{"id":3657,"date":"2017-01-20T22:58:37","date_gmt":"2017-01-20T22:58:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3657"},"modified":"2017-01-20T23:04:33","modified_gmt":"2017-01-20T23:04:33","slug":"all-new-x-men-14-16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3657","title":{"rendered":"All-New X-Men #14-16"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mmm. \u00a0I had it in mind that\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> #14-16\u00a0were a three parter. \u00a0And re-reading them, they kind of are, but they’re kind of not. \u00a0This is the tail end of a string of solo stories,\u00a0which seemed to be on the one hand spotlight time for individual characters, and on the other\u00a0a gentle subtext of the team falling apart\u00a0the longer they spend in their new setting.<\/p>\n

Issue #14 is basically Scott’s issue, even if Hank is\u00a0lurking ominously in the background throughout. \u00a0Scott is still stuck at home with his leg in a cast, going stir crazy. \u00a0Probably this book’s best feature is Dennis Hopeless’s ability to find a different angle on the characters’\u00a0established traits by sticking them in a different context. \u00a0In Scott’s case, the\u00a0workaholic obsessiveness that would have made him the X-Men’s ideal\u00a0leader (or\u00a0field leader, anyway) needs\u00a0somewhere else to go, now that\u00a0the antics of his older self seem to have\u00a0debarred him from a leadership role.<\/p>\n

So instead we have Scott trying to find out what the heck Hank is up to in his secretive lab, and spending\u00a0much of the issue\u00a0patiently trying to outwit\u00a0all of Hank’s security devices – ultimately to no avail, because Hank is a technical genius. \u00a0There’s a lovely visual of Scott trying to exploit the\u00a0Airstream’s Tardis-like properties and accidentally walking into all the rooms\u00a0at once. \u00a0Scott doesn’t need to succeed\u00a0in order for all this stuff to work as character material; he just needs to keep on trying. \u00a0Moreover, Scott’s more interested in\u00a0the challenge of\u00a0finding\u00a0out what Hank is up to, rather than having any intrinsic fascination in the answer. \u00a0It’s an echo of an\u00a0occasional theme with the original character, though not one we’ve seen in a while: that he’s a good guy\u00a0in part\u00a0\u00a0because that’s just the role and the challenge that happened to present itself, and Xavier happened to channel him in the right direction.<\/p>\n

Anyway, it turns out that Hank has accidentally raised an Elder God or some such thing, and there’s quite a good sequence of Scott fighting this Cthulhu-issue demon from his wheelchair. \u00a0It works because, again, Hopeless plays it in the right way for Scott’s character: he remains calm in the face of madness and reasons his way to the solution.<\/p>\n

Issues #15-16 are a less satisfying. \u00a0They serve partly as Hank’s spotlight story, but they also involve\u00a0the whole team being brought back together, which kind of detracts from that. \u00a0And they involve two parallel demonic attacks – one the result of Hank’s unwise experiments in black magic in the Airstream, the other the result of the Goblin Queen just showing up\u00a0for no particular reason. \u00a0Yes, she was foreshadowed in a subplot a while back, yes, there’s a thematic reason to have her here, but there’s still no good plot reason to have two sets of demons show up at once beyond sheer coincidence, and that’s an irritant.<\/p>\n

Then there’s the fact that most of the team, despite being brought back together here, don’t actually have a great deal of interest to do. \u00a0They spend the two issues fighting a whole load of demons under the control of the Goblin Queen, and it’s pretty much just random fighting until Hank saves the day. \u00a0And it’s an underwhelming use of the Queen, too. \u00a0She seems like a sensible choice of villain, since not only does she have the link with the original Scott, but she’s a twisted version of the team’s absentee member Jean Grey. \u00a0But she doesn’t\u00a0actually have a plan here beyond causing chaos for its own sake. \u00a0That’s a bit uncharacteristic of her – yes, she always revels in the madness, but she usually has a clear agenda on top of that. \u00a0But it’s also not much to hang a story on. \u00a0Sure, the whole thing is a vehicle\u00a0for some material focussing on\u00a0\u00a0Hank, but it’s a pretty\u00a0ropey vehicle. \u00a0A stronger plot would really raise this a notch.<\/p>\n

The plusses and minuses are pretty similar when it comes to Mark Bagley’s art. \u00a0He’s good at selling character moments, and he’s always an effective storyteller. \u00a0On the other hand, he’s not so good at epic chaos. \u00a0The original\u00a0Inferno storyline benefitted\u00a0hugely from having artists\u00a0like Blevins and Simonson\u00a0cranking it up to 11, but that’s not really where Bagley’s strengths lie. \u00a0He’s always a solid artist, but this doesn’t always feel like his natural territory.<\/p>\n

Still, the story does\u00a0have some\u00a0good ideas with Hank. \u00a0The big reveal is\u00a0his casual announcement that he actually solved the time travel problem a while back,\u00a0and\u00a0he could go home whenever he wanted, but he’s become completely sidetracked by his new obsession with experimenting in magic. \u00a0The idea seems to be that Hank belatedly realises that he’s gone off the rails, and that he’s become distracted by trying to regain\u00a0a sense of being special in a world that feels like it’s outpaced his intellect. \u00a0If he can’t catch up with science then he’s going to hide away from it and try something else. \u00a0There’s an obvious logic problem with this, of course, which is\u00a0that he could just go home and\u00a0become special again that way. \u00a0But\u00a0it’s the sort of “not logical” that feels like a plausible emotional reaction, rather than a plot hole, so that’s fine by me.<\/p>\n

Of course,\u00a0Hank then gets to somewhat redeem himself by being the one guy who knows\u00a0just<\/em> enough about magic to fend of the Goblin Queen – although it’s pretty clear that we’re heading towards the story where Hank has already set himself on the road to ruin and has come to his senses too late to avoid that. \u00a0No doubt we’ll get back to that after the\u00a0Inhumans crossover. \u00a0I’m not altogether convinced by this direction, since it’s obviously\u00a0meant to be a parallel of what Brian Bendis was doing with the original Beast, which always suffered from the\u00a0major drawback of\u00a0not being remotely\u00a0convincing. \u00a0But perhaps Hopeless can sell me on the do-over; he’s certainly done a\u00a0better job of building it so far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mmm. \u00a0I had it in mind that\u00a0All-New X-Men #14-16\u00a0were a three parter. \u00a0And re-reading them, they kind of are, but they’re kind of not. \u00a0This is the tail end of a string of solo stories,\u00a0which seemed to be on the one hand spotlight time for individual characters, and on the other\u00a0a gentle subtext of the […]<\/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-3657","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\/3657","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=3657"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3659,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3657\/revisions\/3659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}