{"id":3182,"date":"2015-09-14T22:59:46","date_gmt":"2015-09-14T21:59:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3182"},"modified":"2015-09-16T21:59:00","modified_gmt":"2015-09-16T20:59:00","slug":"x-men-92","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3182","title":{"rendered":"X-Men ’92"},"content":{"rendered":"

The X-Men’s contributions to\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> rest heavily on straight sequels to old stories. \u00a0And given the nature of those old stories,\u00a0that means the X-Battleworld is\u00a0largely a case of\u00a0“pick your dystopia”. \u00a0But there are a couple of exceptions,\u00a0and\u00a0X-Men ’92<\/em> is one.<\/p>\n

The year is telling. \u00a01992 was not especially a banner year for X-Men comics. \u00a0That would have been 1991, when X-Men\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0X-Force<\/em> launched; by the following year,\u00a0the big name artists\u00a0were packing up and heading for Image. \u00a0But 1992 was the year when\u00a0X-Men: The Animated Series<\/em>\u00a0began its five year run.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0paid virtually no attention to\u00a0X:TAS<\/em>. \u00a0If I remember rightly, it\u00a0was broadcast in Britain\u00a0as a feature on one of the Saturday morning kids magazine programmes, which meant it didn’t even have a specific time\u00a0given in the listings. \u00a0Besides which, I was a student and\u00a0I had better things to do\u00a0on Saturday mornings than watch\u00a0the junior version of the X-Men. \u00a0I saw enough of it to pick up\u00a0that it was a relatively faithful adaptation with an especially stentorian Storm. \u00a0Still, in\u00a0terms of the size of its audience, the animated series was presumably reaching more people than the actual comics (which tends to be the way of successful spin-offs). \u00a0So\u00a0for\u00a0a lot of people, the X-Men in the 90s will be more about the TV show than the comics.<\/p>\n

Which means that\u00a0there are two different 90s X-Men, and Chris Sims and Chad Bowers seem to have an eye on both. \u00a0A version of X-Force shows up here, for example, with Cable joined by a bunch of other high-profile 90s characters like Bishop and Psylocke who may not have actually been in the original X-Force, but were certainly\u00a0too close to its spirit to fly as main characters in the animated\u00a0series.<\/p>\n

It’s certainly\u00a0tongue in cheek, but the book mostly stops short of outright parody. \u00a0Storm’s dialogue certainly lends itself to the animated series’ booming tones, Cyclops gets lines like “I’ve nothing against having a\u00a0little<\/em> fun…”. \u00a0Artist Scott Koblish brings out the impracticably large guns and remarkably flowing hair. \u00a0But\u00a0we’re\u00a0in the territory of faithful homage rather than mockery; you could take this at face value. \u00a0While the digital versions were released as Infinite Comics, which nods in the direction of the animation,\u00a0everyone’s also emulating the style\u00a0of\u00a0the 90s\u00a0comics, and doing so pretty effectively. \u00a0Obviously the Infinite tricks don’t really fit into the 90s style so clearly, but\u00a0there are some\u00a0moments\u00a0which make clever use of the fades and pull-outs, and they don’t break the vibe.<\/p>\n

The domain of Westchester is apparently the remaining fragment\u00a0of a world where\u00a0the X-Men eventually defeated\u00a0all their\u00a0villains and are now popular heroes in a post-war world. \u00a0Robert Kelly is the local Baron. \u00a0The\u00a0plot involves them investigating his\u00a0Bureau of Super-Powers’ new Clear Mountain facility, which is ostensibly helping to reintegrate evil mutants into society. \u00a0\u00a0Clear Mountain turns out to be run by Cassandra Nova, of all people, who\u00a0actually has a weird plan to sanitise\u00a0her patients, including the X-Men, to keep Westchester safe for the future. \u00a0Oh, and she’s going to murder Kelly and try to usurp the role of Baron. \u00a0Cue several issues of very 90s astral plane sequences as she tries – with only partial success – to brainwash the team into becoming her “New X-Men”.<\/p>\n

Obviously, the joke here is that the Bureau of Super-Powers is actually a stand-in for Broadcasting Standards and Practices, those well-meaning nuisances. \u00a0Some of the astral plane scenes are very nicely done, and they lend themselves\u00a0rather nicely to the Infinite visual tricks. \u00a0Her attempt to drain Gambit and Rogue’s relationship of sexual tension and make it about simpering (yet child-friendly)\u00a0platonic love is a particularly good bit.<\/p>\n

The book also makes better use of the Battleworld set-up than many of the “Warzone” books. \u00a0The “Warzone” titles, you may recall, are the ones set within a particular domain of Battleworld,\u00a0without getting too worked up about what’s going on outside. \u00a0\u00a0In practice, most of them seem to be\u00a0What If…?<\/em> stories with some Battleworld trappings bolted on and largely\u00a0ignored. \u00a0And as we’ll see in some upcoming reviews, this doesn’t always work, especially when you raise the stakes in a way that feels like it ought to be worldwide; it’s as if, to read the stories as their creators intended, you have to mentally screen the Battleworld references out again and just take it as an alternate reality story.<\/p>\n

X-Men ’92<\/em>, by contrast, actually uses Battleworld even without straying beyond its domain. \u00a0Partly, it does that\u00a0by having Cassandra express her ambitions in terms of spreading beyond her domain. \u00a0But it\u00a0also plays with the idea that, as a\u00a0powerful telepath, she can actually\u00a0sense what’s going on in\u00a0other domains. \u00a0She can tell most of the X-Men themed ones are hellholes, and\u00a0she concludes that her X-Men need to be kept in line too.<\/p>\n

While it’s a fun book that largely sustains the tone it was going for,\u00a0it has ideas that seem to be pulling in opposite directions. \u00a0Cassandra Nova is plainly an odd choice for the villain in a 90s nostalgia book, given that she wasn’t created until 2001. \u00a0You’d think the idea would be to confront the 90s X-Men with something from a later incarnation of the franchise… except that she’s used mainly as a stand-in for Standards & Practices, which\u00a0is\u00a0only relevant because\u00a0of the animated series, and has little or nothing to do with Cassandra herself. \u00a0(In fact, this\u00a0version appears to be a female clone of Xavier corrupted by the Shadow King.)<\/p>\n

But on the whole, it works. \u00a0It doesn’t quite manage to be more than the sum of its parts, but the parts\u00a0themselves are pretty good. \u00a0It’s an affectionate throwback which does more than just recycle the obvious jokes about 90s comics, and winds up as one of the\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> X-books’ more pleasurable nostalgia trips.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The X-Men’s contributions to\u00a0Secret Wars rest heavily on straight sequels to old stories. \u00a0And given the nature of those old stories,\u00a0that means the X-Battleworld is\u00a0largely a case of\u00a0“pick your dystopia”. \u00a0But there are a couple of exceptions,\u00a0and\u00a0X-Men ’92 is one. The year is telling. \u00a01992 was not especially a banner year for X-Men comics. \u00a0That […]<\/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-3182","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\/3182","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=3182"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3183,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3182\/revisions\/3183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}