{"id":4212,"date":"2018-07-23T21:59:53","date_gmt":"2018-07-23T20:59:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4212"},"modified":"2018-07-23T21:59:53","modified_gmt":"2018-07-23T20:59:53","slug":"x-men-gold-26-30-til-death-do-us-part","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4212","title":{"rendered":"X-Men Gold #26-30 – “‘Til Death Do Us Part”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bait and switch marriage issues seem to be the thing this year for superhero comics. \u00a0Not that I’m complaining too much; the\u00a0Batman<\/em> issue works as a story even if it makes the hype look insincere, while\u00a0X-Men Gold<\/em> seemed to be on the verge of marrying off Kitty and Peter for no particular reason beyond the fact that it seemed like an X-Men-y sort of thing to do.<\/p>\n

How many of today’s X-Men readers actually are invested in the idea of Kitty and Peter’s relationship, I wonder? \u00a0It’s something that gets referenced from time to time, but the actual meat of it stems from Claremont stories back in the early 1980s – it was in the past even by the time I started reading. \u00a0The marriage we actually get in issue #30 seems like one that far more readers are likely to care about, so if anything, it’s a switch that many fans will see as a trade up.<\/p>\n

But inevitably, these issues have to spend more time pushing Kitty and Peter’s relationship, and so we get some flashbacks to their highlights, rather nicely done by guest artist David Marquez, with a sensitive colouring job by Matthew Wilson – they echo the art style of the original issues very convincingly without being too showy about it. \u00a0And to be fair to writer Marc Guggenheim, the story proper goes right into Peter and Kitty talking about how their relationship has, until very recently, taken an awfully long time to go precisely nowhere.<\/p>\n

You can’t fill five issues with people talking to the caterers, though, so issue #26 spends most of its time on the X-Men capturing Mesmero in South America – something that also serves as an excuse to get Rogue and Gambit back into the cast – and then . \u00a0Again, the story wisely avoids putting too much emphasis on their return; they’re just there, albeit used prominently so that they’re firmly established as available for the final issue.<\/p>\n

After that, we’re on to a four issue storyline with Alpha, the “sentient nanotech cloud” Sentinel from a few issues earlier, and good old Lydia Nance, the book’s signature villain. \u00a0It’s very much the sort of thing that would benefit from not being billed as a part-X-of-five storyline, since the structure is, once again, more of an open-ended ongoing serial. \u00a0There are the usual juggling subplots – Rachel is acting oddly thanks to Mesmero’s meddling, which will come to something in the next arc; \u00a0Storm can’t seem to get rid of her ersatz Mjolnir, which gets us a footnote to the hyper-obscure\u00a0X-Men: To Serve & Protect\u00a0<\/em>#3; and Iceman is defending his decision to put the new Pyro on the team.<\/p>\n

The A plot, though. \u00a0Alpha and Lydia kidnap Peter because they think his bloodstream contains traces of the Legacy Virus which can be used to wipe out mutants. \u00a0There’s a mildly interesting idea with Alpha that subverts the normal “AI out of control” tropes: Alpha\u00a0agrees<\/em> that he is himself a mutant, but rather than going into a logical tailspin, he simply acknowledges that once he’s killed all the other mutants, he’d better shut himself down too. \u00a0In fact, Alpha regards himself as further evidence of how dangerous mutants are – after all, he’s absolutely murderous.<\/p>\n

So all this is basically a backdrop for Kitty to put aside her hesitations about the marriage and focus on rescuing her man from the baddies. \u00a0Of course, it also helpfully separates her and Peter for most of the arc. \u00a0Very conveniently, it takes Alpha only an issue or so to come up with a virus and produce it in quantities sufficient for the whole planet, which seems excessively easy for a genocidal weapon in this day and age, and so we get some running around in space while the X-Men try to stop the weapon in its tracks.<\/p>\n

These things are always basically false peril, because we know perfectly well there’s no prospect of all mutants being wiped out at the end of the issues. \u00a0Unfortunately, Guggenheim gets himself a bit tied up in knots here; having pitched the threat at “seemingly unstoppable”, he doesn’t really have a very convincing escape route by which to stop it, so we get lots of people running around zapping bioweapons as they fall from the sky. \u00a0And that doesn’t seem like it would be an entirely effective method of containing something as dangerous as the plot previously required the virus to be.<\/p>\n

But that leaves us with an issue still to go – the wedding itself. \u00a0Having covered Peter and Kitty’s highlights in chronological sequence up to this point, the opening flashback suddenly loops back to their break-up after Secret Wars<\/em>, which is a neat touch. \u00a0And after some merely okay art from other creators in the earlier issues, it’s a pleasure to see Marquez get to do the whole of issue #30; he’s a great artist who really brings some grace and lightness to a very talky story.<\/p>\n

The turning point is a scene with Kitty and Illyana, playing off their long-discontinued status as best friends, with Illyana not being able to hide her doubts about whether this is really such a good idea. \u00a0That’s essentially for the reasons most readers would give (“if you two were meant to be together, it would’ve happened by now”). \u00a0It’s also rather out of character for Illyana in terms of the way she’s been written in recent years – she’s torn between not wanting to ruin Kitty’s evening and not feeling able to dodge a direct question about what she thinks – but you can probably rationalise it as Kitty being unusually well placed to cut through Illyana’s usual emotional blockade, if you’re so minded.<\/p>\n

Obviously, this being melodrama, Kitty can’t just no show the wedding; she has to panic during the ceremony. \u00a0Visually, this is a lovely moment – Peter tries to put the ring on her finger and his hand passes straight through her. \u00a0It’s beautifully done. \u00a0Sure, it’s a little odd to have them putting on the rings\u00a0before<\/em> doing the vows. \u00a0But the visual is worth it.<\/p>\n

The pay off is a late night heart to heart between Kitty and Peter where she tells him that she loves him but can’t commit to marrying, followed by Rogue and Gambit suddenly deciding to take advantage of the available rabbi to get married on the spur of the moment themselves. \u00a0(Can you\u00a0do<\/em> that in New York state? \u00a0Maybe in the Marvel Universe, I guess.) \u00a0While they’ve been reintroduced into the cast during the arc, this really does come out of nowhere so far as X-Men Gold<\/em> is concerned; if you’ve read the recent\u00a0Rogue & Gambit\u00a0<\/em>miniseries, however, then it’ll feel like a reasonably plausible development.<\/p>\n

The Kitty\/Peter material is largely good. \u00a0The busy work in the middle issues with Alpha and Lydia is rather more middling stuff. \u00a0But the artwork on the flashbacks and the final issue is definitely worth your time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bait and switch marriage issues seem to be the thing this year for superhero comics. \u00a0Not that I’m complaining too much; the\u00a0Batman issue works as a story even if it makes the hype look insincere, while\u00a0X-Men Gold seemed to be on the verge of marrying off Kitty and Peter for no particular reason beyond the […]<\/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-4212","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\/4212","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=4212"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4213,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4212\/revisions\/4213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}