{"id":3794,"date":"2017-06-06T22:18:48","date_gmt":"2017-06-06T21:18:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3794"},"modified":"2017-06-06T22:18:48","modified_gmt":"2017-06-06T21:18:48","slug":"generation-x-1-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3794","title":{"rendered":"Generation X #1-2"},"content":{"rendered":"

We reviewed\u00a0Generation X\u00a0<\/em>on the podcast<\/a> a few weeks ago, but it turns out that the book is opening with a two-parter, so here we are already. \u00a0This is a straightforward intro story –\u00a0very straightforward – so, sure, if you’re going to start with this, best get it over with.<\/p>\n

Be warned, this is basically going to be me\u00a0putting in writing the same things I said on the show. \u00a0Which is to say,\u00a0there are\u00a0good elements here, and some individually promising\u00a0ideas, but right now it’s very much less than the sum of its parts.<\/p>\n

Jubilee returns to the\u00a0re-opened school to take up\u00a0a position as a teacher. \u00a0This is the\u00a0student-turned-teacher trope which, in a sense, we’re already doing with Kitty in the main book. \u00a0But the difference is that Kitty has been\u00a0a grown-up since, what… Warren Ellis’s run on\u00a0Excalibur<\/em>, maybe? \u00a0So having her lead the X-Men is really just formalising a role that she’s been playing for 20 years. \u00a0Jubilee is somewhat new to this role, even if she’s been lugging Shogo around for the last few years, and the idea of her finding her feet as a mentor works. \u00a0She’s still a vampire, by the way, which the book really does very little to establish or explain if you didn’t know already.<\/p>\n

Beyond that,\u00a0the broad plot involves\u00a0another very familiar\u00a0X-Men trope – the new student who arrives at the school and finds the madness off-putting,\u00a0gets caught up in a big fight, and winds up staying after a pep talk. \u00a0The big fight is with the Purifiers, who are here to serve as\u00a0the generic X-Men villains that\u00a0are far enough down the\u00a0pecking order for the students to stand a chance against them. \u00a0They have no personality and they just show up to shoot at mutants.<\/p>\n

Somewhere along the line somebody decides to group a bunch of the\u00a0students together into Jubilee’s class, and nothing about it really feels like it emerges organically from the\u00a0preceding story. \u00a0From Jubilee’s speech at the end,\u00a0it sounds as if the hook is supposed to be that the team have been grouped together because they’re unsuited to be superheroes\u00a0either because of their powers, or because of their personalities – so instead they’re going to be taught how to get by in the real world. \u00a0But\u00a0if that’s the premise, the story does a poor job of setting it up.<\/p>\n

Who have we got in the cast, then? \u00a0There’s Flashback, the new\u00a0point-of-view character who’s uncomfortable with the craziness. \u00a0I can’t say he comes across as a very well\u00a0defined character beyond that. \u00a0Eye-Boy and Nature Girl are back, but\u00a0neither gets much to do. \u00a0Bling!, who’s been floating around as a background character for years, finally gets her moment in the sun; she is mostly angry. \u00a0And Quentin Quire is the star of the bunch, apparently relegated to this group on the logic that he’s still too flaky to put in a real X-Men team, even if he’s easily powerful enough for it.<\/p>\n

Quentin gets most of the focus here, and the angle seems to be that his\u00a0schtick has become\u00a0a largely self-sabotaging exercise in promoting his\u00a0own mythology. \u00a0He’s\u00a0powerful enough to beat the villains singlehandedly but incapable of doing it without pointlessly showing off and\u00a0gratuitously scaring people. \u00a0I’m guessing – though they don’t get much interaction here – that Bling! is meant to be here as the contrast character whose anger is more authentic and less of an affectation. \u00a0And that could work. \u00a0It’s a pretty good take on Quentin, and I can see it working as a direction.<\/p>\n

Amilcar Pinna’s art is okay, but it’s missing something. \u00a0The second issue offers what ought to be a great visual set piece, in which Quentin is asked to restore a smashed up classroom and puts all the furniture on the ceiling, but something about the focus never quite draws it out fully. \u00a0It comes across as a background gag when it\u00a0should have been front and centre.<\/p>\n

What’s mainly missing here, though, is a story which convincingly sets\u00a0up the premise of the book, and\u00a0bad guys who are\u00a0more than just generics advancing the plot. \u00a0The character work is decent and there are\u00a0elements that could grow over time, but\u00a0at root the story is very average.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We reviewed\u00a0Generation X\u00a0on the podcast a few weeks ago, but it turns out that the book is opening with a two-parter, so here we are already. \u00a0This is a straightforward intro story –\u00a0very straightforward – so, sure, if you’re going to start with this, best get it over with. Be warned, this is basically going […]<\/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-3794","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\/3794","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=3794"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3796,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3794\/revisions\/3796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}