The X-Axis – 29 January 2012
It’s a busy weekend here on the blog. This week’s podcast is a couple of posts down, and there’s a wrestling preview just below. But now, comics.
Astonishing X-Men #46 – Greg Pak and Mike McKone’s fill-in arc is proving to be very much in the vein of the cancelled Exiles. Cyclops is kidnapped by X-Men from another earth, and finds himself leading a makeshift team composed of other captives from yet further parallel worlds. So we’ve got a civilian schoolboy version of Nightcrawler, a military version of Wolverine, and such like.
This issue, Pak spells out the high concept. It’s a world where the X-Men finally triumphed over the bad guys, only to find that the world was so horribly damaged by the battle that it needed special machines to keep it going. By the magic of plot contrivance, those machines need to be powered by mutants sacrificing their lives. And having run out of willing sacrifices on their own world, they’ve started harvesting.
It’s a rather forced set-up, but there’s an interesting idea in there. The alternate X-Men have evidently decided that they’re happy to throw a constant stream of mutants on the fire, and precisely why is left to implication. It’s possible that they think it’s the lesser of two evils compared to the death of their entire planet, but it could also be that they simply regard the other worlds as less real. Or maybe they’re just more loyal to their home world. Regardless, I like the fact that this version of Storm is allowed to be unrepentant and to have a go at taking the moral high ground.
I’m not quite sure how well it works as a Cyclops story. I suppose you could argue that he’s being confronted with another version of the X-Men which has similarly taken an “end justifies the means” approach to their mission, but if that’s the idea, it doesn’t come across very clearly thus far. Pak seems more interested in playing up Scott’s status as the natural leader of the group, which is maybe worth reasserting in the wake of Schism, but I’m not sure it’s really going anywhere in this particular story.
Even so, it’s a serviceable action story with the pseudo-Exiles gimmick nicely played, and Mike McKone does good work with his variations on the standard character designs and trappings. Perhaps inevitably, it does feel like a fill-in story, but it’s well told, and the concepts are reasonably interesting.
Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred #1 – David Hine and Shaky Kane’s follow up to last year’s Bulletproof Coffin miniseries is apparently taking a different tack, with six self-contained stories in the same pulp-throwback vein as the original series. This one is supposedly closest in tone to the earlier run, and it does indeed maintain the established theme of the book’s invented Silver Age pulp heroes somehow escaping from their fiction and infecting the “real” world. Well, the relatively real world, at any rate.
Specifically, this is either the origin story of the Shield, or an example of him escaping from one layer of fiction to another; Bulletproof Coffin‘s innate surrealism means you could read it both ways. But rather than just using that as an “anything goes” excuse to throw logic out the window entirely, David Hine’s story instead creates a world built on established plot devices and then pursuing them to their bizarre but somehow logical conclusion. The ending feels like the story is folding in on itself, but still makes a perverse sense on its own terms.
Kane’s art has always been an acquired taste, but the superficial awkwardness conceals strong underlying storytelling, and perfectly complements the book’s general sense that something is subtly but profoundly wrong with its world. Definitely not for everyone, but it absolutely achieves its goals.
Daken: Dark Wolverine #20 – The book may be cancelled, but through the magic of double-shipping, there’s still another three issues to go after this. So with the Marcus Roston/Heat storyline complete, it seems Rob Williams is being given a fair amount of space to tie up his storylines and (more to the point) do something to resolve his themes.
This issue returns to the Donna Kiel subplot which has been running in the background throughout the Heat arc. Kiel is the FBI agent investigating Daken, and she’s an interesting character in a number of ways. Our antihero Daken is plainly a murderous psychopath. Donna, his opposite number, is a psychopath too, but one who actually functions in society. While she’s equally obsessed with proving her own superiority, she channels that into her career instead of semi-random killing. That makes her an interesting comparison with Daken, and it’s also led to the series presenting her as a possible love interest, on the logic that, hey, they understand each other.
So this issue sees Daken pursuing his interest (well, curiosity) in Donna. He sees her as a kindred spirit who just needs to indulge those murderous impulses she must clearly have been suppressing all this time. This makes sense, since a big part of Daken’s character is his need to believe that he’s a rational man in control of himself, and not just a psychopath who’s fooling himself into thinking that his murderous impulses are something more. Unfortunately for him, while Donna may be wholly lacking in empathy, she has neither the same hang-ups, nor (it seems) the same violent urges – all of which is terribly threatening to Daken’s self-image.
After the slightly wonky resolution to the previous storyline, it’s good to see the book getting back to this kind of story, which is what it does best. Guest artist Alessandro Vitti marks a change of visual style to something a little more detailed, but I think it works fine for a story like this, and he gets the character moments. I’m not so sure about the muted colouring, which reminds me of the period when Vertigo seemed convinced that drowning the page in sepia was the best way to show that serious drama was in the offing. Here, it’s more grey, but same difference.
In a subplot, the story also suddenly establishes that the mystery crime lord of Los Angeles is Count Nefaria, apparently so that Daken can fight him in a future issue. I gather that Nefaria’s role in the LA underground was established over in Moon Knight, but even if you know that, Daken’s sudden and largely unexplained knowledge of this (“I finally got some intel…”) is clumsy.
But that aside, this is a return to form after the flawed wrap-up of the previous arc.
Secret Avengers #21.1 – We reviewed this on the podcast, but it seems worth mentioning, since it’s the first issue by writer Rick Remender, who’s been doing great work over on X-Force. Unfortunately, this issue doesn’t hit the mark in the same way.
Remender tends to shift his style for each book, and with Secret Avengers he generally seems to have wound up with an 80s Marvel house style. Captain America and Hawkeye go on a mission to one of those made-up countries full of criminals, apparently mainly so that Captain America can test Hawkeye’s suitability to lead the new Secret Avengers roster. Cue the running around and fighting. The key dynamic is meant to be about Hawkeye proving his suitability, though the issue also introduces a new version of the Masters of Evil. And they seem quite good fun; I particularly liked the new Princess Python, who now comes accompanied by a ludicrously, ridiculously oversized psychic snake.
But Hawkeye’s demonstration of his covert-ops skills is glossed over despite being a theoretically key plot point. The opening exposition scene is painfully clumsy. And the whole thing seems premised on the highly questionable idea that anyone still doubts Hawkeye’s leadership skills, even though the character has been consistently cast in leadership roles since the 1980s. If you want to revive the Cap/Hawkeye dynamic of the late 1960s, the Ultimate Universe is just down the hall. But in the mainstream Marvel Universe, it just doesn’t fly; it involves ignoring something that’s been a core part of Hawkeye’s depiction for a quarter-century or more.
Given the expectations raised by Remender’s other work, this is a disappointing first issue. It’s by no means horrible, and the book could quite easily get on track next month, but it’s not up there with X-Force by any means.
X-Men: Legacy #261 – Following his Point One issue from a couple of weeks ago, Christos Gage gets his run properly underway by kicking off an Exodus story. With five books a month to fill, and M-Day placing a limit on the creation of new mutant villains, it’s understandable that writers must find themselves rifling through the list of surviving mutants to see who might be worth a go. But Exodus is something of a challenge; as originally conceived, he was a fanatic who regarded the rise of mutantkind as a quasi-religious calling. He doesn’t readily fit into a post-M-Day Marvel Universe, except perhaps as someone searching for a way to reverse it.
Mike Carey addressed that problem back in the first Legacy arc by having Professor X tell Exodus and his remaining followers that they were indeed relics of a bygone era who should just throw in the towel. Adopting the X-books’ party line, Xavier argued that with so few mutants remaining, it was simply pointless for them to do anything but stick together.
Christos Gage follows through the logic of that. Born fanatic that he is, Exodus has now become utterly convinced that Xavier was right – from which it follows that the schism is a catastrophe which must be reversed at all costs. By force, if need be. Or by just getting obstinate people out of the way. That’s a potentially interesting angle, though it also appears to lead to the two X-Men teams having to appear together, and I’d have held off on that for quite some time to come. Still, it’s a good use of Exodus, and one that follows very naturally from his last appearance.
I’m not quite so sold on the way the story uses the students. Kid Gladiator is such an over-the-top comedy character that he feels a little out of place in this book. And though I like the idea of the kids deciding that Blindfold is some sort of curse who should be shunned, surely the perennially reasonable Anole is the wrong character to do it with. Generally speaking, in fact, Gage hasn’t got Blindfold’s voice right; much of what she says in this issue is rather direct exposition with some vocal tics thrown in.
But those are subplots, and the main story works well. David Baldeon’s a good superhero artist, and he’s giving a bit of life even to the background students, which is important in a book like this. Overall, a good start to Gage’s first arc.
I liked this issue of Legacy until I got to the last page…then I just about died laughing. This will probably be the first X-Book in a while that I’ll pick up as monthlies and as trades. (WatXM is fun, but not enough to double dip.)
I’m not sure we’ll have a full-blown confrontation of the two teams (it does seem better to wait a while longer for a more significant meeting), but it would make sense to include Magneto in particular, given Rogue’s and Exodus’ history with the character.
The problem with the Astonishing X-Men story is that it raises the question of why, if they have such easy interdimensional travel, they don’t just evacuate from their shattered world.
I’m hoping this will be addressed within the story; after all, the people who control the travel are the ones who would stop being in charge if they cleared out.
I like that the two sides aren’t out of contact or hostile to each other. A confrontation wouldn’t make sense since a ‘fight’ serves no purpose. Both camps are happy to tolerate the existence of the other and to allow individual mutants choose where they live e.g. Blink.
My main problem with Exodus is that I can’t recall any time where he’s actually done anything to justify the almost quaking fear that he’s supposed to inspire in everyone whenever he shows up. There’s always been plenty of talk about what an enormous threat he poses, but aside from frying Fabian Cortez (who then later got better anyway), I honestly don’t remember him ever doing very much besides posture a lot and get taken down without a whole lot of trouble by any X-Men who happen to be handy at the time.
Didn’t Emma Frost and Dust mop the floor with him without a whole lot of trouble?
Exodus is rubbish. He’s always been rubbish. Unfortunately all of his loud posturing and proclamations seem to fool present-day writers into thinking he’s a villain worth dusting off, but Exodus was just a walking plot device created for a specific storyline…
“Oh, so in this story (Fatal Attractions), Magneto will attempt to convince mutants to leave earth and join him on Avalon? Why, that’s an exodus. Let’s create a character to help him with that. What should we call him? “Exodus.” Brilliant!”
In principal, he’s the same as that awful villain from Claremont’s awful Genoshan Excalibur series, “Stripmine.” A villain designed for a specific plot. Want to do a story about someone strip-mining Genosha? Get a guy called Stripmine! Want to do a story about mutants departing earth for a rock in orbit? Get a guy called Exodus!
Careful now, Brian. Next thing you know you’re going to be suggesting that Pipeline – the Genoshan kidnapper with the mutant power to transmit people over phone lines and neutralize their powers en route – wasn’t a wholly organic character who went on to enrich the Marvel Universe with his presence.
That sounds like a perfect candidate for handbook selection on the pod. Al and paul love update antiquainted technological villains.
He could be called fiber-optic now.
Careful, ZZZ, you are confusing 2 different characters…Wipeout neutralized the powers. Maybe we can combine the 2 into 1 single person with both powers? Pipeout? Whiteline? 😉
As for Exodus, I wouldn’t say he is rubbish. Name and plot device aside, there is some potential there, he just needs a good writer.
“But in the mainstream Marvel Universe, it just doesn’t fly; it involves ignoring something that’s been a core part of Hawkeye’s depiction for a quarter-century or more.”
Hey, writers do that all the time. Morrison did the same thing with Emma when he started with NXM…granted, it was only 5 or 6 years as opposed to a quarter-century, but still.
Huh? What did Morrison ignore about Emma?
It just felt like none of the characters seemed to notice or care that she had spent all that time teaching Generation X. Like she had walked right into the Xavier Institute from the Hellfire Club.
I think you might want to give NXM 116 another read.
I think you might want to give NXM 126 another read.
wwk5d, to be fair, you did say “Morrison did the same thing with Emma when he started with NXM…” and “…like she walked right into the Xavier Institute from the Hellfire Club.” Those were your words.
Well, NXM #116 was Morrison’s third issue and the first where he had Emma interacting with the rest of the team. In that issue, Jean immediately acknowledged her as an ally. (“She’s one of us! X-Men!”) and subsequently tried to stop Emma from walking out on them (“We need your strength and your brilliance!”) Emma was certainly not treated as though she just fell off the Hellfire truck.
Sure, in issue #126, Hank wrongfully concluded that Emma had betrayed the team, but Hank was: 1) panicked, and 2) alone in that conclusion. Scott and Logan didn’t buy it as indicated by their dialogue.
That was it pretty much it. The Beast having a moment of panicked doubt about Emma’s loyalty doesn’t compare at all to Captain America inexplicably forgetting that Hawkeye has a substantial amount of leadership experience under his belt.
I like the idea that Cap just wants to hang out with Hawkeye for old times’ sake. And Hawkeye’s playing along for the same reason.
Pardon me, counselor. I just had that impression from Morrison’s run, I’ll try and be more specific and concise with my wording in the future.
In wwk5d’s defense, the change in Emma’s character was more than just the way the other characters treated her. Through her years in Generation X, she had transitioned from her snarky, arrogant Hellfire Club persona to someone more even toned and compassionate (not that the character as she’s currently written doesn’t have that, it’s just the snark is a lot more surface level). Morrison’s take on the character definitely made her more distinct, but I remember that, at the time, it took me quite a while to accept the shift.
“Morrison’s take on the character definitely made her more distinct, but I remember that, at the time, it took me quite a while to accept the shift.”
Hey, that’s fair. But that’s, as you’ve described it, a shift in characterization (Morrison took some liberties when he borrowed Sage for two issues as well).
Did Morrison do anything to blatantly contradict the fact that Emma had been reformed for years in the same way that Remender’s Avengers story contradicts the fact that Hawkeye had been a leader for years?
Maybe if Morrison had written Emma in full-on White Queen-mode with no explanation given as to why she’d reverted back to villainy, and with the X-Men not even batting an eye, then sure. That would be the same thing.
Didnt Morrison give Emma an English accent which didnt REALLY jibe with her previous appearances (except maybe those Ellis Counter X issues)? Not that I’d cahnge it
I always had a fondness for Claremeont’s horrible “well, he’s a midget that runs a Casino, guess what he’s called. BIG CASINO! Get it? Get it?”
Sigh.
That being said, even aside from his dodgy conception as a literal crusader turned mutant crusader, the hot pink skin and curly mullet of Exodus always made it rather hard to take him too seriously, especially with the piece of modern art he lugged around on his back. Not Joe Q’s finest hour of character design. The new design in Legacy softens the design a bit, but I’m not sure his present mop-top does much more for him. But there’s probably nothing to be done, fashion-wise, for that horrific complexion. He’s like one giant floating birthmark.
@wwk5d
You’re entirely correct about Pipeline. The worst part is, I actually looked him up on Wikipedia (to make sure I had his name right) and still thought he was the one who wiped out the powers (in my defense, Wikipedia does say that when teleporting people, he can “attach additional files to the packages, teleporting a person and sedating them or paralyzing them on arrival,” which is all my faulty memory needed to confirm what I was misremembering).
And I’m sure if he were created today, he’d have built-in wi-fi (and possbily be named “Wi-Fi”).
Odd footnote: Pipeline’s real name (he seems to be the only member of the Genoshan “Press Gang” with a real name) was, apparently, “Cormick Grimshaw,” and his team leader’s name was “Hawkshaw.” Coincidence … or conspiracy?
I kind of assumed that Hawkshaw’s real name was Hawkshaw.
(It’s actually an obsolete slang term for a detective, and Claremont was probably intending to reference the early comic strip Hawkshaw The Detective, but it’s also a genuine family name.)
Has anyone every addressed what happened to the Genoshan Mutates in the wake of M-Day? Did they lose their powers too? Or were they all assumed to be dead when Cassandra Nova destroyed Genosha?
If I remember right, Morrison made it clear that Emma was just affecting that accent, to play up her snobbishness.
Some of the mutates survived (as we saw in the Excalibur series) but I don’t think we’ve seen any of them retain their powers after M-Day. Silent War established that the island is now totally deserted, so presumably the handful of survivors eventually gave up and got a lift back to the mainland.
The Necrosha-X crossover clearly established that Genoshan mutates were affected by the mass depowering (even the ones who were already dead).
From memory, the comment about Emma sounding British was supposed to be a reference to her Boston accent, though it ended up just confusing people.
So… Morrison has never actually been to Boston then? I can dig that. 🙂
@Person of Con
“Through her years in Generation X, she had transitioned from her snarky, arrogant Hellfire Club persona to someone more even toned and compassionate…”
Hmmm, it’s been years since I read them, but I remember Emma being like that with the kids, but still being snarky and arrogant to Banshess and, in particular, to her sister (who she killed).
Banshee, even.
@Taiback – It’s very possible that Grant was parodying the general tendency of American writers to get Scots and Irish characterisations completely wrong.
Wait, what? This site is useful for something?
Donnacha: Oh it’s very possible. I’m just from Boston and find it hilarious that anyone would mistake our accent for English. Hell, I’ve spent enough time in the UK and have enough British friends that I can do a passable English accent – and nobody in Boston can understand me when I do.
I’m pretty sure that the official party line is that Emma fakes a British accent as part of the blanket rejection of her pre-Hellfire Club life that includes dying her hair blonde (she’s naturally brunette), getting breast implants, and generally being assertive and bitchy.
While she honestly does strike me as the kind of person who would fake an upper class British accent (in the American mind, that’s the best way to seem sophisticated and exotic if you can’t speak a language other than English like a native) I always assumed it orignated from a confusion over where she’s actually from.
The Hellfire Club had a fairly European sense of style and you don’t meet a lot of Americans named “Emma” so a lot of people just assumed she was British back in the days when X-Villains got no real characterization, and nothing contradicted that for quite a while. When they got around to giving her a backstory, the stories that established that she’s definitely an American were generally in “extended X-family” books like Generation X and the short-lived Emma Frost ongoing (and I think there was a Marvel Comics presents or X-Men Unlimited in there too, but I’m not positive).
So, I think, a lot of people who only knew the character throught the core titles (including some writers on the core titles) thought she actually was British for a while after she was established as being from Boston, and she was often written accordingly. The best way to resolve that confusion was to just say she pretends to be British.
I always assumed it was a Patrician New England accent, which can be confused with British sometimes.
Regarding Secret Avengers:
I read Cap’s concern being about Hawkeye leading a covert ops team, not leading in general. Yes, he has lots of experience leading–West Coast Avengers & Thunderbolts most prominently–but none of these teams were covert.
The bit of Hawkeye’s characterization that jarred with me (but in a good way) was his declaration that “Avengers don’t kill.” That has been Hawkeye’s characterization in everything but Bendis’s New Avengers, where he all of a sudden wanted to kill Norman Osborn, for example. It always bothered me that Bendis changed this about Hawkeye, so I’m glad to see him restored to what’s been a consistent element of his characterization. Even when he killed Egghead, it was unintentional and in the defense of Hank Pym. I never liked the willing-to-kill Hawkeye Bendis wrote/writes.
It was established in Emma Frost’s own series (the one about her shy teenage years but with the porny covers) that she absorbed a dying British friend’s psyche or something and gained her accent. Pretty sure this is a retcon.
One thing that Remender ignored (and claimed as much in an interview) in his Uncanny X-Force run is that Betsy have her TK powers. I found it kinda amusing when she was fighting Reavers who were immune to her mental powers and all of the sudden there was the appearance of a dramatic physical fight. Cus I’m sure they’d still be pretty susceptible to being whupped by telekinesis.
@alsoMike: That’s not quite how it went down. She picked up some of her friend’s telepathic skills while she was locked in her mind. At this point Emma was the far less experienced telepath. Then she broke free, they had a brief telepathic battle which Emma won and that left the friend in a coma.
It doesn’t help that Emma was originally loosely based on a character from a British TV series played by a British actress.
Well, her name is a reference to Emma Peel from the Avengers, yes. But she doesn’t directly map on to any character from the original episode “A Touch of Brimstone”; Jean/Phoenix takes the Emma Peel role as the corset-wearing Queen of Sin in the secret, period-costumed Inner Circle of the Hellfire Club. (I’m not sure many readers realise just how extensively Claremont and Byrne copied from that episode; Marvel were lucky not to get sued.)
Youre so cool! I dont suppose Ive learn anything like this before. So good to seek out any individual with some unique thoughts on this subject. realy thank you for beginning this up. this website is something that is needed on the web, someone with somewhat originality. helpful job for bringing one thing new to the web!