{"id":3440,"date":"2016-06-03T21:30:47","date_gmt":"2016-06-03T20:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3440"},"modified":"2016-06-05T10:34:58","modified_gmt":"2016-06-05T09:34:58","slug":"x-men-92-1-4-world-is-a-vampire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3440","title":{"rendered":"X-Men ’92 #1-4 – “World is a Vampire”"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-Men ’92<\/em> was\u00a0one of the X-books’ more unusual contributions to\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em>, and not one that you’d naturally expect to continue beyond it. \u00a0Being an out-of-continuity title, it doesn’t really\u00a0fall within my remit for the X-Axis, but\u00a0I figured I’d give it an opening arc anyway.<\/p>\n

Now, I pretty much enjoyed\u00a0the\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> tie-in. \u00a0While the rest of the\u00a0X-Men’s “greatest hits” parade consisted of assorted variations on dystopia, it was looking\u00a0back to the 1992 animated series. \u00a0Instead of doing a straight copy or\u00a0a parody, Chris Sims and Chad Bowers went for\u00a0more of a tongue in cheek homage, blending in elements from the rather different 90s comics for a\u00a0broader take on\u00a0the X-Men of the time. \u00a0And the decision to do it as an Infinite book was a neat way\u00a0of echoing the animated roots.<\/p>\n

Less\u00a0obvious was the thinking behind giving a major role to Cassandra Nova, who wasn’t from the 90s at all. \u00a0And unfortunately, that’s the trend which seems to predominate in this ongoing series, which is a baffling mash-up of Marvel Universe plot elements from all over the place, some\u00a0of which are not\u00a0particularly\u00a0related to the X-Men or to\u00a0the early nineties, let alone both.<\/p>\n

Picking up where the\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> miniseries left off, the X-Men have opened up their school to actual pupils. \u00a0The\u00a0student\u00a0cast is made up of members of Generation X (which makes sense) and teenage versions of the members of X-Statix (which is a bit random). \u00a0Maverick shows up at the\u00a0Mansion fleeing from\u00a0the Russian super-team, the People’s Protectorate. \u00a0Meanwhile,\u00a0the\u00a0Upstarts’ competition – you remember, rich kids killing mutants for points – is just getting under way, and Fenris\u00a0try to recruit a locked-away Soviet agent called Alpha Red who eventually turns out to be this world’s version of Janus, the son of Dracula, and who shows up to bite Jubilee before going on to turn the Protectorate and a whole bunch of students. \u00a0It turns out that Maverick has\u00a0stolen a computer disc with the Russian government’s copy of the Darkhold, which\u00a0is the key to defeating the vampires. \u00a0The X-Men\u00a0recruit Dracula to help fight back, and he reveals\u00a0that the vampires turned by Janus will burn out and die quickly. \u00a0There’s a big showdown. \u00a0Eventually Dead Girl, of all people, goes into 90s virtual reality to interact with the Darkhold, and uses the Montesi Formula to turn all vampires back into humans, except for Janus who dies.<\/p>\n

Now, in plot terms, this all certainly hangs together, and it’s actually pretty well constructed as a dense action story. \u00a0But \u00a0unlike the first mini, it feels very much a Frankenstein patchwork of scattered concepts drawn from all over Marvel history,\u00a0with no particular rhyme or reason. \u00a0You’ve got X-Statix from the\u00a0outer reaches of the early 2000s X-books. \u00a0You’ve got the People’s Protectorate from Captain America\u00a0<\/em>or\u00a0Avengers\u00a0<\/em>or wherever it was they came from. \u00a0You’ve got a callback to Jubilee being turned into a vampire in a relatively recent\u00a0X-Men<\/em> story. \u00a0You’ve got\u00a0a callback to a Storm\/Dracula story from the 80s. \u00a0You’ve got\u00a0Janus from\u00a0Tomb of Dracula\u00a0<\/em>in the late 1970s.\u00a0 And\u00a0as a climax, you’ve got a callback to the Montesi Formula being used to purge the\u00a0Marvel Universe of vampires in\u00a0Dr Strange<\/em> #62,\u00a0published in 1983.<\/p>\n

X-Men ’92?<\/p>\n

There are some\u00a0cute moments – plenty, in fact – and it’s quite well done on that\u00a0level. \u00a0A passing mention of the Council of Cross-Time Draculas is gloriously absurd. \u00a0The idea of revisiting the Upstarts, who seem to be a longer-term storyline, is quite good, since that’s squarely within the book’s remit and it was a high-profile\u00a0story that never came to much and could have been done vastly better. \u00a0\u00a0If you’re going to revisit\u00a0early 90s X-Men,\u00a0that’s\u00a0a good bit to work around. \u00a0And Alti Firmansyah isn’t Scott Koblish, but her storytelling is clear enough, she does a good vampire Jubilee, and she fits the notional animated vibe. \u00a0And yes, it all barrels along happily enough, and it’s a lot better constructed than many\u00a0books I’ve read lately.<\/p>\n

But even allowing for the fact that the book doesn’t expect to be taken terribly seriously, the\u00a0bombardment of references kind of overwhelms it. \u00a0There are really two problems here. \u00a0One is that it overshadows the core idea. \u00a0The book is called\u00a0X-Men ’92<\/em>, after all, and it’s decreasingly recognisable as such.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps the idea was to avoid a straight cover of the 90s by bringing the X-Men into contact with elements from other books and other periods. \u00a0Fair enough, but for that sort of clash to work, you still need to hold on to the core identity of the book, so that it can play off the other stuff. \u00a0Here, it gets overwhelmed in a tidal wave of unspoken footnotes. \u00a0Maybe it was a mis-step to launch the regular series with a riff on something as peripheral to the X-Men as Marvel’s vampire mythology.<\/p>\n

The other problem is that while the story might\u00a0technically<\/em> work, it’s a bit weightless, because it’s hard to shake the feeling of a parlour game where\u00a0people\u00a0pick fifteen concepts at random from\u00a0The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe<\/em> and see if they can construct a plot around them. \u00a0The answer to that question is “yes, they can”, but it doesn’t feel like a story that’s really\u00a0about<\/em> anything in particular, even\u00a0on the pretty flippant level that the book is aiming for. \u00a0The epilogue, with\u00a0everyone feeling a bit nervous about the implications of resorting to black magic,\u00a0does actually work, and\u00a0with a little more focus\u00a0this could work a lot better.<\/p>\n

This feels like a book that needs to calm down a bit and regain the focus\u00a0it had in the\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> arc. \u00a0It’s still quite good fun\u00a0moment to moment, but it’s less than the sum of its parts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-Men ’92 was\u00a0one of the X-books’ more unusual contributions to\u00a0Secret Wars, and not one that you’d naturally expect to continue beyond it. \u00a0Being an out-of-continuity title, it doesn’t really\u00a0fall within my remit for the X-Axis, but\u00a0I figured I’d give it an opening arc anyway. Now, I pretty much enjoyed\u00a0the\u00a0Secret Wars tie-in. \u00a0While the rest of […]<\/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-3440","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\/3440","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=3440"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3443,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3440\/revisions\/3443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}