{"id":2976,"date":"2015-04-06T22:41:29","date_gmt":"2015-04-06T21:41:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2976"},"modified":"2015-04-06T22:41:29","modified_gmt":"2015-04-06T21:41:29","slug":"cyclops-vol-2-a-pirates-life-for-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2976","title":{"rendered":"Cyclops vol 2 – “A Pirate’s Life For Me”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first volume of\u00a0Cyclops<\/em> was one of the quiet gems of the\u00a0line last year. \u00a0Plainly\u00a0never intended for anything more than a short run (though sales would probably have done for it anyway),\u00a0and\u00a0doomed to be seen as a footnote to\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em>, the second volume nonetheless has a good stab at completing\u00a0the title character’s arc.<\/p>\n

But while the first\u00a0five issues were written by Greg Rucka, this arc sees John Layman take over.\u00a0Layman’s\u00a0\u00a0good in his own right, though, and for most of this book he does\u00a0a solid job of\u00a0continuing what Rucka had started. \u00a0Broadly, the idea seems to be that the\u00a0series starts with\u00a0Scott depressed by the knowledge of what his older self will become, and sees him gradually regain his confidence and mature into a (somewhat) different sort of hero under the different mentorship of his father Corsair, who was absent the first time around. \u00a0So instead of Cyclops being defined by the X-Men, this is Cyclops having formative experiences in the\u00a0Starjammers’ milieu.<\/p>\n

One problem with the set-up is that\u00a0Corsair is saddled with the Starjammers as his supporting cast, but they’re entirely superfluous to requirements as far as this book is concerned. \u00a0So, just like Rucka in the first volume, Layman sidelines the rest of the crew as quickly as humanly possible. \u00a0A rival pirate ship\u00a0led by Corsair’s (apparently) old nemesis Valesh Malafect\u00a0captures the crew,\u00a0fires the Starjammers into space (which lets Scott\u00a0heroically save them and\u00a0otherwise gets them out of the plot), slings Corsair into the brig, and takes on Scott as a new crew member, not realising that he’s Corsair’s son.<\/p>\n

What follows is several issues of Scott working with the rival crew and bonding with some of them – including the captain’s teenage daughter Vileena – enough\u00a0that he’s not willing to throw them to the wolves when the time comes\u00a0to make an escape. \u00a0This despite the fact that the Desolation’s crew are pretty much happy to kill anyone they attack; they’re not\u00a0especially nice guys, but they do at least have some group loyalty, and since Scott is posing as a loyal crew member, most of them dutifully reciprocate.<\/p>\n

This does\u00a0start to verge into territory where a Starjammers story probably doesn’t want to go. \u00a0By giving us a “dark” version of the Starjammers, it rather begs of how a “heroic” crew of pirates actually works. \u00a0But of course, the Starjammers are “pirates” in the sense of being swashbucklers relocated to space;\u00a0they’re tied to pulp fiction, not guys with machine guns off the coast of\u00a0Somalia. \u00a0Probably wisely, Layman just keeps his head down and ignores\u00a0the whole issue rather than\u00a0try to explain it.<\/p>\n

And these issues are\u00a0good. \u00a0Layman has the voice of the\u00a0teenage Cyclops down, and the dynamic of him simultaneously outwitting his new shipmates and starting to identify with them works very well. \u00a0Artist Javier Garron\u00a0is well suited to the material, getting the “pirates in space” set-up\u00a0effortlessly, and bringing plenty\u00a0of life to his characters. \u00a0His Cyclops is maybe a bit too nerdy in issue #6, but he sells the comedy moments and the hook of Scott staying one step ahead of\u00a0the rest of the crew.<\/p>\n

Vileena works very well as a foil in those issues; she’s\u00a0set up convincingly as an alternative love interest to Jean,\u00a0which both plays into the general story of his divided loyalties, and helps to further extract him from the established course of his life. \u00a0The question of how she’s going to react when she finds out\u00a0that he’s stringing them all along is precisely the sort of soap opera hook that works for the X-books.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, it all\u00a0goes a bit awry in the last couple of issues. \u00a0The answer to “how will Vileena react” is “by turning into a crazy ex-girlfriend who wants to kill him”. \u00a0And that’s disappointing; she goes from a\u00a0reasonably rounded character to a one-dimensional caricature\u00a0almost instantly. \u00a0Fair enough, there’s got to be a backlash, but it’s\u00a0played\u00a0way, way over the top; the gear change is jarring and it doesn’t feel right as a\u00a0resolution for her story.<\/p>\n

And then we hit the final issue, in which Layman attempts to simultaneously deliver a thematic finale for the series,\u00a0while also writing a middle chapter of the “Black Vortex” crossover. \u00a0This goes about as well as you’d expect.<\/p>\n

For example,\u00a0a main theme of this series is the father-son relationship with Corsair. \u00a0So you’d think it might be nice to have Corsair in the final issue. \u00a0And indeed, Layman clearly really wants to write a scene in which a final pep talk from his dad leads Cyclops to step up to the plate and accept his heroic mantle. \u00a0But the plot of “Black Vortex” doesn’t allow for that, because\u00a0it has Corsair trapped on the planet Spartax. \u00a0Layman’s solution is\u00a0to have Scott apparently\u00a0receive that pep talk from Corsair telepathically, only\u00a0for it to turn out that he’s imagining the whole thing and it’s just his own self-belief.<\/p>\n

This is\u2026 pretty excruciating, really. \u00a0It’s awkward enough that I wonder whether the original idea\u00a0was<\/em> a telepathic pep talk and\u00a0they ended up trying to shoehorn the scene into the story anyway. \u00a0In the event, the result is a story where Scott inexplicably hallucinates before making a key decision. \u00a0It doesn’t work at all.<\/p>\n

Worse yet, the plot of this series wants Scott to complete his character arc by\u00a0embracing his role as hero. \u00a0But the plot of “Black Vortex” calls for him to submit to the Black Vortex, which by this point in the story has been clearly established as a dangerously self-destructive thing to do. \u00a0Surprisingly, this being a crossover, the interests of the series prevail – and so, for one night only,\u00a0submitting to the Black Vortex is a\u00a0good, brave and courageous decision. \u00a0In fairness, it’s conceivable that this might be heading\u00a0somewhere in the crossover story, by giving this Cyclops an opportunity to show that he can handle the sort of cosmic power that his adult version couldn’t. \u00a0But it reads\u00a0quite bizarrely on any view.<\/p>\n

It’s a noble effort to make a crossover chapter double as the finale of a series, even though the two stories have little or no overlap – and it’s clear Layman knew\u00a0that this was coming, because earlier\u00a0issues are already setting up the crossover to make sure it doesn’t come out of nowhere – but it’s an impossible task that gets the book caught up into some pretty horrid convolutions.<\/p>\n

Which is a shame, because there’s two thirds of a good volume here, and the good bits are self-contained enough to make it just about worth recommending for them. \u00a0But boy, does it\u00a0spin off the road at the end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first volume of\u00a0Cyclops was one of the quiet gems of the\u00a0line last year. \u00a0Plainly\u00a0never intended for anything more than a short run (though sales would probably have done for it anyway),\u00a0and\u00a0doomed to be seen as a footnote to\u00a0All-New X-Men, the second volume nonetheless has a good stab at completing\u00a0the title character’s arc. But while […]<\/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-2976","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\/2976","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=2976"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3001,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2976\/revisions\/3001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}