Well, this is all very traditional, now isn’t it? \u00a0I’m used to ongoing titles lurching from one arc to the next, trade paperbacks for the collecting-in. \u00a0But when you’ve got a big crossover coming up\u00a0midway through the first year,\u00a0it’s maybe better to get a couple of stories under your belt\u00a0first. \u00a0And here we are – a two-parter, nestling between the opening arc and the Apocalypse crossover.<\/p>\n
And it’s\u00a0a two-parter very much designed to get\u00a0the plates spinning, and establish a direction for the series. \u00a0Subplots abound.<\/p>\n
So\u00a0on top of an A plot and a B plot, we’ve got Glob showing tentative interest in Jean, and Logan being protective about her. \u00a0We’ve got Colossus being steered towards a big brother role for\u00a0some of the more experienced trainees. \u00a0We’ve got a scene with Iceman and Anole which inverts\u00a0the expected relationship by making the point that\u00a0it’s Anole who’s far more comfortable being openly gay. \u00a0And we’ve got Magik developing her bond with Sapna,\u00a0the kid she rescued in issue #1, who shows an unnervingly\u00a0good understanding of Limbo, and does some heavy foreshadowing of\u00a0major stories to come. \u00a0All this before we even get on to the\u00a0main plots.<\/p>\n
It’s a juggling act, and\u00a0it\u00a0cements the sense that Lemire is writing a throwback to the team book formula of the 80s and 90s – everyone must have something to do, and space must be found\u00a0for them to do it. \u00a0Artist Victor Ibanez is obviously very different from Humberto Ramos –\u00a0most people are – but his solid, traditional superhero art seems\u00a0a good match for this tone,\u00a0and he makes the most of\u00a0some of the visual set pieces that the script offers. \u00a0He’s pretty decent with character acting as well, though he might be overdoing it in\u00a0terms of playing up Jean as a teenager – how young is she meant to be, if she’s this short?<\/p>\n
All this is nicely reassuring in terms of setting out the book’s stall and convincing us that\u00a0it knows where it’s heading. \u00a0Which is a good thing, because the two main story threads are both a\u00a0bit underwhelming.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In the\u00a0A-story,\u00a0most of the team go to Weirdworld to rescue a group of mutants who\u00a0were fleeing the riots and… I don’t know, got lost in the Bermuda Triangle or something? \u00a0It’s all rather vague quite what Weirdworld is exactly. \u00a0The story handwaves it as an “anomaly”, then muddies the waters by explaining that it isn’t a geographical location as such. \u00a0So… a portal or something? \u00a0Who knows. \u00a0The\u00a0X-Men\u00a0already know all about it, it seems, so we’re spared the usual\u00a0scene\u00a0where a local explains the premise.<\/p>\n
Even so, the plot pretty much consists of\u00a0everyone taking some time to observe that Weirdworld is\u00a0a weird world, seeing the local\u00a0sites, and rescuing the mutants, who are being shepherded by Sunfire. \u00a0Sunfire, apparently,\u00a0is very much out of favour with the X-Men because he sided with Cyclops when Something Terrible happened during the eight-month gap. \u00a0Sunfire’s a\u00a0sensible choice of character to do something deeply ill-judged, but I hope we’re not going to get the “we all know what Scott did but nobody’s going to say” schtick dragged out indefinitely. \u00a0Oh, and a local\u00a0mystic gets to\u00a0reiterate\u00a0Sapna’s foreshadowing scene from earlier on. \u00a0But pretty much, that’s your story, and it hinges on the local colour of Weirdworld to distract from the fact that it’s really very basic.<\/p>\n
And… well, Weirdworld, eh? \u00a0I mean, fair enough, it’s a new thing they’ve added to the Marvel Universe and they’re trying to establish it by doing guest appearances. \u00a0That’s the traditional approach. \u00a0Nothing wrong with that. \u00a0But from what I’ve seen of it, both here and elsewhere, there’s not really much to Weirdworld\u00a0beyond a bunch of fantasy tropes dumped in a chaotic landscape. \u00a0And that’s not\u00a0terribly interesting. \u00a0It’s not really a place (or even a setting), so much as an excuse to roll out anything that feels vaguely appropriate to\u00a0a particular\u00a0type of fantasy subgenre. \u00a0Maybe that’s the issue. \u00a0I suspect it’s meant to feel like a place where anything can happen. \u00a0In fact, it feels like a place where only\u00a0established\u00a0genre elements can happen, with the added wrinkle that they\u00a0happen in a random bombardment that prevents any coherent world-building from emerging. \u00a0And I don’t care.<\/p>\n
In fact, Lemire and Ibanez seem rather more inspired by the B-plot, in which Jean and Storm go into Kurt’s mind to try and find out what left him so traumatised. \u00a0Aside from re-hashing his first appearance, this lets them do some lovely Inception-style scenes\u00a0with the village collapsing around him, or\u00a0an upside-down ship sailing on the roof of the world. \u00a0That’s nice – and more memorable\u00a0than the Weirdworld bits. \u00a0The problem\u00a0with this thread\u00a0is that the ultimate pay-off is underwhelming. \u00a0Kurt is upset because\u00a0he\u00a0found a mass grave of mutants in Germany. \u00a0And apparently, that’s it; that’s\u00a0the traumatic experience\u00a0that’s left him shuddering in a corner of the room.<\/p>\n
The thing is, this certainly ought to be shocking. \u00a0It’s not so much the anti-mutant venom; that’s been standard for decades. \u00a0It’s more the\u00a0fact that it’s something from a proper war zone rather than a\u00a0superhero comic, plus\u00a0the fact that it’s placed in nice\u00a0democratic Germany instead of\u00a0some invented republic somewhere. \u00a0But the build-up has over-sold it. \u00a0The baseline for ruinously traumatic experiences in the X-Men has been set rather higher than this –\u00a0look at the Morlock Massacre or the obliteration of Genosha. \u00a0So having Kurt react\u00a0in quite such an extreme way leads you to expect something even worse –\u00a0extended periods of torture or\u00a0something – and ends up\u00a0making the actual scene look like an anticlimax.<\/p>\n
There was a vogue at one point for establishing new threats by having them beat up the Juggernaut, because the Juggernaut was\u00a0a massively powerful A-list villain, so anyone\u00a0who could beat him was plainly a really big deal. \u00a0Extraordinary X-Men<\/em> seems to have hit on the emotional equivalent – this must be awful because it has deeply upset Kurt, who is the happiest character in the series. \u00a0It feels rather heavy handed, and not very effective either.<\/p>\n Once\u00a0again, I find myself in the odd\u00a0position of not being particularly gripped by\u00a0the main stories, but feeling\u00a0quite reassured\u00a0by a lot of the smaller details. \u00a0There’s still plenty of potential for this to settle down and get it right,\u00a0but a bit more tuning is called for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, this is all very traditional, now isn’t it? \u00a0I’m used to ongoing titles lurching from one arc to the next, trade paperbacks for the collecting-in. \u00a0But when you’ve got a big crossover coming up\u00a0midway through the first year,\u00a0it’s maybe better to get a couple of stories under your belt\u00a0first. \u00a0And here we are – […]<\/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-3331","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\/3331","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=3331"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3367,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3331\/revisions\/3367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}