{"id":2822,"date":"2014-11-23T11:47:13","date_gmt":"2014-11-23T11:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2822"},"modified":"2014-11-23T11:47:13","modified_gmt":"2014-11-23T11:47:13","slug":"axis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2822","title":{"rendered":"Axis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once again, everything is in mid-storyline this week. \u00a0So instead let’s quickly\u00a0check in on how the\u00a0sprawling\u00a0Axis<\/em> crossover is doing, six\u00a0issues in.<\/p>\n

Despite being billed as\u00a0Avengers vs X-Men: Axis<\/em>, the core series is really just\u00a0a re-labelling of twelve issues of Rick Remender’s\u00a0Uncanny Avengers<\/em>, which had been building to a big confrontation with the Red Skull from an early stage. \u00a0Uncanny Avengers<\/em> has always been somewhat semi-detached\u00a0– and indeed, while there are tons of tie-ins\u00a0being published here,\u00a0they don’t actually impinge on the main Avengers and X-Men titles, which are\u00a0getting serenely on with business as usual.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0build to this storyline\u00a0culminated in Magneto attempting to kill the Red Skull and instead just turning him into a new version of Onslaught. \u00a0The first\u00a0act has Onslaught spreading hate all over the globe\u00a0until he’s stopped by a collection of heroes and\u00a0a\u00a0largely random group of villains; the villains’ participation is justified on the logic that the Skull\u00a0hasn’t made plans to deal with them. \u00a0Eventually Onslaught is defeated by magic which is supposed to\u00a0“invert” him by putting the remnants of Xavier’s persona in charge, and\u00a0burying the Skull in his place.<\/p>\n

This is an odd move, since it effectively removes from the board, at the end of act one, the villain who had been built up for months. \u00a0It’s also a relief, since\u00a0twelve issues of “everyone in the world is angry” would have been almost intolerable. \u00a0The tie-ins that connect with this phase of the story struggle to find anything very interesting to do with it; even though there’s an attempt to stress the idea that Onslaught is merely bringing out feelings that are there anyway, there’s really nothing\u00a0much to be done with “psychic villain makes everyone fight”.<\/p>\n

So with act 2 we get to the real point, which is that\u00a0the inversion spell affects everyone who was there for the fight with Onslaught, not just\u00a0him. \u00a0That’s the actual set-up for the remainder of the story – most of the Avengers and X-Men are now crazed baddies, while\u00a0the villains\u00a0who were present\u00a0are now filled with an urge to go out and help people.<\/p>\n

It’s a version of the old “mirror universe” trope, in other words, where we visit a world in which everything is basically just like it is here, except the goodies and baddies are reversed. \u00a0This sort of thing is a staple of sci-fi television, largely because it gives the cast an opportunity to have fun playing oddball versions of their normal characters. \u00a0Whether it works so well in comics, I’m decidedly less sure.<\/p>\n

There’s a tentative attempt to\u00a0suggest that the inversions\u00a0aren’t simply a case of “good\/evil”, but\u00a0in most cases any such idea is only marginally present. \u00a0For example, you\u00a0could<\/em> have done an inverted Avengers team who still want to be heroes but suddenly decide to embrace authoritarianism. \u00a0But in practice the inverted Avengers are pretty much just a bunch of sociopaths going through the motions of\u00a0their Avengers duties in order to preserve their position. \u00a0About the only exceptions here are Hulk (a\u00a0big placid monster who turns into an even bigger monster when he’s angry), Thor (who still thinks he’s a hero but behaves like a drunken thug) and Iron Man (who becomes overwhelmingly smug and self-absorbed, but does still seem to have some marginal interest in showing up to fight bad guys, if only as a way of demonstrating his own superiority). \u00a0And whether this version of Iron Man is meaningfully\u00a0capable of being understood as an inversion, rather than an awkward yank of the character in the direction of Mark Millar’s Ultimate take, is highly debatable.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0inverted X-Men\u00a0no longer believe in\u00a0the possibility of assimilation and want to set up an independent mutant nation to protect\u00a0mutantkind. \u00a0That’s fine as far as it goes, but ought to simply lead to them showing up en masse at Cyclops’ doorstep and yelling “we were wrong!” \u00a0Instead we’ve got them\u00a0conquering Manhattan under the leadership of Genesis\/Apocalypse, which is about the single least interesting thing you could conceivably do with an inverted X-Men team.<\/p>\n

The villains fare rather better –\u00a0there’s rather more potential\u00a0for\u00a0creators to work with in having\u00a0characters who are plainly unsuited to heroism in every other respect attempt to fulfil their newfound urges. \u00a0So\u00a0Axis:\u00a0Carnage<\/em> has the hopelessly violent killer trying to his best to be a Spider-Man style hero despite\u00a0his skill set really not lying in that area, while\u00a0Axis: Hobgoblin<\/em> sees the Hobgoblin turn his skills in scheming and image-building towards\u00a0literally re-branding himself. \u00a0These are actually not bad at all. \u00a0The\u00a0Magneto<\/em> tie-ins are significantly more disappointing, amounting to little more than expanded re-tellings of Magneto’s segments in the core series; after\u00a0such a strong opening arc, the series now appears to be engaged in an intensive goodwill incineration programme.<\/p>\n

What Marvel\u00a0likes in an event book is a central hook that can be exported across a range of crossovers to generate legitimate tie-ins that don’t actually have to be worked into the central plot. \u00a0This makes life simpler for the reader who doesn’t want to buy everything, and no doubt simpler for the editors who have to co-ordinate everything. \u00a0You can see why the inversion gimmick appealed along those lines; essentially, if you have a story to do that turns on the inversion gimmick, it can be marketed as an\u00a0Axis<\/em> tie-in no matter how detached it may be from the actual plot.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0in fact, the possibilities for the heroes turn out to be rather thin, since they aren’t being inverted in very interesting ways. \u00a0That’s not such an issue for the core story itself, which is a straightforward tale of “the heroes are out of their minds and it’s up\u00a0to the villains to rise to the occasion and set things right”. \u00a0That’s a harmless romp and it doesn’t call for any great sophistication. \u00a0Once you want to stretch out the concept to all manner of tie-ins, though, the limitations become apparent.<\/p>\n

Ideally,\u00a0the effect of this story would be to bring out other aspects of\u00a0the heroes’ characters, by having them continue to behave in a way that’s distinctively them, even while a central\u00a0trait is reversed. \u00a0That’s not happening because the inversion is just too crude to allow for it (and, perhaps, because\u00a0the plot requires most of the inverted characters to act\u00a0in groups thus far – preventing them from responding in any very individualised way). \u00a0You’re left with a story which asks “what happens if you reverse a fundamental\u00a0value of these characters?” and delivers\u00a0the answer “they act out of character” –\u00a0which might be fine for a single story but just isn’t that interesting as the conceptual lynchpin of a whole crossover.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once again, everything is in mid-storyline this week. \u00a0So instead let’s quickly\u00a0check in on how the\u00a0sprawling\u00a0Axis crossover is doing, six\u00a0issues in. Despite being billed as\u00a0Avengers vs X-Men: Axis, the core series is really just\u00a0a re-labelling of twelve issues of Rick Remender’s\u00a0Uncanny Avengers, which had been building to a big confrontation with the Red Skull from […]<\/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-2822","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\/2822","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=2822"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2823,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2822\/revisions\/2823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}