Well.<\/p>\n
On paper, this looked okay. \u00a0New direction, weekly storyline. \u00a0Written by Ed Brisson, Matthew Rosenberg and Kelly Thompson – they’re usually interesting writers. \u00a0Named after “Avengers Disassembled”, which was awful… but actually closer to the format of last year’s “Avengers: No Surrender”, which was pretty good. \u00a0Art by… well, the first issue is drawn by Mahmud Asrar, but mostly it’s the likes of Pere Perez, RB Silva and Yildiray Cinar, because it’s a weekly and it needs a team. \u00a0Still, it sounded quite promising on paper.<\/p>\n
And here it is, and it’s kind of meh.<\/p>\n
For one thing, this turns out to be a ten issue lead-in to “Age of X-Man”, and if you’re spending ten issues on a prologue, then you’ve got a problem with bloat. \u00a0Yes, it’s a weekly schedule, and yes, you can take a bit more time over things when the issues are coming out more frequently. \u00a0But still, ten issues? \u00a0With hindsight, most of what happens in “Disassembled” seems to be busy work to fill the pages. \u00a0Send a team here, send a team there, have a squabble over a civil war somewhere… but what really matters is remarkably little.<\/p>\n
What\u00a0actually matters<\/em> seems to be roughly this: Nate Grey is back at full power, he’s decided the world is going to hell, and he’s going to be the messiah figure who saves it. \u00a0So he transforms a bunch of villains into his Horsemen, and kidnaps three reluctant “advisors”, namely Kitty Pryde, Apocalypse, and some random anti-mutant senator. \u00a0Legion wants to stop Nate, and is going about it in a very erratic way that doesn’t achieve a whole hell of a lot. \u00a0In the background, some of the X-Men’s trainees are a bit annoyed about not being given more to do, and there’s a very half-hearted subplot about an anti-mutant vaccine which gets almost no space but suddenly turns out to be a big deal in the epilogue. \u00a0Anyway, big showdown against Nate, “all the X-Men” are gathered to fight him (terms and conditions apply), Nate winds up merging with Legion to become more powerful and madder than ever, and Nate decides he can’t fix the world with the X-Men in his way, so he zaps them away somewhere. \u00a0Which is the set-up for Age of X-Man, obviously, and the reason why a bunch of characters have to be hauled to the finale.<\/p>\n That’s not really ten issues worth of plot, and the whole thing feels as if it’s not fully developed. \u00a0The art is\u00a0alright<\/em>, and there are points where you can see it reaching for something a little bit more interesting, but it never reaches the epic scale that it was presumably meant to be going for. \u00a0Visually, the best thing about it is the revised character designs for Nate and his Horsemen, which manage to get across the idea of invoking religion without being too clumsy about it; it’s the sort of thing that could easily have been excruciating, but I think they pull that off.<\/p>\n In character terms, the best thing about it is the subplot with Armor’s training team, who take the role of striking out on their own when they think the grown-ups aren’t paying any attention to them. \u00a0Some of these guys really should just be counting their blessings that they’re even allowed on training missions, but you can see the point for someone like Armor or Pixie, who was on the fringes of being a main team regular before somehow drifting off to backgroundsville. \u00a0They get issue #7 to themselves, as a well-placed break from the regular action, in which they spend five minutes in an illusory Age of Apocalypse and think they’ve been there a year. \u00a0This doesn’t really play into anything much, but it’s a good issue on its own terms, and it could yet be leading into something in “Age of X-Man” proper.<\/p>\n But the whole religion thing seems strangely underdeveloped, as does Nate’s character generally. \u00a0The broad idea seems to be that Nate is appalled by the direction of the world, and thinks that he must have been given his A-list powers for a reason, namely to set things right with a fresh start. \u00a0Fair enough. \u00a0But then for some reason we’ve got him acting like a messiah and dressing up his followers in religious robes. \u00a0It’s less clear what that has to do with Nate Grey. \u00a0Sure, he and Cable have both sometimes had messianic hints. \u00a0And he’s got some track record of interest in wacky spirituality from the Warren Ellis run. \u00a0But does religious iconography really mean all that much to him? \u00a0It’s not like he had a traditional Christian upbringing in his dystopian test tube, surely? \u00a0Perhaps the idea is that he’s trying to act the part, having decided that he’s going to be god, but it’s not like we see him actually running any sort of meaningful religion or cult, beyond a handful of characters that are mind controlled anyway.<\/p>\n Yet issue #5 seems to have Nate wiping out all the world’s churches and religious shrines and the like, in response to a suggestion from Apocalypse that “false” religion is standing in the way of the world embracing him. \u00a0This sure seems like it’s setting up a very different story, and probably a more contentious one, but it doesn’t get followed up. \u00a0And making Nate the sort of character who does something as drastic as that, the second Apocalypse suggests it, just makes him come across as an ill-defined crackpot. \u00a0I’m not at all sure what they’re going for with Nate here, and I’m not entirely convinced that they know either.<\/p>\n The finale is… weird. \u00a0It’s set up as calling in every X-Man ever, but it’s really not – I get that the likes of Scott and Rachel are tied up in other stories, and Magik is still in cliffhanger limbo following the\u00a0New Mutants<\/em> mini, but I don’t see Havok, or Banshee, or Warpath, or Longshot, or Chamber, or the new Pyro… all of whom have been used quite recently. \u00a0But we do get Kylun, Magma and… is that Firestar? \u00a0When was she in the X-Men? So it’s really “those X-characters we need for Age of X-Man”, I guess. \u00a0Yet the epilogue suddenly jumps to telling us that with the X-Men gone, there’s a sudden race to introduce an anti-mutant vaccine – the one that was a pretty minor background feature of the plot.<\/p>\n And… um, what? \u00a0The decision on whether to introduce an anti-mutant vaccine turns on whether fifty or so X-Men are around to say they disagree? \u00a0Come to think of it, didn’t you publish an issue of Iceman\u00a0<\/em>just last month about Manhattan’s full-scale mutant pride parade? \u00a0Make up your bloody minds. \u00a0But regardless of that, it’s an epilogue that doesn’t emerge in any remotely satisfying way from anything we’ve seen before. \u00a0It lands on the ground with a wet thump.<\/p>\n Despite occasional bits that land, “Disassembled” as a whole isn’t very good. \u00a0It feels like there might be some sort of story about religion trying to get out, but it doesn’t come to anything. \u00a0Does it fill me with interest in “Age of X-Man”? \u00a0It does not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well. On paper, this looked okay. \u00a0New direction, weekly storyline. \u00a0Written by Ed Brisson, Matthew Rosenberg and Kelly Thompson – they’re usually interesting writers. \u00a0Named after “Avengers Disassembled”, which was awful… but actually closer to the format of last year’s “Avengers: No Surrender”, which was pretty good. \u00a0Art by… well, the first issue is drawn […]<\/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-4477","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\/4477","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=4477"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4478,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4477\/revisions\/4478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}