Uncanny X-Force #10-15
Hey, six issues of Revenants! You know, the story we started back in issue #1!
The pace of Uncanny X-Force might charitably be called stately. It’s not “decompressed” in the classic sense; plenty happens. But much of what happens is layers of complication that drag out a fairly basic plot way beyond its natural lifespan. We’re now a year into the title’s life, and not only are we still on the first storyline, but the titular team hasn’t even formed yet! And they’re being cancelled in a couple of months!
It’s not even paced for the trade. In fact, it’s wildly inconvenient for the collected editions, which end up splitting this story over two volumes. (Volume 2 has the three-issue Psylocke/Fantomex interlude, while volume 3 will include the entirety of the upcoming “Vendetta” crossover. And yes, anyone who’s buying both this book and Cable & X-Force in the trades will have the inestimable privilege of buying the whole crossover twice.)
There are points of interest here, to be sure. Adrian Alphona pops in for most of an issue, to deliver some lovely art on Spiral’s extended flashback. Though there are four artists on this arc – the others being Dexter Soy, Ramon Perez, and Phil Briones – which means any sort of consistent style is out the window, even though the overall standard is solid enough.
And the first couple of issues actually do something with the idea of the Revenants being everyone’s dark psychic shadow, rendered as versions of the heroes designed to make them feel like underachievers. So Puck’s duplicate is tall and has a full head of hair, among other things.
But there’s simply no getting away from the main point to be taken from this storyline, which is that it’s inordinately long and doesn’t have the content to justify it. The Revenants aren’t that complicated an idea; they’re humanity’s dark twins. To the extent that this story does anything with that idea, it’s all at the start, and it’s the sort of thing that, back in the day, would have made for a one-issue story with D’Spayre as the villain. Even that theme largely gets lost as the story progresses, and we end up with one of my pet hates – a story in which, in order to save the day, the heroes must do something utterly arbitrary, Because Magic.
In this case, Cassandra Nova is trying to bring about the “Great Corruption”, in which the world is flooded with Revenants. Once she’s got things under way, this can only be stopped by the killing of a telepath before the moon turns completely to blood, Because Magic. It’d be one thing if this had some sort of thematic resonance, but it really doesn’t. It’s just a random thing designed to present the heroes with a goal and an ethical dilemma – one which the story then gets out of extremely cheaply, by having Psylocke turn Cassandra into a human by God Knows How, and then killing her.
Yes, there are a few nice ideas about the characters floating around here – but the core story is nowhere near strong enough to sustain such an inordinate length. The Revenants are just not that interesting, and the story largely uses them as generic invaders anyway. It’s a shame, since this book was doing some good stuff with Psylocke in the Fantomex interlude that preceded this arc. But after slogging through another few months of this, I can’t honestly say I’ll miss it when it goes.
Good riddance, Uncanny X-Force Vol. 2. You squandered whatever goodwill Remender had generated for this concept.
This book has been all over the place and could have benefitted from tighter editing right from the get go. Storm, Puck and Spiral have done the sum total of nothing throughout. Cluster, despite featuring on the cover, has never actually joined the team. Why is Cassandra Nova, a huge threat, taken down so easily. Why was she in the future, with random owl queen imagery? Why the Demon Bear? What is the point of Ginny? Why why why? It’s all just so disjointed and disappointing. Also, much as I like Alphona, I really don’t feel his art style has fitted here either. Shame, really. I guess there’s been some fun Psylocke moments in isolation (she finally had a go at Wolverine and seems to be the only character to do so, before Kitty. And the scenes with Cluster could be seen coming a mile away but at least made some sense, rather than just being girl on girl for the sake of it).
The bit with Cluster on all the covers was just darn odd. It reminds me of a quirk of anime series adapted from manga, where they sometimes include all the significant characters from the book in the opening credits of the cartoon, including ones that don’t show up until late in the series or who are only in a couple of episodes.
But while that makes sense in a cartoon series based on a comic – fans of the book will recognize the character, and if you’re only going to have one opening sequence for an entire series/season, you might have to choose between showing a character before they join the cast or not showing them afterward – it’s kind of a bizarre choice for a comic, the covers for which are presumably made to order.
The only way it seems to make sense (to me) is if the covers were all drawn before the issues were written and Cluster was originally supposed to have a larger role, or if the covers were drawn with the idea that any cover could end up being the cover of the trade, so they better all have all the characters on them, even ones that are barely part of the book.
I subscribe to the theory that Cluster was originally intended to join the team but got written out later. Even the #1 cover had a team-looking cover of Psylocke, Storm, Spiral, Cluster, and Puck, with Bishop in the background.
But yeah, this comic basically wasted its shot. I’ve said before that this is basically a Psylocke book, since Storm, Puck and Spiral really don’t do anything important. The final storyline falls on its face, because as Paul points out, MAGIC! (I’m still not sure exactly what happened with Cassandra Nova at the end).
But hey, at least it gets Bishop back in circulation. And some wrapping up to the Psylocke/Fantomex story (though apparently that’s going to continue in the next X-Force book). I’d love to see Demon Bear become part of Psylocke’s power set, but I’d wager he never gets mentioned again.
This book was a complete misfire.
Speaking of things never mentioned again, whatever happened to the void in cyclops’ head?
That is obviously a plotline they have no intention of ever revisiting.
Based on this, Ultimates, and Avengers AI, Humphries’ writing seems to involve lots of characters having action scenes all over everything, with little attention given to the connective tissue. The larger plots are sprawling and convoluted, but they don’t really develop organically. Maybe they’d make better movies than comics?
What a waste of Cassandra Nova. I loved the Mmumudrai as a psychic space-parasite, but the crazy magic world of evil twins thing just feels like they’ve cheapened and wasted the wholeconcept.
I think it was an evil twin before it became a space parasite under Carey.
The void thing in Scott’s head will no doubt be brought up again when they’re shifting back to the familiar status quo. I will give Marvel this. I thought the toys would have been put back in the box well before now. HoM was 9 years ago almost. You think this was a case of writing themselves so far into a corner?
With House of M, the Void, etc., I suspect it’s a case of Marvel trying to exploit their comics publishing to promote their Avengers films over Fox’s X-Men. That means we’ve seen some weird and interesting variations on the status quo for the X-Men (Legion, Utopia, Scott’s Brotherhood, Wolverine runs Hogwarts, etc) as well as some stories pretty blatantly calculated to kneecap the X-men by removing the elements that made them unique and popular (House of M cutting out the “random people get superpowers” theme, the end of “mutant culture”)
When it comes to that Void plot, I quite liked the explanation that Cyclops himself gave: his powers of repression are so unyielding that he can stuff a mind-control demon down into the depths of his psyche without a problem. (Doesn’t quite jive with the Dark Phoenix stuff from AvX, though.)
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