{"id":2848,"date":"2014-12-12T21:55:46","date_gmt":"2014-12-12T21:55:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2848"},"modified":"2014-12-12T21:55:46","modified_gmt":"2014-12-12T21:55:46","slug":"amazing-x-men-14-the-worst-of-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2848","title":{"rendered":"Amazing X-Men #14 – “The Worst Of Us”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oh good, another\u00a0Axis<\/em> tie-in. \u00a0We definitely haven’t\u00a0flogged the inversion\u00a0horse to death yet. \u00a0I’m so glad we’re getting it again here.<\/p>\n

Let’s recap why these\u00a0tie-ins largely don’t work. \u00a0The whole\u00a0“inversion” angle is\u00a0fine for a few issues of\u00a0Uncanny Avengers<\/em> where you camp it up to the nines and have the heroes go crazy so that other people have to step in and save the day. \u00a0But\u00a0when you try to extend it beyond that, you find that it kind of works with the villains, but it’s a lost cause with the heroes.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0inversion gimmick assumes that “good” and “evil” are somehow personality traits in their own rights, rather than the\u00a0result<\/em> of personality traits. \u00a0So if you just try a straight good-evil flip, you get a character that doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense. \u00a0The inverted villains don’t really make sense either, but at least they don’t make sense in an interesting way. \u00a0The inverted heroes\u00a0just wind up as rather boring interchangeable fascists. \u00a0And since that’s kind of the plot of\u00a0Axis<\/em>, there’s not much that tie-in writers can do\u00a0to breathe life into it.<\/p>\n

Chris Yost tries his best here, and\u00a0he\u00a0actually has one of the stronger ideas we’ve seen for an\u00a0Axis<\/em> tie-in, using Nightcrawler and Mystique. \u00a0Since they’ve got a relationship to start with that\u00a0isn’t<\/em> defined in terms of good and evil, you’ve at least got something to work with there\u00a0that survives the inversion gimmick.<\/p>\n

So\u00a0the hook here is that the normally placid Nightcrawler is running around his home town terrorising people in general and priests in particular, in the sort of bitter retaliation for past lynchings that he wouldn’t normally indulge in. \u00a0And Mystique,\u00a0who has a clearer understanding that something isn’t right with either of them, is trying to stop him from doing anything that he’ll regret once he’s back in his right mind.<\/p>\n

Now that last bit is quite a good idea, given the premise that the\u00a0story has to work with. \u00a0The idea that a newly conscientious Mystique would try to protect her son\u00a0makes\u00a0perfect sense, and her concern is\u00a0perfectly logical. \u00a0Even if all the heroes are mad right now, they’re going to feel awfully bad about this when they wake up,\u00a0and at least she can stop him crossing a line that there’s no going back from. \u00a0If nothing else, at least this gives some degree of dramatic\u00a0stakes to a tie-in story where nobody’s in character because they’re all out of their minds.<\/p>\n

It’s surprising that this angle isn’t being played up more, since at least it serves as a reminder that the real character is in there\u00a0somewhere, in abeyance. \u00a0Because the thing about\u00a0Axis<\/em> is that everyone’s so far out of character that, essentially, none of the\u00a0supposed star characters are really in it at all. \u00a0The inverted\u00a0heroes are so one-dimensional that they barely function as recognisable\u00a0versions of themselves; they are certainly not, in any sense, interesting.<\/p>\n

“The Worst of Us” is not a great story – it can’t ultimately get around the fact that inverted Kurt is a flat character, and its status as a tie-in issue prevents it having any proper resolution. \u00a0But it does find something to work with in Mystique; it does\u00a0have some\u00a0sequences with nicely inventive uses of both characters’ powers; and it marginally advances the plot by\u00a0clarifying that the revived Kurt doesn’t have a soul. \u00a0I’m not sure that’s the take Chris Claremont is running with over in Kurt’s solo book, but it’s certainly what Jason Aaron seemed to be suggesting.<\/p>\n

Part of me thinks that\u00a0it should have been possible to tie Kurt’s lack of a soul\u00a0in with the inversion gimmick, but really, I’m not sure how; if anything, I suppose it could come into play more after things are sorted out, when Kurt discovers that he doesn’t feel all that bothered about what he did. \u00a0If indeed that’s what not having a soul means. \u00a0It’s one of those hazy concepts\u00a0that manages to be terribly important-sounding while having no discernible practical significance. \u00a0That’s a problem for another day, though.<\/p>\n

This story has the misfortune to come along at a point when I’m already pretty much sick of the crossover, but\u00a0given what it has to work with, it’s not too bad. \u00a0It\u00a0does get to grips with the\u00a0challenge of finding a story in this material, more successfully than\u00a0many books that have tried. \u00a0It’s time to move on, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oh good, another\u00a0Axis tie-in. \u00a0We definitely haven’t\u00a0flogged the inversion\u00a0horse to death yet. \u00a0I’m so glad we’re getting it again here. Let’s recap why these\u00a0tie-ins largely don’t work. \u00a0The whole\u00a0“inversion” angle is\u00a0fine for a few issues of\u00a0Uncanny Avengers where you camp it up to the nines and have the heroes go crazy so that other people […]<\/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-2848","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\/2848","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=2848"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2849,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2848\/revisions\/2849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}