The X-Axis – 10 June 2012
Let’s get straight to it, shall we?
Age of Apocalypse #4 – We’re four issues into this series, and it’s not really working for me. There are some interesting ideas floating around in here, but it’s missing something.
This issue, the human resistance (“the X-Terminated”) continue their efforts to stop the Dark Beast from reviving a whole load of dead mutants using the Life Seed. To help out, Goodnight tracks down their world’s version of Bruce Banner to get the Hulk on their side – at least as a distraction. The basic idea, I guess, is to play up the lead characters’ “end justifies the means” attitude, which is consistent with their roots as fanatical villains in the mainstream universe, and to present it as something which, in the context of the Age of Apocalypse world, nonetheless counts as a note of optimism.
That could work. But there are big problems with this series. I’ll be blunt: I don’t care about any of the characters, and I don’t believe in the world.
So far as the characters are concerned, there’s not enough variation between them to give light and shade – particularly in an issue like this one which doesn’t use Jean Grey. It’s essentially a whole team of variations on the same theme. The most interesting of the bunch probably remains Goodnight, though this issue’s I-must-atone origin story does nothing to help – and why on earth is he randomly telling Bruce Banner something that he apparently conceals from his colleagues? Prophet is also presented as suitably enigmatic, running his own secret plans without telling the others what he’s up to. But Deadeye and Fiend remain wholly forgettable, and there’s nobody here to really root for. Harper Simmons, the supposed point of view character, gets nothing much to do in this story beyond provide largely generic narration.
The world doesn’t really hang together coherently either. On the one hand we’ve got a world run by demented supervillains in a dictatorship. But then we’ve also got scenes of Bruce Banner hanging around in his apartment with his collection of science textbooks. Leaving aside the question of where he’s getting them, it seems that life is in some sense going on for the ordinary folk, but I still have no real clue as to what their lives are supposed to be like. Maybe that’s why it feels like there’s no weight to this book and nothing really at stake. This might not matter so much if the book was pitching itself as large-scale craziness, but it’s chosen to opt for grim-n-gritty, and that makes it harder to avoid questions about whether the world makes sense. The art doesn’t really help; all the locations are thoroughly generic, and there’s not much sense of place here.
In theory, it’s not a bad idea for a book, and I can see moments of promise here, but on the whole it’s a ponderous affair that doesn’t really have any weight to it.
Avengers Academy #31 – An Avengers vs X-Men tie-in. Incidentally, you need to read it before this week’s Uncanny X-Men (which gives away the ending), though there’s no sign on either book to warn you of that.
Sebastian Shaw, it turns out, isn’t trying to kill anyone. He’s just trying to escape and take the X-Men’s students with him. So the storyline of his redemption remains alive, though with Generation Hope cancelled, it’s understandable that Christos Gage ends this story by shunting the character off into limbo for the time being, having him go his own way for now.
The cast of this story is unavoidably huge, since it involves the entire student bodies of both Utopia and the Academy. It’s to Gage’s immense credit that he makes it work. In part, it’s because he keeps the central story very simple and allows the characters to orbit around that. But it’s also because he’s able to keep all of these characters distinctive instead of letting them blur into faces in a crowd; this arc is probably the first time in years that Loa has had any personality at all, and she’s not even got a major role here. There’s also a nice emotional core to the story, with X-23 both siding with the mutants’ desire to escape, and deciding to stay with the Academy to further her friendship with Finesse, the one character emotionally blank enough to understand her. Enough characters switch sides to make the argument resolution effective, but a few are allowed to credibly stand their ground and insist on the Avengers’ point of view. And there’s good comedy with Hercules overselling his attempt to convincingly throw a fight. (“Aaagh! I am undone! O cruel fates, why have you cursed me so?”)
There’s an awful lot being juggled here, and pretty much without exception, Gage gets it to work. Tom Grummett is a fairly old-school superhero artist, but he’s a very good choice for a story like this; with this many characters, it really does help to have everyone clearly recognisable and on model, and to keep the storytelling as clear and straightforward as you can. Considering that it’s a peripheral crossover issue being shoehorned into an unrelated series, this has been a surprisingly good couple of issues.
Avengers vs X-Men #5 – Matt Fraction is the committee member delegated to script this issue, not that you’d really know. It’s basically a whole issue of everyone fighting on the moon. Hope asks Wolverine to kill her, but the X-Men won’t let him. Iron Man goes after the Phoenix itself in a giant suit of armour, though since its function is just to fire a gun at the Phoenix, it’s not altogether clear why a normal sized item wouldn’t have done. The gun in question is billed as a “disruptor”, though what exactly that means, or what Iron Man expected it to do, isn’t really elaborated on. Oh, and in a one-panel cameo, Professor X and Legion are apparently paddling on a beach in Ibiza while fully dressed.
And yet, and yet…
It does build well, pushing the idea that this is something that Scott is not just passionate, but desperate about. And so the closing twist – the disrupted Phoenix goes right past Hope and powers up the other five X-Men standing next to her instead – is a rather nice idea. Having spent so long pushing the idea that Cyclops is obsessive about letting Hope fulfil her role, there’s some genuine story potential in having him end up with the Phoenix himself. It’s a twist that makes sense, at least from the standpoint of the general structure of the story. From the standpoint of what actually happened, of course, it doesn’t make much sense at all, since the entire question of what the disruptor was meant to do is hand waved away. The question is how much that sort of thing bothers you. On a first read, the momentum kind of carries it through.
Where do we go from here? Well, presumably this is heading towards a story where Cyclops, having actually become Phoenix, can’t control it and has to be reined in by the Avengers and the remaining (vast majority of) X-Men. And in the long run, I can see that working. Cyclops is now theoretically in a position to reverse M-Day and save mutant kind, which has been his central preoccupation for the last few years of stories. If it all goes horribly wrong – and let’s face it, it’s hardly going to go smoothly – then there’s a lot of potential there.
Uncanny X-Men #13 – With Avengers vs X-Men, Marvel seem to be putting a lot less emphasis on the tie-in issues being self-contained than we’ve seen in recent years. Most of the book’s cast are off on the moon in Avengers vs X-Men #5 getting turned into Phoenixes, but while all that is acknowledged, it’s not the central point of this book. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Trying too hard to keep all the books self-contained results in a lot of grinding repetition as key plot points are repeated again, and again, and again. I’m not sure the events on the moon as shown in this story would make a lot of sense to people who weren’t reading the core series, but so be it.
What actually happens in this issue: the remaining X-Men (Magneto, Storm and Psylocke) find themselves stuck in a safe house, realising that they’ve missed the boat in terms of getting to the big fight, and wondering if there’s anything much they can do besides wait and hope for the best. In the context of the crossover as a whole, this works pretty well; the major characters need a bit of downtime like this, and it fits the bigger picture of what’s going on.
Meanwhile, following their escape over in Avengers Academy, the rest of Generation Hope return to Utopia to ask Unit for an explanation about the Phoenix. What they get is a surprisingly direct answer, assuming that you can believe Unit. According to him, this is the second time the Phoenix has shown up to break a world out of an M-Day-like spell. What was meant to happen was that Hope and the Five Lights would commune with the Phoenix (which, incidentally, presumably explains why there are precisely five X-Men up on the Moon) and save the world. Unit could have told Hope that, but, well, he already knows what would have happened then. This is much more interesting. It’s a lovely scene for Unit, casually explaining that he’s deliberately screwed the whole thing up in a spirit of scientific curiosity.
Billy Tan takes over on art with this issue, and it’s a big step up. Unlike Greg Land, who did the punch-kick tie-in issues, Tan’s better able to sell the conversational moments. The story here can’t really be separated from the broader crossover of which it forms part, but it does complement the main story very nicely.
X-Factor #237 – Meanwhile, wholly divorced from crossovers of any sort, X-Factor gives us an issue in which Lorna and Theresa take Rahne on a road trip to try to cheer her up after she had the mystical child a few months back. The big idea here is that Rahne’s been deeply depressed ever since, though that’s a storyline that’s somewhat been lost in the shuffle over recent issues. It might have been an idea to give it a bit more prominence before shoving it centre stage here.
Anyhow, they take Rahne to meet the Madrox duplicate who became an Anglican priest, and there follows a lengthy conversation about forgiveness and redemption. Madrox is here to put forward the argument that there is always scope for forgiveness and moving on; Rahne is there, as usual, to convince herself that she’s going to hell. It’s a very talky issue into which David tries to introduce some tension through the melodramatic deployment of a cat-o’-nine-tails, with Madrox pretending to think a bit of old-school flagellation will be just the ticket. Theoretically I guess the idea is to take Rahne’s guilt-trip to its logical conclusion and demonstrate its pointlessness, but I can’t help thinking it’s pitched a bit over the top for the scene; it’s used as an out-of-context flash forward at the start, which perhaps contributes to the sense that it’s forced drama.
Still, it’s a story that needed done in order to nudge Rahne’s arc along, and now we can move on to the obvious next step of trying to find the missing demon kid.
Did anyone read this week’s Mighty Thor annual? Is there any reason for it to be collected in a Journey Into Mystery TPB other than it having Elson on art, and JIM needing to pad out a collection?
I loved this week’s JIM. Everything with Loki as a tourist in England was fantastic.
Say what you will, but Tom Grummett does know how to draw teenage character well, and make them look like teenagers, instead of really short adults.
Well, it looks like the crossover is introducing *some* nice twists and turns…nothing wow, but here’s hoping Marvel doesn’t screw it up.
Paul after reading your take on AvX #5 i like that idea and ending but all I saw it as was The Phoenix possesing five X-men because Hope was unconsious. (I think I am not letting myself enjoy this book in part due to a dread of Bendis coming.)One more thing I want to ask, wasn’t the point of the Avengers mission to capture the force not disrupt it?
Really liked Uncanny and glad we get a reason why the two most powerful members weren’t part of the fight. I want to know where Magneto stands though, my take is he has been very weak since he saved Kitty from the bullet.
“Did anyone read this week’s Mighty Thor annual? Is there any reason for it to be collected in a Journey Into Mystery TPB other than it having Elson on art, and JIM needing to pad out a collection?”
The Thor annual is actually a continuation of JM DeMatteis’ Silver Surfer storyline from over a decade ago and features Silver Surfer and Galactus more than Thor. It seems to me like DeMatteis had a Silver Surfer story to tell and since there isn’t a Silver Surfer title currently, they put it in Thor.
And no, there really isn’y any reason for the Thor annual to be in a JIM TPB (and maybe not even a reason for it to be in a Thor Annual.)
That said I did enjoy it.
Does everyone forget that Loa got a significant amount of spotlight/personality in the short-lived Namor series? Just cause many didn’t read it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t count. She’s had more exposure than a good chuck of the X-Students.
Oh for flip’s sake . . .
Uncanny X-Men and Avengers’ Academy were both really good. AVX was not. I also think that the Unit storyline should have been included in the main book. The twist comes across as a little cheap if you’re not reading Uncanny. Cyclops, again, comes across as fanatical because if you haven’t read X-Sanction etc.
Tony, I think that’s asked and answered. Presumably if very few people read it, than people haven’t forgotten, they just didn’t know. (Also, it seems to me that the number of people that actually saw an appearance of a character counts in measuring exposure)
Y’know, despite modern history of events, I was hoping for AvX to be a really fun x-over. Now I can’t wait to read it because it sounds like a train wreck thus far. And train wrecks are always fun.
The idea of Tony building Armor and a weapon that can disrupt the phoenix force may work for ten tear olds, but not for me. That nothing was explained and that the armor was nothing more than a plot device to get us to where Mr. Fraction wanted the story to go, is insulting. Five issues in, I think I may be done with this year’s version of “Fear Itself.”
@living tribunal.
Paul and Al had this discussion about Factions event writing last fall, the unearned moment.
For me at least, with this week’s books, the event is back on track. I loved the main book twist and the background revelations in Uncanny, not to mention Academy.
To understand what actually happened on the moon, you have to read Uncanny and AvX together. Tony Stark’s MacGuffin was called a “disruptor”, so it’s not too much of a stretch to presume it was designed to tear the Phoenix Force apart, and that’s what it did – only the pieces still went into action. And while the presence of five X-Men was probably an accident, I gather from UNIT’s words (and he had no need to lie, given that he was planning to erase their memories anyway) that if the Lights had been there, Hope would have become Phoenix and they’d have helped her to stabilize it; but with the Phoenix “disrupted” and the wrong five people to back her up, everything went sideways.
By the way: in X-Factor, the priest duplicate goes by the name of “Maddox” :).
For anyone else reading Age of Apocalypse did I miss something with the close up shot of them not killing Monet St Croix? I’ve gone back and read the all the preceding issues and I still don’t understand why she would be important to this group of characters.
Phoenix Five…so. utterly. lame.
I’m a little vague on my continuity here, but here’s a question:
Do Madrox’s duplicates share his powers of self-replication? Or can only the original create dupes?
If so, it seems like it’s been an awfully long time for the Reverend Maddox to go without ending up beside himself because he stubbed his toe….
Paul said: “Avengers Academy #31 – An Avengers vs X-Men tie-in. Incidentally, you need to read it before this week’s Uncanny X-Men (which gives away the ending), though there’s no sign on either book to warn you of that.”
I can’t speak to the lack of editorial notes in AVENGERS ACADEMY, as I’m not reading that series. There’s, certainly, no tie-in reference in the main series. UNCANNY, at least, provided guidance on the first page — “This issue takes place after the events of Avengers Academy #31 and during the events of AVX #5”. Granted, it was buried in the recap so it would’ve been easy to overlook.
I’m glad I noticed it. I was going to read UNCANNY, first. I noticed the note, set it aside, and read AVX first. This is good, as UNCANNY would’ve blown the ending of AVX.
As Paul suggests, the blown ending is only a, potential, problem if you’re reading both series. People reading UNCANNY and not AVX might not quite know what was going on.
– Didn’t Rahne get over her whole fundamentalist terror-of-going-to-hell thing back during Ellis’s run on Excalibur? Was that just conveniently tossed aside along with all the other character development that happened during that series?
– At what point did Tony Stark stop being depicted as a really smart engineer and start being depicted as a mega-scientist on par with Reed Richards and Doctor Doom, who can basically come up with magic if you sit him down with a toolbox for long enough? Because while the Iron Man I remember from ten years ago was always pretty good at, say, coming up with lots of different versions of the same suit of armor (“this one’s slightly lighter, and fits in a suitcase now!”), he was never apt to sit down and basically say, “give me two hours and I’ll come up with a gun that kills God” the way he does here.
– I hate to say this, but I’m seriously losing interest in Kid Loki at this point. When he was reintroduced, it was along the lines of pivoting the character away from “evil” and towards “amoral” (or “chaotic neutral” maybe, for you D&Ders) – he still pulled a lot of nasty, backstabbing shit in that first arc, albeit geared towards protecting Asgard (with the selfish motivation that Asgard was his home). But Gillen’s portrayal since then has slipped more and more towards the cute and cloying – having him spout one-liners and pop-culture references, giving him a cute animal sidekick, and in general having him act more like an actual child than a trickster god who happens to be wearing a child’s body. It’s a portrayal that starts to grate after a while. Maybe it works for some people, but it’s not working for me – I get the feeling that I’d love to see Gillen write a straight-up Loki book (based on his Siege one-shot and his first arc on JIM, at least), but the watered-down kid version really isn’t for me.
@Taibak – Yes, dupes can create more dupes. However, Madrox (and by extension Maddox and other dupes) learned to control the duplication process between his original stint on X-Factor and the Madrox mini series. A dupe is no longer automatically created with every impact.
Also, I’m not certain that Maddox is keeping his identity a complete secret. There was a development with Rev Maddox’s son that I believe implied at least some of those in his immediate circle knew about his true nature.
Moose – I understand your criticism and while I’m not going to go to the mat for JiM being a perfect book by any means, one of the things I have enjoyed is the fact that it’s *not* just Loki pretending to be a child while still being the same malevolent trickster underneath it. They’ve sold me on the idea that while this is still Loki, it’s a Loki who has been drained of the malice of his adult self and given the proverbial second chance. It’s not like when he was a woman and he was just putting on a new body to fuck with people, he *really is* a kid again, with all that entails.
Why do we need a redemption arc for Sebastian Shaw again? Not enough reformed villains to pad out the X-Teams?
two nerdy popular culture AvsX witticisms:
Now, we just need to see Professor X to show up and say “there are four lights.”
5 Lights + Phoenix = Science Mutant Team Gatchaman
So, not sure how I feel about AvX… on one hand, it did have an obvious “twist” (Hope doesn’t get the Phoenix), on the other hand, didn’t expect to see it go to the 5 other X-Men. I disagree with Paul’s interpretation of it; I think the Phoenix has outright possessed Cyclops and company, and they don’t have anything to say about it. Which is kinda lame, since it turns Avengers vs. X-Men into Avengers vs. Phoenix-Possessed Guys. Heck, the other X-Men like Magneto and Storm will probably just end up on the Avengers’ side.
I think Uncanny did a good job of writing around the edges of the crossover. The fact that we had five X-Men possessed and five Lights ALMOST made me think that it was planned into the crossover itself… but I think Gillen just took the idea of “these five X-Men will get possessed” and ran with it himself. I was kinda wondering why the other X-Men like Magneto, Storm, Psylocke, etc. didn’t make it to the Moon at the end of #4, guess we know why now. I’m curious to see if it’s for any reason in the overall crossover or just because.
I’m just hoping Cyclops and Nightwing don’t both go to the Marvel/DC solstice ball, because one of them would have to go home and change.
I’m really glad to see Lorna Dane being written by Peter David again, as he’s one of the few writers who has ever seemed to view her as a strong, intelligent, capable and reasonably sane human being and not as some feeble-minded dimwit hanging around at the edge of the X-Teams with a VACANCY sign tattooed on her forehead just waiting to be possessed by whatever mind-controlling goon happens to wander by looking for something to do for a few months.
Of course, I’m pretty sure Chuck Austen was convinced he was writing her as a strong, intelligent, capable and reasonably sane human being also. He just didn’t know any better.
I’m fine with Loki being “drained of malice” – there’s a difference between a trickster who’s consistently seeking to do ill will, for instance, and a trickster who may cause plenty of incidental harm on the way towards some other, less malicious if still self-serving goal. The latter seemed to be Gillen’s initial take on the character, and I was fine with that – what I’m not fine with is Loki becoming cute. At this point, he might as well turn Thor, Heimdall and the rest of them into toddlers, call them the Asgard Babies and be done with it.
Moose: Since Hank Pym, who’s a much more omnidisciplinary scientist than Tony, was working on it too that one’s easy to write off. Hank built the Disruptor, Tony built the armor it’s mounted on.
“- At what point did Tony Stark stop being depicted as a really smart engineer and start being depicted as a mega-scientist on par with Reed Richards and Doctor Doom, who can basically come up with magic if you sit him down with a toolbox for long enough?”
I think this began during the time Mike Grell was writing Iron Man. He has Tony build a time machine and reverse engineer Asgardian “technology.”
At the time I thought it was a bit of a stretch; sure Tony is smart, but Dr. Doom and Richards should be on a whole another level.
I hate in comics when a genius in robotics or biology or chemistry is suddenly written as a genius in all fields of science. Wasn’t Tony also involved with the Thor Clone? I always found that to be quite a stretch, he never expressed any interest or understanding of that particular field of science. In fairness Reed Richards was also involved, but cloning doesn’t really fit his MO either. Cloning I always associate with some morally corrupt characters like High Evolutionary or Sinister. Tony and Reed not so much.
Stuff like this is on the same level as when Wolverine writers treat a healing factor and invincibility as the same thing. Overpowering your characters just to get a “cool” moment. It’s lazy writing, and the “cool” moment is never anywhere near as “cool” as the writer believes it to be. Quite often it actually detracts from the story.
Huh, you’re absolutely right – the UNCANNY recap page *does* mention that it takes place after AVENGERS ACADEMY. I don’t know how I missed that. Whoops.
Hmm…. I’m not reading the crossover (or indeed any new comics at all right now), but given the setup described in this post, I think my guess on the rest of the series would be: Five Phoenix-powered X-men easily take down the Avengers — but don’t have the power to reverse M-Day. So they need to figure out how to de-power themselves and reintegrate the full Phoenix force — somehow in the process giving the Avengers the chance to come back and fight again.
@ Sol
Which will include a scene of Captain America walking up to the Phoenix 5 after they have whupped most of the other Avengers, making some speech about “How It’s Not Over While One Person Still Stands” (or some silly claptrap speech he usually gives in these situations), punch out some of the Phoenix 5 (whereas previously not even Thor could lay a hand on them), then get defeated by the 5 while they all make comments about how awesome he is…
I suspect you’ve read the scripts. Sounds exactly like what I expect to happen! Captain America works well in his own book but things get silly the moment he joins a team or participates in a crossover. He’s a strongman soldier with a shield and no other weapons but writers treat him differently because he wears a flag.
Yeah, it’s quite obnoxious.
Sometimes it even feels as if the writers confuse him with Batman.
I don’t mind Captain America as a team player. He’s a good fit with the Avengers, and a good tactical leader. I just find it silly when he punches out people like Korvac or Thanos.
The difference between Batman and Captain America is that it is – at least sometimes – possible to imagine Batman having prepared for most scenarios. He’s like Midnighter, or a superior Cyclops.
Captain America, we are meant to believe, is better just because he has more will and spirit than anybody else. We’re told he’s a tactical genius, but actually rarely see this genius in action. At times, he can be the male version of Squirrel Girl.
Tony being able to do ridiculous stuff goes all the way back to the 1960s. In the Black Widow’s second appearance from Tales of Suspense #53, she’s out to steal Tony’s new pocket-sized anti-gravity ray that can levitate a small building somehow.
Later on, in ToS #74, Stark invents a “cobalt ray” that accelerates healing, but has the nasty side effect of turning people into a giant superstrong berserker whom everyone sensitively dubs “the Freak.”
Tony also had a story in which he created a time machine in 1969 or so, which made it rather odd when Grell had him invent one decades later. It wasn’t just Tony, by the way; Bruce Banner invented a time-travel ray in an old Tales to Astonish story, and Thor’s alter ego Don Blake, a medical doctor, invented a humanoid robot in a Lee/Kirby issue of Journey into Mystery.
Also, Stark was supposed to be the guy behind all of SHIELD’s tech, meaning that he invented Life Model Decoys, flying cars, the Helicarrier, a lot of the ESP/psionic technology and so forth.
Some of that’s was retconned recently in Hickman’s Secret Warriors, where the much more, er, plausible explanation seems to be that immortal Isaac Newton and Leonardo da Vinci created the basis of this stuff in several centuries ago.
Omar: That may all be true, but you have to give 60s comics a pass that doesn’t apply to modern comics. The 60s were still in the era of promise, where some guy in his garage really could invent something world-changing (and several did), and sapient computers and cities on the moon seemed to be just around the corner. Today comics are written for more sophisticated tastes, primarily for adults, adults who know damn well they’ll never own a jetpack or invent a mechanical wife. Letting Tony Stark invent any plot device he desires is just lazy.
As for Captain America, will and spirit are his super power. Maybe he shouldn’t be able to punch out Thanos, but he absolutely should be super-capable. And I’m sure the only reason we don’t usually see his tactical genius in the comics is because while the good Captain may well be a phenomenal tactician, your average comic book writer is not.
My favourite bit for Captain America* was in a Hulk story. Hulk was off to beat somebody up or something similar that he’d regret later, and Captain America ran up behind him and dropped him to the ground by hitting a couple of pressure points. That really showcased the fact that even the strongest man in the world can be taken out by sound tactics and a bit of bravery.
*Not counting the movies. Because then it’d be the bit where he jumps on the grenade while everyone else runs away.
The genius stuff has let to people on another board trying to rank the various super genius in marvel and dc continuity.
Answer: if youre from dc, the title professor, esp as a villain, usually means super genius.
@Niall
No, he’s better because he has AMERICAN will and spirit
Also, the idea of Captain America taking out the Hulk by hitting his pressure points is laughable.
Why’s that? Hulk might be hugely muscled and super-tough, but he’s still got a human-like frame and human-like nerves. And that means if you poke him on the back of the knees, his leg muscles will all involuntarily relax just like every other human. It’s not down to force or damage or anything like that so there’s no reason why he’d be immune or even resistant.
Smells a little like Black Panther taking out the Silver Surfer . . .
Maybe Hulk has a human-like nervous system, but this hasn’t been the way he has been depicted typically. If that was the case, then the perfect Hulk-Busting team would feature the likes of Shangi-Chai, Iron Fist and the Immortal Weapons, Black Widow, Psylocke etc. as these characters typically use this fighting style more frequently than Cap. It would also make people and Hawkeye and Cyclops (people who use projectiles with percision) pretty good at taking out Hulk. Ant Man and Wasp would also be good bets, not to mention any of the characters who use nanites.
If Daredevil took out the Hulk in the same way that Cap did, there would be few who would find it anything more than laughable, but Cap gets a whole different set of rules to play by.
It didn’t take Hulk out, it didn’t harm him in the slightest. It just made him fall down for a few seconds so Cap could talk sense into him. And also did a dominance thing to make sure he’d listen. It worked logically and it worked within the structure of the story. But if you have a story, say a Versus comic, that based the victory strategy on making Hulk trip over, then you’d have a problem.
It’s worth remembering that the scene where Cap takes on the Hulk – takes on, not takes down – happened in the Hulk’s own book, in an issue written by Peter Davis. If you can’t trust PAD to get the Hulk right, who can you trust? But it’s also worth noting that it happened during the period where the Hulk was smart and relatively reasonable, it might not have had such an outcome if he tried that against the savage Hulk.
And the scene where Cap “takes out” Thanos was anything but. It’s the end of INFINITY GAUNTLET #4 where Cap is the last man standing against Thanos. Basically, Cap get’s his neck broken in a heartbeat, but he manages a nice speech before he dies.
If you’ve got a problem with Cap knowing how to win, however, I would just like to congratulate you on having started reading comic books so recently!
The Hulk has pressure points, but the guy is built like a solid mountain. Cap just isn’t strong enough to affect those points. And if it were that easy, you’d think people like the Thing would take a few kung-fu or akido classes for their next fight with the Hulk.
Um, I never said anything about Cap “taking out” Thanos. And it doesn’t matter when a person started reading comics, it’s still very annoying when Cap is written that way.
That may all be true, but you have to give 60s comics a pass that doesn’t apply to modern comics. The 60s were still in the era of promise, where some guy in his garage really could invent something world-changing (and several did), and sapient computers and cities on the moon seemed to be just around the corner.
Is the tech in 60s comics genuinely that much goofier than the tech we see now, or is it just that we get more of an effort at clever technobabble these days? Writers in the 60s may have treated radiation, engineering, and the word “science!” as excuses for plot magic, but writers today do much the same with nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and the word “quantum!”
In many ways, the mid-to-late 1980s were really the beginning and the end of the quasi-realism you discuss in superhero comics. That’s certainly the era in which Tony Stark’s plotsa focused on his ability to build armors, and his role as a CEO. I’ll grant you that the character didn’t invent many outrageous gadgets in those days.
But then the 1990s followed and became all about excess, where Mister Sinister could create any kind of superperson by uttering the word “genetics” and even freakin’ Doctor Octopus could warp matter and energy if he called it “virtual reality” technology. The later 1990s and early 200s have cemented this; witness Grant Morrison’s comics, or, more irritatingly, Mark Millar’s, where people like Lex Luthor and Norman Osborn (!) can suddenly do everything from bioengineering alien lifeforms to predicting human behavior to the last detail over a span of decades as if they were the Mad Thinker on steroids.
Hell, in the 1990, the Iron Man and Force Works comics saw Tony Stark create two different sentient computers, figure out how to summon supercharged bolts of lightning in order to defeat the giant robot Ultimo, create a “biochip” that replaced a destroyed section of his spinal column, devise in a matter of hours a technorganic virus to defeat a magically-powered version of the Mandarin, and create and twice reprogram a sophisticated artifical nervous system underneath a synthetic skin in order to beat the effects of a genetically-engineered neural parasite implanted in him by an enemy. Stark was pretty much always vaguely omnidisciplinary in his talents outside of the Michelinie/Layton and Denny O’Neil days.
For that matter, the 1960s-style omnidisciplinary scientist never really went away. Certainly, it’s not as if Reed Richards, Doctor Doom, or Hank Pym have ever had their 1960s “passes” revoked. All that’s happening now is that Tony Stark is getting his pass back after a while so he looks like he can hang with those guys.
Today comics are written for more sophisticated tastes, primarily for adults, adults who know damn well they’ll never own a jetpack or invent a mechanical wife.
I remind you that the writer of this issue, Matt Fraction, is the guy who notoriously gave Cyclops a jetpack out of the blue, complete with a little caption box pointing out how “cool” this was supposed to be.
Letting Tony Stark invent any plot device he desires is just lazy.
If it helps, the idea here seems to be that Tony is really good at building weapons in particular. We’ve seen him create Hulkbuster armor, Thorbuster armor, and so forth. This is the Phioenixbuster. The Hulkbuster suit comes from Len Kaminski’s run.
“At this point, he might as well turn Thor, Heimdall and the rest of them into toddlers, call them the Asgard Babies and be done with it.”
Already done in a Power Pack miniseries. It was pretty cute.
I would totally read an Asgard babies miniseries. A crossover with the X-babies would also be very cool!
“In many ways, the mid-to-late 1980s were really the beginning and the end of the quasi-realism you discuss in superhero comics.”
Oh yeah sure, I didn’t mean to suggest that it stopped 45 years ago and only just restarted. It’s always been there (to some extent) and it’s always been lazy and a bit silly. The Thorbuser armour was particularly on the nose, since it was literally magical. I think it has been more prevalent in the last five or six years though.
Of course, before Journey into Mystery, and before Power Pack even, the movie Erik the Viking had wee Asgardians (three minutes in).
http://youtu.be/xeqMCyQVdfA