The X-Axis – 17 June 2012
This week: three more crossover issues, Brian Wood takes over X-Men, and X-Force mercifully continues to do its own thing.
AvX: Versus #3 – Two more fighty scenes from the tie-in book that does what it says on the tin. The question with a book like this is, since there’s essentially no plot and no character, does it either have spectacular art, or come up with some inventive way of doing the scene? Since this issue has art by Ed McGuinness and Terry Dodson, if you’re feeling charitable, you might well judge that the visuals just about carry it. Plainly, there’s not a great deal more to it than that.
Both of this issue’s stories are expanded from the Avengers/X-Men fight on the moon in Avengers vs X-Men #5. Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness are reunited to do Colossus versus the Thing, which is actually not bad for what it is – namely, a fight scene with above average art and a bit of effort put into adding a bit of imagination into the moves. What’s odd about it is that Loeb spends the entire story trying his damnedest to sell the current Colossus-as-Juggernaut plot, and the tragedy of Colossus’ condition. In a book that prides itself on its aggressive disdain for any sort of actual content, this seems very out of place. It’s like Loeb didn’t get the memo. Even so, the story is none the worse for trying to make some sort of point, even if it’s one that Uncanny X-Men has already been making on a regular basis.
The second half of the book is the rather arbitrary pairing of Black Widow and Magik, which is one of those fights that really ought to have only two possible outcomes. Either Black Widow wins by ambush, or Magik gets time to fight back and wins by massively superior firepower. Both of those are rather short, and so Chris Yost has to put a bit of work into making the story a little longer. There’s a vaguely aggravating gimmick of having the characters talk to one another in Cyrillic, since Russian-ness is the only thing they really have in common, but it’s a nicely choreographed fight, and it puts some work into selling Magik’s current status quo.
Given the limits of the format, this is actually one of the better issues.
Avengers #27 – Avengers is now lagging some way behind the rest of the crossover – this story takes place before Avengers vs X-Men #4 – but then, it’s got a plot of its own that it needs to resolve. This issue is clearly intended as a major turning point for the Protector, who has betrayed the Avengers by taking the captured Phoenix sample back to the Kree Empire instead. He thinks he’s serving the greater good because the Kree are meant to be protecting Earth (this was set up back in Dark Avengers Annual #1, if you’re wondering), but it turns out they’re really kind of more interested in holding on to the Phoenix for themselves and conquering the universe as per usual.
Brian Bendis’ reinvention of this character, who started life in Grant Morrison’s Marvel Boy miniseries some years ago, remains little short of baffling. The original character is basically a cosmic vandal, which is a fun idea. Bendis has turned the character into a Kree patriot working as a thoroughly generic hero on Earth, and with this story, he finally ends up with the status quo that Bendis was presumably heading towards all along – an outcast from both Earth’s heroes and the Kree. That’s fine as far as it goes, but there are two major difficulties with the whole approach. First, none of it builds in any way on the original conception of the character. It would have been a better idea to create him as a new character from whole cloth and avoid wrenching an existing (and more distinctive) character into a role for which he is singularly unsuited. Second, to get him to this point, Bendis has had to cast him as a thoroughly generic hero for a period of years; the Protector is perhaps the most boring character design and power set I’ve seen in many a year.
We’ve now got the character to a point where I can just about see him carrying a story. But it should have been possible to get to this point in a fraction of a time and with a fraction of the tedium.
I still like Walt Simonson’s art on this arc – it really does change the tone of Bendis’ writing when you match him up with a more traditional and much broader artist who brings some energy to the page. Something to bear in mind when they’re selecting artists to work with Bendis in future, I think; he really does need a high-energy artist to balance out his weaknesses.
Uncanny X-Force #26 – Ah, it’s a new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, setting out to take out X-Force. Not the most original of concepts, but as so often with this book, the details are done very well, which elevates it. We’ve seen the “debauched party” scene a hundred times before, but Phil Noto fills this one with weird features – people randomly dressed as pandas, and Fantomex wandering around in his mask and underwear without any explanation at all. More to the point, he also plays Psylocke in a much more low-key way when she shows up, and it’s a lovely contrast.
As for the core team fighting the Omega Clan – genetically engineered assassins who think they’re avenging the death of their father, but aren’t – I’m a little less sure. The basic idea of the Clan is very strong, but in practice we end up with another of those scenes where the villains do terrible things to the heroes’ bodies, ending in a gross-out sequence. The book’s done this schtick before, and it feels a bit repetitive (as well as being something that would be more at home in a Deadpool story). Perhaps the art ends up playing it for comedy more than the script really intended.
I’m also a bit confused about the Psylocke subplot. She’s sure piling on the angst for somebody who claimed only two issues ago that she had given up her capacity to feel sorrow. Maybe the idea is that she was lying all along, but at any rate it reads a little oddly.
Still, even though not everything works, there’s a lot of good stuff in here, and it remains a nice self-contained team book that works on its own terms without getting dragged into the wider X-Men continuity. The book’s had better issues, but there’s still more good than bad here.
X-Men #30 – Brian Wood takes over as the new writer, which is very welcome after his recent Wolverine and the X-Men: Alpha & Omega miniseries. (He’s also writing Ultimate X-Men at the moment, which puts him in the odd position of writing two radically different versions of the franchise at the same time.)
As always with the lower-tier X-Men titles, the big question for a new writer to address is, what’s this book about, exactly? X-Men and Astonishing in particular have both struggled to define their function. Until now, X-Men has essentially been a team-up book, but that never really felt like a premise that justified a series. Wood appears to have dumped that idea entirely, in favour of making this a book about the Security Team squad – except the roster he’s chosen consists mainly of characters from other titles. We’ve got Storm, Colossus, Psylocke, Domino and Pixie, and only the latter two are really unique to this book. That said, the book does get one point across: this is Storm’s squad, and she is not necessarily on the same page as Cyclops.
This may not be the best time to launch a storyline based on that premise. Avengers vs X-Men is plainly about to tear up the status quo, and so tensions with Cyclops in his role as leader of Utopia feel like something that surely can’t be a live issue for very much longer, regardless of what happens in this title. In fact, I can’t help wondering whether this might be a case of Wood simply having to play for time in his first storyline because, even though he doesn’t have to participate in Avengers vs X-Men, he can’t set up a permanent status quo until the crossover is out of the way.
The story here involves some bad guys discovering ancient mutant DNA and using it genetically engineer… well, monsters, I guess. Storm’s team get to fight the monsters and investigate the bad guys, but for some reason Storm’s also trying to keep the details secret from Cyclops. That’s pretty much the plot of the first issue, but nonetheless it’s paced nicely to fill the book. There’s a decent set-up of the Security Team’s status, there are a well-executed action set-pieces, and there’s a good little mystery about what Storm’s up to. It’s also nice to see Storm being used as a leader again, since it’s a role that fits her well.
The artists are David and Alvaro Lopez, who have been doing wonderful work lately, and keep up their high standard here. It’s lovely clean work, beautifully expressive and with nice subtle use of layout. If I were Marvel, I’d be using them on a higher-profile book than this, but as a reader, I’m delighted to see them here.
Colossus is used rather strangely here; there’s no sign of the Juggernaut storyline that’s dominated his appearances in other books, to the point where you have to wonder whether Wood is actually aware that that storyline is going on. (The art also suggests at times that he was drawn with his hair and the colourist has fixed it.) It’s not an outright contradiction, but there’s certainly something rather jarring in his portrayal here. Hopefully that’ll get ironed out as the book goes on – either that, or the timeline will become clearer in due course, though again, if this takes place after Colossus stops being the Juggernaut, that’s dreadful scheduling.
Overall, it’s a strong first issue. While the world obviously doesn’t need so many X-Men comics, it’s hard to complain too much when the quality on the lower-tier books is kept at this level.
X-Men: Legacy #268 – Ooh, red skies time! And another very strange piece of scheduling.
This is part of the Avengers vs X-Men crossover. But in practice it just uses that as the set-up for a Frenzy solo story that fleshes out her origin. Even so, the story set-up gives away what the Phoenix X-Men are going to do with the Phoenix power. They’re going to be the Authority. Okay, you probably figured that out for yourself – but it’s still a bit weird to see a major plot point making its first appearance in an issue of X-Men: Legacy that doesn’t even seem that interested in the crossover.
The story sees Frenzy being sent in to help keep an eye on things in Generic African Country #9562 after Cyclops has single-handedly stopped the local civil war. Of course, that still leaves plenty of general chaos around, and so Frenzy ends up protecting local girls from warlords. In amongst this we get flashbacks to her own relationship with her unappreciative father (who she eventually killed with one punch when her powers emerged while fighting back), and we get her rather awkward attempts to be some sort of mentor to the girl she rescues.
The ideas are familiar, but they’re well handled; Christos Gage has a nice handle on Frenzy as a character who’s still trying to remake herself into a heroic role that doesn’t come naturally to her, and who doesn’t always realise when she herself is sliding back into the same cycle of violence she thinks she’s punishing. When the Stepford Cuckoos propose simply erasing everyone’s memories of their past traumas, it’s no surprise that Frenzy chooses the traditional superhero option of rejecting the idea (except for the people who really can’t cope), but the idea gets a bit more dramatic weight given that she’s weighing up the importance of identity against that cycle of violence. Frenzy has a load of undeveloped and contradictory moral opinions, but that makes her an interesting character, and that’s why putting her in one of these old standard moral dilemmas works in a way that wouldn’t for most of the cast.
“That’s fine as far as it goes, but there are two major difficulties with the whole approach.”
Third, Parallel Universe Kree.
Isn’t the current rumour that Bendis gets X-Men & Uncanny X-Men post-AvX, in which case Wood is just filling in until the crossover’s over?
Would anyone have bothered giving Jeph Loeb a memo saying “Don’t bother with characterisation or plot”, or would they just have relied on him to deliver a Jeph Loeb story?
When I first read the solicitations about the Omega Clan I would have sworn they’d be a sentai/power rangers style team of Omega Blue, Omega Pink, combining to form a giant Albert cyborg etc.. The reality was a bit of a let down.
So show of hands: Who here ever thought we’d be singing the praises of Frenzy as a character?
Marvel Boy was a cool character. The Protector is not.
Bendis must be stopped.
Are you guys covering Spider-Men in the podcast?
I’ve heard that Bendis and Simonson may be working more in the future, and in regards to Bendis’ rumored cosmic book (which Walt would make even more amazing than most other Marvel artists today)…
I was amused Jeph Loeb managed to work Red Hulk stopping the Juggernaut into his fight fairly casually, by… well, being the Red Hulk, I guess?
Oh, Loeb. Never change.
Bendis? Cosmic book?
Oh no…
@KelvinGreen
Not just a Bendis cosmic book…a cosmic X-Men book.
Bendis writing the X-Men as Starjammers fighting cosmic foes? High-stakes space opera with none of the special effects and all of the decompression of subspace flight, and more than half of the stories taking place in the kitchen of their space ship? The sales are going to go through the roof, especially when Luke Cage becomes leader and Spider-Man and Wolverine join the team!
@ARBCo
Yeah, Rulk’s appearance was just silly. It’s( and this may seem like a silly complaint given its a superhero comic) childish the way that Loeb writes Rulk. He just included Rulk just so he could show how kewl he was. He couldn’t just write a Colossus V Thing fight, he had to use that fight to show that Rulk is better than both of them!
There was a Jugs/Hulk fight during WWH. It was actually very well written, and it showed how you could have Hulk beat somebody with Jug’s powerset without giving Jugs an off screen power downgrade.
In AVX, the writers have written Colossus poorly in that they’ve clearly depicted him as stop-able (as in, when he has been moving toward somebody he has been knocked back or stopped).
Also, while it seems that Thing can breath underwater, he cannot breath in space. Go figure.
“…the Protector is perhaps the most boring character design and power set I’ve seen in many a year.”
I’ve read most of his Avengers appearances, and I really couldn’t say what his powers are, beyond ‘energy related’.
What’s the official score in Versus now? Who beat up who?
@Niall – To be fair, anyone who could breathe underwater would be unable to breathe in space because there’s oxygen in water but not in a vacuum, but when he fought Namor underwater the Thing was supposed to be holding his breath through the whole fight, which is why he was so happy to find a thermal vent containing apparently breathable air. I found it a bit irksome that in a book that, one would think, should be capitalizing on variety and novelty, we not only got two people that we’ve already seen but this was the second time the Thing’s had to fight someplace he couldn’t breathe.
I found it far more irksome that so much of the dialogue in the second fight was not only not in Russian but was in Cyrillic so I can’t reproduce it n my computer to try an online translation. I can deal with Marvel putting in special bonus content for the special people who have all the latest gadgets, but having the actual main content of the book incaccessible to us smart-phoneless muggles is coming dangerously close to Marvel telling me they don’t want my $3.99.
For some reason that actually bothered me more than the cosmic away team story going on in Avengers being so irreconcilable with the one in Secret Avengers that it’s starting to make Wolverine’s infinite supply of spare costumes (he lost number 4 in AvX 5 last week!) look well thought-out. As it stands right now, if you assume both plotlines are taking place in the same story (as opposed to one being a dream sequence or alternate reality) Protector has betrayed the team twice (and Ms. Marvel once) in three distinct attempts to attack the Phoenix.
Wait, I assumed when Paul said Cyrillic, it was some pseudo-Rusian font that made it hard to read. Are you telling me the talk balloons were actually in another language? And people are baying four bucks for this? Wow.
@ZZZ: Maybe it’s best to take a Rashomon approach to the whole Avengers vs. X-Men event: we’re getting the same story, told by extremely different, even contradictory perspectives. Of course, Rashomon isn’t currently synonymous with “lazy plotting,” but give it a few years.
I liked the cyrillic gimmick, but i was expecting the dialogue box to be translated in the letters page or equivalent.
I hope that at least one of the comments points out the irony of two people named Rasputin and Romanoff going toe to toe. Though more likely they’re all just anti-piracy warnings.
A small (big) part of me also hopes that the text is completely garbled Babelfish sentences that Russians and polyglots alike laugh at.
“The story sees Frenzy being sent in to help keep an eye on things in Generic African Country #9562 after Cyclops has single-handedly stopped the local civil war.”
Um…say what? Given that Cyke is all about mutant supremecy these days, is there any explanation why’d he give two shits about civil unrest in Africa instead of using his Ultimate Power toward mutant-related ends?
Speaking of explaination…does X-Men Legacy #268 also say why Frenzy (and her alone) would be the one sent to Africa? (I REALLY hope it’s not for the reason I think it is.)
Heh. “Go help your people, Frenzy.”
Regarding UNCANNY X-FORCE: Yeah, the Psylocke part was really jarring for me too, but hey, we’ve got appropriate story material for the book being illustrated by an appropriate artist again. Things are looking up.
That said, I need to see a little bit of Dark Angel Saga magic to convince me not to drop the book after this arc.
The Cyrillic text is being used to push the AR gimmick – you’re supposed to use your phone to get the translations. Which is a load of bullshit.
!@#@!
@Jon Dubya
There’s no real explanation as to why Cyclops cares about fighting in Africa because Legacy is inexplicably set after AvX #6, which hasn’t been published yet but, presumably, has the explanation. The best we get for now is that they’re using the Phoenix to bring about world peace. Possibly he’s decided that the only way mutants are going to get a fair shake is if the world around them is a perfect place or something like that.
The in-story explanation for why Frenzy is sent to Africa appears to be “because she was available.” Like, Cyclops figured they needed a representative there and the Cuckoos just picked the first name on the list of people not currently busy doing something else. The out-of-story reason why the writer chose to set her story there may have something to do with race (she is supposed to relate to the girl she ends up protecting), but I think it had more to do with wanting to have her run into the kinds of things that happen in comic book stories set in Africa (i.e., child brides, cruel warlords, constant violence, no government infrastructure, etc.).
“Given that Cyke is all about mutant supremecy these days . . .”
When has Cyclops ever been written as a supporter of mutant supremecy? Sure, he’s become something of a pragmatic isolationist, but he’s not Magneto or even Frenzy.
I really figured after reading AvX #5 that it’s the Phoenix possessing and controlling the 5 X-Men, rather than that the five X-Men actually gained control of the Phoenix themselves. So it’s the Phoenix using Cyclops as an avatar for its own ends; Cyclops himself doesn’t care a whit.
Or does the comic itself make clear that Cyclops is in control?
You don’t see enough of Cyclops to tell whether he’s behaving differently since he got the Phoenix Force, but the Cuckoos and Frenzy seem to think it’s Cyclops in control. That doesn’t rule out the possibility that the Phoenix is in control and is just impersonating Scott the same way it impersonated Jean back in the day (assuming that’s still in continuity – they seem to be quietly retconning out the “Phoenix didn’t bond with Jean, it replaced her” retcon). And it certainly doesn’t rule out the possibility that all the X-Book writers aren’t on the same page and that Gage’s take on Phoeclops won’t jibe with what we end up seeing in AvX.
“they seem to be quietly retconning out the “Phoenix didn’t bond with Jean, it replaced her” retcon).”
That…has its own set of troublesome implications. Though I guess what with Jean being dead still (for the moment), it is less problematic than it might otherwise be.
Speaking of troublesome implications: when Grant Morrison killed Jean again then rehabilitated Cassandra Nova, I think that was supposed to explain everything but I’ve never been sure exactly how.
In X-Force… I’m pretty sure it’s not Psylocke, or at least the real Psylocke does not appear in the issue. It’s … uh, spoiler…
Mystique. Wasn’t it?
Something that got me this week, was VS… It’s now clear in all her years with it, Illyana’s never really learned how to fight with a sword. And I thought the whole point of her manipulating the X-Men and threatening reality was that she got the fragments of her soul back?
@ McKenzie
I was confused by that as well when I was reading these comments. But I went back and looked at the issue and I believe people here are referring to the way the REAL Psylocke was acting in that scene near the end of the book when she’s visited by “Xavier” and “Warren”.
I figured the part with Psylocke freaking out when she’s visited by “Xavier” and “Warren” was her luring them into a false sense of power, since she then immediately lashes out with a SHE IS GONE. Doesn’t really explain the last page, though. (I could understand the “I must die”, but not the crying).
So, hey, are they ever going to address that Frenzy is a mass murderer? Because rehabilitation of a character should kind of deal with that kind of thing.
“The in-story explanation for why Frenzy is sent to Africa appears to be “because she was available.” Like, Cyclops figured they needed a representative there and the Cuckoos just picked the first name on the list of people not currently busy doing something else. ”
Why would she be available to Cyclops at all? She went to Westchester with Wolverine.
Because she’s on the X-Men’s side of the Avengers/X-Men split.