There’s a moment in these six issues that I really like. It’s at the end of issue #17, when Cain – who only showed up partway through the previous arc – finally takes a look at the X-Men’s hit list of mutants they want to track down and asks why Emma Frost isn’t on the list. And everyone turns to look at him and asks: Who’s that? It’s a lovely reveal, since it’s not telegraphed, but at the same time, Emma is such a prominent character that it is indeed odd for nobody to have mentioned her up to that point. It’s really well done.<\/p>\n
Viewed as a whole, though, “We Have Always Been” goes in the pile marked “interesting failure.” It’s taken me a while to get around to reviewing this, and it does benefit from being viewed in the context of the stories that surround it. Matthew Rosenberg’s run came out alongside the “Age of X-Man” crossover, with most of the cast off in a mock utopia for several months; understandably enough, it contrasts with that by going in the opposite direction, and cranking up the angst and misery.<\/p>\n
But it also leads into the Jonathan Hickman run. And given what a drastic change of pace that is, with a drastic change in the X-Men’s place in the world, it’s perhaps more understandable that Rosenberg aims for a definitive version of the X-Men standards – the persecuted, marginalised group. Hickman’s story also seems to involve at least some characters returning from the dead (the Stepford Cuckoos are back up to five, for example), which may explain why Rosenberg feels so relaxed about casually killing off cast members. Dani even tells us outright in the final issue that she expects we’ll see them all again – and she’s a Valkyrie, so she ought to know. That’s not to say that these plot points are actively intended to set up Hickman’s run, but they seem to at least be taking advantage of the opportunity presented by the impending reboot.<\/p>\n
It still doesn’t really work, though. The basic shape of these six issues is to reveal that Emma Frost has been pressganged into service by O*N*E’s evil General Callahan, who wants to use her against other mutants. For reasons which are unfathomable, except for the fact that there wouldn’t be a plot otherwise, Callahan releases her back onto the streets after putting a bomb in her head, and Emma has been trying to steer the X-Men in a safe direction while finding a way to get out from under Callahan’s control. The X-Men wind up allying with Emma and some baddies, and Emma has the bright idea of erasing humanity’s knowledge of mutants so that they can live in peace. Everyone’s still a bit depressed, General Callahan shows up with some Sentinels in tow (having protected himself with some sort of psychic blocker), and there’s a big fight where the rest of the X-Men arrive from the Age of X-Man in time to sort it all out. And then everyone decides not to hide but to live openly as mutants because of course they do.<\/p>\n
There’s not much shape to any of this, and the assorted plot threads don’t knit together into any larger whole. Remember the subplot about the anti-mutant vaccine? That’s got nothing much to do with O*N*E, so it gets casually disposed of by having Dark Beast knock up a cure in his basement. That cure then turns out to be poisonous in its own right, but Dr Nemesis (who has barely appeared in the story up to that point) then knocks up a cure for the cure in equally offhanded fashion. The story needs the vaccine thing in order to justify the claim that, honest, it’s the end for mutants this time – but having introduced it, it struggles to find a way of incorporating it into the unrelated Callahan plot.<\/p>\n
Callahan, meanwhile, is a completely one-dimensional villain who isn’t strong enough to anchor the story. He’s an off-the-shelf sadist and bigot with no real distinguishing features beyond that. All of which would be fine if he was a faceless antagonist, but the story gives him more prominence than that. And his casual brutality barely stands out against the meat-grinder bloodbath of the rest of the series, which casually slaughters Wolfsbane, Chamber, Vanisher, Shinobi Shaw (!), Velocidad… The misstep here, I think, lies in killing them one at a time in seemingly unrelated ways. If a bunch of them got blown to smithereens at once then that would feel like a disastrous error that Scott as leader would have to live with – instead, it just feels like the writer has got trigger happy. There’s no obvious in-story reason for characters to start dropping like flies, and that’s a problem.<\/p>\n
There’s a half-developed idea to the effect that Cyclops is doing the wrong thing by keeping this version of the X-Men together. He’s ignoring Blindfold’s warnings, not because the world really needs an X-Men but because the X-Men and their legacy is so important to\u00a0him<\/em> – to his own sense of identity – that he’s willing to put others in harm’s way just so there can be an X-Men for him to build his life around. This isn’t such a bad idea, but it doesn’t click, because the story never really makes a convincing case that Scott is to blame for the body count.<\/p>\n As for the art, things are patchy. Salvador Larroca is meant to be the lead artist for this storyline, but he only actually draws the final three issues. The first three are drawn by Carlos G\u00f3mez, Carlos Villa and Bob Quinn, with a total of five inkers credited on issue #19 alone. It’s competent enough, but you couldn’t go much further than that. Larroca’s issues are alright, though I still think his bright and clean style is miscast on this story – except that even then, he drops out halfway through the final issue, so that the big rousing return of the other X-Men is drawn by David Messina, whose art looks entirely different. It’s been a while since I’ve seen fill-in artists thrown at an X-Men story in quite this way, but then they\u00a0had<\/em> to get this one done in time for House of X<\/em>, I guess. You can understand how it ended up happening; that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a drag on the story.<\/p>\n Rosenberg may have a meta reading in mind here. \u00a0You could see this as the angst-ridden archetypal X-Men story dialled up to 11. And just as Cyclops seems to be keeping the team going for the sake of having it exist, maybe the story is trying to explore the idea that the X-Men themselves are a zombie franchise which exists simply in order to exist.\u00a0But if that’s the idea, it makes the case rather too convincingly; this is too often a depressing slog to read. And while it’s certainly a relief when the other X-Men to show up at the end in a burst of \u00a0triumph, it feels tacked on, rather than any sort of true answer to the complaint – all he can really promise in his final issue is the X-Men doubling down for more of the same. (An explicit lead-in to House of X<\/em> would probably have helped this arc enormously, but it wouldn’t be great for the Hickman collection down the road.)<\/p>\n This is a strange arc, which is clearly aiming for bleakness as a creative choice, but veers into both self-parody and outright depression. There are some good moments, but more often it’s joyless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There’s a moment in these six issues that I really like. It’s at the end of issue #17, when Cain – who only showed up partway through the previous arc – finally takes a look at the X-Men’s hit list of mutants they want to track down and asks why Emma Frost isn’t on the […]<\/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-4722","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\/4722","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=4722"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4733,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4722\/revisions\/4733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}