wound up in a room together. \u00a0There’s also something quite odd about the idea that she’d want to\u00a0try to fit back into her old role, but then\u00a0this rather flimsy set-up is the closest thing to familiarity that she has available to her.<\/p>\n

Even so,\u00a0if this story was relying simply on its underplayed emotional impact, I don’t think that’d\u00a0be enough to carry it. \u00a0But there’s also a distinctly meta angle going on here. \u00a0Obviously, Bendis has been coming back to time travel\u00a0repeatedly over recent years,\u00a0with\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> and\u00a0Age of Ultron<\/em>, and with the\u00a0now firmly established idea that there is something wrong with the nature of time. \u00a0This is plainly building to something – frankly,\u00a0All-New<\/em> often\u00a0feels like it’s marking time waiting for that Thing to happen – and\u00a0as I’ve pointed out before, it’s very obviously the sort of Thing that could be used for a bit of\u00a0rebooting or continuity revamping if one were so minded.<\/p>\n

It’s interesting, then, to see\u00a0Eva’s time jumping\u00a0repeatedly rendered\u00a0by showing the panels themselves disintegrating. \u00a0Time travel is often a\u00a0vehicle for some degree of narrative incoherence,\u00a0with writers having to walk a\u00a0fine line\u00a0and find precisely the right degree of not quite making sense. \u00a0The fun of\u00a0time travel paradox stories is that they teeter on the brink of not working,\u00a0and that the narrative structure papers over the\u00a0(visible) logical cracks. \u00a0But this\u00a0is a story fairly evidently presented as the breakdown of the comic page itself – and if that’s what you want to emphasise, then yes, it does make sense to choose the old faithful guest stars and position this explicitly as a jaunt around the\u00a0wider Marvel Universe,\u00a0rather than one around space and time.<\/p>\n

Because\u00a0consider\u00a0the implications of this story’s worldview for\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em>, the book whose title it\u00a0carries. \u00a0Forget the fact that it doesn’t match up with earlier stories about time travel – it’s Bendis’ rules, and he can point to the “time is broken” stuff as a get out of jail free card. \u00a0For present purposes,\u00a0Bendis is clearly envisioning a\u00a0single timeline which is in flux and which can be altered by time travel. \u00a0People who are out of time, like Eva, are particularly prone to muck up the timeline. \u00a0By travelling into the future, spending an extended time there, and then going back into the distant past, Eva\u00a0apparently triggers a butterfly effect that wipes out\u00a0the history that she remembered. \u00a0In however hand-waving a way, the story is essentially telling us that\u00a0Eva’s personal history cannot be bound by what she experiences in the future, and that anything she sees in her trip to the future is\u00a0rendered merely provisional the moment she travels back in time again.<\/p>\n

And where does that leave the Silver Age X-Men? \u00a0If they don’t go back where they belong,\u00a0the Marvel Universe collapses in a paradox. \u00a0But if they do, according to this story, the Marvel Universe collapses\u00a0anyway<\/em>, because\u00a0from their perspective the present MU becomes a provisional future that can be altered by the butterfly effect. \u00a0(The same way, after all, that\u00a0characters from the present day timeframe always behave when they return from a future they don’t like.) \u00a0So the pretty strong implication for Bendis’ other title is that\u00a0continuity is indeed\u00a0profoundly screwed, and something pretty drastic is going to have to happen. \u00a0It’s hard to think that we aren’t supposed to be drawing these conclusions.<\/p>\n

Throw in that dimension of the slow burn towards the pay-off of Bendis’ long-term time travel plot, and I think this one\u00a0comes off. \u00a0Quite how you pay this off at this stage without doing the collapse of the Marvel Universe, I’m not sure\u00a0– but that’s a prospect I’m actually pretty relaxed about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Filling in\u00a0what happened\u00a0to her\u00a0when she got separated from the trainee X-Men\u00a0during their visit to Tabula Rasa,\u00a0“The Secret Life of Eva Bell” is billed as comprising this year’s\u00a0Uncanny X-Men and\u00a0All-New X-Men annuals. \u00a0Which is interesting in itself, because while Eva is certainly part of the\u00a0Uncanny\u00a0cast, she emphatically isn’t part of the\u00a0All-New X-Men cast – at least, […]<\/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-2730","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\/2730","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=2730"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2879,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2730\/revisions\/2879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}