{"id":4217,"date":"2018-07-25T23:58:01","date_gmt":"2018-07-25T22:58:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4217"},"modified":"2018-07-25T23:58:01","modified_gmt":"2018-07-25T22:58:01","slug":"x-men-blue-29-30-the-search-for-jimmy-hudson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4217","title":{"rendered":"X-Men Blue #29-30: “The Search for Jimmy Hudson”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continuing my catch-up efforts –\u00a0X-Men Blue<\/em> is already up to issue #32 – we have this bizarre little two-parter from Cullen Bunn and Nathan Stockman. \u00a0You may recall that we just did an arc with a fill-in team so that the regular cast could go off and appear in the Venomized<\/em> miniseries.<\/p>\n

X-Men Blue<\/em> doesn’t really bother to explain what happened in those issues, beyond the fact that Jean Grey is alive and well, something that is unlikely to come as a tremendous shock. \u00a0But Jimmy Hudson, who wasn’t in the set-up issues at all, is apparently now the last remaining Poison on Earth. \u00a0Yay?<\/p>\n

Cullen Bunn is hardly the first writer to have pet villains who he takes from book to book with him, but his decision to cart the Poisons around with him is an odd one. \u00a0They’re plainly designed as Venom villains; they’re a riff on the symbiote concept, and they’re intended to be particularly threatening to Venom and his fellow symbiote users. \u00a0But instead of taking root in the regular\u00a0Venom<\/em> title, instead they’ve followed Cullen Bunn to\u00a0Monsters Unleashed<\/em> and\u00a0X-Men Blue<\/em>, where they don’t really belong at all.<\/p>\n

Jimmy Hudson is off on his own, doing the old Bruce Banner sad wanderer routine where he tries to keep himself to himself but turns into a monster when he’s angry. \u00a0Since he’s Poison Wolverine, the monster is basically an exaggerated version of Wolverine, complete with claws that stream around the room. \u00a0Visually, it’s actually not bad; Stockman has a likeably cartoony style that can carry this sort of thing off, but there’s also something very believable and grounded about his work, which the Poison stuff can play again. \u00a0(He’s also commendably good on drawing a wide range of body types, something that always helps to make the bit players feel more distinctive, because so few artists do it.)<\/p>\n

So the X-Men are trying to catch up with Jimmy, who bizarrely insists that he’s entirely a Poison now, even though he acts completely normally most of the time. \u00a0He maintains, rather unconvincingly, that these are just the echoes of his host body’s memories. \u00a0Everyone else thinks Jimmy is horribly dangerous, but Jean Believes In Him, and she’s starting to get through to him just in time for Daken to turn up at the cliffhanger.<\/p>\n

What’s Daken doing here? \u00a0Well, he was in the previous arc, and he’s apparently here at Magneto’s request to do what needs to be done. \u00a0But I guess we’re going for the idea that he and Jimmy are both meant to be the sons of Wolverine, and that should be interesting, right?<\/p>\n

Not really. \u00a0Daken is the antihero who wants to use lethal force and seems to have a perfectly good reason for doing so, but we all know he’ll turn out to be wrong because it’s a superhero comic and that’s how it works. \u00a0There’s a hint of him taking an interest in getting rid of Jimmy, but it’s not well developed, and it wouldn’t fit anyway with the way he’s been written in books like\u00a0All-New Wolverine<\/em>. \u00a0More to the point, there’s a fundamental difficulty in trying to play Daken off against Jimmy Hudson, which is that Jimmy Hudson has the charisma of a plank. \u00a0The story tries to suggest that Jimmy and the Poison are both survivors of dead universes, but… so what? \u00a0Where does that take us?<\/p>\n

Eventually the X-Men just let Jimmy go, because Jean trusts him so much and he’s trying so hard. \u00a0Which comes across as monumentally dim, given how he was acting earlier in the story. \u00a0Whatever Daken’s motivations, he’s surely right when he objects that Jimmy is not safe to be out there unsupervised.<\/p>\n

It’s fortunate that this story has two issues of interesting art, because it’s not got much else going for it. \u00a0It’s an over familiar plot, but it really falters on the most fundamental level: who cares about Jimmy Hudson? \u00a0Who cares that he was a Poison, and who cares that he’s out of the book? \u00a0Who ever cared? \u00a0It’s not that Cullen Bunn has done a bad job of finding character hooks on this title generally. \u00a0But he hasn’t found anything that works with Jimmy. \u00a0Perhaps this should be taken as a two-issue admission of defeat and a gentle removal of the bozo from the cast, but I suspect not, given that he’s been partnered with Bunn’s current pet concept.<\/p>\n

More likely, there’s just nothing much to the guy – or perhaps, anything that worked was specific to the Ultimate Universe setting. \u00a0I wouldn’t know. \u00a0Even I’d given up on\u00a0Ultimate X-Men<\/em> by the time he appeared. I suppose he’s a loose end that somebody will feel compelled to tie up in the end, but for now I’m happy enough to see him go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continuing my catch-up efforts –\u00a0X-Men Blue is already up to issue #32 – we have this bizarre little two-parter from Cullen Bunn and Nathan Stockman. \u00a0You may recall that we just did an arc with a fill-in team so that the regular cast could go off and appear in the Venomized miniseries. X-Men Blue doesn’t […]<\/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-4217","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\/4217","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=4217"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4218,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4217\/revisions\/4218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}