The X-Axis – 17 February 2013
Right! Back to business as usual!
And after a couple of quiet weeks, this time it’s the inevitable deluge…
Age of Apocalypse #12 – Just another two issues to go, and those are both part of the X-Termination crossover. As I recall, the previous issue seemed to make the pacing work for it, at the cost of de-emphasising some of the individual cast members’ storylines. With this issue, though, David Lapham appears to be back to trying to get through loads of outstanding plots in the time available. Logan has been defeated, at least in the sense that he no longer has Apocalypse’s power and he’s sane again. But of course that doesn’t just lead to his military apparatus vanishing, so the government is still pretty much in control. So what we get is an issue that reads like it started life as the idea for a second year of stories, with Monet emerging as the rival leader figure now that she’s got some chance of coming out on top. At around the same time, we’ve also got Graydon Creed confronting his father, Goodnight being exposed within the Hellfire Club (the actual role of which has never really been made terribly clear), and the scientists wondering what they’re going to do with the power of Apocalypse that they’ve managed to harness with their Big Machine. There are a lot of threads being drawn together here, as is inevitable when a series with longer term plans is being wrapped up, and in one sense Lapham is handling them all well – but it’s hard to shake the feeling that these are storylines which were intended to play out at a much, much more leisurely pace.
Cable & X-Force #4 – Effectively the end of the first arc, in that it finishes explaining how the team’s first mission went horribly wrong and why everyone now thinks they’re terrorists. (The first trade will actually run up to issue #5, and be rounded out with the material from the Marvel Now: Point One one-shot.) There are a couple of interesting ideas in here: the book does a nice job of selling that the whole mission has gone spectacularly wrong, which is a pleasant change from the usual hypercompetence of this sort of team. And I quite like the idea that Cable’s team are appear to be taking the flak for all this because the actual explanation would be even more damaging in terms of anti-mutant sentiment. Though it really doesn’t make sense for Colossus, of all people, to be the one who advocates turning themselves in to the authorities – he’s the one member of the team who was on the run to start with.
The main problem with this series is that it’s just a bit sluggish. It’s taken four issues to set up a premise that most of the promotional interviews succeeded in explaining perfectly adequately in a couple of sentences, and it really should have been possible to get to this point much more quickly. And Salvador Larrocca is drawing much of the book with the same layout of five horizontal panels to a page, a style that I’ve always found painfully boring. Besides, it’s one thing to do this if you want to establish a rhythm in order to break from it later, but why the hell is this book doing it during the fight scenes too? It’s unfortunately appropriate for the book, though – the story could be good in theory, but in practice it’s rather flat.
Uncanny X-Men #1 – After the race to get through the first volume of All-New X-Men before officially starting on the sister title, we finally get to the relaunch of Uncanny X-Men, the book about Scott’s team. And Bendis, bless him, starts off this issue by re-establishing the premise, because presumably there might be people reading this book who aren’t reading the other one. Seems terribly unlikely to me, but he’s probably right to err on the side of caution. (Perhaps more to the point, there might be people buying the collections who read this one first.)
So, here’s what happens in this issue: a mystery man shows up at SHIELD wanting to talk to Maria Hill, and gives her all sorts of information about Cyclops’ X-Men in the form of an enormous infodump. Even Hill has to point out that for the most part, she’s just being told stuff that’s in the papers. There’s also a flashback to one of the recent outings for Scott’s team in which, you guessed it, they show up to rescue a mutant whose powers have just emerged. I get that this is the premise of the series, so it’s fair enough to do it in the first issue to establish the format, but I hope we’re going to start getting a bit more variation in what Scott’s team are up to – though at the same time it does make sense to keep them clear of conventional supervillains who would detract from the revolutionary vibe that the book is going for.
And then at the end we find out who the mystery man is, which is The Twist. It’s a twist that I guessed on page three (and which Bendis has to cheat to preserve at one point, by having the mystery man refer to himself in the third person), but that’s fine; it suggests an intriguing direction that makes sense, and even if you see it coming, the confirmation still works as a pay-off.
That said, let’s be clear that I’m giving this issue a bit of leeway because I’m prepared to accept that it needs to repeat the job of re-establishing the concept, and it seems to get that over and done with here. If you aren’t feeling so tolerant, you may consider that there’s a lot of repetition here of stuff we’ve seen in All-New X-Men, married to essentially one plot development (albeit a major one) and some new costumes. And you could also make the point that the book remains terribly vague about what Cyclops’ “mutant revolution” actually entails, and what really makes it different from the other X-Men – other than a greater willingness to rescue new mutants from the authorities by force.
Oh yes, the redesigns. Chris Bachalo is the artist on this book, and he’s been allowed to revamp the character designs. I like the issue, on the whole – it’s nice and clear, which isn’t always his strength, and (unlike the book just mentioned) it makes good use of varied page layouts for pacing. Dropping Cyclops’ visor, which really is as close to iconic as anything in the X-books besides the X-logo itself, is a bold move, but replacing it with a red X keeps the key point of obscuring Scott’s face. Plus, there’s an obvious storyline justification that Cyclops needs a visible excuse for why his optic beams are behaving differently. Magneto in white is an interesting spectral presence; I’m not so sure, though, about Emma in black, or Magik with a Stupidly Large Sword. Granted that Bachalo’s got the sort of style that can carry that sort of exaggeration, I’m not sure the Soulsword is the sort of prop you can casually redesign in this way (or one that you should, anyway).
A good first issue if you’re willing to be charitable about the repetition from All-New. I am, though a nagging voice tells me that maybe I shouldn’t.
Wolverine and the X-Men #25 – The big number #25 on the cover and the updated cast list at the back suggests that somebody sees this as a big anniversary issue, but the actual story is a little more business as usual: Wolverine takes some of the kids to the Savage Land on a survival trip which he sees as a team-building exercise. The opening scenes have him putting it over to them as a genuinely life-threatening experience, but if you’re the sort of reader who finds this book a little over the top, it’s worth noting that, based on his conversation with Beast later in the issue, it’s pretty clear that he’s winding them up. (Though Quentin Quire appears to take him at face value – you could see that as an inconsistency or as a case of Quentin being a little more gullible than he’d like to think.)
The story, naturally, is that Wolverine sets the kids loose in the jungle intending to keep an eye on them from a discreet distance, but then a baddie shows up, which means that the kids are genuinely on their own. And the focus of the issue is firmly on the kids rather than the X-Men proper – the actual fight with said bad guy won’t be along till next month. There’s a neat feint with Quentin attempting to rise to the challenge of leadership and actually giving some perfectly sensible directions to the squad, only to be utterly ignored because everybody thinks he’s an idiot. Idie’s character seems to be dialled back a bit after the rather extreme way she’s been written of late; the stuff with the Hellfire Church didn’t really ring true, so it’s a relief to see her being reined back from that.
Ramon Perez is the artist on this issue, and it’s entirely solid work with enough of a cartoony edge to fit the book. You do have to wonder, though, whether this book is starting to lose its visual coherence with all the artists who are passing through it; it’d be nice to get a bit more consistency going.
X-Men #41 – The “final” issue before the book relaunches with, uh, the same writer as before. We’re really stretching the definition of “final” here, even by Marvel’s standards.
To commemorate this unmonumental event, we have a cover by Adam Kubert with X-Men past and present, and a fill-in story by Seth Peck, Jefte Palo and Guillermo Mogorron, which serves to introduce a new Freedom Force who will doubtless never be heard of again. Not an awful story by any means, but certainly the most blatant exercise in page-filling the X-Men have seen in quite some time.
X-Treme X-Men #10 – Another book heading for cancellation and, in its own way, racing through plots. So this issue mainly serves to sketch out the back story of the Civil War version of Cyclops (who was introduced two issues back but hasn’t had much panel time yet), before moving on to the latest version of “the team travel to a new world and fight an evil version of Professor X” – a format which really is proving to be even more repetitive than the old Exiles stories, which at least allowed for its team to travel to new worlds and do different things.
This evil version of Professor X appears to be a Nazi, though some fairly clear hints are dropped that, since this is an alternate reality and all, our heroes shouldn’t necessarily be assuming that the local version of the Nazis are necessarily such bad guys. If that’s really where they’re going then best of luck next issue in trying to pull that one off without being horrendously offensive. If not… well, it’s not the most inspired of evil variants, is it? It’s audacious, but only in that “they’ve got to be kidding, surely” way. But then this is Greg Pak, a writer who knows better than to just go for shock value, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for now that he knows where he’s going with this.
Magik looks like she stepped out of Final Fantasy VII.
I like that there are a couple of directions that they can take the character reveal in Uncanny. It could turn out to be some sort of long con by Cyclops, as in it is better for his plans if he knows that SHIELD knows at least some things about him in order to avoid an ambush. Or on the flip side that character could work as some sort of double agent to plea bargain, as I think he is still wanted by the authorities.
The only real problem I had was when the character mentioned to them that Cyclops’ powers had gone out of control, but he ended up surviving that assault due to a “lucky shot”. It made me groan as it seemed like a bit of obvious hand-waving just to get around the situation.
And the other thing is that all this seems to take place within one day, and even though with Bendis he could stretch this out over a couple issues, it does seem like an awful lot has to happen to get us from then until now.
I found Chris Bachelo’s art to be excellent. Yeah the character designs are hit & miss, with Emma looking off and Magneto’s in particular looking quite worse than before. But overall his art can sometimes look a bit messy or too busy, however I’m not sure if he had plenty of lead-in time or whether doing colours himself allowed the opportunity to refine some things, as it was really strong here.
There were 2 things in Uncanny X-Men #1 which stood out to me and made me wonder if they were intentional:
1.) Tempus refers to Emma as Scott’s girlfiend. Now this could be because they were together for so long and in the public eye, but I hope they haven’t got back together behind-the-scenes (especially as their relationship ended in Phoenix-force influenced domestic violence).
2.) They spelled Magneto’s “real” name as Eric instead of Erik. This seems to me like it was an error Bendis made which no one bothered to check. (I still find it odd that Marvel went through the trouble of having Max Eisenhart be established as Magneto’s real name, only to continue to refere to him as Erik Lensherr.)
” Magik looks like she stepped out of Final Fantasy VII. ”
I’d say Final Fantasy X. Final Fantasy VII’s looks were significantly more restrained.
You’re much kinder to UXM #1 than the folks on the other boards I go to. They all thought it was atrocious.
I don’t plan to read it because I haven’t been interested in Cyclops since Joss Whedon finished up with him. And I’ve been done with Magneto since Claremont offed him in X-Men v.2 #3.
I never thought I’d say this, but I actually have to stick up for Bendis on UXM one. It’s the first issue of a relaunched series with a genuinely new direction. He absolutely should spend the first couple pages establishing the status quo, which it sounds like he’s done. Frankly, Paul, it sounds like the sort of thing you used to give DC grief for not doing when they relaunched a series.
I never thought I’d say this, but I actually have to stick up for Bendis on UXM one. It’s the first issue of a relaunched series with a genuinely new direction. He absolutely should spend the first couple pages establishing the status quo, which it sounds like he’s done.
Stupid web browser double-posting. Sorry. 🙁
While I enjoyed Uncanny, it does leave several questions. What do you call the White Queen who is now in all black, anyway? What is the extent of the damage to the team’s powers if your new resident healer can’t heal you? Why is a healer on active combat duty anway? Little things, I know. I would also add that the sleeveless Magneto costume made me hearken back to Sabretooth in the AoA. And I didn’t like it then either.
Something you saw a lot of in the late 80s/early 90s was a character’s real name would be revealed, and within an issue everyone would be calling them by that name; friends, enemies, enigmatic giant musclemen in metal outfits with blades, capes and pouches as they stand silhouetted against the moon, etc. So I’m more than happy for the secret to remain between Magneto and the reader. It suits the character. And after all, except for one or two clumsy reveals (including Grant Morrison’s X-Men), everyone still calls Wolverine Logan, rather than his real name James Growlywolf-Lunarmane.
@Mr. Sandman — It;s arguable that Emma hasn’t been “The White Queen” since she left the Hellfire Club. Even if the X-Men called her by her title as though it were a code name, that was just out of habit.
Perhaps I am reading too much into this but I thought Broo being lead around on a leash in WatX #25 was a bit much even for this series (surrealist as it often is). If he were a human character reverted into a feral state it’s unlikely he’d have been sent off on a “team building” exercise in this condition – the brief explanation that it might shock him back to his senses is pretty thin. Obviously it’s being played for laughs but there does seem something off about it.
Dunno why alternate-reality good Nazis would be offensive provided the characteristics which make them offensive here are different. Or maybe they’re not “good” but there’s a worse threat, which would also be valid.
Obviously we don’t expect Pak to draw a reality in which it’s the world is better for Nazi control.
spoilers for uncanny
i get that the magneto reveal is an ironic reversal, but i dont know if it makes sense for his character. the reasons he gives seem personal and even petty, isnt he more of an idealist? i think it would have made more sense for emma to be the informant.
and yeah, i wish they would be a little more clear about what cyclops is up to, exactly. at this point, all the talk about revolution seems a bit like empty sloganeering.
Unless it’s just Romulus who’s done it more than once, I thought Wolverine had been called James a few times since he got his memory back.
Can’t recall who else by, though.
I think Quentin Quire was one of the first characters to call Wolvie James. Or perhaps it was Cassandra Nova…. oh balls I can’t remember. It was in the Morrison run.
Dave, Max: I think Fantomex did too.
White Magneto could be a good look, but ironically I think it would work better under an artist other than Chris Bachalo. Between his tendency to skimp on backgrounds and his mostly drawing Magneto in shadows in this issue, the effect was generally lost.
I see that Bendis is stretching his writing legs by opening with an interrogation room scene.
“Wow, Eric, the old you could have balled these puppies into a pinball before they even–” Someone get that man a DVD of AbFab before he writes any more dialogue for Emma.
New Uncanny X-Men isn’t so great. Emma’s dialogue is so off, and her costume is identical for Bachalo’s design for Lady Mastermind, from Mike Carey’s initial Supernovas arc (man, I miss Carey).
Wolverine and the X-Men started off fun, but has become so chaotic. No plots for Rachel, or Husk, or many background characters.
By the way, what has happened to Frenzy? Just been shuffled away?
:Unless it’s just Romulus who’s done it more than once, I thought Wolverine had been called James a few times since he got his memory back.
Can’t recall who else by, though.”
Fantomex. It was an unusually clumsy scene in my opinion, and shouldn’t have happened. But it’s ok if every now and then a real name comes up, if it serves the storyline well. So long as it’s done extremely sparingly. I’d be happy if some supervillain tries to show off by mentioning Magneto’s real name, then later on he mysteriously disappears, for example.
I hated, hated, HATED Uncanny X-Men #1. Not because it was slow (I have no problem with it being an introductory issue), but because having Magneto turn on Cyclops is a horribly disappointing plot twist. My favorite aspect of the X-Men plots recently, by far, was having Cyclops take on more of outlaw persona and getting chummy with Magneto, the reformed villain. So to have Magneto turn on him and be the villain against is really, really lame. Especially when the reasons behind it (the whole “Cyclops-Phoenix messed with the Phoenix Five’s plus Magneto’s powers” plot is just stupid and has no basis in AvX) are kinda lame. Guhhh. And I was looking forward to this series, too.
As for the new looks, they’re not bad (Cyclops looks much better than I feared, though I’m worried under non-Bachalo it won’t work). Magneto not having sleeves is kinda dumb though, especially for an old man. Old men just love showing off their arms.
I was going to drop WAXTM after the circus issues, but #24 (“Date Night”) was everything I want from an X-Men comic. This is back to the Wolverine & the Kids, though, so I’m back to rapidly losing interest. I just don’t care about any of these kids. Idie is incredibly annoying. Genesis is interesting as a “kid Apocalypse grown up like Superman” sort of way, but his actual character right now is just generic goodie kid. Broo is feral. Quentin Quire is a completely different character from what he was under Morrison, so I get cognitive dissonance whenever I see him on the page. And the rest of the characters are a bunch of nobodies (even if Shark Girl is visually interesting).
@Adam
On Nazis, you mean like the reveal in Red Panda Adventures (decoderringtheatre.com)? Red Panda’s archvillain was helping the Nazis because the guy thought a world united under military force was the only way to stop an alien invasion that was heading towards Earth.
Didn’t stop Red Panda from beating the guy and possibly cheesing off the coming alien invasion, mind…
> By the way, what has happened to Frenzy? Just been shuffled away?
She appeared in X-Men Legacy (Legion) a couple of issues back, on a team with Chamber & Blindfold (oh, and Storm, Beast & Wolverine).
@Si
I think the suddenly revealed name being used a lot continued into this decade. Bishop’s first name for instance after it appeared in X-Treme X-Men, and Rogue in particular. Decades of no name for her and then suddenly she had one and no one seemed to react to it. I’m still not sure if it’s an alias or part-alias or what. (Seemed to me that Claremont didn’t like that the movies gave his creation a name so gave her a different one in the comics)
(oops meant century not decade)
“Someone get that man a DVD of AbFab before he writes any more dialogue for Emma.”
Why? She’s not British.
Having missed most of the ‘ 90s comics output, someone tell me: what did Emma sound like in Generation X? I always assumed her characterization as an American with an affected posh British accent was a Morrison invention. I remember her early speech patterns as Generic Supervillain, and that TV movie cast her as British, so I’m confused. Did Claremont/Byrne intend for her to be British and her character retconned at some later point? And how true was Morrison to previous depictions of her?
Is Morrison’s Emma necessarily speaking with a British accent? I always heard it that way, but that sort of arch/posh bitchiness could just as easily be American drag queen speak (which arguably has roots in AbFab). I never read Generation X, though.
She thinks she is, though.
The Emma question is one I’d like answered too. From my recollection she didn’t especially have any accent in her early appearances. I’m pretty sure she was mentioned as being Boston old money though. I don’t recall her ever being portrayed as British. And let’s face it, if it were Mr Claremont who said she was a Brit she’d have been saying things like “Arr, old chap, wot a ruddy spiffing knees up by gosh, och aye begorrah.”
Was it Mr Morrison who first mentioned a “fake British accent” or was it Mr Ellis? Or was it even earlier?
Morrison, I’m pretty sure, though I always had a vague suspicion that it was a cover for a continuity error.
Magneto’s rocked the all-white look before, when he was White Kind of the Hellfire Club – http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/3/30090/2789524-magneto1.jpg
From the couple issues of GenX I’ve read, I don’t recall Emma being as arch/snobby as she was during Morrison’s run. Interesting, though, that he may have thought she was British after seeing that movie. I don’t think I saw her as being possibly British until Finola Hughes played her, as well.
I think the posh English ‘auntie Emma’ stuff was Ellis/Wood counter x stuff.
Emma’s from America. It’s been said several times, and by different writers, that she speaks with a British accent. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Bendis – or any other writer who hasn’t brought it up in a book or an interview – considers her to be speaking with a British accent, or that that’s the “official” version of the character (hell, Claremont once used Bishop’s never-before-or-since-mentioned Australian accent as a minor plot point, and we’ve discussed Legion’s abrupt Scottishness here several times – it’s safe to say the speech pattern of any comic book character whose accent isn’t renderred phonetically is up for grabs), but she’s definitely American and she’s definitely been referred to as using a British accent.
Some people have speculated that she has a New England accent that just sounds British, which would be possible if we actually heard her speak and were debating where her accent came from, but I think it’s extremely unlikely that when Cyclops said Emma “speaks with a fake English accent” in Xenogenesis it was supposed to represent him misinterpretting her accent.
I’ve seen several explanations for why she would do this. The most compelling to me is that she simply likes to sound British – Americans traditionally associate upper-class British accents with culture and intelligence; it’s been revealed that she bleaches her hair and has had cosmetic surgery, so I don’t see why she’d draw the line at changing her voice. But I’ve also seen people say it was because she picked it up off a British telepath during her first psychic battle (in the Emma Frost solo series, I believe), or that everyone at the Hellfire Club did it to fit the club’s theme and it just stuck. Complicating things is the possibility that it first came up because someone thought she actually was British and wrote her that way (or thought her birthplace had never been mentioned and so felt free to place it wherever he wanted) and someone came along later to wank an explanation for why she was so British for a while there (much like the way Iceman seemed to pick up the ability to turn to ice because so many artists thought he could already do that and drew him as translucent).
I figured she had a Madonna/Gwenyth Paltrow accent.
I was thinking more Lady Cora Crawley.
Whether Emma has an established British accent or not, Bendis will only acknowledge it if he cares; his grasp of what’s gone before is somewhat erratic.
Having been born and raised in New England, I have to suggest that it is extremely unlikely anyone would confuse a New England accent with an English Accent. Maybe the Boston Brahmins of 150 years ago sounded faintly British; but no longer.
On the other hand, there are many, many English accents, and I certainly have not hear them all. Perhaps there is one that sounds vaguely similar to something from New England, but I doubt it.
It’s established that Emma is from Boston, and from an old-money family. If she speaks with an English accent, or something similar, it’s an affectation not her childhood accent.
Emma’s accent reads to me like some kind of Mid-Atlantic English, c.f. Katherine Hepburn, and also c.f. really posh Edinburgh. That kind of botox-lippéd hip-handed “rahlay, Scaat, you simply maast cam down to Newpoart for tha Sammar.” Youtube: Cc7quH-i_0w
Although, I suppose riding horses would be a touch plebian for Jackie D.
(mus and Pliers)
//\Oo/\\
More generally, Bendis’s efforts at writing dialect other than the default New York City inflection shared by of most of his characters have been uniformly dire. (Remember Geldoff, anyvone? Or Doctor Doom bellowing about Ms. Marvel’s “fat cow mouth?”) Maybe it’s for the best that he’s not bothering with Emma’s speech patterns.
Omar Karindu, that is an excellent point. Much as I thought his Thor-who-spoke-like-Spider-Man was dumb, an honest Bendisian attempt at Thor would have been atrocious.
There’s really only two ways to indicate an accent in comics; wif phonetic’ spellin, loike this, or with bloody indicator words, eh wot? Both are easy to overuse (just look at bad versions of Constantine). But I don’t recall Emma being written with a phonetic accent. It’s really the voice that Ellis gave her and Morrison continued that’s missing here, and the haughty attitude behind it. Maybe Omar is right and Bendis shouldn’t attempt it.
Yeah, I never really read Emma as British so much as upperclass bitch with a dry attitude.