{"id":3710,"date":"2017-03-16T23:08:25","date_gmt":"2017-03-16T23:08:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3710"},"modified":"2017-03-16T23:08:25","modified_gmt":"2017-03-16T23:08:25","slug":"ivx","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3710","title":{"rendered":"IvX"},"content":{"rendered":"

You’ve got to admire Marvel’s perverse determination to confuse people. \u00a0The solicitation says\u00a0IvX<\/em>. \u00a0The Comixology listing says\u00a0IvX<\/em>. \u00a0The cover says\u00a0Inhumans vs X-Men<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Let’s go with\u00a0IvX<\/em>. \u00a0It’s shorter to type.<\/p>\n

IvX<\/em> is an example of a beleaguered genre – the necessary resolution to a high profile storyline that\u00a0bombed. \u00a0Regular readers know the back story. \u00a0Marvel wanted to plug the Inhumans into the\u00a0role that mutants had occupied in the Marvel Universe, because that fitted more neatly with the rights that were available for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the X-Men being licensed elsewhere). \u00a0As a piece of corporate synergy, this made reasonable sense; as a story direction,\u00a0not so much, for either group.<\/p>\n

The device to achieve this was to take the Terrigen Mists –\u00a0which had previously been part of a special ritual in which\u00a0the hidden race of Inhumans exposed their children to mutagenics to give them powers in a coming of age ritual – and turn them into a\u00a0bloody great cloud that floated around the world, activating the powers of random people who apparently had some\u00a0degree of Inhuman DNA in them. \u00a0This\u00a0meant that the Inhumans could now serve the\u00a0mutants’ function as a generic origin story, while the X-Men got to do a story in which the mists\u00a0were poisonous to mutants.<\/p>\n

From the X-Men’s standpoint, this was an\u00a0awful idea, because it was basically a retread of the “No More Mutants” storyline – which had\u00a0itself dragged on for years, wasn’t any good, and had only just been resolved. \u00a0It was a hopelessly retrograde step\u00a0and it did nobody any favours.<\/p>\n

But from the Inhumans’ standpoint, it wasn’t so great either. \u00a0They were never designed to\u00a0serve the mutants’ role. \u00a0Their whole thing was that they were a hidden culture that was a bit weird and, in some respects, a bit creepy to boot. \u00a0Sometimes the Inhuman royal family were fairly straightforward heroes, sometimes you got rather odd stories about their obsession with eugenics, and sometimes they would turn out to have a clone slave race\u00a0which they didn’t really see a problem with. \u00a0And that worked quite well for them. \u00a0They were basically decent but with some really odd cultural values.<\/p>\n

Once the Terrigen Mists go from being part of a culturally important ritual to just a thing drifting around the world, though, you’ve got a problem. \u00a0You’ve already deviated so far from the values and norms of their society that it\u00a0looks awkward for them to treat\u00a0the cloud as central to their culture. It might have worked to play it as the Inhumans clinging on dementedly to the last vestige of their\u00a0traditions, but\u00a0the franchise wants new Inhumans\u00a0– or at least a fair number of them – to cheerfully pack up and go to live in New Attilan. \u00a0And that just doesn’t work. \u00a0There is no earthly reason why these characters should identify in any significant way with Inhuman culture, let alone this attenuated version of it.<\/p>\n

But here we are anyway, and this thing must come to a climax so that it can be cleared away. \u00a0It does so thusly:\u00a0the mutants discover that the Terrigen Mists are going to wipe out the mutants, which\u00a0they knew anyway, and has been driving the books for the last couple of\u00a0years. \u00a0But supposedly it’s urgent now because the Cloud wibble wibble something or other unless it’s destroyed\u00a0very soon. \u00a0So the X-Men set out to sideline the Inhumans and then get rid of the cloud with a macguffin built by Forge. \u00a0And\u00a0after\u00a0six issues of this, Medusa discovers that the cloud is going to kill all the mutants, which she too knew already, and agrees that they have to get rid of it.<\/p>\n

Which… well, it gets us where we need to go. \u00a0It\u00a0wipes the slate clean for the X-Men so that we can forget about this whole fiasco. \u00a0Yes, yes,\u00a0they claimed\u00a0once that the Mists\u00a0had already sterilised all mutants so that no mutants would ever be born again, but\u00a0shh, we’re pretending that didn’t happen. \u00a0It made no sense anyway, because\u00a0how could the Mists have affected the mutants who hadn’t yet been poisoned by them? \u00a0And how would it stop new mutants being born to normal humans? \u00a0So it never happened. \u00a0You didn’t read it. \u00a0We’re back to the status quo.<\/p>\n

The Inhumans\u00a0basically inherit the X-Men’s sidelined role, as a group with no future and\u00a0no way of activating the powers of their next generation. \u00a0This, of course, is easily solved in a couple of years when somebody\u00a0finds\u00a0some\u00a0more Terrigen crystals down the back of the sofa, but it might give them something to do in the meantime.<\/p>\n

But beyond that. \u00a0Ugh.<\/p>\n

A lot of the eye rolling about this series has come from the treatment of Emma Frost, who is basically now a full scale villain who was trying to engineer the X-Men and the Inhumans into vicious conflict. \u00a0At the broad strokes, I don’t greatly mind this, at least if you see it as driven by bitterness over Scott’s death. \u00a0The current take on Emma seems to be that she’s trying to memorialise her rather distorted image of the man she loved, and take on his\u00a0revolutionary role in a way that\u00a0further blurs the moral lines. \u00a0They’re not\u00a0pitching it right – for this to work properly she needs to be\u00a0veering towards Magneto without quite\u00a0becoming him, and that distinction isn’t really there. \u00a0Instead, we get her wheeling out a bunch of anti-Inhuman Sentinels in the final issue, which comes across as absurdly over the top. \u00a0I guess that once the misunderstanding is cleared away, somebody has to serve as the token villain in order that there can be a climax. \u00a0But with a bit more subtlety, the basic idea is not so bad.<\/p>\n

And there’s some entirely\u00a0passable corridor-running and page-filling action sequences over the course of the story. \u00a0Leinil Francis Yu and Javier Garron are\u00a0a perfectly fine artists for this sort of thing, and both\u00a0handle a large cast well. \u00a0There are a few cute moments\u00a0as lesser characters get their page in the sun.<\/p>\n

But there’s no content to any of this. \u00a0The general thrust of it is that the X-Men get the upper hand at first, but then some of the more peripheral Inhumans\u00a0get brought in as reinforcements – you know, Moon Girl, Ms Marvel, Mosaic,\u00a0the equivalent of mutants who don’t really hang around much with the X-Men – and it all gets a bit out of control. \u00a0And then the Inhumans find out what’s happening with the Cloud and just agree that it has to be stopped. \u00a0The peripheral guys help Forge rebuild his Save The Day Machine, and Medusa agrees that it has to be used.<\/p>\n

It feels like there’s a better story in here trying to get out. \u00a0The conflict, in theory at least, is between the X-Men wanting to preserve their race and the Inhumans wanting to preserve their culture. \u00a0This only works if you’re prepared to accept that the Inhumans place a higher value on their cultural artefact than on\u00a0mutant lives. \u00a0No sensible reader is going to think that, so when it turns out that the Inhumans\u00a0don’t\u00a0believe it either, you’re left with six issues of tap dancing to disguise the fact that there is no story.<\/p>\n

For this to work, the Inhumans – or at least some of them – need to\u00a0actually believe<\/em> that\u00a0the loss of the Cloud would be\u00a0the destruction of a central aspect of their culture. \u00a0And they need to actually believe that this is so important that the\u00a0mutants are acceptable collateral damage. \u00a0That’s eminently writeable. \u00a0It’s not as if the Inhumans haven’t displayed some staggeringly odd\u00a0cultural values in the past. \u00a0It’s not even that unusual\u00a0for one culture to be indifferent to another, at least in the level of out of sight, out of mind. \u00a0So there’s a\u00a0viable plot in here where\u00a0some of the traditional\u00a0Inhumans\u00a0really are\u00a0willing to throw the mutants to the wolves, and it’s the new blood characters who\u00a0ultimately see through it all.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0that’s not the direction for the Inhumans. \u00a0It would make them into, at best, sympathetic villains. \u00a0They might do quite well in that role, but they’re supposed to be heroes. \u00a0In the\u00a0bigger picture, perhaps that’s the right call. \u00a0For this story, though, it means it’s just a case of\u00a0\u00a0killing time until the bad idea has gone away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You’ve got to admire Marvel’s perverse determination to confuse people. \u00a0The solicitation says\u00a0IvX. \u00a0The Comixology listing says\u00a0IvX. \u00a0The cover says\u00a0Inhumans vs X-Men. Let’s go with\u00a0IvX. \u00a0It’s shorter to type. IvX is an example of a beleaguered genre – the necessary resolution to a high profile storyline that\u00a0bombed. \u00a0Regular readers know the back story. \u00a0Marvel wanted […]<\/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-3710","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\/3710","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=3710"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3711,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3710\/revisions\/3711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}