{"id":7071,"date":"2021-08-31T21:51:02","date_gmt":"2021-08-31T20:51:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7071"},"modified":"2021-08-31T21:51:02","modified_gmt":"2021-08-31T20:51:02","slug":"children-of-the-atom-1-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7071","title":{"rendered":"Children of the Atom #1-6"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>CHILDREN OF THE ATOM #1-6
\n#1-2 by Vita Ayala, Bernard Chang & Marcelo Maiolo<\/strong>
\n#3-6 by Vita Ayala, Paco Medina & David Curiel<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here’s another one, then, for the list of recent X-books that read like they’ve been guillotined.\u00a0Children of the Atom<\/em> had long pre-release delays as well, perhaps pandemic-related. And after all that, it runs for six issues, five of which are spotlights on the individual team members. It’s not a gathering of the team arc as such – they’re already together right from issue #1 – but it’s a careful focus on each team member in turn, all very clearly intended to set up characters and relationships for the future.<\/p>\n

Now, it’s certainly possible that we’ll come back to these characters. Carmen in particular seems like a natural fit for\u00a0New Mutants<\/em>. And it looks like some sort of revamp is \u00a0coming after Inferno<\/em>, so who knows, maybe the Children resurface then. That could explain some of the very obviously dangling plots, such as how they stumbled into a spaceship and found their equipment, or how one of their friends got super powers from being treated by Arthur Nagan of the Headmen, or… well, anything at all to do with poor Gabe, who never really gets around to do anything in these six issues, aside from getting introduced in issue #2.<\/p>\n

But then there’s the sudden rush in issue #6 to tie up the romance angle that had been established with Gabe, Buddy and Carmen in earlier issues. That feels like something you only do if you have no choice but to cut to the chase.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So was it a mistake to go with one character per issue, and to leave all those plot threads unanswered? I don’t think so. The core story of this book was always about the Children posing as mutants, eventually getting exposed, and what happens after that. If you’re ending here, then that’s the story to focus on. It doesn’t really matter\u00a0<\/em>how they stumbled onto the alien technology that they use to simulate powers.\u00a0And Children of the Atom<\/em>\u00a0is fundamentally a character-driven series; it needs to make the Children feel like fully developed characters instead of just five variations on the same gimmick.<\/p>\n

On that level, it works very well. They\u00a0are<\/em> all fully realised characters, and the book clearly has a lot of sympathy for them all, even if it doesn’t much care for some of their central choices. Ayala’s choice, evidently, was to try to sell me on the characters by taking the time early on to round them out. And that succeeds. I’d have liked to spend more time with them.<\/p>\n

Despite the change of artist three issues in, it’s a good looking book too. The style change from Chang to Medina isn’t too noticeable, and both of them do a solid storytelling job with some quite busy pages. Thought seems to have been given to how everyone’s home ought to look, and there’s plenty of nice little choices in the detail. But at the same time, it’s classic, clean-looking bright superhero art, which is precisely what this book needs. The whole point is that the Children want to look like proper superheroes, and they need to carry it off well enough to fool the casual audience. Character design has to walk a fine line here between making them obvious homages to the characters they idolise, and not making them too obviously ridiculous. They undercut themselves enough by choosing intentionally awful codenames like Cyclops-Lass; on some level, they need to look cool for the gimmick to work.<\/p>\n

The central premise, though. The metaphor. How well does it work?<\/p>\n

A standard reading of this book seems to be that it’s about cultural appropriation. I’m not sure it exactly maps on to that. That’s no bad thing, mind you. The X-Men’s central metaphor of mutants representing an all-purpose oppressed and marginalised group has always been somewhat broken through the very fact that many mutants\u00a0really do have wildly dangerous powers that a lot of them can’t control. And that’s fine. It muddies the waters, and if you do it right, that makes it more interesting.<\/p>\n

Still… if the book is concerned about cultural appropriation, then it’s looking at the most extreme form of it. When the Children learn their lesson and put out their corrective statement in the last issue, what they drop is the active pretence of being mutants – perhaps not something they’ve publicly said in quite those terms, but something they deliberately allowed people to believe, and certainly the way they presented themselves to other mutants who were inviting them to go to Krakoa.<\/p>\n

What they\u00a0don’t<\/em> drop, if the data page in issue #6 is anything to go by, is anything else about their act. They’re still the Children of the Atom; they’re still using the same codenames; they’re still wearing X-Men-inspired costumes, complete with X-logos. If that counts as learning their lesson, then we’re not concerned here about the simple copying of cultural elements and the grey line with inspiration. We’re talking about outright pretending to be a member of a group for which you don’t meet the membership criteria. This seems to be Storm’s focus in issue #5, when she characterises them as “children, and it is in your nature to explore identities other than your own to learn more about yourself.”<\/p>\n

So, in real world terms, is the closest analogy somebody pretending to be gay because they love gay culture and they think it makes them more interesting? I suspect that’s probably what the book had in mind, but the stuff with them repeatedly trying to get through the Krakoan gates complicates matter.<\/p>\n

In most X-books the gates serve as transport to help move the plot along. In\u00a0Children of the Atom<\/em> the focus is on Krakoa as a literal gatekeeper, policing access to Krakoa and membership of its community. With the exception of Carmen, and even then only once her powers emerge, the Children are not allowed in. They already know this before issue #1. But again and again they keep trying to get through.<\/p>\n

What exactly are they meant to be thinking here? That question’s particularly pointed in the case of Buddy – pretty much everyone else can be seen as being dragged along in her wake, and in their case the answer to why they keep trying the gates may be, to a large extent, “to humour Buddy”. But Buddy seems absolutely serious about it. What does she think is going to happen?<\/p>\n

For all of her apparent obsession with mutant trivia, it’s clear that there are major gaps in her knowledge. Still, she must know that ordinary humans can’t generally use the gates – that’s surely common knowledge, since many of them are in high profile locations. It takes her until issue #4 to come up with the theory that it might be something to do with DNA, and that stealing Cole’s clothes might fool the gates. Before that… does she think that the gates might be reputation based? That there’s some sort of database that might get updated if the Children become widely recognised? Is she just obsessive and unwilling to stop trying because she has no better ideas? Does she think it’s something to do with her state of mind and how she identifies? Does she believe that on some level she\u00a0is<\/em> a mutant, and that there must be some sort of glitch which will sort itself out in the end?<\/p>\n

Let’s be fair to Buddy – if she thinks it’s possible to somehow become a mutant, or at least be recognised as one, then she’s not wrong. It\u00a0is<\/em> possible for a human to turn themselves into a mutant. Mr Sinister did it, and he’s on the Quiet Council now. It’s certainly possible for a non-mutant to look like a mutant for extended periods, and to believe themselves to be a mutant. Wanda and Pietro did it. It’s possible for a human to have mutant DNA spliced into them. Cole does it in this series. And if you want to push the idea more broadly, and claim that being part of mutant culture isn’t about DNA so much as a shared experience, the Marvel Universe is littered with characters who aren’t strictly mutants but who got powers in similarly arbitrary fashion at broadly the same time in their lives. Kamala Khan, say.<\/p>\n

It feels like there’s a lot of untapped material in there. The obvious plot direction was for Buddy to sign up for the same treatment Cole went through, at which point she presumably discovers that the Headmen are behind it and either sacrifices her chance or goes for it anyway. Either would work, but having her actually become a mutant seems like it would have had potential.<\/p>\n

The other analogy here, which shouldn’t be overlooked, is that the Children of the Atom are the fans. An odd tension of the Krakoan era is that the fans are invited to identify with the mutants, while the mutants spend much of their time loudly disdaining the human world. Which, of course, is where the fans reside. Books like\u00a0Children of the Atom<\/em> foreground the fact that the fans don’t qualify for admission, and again, it’s an interesting tension. So too is the promised set up where one of the group, and only one, makes it onto Krakoa the normal way. That feels like something that could have played out happily for years.<\/p>\n

The book’s biggest problems are plot-related. It’s essential to the premise that the Children of the Atom fool some people, and that they believe they’re fooling other people. So sure, by all means have them confuse Hell’s Belles or the U-Men, all of whom have every reason to fall for it. But it was a mistake to have the X-Men themselves fall for it – and there was no real need to have scenes from the X-Men’s point of view that made that point clear. Right from the off, the Children of the Atom are a group of teenagers in knock-on X-Men costumes, who quite coincidentally have the powers to go with their costumes, and who don’t show up on Cerebro. It just defies belief that, faced with these facts, the X-Men wonder why Cerebro isn’t detecting the kids – instead of jumping to the utterly obvious conclusion that they aren’t mutants. If you want the X-Men to be surprised by the reveal, then they really needed to have less information to start with.<\/p>\n

And the reveal doesn’t get the reaction you’d expect. Krakoa has serious cultural issues with people pretending to be mutants. The Scarlet Witch is Krakoa’s greatest cultural hate figure, and the favoured term of abuse for her is “the pretender”. Maybe it’s another element that had to be truncated. But at the very least, there should have been a lot of Krakoan opinion that was seriously,\u00a0seriously<\/em> unimpressed with the Children of the Atom.<\/p>\n

Still, I liked this series a lot. Yes, it’s always tempting to credit a truncated series with all the interesting stories it never actually got around to telling, and that might or might not have worked. But there were so many stories that could have been done with these characters, and hopefully they don’t completely drop off the radar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CHILDREN OF THE ATOM #1-6 #1-2 by Vita Ayala, Bernard Chang & Marcelo Maiolo #3-6 by Vita Ayala, Paco Medina & David Curiel Here’s another one, then, for the list of recent X-books that read like they’ve been guillotined.\u00a0Children of the Atom had long pre-release delays as well, perhaps pandemic-related. And after all that, it […]<\/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-7071","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\/7071","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=7071"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7074,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7071\/revisions\/7074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}