{"id":3314,"date":"2016-01-27T22:24:06","date_gmt":"2016-01-27T22:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3314"},"modified":"2016-01-27T22:24:06","modified_gmt":"2016-01-27T22:24:06","slug":"all-new-x-men-1-3-ghost-of-the-cyclops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3314","title":{"rendered":"All-New X-Men #1-3 – “Ghost of the Cyclops”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The most striking thing about the opening arc of Dennis Hopeless and Mark Bagley’s\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> might be how low key it is. \u00a0A three parter, instead of the traditional six\u00a0– this will be the first half of the first trade paperback collection. \u00a0No big name villains. \u00a0No big\u00a0villains at all, in fact – the bad guys here are pretty much at the bottom of the pecking order. \u00a0The stakes, at least in that sense, are determinedly low.<\/p>\n

Which is\u00a0actually quite a\u00a0pleasant change. \u00a0It’s not that there isn’t melodrama and hand-wringing in here –\u00a0of course there is, Cyclops is in the book. \u00a0But\u00a0this series turns out to be an open-ended teen road trip, entirely unbothered about the whole Terrigen Mists thing.<\/p>\n

As seems to be the norm\u00a0these days, this may be billed as an X-Men comic, but it’s really a spin-off book, picking up on the time travelling\u00a0Silver Age X-Men from Brian Bendis’s run. \u00a0They’ve struck out on their own, but not with any particular\u00a0interest in being superheroes. \u00a0Jean has wandered off to be in another book, and\u00a0Bendis’s last-minute subplot setting up her and Hank as a couple\u00a0is no more. \u00a0(Jeff Lemire quietly spiked it in a single line in\u00a0Extraordinary X-Men<\/em>, so evidently it’s to be filed under We Shall Not Speak Of This Again.) \u00a0But X-23\/Wolverine is still here, and the rest of the cast\u00a0is\u00a0filled out by the somewhat random choices of Idie and Evan.<\/p>\n

The story starts with most of the group\u00a0aiming to meet up at Vail, but Scott is ignoring them so he can go off and sulk on his own. \u00a0We still haven’t found out what Big Cyclops\u00a0actually did during the eight-month gap, but whatever it was, it apparently made him really, really unpopular with pretty much everybody. \u00a0Which is unfortunate if\u00a0you’re\u00a0Cyclops too and have an instantly recognisable power.<\/p>\n

With typical levels of displacement, Scott is spending his time hunting down a\u00a0bunch of low-level mutants calling themselves the Ghosts of Cyclops, who do count as supervillains, but really, only just. \u00a0They’re basically just a bunch of college students who wear Cyclops masks and\u00a0do a bit of property damage and petty theft while yelling\u00a0incoherently about how\u00a0Cyclops was definitely right about\u00a0something or other. \u00a0They haven’t really got a clue what they’re doing, and\u00a0they’re not exactly an insuperable challenge even for the regular cops. \u00a0It’s pretty obvious that it’s the use of his name that’s driving Scott to get involved, rather than the inherent significance of anything they’re doing. \u00a0And of course it’s his encounter with the Ghosts that brings the rest of\u00a0the regular cast looking for him.<\/p>\n

Where this all leads is to a fight\u00a0between Scott and the Ghosts’ leader, who\u00a0has water powers and\u00a0rejoices in the name of Thirst, which\u00a0winds up with both guys being hauled off to jail to calm down – something Scott pretty much acquiesces in, because\u00a0it really is just a case of the cops breaking up a fight. \u00a0This leads the Ghosts into botching a jailbreak and finding themselves under siege by\u00a0the police, at which point everyone realises that they may have crossed the point of no return and gone from being petty\u00a0criminals to imminently dead at the hands of\u00a0a panicky armed response team.<\/p>\n

Hopeless certainly has a decent angle on young Scott, who’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. \u00a0On the one hand, he can see that his older self turned into a raving cult leader with a baffling plan about a mutant revolution that did no good for anyone. \u00a0But on the other, he can also see that the world has singularly failed to get better in the way that Xavier promised it would. \u00a0Xavier’s great strategy to realise his dream pretty much boiled down to fending off evil mutants while waiting patiently for human nature to bring about the march of progress. \u00a0And it didn’t work. \u00a0So Scott is trying to escape the shadow of not one failed agenda, but two. \u00a0And of course, the point where he starts to become sympathetic to the Ghosts is where they tip from being dimwit followers of his older self, to another group of teenagers who’ve made a terrible mistake that the world won’t let them take back. \u00a0First and foremost, this version of Scott just wants to earn himself a second chance, even if he doesn’t yet know quite what he wants to do with it.<\/p>\n

All this is very interesting, and it\u00a0also plays quite nicely to Mark Bagley’s strengths as a fairly traditional, character-focussed superhero artist. \u00a0But the thing is, this is a team book, and the first three issues are\u00a0more or less a Cyclops solo story. \u00a0The rest of the cast have a nice jovial time of it, which helps balance out Scott’s angst and keep the general tone light (again, something that suits Bagley fine), but they don’t really have all that much to do.<\/p>\n

There are a couple of good scenes with Warren and Laura. \u00a0She’s a lot more chatty than she has been in the past, but that’s the case in\u00a0All-New Wolverine<\/em> too, so there’s evidently been an editorial decision somewhere along the line there. \u00a0Nonetheless, she’s still stubbornly unwilling to accept any sort of help from Warren, to the point of exposing herself to gratuitous injury – something Warren’s meekly coming to accept as a health part of showing respect for her independence, and which is obviously leading to trouble down the line. \u00a0But\u00a0Hank and Bobby\u00a0don’t have much to work with,\u00a0and Evan and Idie are a problem. \u00a0Both feel blandly out of character, and neither has any particularly discernible\u00a0reason to be here. \u00a0Right now, they’re dead wood.<\/p>\n

Still, the general tone and road trip set-up seem like they could be fun, and\u00a0hopefully the focus will broaden beyond Scott in the next arc. \u00a0There’s some promise here, and\u00a0at least it sets up a clear and\u00a0workable direction for Scott himself as he\u00a0struggles to\u00a0redefine himself.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The most striking thing about the opening arc of Dennis Hopeless and Mark Bagley’s\u00a0All-New X-Men might be how low key it is. \u00a0A three parter, instead of the traditional six\u00a0– this will be the first half of the first trade paperback collection. \u00a0No big name villains. \u00a0No big\u00a0villains at all, in fact – the bad […]<\/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-3314","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\/3314","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=3314"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3348,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3314\/revisions\/3348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}