{"id":2734,"date":"2014-10-04T22:06:53","date_gmt":"2014-10-04T21:06:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2734"},"modified":"2014-10-04T22:06:53","modified_gmt":"2014-10-04T21:06:53","slug":"uncanny-avengers-vol-5-axis-prelude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2734","title":{"rendered":"Uncanny Avengers vol 5 – “Axis Prelude”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Uncanny Avengers<\/em> officially ends with issue #25,\u00a0though what this actually means is that it gets replaced first by\u00a0Axis<\/em>, and then by\u00a0whatever relaunched version comes after\u00a0Axis<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Since volume 4 of\u00a0Uncanny Avengers<\/em>\u00a0ran through to issue #22, this presents the collections department with something of a problem. \u00a0Hence the unlikely-looking\u00a0volume 5, “Axis Prelude”, which collects\u00a0the final three issues of\u00a0Uncanny Avengers<\/em>,\u00a0the two tie-in issues of\u00a0Magneto<\/em> (which will also be included in\u00a0Magneto<\/em> vol 2), and\u00a0the entirely unrelated comedy issue\u00a0Uncanny Avengers Annual<\/em> #1.<\/p>\n

Did we do\u00a0the Annual when\u00a0it came out? \u00a0I forget. \u00a0As I recall, it’s not very good. \u00a0It’s\u00a0a Mojo story which\u00a0thinks it’s being very clever and met by having a completely arbitrary non-plot, but continually lamp shading that fact. \u00a0It’s a joke that quickly wears thin.<\/p>\n

That aside, what we have here is a transition\u00a0between larger stories. \u00a0Issue #23 is largely aftermath from the previous arc, with the\u00a0characters adjusting to their new status quo. \u00a0This basically means Alex being horribly scarred, he and Janet\u00a0remembering the daughter they had in the\u00a0deleted future timeline (who\u00a0is presumably still out there somewhere in Kang’s custody), and Rogue having Wonder Man stuck in her head. \u00a0All of which is basically fine. \u00a0I’m not particularly thrilled about going back to a variant of Rogue’s old status quo – once you’ve already done the story about her maturing and gaining control, you can’t really re-tread that ground with this version of the character. \u00a0If you want to do that story again, what you really need is a reboot. \u00a0But\u00a0once the decision has been taken to go this route,\u00a0the book does it as well as can be expected.<\/p>\n

After that, it’s a\u00a0four-issue crossover with\u00a0Magneto<\/em>,\u00a0billed as a direct lead-in to\u00a0Axis<\/em>. \u00a0And for once that billing is perfectly fair; the end of issue #25 is indeed a major plot point leading into the big crossover.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Avengers<\/em> issues have the Red Skull kidnapping Rogue, Wanda and Alex to\u00a0Genosha, where he’s set up a mutant concentration camp. \u00a0This doesn’t go as well as he might have expected, because he hasn’t allowed for Rogue having Wonder Man’s powers. \u00a0Meanwhile, over in his own title, Magneto makes his own attempt to\u00a0kill the Skull, and gets captured. \u00a0That leads to the Avengers rescuing him so that he can join the\u00a0big confrontation with the\u00a0baddie in issue #25.<\/p>\n

If a crossover between\u00a0Uncanny Avengers<\/em> and\u00a0Magneto<\/em> sounds like a horrendous style clash\u2026\u00a0well, yup, it pretty much is.\u00a0 Uncanny Avengers<\/i> is, at heart,\u00a0a superhero team book of the 1970s and 80s, given a 21st century polish by the contemporary art. \u00a0Magneto<\/em> pitches itself as a more brittle character piece,\u00a0a little bit removed from\u00a0the superhero house style. \u00a0Purely in plot terms,\u00a0a crossover seems like it ought to\u00a0make\u00a0sense;\u00a0Magneto is Wanda’s father, and\u00a0the Red Skull fits with\u00a0Magneto’s background, what with\u00a0him being a Nazi war criminal. \u00a0But the\u00a0tone of\u00a0both books winds up muddled.<\/p>\n

Uncanny Avengers<\/em> is not a book that’s particularly interested in the psychology of its villains. \u00a0For the most part, it’s perfectly content to go with the idea that\u00a0the Red Skull does evil things because he’s evil. \u00a0He’s not evil for any particular reason, or at least, the reasons\u00a0why he is evil are not of interest to the series. \u00a0He’s a force and a threat for\u00a0other characters to respond to, and that’s basically all.<\/p>\n

Magneto<\/em> isn’t that bothered about the inner life of Nazis either, but it certainly is concerned with the inner life of Magneto and\u00a0the way he’s been damaged by his past. \u00a0It acknowledges that it’s dealing with a\u00a0character who has come to take on many of the features of the people he hates (and where that hate drives him as a character). \u00a0It doesn’t treat his single-minded obsessiveness as necessarily making\u00a0him a villain, but it does see it as something that makes him\u00a0unnervingly like a villain, even today. \u00a0And it sees Magneto’s own lack of interest in the psychology of\u00a0his opponents as part of the problem with him.<\/p>\n

So bringing these two\u00a0titles together to do a Red Skull story poses a problem, and for the most part it’s\u00a0Magneto<\/em> that comes off worst. \u00a0It’s not a series that really wants to be doing stories with major Marvel Universe figures to start with, and it\u00a0would rather prefer its Nazis to take the form of realistic figures, not demented\u00a0cartoons in skull masks.<\/p>\n

In fact, Uncanny Avengers<\/em> is right in its approach to the Red Skull. \u00a0He’s an outrageously malevolent\u00a0icon of evil. \u00a0He\u00a0doesn’t function well as a rounded character, and his creators\u00a0never really\u00a0intended him to. \u00a0After all, he’s\u00a0a\u00a0Nazi villain\u00a0from the heyday of\u00a0propaganda. \u00a0If he had a moustache he’d be twirling it constantly. \u00a0 This doesn’t make him a bad character; but it does make\u00a0him a character who\u00a0isn’t at home in\u00a0Magneto<\/em>. \u00a0When you stick him in a setting of huts and tortured prisoners, you’re evoking the grotesquerie of\u00a0concentration camps. \u00a0But the\u00a0Red Skull is a different sort of\u00a0camp entirely. \u00a0They don’t go well together.<\/p>\n

Still, Uncanny Avengers<\/em>\u00a0does find some use for Magneto as a guest star. \u00a0There are some good ideas in here about his awkward pseudo-relationship with his daughter Wanda – as she points out,\u00a0Magneto has occasionally tried to be a better person for Xavier, or the X-Men, but never for her. \u00a0She’s just not that important to him. \u00a0More broadly,\u00a0Remender uses Magneto to play into\u00a0the book’s usual theme of the need for unity. \u00a0Magneto is locked firmly in the cycle of hate, or at least that’s how the Avengers see it. \u00a0From his standpoint, killing the baddies is\u00a0a necessary exercise in clearing away the obstacles to\u00a0a future peace. \u00a0But\u00a0given the amount of hate the character has, there’s obviously a lot of rationalisation in there. \u00a0Magneto is all too willing to come up with reasons not to rise above\u00a0things.<\/p>\n

This builds to a rather wonky finale, in which Magneto\u00a0actually does kill the Red Skull, only\u00a0to find that this releases the Skull as the new Onslaught. \u00a0It’s a nice enough twist in its way, not least because it actually delivers on the “Axis prelude”\u00a0billing in a way I never really expected the story to do. \u00a0Okay, it’s Onslaught,\u00a0and much\u00a0like\u00a0the sixties, if you fondly remember Onslaught, you weren’t there. \u00a0The original story is a catastrophe from start to finish – an extended tease for a character whose details hadn’t actually been worked out, belatedly swerving into an incoherently plotted story that was simply an excuse to set up the Heroes Reborn line (which had nothing to do with the X-Men). \u00a0But\u00a0the flip side\u00a0is that it’s almost inevitable that the\u00a0second attempt will do it better. \u00a0The bar has been set so low that they had to excavate.<\/p>\n

Does it work beyond the surprise factor?\u00a0\u00a0The way it’s structured, the idea certainly seems to be that Magneto has transgressed by deliberately killing a bad guy, and is getting his comeuppance for that. \u00a0This is slightly tricky territory, since\u00a0the “heroes don’t kill” trope has the downside of not actually making any\u00a0sense. \u00a0An absolute prohibition on lethal force\u00a0doesn’t match up with any ethical code people apply in the real world, and it doesn’t even\u00a0make sense within the logic of the Marvel Universe. \u00a0(Captain America was desperate to enlist in the US military –\u00a0how can he possibly be a non-lethal absolutist?) \u00a0You could make a case that Magneto kills the Skull\u00a0unnecessarily<\/em>, but given the scale of the threat he poses and the absence of any clear means of containing him, it wouldn’t be a very good one.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the “heroes don’t kill” thing isn’t an ethical principle so much as a genre convention tied to the idea that superheroes are\u00a0simply better – just as they can do impossible things, they can (and therefore should) hold themselves to impossible ethical standards. \u00a0And this is fine, I guess, if you use it as a vehicle to do stories about people crossing ethical lines, rather than seriously trying to push it as a moral in its own right. \u00a0It works, in other words, if you get everyone to buy it as a\u00a0sort of metaphor for real-world\u00a0compromise that allows superheroes to cross a moral line without straying too far beyond\u00a0PG territory.<\/p>\n

But this sort of artificial ethics sits a little uneasily next to the concentration camp stuff, for my money. \u00a0This may well be the idea – issue #23\u00a0goes out of its way to remind us that Wolverine is a killer and that he’d\u00a0be willing to kill the Skull too, so Remender doesn’t seem to think that Magneto’s behaviour is\u00a0somehow entirely beyond the pale. \u00a0At any rate, the message ends up feeling more than a little confused. \u00a0There’s a symbolic logic to what’s going on here, but it’s not one that feels\u00a0quite\u00a0consistent even within the series.<\/p>\n

Frankly,\u00a0there’s another point hanging over\u00a0these issues as far as I’m concerned, which is that I can’t honestly claim to be remotely excited about\u00a0Axis<\/em>. \u00a0Yes, as I’ve acknowledged, Onslaught II can hardly be worse than Onslaught I. \u00a0But neither the Skull nor Onslaught are inherently interesting threats – Onslaught is\u00a0actively the opposite of interesting – and I’m kind of dreading\u00a0months of stories with variations on the same “here’s a character with a\u00a0central\u00a0trait reversed” theme. \u00a0I’m not convinced that’s anywhere near a strong enough idea to carry the volume of material that’s apparently being asked of it. \u00a0We’ll see, though.<\/p>\n

There are\u00a0plenty of good moments in these issues – they certainly aren’t bad, and in plot terms they do what they were designed to do. \u00a0But\u00a0there’s a mismatch of elements in here that\u00a0stops things from quite working smoothly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Uncanny Avengers officially ends with issue #25,\u00a0though what this actually means is that it gets replaced first by\u00a0Axis, and then by\u00a0whatever relaunched version comes after\u00a0Axis. Since volume 4 of\u00a0Uncanny Avengers\u00a0ran through to issue #22, this presents the collections department with something of a problem. \u00a0Hence the unlikely-looking\u00a0volume 5, “Axis Prelude”, which collects\u00a0the final three issues […]<\/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-2734","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\/2734","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=2734"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2765,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2734\/revisions\/2765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}