Well, this is not very good.<\/p>\n
And it’s a shame to be saying that, because “The Negative Zone War” is also the\u00a0X-Men: Gold<\/em> storyline which relies least on nostalgia. \u00a0That’s not to say that it’s strikingly original – the X-Men visit another world and get caught up in the local civil war, which is not new. \u00a0But it’s a world they have no connection with, and it’s a new villain.<\/p>\n In fact, that seems to be a large part of the story. \u00a0Kologoth – the alien bad guy who had an origin issue a few months back – is finally rescued when his rebel army open a portal to Earth. \u00a0The rescue mission causes a bit of chaos, the X-Men get involved, and Kitty and Kurt wind up stuck on the ship when it goes home. \u00a0And so the X-Men go after them. \u00a0But while Kologoth is mildly pleased to have the chance to imprison a couple of X-Men in turn, he’s not\u00a0that<\/em> bothered.<\/p>\n So when the rest of the team come on their rescue mission, Kologoth pretty much shrugs his shoulders and says, fine, take these guys off my hands. \u00a0It’s the X-Men who spend more time worrying about whether they should bother getting involved in the local civil war, which they may or may not fully understand; Kologoth, quite sensibly, just wants them to go home before they get in his way.<\/p>\n This seems mildly interesting, at least as a departure from normal villain behaviour. \u00a0And there are a couple of other vaguely promising points here too. \u00a0Kologoth’s relationship with his lover and aide Augor has some potential. \u00a0And, as foreshadowed in Kologoth’s origin issue, he does indeed turn out to be exploiting his followers’ religion, when what he actually wants to do is raise some sort of elder god – something which he claims to be the genuine, original form of the story.<\/p>\n But the good ideas stay undeveloped. \u00a0What we get is a story with a mish-mash of artists, with themes never quite getting developed, and with a couple of downright odd creative choices.<\/p>\n Across five issues, we’ve got three artists – Lan Medina, Ken Lashley, and Diego Bernard. \u00a0All are competent enough, none is especially memorable. \u00a0Lashley’s weird angular shading on clothes is just odd. \u00a0The plot, once we’re on Kologoth’s world, boils down to the X-Men meeting up with Kologoth for a prisoner swap, and Kologoth then deciding to just go ahead and raise his god Scythian. \u00a0Soon after that, Kologoth is summarily despatched by Logan, and the X-Men then spend half an issue figuring out how to launch Scythian into space (which does at least have some nice mechanics going on). \u00a0And there’s still an issue left, which is devoted to an odd coda of the X-Men crashlanding on\u00a0another<\/em> planet, picking themselves up, and going home. \u00a0It’s the sort of thing that would have worked better in a traditional ongoing title which didn’t expressly mark the beginning and end of storylines; billing it as part five of “Negative Zone War” feels strange.<\/p>\n More fundamentally, though, the plot doesn’t give space for Kologoth to be anything more than a mad conqueror who wants to raise a demon. \u00a0In theory, Kologoth is meant to be an X-Men villain because he’s a highly visible mutant who was an outcast from birth, and who is responding the wrong way by letting his bitterness consume him. \u00a0But to develop that theme, more needed to be done with his relationship with Augor, the one character who clearly\u00a0does<\/em> love and accept him; in practice, Augor winds up as an expository sounding board.<\/p>\n The religious beliefs of Augor and Kologoth’s other followers are never very clearly set up in the first place – what did<\/i> they think they were fighting for, and how do they react to Scythian actually showing up and turning out to be a demon Godzilla? \u00a0There’s a vague hint in here of a story about religion as a vehicle which dilutes horrific truths into something false but comforting, or (more conventionally) as something which can lead well-intentioned people in the wrong direction. \u00a0At any rate, a vague hint is as far as it gets – a gesture in the direction of a difficult but interesting topic. \u00a0And the obvious Nazi connotations of Kologoth’s army uniforms hardly set up his men as sympathetic freedom fighters – again, the story seems to back off before it gets to grips with any of this.<\/p>\n There’s an obvious plot problem: in part 2, Kologoth wants to give his prisoners back so that the X-Men will go away, because “Their abilities are formidable. \u00a0They could sway the balance. \u00a0We can risk nothing at this stage.” \u00a0So what does he do in part 3? \u00a0He decides to meet the X-Men at precisely the point where Scythian’s statute is going to come to life, thus maximising the chances of them being around to interfere. \u00a0In fact, it’s not even terribly clear to me what Kologoth actually did to bring Scythian back to life.<\/p>\n Then there’s the odd choice of characters to use in this story. \u00a0Kitty and Kurt are needed as prisoners, and Rachel’s otherwise occupied in a subplot – all fair enough – so we have a rescue squad consisting of Logan, Colossus, Storm, Armor and Ink. \u00a0Armor’s barely been used in some time, but she’s been an X-Man before and she’s a somewhat reasonable choice. \u00a0Ink, on the other hand, has barely been seen since\u00a0Young X-Men\u00a0<\/em>was cancelled in 2009.<\/p>\n He’s a Marc Guggenheim creation, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with a writer bringing back a concept that he didn’t get to finish properly the last time. \u00a0I’m all for cycling in new characters, or underused old ones. \u00a0But he feels like a random choice when he’s done so little for so long, and while he gets plenty of panel time in this story, he winds up feeling generic. \u00a0The story just doesn’t sell him as an interesting character, beyond his curious gimmicky power.<\/p>\n At the end of all this, we wind up with Kitty deciding to propose to Peter, something which also doesn’t really seem to emerge in any particularly concrete way from the story that went before. \u00a0This is a blur of half-formed concepts, some of which showed more promise. \u00a0It’s thoroughly underwhelming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, this is not very good. And it’s a shame to be saying that, because “The Negative Zone War” is also the\u00a0X-Men: Gold storyline which relies least on nostalgia. \u00a0That’s not to say that it’s strikingly original – the X-Men visit another world and get caught up in the local civil war, which is not […]<\/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-4012","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\/4012","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=4012"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4014,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4012\/revisions\/4014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}