{"id":3998,"date":"2018-01-07T20:48:52","date_gmt":"2018-01-07T20:48:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3998"},"modified":"2018-01-07T20:48:52","modified_gmt":"2018-01-07T20:48:52","slug":"astonishing-x-men-1-6-life-of-x","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3998","title":{"rendered":"Astonishing X-Men #1-6: “Life of X”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Astonishing X-Men<\/em> picked up a few votes in our end of year poll in the pleasant surprise category. \u00a0And it is indeed better than you might have expected, even if this says as much about expectations as it does about the comic itself. \u00a0After all, if you follow up a slightly subdued relaunch by suddenly saying “hey, here’s another X-Men book”, and push it on the basis that it\u00a0doesn’t<\/em> have a regular artist… well.<\/p>\n

After a gentle prologue in which the Shadow King attacks various low-level hermit psychics to regain his foothold on Earth, issue #1 kicks off the story proper with him having a stab at seizing Psylocke. \u00a0This lets him use whichever X-Men he wants, since the result is a lot of psychic thrashing around in London, and whichever X-Men are nearest turning up to help.<\/p>\n

So our cast for this series turns out to Psylocke herself, Bishop (who we’re going to treat as rehabilitated and pretend that whole thing with Hope didn’t happen), Logan, Rogue, Angel, Fantomex, Gambit and Beast. \u00a0Only Beast turns out next issue to be Mystique, who doesn’t have an ulterior motive – she isn’t especially keen on the Shadow King taking over the world either – but figured that nobody would trust her if she just showed up as herself.<\/p>\n

Anyhow, this makes for a strong first issue, which quickly lays out the groundwork to introduce the cast (or, if you prefer, spell out how Soule sees them), deals with a secondary threat (getting Psylocke under control), and then sets up the real plot for the remaining five issues: the Shadow King is getting very, very powerful again, so some of the team will have to go to the astral plane to fight him now, right this minute, absolutely now, which means they’re going to have to do it in the middle of London while fending off the authorities who understandably want to know what the hell was going on. \u00a0It’s a good set-up, and since this arc ends up leading directly to the next one, the characters who spend these issues on guard duty may well get more to do next time round.<\/p>\n

But the big reveal at the end of issue #1 is that the Shadow King has got the spirit of Professor X chained up. \u00a0So, yes, it’s time for the return of Professor X. \u00a0This calls for some tricky plot mechanics, since Professor X was about as definitively dead as you can be in comics – they cut out his brain and used it as a macguffin in Uncanny Avengers<\/em>, for god’s sake. \u00a0Still, that doesn’t preclude a spot of astral projection which allows his spirit to live on. \u00a0The obvious way around this would be to wheel out the Starjammers to clone him another new body, but that’s not where Soule is heading – a point which actually becomes rather clearer in issue #7.<\/p>\n

At this point the story starts developing some meta undertones. \u00a0But much of issue #2 is the astral excursion team – Logan, Rogue, Gambit, Mystique and Fantomex – obliviously watching a play consisting of stock X-Men tropes while Xavier tries to nudge them into breaking the illusion. \u00a0As far as the Shadow King is concerned, he and Xavier are engaged in some sort of game (Xavier is stringing him along, but he spends the first part of the story seeming to agree). \u00a0Xavier does in fact win the first round by, in effect, subverting the X-Men cliches – and then gets a little speech about the limits of nostalgia.<\/p>\n

Hmm.<\/p>\n

This meta theme resurfaces big time in issue #5, by which time the astral team have gone off to experience their own separate illusions, and a multi-tasking Xavier has been trying to get through to them in fairly conventional Claremont style. \u00a0So you’ve got Rogue and Gambit in a hot tub, which both of them quickly recognise as an illusion, but Gambit’s not desperately keen to escape from anyway. \u00a0In a clever touch, Logan is determinedly plodding through the illusions towards the Shadow King, unfazed by everything that’s thrown at him – but he’s so determined about it that he ignores Xavier too.<\/p>\n

At this point we get a big speech for Xavier – which, interestingly, is presented in parallel to a slightly different speech that he gives to Fantomex – explaining what he and the Shadow King have been up to. \u00a0Unsurprisingly, he basically says that they’ve been locked in psychic battle for what seems like years, but then goes on to explain that after starting with emotion, they “turned to story”, and have been using the X-Men as raw material for those stories. \u00a0“Recently, it’s been time travel, and then a mutant-killing plague.” \u00a0It’s pretty obvious that he’s talking about the last few years of X-Men stories, even if it’s unclear whether this is meant to be coincidence or some sort of influence on the outside world. \u00a0If the latter, it’s interesting to note that the logic of Xavier’s account is that the Shadow King\u00a0won<\/em> all of these battles, which is a curious take on the way those stories ended. \u00a0(Of course, Soule himself co-wrote\u00a0Inhumans vs X-Men<\/em>, which is one of those stories…)<\/p>\n

The upshot of all this is that the Shadow King gets control of Logan and Gambit, and starts using them to spread his psychic infection in London; and Xavier gets Rogue and Mystique on side to escape the astral plane. \u00a0As for Fantomex, he winds up surrendering his body so that Xavier can use it to return to Earth. \u00a0From there, things continue into the next arc, but it seems pretty clear that Soule is going out of his way to restore Xavier, but in a sufficiently different way to avoid hitting the reset button.<\/p>\n

This is fortunate, because until this point becomes clear, the story seems to be pulling in different directions. \u00a0It’s clearly a “return of Professor X” story, yet the story keeps talking about the limits of nostalgia and the importance of moving forward. \u00a0Xavier tells us outright that the characters who escape the Shadow King’s control are the most flexible ones – Rogue and Mystique have literally shifting identities, but they’re also characters who seem to still be developing, or at least to have avoided settling into a rut. \u00a0In contrast, Gambit is in love with his persona and keeps wanting to turn the clock back to when he and Rogue were a couple; and Logan is the ultimate static character, someone who’s lived through the apocalypse and the death of everyone he loves and\u00a0still<\/em> winds up reverting to the same basic personality inside a year. \u00a0As for Fantomex, we’ve been told many times that his character traits are hardwired into him, making him \u00a0unable to grow – even if writers have had varying takes on how literally we should take that.<\/p>\n

Soule’s view seems to be that the way forward is to do the classics but make sure to have enough twists to avoid it all being too safe. \u00a0And this arc seems a good example of that. \u00a0In many ways it’s very Claremont indeed – he always loved a good psychic illusion – but issue #6 makes clear that he’s not simply reviving Xavier (and issue #7 bends over backwards to stress that the revived Xavier is really quite different).<\/p>\n

What about the art, then? \u00a0The decision to use rotating artists as a selling point was, to put it mildly, curious. \u00a0The lack of a consistent voice is not normally a plus. \u00a0On the other hand, there are big names attached here – Jim Cheung, Mike Deodato Jr, Ed McGuinness, Carlos Pacheco, Ramon Rosanas (the lowest profile name here, but his issue has a nice Paul Smith feel to it), and Mike Del Mundo.<\/p>\n

Individually, every issue looks good. \u00a0And most of these artists are close enough in style that the shift isn’t too jarring – bold, primary colour stuff. \u00a0Deodato is another matter, with his current fondness for heavy shadow and weird grids; and Del Mundo is miles away from everyone else, with a more washed-out, sickly colour palette. \u00a0He seems ideally suited to astral plane weirdness, but his issue is mostly in the real world.<\/p>\n

It’s certainly possible to use multiple artists in a way that serves the story, for example if they’re reflecting different characters’ points of view. \u00a0The subjectivity of the astral plane seems like it should lend itself to that. \u00a0But there’s no real sense that the book is making any particular attempt to accommodate its multiple artists, and while the actual choice of artists leads to good work, the more visible joins are not a plus.<\/p>\n

The jury is still out on where all this is going, and whether Soule really can have his nostalgia cake and eat it – that depends hugely on how his revamped Professor X settles down over the next few issues. \u00a0Still, this is a good start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Astonishing X-Men picked up a few votes in our end of year poll in the pleasant surprise category. \u00a0And it is indeed better than you might have expected, even if this says as much about expectations as it does about the comic itself. \u00a0After all, if you follow up a slightly subdued relaunch by suddenly […]<\/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-3998","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\/3998","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=3998"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3999,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3998\/revisions\/3999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}