Hark, listen closely. \u00a0Do you hear it? \u00a0There – ever so faint. \u00a0It’s the plaintive quack of a lame duck.<\/p>\n
X-Men Red<\/em> has spent nearly a year on its opening storyline with Cassandra Nova, about half of that time on an extended gathering-of-the-team sequence. \u00a0And by the time the damn thing has even finished, we were already several issues deep into the\u00a0next<\/em> relaunch. \u00a0Astonishing X-Men<\/em> had this problem too – and suffered for it – but at least it also had a relatively self-contained redemption arc for Havok. \u00a0X-Men Red<\/em> finds it more of a challenge, because it spends so very long on its team-building, and the whole thing reads like a statement of intent designed to set the direction for a new team.<\/p>\n Then again, there’s another problem here:\u00a0X-Men Red<\/em> is one of those stories where outrageous levels of hate spread around the world and it’s all due to a mind-control baddie, and I’ve never liked that story. \u00a0Didn’t like it with the Shadow King back in the late eighties, don’t like it now. \u00a0All of which is a bit frustrating, because this is written by Tom Taylor, and his\u00a0All-New Wolverine<\/em> was one of the highlights of the X-books over the last few years. \u00a0He even brings Laura and Gabby into the cast with him. \u00a0I had high hopes for this.<\/p>\n This book replaced\u00a0Jean Grey<\/em> on the schedule, and our team leader and lynchpin is the revived Jean Grey (the original, not the time traveller). \u00a0Scott’s absence creates an opportunity to give her a different role, no longer defined as half of a couple. \u00a0X-Men Red<\/em> plays her as an elder statesman returning to find an even more divided and angry world than she remembers, and determined to find a way of addressing that problem. \u00a0Fair enough; the X-Men have always been open to the criticism that their plan to improve human\/mutant relations largely boils down to being nice and waiting for things to change, and I’m all for them having a proper plan to take the initiative.<\/p>\n Jean’s big idea is to make a rather vague announcement that the “mutant nation” needs a voice in the United Nations. \u00a0This has similar problems to Scott Summers’ good old mutant revolution during the Bendis run: since it doesn’t appear to be a “nation” in any conventional sense, what the heck is it? \u00a0A claim that she speaks for mutants worldwide? \u00a0(Has she asked them?) \u00a0A claim that mutants don’t have to obey national laws? \u00a0Just a grandiose label for observer status at the UN? \u00a0We’re clearly meant to be very impressed by it, but it’s all terribly hazy. \u00a0That said, this is also set up as the grand vision for the series going forward, and the one which Cassandra Nova’s interference is preventing Jean from getting properly off the ground. \u00a0So perhaps it would have made more sense if the book had continued – though if anything, it seems to be heading towards a new Utopia in Atlantis, and we’ve done that before.<\/p>\n Cassandra promptly frames Jean for murdering an ambassador, whereupon we go on several issues of recruitment. \u00a0Issue #2 introduces the book’s new character, Trinary, an Indian mutant with the power to control machines. \u00a0She is annoying The Man by transferring money from rich people’s bank accounts to poor people’s bank accounts – which is a cute idea, but the story seems a bit too pleased with it. \u00a0More to the point, I never get much sense of Trinary’s personality beyond that; she feels like a mouthpiece rather than a character. \u00a0She literally spends most of the arc just delivering exposition, or telling us how bad social media is.<\/p>\n In fact, a problem more generally is that the lengthy storyline here doesn’t give all that much scope for individual team members to do their own thing, aside from a brief sequence designed to make Nezhno’s powers more viable.<\/p>\n By the end of part 3, we’ve established that the human race is being programmed to hate mutants, which is why things are going the way they are. \u00a0And by part 4, we’ve established that it’s nanites (which obviously belong to Cassandra). \u00a0But the story pretty much continues with escalations of that concept for months to come, as Cassandra infects world leaders. \u00a0It looks great –\u00a0Mahmud Asrar, drawing the first half of the arc, clearly has fun touring the world. \u00a0If you’re going to tour India, Wakanda, Atlantis and so on, you should sell it, and Asrar does. \u00a0I like Trinary’s hijacked, rainbow-bedecked Sentinel, too. \u00a0In the second half, Carmen Carnero’s work is nicely polished, with a decent sense of scale. \u00a0But…<\/p>\n The second half of the storyline feels like padding. The basic set up is all complete by issue #5, yet the story just keeps ploughing on. \u00a0And the upshot of it all is really just that Cassandra Nova is using nanites to make people hate mutants.<\/p>\n The story seems to think that it’s about big data and manipulation; issue #4 has a speech pretty much claiming outright that Cassandra’s mind-control nanites are a larger-scale version of Cambridge Analytica. \u00a0There’s some worryingly paranoid stuff later in the story, too, which casually claims as fact that all phones are recording us at all times – which is\u00a0not the plot<\/em>, but something simply taken as read in order to allow Trinary to recover evidence to exonerate Jean. \u00a0The real issue, though, is\u00a0that the central metaphor is broken, because what Cassandra is doing\u00a0isn’t<\/em> manipulation, it’s just literal mind control.<\/p>\n X-Men Red<\/em>\u00a0doesn’t have anything much to say about online manipulation or fake news or microtargeting. \u00a0It falls into the same trap as the Shadow King plot from back in the day: the plot winds up being that hate is something imposed on people by baddies, rather than having its roots in the fundamental defects of human nature. \u00a0And when it comes to why the baddies want people to hate, well, you pretty much just wave your hands and say they’re evil – in this case, Cassandra was “put together wrong” and lacks empathy. \u00a0So she’s a psychopath, in other words. \u00a0It’s all profoundly unsubtle, but that’s not really the problem. \u00a0This is not an age of subtlety, and there’s nothing wrong with a good polemic. \u00a0But a model of hate that attributes it primarily to mind control and mental disorder doesn’t do a great job of explaining the world we see around us. \u00a0And that’s pretty much the one the story has to offer.<\/p>\n The arc is way too long, and comes off as self-important. \u00a0It doesn’t have the depth to carry off its evident aspirations to being a manifesto. \u00a0There are glimmers of the charisma from\u00a0All-New Wolverine<\/em>, and it certainly looks the part, but it falls short.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hark, listen closely. \u00a0Do you hear it? \u00a0There – ever so faint. \u00a0It’s the plaintive quack of a lame duck. X-Men Red has spent nearly a year on its opening storyline with Cassandra Nova, about half of that time on an extended gathering-of-the-team sequence. \u00a0And by the time the damn thing has even finished, we […]<\/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-4440","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\/4440","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=4440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4441,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4440\/revisions\/4441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}