Well, I say “#4-7”. \u00a0That’s kind of a guess, really. \u00a0The cover of issue #4 says it’s the start of a new arc, and\u00a0it sure reads like it runs smoothly through to issue #7. \u00a0But apparently the trade paperbacks are taking the break at the end of issue #6. \u00a0And there’s certainly a gear shift there.\u00a0 So maybe it’s meant to be issues #4-6 and I’m just chucking an extra issue on the end. \u00a0It’s\u00a0hard to tell. \u00a0At any rate, issue #7 is the natural break point,\u00a0whatever the trades may think, so we’ll run with that.<\/p>\n
Dennis Hopeless and Mark Bagley are doing something of an old-school team book here, with multiple plot threads fading in and out\u00a0of prominence. \u00a0In these four issues, two themes dominate: Laura’s self-destructive tendencies, and some of the X-Men’s villains from the early sixties.<\/p>\n
Issues #4-6 see the\u00a0teen X-Men in Paris where they\u00a0stumble upon the Blob, whose current villainous plans\u00a0extend to nothing more outrageous than abducting giant animals from zoos – in a cute touch,\u00a0European zoos in the Marvel Universe apparently have an extensive line in cryptozoology – and forcing acclaimed chefs to cook them for him. \u00a0Because he just likes eating stuff. \u00a0This occupies our heroes for three issues, during which Cyclops is abducted by a drunken\u00a0Toad, who then spends issue #7 trying to summon up the courage to actually kill him. \u00a0Toad has nothing in particular against Kid Cyclops,\u00a0he just thinks that killing him will\u00a0alter the timeline and that\u00a0Cyclops’ influence turned out to be so disastrous that the result can only be an improvement.<\/p>\n
The Blob and the Toad are nobody’s idea of A-list villains, but then the first three issues of this series pitted the X-Men against a bunch of amateurish college students with pretensions of\u00a0villainy. \u00a0Clearly,\u00a0the book is rather more interested in the X-Men as characters than it is in any pretence of grand threats – which, in itself, is no bad thing. \u00a0And since the teen X-Men’s\u00a0whole schtick is that they were yanked from an early point in their career before they had\u00a0much in the way of experience,\u00a0you can see the thinking\u00a0behind a story which shows them as being outclassed by\u00a0C-list villains\u00a0from their own past who have at least put in the years. \u00a0Okay, it’s maybe a bit late in the day to be hitting\u00a0this point so hard – when the Bendis volume is taken into account, we’re actually pushing issue #50 – but that’s still not much compared to forty\u00a0plus years of history. \u00a0A bigger problem is that this theme doesn’t actually work for Laura, who isn’t a time traveller from the Silver Age. \u00a0She’s hypercompetent and has been since the word go. \u00a0I’m not convinced the book is getting that dynamic right at the moment –\u00a0the Blob just isn’t the sort of villain who should be posing her a major problem.<\/p>\n
On the other hand,\u00a0Hopeless does do a good job of\u00a0linking this version of Laura back to the original, emotionally muted version. \u00a0For whatever reason, the eight month gap has\u00a0left Laura much more talkative and socially competent than she ever was before – something\u00a0which is common to this book and to her own series, so it’s clearly a deliberate choice. \u00a0But she’s still disturbingly keen to shove herself in harm’s way, blithely\u00a0insisting that her healing factor will make it all okay in the end.<\/p>\n
In one sense this is obviously true, but\u00a0that\u00a0won’t stop the injuries themselves from being horrendously painful, and Warren is clearly\u00a0all too aware that Laura seems to be deliberately hurling herself into these situations even when she doesn’t really have to. \u00a0He\u00a0thinks she’s still putting on a front (and it’s a smart move to leave it some\u00a0five issues before foregrounding that point), and when she rebuffs his expressions of concern, he’s not prepared to just sit there and be supportive. \u00a0On the other hand, it’s also not clear that this is quite so simple as Laura self-harming; in her own mind, this seems to be her protecting the rest of the team by always putting herself at the front, and living up to the task of filling Logan’s role. \u00a0In some ways she’s doing nothing that Logan hasn’t been doing for years, and the book is using the fresh perspective of Warren and Laura to say “hold on, this is horrific”.<\/p>\n
In fact,\u00a0some of this is remarkably violent. \u00a0Though there’s a degree of wiggle room for\u00a0future stories to ignore it,\u00a0it’s certainly\u00a0strongly implied that Warren gouges out Blob’s eyeball. \u00a0And\u00a0Scott’s ponderings of how he’s going to deal with the purely practical challenge of escaping a bozo like Toad are\u00a0abruptly interrupted by the Toad smashing a bottle of whisky over his face. \u00a0If you’re trying to do this\u00a0sort of thing without stretching into mature readers territory then Mark Bagley\u00a0may be a very smart choice of artist, since his style is traditional enough to take some of the edge off it while at the same time\u00a0providing a shock value based on how\u00a0incongruous\u00a0these moments are. \u00a0The\u00a0actions are dark enough without the art\u00a0going out of its way to hammer the point home.<\/p>\n
What else? \u00a0Well, Hank and Bobby both get some nice individual scenes, with Bobby awkwardly\u00a0attempting to flirt\u00a0in broken English, and Hank lamenting\u00a0how his genius keeps being undercut by\u00a0all the innovations he doesn’t know about. \u00a0(Though it’s a bit of a stretch that, nearly fifty issues in, somebody’s still having to\u00a0tell him about Twitter.) \u00a0Scott obviously gets to continue the theme of struggling to escape the shadow of his older self, and issue #7 is a nice spotlight issue built around\u00a0an old trope we haven’t seen in quite a while –\u00a0namely, Scott\u00a0losing his visor and not being able to open his eyes for fear of what’ll happen. \u00a0It’s\u00a0played\u00a0more for horror here, which it suits nicely.<\/p>\n
Idie, on the other hand, gets\u00a0some rather heavy handed scenes yelling at God. \u00a0On top of that, the book seems to believe that her power is to change fire to ice and vice versa,\u00a0so that unless one of them is already there, she can’t do anything. \u00a0(“I need fire to make ice and vice versa.”) \u00a0That’s just wrong, and it’s wrong in a way that should have been blatantly obvious\u00a0on even a superficial reading of her earlier appearances. \u00a0It’s the sort of ludicrously massive continuity error that’s\u00a0hard to\u00a0overlook.<\/p>\n
And Evan… yes, what exactly is Evan doing here, other than providing the book with a reason to participate in the Apocalypse crossover?<\/p>\n
There are some strong ideas in here, but\u00a0a few seriously irritating glitches as well. \u00a0And even the plus points often\u00a0feel like a grab bag of unrelated ideas, instead of a coherent whole. \u00a0But to some extent, that\u00a0comes with the territory of a throwback team book format. \u00a0The\u00a0good continues to outweigh the bad, even if some of the bad can grate.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well, I say “#4-7”. \u00a0That’s kind of a guess, really. \u00a0The cover of issue #4 says it’s the start of a new arc, and\u00a0it sure reads like it runs smoothly through to issue #7. \u00a0But apparently the trade paperbacks are taking the break at the end of issue #6. \u00a0And there’s certainly a gear shift […]<\/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-3399","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\/3399","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=3399"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3400,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3399\/revisions\/3400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}