{"id":4178,"date":"2018-06-21T22:39:10","date_gmt":"2018-06-21T21:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4178"},"modified":"2018-06-21T22:39:10","modified_gmt":"2018-06-21T21:39:10","slug":"x-men-blue-23-28-cry-havok","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4178","title":{"rendered":"X-Men Blue #23-28 – “Cry Havok”"},"content":{"rendered":"

When we left off\u00a0X-Men Blue<\/em>, the X-Men were tied up in a crossover with\u00a0Venom<\/em>, which does not interest me in the slightest. \u00a0Since Jean Grey returns to the cast just fine in issue #29, and something happens to Jimmy Hudson in the interim as well, apparently I’m meant to have read that Venom series, but I’m not going to because I have less than zero interest in Venom and it’s Not Technically An X-Book.<\/p>\n

So with its core cast otherwise occupied,\u00a0X-Men Blue<\/em> gives us that old favourite, the stand-in team arc. \u00a0It wouldn’t be fair to call this filler; it’s not. \u00a0It pays off the Mothervine subplot which has been building for months. \u00a0And it finally does the only thing you can possibly do with Inverted Havok: change him back, and make enough of a fuss about it to pretend it’s a big deal rather than just hitting the reset button on a dodgy idea.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The plot, then. \u00a0Miss Sinister’s Mothervine idea is basically to use the mutant DNA she got from the Ultimate Universe characters to create some sort of genetic weapon which is going to create tons of new mutants and power up some of the mutants that already exist. \u00a0(This is why some people suddenly had new powers during the\u00a0Secret Empire<\/em> tie-in issues.) \u00a0Magneto doesn’t have the teenage X-Men to throw at the problem, but he does still have Polaris, Bloodstorm and Jimmy Hudson on hand. \u00a0To round out the group, at least by halfway through the story, we have one of the Raksha, Xorn and Daken, whose personality continues to oscillate wildly between titles, and who would really benefit from the editors picking one reading of the character and sticking with it for a while.<\/p>\n

Miss Sinister, meanwhile, is hooked up with a rather random assortment of villains: Bastion, Havok and Emma Frost. \u00a0We established in an earlier storyline that Bastion is currently suffering from a programming glitch that makes him want to build up the mutant population again, because he’s programmed to kill them as an end in itself, and he can’t do that if he runs out. \u00a0This has nothing much to do with the current storyline, but one thing I do appreciate about\u00a0Blue<\/em> (and\u00a0Gold<\/em>, for that matter) is the juggling of ongoing subplots; there is at least a restored sense of a bigger picture, and of events having consequences.<\/p>\n

Havok and Emma are more important to the plot. \u00a0He’s there because post-Axis<\/em>, he’s a mutant supremacist; she’s there because she wants to build up the mutant population and doesn’t have many moral scruples about how to do it. \u00a0What they’re going for, I suppose, is that inverted Havok still retains some sense of identity and idealism, but it now manifests as something rather unpleasant; and putting him next to the morally gray Emma is supposed to play up the idea that this is, in some recognisable sense, Havok gone astray, as opposed to just a generic sadist persona.<\/p>\n

Naturally, it quickly becomes apparent that there’s a problem with these Mothervine powers, which tend to burn out unpleasantly, or cause horrible, traumatic mutations in the affected humans. \u00a0More to the point, it turns out that all the Mothervined mutants are open to mind control by Miss Sinister, so she’s going to wind up with an army – though she tries to spin it as a useful feature to help ease the traumatic transition. \u00a0There’s some dodgy plotting on that point. \u00a0The idea seems to be that Emma and Alex are planning to let Sinister create the new mutants before taking her out of the picture, but somewhere between parts 1 and 4, Emma goes from being suspicious that Sinister plans to control the new mutants, to finding it an incredible surprise. \u00a0(And none of this entirely explains why Sinister really needs them around to start with, beyond the fact that the plot requires it.)<\/p>\n

There are quite a few diversions to get this up to six issues, which is presumably why we get a diversion with Ultimate Malice, issues #25-26 throw in some scenes of the original team still waiting to join their\u00a0Venom<\/em> crossover, and long forgotten cannon fodder like Wildside and Dragoness. \u00a0Even Exodus crops up out of nowhere in the final issue. \u00a0But as an arc, it keeps up the pace nicely, it has a decent sense of scale, and Jorge Molina does a great job of juggling an insanely large cast while keeping things readable. \u00a0Whether the book really benefits from having quite so many characters running around is debatable; I’m really not convinced Daken and Xorn are adding anything here. \u00a0Still, the art handles it all impressively.<\/p>\n

But the pay-off for all this is that Emma sees sense and turns on the other bad guys, and then she cures Alex by… um… \u00a0Well, there needs to be a reason why she couldn’t have done this ages ago, so the rationale is that having Lorna to hand helps, because they\u00a0used<\/em> to be in love, and…<\/p>\n

Look, it’s ultimately just a device to draw a line under a bad idea, and it winds up illustrating the problem that was there all along: for the most part, the “inverted” characters simply haven’t been recognisable as versions of themselves, and there’s nothing you can do with them as supposed expansions from the regular character. \u00a0Weapon X<\/em> has been having a bold stab at it with Sabretooth, but only by playing the idea that he might be reverting to type. \u00a0This arc has a reasonable go at trying to persuade us that an inverted Havok is a somewhat recognisable mutant supremacist, but it doesn’t really work because Havok doesn’t have the sort of strong character traits that can still punch through when he’s being a villain.<\/p>\n

The bottom line is that the story ends with a passing psychic flipping the switch back, with a whole lot of chaos being thrown around to give the impression that it’s a climax of something or other, but it doesn’t really emerge from anything we’ve seen in the story. \u00a0It’s doing its best with a bad hand, and the smoke and mirrors more or less get it to work – and I do appreciate the effort to make it feel like a major turning point instead of a reset button. \u00a0The storyline is quite good fun as it’s going along, but it does seem like empty calories in hindsight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When we left off\u00a0X-Men Blue, the X-Men were tied up in a crossover with\u00a0Venom, which does not interest me in the slightest. \u00a0Since Jean Grey returns to the cast just fine in issue #29, and something happens to Jimmy Hudson in the interim as well, apparently I’m meant to have read that Venom series, but […]<\/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-4178","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\/4178","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=4178"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4179,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4178\/revisions\/4179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}