{"id":3689,"date":"2017-02-26T21:48:06","date_gmt":"2017-02-26T21:48:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3689"},"modified":"2017-02-26T21:48:06","modified_gmt":"2017-02-26T21:48:06","slug":"uncanny-x-men-16-18-inhumans-vs-x-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3689","title":{"rendered":"Uncanny X-Men #16-18: Inhumans vs X-Men"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, more tie-in issues, then. \u00a0I’ve done\u00a0All-New<\/em>, I’ve still got\u00a0Extraordinary<\/em> to go after this. \u00a0That’s a lot of\u00a0Inhumans vs X-Men<\/em>. \u00a0And what could be more exciting than a lot of\u00a0Inhumans vs X-Men<\/em>?<\/a><\/p>\n

But of course, this is a Marvel crossover in 2016\/7,\u00a0which means it’s not as if\u00a0these stories\u00a0actually serve to answer the wider plot. \u00a0The now-standard crossover format is to have the entire story confined in a\u00a0miniseries, and for the tie-ins to\u00a0be stories\u00a0written in the margins of that plot. \u00a0That’s what we have here.<\/p>\n

There are advantages to\u00a0doing it this way – principally, that in the days when every book had to pretend to advance the plot, the result was hideously complicated stories, a very long shopping list, and a lot of pointless side quests that served solely to provide plot fodder for\u00a0secondary tie-ins. \u00a0But the downsides are pretty significant too. \u00a0It means that\u00a0ongoing titles find themselves shoved to the margin of their own plot for several months,\u00a0while casting about for something that can be done with the premise of the crossover.<\/p>\n

Many\u00a0recent crossovers\u00a0have been designed with a premise\u00a0that doubles as a suitable plot springboard for the tie-ins –\u00a0somebody turns out to be a Skrull,\u00a0some random secret is revealed by the Watcher,\u00a0some alternate\u00a0version of the series from Battleworld. \u00a0Unfortunately,\u00a0Inhumans vs X-Men<\/em> doesn’t\u00a0even really have that\u00a0– or at least, the\u00a0Uncanny<\/em> tie-ins seem to find\u00a0little inspiration in it. \u00a0Its three tie-in issues consist of three unrelated one-shots,\u00a0and while they all use the crossover as background, only one of them really\u00a0tries to do\u00a0anything thematic with it.<\/p>\n

Issue #16, by Cullen Bunn and Edgar Salazar,\u00a0at least uses the tie-in for a bit of misdirection. \u00a0It\u00a0initially presents itself as an expansion on the idea\u00a0from the core series of the telepaths trying to tie Karnak up in\u00a0hallucinatory knots so as to keep him off the board. \u00a0And this is okay\u00a0as a cat and mouse battle of wits, with Jean and the Cuckoos trying to convince them that he’s already escape and Karnak continually seeing through the illusions. \u00a0The fact that the current incarnation of Karnak is so blisteringly amoral means that\u00a0the\u00a0clumsiness of the plot presents fewer problems for him, too.<\/p>\n

In fact,\u00a0the real story here turns out to be that\u00a0one of the Cuckoos (Irma, if you want to know) is secretly\u00a0trying to go further and access Karnak’s powers to help\u00a0Fantomex explore what the Someday Corporation did to the World when they tried to “hack” it in the previous story. \u00a0The upshot of\u00a0that<\/em> is that Fantomex in turn is manipulating Irma and as soon as he has what he needs, he cuts her out and cheerfully sets about trying to hijack the World for his own ends. \u00a0This, of course, has not the slightest thing to do with the\u00a0crossover\u00a0story. \u00a0It’s not a hugely interesting story in its own right either,\u00a0to be honest, since\u00a0I can’t say I’m especially invested in Fantomex and the World, and while Irma’s story could\u00a0potentially<\/em> go somewhere, it isn’t followed up in these issues, and… well, I can never remember which\u00a0one is Irma, which is not a good start if you want me to care about her\u00a0storyline. \u00a0I get the idea, and it’s a solid enough idea,\u00a0but I just don’t care. \u00a0Still, it’s quite a creative way to\u00a0hide a different story within a\u00a0tie-in.<\/p>\n

Issue #17, with Ken Lashley on art, takes us to Limbo, where (over in the main series)\u00a0the X-Men dumped some of the Inhumans to keep them out of the way. \u00a0The hook for this story is that Sabretooth and Rachel Grey are trying to find some bit-player Inhumans who have wandered off, before they get killed by the local demons. \u00a0But in fact,\u00a0Sabretooth is trying to find Monet before she kills the Inhumans\u00a0herself, thanks to Emplate’s influence.<\/p>\n

This doesn’t entirely make sense, because Emplate’s whole thing is that he needs to feed on mutants. \u00a0The story does acknowledge that, in a hand-waving sort of way, which seems to suggest that Monet is going after the Inhumans through vindictiveness, but\u00a0it doesn’t really make much sense. \u00a0The bigger point –\u00a0and it actually is a major\u00a0development – is that Sabretooth’s normal personality is re-asserting itself, and he ultimately kills an Inhuman bit player in order to keep Monet’s secret.<\/p>\n

This falls under the heading of a plot\u00a0development which is welcome\u00a0more\u00a0because it promises to draw a line under a very bad idea than because of its inherent\u00a0interest. \u00a0Randomly altering characters’ personalities in\u00a0Axis<\/em> was a\u00a0hopeless idea and in every other case it’s pretty much been forgotten about already. \u00a0I\u00a0genuinely couldn’t tell you what Havok’s current status quo is meant to be. \u00a0Sabretooth has clung in there longer than you’d think, but with fairly limited returns. \u00a0The effect starting to\u00a0fade potentially leads to\u00a0some more interesting\u00a0directions; but that’s for the future.<\/p>\n

Issue #18\u00a0heads to New Attilan, where Xorn and his “Sleepers” try to keep order over\u00a0the remaining Inhumans still living there. \u00a0Everyone is basically miserable: the Inhumans are terrified, the Sleepers\u00a0are being pressed into service as unwilling soldiers, and Xorn sees the whole thing\u00a0as at best a deeply regrettable necessity. \u00a0Sebastian Shaw is there too, to give Xorn\u00a0somebody to kick against, and to keep him as a relatively sympathetic figure.<\/p>\n

The ultimate idea, I suppose, is that Xorn\u00a0feels that he’s wound up as a jailer to both groups, and can’t ultimately contain his frustration, leading him to feel he’s … not up to the job or something? \u00a0It’s all\u00a0rather vague,\u00a0perhaps because Xorn’s role in this book so far has\u00a0largely been\u00a0to serve as a dispenser of aphoristic wisdom. \u00a0Seeing the mask slip and letting him feel\u00a0overwhelmed by the situation ought to be interesting, but his reaction feels too pat for it to work. \u00a0Perhaps\u00a0part of the problem is that this is the issue most clearly revolving around the\u00a0Inhumans vs X-Men<\/em> themes, with Xorn caught between trying to serve\u00a0as a bridge between the\u00a0mutants and the\u00a0Inhumans, and finding it all beyond him. \u00a0And that’s where you run up against the problem that\u00a0Inhumans vs X-Men<\/em> doesn’t work, but we’ve been through that before.<\/p>\n

Given the crossover remit, these three issues could have been a lot worse –\u00a0while they\u00a0deliver the advertised crossover, they’re actually more interested in advancing\u00a0unrelated storylines of regular characters. \u00a0But it’s all very bitty, and\u00a0it’s hard to avoid\u00a0feeling that\u00a0these ideas would have worked better attached to a story that belonged wholly to this book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, more tie-in issues, then. \u00a0I’ve done\u00a0All-New, I’ve still got\u00a0Extraordinary to go after this. \u00a0That’s a lot of\u00a0Inhumans vs X-Men. \u00a0And what could be more exciting than a lot of\u00a0Inhumans vs X-Men? But of course, this is a Marvel crossover in 2016\/7,\u00a0which means it’s not as if\u00a0these stories\u00a0actually serve to answer the wider plot. \u00a0The […]<\/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-3689","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\/3689","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=3689"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3693,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3689\/revisions\/3693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}