{"id":8039,"date":"2022-07-28T23:03:32","date_gmt":"2022-07-28T22:03:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8039"},"modified":"2022-07-28T23:03:32","modified_gmt":"2022-07-28T22:03:32","slug":"x-men-vol-6-6-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8039","title":{"rendered":"X-Men vol 6 #6-12"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN vol 6 #6-12<\/strong>
\nWriter: Gerry Duggan<\/strong>
\nArtist: Pepe Larraz (#6-7 \u00a0& #11-12), Javier Pina (#8 & #10), C F Villa (#9)<\/strong>
\nColourist: Marte Gracia<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Clayton Cowles<\/strong>
\nDesign: Tom Muller<\/strong>
\nEditor: Jordan D White<\/strong><\/p>\n

There’s something about this book that doesn’t click for me. It’s certainly not the art, which is excellent. Pepe Larraz, the book’s primary artist, is just excellent. He makes Cyclops look like Superman while doing completely banal cat-rescuing; that Captain Krakoa costume is just ludicrous enough for the idea to work. The Martian landscapes are great; the detail in Dr Stasis’s lair is perfect.<\/p>\n

True, he only draws four of these seven issues, but the other artists keep the book looking consistent; holding on to the same colourist obviously helps. Javier Pina delivers a joyfully ludicrous MODOK; CF Villa does a solid job on a relatively non-visual issue of meetings. It’s a good-looking book with a classic superhero feel that mirrors what Duggan’s X-Men are apparently trying to do – re-establish the X-Men as proper superheroes, in order to be cultural ambassadors from the isolationist nation of Krakoa to the outside world.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And I like that as a direction, too. The mutants have been hiding away on their utopian island; Cyclops thinks that’s an overcorrection and wants to engage more with humanity. Fair enough. And it does feed into one of the major plot threads, which is Cyclops wavering about whether to be open about resurrection. True, it’s a bit of a stretch to think that the Krakoans ever thought they could keep this quiet; other books have suggested that Xavier just wanted to hold off the inevitable for a bit, but that’s not really the way the debate is portrayed in\u00a0X-Men <\/em>itself.<\/p>\n

And by the nature of the Marvel Universe, it’s incredibly difficult to set up the idea that a character died too publicly for his return to be explained. Nothing is beyond explanation in the Marvel Universe. The MU public are as jawdroppingly gullible as the plot demands, so you have to really stretch the genre rules to make this idea work. But if you can get past that, the idea is sound. Scott is forced into ludicrous contortions in an attempt to preserve the secret, which ends up just compounding his desire to come clean about everything. Dr Stasis is trying to engineer a situation where the mutants stage a cover-up that will rebound on them when it’s exposed, and the Quiet Council are going to fall for it, but Scott – the voice of traditional heroism on Krakoa – does the right thing. That’s all fine, and it fits in with the earlier suggestion that Scott was establishing a moral authority to compete with the Quiet Council. That remains very much a background note in this series, but it’s there.<\/p>\n

Still, there’s something not quite working. Perhaps it’s the fact that the book feels a bit semi-detached from the rest of the line. They’re in New York, after all. The Orchis threads are obviously linked – the reveal of Dr Stasis is a good moment – but MODOK and Gameworld feel random. Gameworld in particular falls flat for me. It’s a vehicle to throw some random attacks at the X-Men in the early issues of the series, but it recedes into the background for most of this period only to come back for the end-of-year climax. And Gameworld is, well, silly. It’s an alien casino where the ultra-rich bet on the annihilation of entire planets.<\/p>\n

Duggan tells us outright in issue #11 that it’s “capitalism’s final form”<\/a>\u00a0–\u00a0but it’s way too over the top for that. My problem isn’t with the idea that if there was a demand for such a thing, capitalism would serve it. My problem is with the idea that there’s a demand for it in the first place, unless you want to cheat and play the “aliens can have whatever attitudes we like” card. I just don’t buy it as a ramped-up version of anything. Which would be okay if it was basically a gag, but it’s given too much prominence for that – and Duggan seems to want stopping Gameworld to be the way that Jean atones for Phoenix. And… you can’t atone for genocide by beating a comedy villain, you know?<\/p>\n

I don’t think that’s the main thing either, though. I think what’s really missing from this book is a sense of the team as a team. Other than Scott and Jean, they feel like a bunch of arbitrarily-selected characters, each going about their own lives with little intersection. It feels like most of them could be swapped out with zero impact on the plot, and probably without the rest of the cast noticing. Synch and Wolverine have their subplot, but nothing much comes of it. Sunfire, Rogue and Polaris don’t do much of anything, and to the extent that they do have arcs of their own, they play out in isolation from one another.<\/p>\n

Despite that, the book behaves at the end of the year as if everyone’s been on a journey together. And I’m not feeling that. It’s a disjointed book which cuts back and forth between assorted characters and stories but never makes me feel like they have much to do with one another. It’s just different stuff sharing a book. There’s a cast, but is there really a team?<\/p>\n

I’m maybe more optimistic about the second year, which seems to have a team more obviously designed to interact with one another. And now we’ve got to the stage of Scott going against the Quiet Council’s orders, perhaps we can start doing more with that thread, which\u00a0does<\/em> interest me. But this first year is less than the sum of its parts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN vol 6 #6-12 Writer: Gerry Duggan Artist: Pepe Larraz (#6-7 \u00a0& #11-12), Javier Pina (#8 & #10), C F Villa (#9) Colourist: Marte Gracia Letterer: Clayton Cowles Design: Tom Muller Editor: Jordan D White There’s something about this book that doesn’t click for me. It’s certainly not the art, which is excellent. Pepe Larraz, […]<\/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-8039","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\/8039","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=8039"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8100,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8039\/revisions\/8100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}