{"id":3225,"date":"2015-10-16T22:07:02","date_gmt":"2015-10-16T21:07:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3225"},"modified":"2015-10-16T22:07:02","modified_gmt":"2015-10-16T21:07:02","slug":"what-if-infinity-x-men-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3225","title":{"rendered":"What If? Infinity: X-Men #1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some questions can only really be\u00a0answered with another question. \u00a0Take, for example,\u00a0the X-books’ contribution\u00a0to a load of\u00a0What If?\u00a0<\/em>one-shots based on\u00a02013’s\u00a0Infinity<\/em> crossover.<\/p>\n

The book asks the question: “What if the X-Men were the sole survivors of Infinity<\/em>?” \u00a0To which\u00a0the obvious response\u00a0is, “Why would anyone want to know that?”<\/p>\n

Infinity<\/em>, let’s recall, was an\u00a0Avengers\u00a0crossover. \u00a0In fact, it was\u00a0the culmination of a lot of build-up in Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers stories, to the point where it was widely\u00a0regarded as having some serious accessibility problems for any other readers drawn in by the event promotion. \u00a0In fact,\u00a0at its core, there was a fairly simple idea: the Avengers are going off to space to fight the Builders, whoever they are,\u00a0and while they’re away,\u00a0Thanos attacks Earth. \u00a0That’s not too difficult to get across to\u00a0incoming readers.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0it wasn’t an X-Men story. \u00a0The X-Men’s\u00a0only tie-in issue was\u00a0Wolverine and the X-Men Annual<\/em> #1, which was a Kid Gladiator story, and has nothing to do with this\u00a0issue. \u00a0As a hook, “What if the X-Men were the sole survivors of\u00a0Infinity<\/em>?” is a bit like asking “What if\u00a0Power Pack were the only survivors of the Phalanx Covenant?”<\/p>\n

Joshua Williamson and Mike Norton are a solid professionals doing their best with a premise that gives them\u00a0very little to work on. \u00a0Sensibly enough, they don’t try to do much with the details of\u00a0Infinity<\/em>, since none of it\u00a0would be particularly relevant to the X-Men anyway. \u00a0Instead, the set-up is simply that the Earth has apparently been destroyed, and\u00a0a handful of\u00a0X-Men who managed to flee the planet are\u00a0sitting around in a spacecraft, scavenging\u00a0wreckage, and generally not doing much else, since it’s apparently a\u00a0rather empty universe post-Infinity<\/em>. \u00a0Cannonball’s in charge,\u00a0and it’s always nice when somebody remembers that he was supposed to be the\u00a0emerging leader of the future.<\/p>\n

Then, a ship shows up with a group of Avengers on board, led by Sunspot. \u00a0That allows for a nice reunion\u00a0with Cannonball – which gives Norton something to get his teeth into. \u00a0And\u00a0again, since they’re the only two X-Men who were in Hickman’s Avengers and thus have\u00a0a connection with\u00a0Infinity<\/em>, it makes reasonable sense\u00a0to put them at\u00a0the centre. \u00a0This is pleasant enough, in a gently uneventful sort of way. \u00a0Then, Williamson remembers that he needs a plot,\u00a0so\u00a0it turns out that the Avengers are being mind-controlled by a baddie. \u00a0It\u00a0happens to be\u00a0Supergiant from\u00a0Infinity<\/em>, but it could as well have been anyone, because she gets in three lines of dialogue and\u00a0lasts a grand total of six panels after being unveiled. \u00a0She is very swiftly despatched, and\u00a0everyone decides to stay together and call themselves “the X-Men” in an awkward attempt to justify the\u00a0“sole survivors” bit of the title.<\/p>\n

I didn’t read\u00a0Infinity<\/em>, so\u00a0it’s entirely possible that the\u00a0story provides some context which adds depth to the fairly perfunctory proceedings here. \u00a0At the very least, I imagine it\u00a0provided some reason to care about Supergiant, and perhaps it made a big deal of separating Sunspot and Cannonball. \u00a0I’ll give it this issue the\u00a0benefit of the doubt on those two points. \u00a0Even so, that leaves a basic and routine story\u00a0with a tacked on fight scene, which ends up reframing the title question as “What if some of the X-Men were the sole survivors of the Earth?”, and answers it with\u00a0“They would hang around on a spaceship.” \u00a0And that’s just not\u00a0enough to hang an issue on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some questions can only really be\u00a0answered with another question. \u00a0Take, for example,\u00a0the X-books’ contribution\u00a0to a load of\u00a0What If?\u00a0one-shots based on\u00a02013’s\u00a0Infinity crossover. The book asks the question: “What if the X-Men were the sole survivors of Infinity?” \u00a0To which\u00a0the obvious response\u00a0is, “Why would anyone want to know that?”<\/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-3225","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\/3225","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=3225"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3226,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3225\/revisions\/3226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}