{"id":7493,"date":"2022-01-04T20:48:54","date_gmt":"2022-01-04T20:48:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7493"},"modified":"2022-01-04T20:48:54","modified_gmt":"2022-01-04T20:48:54","slug":"hellions-13-18","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7493","title":{"rendered":"Hellions #13-18"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>HELLIONS #13-18<\/strong>
\nby Zeb Wells, Rog\u00e9 Antonio, Steven Segovia & Rain Beredo<\/strong><\/p>\n

We’re entering another season break, making it the perfect time to catch up on reviews. And we start with the X-book that probably had the strongest last six months in terms of what it actually delivered on the page – but it isn’t coming back for another run.<\/p>\n

And I’m pretty much fine with that, because this feels like a good ending point for\u00a0Hellions<\/em>. Not necessarily an ending point for all the characters, some of whom will doubtless go on to other things. But certainly an ending point for the series, since\u00a0Hellions<\/em> has a bunch of inherent tensions in the whole premise. Sinister is a blatant lunatic who the team (or the Quiet Council) are only going to tolerate for so long. Psylocke’s only tolerating all this because she’s being blackmailed to get the back-up copy of her daughter back. None of this can go on for ever. At some point it all has to explode – which is pretty much what happens. Whatever the next logical step is for some of these characters, it isn’t\u00a0Hellions.\u00a0<\/em>So fair enough. Eighteen issues seems the right lifespan for the book.<\/p>\n

The early issues of\u00a0Hellions<\/em> have some grimdark tendencies which don’t do the series any favours. By this point, though, Wells has got the balance right. There’s a lot of black comedy here, but it’s mostly psychological rather than graphic.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Both Rog\u00e9 Antonio and Steven Segovia play the book as a relatively straight superhero series (which it isn’t), and colourist Rain Beredo takes a similarly bright tone. It’s a much more effective approach than going gritty, since it means the book can do optimism and comedy, and it takes the edge off potentially ultra-bleak characters like the Locus Vile. Unfortunately the final issue is marred by fill-in art from Z\u00e9 Carlos which takes up most of the issue – it’s by no means awful but it’s far short of the standards set by the regular artists, and means that a dramatically key scene isn’t what you’d want it to be. At least Segovia does the closing pages, to round out the series.<\/p>\n

The premise of Hellions<\/em> was always a little wonky. Notionally, the Hellions were supposed to be mutants whose powers were in some way predisposed to antisocial behaviour. Quite obviously, the team was no such thing – the whole point of Orphan-Maker, in particular, is that he’s been kept in a state of arrested development to\u00a0prevent<\/em> his powers from emerging. Rather, the Hellions are a dumping ground for problem mutants who had to be found a place on Krakoa somewhere, because the alternative would jeopardise the amnesty. Nanny, Orphan-Maker, Empath and Wild Child simply aren’t functional in normal society. Havok is, but he’s been sent there as an unknowing sleeper agent. Psylocke is supposed to be the sensible one who can keep them in line.<\/p>\n

And Greycrow… well, Greycrow is there because people wrongly\u00a0believe <\/em>him to be an irredeemable maniac based on his involvement in the Mutant Massacre, and he’s sufficiently self-loathing that he won’t argue otherwise. No doubt, if any of the other original Marauders had been around, they’d all have wound up in the Hellions, but the first arc went out of its way to establish that the other Marauders are not around. Hellions<\/em> has rehabbed Greycrow into an entirely usable character: he’s not exactly heroic, but his defining trait is fierce loyalty to the group.<\/p>\n

The outcome of the series is all about whether characters succeed in bonding with their teammates or not. The ones who do get the happy ending and move on to some degree from their respective traumas. Psylocke connects with Greycrow and, while her daughter’s back-up is destroyed, it turns out to be something that frees her from Sinister’s control. Greycrow is a well meaning team player throughout and is rewarded by having someone who accepts him. Wild Child is at least motivated to go back on his medication. On the other half of the team, Nanny and Orphan-Maker never really manage to connect with anyone but each other, and head off to the Pit together – but at least they’re\u00a0<\/em>together, which is all Peter ultimately cares about. Nanny, for her part, is undone by ignoring him in favour of a misguided obsession with the Right AI. And as for\u00a0Empath, he remains ironically unable to form any friendships at all, despite having a power that you’d think was perfectly suited to it. He can see people’s emotions but he can’t truly empathise with them, or at least lacks any understanding of how to act on that information.<\/p>\n

Then there’s Havok, who sits somewhere in the middle. Havok persistently rejects his place on the Hellions, and not entirely without reason. But he deliberately keeps his distance from everyone but Psylocke, and never truly becomes part of the group. He coexists with them, at best. His outcome is mixed at best. He gets freed from Emma’s manipulations but never fully understands what’s happened to him; he gets Madelyne back because Emma is trying to purge her guilt, but he doesn’t appreciate that it’s a looming disaster. His insistence on trying to re-create a connection with Madelyne instead of with his teammates is ultimately going to go badly wrong for him, and\u00a0Hellions<\/em> doesn’t need to play that out to a conclusion for the point to work.<\/p>\n

All of that works for me. There are some lovely bits of pacing and plot twists, too – the slow build to what the Right AI was trying to say is beautifully done, and you can look back over the previous issues and see Nanny trying to get it to say something else. Zeta Team don’t actually get to do all that much despite their lengthy introduction, but I think we see what we need to from them.<\/p>\n

The most questionable choices relate to Mr Sinister, who used to be an A-list mega-powered villain, but is now verging on comic relief status. There’s a school of thought that argues that the ultra-high-powered Sinister from early appearances should probably be reinterpreted as some sort of psychic trickery, which might be the way to go given what we’re looking at now. He’s a great villain in many ways – completely indifferent to the supposed purpose of the Hellions project, manipulative, self-absorbed, and successful enough in his schemes to avoid coming across as a delusional loser. \u00a0Still, there are times when the book pushes a little too far in playing him for comedy – having him literally muzzled in the last issue seems a bit much, when so much of what he does is justified by “well, he’s on the Quiet Council and we need him for resurrection, so he’s untouchable”.<\/p>\n

Mostly he works, though, so that’s a minor issue. Hellions<\/i> is a very strong series built around some seemingly unpromising characters, and a definite high point of the Krakoan era.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HELLIONS #13-18 by Zeb Wells, Rog\u00e9 Antonio, Steven Segovia & Rain Beredo We’re entering another season break, making it the perfect time to catch up on reviews. And we start with the X-book that probably had the strongest last six months in terms of what it actually delivered on the page – but it isn’t […]<\/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-7493","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\/7493","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=7493"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7495,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7493\/revisions\/7495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}