{"id":4363,"date":"2018-10-28T20:32:17","date_gmt":"2018-10-28T20:32:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4363"},"modified":"2018-10-28T20:32:17","modified_gmt":"2018-10-28T20:32:17","slug":"x-men-black-juggernaut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4363","title":{"rendered":"X-Men Black: Juggernaut"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0X-Men Black<\/em> one-shots have been surprisingly decent considering that they’re effectively fill in stories. \u00a0But perhaps we were bound to hit something generic in the end, and here we are.<\/p>\n

What is there to say about this one, really? \u00a0The Juggernaut finds himself in the Silver Age X-Men mansion and gets into a fight with the X-Men inside, immediately suspecting that something is not right here. \u00a0As it turns out, he’s right, but not in an especially interesting way.<\/p>\n

There’s a kid running around who turns out to be Cain’s own younger self, and it seems this whole place is some sort of representation of his own mind. \u00a0He’s locked young Cain away in the mansion “to keep [him] safe”, because he was afraid of something or other, but young Cain is actually just very angry and wants to smash things. \u00a0All of this is being set up as some sort of test by Cyttorak, who has finally lost patience with his avatar’s dodgy win-loss record, but mainly just wants to prompt a bit more rage and aggression from Cain so that he can fulfil his supposed role of fomenting chaos. \u00a0Cain is angry about all this.<\/p>\n

The last couple of pages seem to be setting up a new status quo for Juggernaut – to be followed up heaven knows where – in which he has to track down all eight of the gems for the other Exemplars in order to travel to Cyttorak’s dimension and get his revenge. \u00a0And for no obvious reason, he’s also hallucinating that his younger self is there talking to him.<\/p>\n

All of which is… profoundly dull? \u00a0Writer Robbie Thompson has done some interesting work for Marvel in the past –\u00a0Doctor Strange and the Sorcerers Supreme<\/em> had some clever meta twists and formal quirks – but this just reads like a filler story from X-Men Unlimited<\/em>. \u00a0It does through the motions of being a story that explores the character’s psychology, but there’s nothing really there. \u00a0The younger Cain is a one-note character who just bangs on about rage, just like Cyttorak himself. \u00a0Grown-up Cain is mainly just grumpy about being manipulated and angry with the world. \u00a0None of it adds up to much. \u00a0We’re supposed to be going with the idea that Cain isn’t holding back any more – presumably an attempt to polish up his credibility again after fifty years of regular defeat – but that’s less than gripping.<\/p>\n

A more interesting read on the story, in fact, would be that young Cain is in fact a trick by Cyttorak, and Cain’s self-awareness is low enough for him to be manipulated by this sort of nonsense. \u00a0But that would be a very generous reading, particularly as the closing scenes goes out of its way to disavow it. \u00a0It seems more likely that the story is trying for some sort of inversion of the trope of the innocent, vulnerable child inside the scary villain – but if so, it doesn’t find any especially interesting angle on that idea.<\/p>\n

Instead, it seems we’re just going back to a basic Silver Age take on Juggernaut, though with him being more generically angry, as opposed to being specifically angry about Charles Xavier. \u00a0This doesn’t seem like a great idea. \u00a0Juggernaut as big angry thug was fine for the first Lee\/Kirby story, but it wears thin quickly, and it’s not an angle which has really commended itself to many writers down the years. \u00a0Most writers have been more interested in the idea that Cain is a vastly powerful character who lacks the ambition to do anything with it, and winds up mainly hanging around with his mate. \u00a0The Utopia era played up the idea that the Juggernaut curse fills you with rage, but did it with a different character. \u00a0Cain as just a guy who’s very angry… meh.<\/p>\n

The best thing about the issue is Shawn Crystal’s art, which is blocky and heavy in a way that feels right for Juggernaut. \u00a0He’s drawn completely out of scale with the other characters, but that’s clearly a case of artistic licence – particularly in the Mansion scenes, where Cain gets almost absurdly large as he proclaims his own importance. \u00a0There’s an element of him protesting too much in that. \u00a0The tinkering with Juggernaut’s costume, which I assume originates with this story, also works; it’s a rare case of a costume which has got a little bit too familiar and smooth, and benefits from some modest added weight and clunkiness to try and restore the sense of Juggernaut as a living bulldozer.<\/p>\n

But none of that really gets away from the fact that this is a would-be character piece with nothing much of interest to say about its title character. \u00a0It’s very forgettable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0X-Men Black one-shots have been surprisingly decent considering that they’re effectively fill in stories. \u00a0But perhaps we were bound to hit something generic in the end, and here we are. What is there to say about this one, really? \u00a0The Juggernaut finds himself in the Silver Age X-Men mansion and gets into a fight with […]<\/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-4363","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\/4363","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=4363"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4365,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4363\/revisions\/4365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}