{"id":3633,"date":"2016-12-27T22:58:19","date_gmt":"2016-12-27T22:58:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3633"},"modified":"2016-12-27T22:59:00","modified_gmt":"2016-12-27T22:59:00","slug":"uncanny-x-men-annual-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3633","title":{"rendered":"Uncanny X-Men Annual 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

Technically that’s not the title. \u00a0Technically this thing is\u00a0Uncanny X-Men Annual<\/em> #1. \u00a0But Marvel’s annuals have\u00a0come to embody\u00a0Milk & Cheese<\/em>‘s 1990s dream of a series composed entirely of issue #1s, so let’s call it something that’s actually\u00a0vaguely informative instead.<\/p>\n

The main story, “Balancing The Scales” by Cullen Bunn and Ken Lashley,\u00a0\u00a0is pretty much just an extra issue of the regular series\u00a0– and it does at least\u00a0matter to the plot.<\/p>\n

Josh Foley, who was bumped off in an earlier issue to build up the Dark Riders, is back from the dead, because of his healing powers. \u00a0He promptly heads off to Genosha to torture the\u00a0Dark Riders (who were themselves killed by Magneto a few issues later) by raising them up and dropping them dead repeatedly. \u00a0Precisely how he knows that any of this happened or where to find the Dark Riders is, shall we say, less than clear. \u00a0Never mind. \u00a0Magneto’s X-Men duly show up to\u00a0try and bring the erratic omega mutant under control.<\/p>\n

Reasonably enough, Josh is not desperately\u00a0impressed by the X-Men’s offer of help – it’s not like it did him any good last time, and\u00a0Magneto always has an ulterior motive. \u00a0That gets us a scene where Josh starts trying to raise the entire deceased\u00a0population of Genosha before passing out, and Monet of all people is pressed into service as the character\u00a0who has to tell Magneto to think again about taking him up on the offer. \u00a0There are some\u00a0interesting character ideas\u00a0in here:\u00a0without Psylocke around to act as the team’s conscience, Monet can no longer maintain her ironic detachment and finds herself being drawn into the same role. \u00a0And Magneto is persuaded, but only by the purely practical arguments, not by Monet’s protests that Josh should be seen as a person rather than a tool. \u00a0Unfortunately, this gets somewhat lost under\u00a0dialogue like “But what if he raised 16 million mutants as flesh-eating zombies?”\u00a0 (Judging from the\u00a02009 “Necrosha” storyline,\u00a0which was pretty much that plot, it would have been bad.)<\/p>\n

Anyhow, the X-Men take\u00a0Josh to\u00a0some sort of refugee camp in Kansas City where\u00a0mutant victims of the Terrigen Mists are being treated. \u00a0And again, there are a couple of neat character ideas in here. \u00a0Everyone else is understandably appalled by Magneto parading through a hospital as if he owns the place just because it’s something to do with mutants,\u00a0but he simply blanks\u00a0them. \u00a0And there’s a\u00a0comparatively subtle suggestion that Magneto is particularly infuriated by the Terrigen Mists because\u00a0it’s a problem where his\u00a0personal myth and his legend –\u00a0one of his key preoccupations during\u00a0his recent solo series – is totally irrelevant. \u00a0He can’t use psychology or intimidation against them, and\u00a0that\u00a0impotence grates with Magneto as much as the impact on mutants.<\/p>\n

But again,\u00a0that’s the grace notes, and the plot is leaden:\u00a0at first Josh is indeed powerful enough to\u00a0cure\u00a0M-Pox, but then he goes nuts and starts killing stuff again, which is not terribly interesting because it’s that comic book version of madness where people just kind of do\u00a0random stuff without any particularly coherent\u00a0idea\u00a0beneath it all. \u00a0There’s some blather\u00a0about how\u00a0Josh’s powers have some sort of balance between life and death, which he apparently needs to master now that he’s become this powerful, but this\u00a0feels less like a theme and more like an excuse to pack him off to Xorn for some meditation.<\/p>\n

So a couple of decent moments in here,\u00a0but otherwise a story that clumps uninspiringly through the necessary plot\u00a0mechanics of getting Josh back onto the board,\u00a0presumably with a view to\u00a0having him available for\u00a0Inhumans vs X-Men<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The back-up strip, “Lady Luck”, is a Domino story written and drawn by Anthony Piper. \u00a0Piper has a fiddly take on\u00a0how Domino’s powers work: it’s\u00a0not really luck, it’s that she\u00a0subconsciously moves small objects telekinetically. \u00a0I don’t particularly have a problem with that as an idea – “luck” is a very hazily defined thing – but it\u00a0is<\/em> a retcon, and\u00a0it’s not something I’d have been inclined to do in a one-off back-up strip.<\/p>\n

Then again, it is the focus of the strip,\u00a0since\u00a0the\u00a0bones of the plot are\u00a0a routine “mission to kill a baddie” thing. \u00a0The schtick is that she drops some of her bullets on the way in, but one of them\u00a0winds up falling back into her gun\u00a0precisely when she needs it. \u00a0It’s a visually clear story, and there’s some nice banter between Domino and Roberto da Costa (serving as her handler by radio), but I wonder if that central\u00a0gimmick needed more\u00a0explanation. \u00a0On a first reading, it reads as if\u00a0the whole losing the bullets thing was just a pointless complication. \u00a0On a closer reading, I\u00a0think<\/em> the idea is that\u00a0if she’d kept the bullets in the first place, she\u00a0wouldn’t have had time to re-load, but because it happens this way round, they just fall into the gun – which is a nice enough idea – but I couldn’t completely swear to that being the intention, and it’s certainly not spelt out.<\/p>\n

On the whole, pretty forgettable even\u00a0by the standards of modern\u00a0Marvel annuals. \u00a0You do at least get a plot development in the main story, but not one that’s especially well done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Technically that’s not the title. \u00a0Technically this thing is\u00a0Uncanny X-Men Annual #1. \u00a0But Marvel’s annuals have\u00a0come to embody\u00a0Milk & Cheese‘s 1990s dream of a series composed entirely of issue #1s, so let’s call it something that’s actually\u00a0vaguely informative instead. The main story, “Balancing The Scales” by Cullen Bunn and Ken Lashley,\u00a0\u00a0is pretty much just an […]<\/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-3633","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\/3633","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=3633"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3635,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3633\/revisions\/3635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}