{"id":413,"date":"2010-07-18T17:44:40","date_gmt":"2010-07-18T16:44:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=413"},"modified":"2010-07-18T17:44:40","modified_gmt":"2010-07-18T16:44:40","slug":"the-x-axis-18-july-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=413","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 18 July 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s a podcast weekend, so don’t forget to check a couple of posts below<\/a> for this week’s episode. \u00a0As well as rounding up the news, Al and I are talking about the first issues of Scarlet<\/em>, Royal Historian of Oz<\/em> and Dr Solar, Man of the Atom<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It’s also a weekend with a deluge of comics and not much free time, so I still have a sizeable pile of books to be read (including pretty much all of my non-superhero purchases for the week). \u00a0Still, with six X-books to talk about, there probably wouldn’t be much space for anything else anyway…<\/p>\n

Oh, and yes, I know there’s a wrestling show tonight, but I’m not going to have time to write a preview for it. \u00a0Just in case any of you were waiting.<\/p>\n

Amazing Spider-Man<\/em> #637<\/strong> – The final part of “The Grim Hunt” and, er, as we were discussing on the podcast, did we miss the bit where Arana loses her powers? \u00a0Didn’t Young Allies<\/em> say that was supposed to be happening in this story? Or was it buried somewhere in all the cod mysticism? \u00a0This arc really hasn’t worked for me, which is a shame – the occasional dud isn’t a major problem with a book that comes out on this frequency, but this story was supposed to be the pay-off for an extended build. \u00a0Actually, there are some bits of this issue that I quite like, such as Kraven trying to get himself killed again. \u00a0But there’s a lot of babbling nonsense about the web of life, as \u00a0Joe Kelly struggles manfully to retrofit a bunch of knock-off Spider-Man characters into a profound metaphor; the Kraven family are impossible to relate to as villains; and there’s a whole “dark Spider-Man” thing going on which is never particularly interesting. \u00a0Kelly seems to be trying a “Kraven clan versus Spider-Man clan” schtick, but to do it, he has to use a bunch of characters like Julia Carpenter and Alyosha Kraven who simply don’t belong in that story because their ties to their respective groups are superficial at best. \u00a0Even without that, though, I’m not convinced that there’s a particularly interesting concept in here – it comes across as a story which is trying extremely hard to appear meaningful, without ever really getting its point across.<\/p>\n

Avengers Academy<\/em> #2<\/strong> – After a strong debut, this is another very promising issue. \u00a0From the look of it, Christos Gage is going to spend the first few issues focussing on different characters in turn. \u00a0This month, it’s Finesse, whose gimmick is that she can pick up any skill instantly, but she can’t relate to other people at all. \u00a0It looks like they’re going for an Aspergers-type route here, although she does make a point of saying that she doesn’t have all the usual symptoms. \u00a0Since the idea of this book is that the student superheroes have really been enlisted because the Avengers suspect they might go nuts become villains (and the students know this, but the Avengers don’t know<\/em> they know), it makes sense to have a character who could clearly go either way. \u00a0Otherwise the Avengers just seem paranoid. \u00a0Gage seems to be earmarking Finesse for that role, and this is a really good focus on the character – eccentrics are really hard to write convincingly, because they can so easily descend into one-note characters, but Gage manages to flesh her out persuasively in this story, and set up some suitably convoluted soap plotlines at the same time. \u00a0Beautiful art from Mike McKone, too – someone who’s clearly right at home with Marvel’s current “Heroic Age” direction.<\/p>\n

Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine<\/em> #2<\/strong> – Blissfully ludicrous stuff. \u00a0Jason Aaron is going about as far over the top here as it’s possible to imagine – this is bordering on stream of consciousness lunacy at times. \u00a0Even so, it’s got enough of a central thread, and gets the voice of the characters well enough, that it never quite spins off the rails. \u00a0And Aaron knows how to give one idea enough time to sink in before bringing on something even crazier. \u00a0Insane time travel stories aren’t the obvious thing to do with Spider-Man or Wolverine, but they give Adam Kubert the chance to go nuts, and free up the story from having to worry about any inconvenient knock-on effects on the rest of the Marvel Universe. \u00a0Tremendously silly, in a good way, and hugely enjoyable.<\/p>\n

Doctor Solar: Man of the Atom<\/em> #1<\/strong> – We talk about this on the podcast, but suffice to say it’s not very good. \u00a0Dark Horse are reviving several of the characters from the nineties Valiant imprint, starting here with Jim Shooter and Dennis Calero on Dr Solar. \u00a0There’s a halfway interesting plot hook here, but the pacing is leaden, the technobabble is clumsy, and the story doesn’t play to Calero’s strengths at all – his brightly-coloured action sequences look awfully stiff. \u00a0And heaven only knows what the title character’s powers are meant to be, since Shooter never actually gets around to explaining it. \u00a0It’s really a bit of a clunker all round. \u00a0A reprint of the 1962 original story does offer some historic interest, but it’s hardly a lost classic either.<\/p>\n

Hellbound<\/em> #3<\/strong> – The conclusion of a “Second Coming” tie-in miniseries. \u00a0The plot of “Second Coming” requires all the X-Men’s teleporters to be taken out of commission early on; that means Magik has to be removed from the board; and that triggers this mini, where a bunch of lesser X-Men have to rescue her from Limbo. \u00a0And that’s the “Second Coming” link – it takes a minor plot point from the crossover as its starting point, then goes off to tell its own story. \u00a0Chris Yost treats this mainly as an opportunity to pick up on the stray plot threads from New X-Men<\/em>, where Magik was first brought back into the cast. \u00a0Issue #2 was a bit shapeless, but this is better, building to a fairly decent climax with Magik reconciling with the New X-Men. \u00a0It’s all too heavily tied in to earlier storylines to work as a self-contained three-part miniseries, but it does help to take forward some dangling plot threads. \u00a0I’m still not wild about the art, though – it’s all rather generic Hell imagery, and while it flows a bit better than the previous issue, the pages often feel cluttered.<\/p>\n

The Royal Historian of Oz<\/em> #1<\/strong> – A one dollar debut issue from Slave Labor Graphics, launching a new series by Tommy Kovac and Andy Hirsch, this is well worth picking up. \u00a0Despite the title, this isn’t a Wizard of Oz spin-off (though since Baum’s novels have been in the public domain for years, there wouldn’t be anything to stop it). \u00a0It’s actually set in a near future when the Official Oz Society have captured the exclusive rights to the series, and aspiring writer Jasper Fizzle wants to become the new official Oz author. \u00a0Unfortunately, he’s not very good, and the Society want nothing to do with him. \u00a0But when he discovers a route to Oz itself… \u00a0You get the idea. \u00a0The Oz elements aren’t entirely the point; it’s more about the ownership of old stories and how they’re used. \u00a0More to the point, it’s a clever, skilfully told story, which makes inventive use of its source material.<\/p>\n

Uncanny X-Men: The Heroic Age<\/em> #1<\/strong> – A one-shot bridging the gap between “Second Coming” and “The Five Lights”. \u00a0It’s basically a Matt Fraction issue of Uncanny X-Men<\/em>, with Whilce Portacio, Steve Sanders and Jamie McKelvie splitting the pages depending on who’s in them. \u00a0(Getting Sanders to draw the Beast’s pages, considering how off-model his version of the character is, seems a weird choice – especially when Portacio does a more conventional version only pages earlier. \u00a0But whatever.) \u00a0There are basically three strands here – Scott is persuaded that the X-Men should try and capitalise on their “saviours of San Francisco” status to be proper heroes again; Hank tries to explain the current state of mutantkind to Molly from the Runaways; and Hope decides that she’d like to go and find out who her parents were – something that, astonishingly, it turns out the X-Men still haven’t got around to investigating.<\/p>\n

It’s a pretty good issue on the whole, though I can’t help thinking that it’s doing the Beast story about two years late. \u00a0The idea here is that Hank, as the man of science, doesn’t buy into the idea that Hope’s important, because there’s no real evidence for it. \u00a0So, by implication, Scott’s belief in her significance really is meant to be a leap of quasi-religious faith. \u00a0In theory that’s an interesting idea – the problem is that the characters should have been having this conversation ages ago, when in fact Hank and Scott’s arguments have been about Scott straying into moral grey areas, and haven’t been about this topic at all. \u00a0The idea that Hope is important hasn’t been portrayed as a leap of faith for the characters, but as a self-evident truth which didn’t require any evidence as long as the story asserted it confidently enough. \u00a0And while it’s nice to get that cleared up, it’s faintly bizarre for Hank to be taking the point now<\/em>, after Hope’s return demonstrably has<\/em> achieved something. \u00a0(You could, if you wanted, read this as a “how dare you not buy into my premise” scene… but I think Fraction seems to have too much affection for Hank for that to be the intention.) \u00a0Still, the general direction seems promising.<\/p>\n

X-Force: Sex and Violence<\/em> #1<\/strong> – X-Force were disbanded at the end of “Second Coming”, and the new series doesn’t launch until the autumn, so this is a filler miniseries. \u00a0Kyle and Yost are still writing, Gabriele Dell’Otto is on art. \u00a0It’s a simple story – Domino’s got herself into a bit of trouble with a mercenary job she should probably have thought twice about, now everyone’s after her for revenge, and the rest of the team have to bail her out. \u00a0It’s basically an excuse to go completely over the top with a lunatic action story, and to give Dell’Otto a chance to show off. \u00a0X-Force<\/em> has always had a tendency to take itself far too seriously, but there’s none of that here; it’s a gleefully hyper action story with some great artwork and no pretensions to anything beyond that, and I liked it a lot more than I was expecting to.<\/p>\n

X-Men Forever 2<\/em> #3<\/strong> – I doubt anyone will be surprised to learn that the title characters aren’t really dead after all, but have merely faked their death. \u00a0But the mechanics are quite neat, with the X-Men hiding in plain sight. \u00a0Claremont does indeed seem to be going back to the “everyone thinks the X-Men are dead” set-up from the late-eighties Australian period, which he was required to cut short. \u00a0Fair enough, that’s very much in the spirit of this series, which is supposed to revisit story ideas that he might have used in 1991 given the chance. \u00a0Mind you, the plot of this issue requires a fair amount of charity from the reader. \u00a0Not only do we have to accept Rogue jeopardising the whole plan for absolutely no good reason, but suddenly it turns out that the Australia-era X-Men are still invisible to cameras (a set-up from the late eighties which was quietly dropped towards the end of the Claremont run). \u00a0Now, am I imagining it, or didn’t the X-Men fight a bunch of robots earlier in this series without anyone raising the point that they were supposed to be invisible?<\/p>\n

X-Men: Second Coming <\/em>#2<\/strong> – The end of “Second Coming” is effectively an epilogue, and a transition into the next batch of stories. \u00a0Bastion was defeated in chapter 13, and this is more a set of short stories as everyone gets back to normal afterwards. \u00a0I’m still unconvinced that the story benefitted from the casual killing of Nightcrawler or from maiming the likes of Karma or Hellion – that’s a cheap way of making your story seem important. \u00a0But Cable’s death does work, and he gets a nice funeral here, with lovely art by Esad Ribic. \u00a0Elsewhere, we have a hazy attempt to explain Hope – which is fine, because the characters themselves are a bit hazy about her. \u00a0She’s clearly linked to Phoenix, but the idea – which I have to say didn’t come across at all well in part 13 – seems to be that she’s got a whole load of unrelated mutant powers, and might be some sort of embodiment of the mutant race. \u00a0There’s a clumsy sequence setting up the relaunch of X-Force, as Cyclops quite arbitrarily decides to change direction – it doesn’t help that much of this is drawn by Greg Land, who can’t even manage a recognisable X-23, but this really does seem like a completely random and out of place addition to the story.<\/p>\n

Most importantly, though, we’ve got the ending, with five new mutants showing up on the scanners, as the first sign that things are at least on their way back to normal with the return of Hope – though quite why remains a mystery. \u00a0It’s taken forever to get here, and it’s given us several years of a set-up that didn’t work very well at all, but we finally seem to be back on track. \u00a0Second Coming<\/em> #2 isn’t really a story so much as a collection of segues into upcoming storylines, but we’re clearly heading in the right direction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s a podcast weekend, so don’t forget to check a couple of posts below for this week’s episode. \u00a0As well as rounding up the news, Al and I are talking about the first issues of Scarlet, Royal Historian of Oz and Dr Solar, Man of the Atom. It’s also a weekend with a deluge of […]<\/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,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-413","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\/413","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=413"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":414,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions\/414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}