The X-Axis – 11 July 2010
Now this is a packed week, and no mistake. Only three X-books, but they’re pretty important ones, and there’s a whole bunch of new titles as well. Let’s get to it…
Avengers: The Children’s Crusade #1 – Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung are reunited for a nine-issue miniseries which, essentially, seems to be the long-delayed Young Avengers #13-21. Young Avengers was a good team book that got off to a strong start and then disappeared off into scheduling hell while Marvel waited for Heinberg to become available for a second year… and waited… and waited. Creatively this would usually be the right call, but with hindsight, Marvel would probably have been better cutting their losses and bringing on another writer to try and keep up the momentum.
Heaven only knows how long this one’s been in the pipeline. There’s even an editorial note on the credits page explaining that some of the characters are in the wrong costumes “because work began on this series many months ago”. In fact, the Avengers in this issue include Captain America, Iron Man and Ms Marvel, which I believe takes us back to the pre-Civil War status quo. Come to think of it, this might explain why nobody in the X-books has had the obvious thought of hunting down the Scarlet Witch and persuading her to change things back: it’s the plot of this series, which presumably means it’s been off limits to other writers for years, no matter how pressing the need for somebody to do the story.
Anyway. What’s it like? Well, it’s like Young Avengers, obviously. Not much has changed. But I liked Young Avengers, when it came out. It’s a fun, traditional superhero team book, with strongly defined characters, and making good use of Marvel history without degenerating into a flurry of continuity references. It’s a nice little team book. The story here is that the Avengers have figured out that Wiccan, the sorcerer who might or might not be linked to the Scarlet Witch, might also share her propensity to go mad, kill everything in sight, and screw up the world. So, um, how would he feel about some particularly close mentoring? Well, he’s not too enthusiastic, and he’s especially annoyed about the fact that everyone thinks his mother’s a deranged supervillain.
It’s a good story idea – there’s a good human angle in there, among all the epic stuff. And the art’s excellent. It’s just a shame it’s taken so long to appear, since as I say, the X-books really needed to close off this idea a couple of years ago for the sake of their own stories.
Casanova #1 – Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba’s breakout series, now being reprinted under Marvel’s Icon series. Actually, they’re doing more than just reprinting it – the colouring and lettering have been redone, and they’ve dumped the “slimline” format (best known from Fell) as well. Oh, and they’ve thrown in a back-up strip too.
Now, Casanova was very much an internet favourite, but I’ve never actually read it before. It certainly hits the ground running, starting off as if it was joining an established series in progress. Casanova Quinn is a professional dashing criminal; his dad is the director of EMPIRE, a SHIELD-type organisation; and his twin sister is their star agent. From there, move quickly on to outrageously convoluted stories about parallel worlds. And I can see why it’s so popular – it’s got a sort of freewheeling Silver Age lunacy without being an outright pastiche, the dialogue is often hilarious, the art is excellent.
Does it work as a story, as opposed to a string of cool ideas? Well, mmm. The hectic pace doesn’t give the characters much room to breathe, but that might be a hangover of the original 16-page format as much as anything else. And it’s probably a smart move to kick off by hurling ideas at the reader and leave anything more reflective for down the line. You certainly couldn’t accuse this one of lacking content. Besides, what’s wrong with a string of cool ideas?
The Great Ten #9 – The final issue of the truncated miniseries, which is a bit of a problem for Tony Bedard and Scott McDaniel, since the structure of the story is to focus on a different team member every issue. And, um, there are ten of them. Socialist Red Guardsman draws the short straw, relegated to a supporting role in an issue dedicated to Mother of Champions. Somewhere near the end, you can pretty much see the point where all involved threw up their hands in despair and reached for the Big Book of How To Wrap Up A Series in Three Pages – Bedard takes it up to the big character beat where the Great Ten and the Taiwanese team agree to work together, and then just stops, apparently on the basis that we can take the ensuing fight scene as read. It’s, um, not an altogether satisfactory solution, but probably the best one in the circumstances, preserving as much of the content as possible and jettisoning the formula stuff that we all knew was coming. Even in this heavily compromised form, it’s still actually quite good stuff, but it’s a shame DC wasn’t willing to give it one more issue to complete.
Scarlet #1 – The new Icon series from Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev. Odd one, this. Scarlet is a woman who’s, well, disillusioned with the state of the world, I guess, and she’s a vigilante. She seems to be slightly mad, and she’s got an origin story (which I won’t spoil since it makes up most of this issue’s plot) which isn’t altogether plausible, but then it might well turn out not to be altogether true. The gimmick is that she breaks the fourth wall, and most of this first issue is given over to Scarlet delivering an extended monologue to the readers. There’s clearly more to it than that, since Scarlet makes it abundantly clear that she’s not just addressing the readers, she intends to enlist them for something or other. It looks fantastic, and Maleev is a subtle enough artist to pull off an issue which requires some acting if it’s going to work. The first issue is ultimately a fairly standard urban vigilante set-up with a first person narrator (albeit with a slight twist of being in vision), but there are hints of something more unusual, and a more drastic use of the fourth-wall device, to come. Too early to tell, really, but there’s certainly some promise here.
Shadowland #1 – This is the lynchpin miniseries for a crossover spinning out of the current Daredevil storyline, and using some of Marvel’s street level heroes. If you haven’t been reading Daredevil, well, the idea is that Matt has finally given up on trying to have a normal life, and instead he’s taken up an offer to lead the Hand, hoping that he can turn the lunatic ninja death cult into a sort of Neighbourhood Watch programme with swords. (They should have signs: “This neighbourhood is patrolled by ninjas.”) Now – and I may have missed this issue – he’s set up a bloody great prison in Hell’s Kitchen, and the other superheroes are looking at him nervously, because heaven knows it wouldn’t be the first time he’s gone off the deep end. Needless to say, the idea is that forces within the Hand are trying to corrupt him, so it’s basically a battle for Daredevil’s soul. Considering that most recent issues of Daredevil have had a fairly muted tone, it’s a bit jarring to see the story suddenly sprout guest appearances by the Avengers and art by Billy Tan, none of which quite seems to fit. (Besides which, Tan’s Avengers pages aren’t that good, even though they were chosen for the preview – lots of static characters in empty rooms.) Still, the issue does get across the key idea here, that either Daredevil has a fiendishly clever plan, or he’s completely lost his mind, and we’re honestly not sure which. I’m enjoying that story, and Daredevil’s scenes are the best part of this issue. Expanding it to a wider set of characters without damaging the atmosphere may prove to be more of a challenge.
X-Force #13 – This is the penultimate chapter of “Second Coming”, but it’s really the end of the Bastion storyline. With his big, needless complicated, Sentinels-from-the-future plan foiled, Bastion tries to kill off the X-Men in person. And, having caused all manner of chaos that the X-Men cleared up for her, Hope finally gets to step forward and use those powers we’ve been waiting for. I was wondering whether the second half of this storyline gave Hope enough to do, but on balance, I think they probably got it right – if this is heading where it seems to be heading, then Hope’s importance doesn’t lie in defeating the villains of the week, but in setting up the next batch of storylines. So by all means, let’s have the X-Men be the main heroes and stave off annihilation one last time, instead of having Hope wave her hands and cosmic it all away. The stimulus for all this, by the way, is that the issue kills off Cable, who sacrifices himself to get X-Force back from the future – and unlike the death of Nightcrawler earlier in the arc, which I still think was a bit cheap, this actually does feel earned, because Cable’s a character who’s completed his mission and is now ready to be removed from the board with dignity. And the scene is well drawn by Choi and Oback, too. The second half of the book largely consists of extremely strong hints that she’s Phoenix, and slightly subtler hints that she’s a reincarnation of Jean Grey (there’s a very nice moment where, without spelling it out, we can see the penny dropping for Emma that her position with Scott is under threat). That leaves the closing chapter to deal with the big question of What Now? And yes, they’ve kind of slightly given that away in the teasers at the end of X-Men #1 this week, but not really. I liked this issue – it needed to get across the sense that things are finally turning around and looking up, and it did that.
X-Men #1 – Meanwhile, without waiting for the end of “Second Coming”, here’s the new ongoing X-Men title, and the second part of “Curse of the Mutants”, something which still sounds like it was conjured up by a merchandising guy who’d read a report about Twilight. Now, as I said last week, I quite liked Victor Gischler’s prologue story in the Death of Dracula one-shot. The undead politicking was a good read. I’m less enthused about this issue, in which vampire suicide bombers start showing up in San Francisco and it looks like we’re doing some sort of undead plague angle (which, I guess, allows you to vamp some of the X-Men without it being permanent, but kind of gives the game away too). The vampire leaders who were interesting characters in the one-shot are barely in this one, which instead does everything from the X-Men’s perspective, the idea being that they assume Dracula must be behind it all. Which makes sense, but I’m not sure I see how getting the wrong vampire leader would actually make much of a difference to them.
So, not much in the way of scheming villains. What we do get is an entirely solid superhero story where the X-Men go after some baddies. Gischler’s got the characters’ voices down, and Paco Medina’s art is quite attractive (though his girls still look terribly similar). I quite enjoyed it. But is it strong enough to stand up to the hype Marvel have thrown at it? I have my doubts. It doesn’t have any obvious concept of its own to make it stand out from the other X-Men books, and it doesn’t really have a very strong authorial voice either, so much as a sound rendition of Marvel house style. Of course, it’s unfair to judge a comic by its hype – if this was the first issue of a six-issue mini, I’d be telling you that it was far better than the usual standard for X-Men spinoffs. But by hyping it as a landmark event, Marvel may have written cheques that the book can’t cash.
X-Women – A one-shot by Chris Claremont and Milo Manara featuring some of the female X-Men, and if you don’t know why, you evidently haven’t seen any Milo Minara comics. But in fact, this is remarkably restrained by Minara’s standards. Outright T&A is largely confined to a couple of pages of beach party – and even that’s pretty mild. What marks Minara out from your generic superhero artist is that he can do this stuff without having everything degenerate into pin-ups – his characters still act like characters, instead of posing for the reader. Basically, he doesn’t lose sight of subtlety. The story… well, nobody’s pretending that the story is the selling point here. Wisely, Claremont delivers one of his caper stories, and goes for a nice breezy tone with plenty of interesting opportunities for his star artist to show off. It’s no classic as a story, and it’s unlikely to be remembered as anything more than a curio, but it may well bring Minara to the attention of a new audience, which is no bad thing.
Young Allies #2 – Well, goodness, I’m not quite sure what I make of this series. You might think that with villains called the Bastards of Evil, it’d be completely off the wall. But it’s not; it really takes itself fairly seriously. Which leads us to a downright odd sequence where said Bastards, er, blow up Ground Zero. And boy, I don’t know what I feel about that. It’s meant to be offensive – in the sense that everyone in the book, including other villains, regards it as staggeringly tasteless- and I’ve no doubt it’s written with good intentions, but I can’t help feeling that the book just hasn’t done enough dramatically to go there. It just feels a bit clumsy, as if a largely innocuous teen book was being crushed under the weight of a reference that’s way out of its league. It also seems to distract attention from the stars of the book, at a point when you’d have thought the focus ought to be on them and how the team gets formed. Then again, the bad guys’ plot here is all about getting attention for reasons that remain obscure, and Sean McKeever’s got a good enough track record as a writer that he presumably knows what he’s doing here. But… yeah, either there’s something quite audacious going on here which will become apparent when we get the whole plot, or it’s misfiring. I wonder.
blow up? ground zero? w..t..f.
sounds like a train wreck / gald im picking it up.
i was so close to picking Shadowland up, but i need the lead in story. after i have the trade where Matt joins the Hand, this wont be a bad way to spend an afternoon.
the Young Avengers at least had a good feature in Secret Invasion, with Fury and his Secret Warriors(great title). but ive forgotten about the ‘no more mutants’ line by now..unfairly.
Besides which, Tan’s Avengers pages aren’t that good, even though they were chosen for the preview – lots of static characters in empty rooms
In all fairness, that’s Bendis’ Avengers too, so it’s only following the prevalent version of the team.
Vampire suicide bombers? Given that vampires are all about trying to stave off death, to live on as long as possible, this doesn’t make immediate sense. Do they try to explain it at all?
There might be two storyline-related reasons for waiting to do CHILDREN’S CRUSADE.
1) The idea that the twins are Wanda’s sons. As Heinberg had Wiccan say, the explanation in YA #11 was “insane,” and no explanation fits with Wiccan and Speed being the biological children of other people. Any amount of retroactive time alteration or reality alteration concludes with her actions being less believable than the original conception of the twins in VISION & SCARLET WITCH #3, which was considered unbelievable by some. If they’re not her sons, then why use them in stories?
2) The power, as used by Wiccan and Wanda, isn’t believable. It’s Godlike — thoughts become reality, with the power filling in the gaps — and there’s no satisfactory method of dealing with it within a story, since the long-term resolutions involve the user either disappearing or dying. The power was as responsible for making Wanda unusable after HOUSE OF M as her actions were.
SRS
Sean McKeever, in an interview on the Word Balloon podcast this week, said that the idea behind Young Allies isn’t so much that it’s a formal team book, but rather simply an ensemble cast made up of teenage/college-aged superheroes. They live close to each other, and, consequently, end up hanging out and partnering up with each other, but there isn’t meant to be a traditional team dynamic.
Steven, I do hope that this new series does deal with the relationship between the twins and Wanda; I mean, it should, as they were apparently the whole reason she went “mad” in the first place, but Marvel don’t always tell the stories they should.
Did you notice that the transport for Bullseye in Shadowland was named/coded Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…or WTF?
‘Children’s Crusade’ actually dropped hints that it’ll be dealing with the relationship between Wanda and the boys.
At one point Cap points out how absurd the idea is of their being her sons as he’d just finished talking to Tommy’s biological parents. Then Tommy starts pondering about transmigration of souls, which he then promptly admits sounds kind of silly. Then Cap abruptly changes the subject.
And as this is essentially a Young Avengers mini prominently featuring the Scarlet Witch, I feel pretty confident that tying up that little mystery is one of the whole points of the story.
“Did you notice that the transport for Bullseye in Shadowland was named/coded Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…or WTF?”
I for one noticed, and it made me LOL.
Regarding Wiccan and Speed: Wasn’t there a Young Avengers one shot involving the two boys and Master Pandemonium? I don’t have it with me but I have a faint memory of there at least being a strong hint that the boys were in fact Wanda’s kids.
The thing about Shadowlands is…well, for me, Marvel sort of killed the dramatic stakes of any story involving the Hand in both that “Enemy of the State” arc in Wolverine and the lead-up to Shadowlands in earlier Daredevil issues.
See, someone somewhere decided that it’d be a grand idea to take that chilling scene in Frank Miller’s Daredevil where the Hand resurrect the silent ninja master Kirigi and make that trick one of the Hand’s big weapons. They resurrect people as their servants, you see.
Only then, to get mileage out of the gimmick, we’ve seen Wolverine, Elektra, Northstar, and the Black Taranatula all go through the process and end up beating both the brainwashing and the “being dead” bit entirely.
BT even pulls the trick off in the last Brubaker arc that sets up Diggle’s run on the title. And there’re also the dozens of minor supervillains “killed” and resurrected in “Enemy of the State” who pop back up in speaking roles later as if nothing happened.
So when [CHARACTER] apparently gets killed in Shadowlands #1, my first thought was “Oh, [CHARACTER] will become a Hand minion. And since it seems like you can be un-brainwashed and alive later, it’s not that big a deal if [CHARACTER] is declared dead.”
And with that, I realized that Shadowlands #1 is trying to make a huge dramatic moment out of something that the story has already essentially made undramatic. And it’s riffing on perhaps the two most referenced Daredevil scenes from any run on the title to do something that is, essentially, without any stakes whatsoever.
Then I stopped caring.
Entropest, yes. It was part of the Young Avengers Presents… miniseries. I don’t recall much being resolved there though, just the idea that the twins wouldn’t be getting any answers from him.
I also wonder if they’re going to establish why Speed has his uncle’s powers, which has always seemed a bit on the creepy Mark Millar end of things to me.
Heinberg is admitting now that the explanation in YA #11 was unsatisfactory, but would he have done that if people hadn’t pointed out how ridiculous it was? Establishing practically any connection between the boys and Wanda — and their powers and names require one — mandates uses of her power that are as unintentional and unbelievable as the original explanation. The only simple solution is to say that the existence of the Young Avengers, et al., is part of a dream world.
SRS
we’ve seen Wolverine, Elektra, Northstar, and the Black Taranatula all go through the process and end up beating both the brainwashing and the “being dead” bit entirely.
Black Tarantula – the original version, anyway – was already connected to some sort of Hand offshoot, wasn’t he? I remember a Steve Skroce story where that woman with the eight-foot ponytail and Eric Prydz workout clothes was smashed through a wall until the hole described a spider-symbol shape. That’s how they brought back Doc Ock.
(“Delilah.” Of course!)
(oh, God, I’d forgotten that branch of the Hand was called “the True Believers”)
the Avengers have figured out that Wiccan…might also share [Wanda’s] propensity to go mad…
First the Bastards of Evil, now this? Uh-huh…
Has anyone read both versions of Casanova #1? Has Fraction rescripted the book, or has it merely been re-lettered? I can’t rrrrreallly afford to buy it again, but I might make room if it’s been rescripted – if only out of a misplaced sense of democratic agency.
Paul: stick with Casanova, if you can. The emotional payoff makes it all worthwhile.
Haven’t been to the comic shop for…yikeahootie! Six weeks. Best get down there themorra.
Heh. “Young Avengers.” I remember seeing their action figures in Woolworths. Remember Woolworths? You used to go down there, didn’t you, with your pocket money, etc….
//\Oo/\\
Really enjoyed ‘Shadowland’. I’ve high hopes for this one, which is probably unwise given it is an “event” of sorts and those usually fail. But I like that it is this gritty storyline that is going on in the backdrop of this happy, joyful Heroic Age. Billy Tan does pretty good action scenes, but like you mentioned Paul, panels where characters just stand around come across stiff and he has trouble drawing faces too.
The ending surprised me a bit, and it’s something I’ve always wondered why heroes didn’t do more often and justify it as “for the greater good”. But Omar Karindu’s above comments have got me a bit worried that it will just be a cop-out resolved come the end of the event (especially since most events have to have at least 1 needless death).
‘The Children’s Crusade’ was a bit of a joke. Yeah that story was fine enough, and the art was great. But having Steve Rogers-Captain American was just ludicrous, and that Note came across as a bit patronising. The Wanda story should have been wrapped up years ago, it’s just hard to care at this stage, and who knows what timeline the status quo will be in at the end. Plus the book is shipping bi-monthly, so it will be 16 months before you get the whole story (and that’s the optimistic target given how slow the creative team is).
‘Young Allies’ is getting another issue before a final decision is made. It’s unfortunate if that book set itself up for a great fall after the ballsy idea of using Bastards Of Evil.
The 2 Icon books completely slipped my mind. Really wanted to check out ‘Casanova’ as I’ve heard so many great things, and ‘Scarlet’ would have been worth a read-through at the very least.
I find it kind of odd that people accept the idea that Wanda’s powers could create children for herself and the Vision, and that she can either transform those children into teenagers or recreate them as teenagers, and that she can recreate the entire world in a fashion that seems internally consistent to the people living in the new world, but they draw the line at believing she could either create parents for the teenage versions of her sons so that they seem consistent with reality or that she could have changed two existing teenagers – complete with their own parents – into versions of her sons.
It’s just “Sure, she can reshape reality on a whim sometimes without even wanting to, including altering the past to fit the present she’s created and unconsciously adding small details that she couldn’t have consciously intended, but these kids have parents so they can’t be related to Wanda. That’d just be silly.”
I found Cable’s death to be incredibly satisfying; As Paul mentioned, it makes sense for the character, dramatically, which one can rarely say about other examples. One really gets the sense that Cable achieved his purpose as a character, and there was really only one logical way to do him in. Why, just the visual of the virus finally taking control and then *exploding* him (ahh, so *that’s* how the virus kills people, I see) was fantastic.
And this is coming from – I admit it! – a Cable admirer. Something about the old guy finally got to me. So, while I’ll be sad to see him go, it was a fantastic sendoff.
And now they don’t have to deal with the “say, if Hope is a teenager, shouldn’t Cable be in his 70s now?” problem.
The real story in Shadowlands is whether or not Matt Murdock has once again lost his mind, so any deaths aren’t entirely the point. I’m just irked that they’re trying to tease character death as a story beat alongside plot points that weaken the dramatic impact of such teases.
It’s hard for me to take Cable’s death seriously because he has a way of just showing up or being replaced by another time displaced version. In fact, they could easily just say Cable was “collapsed” into that portal, which could create any number of escapes. I guess it’s a good thing the X-office ignored the Space X-men just because of Rachel’s presence and her ability to send her mind through time. I think Cable and Rachel are able to basically pinpoint each other despite how far apart they are. BTW, did they ever explain how Cable survived his death in Mike Carey’s Xmen? I don’t recall anything in particular being said about it.
Now all the X-office has to do is explain what Hope’s powers really are and why she’s able to tap into so many powers like a mega-Rogue/Ink/Mimic.
I was disappointed by X-men #1. It was kinda just there for me. There and boring. I really hope Dr. Nemesis was just being his usual self in his scene with Jubilee and they really didn’t de-age her for the 4th or 5th time. I was also confused on why Victor decided to have Jubilee so friendly with Pixie and Cyclops but ignored the Wolverine/Jubilee dynamic. Weird choice to make.
Avengers: Children’s Crusade has produced such mixed emotions so far. I guess I’ll wait and trade that… a year or so from now. Everything revolving around Wanda seems to create such diverse opinions, so it’ll be interesting to see what’s changed after this book + the Uncanny backup tie-in are complete. I am a bit disappointed in what I’m hearing about Ms. Marvel and her stance towards Wanda though.
So they killed Cable? Wow. How dramatic.
Which of the major X-Men hasn´t died yet somewhere somehow? Cyclops and Rogue come to mind, but I am not sure about Rogue. 🙂
I liked the way Cable’s death was handled in X-Force. The high probability that the character may be resurrected in some way in the near or not-so-near future doesn’t diminish that in any way for me.
It’s comics, playing cowboys and Indians is part of it.
Cable’s death was handled better than Nightcrawler’s, and that’s saying… exactly nothing. It was telegraphed from just about as far off, and the fact is that Cable is a character the X-editors have had no idea what to do with for years now, and whose basic character traits have changed drastically from one creative team/editorial edict to another. He’s a soldier who does what it takes to finish the mission he’s been given! He’s a general who cares about his soldiers… but keeps his eye on the mission he gives them! He’s a master schemer with a secret plan to change the world! He’s a mystical cyborg messiah from beyond space and time! He’s a guy with a metal arm and a glowy eye and… time-travel? Something? There’s clones? Look at this Rob Liefeld variant cover!
I’ve enjoyed a number of these Cables over the years, and I’ve appreciated a number of the attempts other creative teams tried to make work and failed. But it seems clear to me that the X-office really never knew what to do with him. There was a point when he was a mystery man who sold comics in the 90s, and they dutifully cranked out issue after issue with him, and after a while he sold fewer and fewer of those issues, and then it was time to hit the Concept Reboot-o-matic. And so when I hear someone say, “Well, this death, y’know, it’s very fitting for Cable to die this way, finishing his mission and all,” I think, which mission? Because Cable, Warlord Babysitter of the Future was only with us for the last few years.
Anyway, off to limbo with you, Cable. There was something I always liked about the guy, but could never really rationally defend. I’m probably a sucker for a metal arm and a big glowy eye.
Regarding Wiccan and Speed, I can’t really imagine any explanation for them that doesn’t involve them actually being the Scarlet Witch’s kids not coming across as incredibly contrived. If they aren’t her kids, then them being twins (from two different families), having the same powers as Wanda and her brother, the same names as Wanda’s children, Speed looking exactly like Quicksilver/Magneto, etc. is rather a lot to explain away.
Either everybody forgets that wrap-up of the ‘twelve’ storyline when (I think) Alan Davis was writing both x-books, or I am just mis-remembering it. IIRC, he dies by merging with Apocalypse, then gets resurrected in the ‘Search for Cyclops’ mini.
I think the closest Rogue ever came was the Siege Perilous.
Now Beast on the other hand, I think he’s never died.
Also… while I also, like Paul, picked up on the suggestion that (1) Hope is not only the return of Phoenix, but possibly the return of Jean Grey, and (2) that Emma has noticed this and is worried that, to put it delicately, “her position with Scott is under threat,” someone should note that this is really fucking gross. Hope is a teenager. Cyclops is, what, in his early thirties? There’s the suggestion here that Emma Frost is nervous – and should be nervous! – of sexual competition with a high-school-aged girl, whom Scott Summers, superhero and leader of the X-Men, will presumably want to start fucking as soon as possible.
Cyclops’s death in “The Twelve” barely counts; he was gone for what, all of six months? I’d love to see him gone for a good, long haul, though, especially after this recent period when it seems like Uncanny X-Men has all but turned into a Scott Summers solo title.
@moose n squirrel: …a girl who is also essentially his adopted/step-granddaughter!
The likelihood of Cable coming back at some future point isn’t really a problem for me, for two reasons. One, I honestly do believe that the current regime intends him to stay dead – they’ve finished his story and cancelled his book. And two, he’s not the focal point of the story; what matters is that the other characters believe it.
The only people who have given Wanda godlike or Godlike powers have been Byrne, Bendis, and Heinberg. Limited powers can be handled systematically, whatever their effects are; her reality-altering power, as written by Bendis and Heinberg, didn’t even require conscious intents for its effects. It’s as if there’s a cosmic entity who takes a burst of her energy, divines what its effects should be, and does the mental work required.
Note that Wanda didn’t use her power to conceive the twins in the V & SW maxiseries. I thought that the republication of the maxiseries in June, evidently timed to coincide with CC, might get some reactions, but people seem to have ignored it.
BTW, one problem I haven’t seen pointed out is the small age gap between Wanda and the kids. She’s generally thought to be in her early to mid-20s, and couldn’t be older than 30. A 30-year-old with a 16 or 17-year-old son? A 25-year-old with that son? Soap opera rapid aging only works when the parents are old enough to have adult children.
SRS
moose n squirrel, metal arm, glowy eye, big gun, you mean like this guy? http://www.comicvine.com/beilert-valance/29-63917/
Tom Brevoort and several members of the X-office maintain that Hope IS NOT Jean, and she’s an entirely new character. We’ll see how long that lasts. Let’s keep in mind that the current X-regime isn’t all that fond of Jean (with Fraction going so far as to absolve Emma of her villain past in interviews and to make her very jean like in her mannerisms for almost 2-3 years). That phoenix/non-phoenix scene was a bit weird in how it was set up. Hope didn’t have the full raptor in her power-up shot (could be an artistic thing), and the dialogue between Emma and Wolverine was ambiguous and most people are reading into it because of Emma’s history and personal grudge against the Phoenix Force (assuming that plot point is ever picked up again instead of the typical Jean vs. Emma issues). I don’t know how wise it was to make Hope so cryptic, especially since she’s not a super compelling character, and they had more than enough time to lay into motion whatever importance she may have.
“Come to think of it, this might explain why nobody in the X-books has had the obvious thought of hunting down the Scarlet Witch and persuading her to change things back.”
To be anal, this isn’t quite accurate. Beast found her in one of the X-Men: Endangered Species backups, in which she delivered a very allegorical version of “The Fisherman and His Wife” that somehow convinced him not to bother asking her to restore mutants’ powers. It read like a very forced justification for leaving that obvious plotline out of the X-books, which is of course exactly what it was.
It’s just “Sure, she can reshape reality on a whim sometimes without even wanting to, including altering the past to fit the present she’s created and unconsciously adding small details that she couldn’t have consciously intended, but these kids have parents so they can’t be related to Wanda. That’d just be silly.”
Indeed.
Also, in all the wailing about Avengers Who Might Snap And Kill People, yet again no one is mentioning Iron Man. I know we’d all like to forget The Crossing, but have the inhabitants of the Marvel Universe actually done so?
Also, no one has so far suggested going over to the Baxter Building to drag Franklin out for some re-education either.
Rogue did get stabbed through the heart with a sword in X-Treme X-Men, but she got better because Wolverine’s healing power kicked in after the dramatic “Gambit and Rogue are DEAD” page. (And it was revealed that Gambit wasn’t fatally wounded in the first place, from what I recall.)
The thing with Children’s Crusade is that they started writing it months ago so that they could keep the schedule, but it wasn’t commisioned years ago or anything.
Right now I think there’s something like six issues of story and four issues of art done, but it means they started when they knew Steve Rogers would be back but not that he wasn’t going to be Cap immediately.
@thekelvingreen Well, to be fair, Franklin isn’t a teenaged vigilante; he lives with Reed and Sue, and he’s only really used his powers when he’s needed to for the greater good.
Also, as far as the superhero community knows, Franklin burned through his powers during that Galactus thing and is now just a normal kid. (I guess they were reawakened recently, but they wouldn’t know that.)
Btw was there an explanation as to what legion is doing alive and well? Didn’t he die at the end of AoA?
‘Btw was there an explanation as to what legion is doing alive and well? Didn’t he die at the end of AoA?’
He showed up in the last few months of Excalibur which came out about 3 years after AoA, so if there was any retconning it was done long ago.
Why would Emma be nervous about Jean? Weren’t she and Scott an item before Jean sacrificed herself in that last Morrison New X-Men arc?
Why would Emma be nervous about Jean? Weren’t she and Scott an item before Jean sacrificed herself in that last Morrison New X-Men arc?
I’m not reading Second Coming, so I haven’t seen Emma’s actual reaction, but:
Scott finally picked Emma over Jean only after Jean was dead. He was probably going to do so anyway (at least in my reading of Morrison’s New X-Men), but Emma doesn’t know that for sure. Given that Emma is quite insecure (when written properly), I can see why she would think that ‘Jean coming back’ equals ‘Scott and Jean getting back together.’
Ok, that’s fair. Been a while since I read those issues.
I think the Astonishing X-men one-shot (What if…) from last December shows pretty well how Emma would react towards Jean if she ever returned and was a major component in Emma’s life with Scott again. The only difference now, perhaps, is that Emma could run to Namor. I, however, don’t want another Jean/Scott reunion. Both characters seem to become stale and suffer, story wise, when they’re wrapped around each other’s finger.
The whole point of that last NewXMeN story (Here Comes Tomorrow) – the whole run, really – was to get Scott to break that cycle. Jean even turns back time to get Scott to make that decision, out of love. Not that such things would, might or should cut off story paths for current or future writers, by any means.
Is Hope shooting out loads of different powers? Is she like that other Xorn, only in reverse?
Oh, hey, pop quiz: when was Scott & Jean’s first kiss? Like, circumstances? Cobalt Man? Porcupine?
//\Oo/\\
I always thought Jean was ideal for Wolverine myself, so if they ever decide to bring her back, let Scott stay with Emma so Logan gets Jean instead.
Lambnesio, this is sort of my point. Franklin also created an alternate reality and shunted the heroes into it with new identities and no memory of their past lives; he even forced them into a crossover with Wildstorm, and there’s no excuse for that.
Yes, they don’t know if he could do it again, but one of the points of Children’s Crusade #1 was to show that the heroes lack that kind of trust; they don’t know what Wiccan can do, they don’t know his power levels, but he’s enough of a threat to make a fuss over, because he might be like the Scarlet Witch.
Franklin, who has done exactly the same thing as the Scarlet Witch did, and is probably more powerful, gets a free pass. The key difference is he did it to save the Avengers’ lives, whereas Wanda did it to save her own life, because the Avengers were on their way to execute her.
All I’m saying is I want to see it addressed in the comic. I want to see someone say “Well, hang on Iron Man, you went on a rampage and murdered your team-mates too” or “You were going to execute Wanda, your friend, and instead of killing you all, she moved you into an alternate world” or something along those lines.
In the meantime, we have the Avengers wandering around with this holier-than-thou attitude, and it makes them look like hypocrites.
Second Coming felt like a pretty awful story overall… Everything from Land, Dodson and Fraction to random amputations and the funeral was all a bit horrendous. One or two moments were good, mainly those picked out from this chapter, but it didn’t make for a good crossover or a good storyline at all… But it has persuaded me enough that the books MIGHT be going in the right direction again. God knows how, with Fraction still handling Uncanny (maybe now deciding to give a toss about it?), and Carey just spotlighting more wallpaper characters, but maybe.
I wonder what exactly the Avengers would even do if they did find that he’s as powerful as they fear. Cap isn’t going to imprison him or strip him of his powers (not that either of those things are even necessarily possible), so what’s meant to happen?
Their strategy with the Sentry sure didn’t help much.
Sentry is not a good example of anything, especially if you followed some of Bendis’s post on his own forum where he explained things that were NOT in the comics. For example, Sentry apparently was lying about his power levels in Siege or some such, and all the heroes conveniently forgot about his weakness to the negative zone energy, which was featured heavily in early stories. I’d just like to think all the Avengers were momentarily insane and forgot simple things while they were fighting tentacle Sentry.
@Kelvingreen, I liked the points you brought up, but I seriously doubt they’ll ever be a talking point. Marvel is too event heavy these days to properly address things. I was surprised that the Avengers are openly joking with Tony again despite all the things he set into motion (let’s ignore his forced amnesia). He didn’t even have to try hard to redeem himself in their eyes, even though he has a history of going overboard with his actions. *shrugs* Whatcha gonna do?
Sentry is not a good example of anything
So very true.
Agreed, but nonetheless, Cap and Tony gave the same speech about avoiding what happened with Wanda when they met with Wiccan in this issue as when they recruited the Sentry way back in New Avengers. And in reality, Sentry’s becoming an Avenger was pretty much what led him to his massive freakout, so I guess I’m just wondering what their intention here is.
“Marvel is too event heavy these days to properly address things.”
Actually, Joe Quesada says Siege and the Heroic Age are about getting Marvel out of the endless cycle of events. Which is a good thing, because most of these crossover books have been pretty disappointing, and have also had a tendency to make it so that some books can’t maintain coherence.
he said that when he took over as EIC too. and a few years later, it’s crossover after crossover, because they needed to boost ever-dwindling sales after the “all-new #1 issue” and various other gimmicks (like, you know, getting good creative teams on the books and letting them do what they wanted) quit working.
The all-new #1 gimmick was Harras’, and Quesada reversed it right around the time he became EIC. And Marvel pretty much stopped doing crossovers around 1997, and didn’t start again until House of M in 2005, so your arguments here are pretty baseless. Heroic Age is a long-term status quo, no skrulls or Norman Osborn, and there are no upcoming major crossovers.