{"id":4355,"date":"2018-10-20T20:13:03","date_gmt":"2018-10-20T19:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4355"},"modified":"2018-10-20T20:13:03","modified_gmt":"2018-10-20T19:13:03","slug":"iceman-1-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4355","title":{"rendered":"Iceman #1-2"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an interesting new phenomenon – a book that didn’t survive as a monthly makes a comeback on the strength of sales of the collected edition. \u00a0Perhaps it should be more surprising that this hasn’t happened before. \u00a0It’s not that unusual for Marvel and DC to launch a book in the expectation that the potential audience lies outside the direct market, but those books tend to be ones whose appeal is obviously outside the direct market. \u00a0Sina Grace’s\u00a0Iceman<\/em>, being basically a mainstream X-book, despite the heavy focus on Iceman’s coming out, is not so clearly in that category. \u00a0But here it is for another run, presumably due to sales of the collection coming as a pleasant surprise to Marvel.<\/p>\n

The first two issues seem to be self-contained, so let’s take them together.<\/p>\n

And\u00a0Iceman<\/em> is, in many ways, hyper-conventional. \u00a0Issue #1 opens with one of those scenes where Iceman stops a passing baddie in a back alley to show off his powers, which is the sort of thing Spider-Man was doing routinely for decades. \u00a0The actual plot for that first issue is quite different; it involves Iceman discovering a missing persons flyer, apparently for one of the Morlocks and deciding to lead a team of X-Men underground to investigate.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, as it turns out, only Bishop is available, leading Iceman to wonder whether his missions maybe aren’t being given quite the priority they deserve. \u00a0They’re an unusual pairing for the first issue, because even though they were on the team together in the mid-nineties, they really have nothing in common and no chemistry. \u00a0But that’s the angle; Iceman isn’t quite able to conceal his disappointment at being given just this one C-list X-Man for his mission, while Bishop does his best to ignore that, along with Iceman’s babbling. \u00a0Bishop’s not exactly portrayed here as a bundle of laughs to be around, but he is written as a professional who’s trying his best to be a team player with someone he finds tremendously irritating – and largely succeeding. \u00a0By modern standards, this is an unusually positive depiction of Bishop; he knows this story isn’t about him, and he’s not trying to make it about him.<\/p>\n

The actual threat in the Morlock tunnels turns out to be a new version of the Marauders, who have come to have another go at thinning out the herd. \u00a0These guys have D-list written all over them; many of them don’t have names, and their uniform is thoroughly bland. \u00a0That actually works for the story, but it’s hard to tell how far it’s a conscious decision or just a sign of Nate Stockman’s art being rather middle of the road. \u00a0It’s fine at the more conversational moments, but the first issue is a touch bland when the story feels like it calls for something visually striking. \u00a0The second issue is rather better on that count, but still struggles a bit when asked to visualise the astral plane, striking a note that’s a bit more cartoony than it was probably going for.<\/p>\n

Anyway, the misdirection here is that Iceman and Bishop both treat these guys as low-rent imitators – a threat worth dealing with, but not a serious reprise of the Morlock Massacre – but an epilogue establishes that they really are working for Mr Sinister, who’s presumably going to be back later in the series.<\/p>\n

What does any of this have to do with the themes of Grace’s\u00a0Iceman<\/em>?\u00a0 Well, there’s two aspects, neither exactly central. \u00a0One is to go back to the theme of Iceman trying to live up to his potential and take the lead instead of just being a team player. \u00a0The other is how the Morlocks themselves fit in, as the group who hide away from the world and just want to be left alone. \u00a0This is not so well handled; the story can’t find that much to say about them, other than to have them gripe about the X-Men not understanding, and attempt to position the Morlock tunnels as a “safe space”. \u00a0That’s not an inherently awful idea, but if all you do with it is throw out a 2018 buzzword and leave it at that, it’s not going to work.<\/p>\n

Issue #2 is an Emma Frost story, as she enlists him to help rescue her brother Christian from their potentially abusive father. \u00a0Her stated reasons for choosing him are that he’s “less susceptible to telepathic attacks when you’re in ice” (what?), good in a fight, and “good with people”. \u00a0Supposedly, Christian is out of an institution and running the Frost family business (this is the Marvel Universe, where shareholdings bounce around as the plot demands), but Emma thinks he’s being hidden away by an inexplicably superpowered Winston Frost, who won’t let her in to see him.<\/p>\n

If your main reaction to all this is “who the heck is Christian Frost”, well, that’s understandable. \u00a0Technically he’s a Grant Morrison creation (as in, he was in the background of a flashback to Emma’s childhood), but in practical terms his only previous appearance was in the first six issues of the\u00a0Emma Frost<\/em> solo title – you know, the one which actually contained young-adult stories about Emma’s teenage years, but had dreadful T&A covers laser-targeted at driving away anyone who might actually have enjoyed the content. \u00a0This was around the time when Emma’s evil sisters were cropping up on a regular basis; Christian was a dissolute bohemian who was also clearly the nicest of the family, and a tremendous disappointment to the overbearing patriarch. \u00a0He winds up having a breakdown and being packed off to an institution.<\/p>\n

He was also gay, which was a big plot point in that story and clearly something his father disapproved of, though I’m not sure the original story went quite as far as the recap here (which claims that Winston had him undergo conversion therapy and so forth – the tone of the original story was more that Winston just saw him as a liability to the family image and wanted him out of the way).<\/p>\n

As it turns out here, Christian is genuinely out of the institution, but probably shouldn’t be; he’s got powers of his own, and the “Winston” who drove Emma away is actually a projection of his paranoid mind. \u00a0The plot gets a bit clumsy around this point; by the end, she’s apparently trying to use Iceman to show Christian an example of how to overcome an unsympathetic upbringing. \u00a0But even if that was Emma’s plan all along, it’s still a pretty weak reason to enlist Iceman in particular (Christian’s mental health problems clearly extend way beyond a homophobic father); and if she didn’t know what was going on, which seems to be the plot, it’s even less clear why Iceman is here.<\/p>\n

This issue works pretty well as an Emma Frost story; it’s not a bad idea to dust off Christian and give her someone to look after who she actually cares about, because god knows that’s a side of her character that’s been neglected of late. \u00a0And Christian’s not a bad character on his own terms either, at least as written in the original Emma Frost<\/em> series. \u00a0This story seems to be setting up a status quo where she regains control of Frost Industries with Christian as her genuinely-beloved front man, and you could certainly do something in due course with the idea of Christian as the basically decent outsider who can keep Emma grounded once his head is back together. \u00a0But as written in this issue, Christian is a stock character, the childlike victim. \u00a0There was more to him than that before, and hopefully there will be again.<\/p>\n

Overall, two decent issues, where the good or at least promising generally outweighs the clumsy. \u00a0But there are still the heavy handed bits weighing it down from time to time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is an interesting new phenomenon – a book that didn’t survive as a monthly makes a comeback on the strength of sales of the collected edition. \u00a0Perhaps it should be more surprising that this hasn’t happened before. \u00a0It’s not that unusual for Marvel and DC to launch a book in the expectation that 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-4355","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\/4355","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=4355"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4356,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4355\/revisions\/4356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}