{"id":7879,"date":"2022-05-17T21:42:40","date_gmt":"2022-05-17T20:42:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7879"},"modified":"2022-05-17T21:42:40","modified_gmt":"2022-05-17T20:42:40","slug":"devils-reign-x-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7879","title":{"rendered":"Devil’s Reign: X-Men"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DEVIL’S REIGN: X-MEN #1-3<\/strong>
\nWriter: Gerry Duggan<\/strong>
\nArtist: Phil Noto<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Cory Petit<\/strong>
\nEditor: Jordan White<\/strong><\/p>\n

Three issues, huh? There’s a trade paperback of this listed on Amazon for August, with a page count of 112 – I can only assume they’re pairing it with something to be announced. Anyway, I skipped over this when it came out, since it’s not a core X-book. It’s closer than many, though.<\/p>\n

Publishing it in\u00a0X-Men<\/em> might have been a stretch, since it’s an Emma Frost story, and she’s not in the cast of that book. But it’s by Gerry Duggan and Phil Noto, an established Krakoan creative team. And it picks up on a subplot from Duggan’s\u00a0Marauders<\/em> run about Emma having some sort of back story with Wilson Fisk, running missions for him in exchange for him helping Lourdes Chantel to start a new life away from Sebastian Shaw.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Does this have anything much to do with\u00a0Devil’s Reign<\/em>? Well, somewhat. If I’m being honest, I can’t get very worked up about\u00a0Devil’s Reign<\/em> as a concept. Wilson Fisk runs New York with an iron fist and turns against the superheroes. Some of us are old enough to remember\u00a0Dark Reign<\/em>, which was admittedly over a decade ago, but the name brings it to mind. Or then there was that time HYDRA took over the United States for a bit (and then everyone pretended it never happened). And as a premise,\u00a0Devil’s Reign<\/em> is… that, but in local government.<\/p>\n

I mean, yes, sure, it’s New York local government. Maybe that’s a bigger thing? It kind of makes sense as a power base for the Kingpin, in the context of Daredevil.\u00a0<\/em>But I can’t quite get my head around the fact that it’s a story about evil local government. Maybe it’s an American thing. Maybe it just conjures up the wrong associations for me. Not Aunt May’s bin collection, you fiend.<\/p>\n

Still, it means Fisk is interacting with wider Marvel characters right now, and that’s as good a place as any to pick up the\u00a0Marauders<\/em> plot thread. If we’re being honest, though, there’s really only two issues of this series that actually deal with that story. Issue #1 is all set-up. There’s an opening flashback of 7 pages or so that establishes the basic point: back in the 80s (continuity-wise), Emma was working for the Kingpin at the same time as Elektra. Emma messes with your mind, Elektra kills you.<\/p>\n

The rest of issue #1 is… kind of redundant, if we’re being honest. Fisk sends the Thunderbolts to shut down the X-Men. There’s an argument, and the Thunderbolts are thwarted when Emma has the Treehouse classed as an embassy, making it outside his jurisdiction. Fisk is angry and wants revenge, so he reaches for his old files on Emma. And\u00a0sure, that’s fine, but you don’t need ten-plus pages to set that up, because it’s the basic premise of the crossover. He doesn’t like heroes, he taunts them using his files. One of the good things about crossovers is you can set this stuff up in shorthand!<\/p>\n

So with that we get to the plot. In the issue #1 flashback, Elektra was spotted by a little girl when at work. So she asks Emma to wipe the girl’s memory before she tells anyone and has to be eliminated. But it’s too late for that, since her parents are already off talking to the police, so Emma and Elektra decide to get the girl out of town. That involves psychically hauling in Spider-Man to fend off the conventional Kingpin thugs.<\/p>\n

Spider-Man is in his black costume, by the way, which doesn’t fit at all with the period when Elektra was working for the Kingpin. Duggan seems not to have twigged to the fact that Elektra as the Kingpin’s chief assassin is a very\u00a0<\/em>narrow sliver of continuity from early 1982 – he hires her for the first time at the start of\u00a0Daredevil\u00a0<\/em>#178, and Bullseye kills her three issues later. Spider-Man doesn’t get the black costume for another two years. But whatever.<\/p>\n

Fisk has photos of Emma getting the girl out of town, so Emma needs to produce the girl in order to show that she’s still alive after all. The girl is in England, so we get to do the bit from\u00a0Excalibur<\/em> where mutants aren’t welcome any more, and Union Jack tries to arrest her. The police are really there to add a bit of gratuitous obstruction to what’s otherwise a very simple plot – Emma finds the girl with no particular difficulty, and she shows up to prove Emma innocent. Emma does a bit of threatening to end the story.<\/p>\n

This is very much less than the sum of its parts. To be fair, it may be intended partly to set up the girl, Isabelle Donovan, for future use – she’s given an otherwise pointless bit of back story in which Elektra shows up to train her in martial arts in her new life, before disappearing too (presumably because she’s dead). It more or less answers the question of what Emma was doing for Fisk (though the answer is simply what was always implied). But it’s about an issue and a half’s worth of plot padded out with half an issue of the Thunderbolts and some essentially random altercations with the English authorities.<\/p>\n

That said, some of the parts are really good. It’s got art by Phil Noto, after all, and he brings a charming amused detachment to Emma. I’m not so sure about his Spider-Man – what Noto does best is the subtleties of facial expression that really bring his characters to life, while his web-swinging is a bit static, so black costume Spider-Man really doesn’t play to his strengths. But Emma is the centrepiece of this story and he makes her convincing. Sequences of her swanning her way blithely through crowds of policeman that are beneath her notice also work delightfully. Honestly, I’d happily read three Phil Noto issues of Emma doing her taxes.<\/p>\n

Duggan toys with some interesting ideas about how Emma sees herself at this period in her life, too. The elephant in the room is that this story takes place back when she’s the White Queen of the Hellfire Club, and at this point she ought to be an outright villain. As I’ve mentioned, Duggan seems frankly a bit confused about when exactly this is meant to be happening, but if it’s 1982 then Emma is coming fresh from Uncanny X-Men<\/em> vol 1 #151-152, the story where she body-swaps with Storm. Mind you, that’s the last time she’s really quite so unequivocally villainous; after that, you’re into Hellions mentor Emma, who’s a bit more rounded. And a lot of this story is about Emma blithely justifying her actions to herself and swanning through life largely unaffected by what she’s doing, though with a residual moral compass that kicks in when faced with the truly helpless.<\/p>\n

In Emma’s mind, anyone who gets sent to her is being spared a visit from Elektra, or someone equally lethal. So she’s providing a non-lethal option and making the world a better place, in a way. Elektra sees it very differently: Emma leaves a trail of ruined lives behind her, while at least her own approach is quick and painless. Duggan clearly likes<\/em> the idea that Emma is a serene untouchable in her own mind, who can pull it off most of the time in the real world, but there’s a definite sense that he’s on Elektra’s side in that argument – at least for some of Emma’s victims, since she plainly didn’t ruin the lives of some of the superheroes who cameo. But Emma plainly stops paying attention to Isabelle once she’s out of sight, while Elektra is the one who keeps showing up. Emma’s rationalisation is to keep Isabelle away from her, and maybe she’s right, but there’s no sense that she really\u00a0regrets<\/em> leaving Isabelle and her new family to get on with it. She can justify it to herself, but that’s a different thing.<\/p>\n

Spider-Man’s role in the plot is technically unnecessary, but what he provides is a passing visit from a character who’s unequivocally heroic. He’s here so that a cynical Emma can read his mind looking for something to offer him as a reward, only to be presented with someone genuinely decent. That’s a nice little moment, and Duggan doesn’t labour the point about it putting Emma’s own self-justification into context.<\/p>\n

But all that being said, it’s still a slight and padded plot that would really have been better off as an annual. There are good ideas here, and some beautiful art, but it doesn’t feel fully formed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DEVIL’S REIGN: X-MEN #1-3 Writer: Gerry Duggan Artist: Phil Noto Letterer: Cory Petit Editor: Jordan White Three issues, huh? There’s a trade paperback of this listed on Amazon for August, with a page count of 112 – I can only assume they’re pairing it with something to be announced. Anyway, I skipped over this when […]<\/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-7879","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\/7879","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=7879"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7881,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7879\/revisions\/7881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}