{"id":4072,"date":"2018-03-06T22:30:58","date_gmt":"2018-03-06T22:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4072"},"modified":"2018-03-06T22:30:58","modified_gmt":"2018-03-06T22:30:58","slug":"x-men-gold-21-22-brotherhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4072","title":{"rendered":"X-Men Gold #21-22: “Brotherhood”"},"content":{"rendered":"

We can take this one quickly, because although\u00a0X-Men Gold\u00a0<\/em>#21-22 are billed as a two-part story, they’re really not. \u00a0That’s not to say that bracketing them together is completely random – there’s certainly a story unit here, for want of a better word – but\u00a0X-Men Gold<\/em> is written more as a throwback to the open-ended storylines of the 80s and 90s, before things came in defined arcs. \u00a0So “Brotherhood” is really two issues of set-up – or, if you prefer, it’s not so much a story as a first act.<\/p>\n

From the X-Men’s point of view, the story is very simple. \u00a0Mesmero’s Brotherhood show up again, attacking a Heritage Initiative fundraising event. \u00a0The X-Men dutifully go to save the day. \u00a0But Mesmero is an illusionist, so he tricks them into fighting the police and runs away. \u00a0Kitty decides they should probably play along with the authorities, since they did<\/em> beat up some cops and all, so the team are carted off to jail, which is where we can presumably expect to find them in issue #23’s “Cruel & Unusual, Part 1”.<\/p>\n

So the immediate purpose of this story is simply to get the X-Men to jail and to deliver a fight scene that lasts most of issue #22. \u00a0But in fairness, there’s more going on than that, because Marc Guggenheim also likes to slow-burn his subplots in the style of 20 or 30 years ago. \u00a0(Artist Diego Bernard is a pretty good fit for this, since there’s a decided early nineties feel to his stuff, though with a bit less flash and a bit more character building.)<\/p>\n

This means there’s quite a lot of stuff going on in here which has no immediate pay-off, but seems to be gradually advancing secondary threads, or just keeping some plates spinning. \u00a0Magma insists on tagging along with the rescue team so that she can get her hands on Mesmero, and naturally turns out to be a liability when she won’t take direction. \u00a0Rachel has gone back to her Hound tattoos and spiked costume and seems worryingly cheerful about the whole thing. \u00a0Kitty lets both of them go into the fight against her better judgment and gets to kick herself for seeing the mission go off the rails in precisely the way she saw coming a mile off, if only she’d been a bit less indulgent. \u00a0It’s all simple enough, but it does feel contribute to\u00a0X-Men Gold<\/em>‘s greatest asset: it feels like Guggenheim has a direction in mind for all these storylines.<\/p>\n

On the villain side, there’s a random flashback to the childhood of Lydia Nance, the Heritage Initiative leader who’s clearly being set up as this book’s big bad. \u00a0Thus far, Nance has been a one-dimensional stand-in for the American hard right, and not a heavily disguised one at that. \u00a0Her origin flashback seems to establish her as the victim of an abusive mutant father, which… well, on the one hand, it’s something to add to her character, but on the other, it doesn’t seem a particularly typical motive for the sort of people she’s supposed to embody. \u00a0We’ll see how it plays out.<\/p>\n

Most of the heavy lifting, though, centres on the new Pyro, who’s the focus of these two issues. \u00a0We established back at the start of\u00a0X-Men Gold<\/em> that Mesmero’s new Brotherhood had two new guys claiming to be Pyro and Avalanche. \u00a0This is where we find out more about them; Pyro II, it turns out, is a kid from Brooklyn who first signed up with Mesmero because he thought he was joining the X-Men. \u00a0He’s furious with both Mesmero and Lydia Nance but, being a sucker, sticks with Mesmero in order to get out of jail and take part in what he thinks is a revenge attack on Nance. \u00a0Of course, it’s not a revenge attack at all, it’s just another PR stunt which was commissioned by her all along. \u00a0By the end of the two parter, Pyro has rejected his cut and stormed out, which presumably means he’ll be showing up on the X-Men’s doorstep any minute, since it’s not like they’re hard to find. \u00a0(As for the new Avalanche, he’s delighted with his new criminal career and just wants to know if he can have Pyro’s cut too.)<\/p>\n

Pyro seems to have some potential as a character; he’s got some obviously villainous tendencies, such as a willingness to sign up for revenge attacks on political fundraisers, but he’s not in it for the money and he’s quietly horrified at the thought of actually using his fire powers on other people. \u00a0It’s nothing ground breaking but you can see how it could work.<\/p>\n

Still, for all that I can catalogue the things that are building for the future, it’s quite a slight story here and now. \u00a0As so often with\u00a0Gold<\/em>, it’s basically fine, and much depends on how much goodwill you’re willing to extend to the longer-term stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We can take this one quickly, because although\u00a0X-Men Gold\u00a0#21-22 are billed as a two-part story, they’re really not. \u00a0That’s not to say that bracketing them together is completely random – there’s certainly a story unit here, for want of a better word – but\u00a0X-Men Gold is written more as a throwback to the open-ended storylines […]<\/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-4072","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\/4072","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=4072"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4074,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4072\/revisions\/4074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}