{"id":4428,"date":"2018-12-10T21:17:38","date_gmt":"2018-12-10T21:17:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4428"},"modified":"2018-12-10T21:17:38","modified_gmt":"2018-12-10T21:17:38","slug":"x-men-the-exterminated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4428","title":{"rendered":"X-Men: The Exterminated"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-Men: The Exterminated<\/em> is an epilogue to\u00a0Extermination<\/em>, which you may have noticed isn’t finished yet. \u00a0It’s been a while since we’ve had a book spiral off the schedules like this. \u00a0How I’ve missed it.<\/p>\n

So, spoilers – well, kind of. \u00a0This issue contains two stories saying farewell to Cable, who died at the beginning of\u00a0Extermination<\/em>, in an issue that came out a while back. \u00a0The spoiler, then, is that he’s still dead at the end. \u00a0But that is a spoiler, though, isn’t it? \u00a0Because people who die in the first act of a story tend not to stay dead. \u00a0Plus… well, it’s\u00a0Extermination<\/em>. \u00a0It’s a series that presumably exists to get rid of the time travelling X-Men who are nowhere to be seen in\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em>, but the heavy lifting on that score was already done in\u00a0X-Men Blue<\/em>. \u00a0And so\u00a0Extermination<\/em> has a distinct vibe of not mattering in the slightest. \u00a0All of which means I was honestly a little surprised to learn that Cable was actually meant to be properly dead.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Two stories, then. \u00a0Writers Zac Thompson and Lonnie Nadler, and artist Neil Edwards, bring us a story about Hope Summers and Jean Grey – two characters who don’t really know each other, but are linked by being Cable’s kind-of daughter and kind-of mother. \u00a0It doesn’t get off to a great start, with a really awkward opening page that’s supposed to be Hope giving her team an inspirational pep talk about Cable, but reads more like a ponderous first person narration has been accidentally put in speech balloons instead of captions by mistake. \u00a0And then it makes the mistake of reminding us of that time Bishop was a murderous psycho for a couple of years, something which is best ignored and relegated to “didn’t happen in this timeline”, because it was totally destructive of Bishop as a character; trying to square it away is a suicidal mission, as the scene regrettably demonstrates.<\/p>\n

But the story picks up once we get to Hope and Jean together (the art is a little stiff at times but does a decent job of making them look like mother and daughter), and the point. \u00a0Notionally, the idea is that Hope has a remit to go around Cable’s old safehouses and clear them out. \u00a0That leads them to cross paths with Deadpool, who’s doing exactly the same thing, and points out with some justification that he was arguably closer to Cable than either of them (at least in recent years). \u00a0There’s a nice bit of detail about Hope not being able to remember what Cable looked like, without Jean’s telepathic assistance, and of course the pay off is that Hope is\u00a0really<\/em> looking for the time travel gadget which she hopes to use to save Cable’s life.<\/p>\n

For the purposes of this story, apparently meddling with the timestream is really bad (well, I suppose we\u00a0are<\/em> just coming off\u00a0Extermination<\/em>), and so Jean puts a stop to that without any great drama. \u00a0It’s not bad. \u00a0It works for Hope; her grief plays out pretty convincingly. \u00a0It’s not so great for Jean, who falls back into the mother role that she was trapped in for most of the nineties, and which\u00a0X-Men Red<\/em> has been trying to distance her from – but at least it’s a role that it makes sense for her to play here.<\/p>\n

The back-up strip, by Chris Claremont and Ramon Rosanas, is a Cyclops and Corsair story in which Cable features only as an infant and as the narrator. \u00a0Apparently (and I don’t recall this coming up before) Cable has perfect recall of everything in his life, which allows him to tell stories of things that happened when he was an infant. \u00a0Claremont isn’t an obvious writer to turn to for a Cable eulogy story; while he technically created baby Nathan, and he did use Cable briefly in one of his comeback X-Men runs, he’s not particularly associated with Cable. \u00a0If anything, Cable epitomises the shifts of circa 1990 which led to Claremont’s departure. \u00a0But then Claremont’s recent X-Men stories have often been best when they approach later contributions with generosity (as they often do).<\/p>\n

Still, despite the conceit of Cable as narrator, this is really Scott’s story, and the link to Cable is symbolic at best. \u00a0While Cable has his perfect recall, Cyclops’s late-70s stories made great play of his lack of clear memory of his childhood; this story is supposed to be Cyclops and Corsair reconciling, and the idea is that repairing his relationship with his father gives Scott more confidence that he can be a father to Nathan.<\/p>\n

The idea is sound, and the art is lovely. \u00a0But the story also gets tied up with period continuity that isn’t really explained, in the form of tension between Scott and Madelyne that also gets resolved over the course of the story. \u00a0There’s no real context for any of that, unless you have a good recollection of where their relationship stood at that particular point in the series (and we’re going back thirty years here, so you probably don’t). \u00a0It’s prominent enough in the plot that it really needed a bit more explanation, but that’s the only serious problem here.<\/p>\n

Back in the 90s, these are the sort of comics that Scott Lobdell would have done for a breather issue after a major crossover. \u00a0While\u00a0The Exterminated<\/em> is another one-shot for the completists, and not something you need to go out of your way to hunt down, it does at least offer a couple of solid stories for those who choose to check it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-Men: The Exterminated is an epilogue to\u00a0Extermination, which you may have noticed isn’t finished yet. \u00a0It’s been a while since we’ve had a book spiral off the schedules like this. \u00a0How I’ve missed it. So, spoilers – well, kind of. \u00a0This issue contains two stories saying farewell to Cable, who died at the beginning of\u00a0Extermination, […]<\/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-4428","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\/4428","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=4428"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4430,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4428\/revisions\/4430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}