{"id":3205,"date":"2015-09-28T21:55:24","date_gmt":"2015-09-28T20:55:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3205"},"modified":"2015-09-28T21:55:24","modified_gmt":"2015-09-28T20:55:24","slug":"years-of-future-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3205","title":{"rendered":"Years of Future Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

The X-Men do so love a nice dystopia. \u00a0In fact, vast tracts of X-history are built on\u00a0either the threat of\u00a0the world becoming one, or a side trip to some alternate world which already is one. \u00a0So with\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> being based largely on\u00a0What If…?<\/em> stories spinning off from old event stories\u00a0(at least in the case of those\u00a0books which are steering clear of the\u00a0patchwork mechanics of Battleworld itself), it’s\u00a0perhaps unsurprising that the X-books find themselves\u00a0largely contributing an array of\u00a0parallel-world misery.<\/p>\n

On paper,\u00a0Years of Future Past<\/em>\u00a0should be one of the most promising. \u00a0For one thing,\u00a0the reference point here is “Days of Future Past”, which is the\u00a0story that sent the X-Men down this path in the first place. \u00a0And for another, it’s by Marguerite Bennett and Mike Norton, which is a pretty strong creative team.<\/p>\n

It certainly\u00a0catches the style of the\u00a0original “Days of Future Past” stories. \u00a0Norton’s art is probably closer to Paul Smith’s than to John Byrne’s, but his\u00a0linework and his\u00a0page layouts are certainly in the spirit of the 80s without going too heavy on the retro. \u00a0Ruined cities can be a pretty boring backdrop after a while, but good choices of angle, and a focus on the characters, makes it work. \u00a0For that matter,\u00a0Joe Caramagna’s lettering is\u00a0pleasingly reminiscent of Tom Orzechowski’s, though again without going to the lengths of actual mimickry.<\/p>\n

It has ideas too, though how well\u00a0they land is another matter. \u00a0The\u00a0story sees\u00a0the X-Men escaping from the camps on the eve of a vote which could apparently lead to the anti-mutant laws being relaxed. \u00a0President Kelly decides to fake an attempt on his own life in order to remind the public how terrible mutants are. \u00a0Naturally, this is going to go wrong and turn into a potentially real threat to his life. \u00a0The X-Men want to\u00a0stop that happening, and use Kitty Pryde’s daughter Chrissie as the positive face of mutants. \u00a0But a couple of the morally flexible ones\u00a0have other ideas, seeing Chrissie as a potentially photogenic martyr for the mutant cause.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0story really\u00a0revolves\u00a0around Chrissie and Cameron, the other second-generation X-Man, and\u00a0apparently the last mutants to be born before\u00a0a successful sterilisation campaign. \u00a0Chrissie is there to be the symbol of hope and positivity; Cameron, who was raised by the more cynical Wolverine,\u00a0sees the world as\u00a0irretrievably screwed. \u00a0There are only a handful of mutants left; there is no realistic possibility of them ever returning to a major population; and\u00a0all they’re really\u00a0doing is to cause a distraction that stops the\u00a0world getting back on track for everyone else.<\/p>\n

In other words, the series is openly flirting with the idea that\u00a0all hope in this scenario is in fact delusion. \u00a0And it makes a lot of the tension between the basic optimism of the genre and the logical reality of just how bad this place has got. \u00a0Perhaps the best example is when a giant Lockheed turns out to be hiding underneath the ruined city. \u00a0It’s a lovely intrusion\u00a0of something fantastic into an otherwise fairly miserable setting.<\/p>\n

This is\u00a0a looser riff on “Days of Futures Past” than it might seem at first glance – what it has in common is the Sentinels, the camps, the threatened assassination of Kelly (but in a different time period), and a New York in ruins. \u00a0The central plot here, after all,\u00a0involves characters worrying about the PR\u00a0implications of an attempt on President Kelly’s life, and of how Kitty deals with it. \u00a0There’s a vote on mutant rights; the first couple of issues\u00a0have corrupt journalists trying to misrepresent the X-Men.<\/p>\n

None of this would work in the original story, because it was a good old fashioned robot apocalypse, in which the robots themselves take over the world. \u00a0That’s a classic\u00a0pulp sci-fi trope, sometimes used just to suggest\u00a0the dangers of over literal thinking. \u00a0(“We only asked the robot to make a cup of tea and now it’s levelled Basingstoke\u00a0to make\u00a0way for its own plantation!”) \u00a0In DOFP, it has\u00a0an added dimension, because the problem isn’t\u00a0so much\u00a0the Sentinels’ reasoning as the awfulness of the\u00a0concept that’s\u00a0at the heart of their programming. \u00a0They’re following\u00a0a terrible idea to its logical conclusion.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0Years<\/em>, on the other hand, the Sentinels are just big\u00a0government-owned robots, and actual power\u00a0still rests with\u00a0a human President. \u00a0There is, it seems, a functioning democracy of some sort here – though since we never actually\u00a0see<\/em> any ordinary humans\u00a0other than Kelly and his immediate staff, it’s all a bit shadowy and off panel. \u00a0But\u00a0when you start tugging at this thread,\u00a0all sorts of story problems emerge.<\/p>\n

For example, why is New York still\u00a0in a worse state than Mogadishu? \u00a0Why\u00a0is there still “no gasoline and barely any electricity”?\u00a0\u00a0It makes (some) sense for a Sentinel-dominated world to wind up like that, because the Sentinels are monomaniacally obsessed and don’t care about any other metric of human happiness. \u00a0But if the humans won outright more than\u00a0a decade ago, why haven’t they rebuilt by now, at least to the point of switching the lights back on? \u00a0Does a\u00a0story about manipulative TV journalists really belong\u00a0in a world like this? \u00a0How are people even watching?\u00a0 Ultimately, the plot seems at odds with the “Days of Futures Past” aesthetic that the series is trying so hard to emulate.<\/p>\n

Like most “Warzones” titles,\u00a0Years\u00a0<\/em>steers clear of the complications of Battleworld and sticks to the confines of its own domain. \u00a0In\u00a0many tie-ins, the upshot has been a story that really wants to be\u00a0set in a completely free-standing alternate reality, but\u00a0with a search-and-replace done on the script to\u00a0swap in references to\u00a0Barons and Doom. \u00a0Years<\/em> is largely like that too,\u00a0the odd exception being a prominent\u00a0role for religion. \u00a0Part of the story\u00a0involves Nightcrawler as\u00a0a priest, running a church which\u00a0(on Battleworld) apparently benefits from the\u00a0laws of medieval sanctuary. \u00a0Of course, this being Battleworld, God has been swapped out and replaced with Doom.<\/p>\n

I can’t quite\u00a0decide what this is going for, and whether it works. \u00a0On one level, it reads like a plot point that’s been through the search and replace,\u00a0even though swapping in Doom obviously changes Nightcrawler’s religion dramatically. But by the same token, the story surely isn’t suggesting that the Sentinels were respecters of churches pre-Battleworld. \u00a0Their concern here is that this God is likely to show up in person\u00a0if he’s been disrespected. \u00a0So this\u00a0doesn’t work unless you see it as a specific feature of Battleworld. \u00a0For that matter,\u00a0Kelly has commissioned a whole line of extra-awesome Doom Sentinels. \u00a0Are those specific to Battleworld too, or\u00a0are we meant\u00a0to take it that Kelly\u00a0was already in the habit of designing Christ-themed Sentinels?<\/p>\n

This could be a\u00a0clumsy attempt to work Doom into the story, or it might be a\u00a0subtle attempt to use him to undercut the religions of both sides –\u00a0implying a Sentinel design that would have been\u00a0horrendously offensive, and essentially saying that Kurt might as well be praying to Dr Doom for all the good it seems to have done him. \u00a0I’m inclining to the latter,\u00a0but to be honest, that’s as much a case of giving the creators the benefit of the doubt as anything else.<\/p>\n

There’s something to this book; it certainly has more going on than appears on the surface. \u00a0But a lot of\u00a0those ideas seem to be at odds with the elements faithfully replicated from DOFP, and with the book’s (well-executed) nostalgia role. \u00a0It’s pulling in too many directions at once, and\u00a0never quite manages to\u00a0come together as a\u00a0particularly satisfying whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The X-Men do so love a nice dystopia. \u00a0In fact, vast tracts of X-history are built on\u00a0either the threat of\u00a0the world becoming one, or a side trip to some alternate world which already is one. \u00a0So with\u00a0Secret Wars being based largely on\u00a0What If…? stories spinning off from old event stories\u00a0(at least in the case of […]<\/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-3205","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\/3205","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=3205"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3206,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3205\/revisions\/3206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}