Completism ahoy!<\/p>\n
All-New X-Men\u00a0<\/em>#1.MU is a one-shot tying in to the\u00a0Monsters Unleashed<\/em> crossover,\u00a0because\u00a0where would we be if\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> didn’t tie in to two crossovers in one week? \u00a0I haven’t been reading\u00a0Monsters Unleashed<\/em>, you’ll be astonished to learn, but\u00a0according to the recap page the\u00a0high concept is that giant monsters are falling from the sky and people have to fight them.<\/p>\n Really. \u00a0That’s the hook. \u00a0There are giant monsters. \u00a0People have to fight them.<\/p>\n What do you do with that, exactly, in a random tie-in\u00a0one-shot? \u00a0The lucky\u00a0writer who gets to wrestle with that challenge is Jeremy Whitely, who I think\u00a0may be doing his first work for Marvel, but\u00a0is best known for writing\u00a0Princeless<\/em>, an all-ages title which got some Eisner nominations in 2012. \u00a0Which is better than we normally get for this sort of thing. \u00a0Oddly, there are two art teams credited on this –\u00a0Carlo Barberi and Walden Wong seem to be the lead, with Ron Lim and Terry Pallot listed as well – but that’s\u00a0a fairly solid creative team for something like this.<\/p>\n And\u00a0indeed it’s a decently polished affair. \u00a0The problem, as you might expect, comes when the story has to find something\u00a0interesting in “a monster randomly shows up and they fight it”.<\/p>\n The book’s\u00a0solution to this problem\u00a0is not altogether satisfactory. \u00a0The book starts with the X-Men arriving in New Orleans,\u00a0and Laura\u00a0going off to help Gambit investigate signs of a monster in the swamps. \u00a0What follows is\u00a0mostly about\u00a0giving Laura and Gambit a chance to share some\u00a0panel time,\u00a0which is actually happening already\u00a0over in\u00a0All-New Wolverine<\/em> at the moment, but whatever. \u00a0Here, Gambit is\u00a0mostly interested in the fact that\u00a0Laura\u00a0hasn’t just taken on Wolverine’s identity, she’s wearing a team colours version of his costume – all of which Gambit, as the semi-detached outsider, sees as\u00a0a curious decision in someone who used to\u00a0run around in\u00a0leather and fishnets.<\/p>\n And then it sort of goes off the rails. \u00a0Gambit and Laura get caught in a rope net apparently laid by a baddie called Dr Chimera. \u00a0He’s a mad scientist\u00a0obsessed with the animals of\u00a0the swamp, and he’s been\u00a0transforming his own body accordingly. \u00a0\u00a0At that point, a monster falls from the sky and eats Dr Chimera, and then everyone just has to fight the monster for the rest of the issue. \u00a0And, um, that’s it. \u00a0Oh, and through the first half of the story,\u00a0there are scenes of the rest of the cast just sort of\u00a0seeing stuff in\u00a0New Orleans. \u00a0None of it really plays into the plot.<\/p>\n What we have here is a book with quite a lot of nicely observed detail, and some well\u00a0thought out bits of business – for example, a lot of thought has gone into\u00a0justifying why Laura doesn’t just cut her way straight out of the net, and making it a big deal when she and Gambit finally do make their move to escape. \u00a0There’s a reasonably inventive\u00a0climax\u00a0with Gambit\u00a0charging up a parade float to blow up the monster. \u00a0And the\u00a0rapport between Laura and Gambit rings true; Whitely clearly has a good handle on their characters.<\/p>\n But there’s no story for any of this to hang on. \u00a0A huge chunk of the issue is basically sightseeing. \u00a0The original\u00a0story of a monster in the swamp is pretty much brushed aside without getting any sort of resolution – Dr Chimera doesn’t look like he actually meets the description of something bitey, and he gets about five lines in before getting brushed aside by a giant crayfish. \u00a0I\u00a0guess<\/em>\u00a0they’re going for the gag where the villain\u00a0starts his big talk and is immediately squashed by a bigger threat, but it just doesn’t land, and you’re left with a story that\u00a0really goes nowhere before a monster shows up for no reason and\u00a0everyone has a big fight.<\/p>\n It’s a shame, because there’s a lot of really good stuff in the\u00a0little details here. \u00a0But\u00a0there’s nothing satisfying to hold it together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Completism ahoy! All-New X-Men\u00a0#1.MU is a one-shot tying in to the\u00a0Monsters Unleashed crossover,\u00a0because\u00a0where would we be if\u00a0All-New X-Men didn’t tie in to two crossovers in one week? \u00a0I haven’t been reading\u00a0Monsters Unleashed, you’ll be astonished to learn, but\u00a0according to the recap page the\u00a0high concept is that giant monsters are falling from the sky and people […]<\/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-3678","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\/3678","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=3678"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3679,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3678\/revisions\/3679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}