{"id":941,"date":"2011-07-24T20:27:39","date_gmt":"2011-07-24T19:27:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=941"},"modified":"2011-07-24T20:27:39","modified_gmt":"2011-07-24T19:27:39","slug":"the-x-axis-24-july-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=941","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 24 July 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

Al and I have just finished recording a five-minute segment for our friends at the Thumbcast<\/a>, which should be on their upcoming video episode. \u00a0So, yes, if you want to know what Al’s sofa looks like, your time is nigh. \u00a0We’ll let you know when it’s up (or maybe just embed it here).<\/p>\n

I am, honestly, still intending to get around to a full review of that X-23<\/em>\u00a0arc from a fortnight ago, as well as the New Mutants<\/em>\u00a0arc that ended last week. \u00a0Meanwhile, this week we have… not a great deal, frankly. \u00a0With one obvious exception, nobody seems to want to release new stuff on the eve of San Diego. \u00a0So, here’s this week’s one big new release, plus the X-books:<\/p>\n

Daredevil<\/em>\u00a0#1<\/strong>\u00a0– This may be billed as a first issue but it would be more accurately described as the start of Mark Waid’s run, since the break from the past isn’t as complete as all that.<\/p>\n

The problem with this book (or the challenge, if you prefer) is that the last few years of stories have emphatically boxed the character into a corner. \u00a0The decision to give away Daredevil’s dual identity has made it difficult, if not impossible, to go back to his classic set-up. \u00a0Of course, these things can always be reversed – it’s been done with Captain America, Iron Man and Spider-Man, with various degrees of vague muttering about magic – but they’re not taking that approach with Daredevil.<\/p>\n

And maybe that’s a smart move, because there’s an opportunity here for Daredevil to carve out a position based on its new status quo: everyone knows Matt Murdock is Daredevil, but nobody can prove it. \u00a0This has essentially been the Kingpin’s status quo for decades, and if it can work for him, there’s no fundamental reason why it can’t work for Daredevil. \u00a0The trick is to stop seeing it as something that prevents you from getting back to the classic set-up, and embrace it as the book’s new organising principle.<\/p>\n

The deck-clearing “Shadowland” storyline isn’t being ignored here; rather, it’s used as the end of Daredevil’s emotional arc, so that a line is drawn under the misery and depression of the last few years, and Matt returns to action with a newfound (and quite possibly dementedly irrational) optimism. \u00a0So the tone of the book is very different from anything we’ve seen in the last few years, as Waid makes clear by dusting off the Spot for an opening battle. \u00a0Matt’s solution to the predicament while his previous writers have left him in is to simply ignore it and hope it’ll go away; Waid quickly makes clear that that’s not going to fly, but still makes the point that this is a happier, more cheerful version of the character. \u00a0And that’s precisely what was needed, since Matt’s spiral of angst long since passed the threshold of self-parody. \u00a0Waid’s aim is to make the book fun again – and I think the “open secret” schtick could work far better with that as the tone.<\/p>\n

Paolo Rivera draws the lead story, though there’s also a back-up by rotating artist Marcos Martin. \u00a0There’s some really high quality art throughout this, and the challenge of visualising Daredevil’s radar sense always gives inventive artists an opportunity to show what they can do. \u00a0Just on a technical level, this is likely to be one of the best books that Marvel put out. \u00a0But the key message sent with this issue is that the book is determined not to live in the shadow of Frank Miller stories from 25 years ago; that’s been taken as far as it can go, and it’s time to change gears.<\/p>\n

Generation Hope<\/em>\u00a0#9<\/strong>\u00a0– Now here’s a story we haven’t had in a while. \u00a0It’s impossible to discuss this meaningfully without spoiling the ending (which the cover kind of does anyway), so don’t say you weren’t warned.<\/p>\n

This one isn’t about the regular cast. \u00a0The focus is on the guests – a student whose mutant “power” turns out to be a general deterioration into sludge, and some singularly unsympathetic friends of his who are too busy filming him for YouTube to actually do anything to help out. \u00a0By the time the stars of the comic show up to help him out, he’s already killed himself. \u00a0According to Kieron Gillen, this is intended as a metaphor for teenage gay suicide. \u00a0I’m not sure it’s entirely helpful to try and read the story that way, though, since it all takes place in one evening and it’s unavoidably tied up with Zeeshan’s initial shock at his transformation. \u00a0(The current set-up of the X-books doesn’t really allow for him to have been out there as an undiscovered mutant living in the general world, so this is inevitable.) \u00a0That’s fine, though; trying to shoehorn the story into an exact correlation with the real world would have felt contrived, and these stories usually work better when the match is a bit looser.<\/p>\n

Since Zeeshan effectively can’t talk, or even form facial expression, for much of the book, he’s a nice everyman figure – and of course it helps that what he does<\/em>\u00a0say tends to suggest a view of things that matches the readers’ viewpoint. \u00a0Luke’s a thunderously unsympathetic character whose utter lack of concern maybe pushes things a bit, but then the internet is depressingly full of inexplicably callousness. \u00a0And the slack-jawed bozos around the edge of the room are all too believable. \u00a0Jamie McKelvie’s art is lovely as ever – I particularly like the two silent grid pages near the end where the panels are spaced further apart than usual, a great example of how a very slight change of layout can really change the way a page reads.<\/p>\n

Uncanny X-Men<\/em>\u00a0#541<\/strong>\u00a0– Kieron Gillen’s other X-Men story this week couldn’t be more different; the second part of the “Fear Itself” arc is basically a chance to revisit the old “No one can stop the Juggernaut” routine, which actually hasn’t been done in this book in a good few years. \u00a0(Inevitably, it’s cropped up elsewhere in Fear Itself<\/em>, most notably in the last issue of Thunderbolts<\/em>, but such is life.) \u00a0So the Juggernaut is marching on San Francisco, accompanied by a sidekick who speaks for him and a bunch of presumably-enchanted followers. \u00a0And the X-Men’s solution is, as usual, to try and get the helmet off. \u00a0Needless to say, that doesn’t go smoothly. \u00a0This is only part two, after all.<\/p>\n

Juggernaut has been wildly downgraded over the last few years, if only because of the storytelling requirements of using him as a protagonist. \u00a0This issue does a good job of re-establishing the basic “No one can stop…” premise and putting the ground rules back in place. \u00a0I like the dynamic with the sidekick, too – I’m not altogether clear how Juggernaut’s agenda here ties in with the wider Fear Itself<\/em>\u00a0storyline, but I guess it works as long as he’s causing trouble.<\/p>\n

Greg Land’s art is a bit mixed – he hasn’t fallen back into the manic grinning, and he does surprisingly good roads (there’s something about the Juggernaut trudging along an utterly mundane dual carriageway that really works for me), but there are also lapses into blank or stilted expressions. \u00a0And I can’t help wondering, after Illyana thoughtfully showed up last issue to put a gun on the mantelpiece, why nobody seems to be suggesting that as a possible solution. \u00a0Then again, we don’t see all the X-Men’s planning, merely the execution – so maybe they have figured it out. \u00a0 We’ll have to see how that one goes.<\/p>\n

Overall, it’s a nice use of the crossover as an excuse to do the old school Juggernaut properly again – the core idea is reasserted, and there are some neat touches to freshen it up.<\/p>\n

X-Factor<\/em>\u00a0#222<\/strong>\u00a0– Guido is released from hospital, and everyone hides in the office while mystic baddies gather outside. \u00a0I realise Peter David inherited the storyline about Rahne’s pregnancy from X-Force<\/em>, but while some of the dialogue between her and Rictor is pretty good, on the whole this isn’t doing much for me. \u00a0We’ve got a bunch of largely faceless villains, and the pay-off is the arrival of a guest star – Jack Russell from 70s horror comic Werewolf by Night<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There are few things in the Marvel Universe that make my heart sink like an appearance by Jack Russell, the Werewolf by Night. \u00a0There can’t be many readers left who have any nostalgia for the guy – his book was cancelled before I could read, for god’s sake. \u00a0Most of the stories I’ve seen him in simply use him as the Marvel Universe’s default werewolf, hauled arbitrarily into stories in much the same way that all Marvel heroes used to be contractually obliged to instruct Matt Murdock for their legal needs. \u00a0Since this story is about cat and dog-themed mystical baddies going after Wolfsbane’s unnamed child, I can only assume this is another story where he’s going to serve as Marvel’s all-purpose werewolf character. \u00a0Frankly, at this point I’m just politely waiting for this arc to finish so that we can move on.<\/p>\n

X-Men<\/em>\u00a0#15 <\/strong>– Another arc wraps up, and since “First to Last” was pushed as kind of a big deal, I’ll try to come back to it in more detail later. \u00a0Actually, I’m not sure why Marvel were pushing this one so much; it’s a perfectly alright X-Men story, perhaps stretched to an issue beyond its ideal length, but it doesn’t seem to have any great significance, other than to unscramble some obscure Emma Frost continuity and introduce a new villain.<\/p>\n

I rather like the Evolutionaries as a concept; you can argue that they’ve completely missed the point of evolution, but within the logic of the Marvel Universe, that’s perhaps open to question. \u00a0Essentially their remit seems to be to clear dead wood aside so that promising new evolutionary branches get a chance, and there’s something quite endearing about their polite bafflement over being unable to find a mutant leader who can get everyone on board for a campaign of global genocide. \u00a0Christopher Yost has given them a combination of an utterly wonky worldview and a bruised confusion at not being able to win people over. \u00a0If they were just faceless cosmic guys, it wouldn’t work. \u00a0But played as murderous lunatics sworn to protect a dwindling bunch of ingrates, there’s some amusing potential.<\/p>\n

There are pacing issues with the arc as a whole; the idea of cutting between the present day and the original encounter that nobody can remember could have been neat, but the plot, particularly in the present day, doesn’t have enough meat to make it work. \u00a0Still, there’s a strong concept in here, and ultimately it serves its purpose by introducing a potential new recurring villain for a series that could do with some.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Al and I have just finished recording a five-minute segment for our friends at the Thumbcast, which should be on their upcoming video episode. \u00a0So, yes, if you want to know what Al’s sofa looks like, your time is nigh. \u00a0We’ll let you know when it’s up (or maybe just embed it here). I am, […]<\/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-941","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\/941","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=941"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":944,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions\/944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}