{"id":2744,"date":"2014-10-24T22:09:04","date_gmt":"2014-10-24T21:09:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2744"},"modified":"2014-10-24T22:09:04","modified_gmt":"2014-10-24T21:09:04","slug":"amazing-x-men-vol-2-world-war-wendigo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2744","title":{"rendered":"Amazing X-Men vol 2 – “World War Wendigo”"},"content":{"rendered":"

When last I reviewed\u00a0Amazing X-Men<\/em>, in May, it was to cover the\u00a0first issue collected in this volume – a fill-in story in which\u00a0the cast of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends<\/em> hunt a goat – and I wondered what on earth a\u00a0book which had only just been launched with great fanfare was doing running such a throwaway\u00a0thing.<\/p>\n

But that story at least had\u00a0a sense of gleeful nonsense going for it. \u00a0The five-part “World War Wendigo”, by contrast, is\u00a0about as mediocre as multi-part X-Men stories get.<\/p>\n

Sure, Craig Kyle and Chris Yost have been doing this a while, and\u00a0they can usually be relied upon to produce something that hangs together. \u00a0But what we have here is\u00a0an undistinguished five parter\u00a0in which the X-Men and Alpha Flight team up to stop a Wendigo outbreak. \u00a0The\u00a0problem isn’t\u00a0that it’s an unimportant story;\u00a0there’s nothing wrong with doing some stories\u00a0from time to time where the X-Men just show up and do some superheroing. \u00a0It’s just a rather flat and uninspired affair which, at a push, had enough good ideas to fill two issues, maybe three, and drags alarmingly when\u00a0extended to five.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0book has a superficially\u00a0cute\u00a0idea as its central premise – if\u00a0the Wendigo curse\u00a0transforms people who eat human flesh into monsters, what happens if someone contaminates a meat-packing plant?<\/p>\n

Well,\u00a0according to this story, you get a whole load of Wendigos. \u00a0I’m fairly sure that’s actually a continuity error, and that\u00a0the established ground\u00a0rules are that\u00a0there’s only one Wendigo at a time, so the existing\u00a0one gets cured every time someone else gets cursed. \u00a0Still, let’s let that one slide, since at least this story is pretty clear on its own terms about\u00a0how the outbreak works.<\/p>\n

But where do you go with that\u00a0idea next? \u00a0Once you’ve done the\u00a0contamination – which is on page two of the first chapter – then, well, you’ve got an awful\u00a0lot of Wendigos running around. \u00a0But\u00a0since Wendigos are basically mindless, that leaves you stuck with the structure of a zombie apocalypse story. \u00a0So the story has to keep escalating the problem with the Wendigos spreading, until finally\u00a0everything gets sorted out on the mystical scale and we can all go home.<\/p>\n

And this doesn’t really work,\u00a0for a whole bunch of reasons. \u00a0Like\u00a0I say, the\u00a0story requires the curse to spread. \u00a0But the Wendigo curse comes from eating human flesh; that’s the whole point of the “contaminated meat” angle. \u00a0So how does it spread? \u00a0The story answers this, but by introducing a completely arbitrary new rule that\u00a0everyone the Wendigos scratch or bite gets turned into a Wendigo too. \u00a0This is a departure from continuity too, but a more problematic one – it’s\u00a0an import from the zombie plot (in a PG form), it has nothing to do with the basic Wendigo concept,\u00a0and it undermines the need for the meat-packing angle in the first place.<\/p>\n

Okay, turning Wolverine into a Wendigo kind of works, though the story doesn’t do much with it, and he ends up being shunted aside in the final chapter. \u00a0And there’s a certain dumb appeal in the idea that the horde of Wendigos can’t cross the border over to the US, at least until the curse gets stronger. \u00a0I mean, it’s stupid too, because the actual mythology is Algonquian\u00a0and actually straddled the border\u2026 but at least it fits with Marvel Universe ground rules.<\/p>\n

But other than that, you’ve got a rather generic subplot in which Northstar helps rescue a little girl, and a last-act trip to the mystical scale to take on the Great Beasts and solve the problem. \u00a0And the Great Beasts are just not very interesting, at least when they’re stripped down to\u00a0random magic giants, as they are here.<\/p>\n

This is the fundamental defect. \u00a0There’s no real content to any of this. \u00a0The Wendigo\u00a0is a genuine myth. \u00a0What’s the myth about? \u00a0Well, it’s a cautionary tale about the horrors that will befall you\u00a0if you\u00a0eat human flesh. \u00a0More abstractly,\u00a0it’s saying that there are certain lines you do not cross, no matter how desperate you may be – that if your choice is to eat human flesh or die, the right choice\u00a0is to die. \u00a0Always.\u00a0 And if you violate\u00a0the natural order in this way,\u00a0terrible consequences ensue.<\/p>\n

That’s the content that’s supposed to underpin\u00a0the Wendigo story. \u00a0So if you\u00a0do a story where a whole\u00a0load of people become Wendigos through\u00a0accidentally<\/em> eating human flesh, though no fault of their own\u2026 well, you’ve missed the point. \u00a0For the concept\u00a0to function, they need to be at fault, or at least arguably so. \u00a0They can be people who made the wrong choice\u00a0faced with an impossible dilemma, but\u00a0there has to be some fault involved.<\/p>\n

It might work if it was\u00a0some sort of consumerist satire, and you somehow made it about greed or fashion. \u00a0 (Contaminated foie gras, maybe?) \u00a0Conceivably\u00a0there might be a vegetarian angle, though a distinction between human flesh and other meat is kind of\u00a0hardwired into the myth. \u00a0Or if you want to go another route, maybe a story about somebody deliberately setting out to weaponise the myth; perhaps there’s something about appropriation in there. \u00a0It’s not like any of this needs to be at the forefront. \u00a0It just needs to be buried in there somewhere.<\/p>\n

But if\u00a0it’s just randomly infected people randomly infecting\u00a0other random people, that’s not a Wendigo story. \u00a0It’s a zombie story,\u00a0but zombies have been done to death too, and even they need some kind of social or satirical angle to\u00a0save themselves from just being retreads. There’s no angle here; it’s just the bare bones of a stock zombie story except with Wendigos and for five issues. \u00a0And that’s not enough.<\/p>\n

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

When last I reviewed\u00a0Amazing X-Men, in May, it was to cover the\u00a0first issue collected in this volume – a fill-in story in which\u00a0the cast of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends hunt a goat – and I wondered what on earth a\u00a0book which had only just been launched with great fanfare was doing running such a […]<\/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-2744","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\/2744","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=2744"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2789,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744\/revisions\/2789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}