{"id":3724,"date":"2017-03-30T22:17:33","date_gmt":"2017-03-30T21:17:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3724"},"modified":"2017-03-30T23:07:56","modified_gmt":"2017-03-30T22:07:56","slug":"all-new-x-men-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3724","title":{"rendered":"All-New X-Men #19"},"content":{"rendered":"

What to do, when you have an issue\u00a0in which to wrap up your run and\u00a0no real way of tying everything up? \u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em>\u00a0tried\u00a0shoving everything aside\u00a0and focussing solely on\u00a0Psylocke and Magneto. \u00a0It\u00a0didn’t really work. \u00a0All-New\u00a0<\/em>has a different approach.<\/p>\n

This series has largely ignored the Terrigen stuff, but it’s more than happy to\u00a0leverage\u00a0the line-wide change of direction into its own sense of resolution. \u00a0The opening lines of dialogue will echo the sentiments of many readers:<\/p>\n

“Just seems like the end of a thing, doesn’t it? \u00a0No more Terrigen death cloud.”<\/p>\n

“No more Inhumans\u00a0versus X-Men.”<\/p>\n

“Thank God.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since the Airstream\u00a0got destroyed,\u00a0this issue finds the\u00a0teen X-Men hanging around filling time while they wait for the new direction to start. \u00a0This basically\u00a0means they hang out with Romeo and have a barbecue in a motel car park, which is precisely the sort of thing this book was about. \u00a0Bringing in Romeo at all is something of a show of good faith – see,\u00a0he wasn’t just there to try and\u00a0breathe some personal stakes into the crossover! \u00a0More to the point, by wheeling him out in the final issue and doing nothing whatsoever to write him out, there’s a clear signal\u00a0being sent that we should expect him to stick around.<\/p>\n

It’s not the only time the book does this. \u00a0The subplot of Hank’s tinkering with black magic is brought up, and even advanced – Jean learns a bit more about what he’s done to himself – but in no sense is it resolved. \u00a0These scenes only make sense on the footing that the storyline will\u00a0continue\u00a0when the book relaunches as\u00a0X-Men Blue<\/em>. \u00a0But neither of the creators on this book will be sticking around to tell those stories. \u00a0Dennis Hopeless\u00a0is departing Marvel; Mark Bagley is off to work with Peter David on\u00a0Scarlet Spider<\/em>. \u00a0And that’s a shame, because they did good work\u00a0here in sidelining\u00a0the ill-advised big picture and re-establishing some much needed humanity and normalcy. \u00a0The X-Men are generally at their best when they at least interact with the real world. \u00a0[EDITED TO ADD:<\/strong> Hopeless is doing the upcoming\u00a0Jean\u00a0Grey<\/em>\u00a0solo series, which I’d forgotten about – but\u00a0at any rate, he’s not involved in the relaunch of this series.]<\/p>\n

At any rate, the effect of flagging up these continuing subplots is\u00a0to make this more of a handover to the new creative team. \u00a0If\u00a0they actually take up the baton then that’ll be welcome; the habit of treating every\u00a0change of creative team as a ground zero has gone a bit far. \u00a0At the same time, by going out with an issue which is very much in\u00a0their own style, Hopeless and Bagley get to take their bow.<\/p>\n

So the Inhumans crossover is pressed into service to provide a sense of\u00a0closure to this era of the book. \u00a0In related news, Cyclops is shown as reaching a turning\u00a0point, because he now knows that he didn’t do the Terrible Things after all. \u00a0We’ve been through this before, but\u00a0a big deal is made of it here,\u00a0and it still doesn’t make sense. \u00a0For\u00a0these scenes to work, you have to be willing to accept that Scott has\u00a0been angst-ridden because\u00a0he thought his older self had destroyed\u00a0the Terrigen Cloud, which\u00a0meant that he was going to grow up to be a baddie. \u00a0 But now\u00a0he knows that Big Scott\u00a0had nothing to do with the Cloud;\u00a0Emma Frost just made it look like he was responsible. \u00a0So, while the rest of the world still thinks\u00a0the older Cyclops was a villain, now Scott knows the truth.<\/p>\n

And let’s be clear that\u00a0the story spends quite some time saying that Scott’s worries were entirely about the Terrigen Mists stuff, and entirely due to Emma’s trickery. \u00a0If you’re prepared to run with that, then the idea is clearly to draw a line under that\u00a0and let Scott move on, even if he still has to deal with\u00a0a ruined reputation and\u00a0get his revenge on Emma. \u00a0Of course, it means buying into the idea that\u00a0destroying the poison gas cloud was a bad thing, which is the party line, but has no comprehensible basis. \u00a0And it\u00a0ignores the fact that\u00a0the older Cyclops was giving plenty of cause for concern with his\u00a0hyper-vague Mutant Revolution stuff even before the Inhumans came along. \u00a0That’s why the young X-Men were brought to the present in the first place. \u00a0I get that the idea is to let the character move on, but\u00a0doing it this way involves some clumsy\u00a0plot fudging.<\/p>\n

To round off the\u00a0issue,\u00a0the story finally draws a line\u00a0under\u00a0the book’s big question:\u00a0given how much the characters have changed, how can they possibly go home to the Silver Age? \u00a0This doesn’t\u00a0really<\/em> grow out of anything much that’s been happening in the book, aside from a throwaway line a few issues back where Hank said he’d already gone back in time. \u00a0But it tidies up some baggage and, again, helps add to a sense of resolution.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0answer is that\u00a0in the past of the Marvel Universe, they never left. \u00a0They’re either from a different timeline entirely, or they’re\u00a0divergent versions of the characters created when Hank brought them forward in time, but\u00a0either way, they can’t simply go back in time because there’s no vacancy for them there. \u00a0If they even have a home timeline, it’s off to the side somewhere and they can’t find it. \u00a0It’s a bit of an anticlimax because\u00a0it’s been obvious for a while now that\u00a0the only other way to square the circle was by hitting the cosmic reset button. \u00a0And yes, it doesn’t\u00a0exactly<\/em> fit with\u00a0scenes in the Bendis issues, but\u00a0you can\u00a0reconcile that – the timeline was screwed up for a while but has now\u00a0resolved the paradox by creating this solution.<\/p>\n

If we’re not going to send the characters back home any time soon, then having a permanent huge paradox hanging over them was doing them no favours. \u00a0Better to clear that aside and make them explicitly distinct versions of the characters. \u00a0And by tying up a major plot thread,\u00a0it helps\u00a0make this feel like a final issue.<\/p>\n

I’m going to miss Hopeless and Bagley. \u00a0It’s\u00a0been a patchy series at times, but it managed to swerve most of the big problems posed by the directions of the line. \u00a0It was trying for the right things, and it quite often connected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What to do, when you have an issue\u00a0in which to wrap up your run and\u00a0no real way of tying everything up? \u00a0Uncanny X-Men\u00a0tried\u00a0shoving everything aside\u00a0and focussing solely on\u00a0Psylocke and Magneto. \u00a0It\u00a0didn’t really work. \u00a0All-New\u00a0has a different approach. This series has largely ignored the Terrigen stuff, but it’s more than happy to\u00a0leverage\u00a0the line-wide change of direction […]<\/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-3724","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\/3724","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=3724"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3727,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3724\/revisions\/3727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}