{"id":7535,"date":"2022-01-21T21:37:42","date_gmt":"2022-01-21T21:37:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7535"},"modified":"2022-01-21T21:37:42","modified_gmt":"2022-01-21T21:37:42","slug":"death-of-doctor-strange-x-men-black-knight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7535","title":{"rendered":"Death of Doctor Strange: X-Men \/ Black Knight"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>THE DEATH OF DOCTOR STRANGE: X-MEN \/ BLACK KNIGHT #1<\/strong>
\nby Si Spurrier, Bob Quinn & Israel Silva<\/strong><\/p>\n

So here’s an early entry for 2022’s most “technically” technically-an-X-book. Tie-in to a wider event that doesn’t affect the X-Men in the slightest? Check! Co-starring with a character the X-Men have nothing to do with? Check! Written by that character’s regular writer? Well… as much as Black Knight has a regular writer. Spurrier wrote the recent\u00a0Black Knight: Curse of the Ebony Blade<\/em> miniseries, after all. So sure! Check!<\/p>\n

Don’t worry if you haven’t been following\u00a0Death of Doctor Strange<\/em>, because it’s one of those stories that’s set up to have a bunch of tie-ins around the margins. All you really need to know about the main story is that with Strange dead, his barrier spell is fading and Earth’s dimension is being invaded by weird stuff. That’s literally it.<\/p>\n

So… it’s a team-up between the X-Men and the Black Knight, is it? Well… depends how generous you’re feeling, to be honest.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Si Spurrier is an X-office writer, but this is a follow-up to his\u00a0Black Knight<\/em> mini. That story established a new status quo: Dane Whitman and his long lost daughter Jacks now share the identity of the Black Knight. So you have one of them in the field, and the other one at home giving direction. And this is Spurrier’s chance to show how the gimmick is meant to work. With lots of squabbling, basically.<\/p>\n

The X-Men were in London doing superhero stuff when it got transformed by the encroaching dimension of the Hungry Land, ruled by the demon Necromon. If that’s not ringing a bell, congratulations! You are a normal person and unfamiliar with Black Knight stories published exclusively in UK-only Hulk comics in 1979!<\/p>\n

Jacks enters the transformed London as the Black Knight, with Dane trying to provide some useful guidance. The odd-couple dynamic here is that she doesn’t much trust his judgment on anything, and he’s not particularly convincing, but at the same time, she’s the reckless one and he’s got the legitimate experience that she should maybe be listening to a\u00a0bit<\/em> more. So, Jacks teams up with the X-Men? Er, no. The X-Men have been transformed by the magical dimension. Black Knight teams up with Faiza Hussein to fight them.<\/p>\n

Which means the X-Men’s contribution to this is, pretty much, to be opposing monsters who the hero has to rescue, so that once they’re freed they can help summarily resolve the plot.<\/p>\n

It does look great. The art by Bob Quinn is dynamic, the designs for the transformed X-Men are suitably grotesque. The hellish colouring works. There’s a real sense of place that seems just a cut above the usual generic hellscapes. It\u00a0does<\/em> look like a demonic hazy city, and the splash page of Necromon himself is imposing. Dane Whitman sitting in a chair isn’t the most visual thing in the world – artists working with this set-up are going to have to work quite hard to make his panels sing – but he’s expressive enough to get away with it.<\/p>\n

Realistically, this is a Black Knight story, with the X-Men’s name attached to help sales. Ostensibly, the angle is the contrast between the teamwork of the X-Men and the dysfunctionality of the Black Knights – two individually dysfunctional heroes who have teamed up to be not much better. But that feels tacked on. It’s not like the X-Men get to show off much teamwork during the period when they’re transformed. And even on the story’s own terms, all it needs is a team who can work together. You could have done this plot with Cloak and Dagger and it would be basically the same.<\/p>\n

Still, if you ignore the title and treat it as what it is – a\u00a0Black Knight <\/em>backdoor pilot – it’s perfectly fine. But calling it an X-Men comic is a stretch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE DEATH OF DOCTOR STRANGE: X-MEN \/ BLACK KNIGHT #1 by Si Spurrier, Bob Quinn & Israel Silva So here’s an early entry for 2022’s most “technically” technically-an-X-book. Tie-in to a wider event that doesn’t affect the X-Men in the slightest? Check! Co-starring with a character the X-Men have nothing to do with? Check! Written […]<\/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-7535","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\/7535","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=7535"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7537,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7535\/revisions\/7537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}