{"id":8479,"date":"2022-11-19T17:57:56","date_gmt":"2022-11-19T17:57:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8479"},"modified":"2022-11-19T17:57:56","modified_gmt":"2022-11-19T17:57:56","slug":"knights-of-x","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8479","title":{"rendered":"Knights of X"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>KNIGHTS OF X #1-5<\/strong>
\nWriter: Tini Howard<\/strong>
\nArtist: Bob Quinn<\/strong>
\nColourist: Erick Arciniega<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Ariana Maher<\/strong>
\nEditor: Sarah Brunstad<\/strong><\/p>\n

So before you ask, yes, this\u00a0did<\/em> finish a while back, but the collected edition isn’t out till December, and that makes this Still Timely. Somewhat. My plan right now is to clear the backlog of minis and completed Infinite Comics that I haven’t written about yet, and then go back and catch up on ongoing titles that I’m writing about as they come out anyway – but since\u00a0Knights of X<\/em> wound up being a five issue series, let’s cover it here.<\/p>\n

Marvel’s approach to this series is… let’s say confusing, shall we? It’s the sequel to Excalibur<\/em>, a book that had its fans, but I had a few problems with. Part of that was that magic stories have never really been my thing where the X-books are concerned, and that’s just a matter of taste. But part of it was that the book always rang painfully false to me when it went anywhere near Britain, and since a major part of the plot was “who gets to be Captain Britain”, that was a big problem.<\/p>\n

So\u00a0Knights of X<\/em>, refocussing the book simply on Otherworld, seemed to me like a good move. It was focussing on the book’s strengths and letting it get on with some world building. It was clearly intended to be an ongoing title, and it winds up being cancelled after five issues. Okay. These things happen. But… it’s then being relaunched again in 2023, with the same writer, as\u00a0Betsy Braddock: Captain Britain<\/em>. That’s just weird. That’s mixed signals if ever I saw them.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And this reads like a truncated book. You can see the early issues setting up for a lengthy quest, and you can see about halfway through a sudden lurch as it has to jump straight to the finale. Clearly, the book is meant to be setting up for an extended quest around Otherworld, the idea being partly that it’s X-Men meets fantasy (if that’s your thing), and partly that it’s the “world that fears and hates them” set-up that the regular X-books aren’t currently doing. But the quest turns out to be, more or less, that they drop by three parts of Otherworld and then cut straight to the finale. It doesn’t help that, because the group split at the outset, half of them actually just go to the Crooked Market and then cut straight to the finale. I’m sure that can’t have been the plan.<\/p>\n

At any rate, it feels like a truncated story. And that has all the usual problems – the groundwork hasn’t really been laid for the ending, there are reveals that don’t feel like they were properly set up to have impact, there are cast members like Bei and Kylun who never really get to do anything. That’s just what happens if you jump straight to the final act, but knowing that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a problem.<\/p>\n

The book starts with Betsy leading the Captain Britain Corps as they and Roma hold out against Merlyn’s reactionary rule of Otherworld. Even allowing for the rushing, there’s something a bit odd about the fact that there’s suddenly meant to be a whole mutant population of Otherworld for Betsy to protect – almost none of whom we ever meet or see, aside from one refugee from Krakoa. Depending on how you think Otherworld is meant to work, it makes a degree of sense; if you think the humans in Otherworld have either come from Earth or been copied from Earth, then I suppose it makes sense that they ought to include mutants. Quite why it’s a priority for either side is never really very clear, though.<\/p>\n

Since Otherworld is based on story (or its magic is, at the very least), Roma can’t simply summon up an army of mutants from Earth to help tip the balance, but she can round up some mutants to participate in a quest. That quest, by the way, was meant to be “deeply personal and test each of our souls”, which I guess is kind of what issue #4 is rushing through, but it was surely meant to happen at greater length. As part of that, they resurrect Arthur’s son Mordred, who turns out to have the mutant power to make everyone hate him (which at least explains why he’s always the bad guy in the stories).<\/p>\n

The team are meant to be on a quest for the Siege Perilous, which leads them to the domain of Mercator. The question of what’s going on in there has been a mystery since the current incarnation of Otherworld was set up. It’s not particularly a surprise to have it confirmed that Mr M – Absolon Mercator – is involved in this, since he’s the missing Omega Mutant. But it feels like a bit of an anticlimax, since he’s just thrown out there as a reveal, and we’re never really introduced to him (beyond a data page recap) or given any particular reason why his identity matters. He turns out to be rather interchangeable.<\/p>\n

Once Mercator’s domain is open, everyone rushes there for the big fight. There’s a perfectly reasonable effort to focus on the big stuff, but it means that the whole plot of Mordred and Arthur winds up getting resolved off panel. And then there’s a sudden swerve into Betsy deciding that the Corps no longer need to be answerable to any of the potential rulers of Otherworld, which doesn’t feel like an idea that was set up at all. Gambit dies and gets resurrected, in a series of continuity references that even the current Marvel editors thought needed a footnote, and the rest of the mutants come through a portal to save the day in one double page spread.<\/p>\n

It’s not especially satisfying, but you can see how it might have played out over the course of a year or more. It probably still wouldn’t have been to my tastes, but most of the story arcs that it gestures at seem like sound enough ideas. Some kind of redemption arc for Arthur to re-embrace the heroic figure that he’s meant to be, in a world based on narrative, while Mordred tries to escape the role in which he’s been cast, seems really quite interesting. It just doesn’t take place on the page.<\/p>\n

The book does look wonderful. One real strength of the current Otherworld set-up is to provide a range of completely dissimilar worlds so that we’re no longer just working on elves, hobbits and trees. You can do all that, but you’ve got the freedom to invoke other tropes as well. Bob Quinn does a really great job of making the locations distinct; I love the look of his Sevalith in particular. His characters feel passionate about everything that’s happening, and that does a great job of selling that emotional stakes are there, even if the story is forced to rush through them. He’s a great choice of artist for this book, which absolutely plays to his strengths.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, though, it feels like a rushed book sketching the outline of something longer that would have had more impact.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KNIGHTS OF X #1-5 Writer: Tini Howard Artist: Bob Quinn Colourist: Erick Arciniega Letterer: Ariana Maher Editor: Sarah Brunstad So before you ask, yes, this\u00a0did finish a while back, but the collected edition isn’t out till December, and that makes this Still Timely. Somewhat. My plan right now is to clear the backlog of minis […]<\/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-8479","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\/8479","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=8479"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8481,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8479\/revisions\/8481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}