Uncanny X-Men vol 6 – “The Revolution”
And here we are at last. The X-books returned to regular continuity this week with their latest relaunch, in the form of Extraordinary X-Men #1. But they also shipped the much-delayed Uncanny X-Men #600, the final issue of Brian Bendis’ run, which was presumably held back to avoid treading on Secret Wars or something.
In theory, at least, this delay does the final volume no favours. Bendis has always had a fondness for the device of consecutive issues all building up to the same event from different directions. Issue #32-35, which round out this volume, are all self-contained issues focusing on different characters, some of which serve as an epilogue of sorts to his run. And issues #33 to #35 explicitly end with “To be continued in Uncanny X-Men #600″.
So the delay in actually shipping issue #600 would be quite a problem – if there was any real connection between the individual stories and issue #600. In practice, the connection boils down to “it’s where the characters show up next”. In fact, issue #34 ends with “To be continued in Uncanny X-Men #600″, even though its final scene is a subplot that actually leads into issue #35. Somebody took their eye off the ball there.
Bendis has long had a tendency to succumb to sprawl. He tends to be at his best when dealing with smaller casts and shorter stories. And indeed, the individual issues have a lot going for them. Issue #33 reunites Kitty and Illyana and completes a reasonably successful exercise of thawing Illyana’s character to bring her a little closer to the classic portrayal. And it has some very good art from Kris Anka, who does a lot with minimal linework, and gets a lot out of things like Kitty remaining unflappably intangible in the middle of chaos.
Issue #34 sees Dazzler taking down Mystique, which actually is a useful capstone on a lengthy Bendis subplot. And issue #35 sees Scott’s former students trying to go it alone as superheroes when he closes down his team, only to wind up slinking back to the X-Men and conceding that they’re out of their depth. This could easily be read as a backdoor pilot for a spin-off book, and issue #600 does in fact refer to them in passing as “new mutants”, but it doesn’t look as though that’s going anywhere in the short term. It’s a cute little issue, with Goldballs becoming a brief media fad before the anti-mutant backlash sets in.
But then we get to issue #600, which is a different proposition, since it’s notionally about wrapping up the overall Bendis run. And that’s kind of hard to do, since viewed as a whole, the run doesn’t have a great deal of shape to it. The norm in recent years has been for each writer to treat their run as self-contained, but much of what Bendis has done seems to hark back to an earlier tradition where you set some plates spinning and then leave them for the next writer to pick up. There is not the slightest pretence, for example, of wrapping up the status of the time-travelling teenage X-Men. Other characters finally confront the Beast over his reckless behaviour over the course of the Bendis run, but there’s no particular resolution attached. And the loose end of whether modern Iceman is gay too is tied up (he is).
Those threads, though – and they’re the ones that take up most of issue #600 – are about All-New X-Men. With hindsight, there was no overall story to All-New X-Men, merely some ideas set out there to wander wherever they may. A case can be made that this is the way things always used to be done in the last century, and that some of the problems here stem from audience expectations of an actual resolution (based on modern genre conventions) being out of line with the more open-ended tradition that Bendis was intending to work in. Of course, how much the incoming creators will actually be building on any of this is debatable – the All-New characters will still be around, but Beast is being shipped off to Uncanny Inhumans.
We’ll talk further about the Inhumans in a future post – it’s going to be a while before we reach the next TPB collection, but a round-up of the first issues of the relaunch seems like it might be worthwhile in the meantime. In the meantime, what about Uncanny X-Men itself, the book which issue #600 is supposed to be capping? Here, Bendis’ big idea seems to be conveyed through a combination of one major scene in issue #600, and the Scott/Alex (and Scott/Emma) conversations in issue #32.
The elevator pitch for Bendis’ Uncanny was Scott’s mutant revolution. The problems with that concept were glaringly obvious from the word go: beyond some extremely vague and general rhetoric, there was no explanation of what a “mutant revolution” actually was. The pay-off, it turns out, is that Scott didn’t really know either. He had vague ideas of making intimidating noises so that people would take mutantkind seriously… and that was about it. And this doesn’t work at all. For one thing, it’s what he was already doing on Utopia in the previous run, except with a less informative label attached. And for another, it was always glaringly obvious that the mutant revolution was vague to the point of meaninglessness. So the only twist is that what looked to be bad writing is repositioned as all the characters being a bit dim, having apparently devoted months of their lives to this “revolution” without ever stopping to ask Scott what it was.
Somewhere in here, there’s an interesting idea about a group of characters hanging together thanks to a vaguely defined, one-size-fits-all agenda that tells everyone what they want to hear. But to work, that would have needed a story where the cracks slowly become apparent over time, and where there was some apparent reason why nobody was speaking up to ask the extremely obvious “what exactly are we trying to achieve here” question. Instead, we have a story where nobody seems to even turn their minds to the purpose of their team until Scott finally admits he doesn’t know what it is. This makes everyone look thick.
Then, issue #600 tries to round off this plot thread by having Scott gather “every mutant in the world” on the steps of the Capitol in Washington DC and proclaiming that the “mutant revolution” is to get everyone together and have them not fight. This scene makes no sense on a number of levels. Even if we assume that we’re not meant to take Scott’s claim absolutely literally – what about the mutants who are in jail, for example? – it’s still not apparent how he gathered all these people, or how he did so without the X-Men finding out sooner, or why nobody said no, or why the contingent of stroppy supervillains are apparently willing to just stand around and go “yeah, dude, peace and love”. And you kind of have to assume that he’s supposed to have gathered a significant number of those types of characters, because if he hasn’t, the scene is completely meaningless even on its own terms, surely?
This is a singularly bizarre and unearned sequence, and since it’s meant to be finishing off the main theme of Bendis’ Uncanny, that’s a big problem. (As for the other big idea of his Uncanny, that was the bit about characters losing control of their powers, and everyone seems to have just forgotten about that entirely, except for Cullen Bunn over in Magneto.) Again, there’s something in here trying to get out – a story where Scott starts a “revolution” without actually knowing what it is, and works out what he really wants as he goes along, then has to corral his existing movement into that new vision. A less bloated version of the Washington DC scene could have worked as Scott finally coming up with a coherent agenda as the culmination of his arc. The story as published is a good few drafts away from that, though.
As for having Scott describe Washington DC as “the heart of everything democratic and good” – seriously? Nobody believes that. Certainly not the guy who’s spent the last few years pushing for a separatist mutant nation and fighting Sentinels that were paid for three blocks down the road.
This final volume of Bendis’ Uncanny X-Men winds up as a fitting summary of his run. There are good bits. There are good issues, in fact. But they come when it steers clear of the big picture. On the larger scale, it’s a mess, where even the better ideas are hopelessly underdeveloped.
Funny to think that despite (perhaps even because of) all the expectations to the contrary, Phoenix has become something of a poster girl for the “how to be dead and remain dead” classes for superheroes in the MU.
She was dead twice and tends to remain dead for many years at a time. Which is more than most Marvel characters can claim.
And yet somehow Jean is the posterchild/punchline for characters who keep coming back from the dead.
Nothing strange with that.
Her death and resurrection was the first and most memorable and can so be said to have opened the floodgates for the current situation.
” far too much has happened off-panel” Yeah, it’s weird that a crossover that a) has so many spin-off books
b) and was delayed ostensibly in part to add an extra issue
c) and is the result of years of planning on Hickman’s part
STILL seems to have these gaps going. But I guess on the last point at least, Hickman tends to seem like he’s more interested in the grand scheme than the fine expression of it.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRyEbSP3OQahp__Bw0SB4h5bAwZESYs8X3FY7pElaRRTjMy6JMMnw
Doesn’t anyone at Marvel remember that Bobby used to date Cloud in the Defenders? Bobby’s always been… open to possibilities
Is it fair to say Phoenix opened the floodgates for resurrections? How many examples were there in the following 10 years? Superman’s the only major one that springs to mind, so I might argue he opened the floodgates – his was followed closely by Batman being broken, and Spider-man being replaced by his ‘dead’ clone, and I think Doom and Reed both died and came back in the early-mid nineties.
I suppose there was Thanos and Warlock before Supes, but they’re cosmic, and I feel like it’s almost built-in to their concepts that there’s always some way they can come back – in a way that shouldn’t apply to more ‘human’ characters.
I’d also give Phoenix itself something of a bye, because death and rebirth should be its thing. There’s no reason that should lead to anyone else coming back, unless they’ve also happened to become attached to embodiments of resurrection.
Psylocke died and came back. So did Colossus. And Nightcrawler. And Northstar. And Captain America. And The Wasp. And Meggan. And James Hudson. And Cypher. And Warlock.
Granted, most of these were all within the last 15 years or so, but still. Jean gets known for it even though others have been subjected to the same.
Wouldn’t count the Superman thing since his death was intended to be temporary from the beginning.
Either way, I’d say there was a strong argument to be made for Phoenix as the opener of the floodgates, even though characters like Professor X and Wonder Man were officially killed off then brought back before she was.
But Phoenix showed you could have a story regarded as a classic partially because it ended with the death of a classic character and then you could bring her back a few years later, with no obvious detriment to sales.
So it becomes a self-feeding cycle – you’re safe to bump off major characters because you can just bring them back later, hence the multitude of stories doing both.
Xavier “died” and returned long before Jean did. And Xavier’s death was also intended to be permanent at the time.
The Phoenix Saga was just a better and more memorable story (and the X-Men were much more popular by this point) therefore Jean’s subsequent resurrection was a much bigger deal.
@Neil Kapit: Homie, I used to be just like you. I’m simply offering a better path.
@MordWa: Bobby did not ever date Cloud. He did attempt to and was rejected.
@Dave: I don’t think Phoenix, or even the Phoenix Force, were ever truly associated with death and rebirth except by the arbitrary name. It just turned out that the Phoenix Force had the power to keep Jean alive once.
@wwk5d: If I am not mistaken, some of those ressurrections were not even explained. Didn’t Danny Ketch (during his 1990s series as Ghost Rider) actually die to simply reappear later on?
The final volume of Bendis’s Uncanny X-Men run changed its title months ago, and now it will be called “Storyville”, which somehow makes even less sense than “Revolution”:
http://www.previewsworld.com/Catalog/APR150908
I had pretty much lost any hope that this run would have a satisfying payoff once it became clear that the original X-Men would stay in the present after Secret Wars, but Bendis somehow made this extra-sized final issue even more embarassing than the laughable conclusions to All-New X-Men and the omega mutant arc in Uncanny. He clearly had no endgame planned for either book, and saw the Secret Wars break as an opportunity to jump ship without having to resolve anything.
Bendis’ work on the X-Franchise was everything I feared it would be – but turned down to 6.
He set up plots and sub-plots that had potential, the dialogue was witty but his characters talked rather similarly, the follow-through was poor and the action scenes were not great.
I kind of wish that half way through his planned run, Bendis had realised he would be unable to finish it and they’d handed it over to Si Spurrier or Kieron Gillen.
the Bendis run on Uncanny X-Men was….terrible. #600 just put a feather in it’s cap.
frankly, I thought All-New X-Men would be the Bendis book that I didn’t like…but it was actually ok. Mostly fun stories, great art and, whether you agreed with them being here or not, the O5 in the present at least felt like a unique enough concept and it was generally was more entertaining than whatever the hell this Uncanny was.
Uncanny didn’t feel so awful as it was happening. I adore the art of Chris Bachalo, Kris Anka, and Irving Frazier. Dazzler, Emma, Cyclops, Magneto, and Magik are five of my favorite characters. It’s only now, at the end, that I realize how meaningless and incoherent the whole thing was. The only established character that truly got developed in any way was Magik. I’m not exactly mad about that, because Illyana needed work badly, but his Dazzler story fell totally flat and he did NOTHING with the broken powers of Scott, Emma, and Magneto. Considering how big those stories were purported to be, it’s a pretty spectacular fail.
So yeah…with that it’s the All-New plot points in Uncanny #600 that work. Thrilled with the Iceman wrap-up and glad to see Beast finally get a bit of what’s coming to him.
Don’t forget the many false returns of Gwen Stacy… be it clones or bastard daughters with Norman Osborn.
Also the Doom Patrol died and one of its members returned like a decade later or so….
and then in the eighties a few more…. and now all of them were resurrected or something.
I think Bucky was the least irritating.
I feel like every second post from me on here is Bendis-bashing, but the phenomenon that is his career baffles me. That said, besides a few exceptions the X-Franchise had gone stale a long time ago. It has so much potential beyond 80s & 90s nostalgia.
The big 3 deaths for me used to be bucky, uncle ben and barry allen.
Oh well
Guys, to be clear, the time to realize that Bendis wasn’t going to wrap anything up and that his run would serve no purpose other than marking time was when it was announced that he’d be writing the book.
I wait for the trade and had ANXM (and to a lesser extent UXM) on my radar as “maybes” pending reader response. About five or six issues in, it dawned on me that Bendis would never do anything satisfying or self-contained, and even then I felt stupid for taking five whole issues (without having read any of them) to realize it.
After all his unfocused writing on AVENGERS, I’ve given up on Bendis team books.
It’s a shame… he has some decent ideas. But a story is more than decent ideas, they need satisfying resolutions.
Chuck Austen was fine, guys.
By the end of his run his writing took an obnoxious passive aggressive turn, probably from fan criticism. And his run didn’t compare favorably to Grant Morrison’s, but whose would? Other than that, Chuck Austen was a decent middle of the road writer. Yeah, he’s no Kieron Gillen or anything.
“Nerd” is no longer a dirty word in pop culture. And no I’m not trolling. So I’m glad I can say this.
Here’s why you hate Chuck Austen. My God, who else but *freaking* *nerds* would ever, *ever* take comfort because a story about Jennifer Walters breaking the bed with Cain Marko is now “imaginary”? With I’m sorry a little sympathy but mostly good humor I want to grab each and every one of you and shout, Good God man get a grip.
No, Chuck Austen’s run sucked.
I just re-read Chuck Austen’s run and then Bendis’s. Bendis was lucky to have some gorgeous art but his work is utterly unreadable. I dare you to try to read his X-Men again. It is awful. Chuck had his flaws but it’s readable stuff.
Far and away, Bendis is the worst writer of a main x title ever.