{"id":4570,"date":"2019-05-04T21:13:49","date_gmt":"2019-05-04T20:13:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4570"},"modified":"2019-05-04T21:13:49","modified_gmt":"2019-05-04T20:13:49","slug":"uncanny-x-men-11-16-this-is-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4570","title":{"rendered":"Uncanny X-Men #11-16 – “This Is Forever”"},"content":{"rendered":"

This isn’t an ideal point to be reviewing Matthew Rosenberg’s current\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> storyline, which to all intents and purposes is still going. \u00a0But for whatever reason – most likely, to give different names to the trade paperbacks – issue #17 is titled “We Have Always Been, part 1”. \u00a0So officially, at least, issues #11-16 are a single arc, and let’s go with that.<\/p>\n

Except… well, except it very obviously is the first part of a continuing storyline, and not an arc at all. \u00a0And I’m bearing in mind that Rosenberg’s\u00a0New Mutants: Dead Souls<\/em> looked like a bit of a mess at the halfway mark, only to cohere in the end stretch. \u00a0Then again, his\u00a0Multiple Man<\/em> miniseries also looked like a bit of a mess at the halfway mark, and it was. \u00a0Still, I’m inclined to reserve judgment to some degree.<\/p>\n

Of course, I wouldn’t be talking about reserving judgment if I was blown away by the story so far. \u00a0“This is Forever” is a strange book – a retread of the “mutants on the verge of extinction” schtick, but played in a different way and against a different context. \u00a0And, within that framework, kind of all over the place.<\/p>\n

The first page of part 1 is a black page with the caption “Every X-Men story is the same.” \u00a0Cyclops goes on to explain that the X-Men always get knocked down and always come back, but this time it’s apparently the end, because… \u00a0Well, because of the vaccine which was introduced in the previous arc, I guess, because we all know how thoroughly effective vaccination programmes are in the contemporary USA. \u00a0And I have a whole range of problems with this whole set-up before we even get to this story, some of which I covered in reviewing “Disassembled” – this stuff about mutants being on the verge of extinction again doesn’t emerge sensibly from the previous story, doesn’t have any coherent plot link to the regular X-Men being missing in\u00a0Age of X-Man<\/em> (despite that being presented as some sort of big turning point here), and seems a ridiculously rapid turnaround from the immediately preceding stories where the X-Men were living more or less openly in the middle of New York.<\/p>\n

On top of that, we’ve had this basic idea dominate the X-books twice in recent years – the “no more mutants” period after\u00a0House of M<\/em>, and the Terrigen Mists storyline when the Inhumans were top of the spreadsheet – so it’s been run into the ground. \u00a0And on top of\u00a0that<\/em>, not only have we had it at length twice in the recent past, but it was absolutely dreadful both times.<\/p>\n

So before we even get to page one of part one, (a) I don’t buy the premise, (b) I’m fed up of the premise, and (c) I think the premise is crap anyway.<\/p>\n

I think we can all agree that this is not a congenial starting point.<\/p>\n

Still, “This is Forever” does bring a different slant to the idea. \u00a0Part of that is because, however illogically, this is all being presented as somehow linked to the absence of most of the cast in\u00a0Age of X-Man<\/em> – and since we know that’s a five-month storyline, there’s a tacit suggestion that this is a relatively short-term deal. \u00a0And another part is that previous iterations of this storyline have seen the X-Men withdraw ever further from the real world, barricading themselves into compounds or islands or mystic dimensions. \u00a0“This is Forever”, in contrasts, strips the remaining X-Men of their usual trappings and leaves them operating out of the back room of a pub. \u00a0It relies on the characters themselves to legitimate this as an X-Men team – and since Rosenberg still has Cyclops, Wolverine, Havok, Magik, Chamber and a bunch of New Mutants<\/em> characters on hand, it’s certainly an X-Men team. \u00a0Ironically (and no doubt intentionally), the return of Cyclops and the “real” Wolverine give this team two of the core elements that have been absent from the regular X-books for a while.<\/p>\n

Within that, though, it’s all terribly scattered and unfocussed. \u00a0Issue #11 isn’t too bad as a set-up, if you don’t mind it being heavy on the misery. \u00a0Having missed the X-Men’s big fight with Legion, Cyclops wants to find and re-start his team, despite warnings from Blindfold (whose precognitions are so depressing that she rather gratuitously kills herself in a back-up strip), and a general lack of interest from the handful of mutants he does manage to track down. \u00a0Finally he resorts to a public appeal to any X-Men still out there, which inevitably attracts a bunch of villains, but also brings out Wolverine. \u00a0And that’s a nice finish which offers a moment of hope at the end of a grim issue – except for the questionable pacing decision to follow it with a bleak back-up story about Blindfold’s suicide.<\/p>\n

Issue #12 follows on logically enough, with Cyclops and Wolverine rescuing the New Mutants from the subplot where they were stranded at the end of Rosenberg’s miniseries, thus bringing together some sort of X-Men team again, albeit one mostly infected with the Transmode virus. \u00a0But from here, the story meanders off, with a random-seeming mixture of things sometimes going well, but mostly going rather badly. \u00a0Cyclops draws up a list of bad guys for the X-Men to finish off in their final run, which leads us to some very scattershot issues. \u00a0The Dark Beast gets recruited; Hope shows up as a bad guy and then turns back almost immediately. \u00a0The Juggernaut shows up (with his new status quo, only just established in X-Men Black,\u00a0<\/em>completely ignored). \u00a0Magneto (but obviously not the real Magneto, because he’s in\u00a0Age of X-Man<\/em>). \u00a0It doesn’t particularly feel like it’s heading anywhere, but then again it’s the first half of a story and for all I know at this stage, it’s laboriously putting all the pieces on the board.<\/p>\n

Artist Salvador Larroca turns in perfectly solid work, but he seems miscast on this material. \u00a0He’s a very solid artist but one who’s generally at his best doing bright, shiny, colourful work. \u00a0He does have some good character work here, and brings a bit of life to some of the minor characters (though his Rahne is a bit of a mess). \u00a0He’s neither a realist, nor a widescreen cynic, nor is he an artist you particularly turn to for atmospherics. \u00a0Somebody in the vein of \u00a0Steve Epting might have been a better match for stories about a weatherbeaten run-down X-Men team in reduced circumstances, if that’s really the direction we’re going in.<\/p>\n

Supposedly there’s a rule of thumb in wrestling that when the bad guy is beating up the hero, before the big comeback, the hero should at least get some offence in every three or four moves, even if he gets cut off again immediately, to remind the audience that he’s still fighting and to stop them giving up hope. \u00a0This series reads a bit like that, with some genuine wins for the X-Men mixed in amidst near-comical bleakness that you’d expect from a Mark Millar comic – people being blown up with internal bombs or shot in the head or Madrox having to absorb a tortured and dying dupe… \u00a0It’s not as unrelentingly cynical as that story would have been, which is obviously a plus, but the overall effect isn’t so much a balance of tone as a story swerving around the road. \u00a0But none of the X-Men’s scattered victories really does anything to shift the sense of despair.<\/p>\n

If there’s a theme discernible in here, it’s about what this X-Men team is actually for, against a background of seemingly total futility. \u00a0The traditional X-Men answer for “why keep fighting” is to have hope and defiance to the last. \u00a0This story opens part three with the words “We’re together again. \u00a0Now we need a reason why.” \u00a0One reading would be that Cyclops needs an X-Men team more for his own sense of identity, and so that he can atone for his mistakes, than because there’s actually anything terribly compelling reason for them to exist. \u00a0The overall effect is of a comic that isn’t so much depressing as\u00a0depressed<\/em>, preoccupied with questions like “why is this book still here” and “why get out of bed in the morning”, and toying with the notion that there may in fact be no satisfactory answer to either question.<\/p>\n

We’re only halfway through and it would be premature to guess where Rosenberg is ultimately going with all this. \u00a0What I can say at this stage is it’s certainly different from most X-Men stories, more in tone more than pure plot. \u00a0Yet precisely because of that tone, it’s not much fun. \u00a0I’m curious to know where it’s heading, yet not especially looking forward to the bit where I actually have to read it in order to find out. But we’ll see; it’s entirely possible that it’ll all knit together beautifully in the second half.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This isn’t an ideal point to be reviewing Matthew Rosenberg’s current\u00a0Uncanny X-Men storyline, which to all intents and purposes is still going. \u00a0But for whatever reason – most likely, to give different names to the trade paperbacks – issue #17 is titled “We Have Always Been, part 1”. \u00a0So officially, at least, issues #11-16 are […]<\/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-4570","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\/4570","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=4570"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4571,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4570\/revisions\/4571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}