Death of X
Death of X is pretty wretched. But at least it has the decency to be revealingly wretched.
When the Marvel Universe picked up again after Secret Wars, we were told that during the gap, Cyclops had got himself killed doing something fairly awful involving the Inhumans. Death of X is tasked with filling in that gap, presumably to lay the groundwork for the upcoming Inhumans vs X-Men crossover (though how much it really adds is debatable).
The oddity of this crossover is that given the raft of X-Men titles already announced for launch in the new year, it rather gives the game away that the X-Men seem to be coming out ahead. That doesn’t necessarily make the promotion a bad idea: sometimes it’s no bad thing to send a clear message that the storyline is coming to a climax. If people didn’t like it until now, maybe at least they’ll show up to see it end.
But regardless. Death of X is co-written by Jeff Lemire from Extraordinary X-Men and Charles Soule from the Inhumans books. Both are talented writers, even if neither is doing their best work on those franchises, let alone the checklist that must have come with this title. Artist Aaron Kuder is perfectly fine. The problems here lie with the idea itself, far more than with the way it’s carried into practice.
The series starts off doing a parallel structure where it cuts back and forth between Cyclops’s X-Men team discovering that the Terrigen Mist is lethal to mutants, and the Inhumans cheerfully celebrating the arrival of the Mists in another city to activate new Inhumans. (There were two separate clouds at this point; Death of X explains what happened to the other one.) Obviously, this leads to Cyclops declaring war on the Inhumans.
What actually stems from that, though? Issue #2 has Storm alerting Medusa to the issue, and Medusa at least giving a few orders to try and have mutants evacuated from the path of the cloud. So you’ve got both women trying to be vaguely co-operative while recognising that there’s a potential conflict here they might not be able to avoid. Then Cyclops makes a global announcement that the Mists are fatal to mutants and, hey, who knows, quite possibly fatal to humans too. Which he doesn’t really have any evidence for, but hey, the Inhumans completely missed the problem with mutants, so it’s not a completely absurd point. This brings us to one of the central problems with the whole set-up, namely that the story asks us to accept that people had hitherto been pretty chilled about the whole idea of mutagenic clouds coming into their city and possibly giving them superpowers and changing what they look like. I don’t believe for a second that people would be relaxed about that, no matter how “safe” the Mists were. It’s nonsense.
At any rate. This leads to Crystal and her team (the cast of All-New Inhumans) trying to keep the Terrigen Cloud away from Madrid until the mutants can be evacuated, and finally succeeding with Storm’s help, because Yay Teamwork. But then Scott and Emma bring in Magneto to provide a distraction, and miscommunication ensues, and you know the drill. Meanwhile, Scott’s group enlist Alchemy, of all people – you know, the kid who can change one substance into another, he was in a couple of issues of Excalibur back in the day – with the perfectly sensible plan of getting him to just change the Cloud into something else. Which sounds like a solution, doesn’t it?
And in issue #4… that’s what they do. Alchemy does indeed simply destroy one of the Clouds by turning it into something harmless, but in doing so he gets infected and dies. Scott then goes to confront the Inhumans and gives a little speech about how the ideas he represents will never die. And then Black Bolt blasts him into oblivion. For reasons which are wholly unclear, this is described later in the issue as “suicide”, when it seems pretty clearly like murder.
Now, there’s a twist at the end – spoilers! – which is that Cyclops didn’t actually do any of this. In reality, he just dropped dead from the M-Pox in issue #1, and Emma has been using a telepathic illusion of him to motivate other characters and to allow him to make the grand symbolic sacrifice that was denied him in real life. In theory there’s something to this idea, but it’s patchily handled in the rest of the series. On a re-reading, most scenes do indeed fit with this – Emma stands on the edge of the group, and occasionally other characters say something that indicates that they’ve twigged. The scene of Scott’s pep talk to Alchemy is definitely improved on a re-read: presumably Emma/Scott wasn’t kidding when she said “I want you to make a choice of your own free will”, but she’s still manipulating him. And yet then there are scenes in issue #3 where she’s talking to Scott when they’re alone, and unless we’re supposed to think she’s having a breakdown – which is not otherwise implied – that’s just odd.
But never mind that. The upshot of all this is that the dreadful, villainous thing that Scott did was, apparently… to get rid of one of the Terrigen Clouds in a way that harmed nobody.
What?
The fundamental problem here is that “Scott” is plainly right about everything, other than when he’s stirring about the possibility of Terrigen killing normal humans too. The Cloud is poisonous. It kills people – never mind whether they’re mutants or not. It’s a massive pollution problem. If it can’t be contained – and nobody suggests that it can – then eradicating it is not just perfectly reasonable, it’s a moral imperative. For this story to work – to work in the slightest – we need to accept that there’s some sort of moral grey area here, just because the Inhumans are quite keen on Terrigen and place great cultural value on it. At best that’s not a properly explored theme, but in any event, some serious heavy lifting would be required to persuade me that the Inhumans have any arguable case that their cultural sensitivities are deserving of greater weight than the fact that the Cloud kills people.
It occurs to me that this might be a story that went off the rails by cranking up the peril too far. Suppose the Cloud didn’t kill mutants. Suppose it just depowered them. Then you’d be able to tell a story where the Cloud is powering up Inhumans and powering down mutants, and it’s a bit of a zero sum game. The mutants are the only ones who lose out and even they just wind up as normal people again. At that point maybe you’ve got a story about whether the mutant identity is worth fighting for, or something on those lines. Maybe.
But as it’s set up, the concept just fails. It’s a big cloud of poison gas. Cyclops tries to get rid of it in a way that hurts nobody. What’s the problem?
I think there are two points to remember here:
1) In Silent War, terrigen gave normal humans (well, soldiers) powers. And then killed them. (Something similar happened with Quicksilver and various depowered mutants in X-Factor.) Something which has obviously been “forgotten.”
2) Karnak’s backstory, which involved his parents refusing to allow him to be exposed to the Terrigen Mists because they saw what it did to Triton (who was unable to breathe air afterward).
The series does acknowledge that the Terrigen Mists haven’t acted like this before. There’s some handwaving about how exposure to Earth’s atmosphere must have changed them. But it’s acknowledged.
I mean, there’s other stuff too – like Crystal turning a batch of terrigen into ice to stop Black Bolt terrigening the Shi’ar, but terrigen killing normal humans and members of the Inhuman royal family itself not exactly seeing terrigenesis as an unalloyed good thing to be inflicted on everybody…
Not just potentially killing them, outright or through M-Pox, but also sterilizing them and prevents mutants from having children.
And Cyclops is the baddie? WTF Marvel? The Inhumans can’t be jettisoned off into space fast enough.
Truly a headscratcher. Considering they already had Cyclops as a pariah – killing Prof. X – it felt very repetitive to hint at ANOTHER event that would cast a shadow over his legacy, so much so that Young Cyclops has spent all year alluding to it. But “Cyclops” didn’t do anything wrong here, as Paul points out.
The whole “Terrigen Mist kills mutants” story has been overblown, and the X-books had finally gotten out from under M-Day only to face M-Pox. It’s such a miserable story. There’s no wonder that of the three X-Books, All New has been the most fun because it has mostly ignored M-Pox.
Didn’t this cloud originate the current Miss Marvel? I seem to recall that it happened some three years ago – checking now, it was actually a bit earlier still.
As dramatic situations go it is an interesting setup, but the plot is not very logical at all.
Is there a plot reason why the Royal Family decided to spread such a cloud? It feels out of nowhere and against character.
As pointed out above, it stretches credibility that the Inhumans would feel so carefree about the mists, given their story. Crystal and Medusa particularly have had trouble with pollution since the early 1970s or even earlier.
Come to think of it, Black Bolt deciding to blast the pestering Cyclops into oblivion just like that is about as out of character as it comes. I wonder if we are meant to assume that Emma nudged him.
So at the Marvel retreats where they plan this stuff out…what do they really do?
This was bad. It doesn’t seem to fit into the time frame they want to squeeze it into ( I swear All new Inhumans started after this but that first issue was the launch of Crystals mission and Uncanny has Magneto in a different situation.) Soule has a tendency to just disregard everything that has come before in his stories and this time it killed me with Maddox just dying (with hamfisted dialogue of this is no dupe, it’s really him) and Wolfsbane and Guido just standing there.
I have a feeling they walked back this ending and the event because Scott will be back in the relaunch and he can’t be that bad a character going forth.
Also I think a better plot point would have been Emma keeping Scott alive with her powers than an illusion.
I’m going to be harsh. Either Lemire had planned for something truly terrible to happen at Cyclops’ hands and editorial stepped in to protect Marvel’s IP, or someone in the creative chain has a frighteningly low opinion of the readership’s capacity for basic empathy. To even begin to make the case that the Inhumans having to make some massive cultural adjustments — which is already going on due to both their being interlopers on Earth and the nature of T-Mist cloud vs the controlled exposure of the Terrigen crystals — is a predicament equivalent to a literal slow and painful genocide is appallingly bad storytelling. And that’s not even taking into account the complete anti-climax of the whole tale. This is what the last year of Cyclops-hate was about? Seriously?
I was going to trade-wait on this, now I’ve cancelled my pre-order. What little interest I had in IvX due to the possibility of some of my favorites making a cameo is now more on the side of cringing dread, because Lemire and Soule are obviously not a writing team that bring out the best in each other, and I don’t trust them to do remotely right by the characters they rope in to this mess. I’ll just be over here hoping everyone I like makes it to the other side for the next relaunch.
“This brings us to one of the central problems with the whole set-up, namely that the story asks us to accept that people had hitherto been pretty chilled about the whole idea of mutagenic clouds coming into their city and possibly giving them superpowers and changing what they look like. I don’t believe for a second that people would be relaxed about that, no matter how “safe” the Mists were. It’s nonsense.”
So much agree. The really weird thing about this is that in addition to rescuing mutants from horrible deaths, Cyclops has actually (apparently) saved untold numbers of ordinary humans from being transformed in an involuntary and uncontrolled manner – something that would surely qualify as heroic to any sane person. But for some reason everyone is revolted instead. It’s bizarre.
I think Cyke’s death was called a suicide because he’s preparing to blast Black Bolt when Black Bolt kills him. It’s only in the art, but it seemed to me like he was preparing to shoot his eye beams at BB and Medusa.
As for the story, it doesn’t make any sense and is insane that no ones afraid of the mists or insinuating that the mist’s cultural importance supersedes their danger.
However, I think that marvel was going to keep going with this “mutants are dying” story line and hadn’t come up with an idea for what Cyclops did (like they didn’t know who Onslaught was originally). So, when they decided to publish x-comics like normal again, they wanted to make an event out of it and had to hurry to explain it. So, this is what we got.
And I thought they were implying that Emma was at least little bonkers, especially with that last page.
However, I think that marvel was going to keep going with this “mutants are dying” story line and hadn’t come up with an idea for what Cyclops did.
This sounds extremely plausible. But it’s still daft. We had Avengers vs. X-Men, which put a cap on “Mutants are dying.” I’m not anything like as harsh about M-Day as most people are – I *like* the Utopia era. But been there, done that.
I can see the germ of a good idea here. The “Emma Frost did it” twist isn’t bad. You can see Emma doing something that Scott himself would at the end of the day have been too rigidly moral to have done. And you can see how public opinion would believe that Magneto!Scott would have done it. Could set up some nice stories around redeeming Cyclops’s memory.
In other words, you *could* have had Scott appear to do something desperate and horrific without damaging the character for future use in any way. Quite how people blunder into orienting the entire line around everyone believing that for months and leave out the small detail of giving them something in which to believe, I’m not sure.
Back in the day Jim Shooter argued that Dark Phoenix had too much of a death tally to be salvageable as a regular character. A similar argument is made about the Joker out-of-universe.
Now if feels like the actual storylines happen in between the annual events of having the supposed heroes do their best to kill some of their own.
Did the story not imply that Emma had, in fact, had a breakdown with the final page? She certainly seems to be giving Alex crazy-eyes in that lady panel.
Not that I’m trying to defend this story – far from it. I feel like this breaks Emma’s character alongside Cyclops’ for no reason.
Here’s the thing: The accepted version of recent X-History is that Cyclops has gone off the rails and is – at best – semi villainous.
Yet, what the hell has he done of his own free will that is unusual within the MU or the real world?
So given the reaction to various Cyclops’ actions, it’s not out of character to condemn Scott etc.
Honestly, all this series had to do was two things: kill Cyclops, and have it happen in a way that remotely justifies the fact that pretty much everyone who knew him seems to feel he did something monstrous in the process. I guess one out of two isn’t bad. (Although it does raise the question why absolutely no one has mentioned Emma in the past year or so.)
It does seem like an awful waste to have a character who’s pretty much been the lynch pin of the X-Men line and almost the only character who’s significantly changed at all since the Morrison days die in such a lackluster way. I hope Suzene’s right and there was an editorial interference at some point, because this certainly doesn’t seem like the event the characters have been referring to for months.
Well, that’s not likely.
*Cough*Phoenixegg*cough*sentinels*cough
“Did the story not imply that Emma had, in fact, had a breakdown with the final page? She certainly seems to be giving Alex crazy-eyes in that lady panel.”
Is there a female superhero at this point who has not had a breakdown? That sort of thing went out with the Brontes in the rest of the world, but comics still keep on churning out women getting sick from their emotions.
By the way, in Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur it was a major plotline that Moon Girl had the Inhuman gene and was terrified of the terrigen mists turning her into a deformed freak. That might be the only place the mists are seen as scary by ordinary people though.
But yes, even if you handwave away the fact that the mists used to kill humans, and that people ought to care that it kills mutants, the mists do still actually kill some people. They enter the cocoons and never come out. Others are turned into monsters. Monsters so horrible to look at that the Inhumans themselves used to lock them away just for not looking human. I’d be horrified of the mists myself.
@Niall: well put. Cyclops is perceived as a villain not because of his actions (which are not remarkably unethical in the context of the Marvel Universe of the last 15 years or so), but because the grand plot demands so.
By current standards he is almost saintly in these days of Red Hulk, Punisher and “black ops” teams. IIRC Wolverine was actually a gang leader when he died, and Black Panther and Namor have engaged in a war of mutual anihilation between their countries a few years ago. But somehow it is Scott that is remembered as dangerous and dishonorable. Even as he protects the Inhumans from the worse of their own criminal inconsequence.
Re: the Marvel retreats
My understanding (from interviews and talking to creators at conventions) is editorial and some key writers get together for a few days / a week and spitball ideas for the next “season” of the universe (about a year, or up to the next line wide crossover). Eventually, they land on something they feel is interesting for a universe wide arc to hang stories off of. Then, they nail in the major books, and take pitches for the “other” books. (Spider-Man’s international now! Dr. Doom’s the new Iron Man! The X-Men are dying and on the run! etc.) (I have an idea for Power Man & Iron Fist! What should we do with Punisher/Moon Knight/Daredevil this time? Let’s make a franchise out of Squadron Supreme! etc.)
Basically, they put together a framework (at the retreat) and then the stories are written/created within that framework for the “season” (after the retreat, obviously). Again, as far as I understand it, once pitches are approved, the writers / artists are given a fair amount of freedom to do what they want… as long as the pitch roughly fits into the big idea for the season.
Having said that, my guess would be the big idea for the X-Books (Terrigenesis is killing mutants and Cyclops did something bad!) was set up at the retreat, but the details were left up in the air. When it came time to reveal the details, they came up with “Death of X” to fit the story details needed (at least we got the reveal this time; we never did see the aforementioned Phoenix Egg thing leading into Secret Wars). How well or satisfyingly Death of X fits is up to debate, of course.
Again though, that’s just my understanding of the process. I do hope that after IvX we get past the GRIM! GRIM! GRIM! status quo for the X-Books. Lighten things up for Pete’s sake! :p
However, given recent events, I wouldn’t be surprised if things get even worse. Say, someone wants to build a wall to keep all the mutants out or something. ***barf***
So Cyclops’s great crimes amount to A: Killing Professor X while involuntarily possessed by the Phoenix and B: Trying to eliminate a toxic cloud that was killing his people and potentially others that was deliberately released by the Inhumans.
What would have made more sense was Scott using Alchemy to create a cloud that would save mutants but also kill humans/inhumans in the process.
That would play in with the reaction he’s been getting in the books.
Alternatively, they could have had Alchemy’s attempt go wrong with the result being that the cloud now has devastating effects on humans/inhumans ad Cyclops/Emma pretending that was the unintended action was deliberate in order to create the impression that you should not mess with mutants. That would have been at least somewhat consistent with their preoccupation with public perception while not turning Scott or Emma into monsters.
As others have said, DOX story works on its own terms but fails as the reveal of a year long mystery or as an explanation for why people have talked about Cyclops as some sort of lunatic terrorist.
Did Jeff Lemire have one big brainfart on what he was writing for the past year?
I’m an X-Men diehard who finally dropped current comics five years ago. This sounds dreadful.
Reading this makes me ask, who are these comics aimed towards? I can’t imagine any of the potential or existing fan bases getting enjoyment from comics like this.
That does sound wretched. I’m looking forward to the x-axis year in review. It’s going to be brutal.
Yikes. This does sound horrible. Definitely not something to check out.
And Scott just drops dead from M-pox? What a shitty ending for a character like him, but I guess PLOT! TWIST! needed to work that way.
I suspect the real purpose of this series was simply to get rid of Cyclops and provide a bookend to both his relationship with Emma and the Hal Jordan-esque hero-to-anti-villain deconstruction arc he’s been in since Morrison’s run. The rest was window dressing/advertising for IvX.
Now, teen Cyclops is in a mirror-mirror position to teen Jean. Whereas she has a dead adult counterpart to live up to, he has a dead adult counterpart to live down.
It would have been a piss-poor send off for Cyclops and his relationship with Emma but let’s face it, if he’s still dead-dead in a year, we’ll be shocked.
Kieron Gillen, Grant Morrison and Joss Whedon all did some excellent work with Cyclops. It’s that old cliche about there being no bad characters only bad writers. When the character has been interesting, it’s because the writer has actively worked with what has gone before. When he hasn’t worked, it’s because he has been shoe-horned into a position that just doesn’t make sense with what has gone before. Schism was a problem in that sense. They needed a reason for a “Schism” and for characters to turn on Cyclops but the reactions of various characters just didn’t make sense given what they’d tolerated from Xavier and what they tolerated from Logan.
The one really sad aspect of Cyclops’ death was Emma putting words in his mouth about only loving (presumably) Jean. So sad to see her still trying to compete with a corpse. Emma really needs a little more respect from editorial. Her partnership with Scott worked really well but at some point she slipped into a secondary role and her motivation to teach was forgotten. The good thing about her relationship with Scott was that it helped to shine a light on the depth of her character. If they just turn her into somebody who goes crazy because she lost her boyfriend, that would be pretty regressive.
Who’s to say that wasn’t Emma’s own words? Which, for the matter, it was!
So…wait. When everyone was pissed off at Sunfire in Extraordinary…it was because he flew Alchemey into the cloud?
I’m so glad this era of x-men is six months away from being over.
@Tdubs
That would be the silver lining the mostly lackluster announcements so far.
I wouldn’t say it fixes it, and it’s a minor spoiler, but this week’s Inhumans vs X-Men establishes the cloud “Cyclops” destroyed is one of only two in existence–maybe Death of X made the same claim, but if it did, I missed it. That doesn’t really jive with the way the clouds have been portrayed for the last few years, but at least it justifies why the Inhumans are so incensed–their survival is, presumably, at stake too. It doesn’t really explain why the X-Men and, to a lesser extent, the general public is so upset with Cyclops–as Paul pointed out, for anyone not an Inhuman, the cloud should be a source of concern.
If I remember correctly, the original state of the clouds was that Black Bolt and Maximus unilaterally detonated them without the other Inhumans’ knowledge. I think the resulting estrangement (and estrangement before that, since this wasn’t long after the Black Bolt harem era) was played up a bit in the main Inhuman series, but I think there was a missed story opportunity, where you could parallel Black Bolt and Cyclops as black sheep leaders who pursued an extreme course of action in what they believed was their people’s best interest, and fell from power as a result. It would have at least lent some gravity to a confrontation between them.
But I guess the “dead by the fourth page” was a way to go too.
Person of Con: I wouldn’t say it fixes it, and it’s a minor spoiler, but this week’s Inhumans vs X-Men establishes the cloud “Cyclops” destroyed is one of only two in existence
There’s a good story in there, or at least I think so: make the cloud the *only* one in existence. (Yes, this basically breaks the universe until you McGuffin more Terrigen mists into existence. But it’s the Marvel universe: McGuffining things into existence isn’t hard.)
Then you pit ending the existence of Inhumans and their culture in the future (but leaving all existing Inhumans unharmed) against killing many (but not all) actually existing mutants with a disease that might be curable (but which no-one right now knows how to cure).
I think you can see how that could seem like a genuine moral dilemma, and you could have the balance of prejudice against mutants vs. Inhumans poison the whole argument, with both sides distrusting the motives of anyone arguing the opposite position.
Of course, it turns on abandoning the idea that “Mutants are dying out “
What’s missing is what the hell kind of PR went on in the aftermath of Cyclops’ death. Presumably Inhuman PR spun it as “Cyclops went mad, destroyed the Terrigen Cloud that’s essential to our survival and then tried to kill Black Bolt and Medusa. BB had not option but to fire first in self-defence.” We’re missing the whole chapter in which Storm and co. decide to go to Limbo and where mutants start getting blamed for the pox. The whole plan has been a disaster, the Inhumans haven’t take over the mutants’ popularity and Marvel sales in general have been hit. Obviously they’re undoing it with Resurrexion and IvX doesn’t look as bad as Death of X so far.
Because Phoenix-egg Cyclops had a prominent death at the hands of Doom in Secret Wars, even the best version of this comic was going to fall flat. To say nothing if the radical disconnect between UXM #600 and this.
I think it’s likely that there may be more to this story than (Scott’s consciousness didn’t die but is in Emma, and hence she’s not totally behind his actions?) but that doesn’t change the fact that, as has been said many times by now, DoX utterly fails at providing s rationale for the utter rejection of Cyclops by his peers.
The X-office could use an editor like Will Moss. I dunno. The solicits for the relaunch aren’t exactly promising though some of the peripheral books (GenX, Iceman) could be fun.
Donnacha DeLong: I think that “Inhuman PR did it!” would sort of work, especially if one factors in a boatload of anti-mutant prejudice into the coverage.
(I think overall it would work quite well to have the Inhuman royals as celebrities: Medusa or Crystal on the front cover of People/Hello!/whatever – because it would fit with them both being a royal family *and* with their origins as exaggerated analogues of the Fantastic Four. Which would suit with effective PR.)
The problem is that all the mutants seem to agree that Cyclops did something horrible, and you’d expect them to be sceptical in such a scenario.
Disclaimer: I’m on Marvel Unlimited, and so am six months behind. But there don’t seem to be any pro-Cyclops conspiracy theorists in any of the X-books, and you’d think there would be.
It was very lame, but at least Emma came off being slightly cool, in a very lame sort of way.
I’m really bored by the new teases, I think I might be done. In 28yrs I’ve had a good run of x-stories, I think it will be cathartic in the end. I’ve ridden some bad runs in my day, but this stuff is nuts. So much recycling, nothing new anymore. Bah.
Wasnt there a mutant who had some weird PR power? During the Fraction, team in SF, era?
@Joseph
I think the creative team and hook for the Iceman book is darn near perfect, so that’s one going on the pull list. GenX…well, I’ve got my doubts. It’s not the X-Kids book I wanted and the only creative I know is the artist. But there’s five months between now and April for the writer to win me over.
It seems like if they just suggested that not undergoing Terragenesis can be potentially harmful to latent Inhumans, they’d have a perfect reason for the Inhumans to think that destroying the cloud was as bad for them as leaving it alone would be for mutants, giving both sides equal stakes in the matter.
If memory serves, they refer to Cyclops’s death as “suicide by Blackbolt,” presumably a reference to the phrase “suicide by cop,” which is basically when someone commits suicide by acting threatening in front of the police in the hopes of provoking them into shooting the suicidal person. (I would not at all be surprised to find out that this phrase is not well known outside America.) The implication being that (faux) Cyclops wanted Blackbolt to kill him, or at least knew he would and was okay with it.
I’ll go so far as to say that Black Bolt ought to be the hated figure mutants have been mentioning for months. Are the X-Men meant to be this self-loathing? Many of them may have had hard feelings with Cyclops for quite a while, but it’s extraordinarily hard to argue that what he did to the cloud, in the name of saving lives, was worse than BB’s outright murder (or supposed murder, but no one knows that).
It’s absurd to me that no one has an issue with Black Bolt. I just don’t understand that anyone thought this story as presented would get anyone on side with the Inhumans.
Say what you will but Bunn and Guggenheim are solid comic story tellers, it won’t be Morrison but it will be more enjoyable for me. I’m just breathing a sigh of relief the books didn’t go to Soule. He does some good stuff but when it comes to existing character I always find his characterizations way off for my liking. Personally I’ve been turned off by all his Marel work.
@odessasteps: Her name was Kate Kildare and she wasn’t a mutant, she was a human that ran a PR company. She was actually a character that Fraction brought over from his (great) cancelled book with Barry Kitson called The Order. She ended up getting killed by Sinister at the end of AvX I think?
If you thought DOX was bad, IVX is worse.
@Tdubs Uh, Guggenheim is a solid comic storyteller? His previous mutant-related work has been either boring and not in a good way weird (Young X-Men) or boring and atrocious (Wolverine fighting the angel of death).
I’m not down on the creators… I just feel the overall editorial vision for the line no longer appeals to me. I think the first class thing really wore me down, especially since Beast says he fixed the time travel problem in recent All Old X-Men issues.
As to the Inhumans, something that has bothered me a lot with the clouds going around. Karnak never submitted to terrigenesis – was that changed? Does he just avoid the cloud? Now that’s bugging me…
@Keran
Let me start with I am in no way a critic, I’m just a guy that has read comics for years and knows what he likes and what he’s happy to get after paying $4. It’s just my opinion and it only matters to me and probably don’t even need to defend it but I will.
In my opinion, yes. I didn’t read his Wolverine. I read Young X-Men all at once. I thought it was a book that had a solid premise, two or three twists and consistent characterization as it told it’s story and then was forced to tie up a bunch of seeded story in its second arc. I bought his Agents of Shield series in a Bogo and enjoyed it so I read up what I could on unlimited and purchased the rest. My opinion is he does well with a 20 page format to give me a story, characterization and a desire to come back. I don’t get that out of Bendis, Soule or Lemire anymore.
I give Marvel my $4 an issue to give me a solid read, mostly a nostalgic super-hero story. (I get my more mature, nuanced comics from the other publishers.) Hopeless does a good job of that but All New feels boxed in by editorial and Uncanny for me is ruined by the art. I’ve looked at the announcements as an improvement (except Land). I don’t think they will set sales records or get any kind of buzz but I see my enjoyment of them being increased.
All of this is just a continued sign of an ongoing structural problem in the MU.
Avengers and X-Men teams are simply _too large_ for superhero storytelling.
Due to the desire to boost sales by slapping an X or Avenger on every team book, the result is a Legion of Superheroes problem where a full muster of Avengers or X-Men number number in dozens to scores (to say nothing of when they’re combined together).
Moreover, despite the various conflicts, the cross-membership of Avengers/X-Men/Inhuman teams is such that everyone has everyone on speed dial (including Guardians of Galaxy).
As a result, very few villains, short of a major galactic menace, can hope to stand up to a decent hero muster. With a result that the only suitable threat is each other, hence endless tedious Civil Wars, Avengers vs. X-Men, Secret Wars, etc., etc. Having SHIELD have everyone else on speed dial hurts as well.
A few recent situations – such as the formation of the young heroes Champions group from disgruntled teen avengers – give me some hope, but really, what Marvel needs to do is to break up and downsize the Avengers and X-Men, restore the “Secret” in secret identities, see a widespread distrust of SHIELD among fellow heroes.
I pine for the day when the Avengers, X-Men, Defenders, New Mutants, etc. each had about half dozen members (changing 1-2 every year) plus a few hangers on and where these books each had a sense of “family.” I see absolutely no story telling advantage at all in super teams with 30+ members organized into multiple squads, platoons, or whatever.
If it can do this simply in a sane way, by having the vast majority of second-string Avengers and X-Men simply retire to go solo in small cities until guest stars are necessary, I’d be happiest.
X-Men needs a relaunch with A-list creative. Like Jim Lee in 1991 or Grant Morrison in 2001. Not to knock the upcoming creators but the books just look… ordinary.
And I just want a book about the actual X-Men. No teenage versions, no alternate Logans. Just X-Men doing X-Men stuff. Fighting Sentinels. Nightcrawler and Wolverine drinking beer. That kind of thing. Why is this so hard for Marvel to figure out?