{"id":6144,"date":"2021-01-12T22:28:01","date_gmt":"2021-01-12T22:28:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=6144"},"modified":"2021-01-12T22:28:01","modified_gmt":"2021-01-12T22:28:01","slug":"hellions-1-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=6144","title":{"rendered":"Hellions #1-6"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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HELLIONS #1-6<\/strong>
by Zeb Wells, Stephen Segovia, Carmen Carnero & David Curiel<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continuing my reviews catch-up, we come to the opening six issues of Hellions. <\/em>Very loosely, this might be seen as the replacement title for Fallen Angels<\/em>, the one generally accepted dud from the first wave of Krakoan X-books. It picks up Psylocke and Mr Sinister, and in the last couple of issues, the plot links have become rather more explicit. Clearly this is the new home for the storyline that was set up in Fallen Angels<\/em>, not just for two of its characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it’s a very different sort of title. Fallen Angels <\/em>was a ponderous affair with more than a dash of sixth form poetry to it. Hellions <\/em>is a gleeful antisocial mess, in which Psylocke attempts to corral a team of mostly unmanageable eccentrics and supervillains into some sort of viable team, running missions on behalf of the utterly untrustworthy Mr Sinister. Sinister needs some sort of deniability in order to maintain his position on Krakoa, but that’s about all in terms of how far they can trust him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Where Fallen Angels <\/em>was full of moody glumness under neon, Hellions<\/em> opts to go bright, bold and more traditionally superheroic in many ways. It’s clearly the right call. A book about this sort of team, played completely straight in a dark and gritty fashion, would be a terrible grind. Hellions<\/em> thrives when it strikes the balance between the brightness and craziness of its stories, and the darkness of some of its characters – and when it leaves space for a bit of character work and some more interesting ideas in the middle. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s the character moments that really elevate the book; Zeb Wells has already been good at that sort of material. Ostensibly, if issue #1 is to be believed, this is a book about a team of mutants with inherently antisocial powers, who have to be offered some sort of role on Krakoa. But that doesn’t really stand up to much scrutiny, and you suspect it’s not meant to. Only Empath really has powers that you could call antisocial, and even he’s no more inherently problematic than any other psychic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nor is the team as outright evil as you might expect. It wouldn’t have been difficult to fill this book with sociopaths and sadists; there have been enough of them over the years. Instead, we have Psylocke and Havok as the reasonable ones, Wild Child as a loyal guard dog, and Greycrow (formerly Scalphunter of the Marauders) as the trustworthy professional. Nanny and Orphan-Maker are deluded serial killers, but even they were traditionally motivated by a distorted belief that they were helping the children they “rescued”. Only Empath could really be regarded as evil; his complete lack of ethics in manipulating other people for his own amusement is sociopathic. But by the standards of X-Men villains, he’s a nuisance-level character. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of these characters have been underused for years. Greycrow has previously been hinted to have a more sympathetic side, but he gets the most effective retooling here. He’s clearly not the nicest guy in the world – he was involved in the Morlock Massacre after all – but he is<\/em> a devoted team player, genuinely loyal to anyone else who is also loyal to the team. Nanny and Orphan-Maker are adorable characters who haven’t been used properly since the 1980s, and whose back story was never fully explained. I love the decision to go with absurdist characters like this instead of the more obvious choices; and at the same time, there’s a nagging sense that Nanny will be more than she seems. She’s not intimidated in the slightest by Sinister, despite the massive disparity in their positions on the pecking order – and there’s a sense that maybe she’s right. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Empath is less rounded, but then that’s the premise. The running joke of killing him off in every mission works partly as a riff on Krakoan resurrection, but also because a little of Empath goes a long way. Getting him out of the way once he’s served his purpose in a story is no bad thing. Wild Child interests me the least, probably because he’s not<\/em> really a character. But then that’s practically the point of him. There’s not much to identify with, but it would defeat the concept if there were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wells has the modern, flamboyant take on Sinister down perfectly, as well – as do the artists, who lean heavily into how over the top he is. Obviously, this take on Sinister, which became standard after the Kieron Gillen run, isn’t for everyone. But I like it; if anything, it’s true to the original concept behind Mister Sinister’s creation. He is<\/em> an absurd character with a silly name and an excessively elaborate costume. He was meant to be. Of course, he’s since been saddled with a more conventional back story that makes those features seem a little odd – but I’d rather have those aspects come to the fore than play him as a straight evil scientist (which is basically how Fallen Angels<\/em> did it).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book is weaker when it succumbs to the temptation to go dark. I’m not wild about the extended conversation between Havok and Maddy in issues #3-4. I really<\/em> don’t like the mouth-slicing sequence, not just because it’s grimdark, but because it unbalances the tone. The idea of the Maddy arc is strong, and points at the awkward questions about resurrection that other books generally gloss over. But considering the plot is basically an extended fight, it could maybe have been compressed down from three issues to two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m counting the two “X of Swords” tie-ins in this review as well – not because Hellions<\/em> is central to the crossover, but because it isn’t. Unlike most of the participating titles, Hellions<\/em> retains its identity in its two tie-in issues, and – despite being labelled as two middle chapters of “X of Swords” – actually provides a two-part Hellions story instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s not to say that the tie-in banner is unmerited; far from it. The two issues are legitimate tie-ins, but not really part of the main story. They involve the Hellions going on a wild goose chase for Sinister in the margins of the story. Unusually, this is a case of a story that’s actually improved by being bannered as a crossover; if it had been bannered as a wider tie-in, it would have been obvious from the outset that the Hellions’ mission wasn’t going anywhere. The story is all the more effective for looking<\/em> like a crucial part of the series, only for the Hellions to wind up getting battered into oblivion without ever actually crossing paths with the main plot. (That said – what was<\/em> Sinister’s plan for the mission until he was forced to go on it himself? Was he going to get Psylocke to betray the team?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are a few niggles here, but only because those are the points that stand out as missteps. When it gets the balance right – which is most of the time – Hellions <\/em>is a great read that makes good use of underexplored characters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HELLIONS #1-6by Zeb Wells, Stephen Segovia, Carmen Carnero & David Curiel Continuing my reviews catch-up, we come to the opening six issues of Hellions. Very loosely, this might be seen as the replacement title for Fallen Angels, the one generally accepted dud from the first wave of Krakoan X-books. It picks up Psylocke and Mr […]<\/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-6144","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\/6144","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=6144"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6146,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6144\/revisions\/6146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}