{"id":7526,"date":"2022-01-16T20:30:04","date_gmt":"2022-01-16T20:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7526"},"modified":"2022-01-16T20:30:04","modified_gmt":"2022-01-16T20:30:04","slug":"s-w-o-r-d-7-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7526","title":{"rendered":"S.W.O.R.D. #7-11"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>S.W.O.R.D. #7-11<\/strong>
\nby Al Ewing, Stefano Caselli, Guiu Vilanova, Jacopo Camagni & Fernando Sifuentes<\/strong><\/p>\n

The period between “Hellfire Gala” and “Inferno” has been a mixed bag for the X-books. Several books feel like they’ve lost their way, or are marking time waiting for the new season to start.\u00a0S.W.O.R.D.<\/em> is the one that goes the other way, with its own stories and its future direction coming to the fore.<\/p>\n

Up to this point,\u00a0S.W.O.R.D.\u00a0<\/em>has been remarkably heavy on the crossovers. Its first seven issues include three tie-ins to\u00a0King in Black<\/em>, one to “Hellfire Gala”, and one to\u00a0“Last Annihilation”. That’s over 70% crossover, which is a bit much. But with these five issues – yes, we’ve got a “Last Annihilation” tie-in in issue #7, okay. After that, though, the focus is squarely on Storm establishing her authority on Arakko, Abigail Brand’s inveterate scheming, and Henry Gyrich’s hamfisted attempts to outwit her. The direction of the book becomes clear, and it’s set up for next season’s\u00a0X-Men Red<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Issue #7, admittedly, devotes a lot of time to “Last Annihilation” material that, with hindsight, isn’t all that important to the book. I do get the desire to ground\u00a0S.W.O.R.D.\u00a0<\/em>in the Marvel Universe, and in particular in the cosmic events that Abigail wants to interact with – in a sense, her priorities lead\u00a0S.W.O.R.D.\u00a0<\/em>to get involved in this stuff – but there’s a lot of Hulkling in that issue, and relatively little of Abigail’s manipulations at the end. Still, Al Ewing is really good at sketching out some of these characters we’ve never seen (in this book) before, and getting the point of someone like Captain Glory across quickly.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What issue #7 does have, of course, is dinner with Storm and Dr Doom, which is a great little scene. Doom’s role in\u00a0S.W.O.R.D.\u00a0<\/em>is to be the human egomaniac who warns the mutants that they don’t know what they’re doing, and gets shouted down. The fact remains, though, that Doom might yet be right. Even if the mutants should be running a mile from his help, they’re surely rookies when it comes to cosmic and magical matters, and there’s a definite element of mutant nationalism in their insistence that they know what they’re doing. Do they really? It’s that undercurrent that maybe Doom has a point, and maybe the mutants are showing the same hubris as him, that adds a dimension to Storm showing him up.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Doom and Storm are engaged in a display of posturing between human and mutants, when the ultimate focus of this series seems to be more on Abigail Brand and her rejection of the entire Krakoan philosophy. At this point she’s not\u00a0exactly\u00a0<\/em>a villain, but she’s getting pretty darned close. She’s certainly scheming, lying, and generally rejecting the whole premise of mutant-centric Krakoan society, all of which would seem to make her as the bad guy in the logic of the current X-books. As she explained fairly directly back in issue #1, her focus is on the relationship between all of Earth and the wider cosmos, and she doesn’t care about the difference between humans and mutants. So far as she’s concerned, all this stuff about a mutant planet declaring itself the capital of the solar system is a load of nonsense to indulge the mutants, and while Gyrich is clearly there to be exposed as out of his depth, Brand’s wheels-within-wheels scheming hardly generates the same result.<\/p>\n

Which begs the question – what is<\/em> she trying to achieve with her cosmic diplomacy? She’s certainly not trying to\u00a0represent the agenda of anyone but herself. What stops her from being an outright villain, at this stage, is that her motivations\u00a0appear\u00a0<\/em>to be limited to the genuine protection of the Earth, albeit filtered through an alarming dose of realpolitik. She thinks she knows better than everyone else what’s good for them, and in the sense that she’s the only one with any relevant experience, she might actually be right. None of this is especially novel for her character, by the way – she’s been cheerfully scheming for the claimed greater good since she debuted in\u00a0Astonishing X-Men<\/em>\u00a0– but it really does put her at odds with the mutants in a way that they don’t yet seem to fully realise.<\/p>\n

There’s some inconsistency in the art in this run, with three different artists over three stories (issues #9-11 are a three-parter). It works well enough, though. Jacopo Camagni’s art on #9-11 is clean and easy to follow, though it feels a little bland at times. Sometimes that plays to its advantage, though, since it sets a baseline that Camagni sometimes manages to take advantage of. The sudden mid-sentence death of a smiling Titan is beautifully done, and works all the better because it’s so understated. That final scene of Brand giving her big speech to Gyrich before killing him is very nicely delivered too, with a bit of informality in her body language. On the other hand, issue #8 – the Storm\/Tarn issue – probably benefits from having Guiu Vilanova, who isn’t quite so polished, but feels more comfortable with the grotesquerie of the final fight.<\/p>\n

There are downsides. The book doesn’t really have something for all its characters to do – Cable doesn’t contribute all that much, and Manifold is down to a scene in the final issue. And then there’s Arakko as a setting.<\/p>\n

Do we actually care about Arakko? Right now, it all feels terribly samey to me. Everyone we meet there seems to be a big fighter with a fun character design – and sure, the volcano guy in issue #8 is neat – whose hobbies are violence, yelling about honour, and Klingon promotions. Tarn stands out from the pack, but mostly by being a hyper-sadistic version of Mr Sinister. There are hints at a bit more range in the various members of the Great Ring when we see them in issue #8, but only Tarn and Isca have really had a chance to do much, and Isca’s still pretty generic when you look past her powers.<\/p>\n

Now, again, Arakko is kind of a fantasy trope and I’m not really all that interested in that sort of thing to begin with, so maybe I’m not the best person to judge. But it still feels to me like it’s\u00a0just<\/em> a fantasy trope. If anything, putting it on Mars makes it less interesting to me. On Earth, you’ve got a conflict with the Krakoan mutants and with modern Earth and you can play off the contrast. In space… I mean, I guess<\/em> you can play them against Marvel’s space empires, but those are all basically fantasy tropes with spaceships too, so it doesn’t feel that interesting to me. Arakko’s been around a while now and I’m still waiting to be persuaded that it’s a particularly strong idea.<\/p>\n

Still, these last few issues have largely worked for me despite being built heavily around Arakko, which makes me interested enough in where we’re going next with\u00a0X-Men Red<\/em>. But Arakko’s going to need a second dimension pretty quickly if it’s going to be the focus of the next season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

S.W.O.R.D. #7-11 by Al Ewing, Stefano Caselli, Guiu Vilanova, Jacopo Camagni & Fernando Sifuentes The period between “Hellfire Gala” and “Inferno” has been a mixed bag for the X-books. Several books feel like they’ve lost their way, or are marking time waiting for the new season to start.\u00a0S.W.O.R.D. is the one that goes the other […]<\/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-7526","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\/7526","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=7526"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7529,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7526\/revisions\/7529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}