{"id":5634,"date":"2020-09-22T22:03:23","date_gmt":"2020-09-22T21:03:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=5634"},"modified":"2020-09-22T22:03:23","modified_gmt":"2020-09-22T21:03:23","slug":"x-men-marvels-snapshots-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=5634","title":{"rendered":"X-Men: Marvels Snapshots #1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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“And the Rest Will Follow”<\/strong>
by Jay Edidin, Tom Reilly & Chris O’Halloran<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Kurt Busiek-curated Marvels<\/em> line is difficult to keep track of, not least because so many of the books have such similar titles. As you might expect, much of it consists of well-handled character pieces written in the margins of past history; the original Marvels <\/em>series was largely about revisiting the history of the Marvel Universe from a different perspective, after all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This book – the cover says Marvel’s Snapshots X-Men<\/em>, the digital copy says X-Men: Marvels Snapshots<\/em>, and does this stuff really have to be so confusing? – takes a rather different approach. It’s an origin story for Cyclops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hold on a minute, you may be saying. Cyclops has got an origin story already. He’s had one since the sixties. And of course Jay Edidin knows that very well – he’s been podcasting on X-Men history for years. The thing about Cyclops’ back story, though, is that it’s not so much an origin story as a big pile of baggage that Scott is expected to lug around with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Historically, there are three main components to Scott’s back story. There’s the original mid-60s “Origins of the X-Men” backup, in which he’s run away from the orphanage, he stumbles upon the Living Diamond, and he gets rescued by Professor X and recruited as the first X-Men… all mostly by being in the right place at the right time. There’s the 1970s revelations that his parents were abducted into space and that he survived a traumatic parachute jump to earth with little brother Alex. And there’s the weird 1980s stuff that inserts Mr Sinister as the evil mastermind behind the orphanage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But all these are things that happened to Scott, not so much things that motivated him. For many years, it was possible to interpret Scott as the middle manager of the X-Men, a basically decent fellow who had drifted into the superhero life by blind chance, had a real talent for it, and stuck around mainly out of a sense of responsibility and a lack of ideas about what else he could do with his life. There was some logic to the Age of Apocalypse take on Cyclops, in which he gets raised by Sinister and becomes a middle-manager supervillain instead. In the last decade or so, Cyclops has been refitted as a crusader for his people, but he’s never really had a back story to go with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s the gap which this story seems to be addressing, and which it deals with very nicely. It’s set at the orphanage, in the period before Scott gets his powers and his glasses. In theory, Mr Sinister’s in the background for all this, but Scott won’t find that out for years, and since he’s the point of view character, the story wisely just ignores the guy – this is the orphanage at face value. And all the better for it, because this story would not benefit from trying to sell it all as part of Sinister’s grand plan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea – simple but very effective – is to make Scott a muted, monochrome character in the orphanage, isolated from the other residents, somewhat bullied but mainly just unable to connect with anyone. He’s not distanced from us – he’s the point of view character – but there’s never any sense that he has friends or any real close relationships within the orphanage. He remembers Alex but everyone insists to him that Alex didn’t exist (the closest the story comes to gesturing at Sinister). And when the first Silver Age superheroes show up, Scott becomes quietly, politely obsessed with the idea of them not just as a more colourful, better life, but also as something intangibly important to him. Part of that – a clever little parallel – is that the Fantastic Four’s origin story (four people in a flying machine, something goes wrong) serves as a nagging reminder of what happened to his family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s not that anything drastic happens<\/em> in this story, but it convincingly plugs the gap of explaining why Scott has always been so drawn to the superhero life, simply by making it into something that symbolically offers him a more interesting and inspiring life and a vaguely-defined re-connection with his past. Scott is too introverted to be conventionally suited as a superhero, but the iconography makes sense to him. Naturally, Scott is rather more impressed with Reed Richards than with the gauche Tony Stark, but still draws the lesson that heroism is about being able to get things done, and getting things done is about planning and preparation. Scott is heroically diligent, and as he starts to develop that side of his personality, and gets his red glasses, he starts feeling more comfortable in who he is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tom Reilly and Chris O’Halloran’s art nails the tone for this; it calls for a restrained and muted style in order that the superhero elements can offer an escape from it, and that’s what they deliver. The tricky bit is to make the orphanage visually interesting even while you’re saving the bright colours and the grand scenes for the token action sequences. The issue pulls that off with the character work, some good use of spot colours, and a strong sense of what Scott’s thinking. Granted, he’s not hugely recognisable, but that’s inevitable when you’re doing a story without his glasses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is very good. It’s a character piece rather than a story that adds any earth-shattering events to continuity. But what it adds is a rationale for who Scott is, which wasn’t really supplied by his pre-established history. It’s a genuine gap where there was something worthwhile to add. Scott’s pre-X-Men history is largely about how he wound up as Cyclops; this is about why, and it finds a very convincing angle on that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“And the Rest Will Follow”by Jay Edidin, Tom Reilly & Chris O’Halloran The Kurt Busiek-curated Marvels line is difficult to keep track of, not least because so many of the books have such similar titles. As you might expect, much of it consists of well-handled character pieces written in the margins of past history; 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,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5634","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=5634"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5637,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5634\/revisions\/5637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}