{"id":4191,"date":"2018-07-05T22:21:12","date_gmt":"2018-07-05T21:21:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4191"},"modified":"2018-07-05T22:21:12","modified_gmt":"2018-07-05T21:21:12","slug":"astonishing-x-men-7-12-a-man-called-x","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4191","title":{"rendered":"Astonishing X-Men #7-12: “A Man Called X”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The second half of Charles Soule’s run – which, I know,\u00a0I know<\/em>, finished a month ago – is one of those arcs that gets a separate title for TPB-bracketing purposes, but really is just the continuation of a single story. \u00a0We left off with the X-Men having apparently defeated the Shadow King, and Xavier having returned to Earth in the body of Fantomex… or something like that… and calling himself X.<\/p>\n

It’s an odd approach, and quite an intriguing one. \u00a0Soule knows perfectly well that bringing a beloved character back from the dead looks like a reset button, and that simply restoring Xavier to his pre-death status quo isn’t all\u00a0that<\/em> interesting. \u00a0Putting him back as the leader of the X-Men feels like a backward step for everyone; and he’s already done the coming-to-terms-with-his-past bit under Mike Carey.<\/p>\n

So Soule goes in the other direction, by bringing Xavier back almost in name only. \u00a0X doesn’t look like Xavier (he’s still dressed as Fantomex, for a start), he doesn’t especially act like Xavier, he doesn’t even want to be called by Xavier’s name. \u00a0Nobody else is entirely convinced that he\u00a0is<\/em> Xavier. \u00a0Calling himself “X” seems to be at once a denial of his identity and a passive-aggressive insistence that he’s still the centre of the X-Men’s universe. \u00a0And he speaks in inverted-colour speech balloons, though heaven knows what that’s meant to sound like.<\/p>\n

Oh, and as issue #7 begins, the UK government is still planning to drop an enormous bomb on everyone to sterilise the area, which is a plot thread left dangling from the previous arc. \u00a0That gives everyone something to do as X sorts it all out in a disturbingly casual way. \u00a0He’s talking about giving people “gifts” from an early stage, and making reassuring comments about how he’s definitely Xavier and you should definitely trust him, but he just\u00a0isn’t<\/em>, and the X-Men respond accordingly.<\/p>\n

Somewhat randomly, this all results in the return of Proteus, for reasons which are rather less clear than one might have wished – there’s a bit of handwaving that the Shadow King was using him somehow, and that’s about it. \u00a0But after some initial staggering around killing people to charge up his energy supply, Proteus calms down a bit and starts complaining that he was a child when the X-Men fought him the first time round, and really just wants to be left alone. \u00a0X, naturally, has a stab at killing him anyway, which gets us into the good old reality-warping stuff…<\/p>\n

Which is a useful thing for this book. \u00a0After all,\u00a0Astonishing X-Men<\/em> has the unfortunate gimmick of changing artists with every issue, which is not desperately conducive to consistency. \u00a0Issues #7 and #8 come across alright, since Phil Noto and Paulo Siqueira aren’t too far distant in style, even if Noto’s issue has a bit more personality. \u00a0But if you want to make something of the rotating artists, best to have some drastic tone shifts built into the story. \u00a0Matteo Buffagni, in issue #9, isn’t that radically unusual, but he gets to have fun with weird stretching, and Giada Marchisio, colouring that issue, makes things look appropriately sickly. \u00a0Still, Buffagni’s probably better at the sense of place when the story decamps to a Highland village for Proteus to hijack it for his experiment.<\/p>\n

The idea here, I think, is that X’s talk about gifts – which recurs in the final issue – is being played off with Proteus’ rather odd idea of turning the village into a place where his reality-warping powers mean that everyone can have anything they want. \u00a0In Proteus’s eyes, this is apparently some sort of gift, because he’s letting everyone else rewrite reality the way he can. \u00a0But because everyone has entirely inconsistent ideas about what they’d like to achieve, the result is chaos. \u00a0Aco, pencilling issue #10, gets to do an issue of everything going completely mad, and takes full advantage of that.<\/p>\n

Proteus’s ideas here are odd, and it’s had to avoid the feeling that he’s not a character so much as a counterpoint for Xavier. \u00a0(Then again, it’s not like Proteus was ever what you’d call rounded.) \u00a0He insists he hasn’t killed the villagers, he’s just given them the chance to choose. \u00a0But he also makes another point: that Xavier’s dream is ultimately based on an optimistic view of humanity, where the majority of people are basically good. \u00a0Proteus argues that if this view is correct, then the good intentions of the majority of his villagers ought to prevail and bring about paradise. \u00a0It’s not clear whether Proteus actually expects that to happen, or whether he’s just trying to provoke Xavier by proving that the majority of people, left to their own devices, will do something awful. \u00a0Xavier\/X’s only real responses is to deny that they’ve made an\u00a0informed<\/em> choice.<\/p>\n

By issue #11 we’re on to rather sketchy Ron Garney art as Proteus tries to spread his grand idea around the world. \u00a0This all looks rather rough, and boy, it’s an issue that’s heavy on the lime green. \u00a0And there’s a twist – sort of – as the Shadow King turns out to have been hiding inside X all along. \u00a0Hardly a huge surprise, given that he was so obviously dodgy and was talking in Shadow King’s inverted-colour speech balloons.<\/p>\n

Except… \u00a0that\u00a0doesn’t<\/em> seem to be where it ends up. \u00a0The X-Men naturally beat Shadow King in the final issue – which is drawn by Gerardo Sandoval and is decidedly lacking in subtlety compared to everything we’ve seen before in this arc, with lots of very stagey posing and angularity, and pages that don’t flow at all well. \u00a0There’s even a big panel of Gambit holding a deck of cards where something is just horrendously wrong with the hand, the cards, and the relative sizes of the two. \u00a0(In fairness, his Archangel on the next page is much better.)<\/p>\n

But even after all this, Xavier still wants to be “X” and still doesn’t go back to behaving all that much like Professor X. \u00a0He’s not quite as sinister as before, but he rounds off the arc by giving everyone the “gift” of what he considers some enlightening ideas to plant in their minds, and then wiping their memories of him – well, except for Psylocke – so that he can wander off to do his own thing.<\/p>\n

It’s a strange arc, which does at least succeed in its core mission of bringing Xavier back, while making him so radically different from before as to avoid the feeling of backsliding. \u00a0It does suffer from devoting quite so much space to Proteus without really making him convincing as a character as opposed to a plot point – and it does seem to want us to treat him as a character. \u00a0But if it’s a slightly mixed affair, it’s at least interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The second half of Charles Soule’s run – which, I know,\u00a0I know, finished a month ago – is one of those arcs that gets a separate title for TPB-bracketing purposes, but really is just the continuation of a single story. \u00a0We left off with the X-Men having apparently defeated the Shadow King, and Xavier having […]<\/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-4191","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\/4191","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=4191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4192,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4191\/revisions\/4192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}