{"id":8533,"date":"2022-12-03T21:45:53","date_gmt":"2022-12-03T21:45:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8533"},"modified":"2022-12-03T21:45:53","modified_gmt":"2022-12-03T21:45:53","slug":"a-x-e-judgment-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8533","title":{"rendered":"A.X.E.: Judgment Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A.X.E.: JUDGMENT DAY #1-6<\/strong>
\nWriter: Kieron Gillen<\/strong>
\nArtist: Valerio Schiti<\/strong>
\nColourist: Marte Gracia<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Clayton Cowles<\/strong>
\nEditor: Tom Brevoort<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are a number of ways of doing a line wide crossover. You can try and give every book something to do that contributes meaningfully to the plot, but beyond a certain point that’s insane. You can throw in a bunch of side quests to provide busy work for the tie-ins, but that has its limits too. Generally the best approach is to have a high concept that everyone can use as a springboard for their own story in the margins, without having to worry too much about the core plot. That’s the\u00a0Judgment Day<\/em> approach: a day of the Progenitor judging literally everyone on Earth, which naturally includes the cast of every other title that might want to do a tie-in. This can go wrong if it turns out that there’s really only one story to be told with the concept, in which case things get painfully repetitive – that’s what happened with\u00a0Secret Invasion<\/em> – but\u00a0since\u00a0Judgment Day<\/em> functions as a hook for whatever character work a book feels like doing, it avoided that problem.<\/p>\n

So, it works as an event concept. What about the actual story?<\/p>\n

Although it’s billed as an Avengers, X-Men and Eternals crossover,\u00a0Judgment Day<\/em> is principally the final act of Kieron Gillen’s\u00a0Eternals<\/em> run. That’s the book where all the big changes take place, and the storyline of Ajak and her relationship with her programmed religion comes to a climax. The Eternals have their status quo changed, the secret of their immortality exposed, and a new ruler put in place. It’s very much their story.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The X-Men are important, but not so centrally. The springboard of the plot is the Eternals declaring war on Krakoa because they’re supposedly excess Deviants – which is really just Druig trying to shore up his shaky position as prime Eternal – and of course there’s an aspect of mutant resurrection treading on the established concept of the Eternals. But that recedes into the background quickly enough when the Progenitor comes calling. The one X-book that really is centrally affected by Judgment Day<\/em> isn’t\u00a0X-Men<\/em> or\u00a0Immortal X-Men<\/em>, but\u00a0X-Men Red<\/em>, thanks to the opening attack on Arakko. And conversely, that plotline is a bit of a side thread in\u00a0Judgment Day<\/em> itself – reading this book in isolation, it seems a bit weird when Magneto shows up for his big moment.<\/p>\n

The Avengers aren’t really in it that much at all. Their house is. Iron Man has a fairly big role because he helps to bring it back to life; Captain America gets to do his inspirational bit. The rest of the team aren’t much of a presence at all. Reflecting that, Avengers<\/em>\u00a0itself barely even rouses itself to do a tie-in, and the single issue it contributes is a fill-in story about Hawkeye.<\/p>\n

So, no, this is an Eternals comic. And yet it’s also the end<\/em> of an Eternals comic, with the Eternals issues being rebranded as a prologue, an epilogue, and\u00a0A.X.E.: Death to the Mutants<\/em>. Even the collected edition of that arc is billed as\u00a0A.X.E.: Judgment Day Companion<\/em>. Marvel would really prefer to downplay the\u00a0E<\/em> in\u00a0A.X.E.<\/em>, from the look of it. But it’s an Eternals comic all the same.<\/p>\n

At its core, the story is that Druig is a weak Prime Eternal who wants to shore up his position by starting a war, so he decides to attack the mutants. That prompts a bunch of characters, including Ajak, to try and put a stop to the war by reanimating the dead Celestial which currently serves as Avengers HQ. There’s a suggestion over in the Eternals issues that Ajak might see this as a happy opportunity to do something that was quite appealing to her already. So the Eternals, Iron Man (who contributes some of the personality) and Mr Sinister (who contributes a bit of technical knowhow) bring Avengers Mountain back to life, whereupon it decides to judge mankind and, after a day, maybe wipe out the planet. Because it’s a Celestial, after all. Showing up and making arbitrary judgments is what they do.<\/p>\n

In other words, Ajak has created her own new god, and it turns out to be a monster. But all of this ultimately leads to Ajak simply becoming a more nuanced version of that same god, still ultimately holding a similar threat over the world, even if nobody else fully appreciates that just yet. It wasn’t the judgment and potential obliteration that Ajak objected to so much as the crudeness of the criteria.<\/p>\n

The Progenitor’s criteria for judgment are never made explicit, but it seems clear that they’re being judged at least to some extent by their own standards. Characters who show a degree of self-awareness and are true to their principles do fine; those who fail to live up to their own standards are failed, usually for the reasons that drive their own self-loathing, but sometimes just for having failed to spot the problem in their behaviour at all. But it doesn’t seem to be necessary to believe anything in particular; just being reflectively thoughtful and unsure seems to be enough, and so does being Doctor Doom.<\/p>\n

The Progenitor is blithely judging the planet by essentially arbitrary criteria, then, but at the same time it’s reflecting humanity’s values back at them. You might have thought you had more time to make changes and live a good life, but nope, it’s too late now. It’s monstrous, of course – it’s a parody of god, represented visually by making it a parody of a Celestial. Its casual narration style, which echoes the Machine from\u00a0Eternals<\/em>, only magnifies that.<\/p>\n

Schiti gives the thing a nicely twisted sense of scale. There’s an awful lot of plot to cover in this book, because there’s a lot of characters running about. Sometimes that does make it feel a bit cramped, but the book does find the space for Schiti to go big when it’s called for, and he delivers there. The colouring is beautiful as well. But at the same time, Schiti’s able to humanise a lot of the exposition. His Druig is perfect precisely because he lacks the imposing scale that the arch villain ought to have; the six civilians who keep recurring are nicely conveyed in single panels<\/p>\n

Then there’s the Hex, bizarre and only semi-explained giant Eternals with weird monstrous forms. I love the abstractness of these designs. They do have the downside of being so unfamiliar that it’s sometimes hard to parse precisely what’s happening in the battles at Krakoa, and an occasional confusion about the action sequences is the main flaw with the art here. But that’s pretty minor in the grand scheme of things – it’s a demanding book pulled off rather well.<\/p>\n

Those six civilians are a good idea. The usual problem with a book like this is that the general public remain squarely off panel and abstract. Even though only one of them really interacts with the main plot, having a small number of ordinary folk who we check in on from time to time, even just for a panel, gives this a bit of grounding that many stories of this type miss.<\/p>\n

The return of Starfox is interesting, and you have to wonder if he’d have spent longer as Prime Eternal if the book had kept running. He’s set up as someone who’s going to provide a power of love ending, and we’re clearly meant to approve of what he’s trying to do. But at the same time he conspicuously fails to deliver it, with the Progenitor proceeding to wipe out the world anyway. Even though he has a ludicrously short amount of time in which to achieve it, that still feels more like cover for him. Starfox seems genuinely lost when his plan A fails, and it’s notable that Gillen has the idealists Nightcrawler and Captain America playing the pragmatists in comparison to Starfox.<\/p>\n

More broadly, the shape of the story seems to suggest that it’s going to be a story in which Captain America inspires and rallies the world to be better. That’s the bit of the final act which I’m not sure lands. The Progenitor makes the initial decision to destroy the world; he’s clearly not quite sure about this, because he keeps testing people anyway. Nightcrawler is given a big scheme to resurrect Captain America and use him as a focal point, as the humans finally start to come together at the very last minute. And yet that doesn’t really feel like it’s the thing that pushes the Progenitor back – Sersi’s public admission about the nature of the Eternals winds up being the tipping point, which is the more important thing for\u00a0Eternals<\/em>, but isn’t much to do with the population of Earth raising their collective game. The whole subplot about Orchis feels too compressed, as well.<\/p>\n

So I’m not sure it quite sticks the landing. And part of me wishes that we’d spent more time in Ajak’s company, since in some ways this whole thing is the story of her religious journey, and the Progenitor is just the outward projection of that. But maybe not – perhaps it’s a better story for keeping a bit of distance between us and Ajak.<\/p>\n

At any rate, by the standards of line-wide crossovers, this is good – there’s an awful lot of characters running around, but that’s in the nature of things where event books are concerned. It’s got the sense of scale, it works as a finale for\u00a0Eternals,\u00a0<\/em>and it works as an X-Men story too. And the Avengers lent us their house for a few months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A.X.E.: JUDGMENT DAY #1-6 Writer: Kieron Gillen Artist: Valerio Schiti Colourist: Marte Gracia Letterer: Clayton Cowles Editor: Tom Brevoort There are a number of ways of doing a line wide crossover. You can try and give every book something to do that contributes meaningfully to the plot, but beyond a certain point that’s insane. You […]<\/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-8533","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\/8533","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=8533"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8536,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8533\/revisions\/8536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}