{"id":3720,"date":"2017-03-28T22:41:21","date_gmt":"2017-03-28T21:41:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3720"},"modified":"2017-03-28T22:41:21","modified_gmt":"2017-03-28T21:41:21","slug":"extraordinary-x-men-20","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3720","title":{"rendered":"Extraordinary X-Men #20"},"content":{"rendered":"

Where Uncanny X-Men<\/em> struggled for a sense of resolution in its final issue,\u00a0Extraordinary X-Men\u00a0<\/em>has no such\u00a0problems.<\/p>\n

Of course, it has several advantages over\u00a0Uncanny<\/em>. \u00a0Of the three X-Men titles from the outgoing era, this was the\u00a0lead title, the one about the actual X-Men in the actual school.\u00a0 All-New<\/em> was a time-travelling second team of X-Men and\u00a0Uncanny<\/em> was X-Force hoping to sell a few more copies. \u00a0But\u00a0Extraordinary<\/em> was the X-Men taking refuge in Limbo while they hunted for a cure for the Terrigen Mists. \u00a0Ill-advised as that direction may have been, it was\u00a0embedded in this series. \u00a0And so the end of\u00a0IvX<\/em>\u00a0genuinely closes the door on this chapter of\u00a0the X-Men.<\/p>\n

There are other advantages. \u00a0Writer Jeff Lemire is not coming back for the relaunch. \u00a0This is a shame, in some ways. \u00a0Considering the unpromising remit which he was given, he’s made the best of it, and it would have been nice to see him get a chance to handle the X-Men without the literal cloud hanging over them.\u00a0 But then again, perhaps not. \u00a0For years\u00a0now,\u00a0Lemire has\u00a0been producing indie books which are\u00a0consistently great, and superhero books which are consistently good to middling. \u00a0Creatively, he’s probably better served on an oddball title like\u00a0Moon Knight<\/em>\u00a0(which, from what I’ve seen of it, is practically an extended fever dream) than he is adjusting to the demands of\u00a0a\u00a0central franchise. \u00a0He can do it, it just doesn’t bring out the best in him. \u00a0Interestingly, Lemire’s\u00a0Old Man Logan<\/em> – which he’s\u00a0staying with, and which has a more eccentric and distinctive tone to it –\u00a0has been outselling the X-Men titles for a while now, at least in the direct market.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lemire has also made matters easier for\u00a0himself by keeping the subplots to a minimum and largely wrapping them up. \u00a0Okay, Glob Herman’s pining for Jean\u00a0Grey never really went anywhere, but it never really needed to – it worked just fine as a character thing for him. \u00a0Lemire’s major\u00a0subplot, the Sapna storyline, hasn’t exactly resolved, but it has been brought to a turning point which feels\u00a0like a suitable\u00a0time to pass\u00a0the character on.<\/p>\n

That leaves the whole idea of the X-Men\u00a0being camped out in Limbo hiding from the Terrigen Mists, which, obviously, is now over. \u00a0And so this final issue consists of the X-Men quite literally dismantling their status quo and going home. \u00a0Job done, challenge overcome, win for the good guys. \u00a0It’s not a tone that the X-Men get to hit very often, and while you couldn’t exactly call this subtle – it’s full of “it’s good to smile again” dialogue – it does at least feel earned. \u00a0Victor Iba\u00f1ez has\u00a0always been good at\u00a0bringing out the human side of\u00a0the characters, and that\u00a0surely helps strike the right tone here.<\/p>\n

You can’t spend an\u00a0entire issue on\u00a0packing up and going home, of course, so\u00a0part of the book is given over to tying up one last loose end – retrieving Cerebra\u00a0after she was battered during the crossover. \u00a0That gives\u00a0us a few pages of fighting wild Sentinels (which Iba\u00f1ez also handles nicely), and\u00a0allows Lemire to quietly tie up the\u00a0question of where Emma got\u00a0her\u00a0killer robots from. \u00a0It’s a case of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, but it helps the finality.<\/p>\n

Finally, we’re\u00a0left with the school deserted aside from the X-Men themselves, and because\u00a0this is all about reasserting a return to normalcy,\u00a0Lemire winds up his run with a couple of pages of baseball. \u00a0This\u00a0trope occasionally gets wheeled out just as a way of signalling that you are\u00a0indeed reading the X-Men, but Lemire is using it correctly here – the point of the baseball games\u00a0was that the school was a little haven of normalcy\u00a0in which, somehow or other,\u00a0Everything Is Going To\u00a0Be\u00a0Alright. \u00a0Wrapping up an X-Men run on an unambiguously optimistic note for once, Lemire can invoke it fair and square.<\/p>\n

It’s unfamiliar\u00a0to see the X-Men in such positive mood, though anything looks like a step in the right direction when you’ve just fended off\u00a0the poison gas cloud. \u00a0There’s a limit to how far you can take it in an ongoing series – there has to be\u00a0a conflict, after all – but\u00a0it would be nice to hope that we can finally close the door on these extinction level threats and get the X-Men back to the sort of stories they do well. \u00a0Maybe we can get back to the\u00a0idea of the mutants as the dawning future,\u00a0and get some much-needed hope\u00a0into the mix\u00a0again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Where Uncanny X-Men struggled for a sense of resolution in its final issue,\u00a0Extraordinary X-Men\u00a0has no such\u00a0problems. Of course, it has several advantages over\u00a0Uncanny. \u00a0Of the three X-Men titles from the outgoing era, this was the\u00a0lead title, the one about the actual X-Men in the actual school.\u00a0 All-New was a time-travelling second team of X-Men and\u00a0Uncanny […]<\/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-3720","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\/3720","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=3720"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3721,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3720\/revisions\/3721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}