{"id":3316,"date":"2016-03-28T20:28:29","date_gmt":"2016-03-28T19:28:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3316"},"modified":"2016-03-28T23:18:23","modified_gmt":"2016-03-28T22:18:23","slug":"uncanny-x-men-vol-1-superior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3316","title":{"rendered":"Uncanny X-Men vol 1: Superior"},"content":{"rendered":"

Of\u00a0the current\u00a0crop of X-Men titles, I greeted\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> with perhaps the least enthusiasm. \u00a0Cullen Bunn’s run on\u00a0Magneto<\/em>\u00a0was very good, and even though it was generally strongest when it steered clear of the mainstream of the\u00a0Marvel Universe, the prospect of putting him on a higher profile X-Men title with Magneto in tow should have been attractive.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> is drawn by Greg Land, who is a dealbreaker as far as I’m concerned. \u00a0I’ve suffered through his work on the X-books before,\u00a0purely through completism, but he’s one of a very small number of artists that can drive me away from books by\u00a0writers I generally enjoy. \u00a0That’s how enthusiastic I am about the prospect of\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> drawn by Greg Land.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In all fairness,\u00a0then, I’ve seen\u00a0far worse work from him than\u00a0these five issues, which are largely\u00a0pretty competent, and even have some decent moments of action. \u00a0His characters express emotions better than usual, and the action is easy to follow. \u00a0But there are still major problems here – Land’s tendency to draw women with vacant grins seems to have been largely confined to Monet, but dear god,\u00a0Monet<\/em>. \u00a0And\u00a0despite some heroic efforts on the colouring side, it struggles to maintain any atmosphere. \u00a0A\u00a0panel which is supposed to show a bunch of shellshocked mutants being left to wander urban Detroit looks more like a bunch of catalogue models posing in front of a\u00a0postcard. \u00a0An establishing shot in the Hellfire Club\u00a0feels like a roomful of mannequins. \u00a0There’s too much of this stuff to keep the\u00a0art the right side of “annoying”.<\/p>\n

Part of the issue, to be honest, is that Land is an odd choice for this series, even on his own terms. \u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em>, despite the title, is really the latest incarnation of X-Force,\u00a0in as much as it’s the one with the renegade team who are\u00a0fairly relaxed about\u00a0lethal force. \u00a0While I’m hardly going to argue for a return to overly serious murk, Land’s air-brushed, sunlit scenes\u00a0feel too far in the other direction, and it’s not like anyone is leveraging that tension for effect.<\/p>\n

But what about the story? \u00a0Extraordinary<\/em> and\u00a0All-New<\/em> chose to kick off their current runs with two shorter stories,\u00a0which\u00a0gave them plenty of time to\u00a0set their tone before entering\u00a0April’s Apocalypse crossover. \u00a0Uncanny<\/em> takes the other approach, devoting its first five issues to setting a\u00a0whole bunch of storylines in play. \u00a0So we’ve got\u00a0the general internal tensions of Magneto leading a team who are broadly on side with his agenda but don’t trust him not to screw them over. \u00a0We’ve got a mystery about what happened to Warren during the\u00a0eight month gap – he’s turned back into Archangel, but\u00a0he’s also become an empty shell who Psylocke\u00a0calls in for aerial attacks\u00a0in between trying to get some sort of response from him. \u00a0There’s a subplot about a dodgy\u00a0outfit called the Someday Corporation who are offering to put mutants into suspended animation\u00a0until the world gets better. \u00a0They get introduced with great fanfare in issue #1, but turn\u00a0out not to be the real focus of this first volume at all. \u00a0Oh, and Fantomex and Mystique are running around investigating them, presumably to join the core cast somewhere on the other side of the crossover. \u00a0There’s\u00a0direction here, to be sure.<\/p>\n

The Someday Corporation is quite a good idea, partly because it makes a\u00a0certain sense\u00a0within the logic of the Marvel Universe (after all, wouldn’t cryogenics make a lot more sense if you went into it\u00a0before<\/em> you actually died?), but also because it allows Magneto to take the (questionable) moral high ground against both sides. \u00a0Even though\u00a0Someday is transparently a scam, Magneto’s sympathy for the victims pretty much stops at breaking them out;\u00a0there are no bystanders for him, only traitors to\u00a0the cause who won’t do their duty for their people. \u00a0Psylocke is\u00a0well written too, and the tension in her wanting to be Warren’s carer while actually just using him as a drone\u00a0has some promise.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, a scene where Magneto\u00a0tries to\u00a0draw parallels between the Terrigen Mists and\u00a0the gas chambers\u00a0is misguided, and there are serious problems with both Monet and Sabretooth. \u00a0Monet, of course, suffers from being stuck with the vacant grin so much of the time,\u00a0but her general air of superiority\u00a0is\u00a0pretty much absent here, and not much comes along to replace it beyond\u00a0a\u00a0sort of mild flirtatiousness that feels wildly wrong for the character. \u00a0As for Sabretooth, suffice to say that Bunn becomes the latest in a series of\u00a0writers to fail to demonstrate that the post-Axis<\/em> “inverted”\u00a0version of the character is in workable or interesting. \u00a0There probably\u00a0are things you could do with\u00a0this version of Sabretooth – maybe you lean in to\u00a0his completely unnatural character development and do stories about whether any of his current feelings are “real”, and whether it would be morally right to change him back – but just\u00a0writing him as a spare\u00a0Wolverine isn’t working.<\/p>\n

The actual story of these issues\u00a0centres on the Dark Riders,\u00a0a bunch of obscure 90s villains who\u00a0would normally be a very\u00a0odd choice. \u00a0But in the context of 2016, they have two big things going for them. \u00a0One, they’re associated with Apocalypse, so they can help lay the groundwork for the crossover –\u00a0even if the story is simply that they’re running around killing people in an attempt to impress some unseen force. \u00a0And two,\u00a0some of them are Inhumans, and\u00a0the list of X-Men villains with a connection to the Inhumans is very, very short. \u00a0In fact, it’s pretty much just them.<\/p>\n

The Dark Riders were never exactly models of psychological depth,\u00a0but\u00a0the story doesn’t really require them to be – they’re here to be the\u00a0foils for Magneto’s X-Men. \u00a0The less human\u00a0character designs, many of which originated with Whilce Portacio, actually bring out the better side of\u00a0Land’s art – he tends to improve when he’s doing things that can’t be photo referenced – and Bunn has a\u00a0neat idea that the group’s one-dimensional personalities are actually the result of the team telepath routinely keeping everyone (presumably including himself) on message. \u00a0They’re not great villains, but they serve their role by having some degree of recognition factor, and by plugging conveniently into the big picture.<\/p>\n

So there are some decent ideas here. \u00a0There are long term plans\u00a0being established, and\u00a0aspects of Bunn’s\u00a0Magneto<\/em> run seem to have survived – and Land has certainly been worse. \u00a0But he’s still a significant hurdle to be overcome, and the irritation factor is pretty huge. \u00a0It’s not in the same league as Magneto<\/i>\u00a0and it’s far too flawed to actually recommend, but the book seems to be planning for the long term. \u00a0As with a lot of the line, it does at least give the impression of knowing where it’s going, which at least offers some reason for cautious optimism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Of\u00a0the current\u00a0crop of X-Men titles, I greeted\u00a0Uncanny X-Men with perhaps the least enthusiasm. \u00a0Cullen Bunn’s run on\u00a0Magneto\u00a0was very good, and even though it was generally strongest when it steered clear of the mainstream of the\u00a0Marvel Universe, the prospect of putting him on a higher profile X-Men title with Magneto in tow should have been attractive. […]<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3316","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=3316"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3396,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3316\/revisions\/3396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}