{"id":4336,"date":"2018-10-12T21:05:06","date_gmt":"2018-10-12T20:05:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4336"},"modified":"2018-10-12T21:05:06","modified_gmt":"2018-10-12T20:05:06","slug":"what-if-x-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4336","title":{"rendered":"What If? – X-Men"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another year, another batch of\u00a0What If?<\/em> one-shots. So welcome to Completist Corner: It’s Technically An X-Book.<\/p>\n

The original\u00a0What If?<\/em> series specialised in alternate endings to published stories, which usually turned out to be that a lot of people died and the world was changed forever or something. \u00a0More recently, though, the\u00a0What If?<\/em> branding has been applied to some ground-up alternate-reality takes on main characters, which is what we have here. \u00a0It’s a cyberspace X-Men, because somebody has spotted that X and *.exe are kind of a bit similar? \u00a0If you squint? \u00a0That somebody, presumably, is writer Bryan Edward Hill, who’s doing a\u00a0Batman and the Outsiders<\/em> series for DC.<\/p>\n

The cover for this thing is, um, eye-catching. \u00a0It’s a staggeringly ugly riot of colour and graphic effects, but with a rather nice Domino figure anchoring it all. \u00a0But that’s by a guy called Rahzzah; the interior art is decidedly conventional. \u00a0The real-world sequences, by Neil Edwards, feel more like something you might have got in the early 2099 line. \u00a0It’s not bad at all on its own terms. \u00a0The figures are decently dramatic, the settings are well established, the characters are expressive enough to keep the conversations visually interesting. \u00a0There’s an interesting use of the nine-panel grid in a three-way conversation, with Cable staring right down the camera and Xavier viewed more distantly from the side; I liked that. \u00a0But it doesn’t really follow up on the visual interest of the cover.<\/p>\n

Things pick up about halfway through when we enter cyberspace proper, since that’s drawn by Giannis Milonogiannis, who gives it a manga\/Tron look. \u00a0It’s minimal backgrounds, a\u00a0vast amount of white space to give it a sense of scale, and charismatic figures. \u00a0He gets a page at the end to do a reinvention of the X-Men, too. \u00a0If there’s a reason to buy this, it’s his pages.<\/p>\n

As for the story… well. \u00a0That’s more of a problem. \u00a0It’s the near future, apparently a rather grim one. \u00a0A lot of things are now in cyberspace and the real world is starting to fall into neglect. \u00a0That’s an interesting enough idea, but it’s not what the story is actually about. \u00a0Instead, the idea is that people with the – oh god – *.exe gene have the ability to circumvent the controls that normally keep cyberspace in line. \u00a0So they’re people who have superpowers in cyberspace, in other words. \u00a0And people are scared of them because they disrupt the predictability and security of cyberspace, on which society and the economy depends.<\/p>\n

This is fairly interesting in theory, but it doesn’t really get the chance to go anywhere in 20-odd pages largely devoted to running around. \u00a0Erik Lensherr is a high profile kind of mutant, and Xavier sends mercenaries Cable and Domino to stop him from being killed by Nimrod. \u00a0Naturally it turns out that Erik is actually a bad guy in the other direction, who intends to give everyone mutant powers so that “all of cyberspace will be free”.<\/p>\n

It’s very simplistic and it doesn’t really do anything with the theoretically promising parts of the premise. \u00a0And when a bunch of X-Men show up in the epilogue sequence, it feels like it has nothing to do with anything that came before.<\/p>\n

Aside from all that, it feels like a throwback to an 80s or 90s take on cyberspace, when it was all terribly novel and exciting and a bit like, well,\u00a0Tron<\/em>. \u00a0And which has not a tremendous amount to do with a cyberspace of online banking and Twitter. \u00a0There’s little or no sense here of anything actually\u00a0happening<\/em> in this version of cyberspace; if vast swathes of people are living their lives in cyberspace, they’re doing it off panel. \u00a0For this to work, cyberspace needs to feel vibrant, alive, exciting – it needs to feel like a culture, and something extrapolated from our own online culture and screen addiction, not from the cyberspace tropes of thirty years ago and streams of green-screen binary.<\/p>\n

All of that cuts against the idea that the story might actually be about anything, and makes it a hazy, inchoate exercise in blurry nostalgia. \u00a0But it’s not quaint or knowing enough to work on that level either. \u00a0The cyberspace genre has kind of died out as the internet has become more familiar, and the idea of it as some sort of virtual reality playground no longer accords with our experience of the prosaic reality; at the same time, it’s important enough in our lives that there ought to be tons of potential in finding another visual angle. \u00a0Unfortunately, this isn’t it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another year, another batch of\u00a0What If? one-shots. So welcome to Completist Corner: It’s Technically An X-Book. The original\u00a0What If? series specialised in alternate endings to published stories, which usually turned out to be that a lot of people died and the world was changed forever or something. \u00a0More recently, though, the\u00a0What If? branding has been […]<\/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-4336","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\/4336","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=4336"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4337,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4336\/revisions\/4337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}