{"id":2970,"date":"2015-11-08T21:34:17","date_gmt":"2015-11-08T21:34:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2970"},"modified":"2015-11-08T21:34:17","modified_gmt":"2015-11-08T21:34:17","slug":"uncanny-x-men-vol-6-the-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2970","title":{"rendered":"Uncanny X-Men vol 6 – “The Revolution”"},"content":{"rendered":"

And here we are at last. \u00a0The X-books returned to regular continuity this week with their latest relaunch,\u00a0in the form of\u00a0Extraordinary X-Men<\/em> #1. \u00a0But they also shipped the much-delayed\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #600, the final issue of Brian Bendis’ run,\u00a0which was presumably held back to avoid treading on\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> or something.<\/p>\n

In theory, at least, this delay does\u00a0the final volume no favours. \u00a0Bendis has always had a fondness for the device of\u00a0consecutive issues all\u00a0building up to the same event from different directions. \u00a0Issue #32-35, which round out\u00a0this volume, are all self-contained issues focusing on different characters,\u00a0some of which serve as an epilogue of sorts to his run. \u00a0And issues #33 to #35\u00a0explicitly end with “To\u00a0be continued in\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #600″.<\/p>\n

So the delay\u00a0in actually shipping issue #600 would be quite a problem – if there was any real\u00a0connection between the individual stories and issue #600. \u00a0In practice, the connection boils down to “it’s\u00a0where the characters show up next”. \u00a0In fact, issue #34 ends with “To be continued in\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #600″,\u00a0even though its final scene is a subplot that actually leads into issue #35. \u00a0Somebody\u00a0took\u00a0their eye off the ball there.<\/p>\n

Bendis has\u00a0long had a tendency to succumb to sprawl. \u00a0He tends to be at his best when dealing with smaller casts and shorter stories. \u00a0And indeed, the individual issues\u00a0have a lot going for them. \u00a0Issue #33 reunites Kitty and Illyana and completes a\u00a0reasonably successful exercise of thawing Illyana’s character to\u00a0bring her\u00a0a little closer to\u00a0the classic portrayal. \u00a0And it\u00a0has some\u00a0very good\u00a0art from Kris Anka,\u00a0who does a lot with minimal linework, and gets a lot out of things like Kitty remaining unflappably intangible in the middle of chaos.<\/p>\n

Issue #34 sees Dazzler taking down Mystique, which\u00a0actually is a\u00a0useful capstone on a\u00a0lengthy Bendis subplot. \u00a0And issue #35 sees Scott’s former students trying to go it alone as superheroes\u00a0when he closes down his team, only to\u00a0wind up slinking back to the X-Men and conceding that they’re out of their depth. \u00a0This could easily be read as a backdoor pilot for a spin-off book,\u00a0and\u00a0issue #600 does in fact refer to them in passing as “new mutants”, but it doesn’t look as though that’s going anywhere in the short term. \u00a0It’s a cute little issue, with Goldballs becoming a brief\u00a0media fad before the anti-mutant backlash sets in.<\/p>\n

But then we get to issue #600, which is a different proposition, since it’s notionally about wrapping up the\u00a0overall Bendis run. \u00a0And that’s kind of hard to do, since viewed as a whole, the\u00a0run doesn’t have a great deal of shape to it. \u00a0The norm in recent years has been for each writer to treat their run as self-contained, but much of what Bendis has done seems to hark back to an earlier tradition where you set some plates spinning and then leave them for the next writer to pick up. \u00a0There is not the slightest pretence, for example, of wrapping up the status of the time-travelling teenage X-Men. \u00a0Other characters\u00a0finally confront the Beast over his reckless behaviour over the course of the Bendis run, but there’s no particular resolution attached. \u00a0And the loose end of whether modern Iceman is gay too is tied up (he is).<\/p>\n

Those threads, though – and they’re the ones that\u00a0take up most of issue #600 – are about\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em>. \u00a0With hindsight, there was no overall story to\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em>, merely some ideas set out there to wander wherever they may. \u00a0A case can be made that this is the way things always used to be done in the last century, and that\u00a0some of the problems here stem from audience expectations of an actual resolution (based on modern genre conventions) being out of line with the more open-ended\u00a0tradition that Bendis was intending to work\u00a0in. \u00a0Of course,\u00a0how much the\u00a0incoming creators will actually be building on\u00a0any of this is debatable –\u00a0the\u00a0All-New<\/em> characters will still be around, but Beast is being shipped off to\u00a0Uncanny Inhumans<\/em>.<\/p>\n

We’ll talk further about the Inhumans in a future post – it’s going to be a while before we reach the next TPB collection, but\u00a0a round-up of the first issues of the relaunch seems like it\u00a0might be worthwhile in the meantime. \u00a0In the meantime, what about\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> itself, the book\u00a0which issue #600 is supposed to be\u00a0capping? \u00a0Here,\u00a0Bendis’ big idea seems to be conveyed\u00a0through a combination of\u00a0one major scene in issue #600, and the Scott\/Alex (and Scott\/Emma) conversations in issue #32.<\/p>\n

The elevator pitch for\u00a0Bendis’\u00a0Uncanny<\/em> was Scott’s mutant revolution. \u00a0The problems with that concept were glaringly obvious from the word go:\u00a0beyond some extremely vague and general rhetoric, there was no explanation of what a “mutant revolution” actually was. \u00a0The pay-off, it turns out, is that Scott didn’t really know either. \u00a0He had vague ideas of making intimidating noises\u00a0so that people would take mutantkind seriously… and that was\u00a0about it. \u00a0And this doesn’t work at all. \u00a0For one thing,\u00a0it’s what he was\u00a0already doing on Utopia in the previous run, except with a\u00a0less informative label attached. \u00a0And for another, it was always\u00a0glaringly obvious\u00a0that the mutant revolution was vague\u00a0to the point of meaninglessness. \u00a0So the only twist is that what looked to be bad writing\u00a0is repositioned as\u00a0all the characters being a bit dim, having apparently devoted months of their lives to this “revolution” without ever stopping to ask Scott what it was.<\/p>\n

Somewhere in here, there’s an interesting idea about\u00a0a group of characters hanging together thanks to a\u00a0vaguely defined, one-size-fits-all agenda that tells everyone what they want to hear.\u00a0 But to work, that would\u00a0have needed a story where the cracks slowly become apparent over time, and where there was some apparent reason why nobody was speaking up to ask the extremely obvious “what exactly are we trying to achieve here” question. \u00a0Instead, we have a story where nobody seems to even turn their minds to\u00a0the purpose of their team until Scott finally admits he doesn’t know what it is. \u00a0This makes everyone look thick.<\/p>\n

Then, issue #600\u00a0tries to round off this plot thread by having\u00a0Scott\u00a0gather “every mutant in the world” on the steps of the Capitol\u00a0in Washington DC and proclaiming that the “mutant revolution” is to get everyone together and\u00a0have them not fight. \u00a0This scene\u00a0makes\u00a0no sense on a number of levels. \u00a0Even if we assume that we’re not meant to take Scott’s claim absolutely literally –\u00a0what about the mutants who are in jail, for example? – it’s still not apparent how he gathered all these people, or how he\u00a0did so without the X-Men finding out sooner, or why nobody said no, or why the contingent of stroppy supervillains are apparently willing to just\u00a0stand around and go “yeah, dude, peace and love”. \u00a0And you kind of\u00a0have<\/em> to assume that he’s supposed to have gathered a significant number of those types of characters, because if he hasn’t, the scene is completely meaningless even on its own terms, surely?<\/p>\n

This is a singularly bizarre and unearned sequence, and since it’s meant to be\u00a0finishing\u00a0off the main\u00a0theme of Bendis’\u00a0Uncanny<\/em>, that’s a big problem. \u00a0(As for the\u00a0other\u00a0big idea\u00a0of his\u00a0Uncanny, <\/em>that\u00a0was the\u00a0bit about\u00a0characters losing control of their powers, and\u00a0everyone seems to have just forgotten about that entirely, except for Cullen Bunn over in\u00a0Magneto<\/em>.) \u00a0Again, there’s something\u00a0in here trying to get out – a story where Scott starts a “revolution” without actually knowing what it is, and works\u00a0out what he\u00a0really wants as he goes along,\u00a0then has to corral his existing movement into that new vision. \u00a0A less bloated version of the Washington DC scene could have worked as Scott finally coming up with a coherent agenda as the culmination of his arc. \u00a0The story as published is a good few drafts away from that, though.<\/p>\n

As for having Scott describe\u00a0Washington DC as “the heart of everything democratic and good” –\u00a0seriously? \u00a0Nobody believes that. Certainly not the guy who’s spent the last few years pushing for a separatist mutant nation and\u00a0fighting Sentinels that were\u00a0paid for three blocks down the road.<\/p>\n

This\u00a0final volume of Bendis’\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> winds up as a fitting summary of his run. \u00a0There are good bits. \u00a0There are good issues, in fact. \u00a0But they come when it steers clear of the big picture. \u00a0On the larger scale, it’s a mess,\u00a0where even the better ideas are hopelessly underdeveloped.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And here we are at last. \u00a0The X-books returned to regular continuity this week with their latest relaunch,\u00a0in the form of\u00a0Extraordinary X-Men #1. \u00a0But they also shipped the much-delayed\u00a0Uncanny X-Men #600, the final issue of Brian Bendis’ run,\u00a0which was presumably held back to avoid treading on\u00a0Secret Wars or something. In theory, at least, this delay […]<\/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-2970","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\/2970","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=2970"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2970\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3261,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2970\/revisions\/3261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}