{"id":4403,"date":"2018-11-19T21:02:59","date_gmt":"2018-11-19T21:02:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4403"},"modified":"2018-11-19T21:02:59","modified_gmt":"2018-11-19T21:02:59","slug":"multiple-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4403","title":{"rendered":"Multiple Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matthew Rosenberg and Andy MacDonald’s\u00a0Multiple Man<\/em> miniseries sounds like a bit of a sideshow. \u00a0It’s Madrox, after all, a character who’s only ever been important in the context of X-Factor<\/em>, which was cancelled years ago. \u00a0But Rosenberg is also writing\u00a0Astonishing X-Men<\/em>, and\u00a0the new\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em>, in which Madrox turns out to have a big role. \u00a0So maybe this will turn out to be a bigger deal than you’d think.<\/p>\n

Plus,\u00a0Rosenberg’s recent\u00a0New Mutants<\/em> series didn’t convince me on the first read through, but turned out to be much more interesting on a re-read. \u00a0And – cards on the table – I really didn’t care for this at all on the first read. \u00a0It’s a time travel paradox story with a\u00a0whole bunch of Madroxes going round in circles, some of whom have gone on to become versions of other Marvel characters. \u00a0And it seemed to have remarkably little interest in Madrox himself, except inasmuch as his powers lent themselves to making the plot even harder to follow. \u00a0It was a grind, frankly.<\/p>\n

So, sitting down to review it, I wondered if it would play better on a second reading. \u00a0And, well, it’s easier to follow when you have the whole thing fresh in your mind. \u00a0There’s that. \u00a0But it’s not good.<\/p>\n

This isn’t the fault of the art, which is fine. \u00a0It has a ton of crowd scenes and identikit characters to deal with, and does about as well as you could expect in terms of keeping the characters distinct yet identical through (mostly) costume design. \u00a0The Madrox-as-other-heroes gimmick doesn’t do a great deal for me, but visually it’s rendered pretty well. \u00a0An older Layla Miller works; the joke of Forge surviving into the future as a floating head attached to a cyborg body isn’t funny, but visually it’s sold well.<\/p>\n

The story is just a headache, though. \u00a0It’s the sort of book which has dialogue like “I just want to send some dupes into the future, farther into the future, to create versions of themselves to go into the past, not this past but the real past, and save me so I can come forward to this past and create those future dupes… in a little bit.” \u00a0And yes, of course, the joke is that the plot is circuitous and hard to follow, but that gag wears thing quickly, and there’s five issues of this.<\/p>\n

So let’s bit the bullet and attempt to explain the plot. \u00a0To be honest, I’ve read it twice now and either it doesn’t make sense, or I still don’t understand it – but let’s try.<\/p>\n

Jamie Madrox was meant to\u00a0have been killed by the Terrigen Mists, but a surviving dupe, in poor health, turns up in an air-sealed lab. \u00a0He needs Beast to whip up a cure that’ll stabilise him. \u00a0But before Beast actually does that, Madrox steals a time travel device from Bishop and vanishes – and then two future Madroxes show up, one trying to make sure Beast creates the cure, the other trying to stop him. \u00a0The latter is our protagonist; the former, as far as as I can figure out, is just there to complicate the plot further. \u00a0Then a bunch more Madroxes show up, all of whom look like other Marvel heroes, and whisk Protagonist Madrox 15 years into the future, where it turns out that the surviving Madrox – cured by Beast – has spawned an army of dupes and taken over the world.<\/p>\n

Except… hold on, the original dupe travelled into the future for no discernible reason (other than to get him out of the way)\u00a0before<\/em> Beast actually cured him, and I don’t really understand how any of that works.<\/p>\n

So Protagonist Madrox and the Hero Madroxes hook up with the resistance, which has an idea that since each dupe represents a different side of Madrox’s personality, they should try to recruit the nice dupes. \u00a0They already have the dupes who will eventually become the Hero Madroxes and travel back in time… except, hold on, the plot\u00a0seems<\/em> to be that the Hero Madroxes brought Protagonist Madrox to this time so that he would\u00a0make<\/em> the dupes who become the Hero Madroxes… and they’re already there. \u00a0Which is especially odd since there’s no particular reason<\/em> for them to already be there. \u00a0Nothing else in the plot requires it. \u00a0It’s just glitchy.<\/p>\n

Protagonist Madrox does indeed send those dupes on their way through time on a wild goose chase which will eventually lead to them becoming the Hero Madroxes, and then gets captured by the authorities, and confronted by the Emperor Madrox. \u00a0Emperor Madrox kills him, which is admittedly a bravura twist that you can only get away with in this sort of story. \u00a0But a little bit later Emperor Madrox figures out that he\u00a0is<\/span><\/em> Protagonist Madrox – or was – and suddenly seems to regret what he’s become. \u00a0So he travels back in time to issue #1 to stop Beast making that cure, which is where Protagonist Madrox came in.<\/p>\n

Once again, the Hero Madroxes show up, but this time they don’t feed straight into the same time loop because apparently time travel doesn’t work that way. \u00a0(Why? \u00a0It’s\u00a0not<\/em> the second time they’ve done this. \u00a0It’s the same time, viewed from a different perspective.) \u00a0This somewhat randomly leads to a big fight against the future Madrox army, now led by the Emperor’s former aide, who is also a Madrox. \u00a0Since the survival of all dupes is apparently tied to the survival of the Prime Madrox, Protagonist Madrox uses Beast’s cure to make himself the Prime Madrox and then commits suicide so that all the other dupes instantly die.<\/p>\n

Except… hold on, wasn’t the whole plot of this series triggered by the survival of a dupe who wasn’t killed by… and a stray dupe shows up at the end anyway, presumably to go on and appear in Uncanny X-Men<\/em>… and…\u00a0oh, I give up.<\/p>\n

Look…<\/p>\n

The fact that a plot doesn’t make sense isn’t necessarily a disaster, especially in a lunatic time travel story. \u00a0You can get away with it, if the plot isn’t really the important bit. \u00a0The trouble here is that the plot\u00a0is<\/em> the important bit. \u00a0It’s not a backdrop to some other through-line that holds it all together. \u00a0Boiled down to essentials, the story here is that a surviving Madrox duplicate spawns an entire fascist dictatorship, then decides it was a mistake, and kills himself to put an end to it all. \u00a0There’s no great character moment that explains either of those turns. \u00a0This reads simply as a story which is terribly pleased with its Heath Robinson plot and thinks you will be too.<\/p>\n

I’ve generally enjoyed Rosenberg’s stories for the X-books so far, but this is just confusing and pointless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matthew Rosenberg and Andy MacDonald’s\u00a0Multiple Man miniseries sounds like a bit of a sideshow. \u00a0It’s Madrox, after all, a character who’s only ever been important in the context of X-Factor, which was cancelled years ago. \u00a0But Rosenberg is also writing\u00a0Astonishing X-Men, and\u00a0the new\u00a0Uncanny X-Men, in which Madrox turns out to have a big role. \u00a0So […]<\/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,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4403","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\/4403","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=4403"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4405,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4403\/revisions\/4405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}