{"id":3643,"date":"2017-01-01T22:59:43","date_gmt":"2017-01-01T22:59:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3643"},"modified":"2017-01-01T22:59:43","modified_gmt":"2017-01-01T22:59:43","slug":"all-new-x-men-annual-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3643","title":{"rendered":"All-New X-Men Annual 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

You’re probably expecting me to tell you that\u00a0the\u00a0All-New X-Men Annual<\/em> is eminently skippable. \u00a0And\u00a0I am, but not without some regret.<\/p>\n

“Idie Goes On A Date” is a does-what-it-says-on-the-tin story by Sina Grace and Cory Smith. \u00a0Grace\u00a0has done things like\u00a0the\u00a0slice-of-life\u00a0memoir\u00a0Self-Obsessed, <\/em>which\u00a0<\/em>came out through Image in 2015, so he’s an interesting choice for an X-Men annual. \u00a0What we actually get, as it turns out, is a story where Idie is hanging around at a mall reflecting on how hard it is to escape being an X-Man and just be normal, when she stumbles upon a nice boy and they wind up going on a date.\u00a0<\/em>The nice boy, as it turns out, is a mutant who’s suffering from\u00a0M-Pox, and there’s a passing fight with some generic bigots, and then Idie\u00a0puts him in touch with Storm and\u00a0packs him off to\u00a0X-Haven for treatment. \u00a0And that’s pretty much the plot. \u00a0It’s a vehicle for Idie to reflect on how she’d like to live\u00a0more like a normal teenager, get\u00a0a taste of it, and reflect on the fact that it’s really not an option.<\/p>\n

And this is a stock concept for the X-Men – I wish I was normal,\u00a0but my fate is otherwise and I must embrace\u00a0it. \u00a0That doesn’t make it a bad\u00a0idea. \u00a0Quite the opposite, writers keep coming back to the stock concepts for good reason. \u00a0But it does mean that you need to bring something extra if it’s going to stand out, at least for people like me who’ve seen it many a time before. \u00a0And there are some nice touches in here. \u00a0There are points of detail that feel a little bit off the beaten track for an X-Men story, like\u00a0having them go to a silent movie which neither of them finds especially promising because it’s all that Ronnie can afford the tickets for, and having them enjoy it anyway. \u00a0Smith’s art\u00a0gives the characters\u00a0the sort of natural feel that a story like this needs.<\/p>\n

But there\u00a0are\u00a0also problems. \u00a0The dialogue often rings true, but there are lapses\u00a0where it feels too on the nose, particularly when Idie is spelling out the moral near the end. \u00a0Ronnie is a bit too uncomplicatedly nice for my tastes; there’s really not much to him as a character. \u00a0And \u00a0if you’re going to do a story about Idie wanting to live like\u00a0a normal American teenager,\u00a0it feels like her cultural background ought to come into it. \u00a0After all, she’s\u00a0not<\/em> American, and this is not the teenage life she would have had back home. \u00a0Yes, there’s some stuff in here about her not getting pop culture references, but\u00a0it feels to me like if you’re going to do this story with Idie, it needs that dimension about\u00a0what her ideas of a normal life really are. \u00a0True,\u00a0the ongoing series has\u00a0heavily downplayed that side of Idie, but\u00a0that’s one of the things I don’t like about it. \u00a0At the same time, though,\u00a0this story is operating in\u00a0very similar territory to the main book’s subplot about Idie trying to help\u00a0Bobby learn to flirt – in that, she’s (unconvincingly) pressed into service as the character who\u00a0can<\/em> chill out and party and who can help show Bobby the way. \u00a0It’s entirely at odds with their roles here.<\/p>\n

So it’s a smoothly executed\u00a0story with some nice points of detail, but\u00a0it’s also a slight affair.<\/p>\n

The back-up, “The Last Of Us, The Last Of X”, is a Dani Moonstar story which presumably wound up here for want of anywhere better to put it. \u00a0This has a more unusual\u00a0hook: although Dani never got her mutant powers back, she’s still a Valkyrie and she’s helping to track down M-Pox sufferers using her visions of death. \u00a0For reasons which aren’t\u00a0entirely<\/em> clear,\u00a0given that she’s been a Valkyrie since the 80s,\u00a0she’s now\u00a0suffering constant panic attacks while waiting for the next vision. \u00a0(The\u00a0story claims that it’s something to do with M-Pox, but\u00a0it’s not obvious how that’s meant to work, since her visions were never specific to mutants.)<\/p>\n

At any rate, the basic idea is that Dani is still a professional who’s capable of working through her fears, and she tracks down and brings in Lady Mastermind, who is in a bad way and is not coping with her own fear anywhere near as well. \u00a0There’s\u00a0an\u00a0interesting contrast\u00a0drawn between Dani, who\u00a0regards<\/em> herself as putting up a front of competence, and Regan, who really is putting up an illusion of strength and power. \u00a0It doesn’t exactly stick the landing – it feels like it loses confidence that\u00a0readers will get the point, and Dani is given a rather\u00a0heavy handed and purple speech, the\u00a0general thrust being that we need to accept fear as an inevitable part of life and learn to live with it instead of fighting it. \u00a0Then, in\u00a0the epilogue page, Magik gets to spell out the metaphor once again.<\/p>\n

It would have been\u00a0better just to let the story make the point;\u00a0it was doing just fine without having two separate characters explain the moral. \u00a0And Lady Mastermind, as somebody who\u00a0literally presents an illusory face to the world, is\u00a0a good choice for\u00a0that sort of story. \u00a0There’s a decent idea in here; it just needed\u00a0to have more confidence\u00a0that\u00a0it could\u00a0get the\u00a0idea across without providing such an obvious\u00a0crib sheet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You’re probably expecting me to tell you that\u00a0the\u00a0All-New X-Men Annual is eminently skippable. \u00a0And\u00a0I am, but not without some regret. “Idie Goes On A Date” is a does-what-it-says-on-the-tin story by Sina Grace and Cory Smith. \u00a0Grace\u00a0has done things like\u00a0the\u00a0slice-of-life\u00a0memoir\u00a0Self-Obsessed, which\u00a0came out through Image in 2015, so he’s an interesting choice for an X-Men annual. \u00a0What […]<\/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-3643","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\/3643","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=3643"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3644,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3643\/revisions\/3644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}