{"id":3718,"date":"2017-03-27T22:06:52","date_gmt":"2017-03-27T21:06:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3718"},"modified":"2017-03-27T22:06:52","modified_gmt":"2017-03-27T21:06:52","slug":"uncanny-x-men-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3718","title":{"rendered":"Uncanny X-Men #19"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another year, another relaunch. \u00a0Coming off\u00a0three issues of\u00a0Inhumans vs X-Men<\/em> tie-ins, the X-Men titles now find themselves with one issue to\u00a0call it a day before returning as something else in April.<\/p>\n

This is, shall we say, less than wholly satisfactory. \u00a0For\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em>, the crossover issues\u00a0had no shared through-line. \u00a0They were separate one-shot stories which advanced other storylines from the book but brought them nowhere especially close to resolution. \u00a0And indeed, this issue makes no real attempt to resolve them. \u00a0It’s a\u00a0further one-shot in which Psylocke\u00a0tries to make good on her pledge from a few issues back to hunt down Magneto if he turned on the X-Men.<\/p>\n

Where does this leave the rest of Uncanny X-Men<\/em>‘s storylines? \u00a0Well,\u00a0about halfway through the book, Psylocke gets to spend a few panels telling us what\u00a0all the rest of the book’s cast are up to now. \u00a0In a nutshell, Mystique is off doing Mystique things;\u00a0Xorn is off doing Xorn things;\u00a0Sabretooth, M and Fantomex have all wandered off to pursue their private unresolved stories from the last couple of issues; and Angel is going to look after all the “sleeper” mutants. \u00a0There’s your wrap-up.<\/p>\n

If that’s\u00a0really<\/em> intended to serve as the capstone then it’s\u00a0abrupt, to put it mildly. \u00a0But it’s hard to know whether it is – Cullen Bunn is sticking around, to write\u00a0X-Men Blue<\/em>. \u00a0And while that’s basically the successor title to\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em>, it’s also got\u00a0Magneto in the cast, so it could well be picking up some of the other storylines that are left dangling. \u00a0Who knows? \u00a0Who can say?<\/p>\n

One way or another, this issue feels like\u00a0an awkward attempt to impose some sort of resolution on a series that got guillotined. \u00a0And it tries to do that by picking up on the running theme\u00a0throughout the series that none of the other characters entirely trusted Magneto. \u00a0It always seemed like only a matter of time before he crossed a line, or\u00a0manipulated them too\u00a0far, and they all turned on him. \u00a0Because\u00a0Inhumans vs X-Men<\/em> saw him ally with Emma Frost to start a war with the Inhumans, that’s\u00a0the catalyst which brings it all down – but it\u00a0doesn’t work, because it doesn’t feel like something that emerged from any of the build-up. \u00a0It’s an external storyline, so it feels like the book was brought to an end from outside.<\/p>\n

Psylocke quit the team a while back, promising to kill Magneto if he went off the rails. \u00a0That fits well enough with\u00a0Psylocke’s current established character,\u00a0as somebody addicted to violence and susceptible to signing on for anything she can convince herself is a morally legitimate outlet for her impulses. \u00a0Having signed on with Magneto\u00a0for precisely that reason, despite all the glaring warning signs, she’s\u00a0arguably still driven by the same urges. \u00a0Magneto gets a bit of inner dialogue reflecting on whether all of this is\u00a0less a matter of moral righteousness\u00a0on Psylocke’s part, and more a case of projecting her own self-loathing.<\/p>\n

For that matter,\u00a0Magneto himself – consistent with Cullen Bunn’s usual take on the character – is simultaneously aware of\u00a0the moral lines he has crossed, and convinced that\u00a0it’s demanded by the greater good. \u00a0And of course there’s a plausible interpretation where he too is just rationalising an outlet for his mutants-first philosophy.<\/p>\n

All this is well and good. \u00a0It’s an interesting enough angle on both characters, and it’s a\u00a0welcome reminder that years of careful rehab have finally salvaged Psylocke from\u00a0the continuity quagmire and\u00a0restored her to having a clearly defined, dramatically interesting personality. \u00a0But it’s not really enough to justify an issue-long fight scene, however nicely Edgar Salazar draws it. \u00a0The entire actual plot of this issue pretty much boils down to “Psylocke shows up to kill Magneto, and does, but after she leaves Elixir and Exodus come along to heal him”. \u00a0The second\u00a0half of that sentence takes the final three pages. \u00a0There’s a lot of fighting before then.<\/p>\n

Nor is it\u00a0great as the final issue of a series; we seem to be showing up after the proper story\u00a0finished somewhere off panel. \u00a0This won’t matter quite so much if there are clear plans to pick up the dangling stories – and with Bunn sticking around, there may well be. \u00a0But as it stands,\u00a0the impression is\u00a0of\u00a0a\u00a0book that had longer term plans which never came to fruition because they were derailed by a premature relaunch. \u00a0In the bigger picture, I\u00a0welcome the change of direction, but it feels like\u00a0there were better ways of drawing a line under this title.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another year, another relaunch. \u00a0Coming off\u00a0three issues of\u00a0Inhumans vs X-Men tie-ins, the X-Men titles now find themselves with one issue to\u00a0call it a day before returning as something else in April. This is, shall we say, less than wholly satisfactory. \u00a0For\u00a0Uncanny X-Men, the crossover issues\u00a0had no shared through-line. \u00a0They were separate one-shot stories which advanced […]<\/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-3718","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\/3718","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=3718"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3719,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3718\/revisions\/3719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}