{"id":7336,"date":"2021-11-21T15:46:42","date_gmt":"2021-11-21T15:46:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7336"},"modified":"2021-11-21T15:46:42","modified_gmt":"2021-11-21T15:46:42","slug":"x-men-unlimited-infinity-comic-5-12-x-men-green","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7336","title":{"rendered":"X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic #5-12: “X-Men Green”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #5-12<\/strong>
\n“X-Men Green”<\/strong>
\nby Gerry Duggan, Emilio Laiso and Rachelle Rosenberg<\/strong><\/p>\n

Readers who don’t subscribe to?Marvel Unlimited may well wonder if there’s anything going on in the Infinity Comics that they need to know about. The short answer is, not really. Most of them – and there’s a pretty steady stream of them – are essentially fill-in stories. But there are exceptions, mostly with stories that focus on minor characters whose status quo is of no real interest to any of the ongoing titles. One such book has been dutifully exploring the back story of Kushala, a character from?Doctor Strange and the Sorcerers Supreme<\/em>. Another is?X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic<\/em>, which focusses its second arc on Nature Girl and Curse.<\/p>\n

Curse is a background character from the Krakoan era and fair game for this sort of thing. Nature Girl was one of the pupils from?Wolverine and the X-Men<\/em>, and used to be a relatively high profile character – she was used in the last run of Generation X<\/em>?- but she’s fallen badly off the radar. That leaves her free for a story like this, which radically changes her status quo. And to be fair, it’s by the regular writer of?X-Men<\/em>, which is a sign that Marvel want you to take this book reasonably seriously.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As a story, it’s… a mixed affair.<\/p>\n

Here’s the thing. Nature Girl has always been set up as a character in tune with the natural world, who thinks animal life is underappreciated by man, and so on. It makes logical sense, then, that she should be alarmed about the state of the world, global warming, pollution, things of that sort. The trouble is that it’s rather hard for the X-Men to do stories about how mankind is destroying the world through its hubris when the very same book is repeatedly telling us that mutants can terraform Mars in an afternoon. If that’s so – and evidently it is – then mitigating global warming seems like it ought to be a pretty trivial piece of work for them. So it’s become a series that can’t easily do eco-catastrophe stories.<\/p>\n

Which ought to be a problem for Nature Girl. I suppose you could make part of the angle “why aren’t we mutants stepping in to do something about this”, but that’s not the direction here.<\/p>\n

Here’s the story. When a sea turtle washes up on Krakoa having choked on a plastic bag from a grocery store, Nature Girl storms off to the store to confront the manager. When the manager fails to show any sympathy for the sea turtle, she stabs him to death, then decides to go on the run with a police dog called Saoirse, whom she insists has told her it’s fine. (Nobody ever seems to query whether the manager of a store in Las Vegas, over 300 miles inland, should really have anticipated this outcome.)<\/p>\n

Since Nature Girl has unequivocally murdered a human, Wolverine is sent to get her back. Curse also decides to tag along with Nature Girl, since Curse is apparently evil and has the power to wish for bad things to happen to people. By all appearances Curse is more just tagging along to revel in the chaos. The two of them show up at an oilfield where Curse also kills a worker (possibly by accident, but she certainly doesn’t seem to care). An increasingly bloodstained Nature Girl declares that she feels alive at last, then physically changes to have a half-blackened face. They show up at an oil refinery where they encounter mercenary guard Black Mamba and Sauron. Of course, Wolverine eventually recaptures Nature Girl and Curse, and the Quiet Council send them to the Hole. But Krakoa doesn’t agree, so the island (and Cypher) set them free and tell them to keep their heads down in future.<\/p>\n

It certainly looks good. Laiso has a nice clean look, the Nature Girl redesign is subtle but effective. And it makes quite good use of the Infinity Comics format. It doesn’t labour it as a gimmick; there’s the occasional showpiece panel designed to be read while scrolling through it, and a rather nice fade to black with a fake ending in the final issue. An underexplored aspect of the format – at least in the Infinity Comics so far – is that there’s a limit to how far readers can scroll through them, and so they can be used to force a pause in a way that would be harder to signal on the printed page. At the same time, if you’re actually telling a story, you don’t want to be doing these tricks all the time, and you want panel-to-panel storytelling that reads smoothly. And this largely has it. It’s one of the better examples of the storytelling potential of the format.<\/p>\n

As a story… it couldn’t be called subtle. The oil company is called Cynadine, for heaven’s sake. But the main problem is that the story seems to be riding two horses at once. On the one hand, it’s abundantly clear that we’re meant to agree with Nature Girl and see her as an avenger with a just cause, even if we have doubts about her methods. On the other hand, Curse is presented as fundamentally evil, and Nature Girl herself is dismissed by all other regular characters as basically a fanatic, which isn’t how the story itself presents her.<\/p>\n

Ideally these would fit together into some kind of discussion about the limits of eco-activism but… that doesn’t really happen. You can do that story with smashing up a morally dodgy oil refinery. But when you’ve already opened by having Nature Girl kill a guy for selling a plastic bag that killed a sea turtle, you’ve positioned her clearly and unambiguously as a lunatic. It’s not stopping anything, it’s not achieving anything in itself… it’s just the behaviour of a homicidal maniac. You can’t really dial that back to “morally ambiguous” in the later chapters, and the effect is just weird.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #5-12 “X-Men Green” by Gerry Duggan, Emilio Laiso and Rachelle Rosenberg Readers who don’t subscribe to?Marvel Unlimited may well wonder if there’s anything going on in the Infinity Comics that they need to know about. The short answer is, not really. Most of them – and there’s a pretty steady stream […]<\/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-7336","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\/7336","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=7336"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7338,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7336\/revisions\/7338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}