THE BLACK VORTEX! \u00a0Its cosmic tendrils bring corruption and devastation wheresoe’er they wind!<\/p>\n
THE BLACK VORTEX! \u00a0Its\u00a0thirteen chapters offer a glimpse into the abyss of eternity!<\/p>\n
THE BLACK VORTEX! \u00a0Playing goth, industrial and darkwave; women enter free before midnight.<\/p>\n
Once the X-books got to dominate crossovers, or even skip them entirely, but\u00a0today things have changed. \u00a0And so here the X-Men find themselves as junior partners in a thirteen-part crossover that in fact only includes three X-books –\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> #38-39, and\u00a0Cyclops<\/em> #12. \u00a0The\u00a0remainder of\u00a0the story wends its way through two book-end one-shots,\u00a0Guardians of the Galaxy<\/em> #24-25,\u00a0Legendary Star-Lord<\/em> #9-11,\u00a0Guardians Team-Up<\/em> #3,\u00a0Nova<\/em> #28, and\u00a0Captain Marvel<\/em> #14.<\/p>\n Precisely what the X-Men are doing here at all is not\u00a0100% clear. \u00a0Kitty Pryde has a reason to be here, because she already doubles as part of Star-Lord’s supporting cast. \u00a0Yet the\u00a0rest of the\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> cast\u00a0could scarcely be called vital to the plot. \u00a0The plot does things to some of them,\u00a0so it’s not a skippable arc for\u00a0All-New<\/em> readers. \u00a0But the\u00a0X-Men could be pulled out of the story entirely and not a great deal would change. \u00a0For that matter, so could most of the individual Guardians. \u00a0It’s really a Star-Lord and Kitty story that’s grown arms and legs.<\/p>\n Chapter 1 begins with a flashback that\u00a0establishes the origin of the\u00a0Black Vortex. \u00a0Twelve billion years ago, for reasons the story never\u00a0returns to,\u00a0the\u00a0people of planet Viscardi\u00a0inexplicably had a Celestial standing around\u00a0ignoring them, and apparently stopping them from developing interstellar flight. \u00a0A woman called Gara has a good yell at the Celestial to complain about this situation,\u00a0and\u00a0specifically to complain that the Celestial doesn’t seem to understand that they long to leave their world, “drea[m] higher than your grasp”, and “know the cosmos”. \u00a0Of course, people who speak to Celestials should be careful what they wish for, because the Celestial responds by creating the Black Vortex, a mirror that turns people into cosmically powered-up versions of themselves. \u00a0This seems like a tremendously useful thing, so naturally everyone submits to it, goes mad, and tears the planet\u00a0apart, leaving Gara as the last survivor of her race. \u00a0So we’re establishing pretty early that submitting to the Black Vortex is probably a bad idea.<\/p>\n Meanwhile,\u00a0Star-Lord and Kitty discover that the Vortex has fallen into the possession of Star-Lord’s arch-enemy and dad Mister Knife, who is using it to power up his henchmen (but evidently has more sense than to use it himself). \u00a0I like the name Mister Knife, by the way. \u00a0For one thing, it doesn’t sound like the stream of random characters that aliens normally get as names. \u00a0And for another,\u00a0before he was Mister Knife, he was J’Son, which is just\u00a0terrible<\/em>. \u00a0Mister Knife is also trying to persuade Thane to\u00a0submit to the Vortex – you know, Thanos’ son. \u00a0All this feels very\u00a0much joined in progress, and quite\u00a0what Knife is up to with Thane is never particularly clear. \u00a0I assume it was all set up in earlier issues of\u00a0Star-Lord<\/em>, but re-establishing\u00a0it for the benefit of crossover\u00a0readers wouldn’t have hurt.<\/p>\n Anyhow,\u00a0Star-Lord and Kitty steal the Vortex\u00a0halfway through chapter 1, and then enlist the X-Men and the Guardians to help them keep it safe. \u00a0So that’s your crossover. \u00a0Cue the running around. \u00a0The bad guys come after them, and by the end of the opening chapter, Gamora has already submitted to the Vortex\u00a0to obtain the necessary power-up to fight back.<\/p>\n Chapter 2 sees\u00a0our heroes run away with the Vortex to engage in some intensive conversation about whether\u00a0more of them should use it in order to power themselves up. \u00a0It’s a Bendis issue – did I mention? \u00a0In fact, as a starting point, this is a perfectly reasonable\u00a0argument. \u00a0It’s obvious to us that the Black Vortex must be a bad thing, because (a)\u00a0we’ve seen the flashback, (b) we know how these stories\u00a0work, (c) identity-subverting transformations are always sinister, and (d) it’s called the Black Vortex, for Christ’s sake. \u00a0But Gamora\u00a0seems fine, they\u00a0could use the power to take on Knife’s guys, and there’s a pretty reasonable split between the moral purists and the more military-minded or simply pragmatic characters who see a useful\u00a0magic trinket\u00a0that shouldn’t go to waste. \u00a0And so Beast (the adult version) submits too\u00a0– which again makes sense, because he’s a bit desperate for some cosmic insight that might help him unscramble the damage he’s done to continuity.<\/p>\n Chapter 2 ends with a really badly executed cliffhanger that\u00a0looks as though everyone has\u00a0been transformed by the Vortex, but turns out just to be everyone looking in the mirror. \u00a0Partly, this is visually confusing; partly, what’s actually happening is so anti-climactic that it doesn’t even register as a likely reading.<\/p>\n Chapter 3 sees Angel sign up for the power-up too – yes, this conversation basically extends through an issue and more, because they’ve got thirteen issues to fill. \u00a0Beast and Angel look decidedly sinister in their powered-up forms, and are starting to ramble about the magnificence of the cosmos and such forth. \u00a0So, you know,\u00a0it’s pretty obvious where this story is going:\u00a0power corrupts, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, yadda yadda. \u00a0At any rate, having set up the premise, it’s now time to start filling those pages. \u00a0So the heroes fight among themselves, and\u00a0then\u00a0the baddies come after them, and the three powered-up guys take the Vortex and leave.<\/p>\n From here – and yes, I know there’s\u00a0ten chapters to go – there’s quite a bit of running around. \u00a0The heroes are hiding from the bad guys. \u00a0The\u00a0Kree steal the Vortex, so the three powered-up guys go after them to get it back. \u00a0Power levels fluctuate wildly according to the demands of the plot – if the Vortex needs to get captured the cosmic heroes can be beaten by some random Kree soldiers, otherwise they get very angry and can tear planets apart single-handedly. \u00a0Something or other is going on with Thane and Knife but\u00a0like I say, nobody ever bothers to explain their relationship\u00a0to X-Men readers, so I’ll assume it doesn’t matter. \u00a0And\u00a0in the manner of crossovers that need to find busy work for a large cast, our heroes split up to deal with\u00a0assorted troubles.<\/p>\n Occasionally Venom gets a line of dialogue and reminds us that he’s in the Guardians of the Galaxy these days.<\/p>\n And there’s a genuinely important bit for X-Men readers where, after much\u00a0cosmic contemplation on the issue, cosmic Beast verifies that\u00a0continuity is indeed\u00a0irretrievably broken. \u00a0This has nothing in particular to do with the Black Vortex plot, though – in fact, it’s positively counter to the Black Vortex plot by implying that Beast already did\u00a0far worse damage before the Vortex got anywhere near him. \u00a0So the story ends up\u00a0moving on.<\/p>\n The Vortex is stolen again. \u00a0Nova has it for a bit. \u00a0Hala gets destroyed. \u00a0Nova takes the Vortex home to his family for tea because we’ve reached an issue of his series and he has to get\u00a0the spotlight for a few pages. \u00a0He nobly resists the temptation of the Vortex. \u00a0The baddies get the Vortex back and Thane gets powered up, which I’m sure I’d care about if anybody had bothered to explain to me\u00a0who the hell he is<\/em>.<\/p>\n And then, somewhat randomly and out of nowhere, in Chapter 9 Mister Knife covers the planet of Spartax in amber and gives it to the Brood as a present, so that they can try to\u00a0infect everyone on the planet with Brood eggs. \u00a0 The deal is apparently that the resulting Brood army will conquer planets for Knife in return. \u00a0This now becomes the main threat for the rest of the story, and the focus switches pretty much entirely to rescuing the population of Spartax. \u00a0Star-Lord gets a really bizarre speech in which he acknowledges that the Vortex is a curse and laments ever having stolen it from his father in the first place – which rather overlooks the fact that\u00a0if they hadn’t stolen the Vortex, surely Knife would have just got to the same basic plan a bit quicker?<\/p>\n The final issue of\u00a0Cyclops<\/em>\u00a0crops up here, and we’ve talked about it before –\u00a0it wants to play its final issue as Cyclops’s coming of age, and so it\u00a0goes completely\u00a0against the entire thrust of the story to date, and\u00a0has Cyclops submitting to the Vortex as a heroic move where he overcomes\u00a0fear. \u00a0Iceman and Groot tag along for the power-up as well. \u00a0But with the very next chapter, it’s Captain Marvel<\/em>, and of course she bravely resists the temptation, in\u00a0the latest iteration of a\u00a0scene that the crossover is beating to death.<\/p>\n Ultimately, in the manner of big crossovers, there is an enormous fight. \u00a0The remaining heroes have to decide who should use the Vortex one last time to save Spartax. \u00a0Eventually Kitty does it because she doesn’t want to and is therefore the least corruptible – the old “the only person you can trust to run the universe is the person who doesn’t want the job” routine. \u00a0Kitty’s cosmically-enhanced phasing powers free Spartax, and then we get an epilogue in which most but not all of the powered-up heroes give up their powers, which nobody had previously suggested was an option. \u00a0We’re told that this will still have unspecified consequences, but none are immediately in evidence. \u00a0Then Gara – remember her? – carts the Vortex away for future sequel use.<\/p>\n And\u2026 that’s it.<\/p>\n Hold on. \u00a0Until the Spartax-in-amber thing showed up in chapter 9, wasn’t this story about\u00a0a cursed power-up trinket and\u00a0characters deciding\u00a0whether to submit to it? \u00a0Because a bunch of characters\u00a0did<\/em> submit to it, and by all appearances, nothing much happened, other than they got more powerful. \u00a0And while the cosmic characters were acting all distant and weird during the story itself, the ones who choose to retain their new powers at the end (like Warren and Kitty) seem\u00a0to be back to their normal personalities anyway.<\/p>\n So it all feels as though the story kind of lost interest in the whole Black Vortex thing about two thirds of the way through, or simply didn’t have a pay-off for it and transitioned into the amber stuff instead. \u00a0And sure, Kitty phasing a planet\u00a0free from amber is a nice visual,\u00a0but\u00a0the whole thing wraps up with epilogues setting up for sequels, and Kitty giving us a monologue about how Earth is in space too. \u00a0Since when was this story about the\u00a0artificiality of the distinction between home and abroad?<\/p>\n At thirteen issues – longer than the\u00a0entire run of one of the participating titles – this is far too long. \u00a0It’s really a\u00a0Star-Lord<\/em> arc that needed some guest stars in order to have people to power up, and\u00a0certainly the finale is all about Peter and Kitty. \u00a0For\u00a0the rest of us, there are a couple of vaguely interesting ideas in here, but a lot of repetitive corridor-running to kill time, building to a final third\u00a0that’s pretty disconnected from the first two. \u00a0While it’s more coherent than\u00a0crossovers of its scale tend to be, you’d struggle to say it managed to tell a satisfying story that rewards its sprawl.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" THE BLACK VORTEX! \u00a0Its cosmic tendrils bring corruption and devastation wheresoe’er they wind! THE BLACK VORTEX! \u00a0Its\u00a0thirteen chapters offer a glimpse into the abyss of eternity! THE BLACK VORTEX! \u00a0Playing goth, industrial and darkwave; women enter free before midnight. Once the X-books got to dominate crossovers, or even skip them entirely, but\u00a0today things have changed. […]<\/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-2968","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\/2968","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=2968"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3024,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2968\/revisions\/3024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}