The X-Axis – 4 April 2010
If you care to check one post down, you’ll find this week’s House to Astonish podcast, in which Al and I discuss Nemesis, The Guild and the X-Men: Second Coming one-shot. Or if you want to stick around here, I’m going to run through this week’s books, along with the X-books I skipped over last week.
Incidentally, it’s been a while since I’ve had time to do any reviews of entire storylines, but I’m planning to get back to that sooner or later with the stories that just wrapped up in Uncanny and X-Force. And yes, that means I’m skipping a few minis and minor story arcs in B-titles, but hey, that’s just the wonder that is life.
Cloak & Dagger – A one-shot from Stuart Moore and Mark Brooks which seems to serve the primary function of extricating Cloak and Dagger from the X-Men. They only joined the team less than a year ago, during the “Utopia” crossover, and they’ve done pretty much nothing since beyond aggravating Uncanny X-Men‘s cast bloat (though to be fair, at least Daniel Way used them in Wolverine: Origins). They always seemed suspiciously like much-loved characters who’d been hauled out of limbo for a book where they didn’t belong – they’re not even mutants, for heaven’s sake – so I can’t say I’ll miss them.
In this issue, Dagger angsts about whether she belongs with the X-Men (hint: no), while Cloak tries to reconnect with his roots by, um, looking normal and hanging out in South Boston with another girl. It’s a very odd version of Cloak, who’s not often shown hanging around on street corners in a hoody, and I can’t help thinking it misses the point badly. He’s supposed to be much odder than that. The art certainly misses the point – Dagger is supposed to be light and Cloak is supposed to be absolute darkness, so why the hell is he glittery? As for the plot, there’s a somewhat interesting idea about a group trying to persuade people not to use their superpowers, in a fairly obvious analogy for giving homosexuals “therapy” to make them straight. Unfortunately, it’s the sort of story that only really works in a Marvel Universe where there are low-level superhumans all over the place, and we haven’t had that since M-Day.
There is a nice closing scene between the two stars, but overall it’s a wonky story that doesn’t really get them right.
Dark Wolverine #84 – This is the final part of Dark Wolverine‘s tie-in to Siege – next month, it’s a crossover with Wolverine: Origins, as that book builds to its conclusion. Dark Wolverine is decidedly hit and miss, and this issue isn’t exactly heavy on plot, but it does have some good ideas about the character. Stuck in Asgard with a bunch of random HAMMER soldiers, Daken tries to be a proper leader for them – not because he’s a born hero but because he wants their respect. Unfortunately for his ego, it turns out that none of these people have much time for him as a leader; they don’t trust him, they don’t like him, and his inspirational speeches fall flat. Now, that’s a somewhat interesting direction for the character – instead of making him a conventional hero, his motivation is to prove that he can do it. I can see something in that.
Alongside that, there’s some rather more garbled stuff about fate. What does Daken have to do with Asgard? Well, nothing, but in an attempt to link this to his character somehow, Daniel Way and Marjorie Liu have chosen to confront him with the Fates. Since Daken’s very big on self-determination, he doesn’t much like this idea, and refuses to play along with his destiny. The pay-off is for Daken to realise that his fate is determined by who he is, and so there’s not necessarily a contradiction. He’s not on rails; he is the rails. Nice idea, but not very clearly explained, and certainly not very effectively dramatised. Still, I like the way they’re heading with this book.
New Mutants #11 – Another Siege tie-in, this time picking up on the stray plot thread from the “Utopia” crossover where Hela briefly turned Dani into a Valkyrie again. If you don’t remember that bit, well, that’s because it was thoroughly unnecessary background clutter that added nothing to the story. But it happened. And as this issue points out, it doesn’t strictly make sense, because the Valkyries took people to Valhalla, not to Hel. The guest creative team, Kieron Gillen and Niko Henrichon, try to turn that probable blunder to their advantage by having Hela call in the favour and despatch Dani to Asgard to sort out the dead. It’s a decent issue – there’s a good use of an obscure piece of Norse mythology, and a clever set-up based on the idea that everyone assumes Hela must have an ulterior motive. And Henrichon’s art is great – slightly sketchy, but clear and effective. It’s obviously a diversion for the series, and it’s peripheral to Siege as well, but it does at least find a proper story of its own to tell within that framework.
Uncanny X-Men #522 – A single-issue story nestling between “Nation X” and “Second Coming”, this is Kitty Pryde’s big return to Earth. Matt Fraction works hard to make this a dramatic and emotional moment, but you really do have to swallow an awful lot in order for this story to work. Kitty’s in a magic space bullet big enough to destroy planets… it’s travelling at the speed of light… and Magneto, who was struggling with his powers just a couple of issues back, can apparently yank the whole thing back to earth? Really? Because, er, no. I don’t know where to start with the ways in which this set-up makes no sense – why didn’t Kitty starve to death months ago? This isn’t really Fraction’s fault; he’s inherited a Joss Whedon plot element that doesn’t really fit with what he’s doing, but has to be dealt with in order to get Kitty back into circulation. And it’s perhaps telling that he’s chosen to do it in a single issue rather than devote a storyline to it – he’s biting the bullet, if you like, and getting it over with. If you can muster the staggering quantities of suspension of disbelief needed accept the basic premise of this story, then the rest isn’t bad at all. Guest artist Whilce Portacio’s work is rough around the edges, but it’s not bad, and he does a good Magneto. There’s also a back-up strip with art by Phil Jimenez that takes Whedon’s idea from another angle, as another planet sees Kitty’s bullet speeding towards them and braces for the worst. It’s a good story, perhaps because it gets to take the “space bullet” story on its own terms, but doesn’t have to deal with it so closely as to expose it to scrutiny.
Wolverine: Origins #46 – You know, you could have just reprinted Mariko Yashida’s Official Handbook entry and run a story in the other 20 pages.
Oh, alright, that’s a little unfair. But this issue basically consists of Daniel Way and Scot Eaton recapping the relationship between Wolverine and Mariko Yashida. There’s a bit of reinterpretation, so that Wolverine can feel a little more guilty about it, but when you get down to it, it’s a clip show. In fairness, there’s some logic to this – we’re talking about stories from 15-30 years ago, so presumably it’s new to a lot of people. And if it’s going to be important to the closing storyline – because this is billed as a prologue to “Reckoning” – then it ought to be properly explained. But for those of us who read it the first time round, it’s rather repetitive.
X-Factor #203 – Uh-oh. I don’t remember reading this. And I just flicked through it, and it turns out I did. That ain’t good.
Monet is being held prisoner in South America and is having nightmares about Penance – and to give credit, Peter David gets the idea across without allowing the story to be bogged down in that storyline’s arcane, convoluted continuity. Meanwhile, Guido is looking for her, and he’s secretly in love with her. Good art, interesting choice of a villain from a completely unrelated corner of the Marvel Universe, but it just doesn’t grab me.
X-Force #25 – The final part of “Necrosha-X”. Since X-Force is going straight into “Second Coming” after this, it’s worth pointing out that “Necrosha-X” isn’t really a crossover at all – it’s an X-Force storyline which a couple of other books happened to use as a backdrop. In fact, it continues a number of X-Force storylines about Selene, Wither, the Transmode Virus and so forth.
But is it any good? No. No, it isn’t.
Selene is absorbing the power of all the undead mutants so that she can turn herself into a god. Fair enough, at least it hits the reset button on most of those revivals and clears the decks. So, X-Force have to fight her. And, uh, they do. But they do it wearing facepaint, because that makes it deep or something. There are some showdowns with Selene’s henchmen which at least try to seem as though character arcs are building to a climax, but basically it’s just a fight scene. And it’s a fight scene drawn by Clayton Crain, which means it’s murky, there are no backgrounds, and sometimes you can’t even tell who is who. It’s really quite bad. At least the writers are making a real effort to give it some dramatic weight, but it doesn’t work.
X-Men Forever #20 – Sabretooth’s really not having a great time of it in this series, is he? This is the second half of a two-parter with Gambit, Sabretooth and co taking on the mysterious Consortium, and it’s basically an action issue. A pretty well executed one, too – Graham Nolan isn’t a very flashy artist, but he’s solid, and Chris Claremont knows how to put these things together. The big event this issue, though, sees Claremont unveiling the mysterious villain behind the Consortium, and once again, it’s the sort of thing he could never have done in the real Marvel Universe. So, yes, we’ve drifted hopelessly far from the advertised concept of “what would have happened if Chris Claremont hadn’t stopped writing the X-Men in 1991” – but probably for the best, because we’re actually getting a version of what Claremont could have done without having to worry about screwing up the Marvel Universe for everyone else.
X-Men Origins: Nightcrawler – Mystifyingly branded in the solicitations as a “Second Coming” tie-in, this shows no signs of being any such thing. But if it is somehow connected to “Second Coming” then that’s a problem, because this thing drives a coach and horses through continuity. It has Kurt as a drugged-up sideshow freak instead of an acrobat (the established version of history is that he quit the circus when a new owner suggested it), it has him meeting Professor X in a completely different way from what we saw in Giant-Size X-Men #1, it has him taking the surname Wagner at the same time… it’s an absolute mess. In fairness, at least it tries to come up with some explanation for Kurt’s Catholicism – which doesn’t exactly seem like a tradition that would have appealed to Margali Szardos. But this isn’t the movie version of Kurt’s history, and it’s not exactly earth-shattering stuff taken on its own merits, so you have to wonder what on earth the point is.
X-Men: Second Coming – The spring crossover kicks off with this opening one-shot by X-Force writers Craig Kyle and Chris Yost, with art from David Finch. Cable and Hope have finally made it back to the present day, and, well, it looks like everyone’s going to be chasing them for the next twelve issues. But on a weekly schedule, that’s fine – “Second Coming” will raise through the story, and if they can keep up the pace, they’ll probably get away with it. As I said on the podcast, what really matters about “Second Coming” is whether it can open a way out of the X-books’ creative culdesac; if it can be entertaining at the same time, that’s a bonus. This story at least goes out of its way to set up Hope as the possible solution to M-Day, but let’s not forget that they promised much the same thing with “Messiah Complex” and “Messiah War”, both of which were ultimately unsatisfying because they ended up in a holding pattern and didn’t really change anything. “Second Coming” has been billed as the final part of a trilogy, so you’d figure they have to get it right this time and something will actually happen… but to be honest, I have no faith that it will. Still, this has people running around and fighting, and David Finch’s art has plenty of drama to it – he’s come a long way since the days when they started pushing him as a major artist, though he’s still clearly in the shadow of Marc Silvestri’s influence.
I quite like it. It’s just that, if I’m being honest with myself, I don’t truly believe it’s going anywhere. Go on, prove me wrong. Please.
why the hell is he glittery?
Because Robert Pattinson, is why. Because commitment to copyright, or trademark, or something.
Repositioning CloDag OH GOD WHAT DID I JUST TYPE as a (trailer voice) Dark Fantasy vehicle in the Twilight model would seem like a good, if bad, idea…assuming they ever want to make a movie out of Kids What Take Drugs And Get Superpowers. Which you KNOW they do.
“it has him taking the surname Wagner at the same time”
!!!!!for GOD’S SAKE.
Changing the way he meets Prof. Xavier doesn’t sound so bad – even in 197whatever, The Germans had largely abandoned chasing people down with flaming torches and pitchforks. Bay City Rollers aside.
And the Catholic thing? Kurt’s found as a baby, right? Easy: rosary in the basket. BOOM.
Still and all, some stuff worked fine first time. Puddings can be overegged.
hmm…Catholicism…eggs…Doctor Who…It’s Gluttoning Time!
//\Oo/\\
Cloak and Dagger haven’t been in oblivion; they were fairly prominent supporting characters in Runaways.
Oh wait…
X-Factor’s been less-than-satisfying for about ten issues now. I think David needs to tamp down the comic tone somewhat–it’s hard to take any of the plot developments seriously, even when they’re meant to be serious.
If the space bullet has been traveling at the speed of light (or a significant portion thereof) time would have been passing at a different rate for Kitty. Thus the months that have passed on earth since the firing of the bullet would have been mere moments from Kitty’s perspective. Was this Fraction’s intent? Well, possibly, but he certainly didn’t address it in the issue.
Except Fraction made it pretty clear that Kitty is still able to react to events outside of the bullet in real time (like when she almost hit that planet in the backup strip, and phased again at the last second, because Fraction didn’t bother to read SWORD or Astonishing X-Men in order to learn that his set up makes no sense on any rational level), so I don’t think we can take time dilation as a fair excuse.
If he desperatly wanted Kitty Pryde back in his book, and was willing to do something that makes no sense anyway, why not just save us all the two months of idiocy and have Magik deus ex machina it all away?
That back up strip in Uncanny confused me a bit. Were they saying that they had 5 years notice before the bullet went through the planet? Even if their years (cycles is sci-fi speak for years, right?) are shorter than ours, that still puts the Whedon storyline a lot further back than I thought it was.
I think “cycles” meant “days” in context
You mean Necrosha JUST ended? All the other books seemed to be done with all this awhie ago.
You’re right that it was really an X-Force storyline that the other books used as a backdrop, but geez, what a mess that was.
Oh. That’s a pretty short amount of time to start a fruit ration distribution system.
I’m pretty sure Kitty was always phased (no one on the planet could tell) and cycles meant years. A lot happened that couldn’t have happened in days. As a story it’s not a bad Twilight Zone tale. In continuity it makes zero sense. Kitty can’t have been gone five years, I’m pretty sure she couldn’t reach another planet no matter how fast she was going and space is so big that going on a straight line from Earth into another inhabited planet is pretty much impossible. Suspension of disbelief is fine but if you’re going to tell science fiction stories you should get the science right.
A year, or cycle, corresponds only to the amount of time it takes for the planet to revolve around its sun. It wouldn’t necessarily be equivalent to an Earth year.
All the back-up did was make me wonder if Magneto’s going to wind up on trial for genocide if/when the non-phased hunk of space-rubbish smacks into the next inhabited planet.
X-Force: Kyle and Yost kill off another one of the X-Kids. Must be Tuesday.
Yes, but cycle is science fiction speak for about a year and in the story it’s written to be more time than makes sense for Kitty and the bullet.
Anyone read the newest issue of Amazing Spider-Man? It basically rips off the opening of the Onslaught storyline, with Spidey finding Juggernaut, who had just been hit hard enough to send him flying miles through the air, after he crash lands in Central Park.
I doubt it has anything to do with Onslaught, but just seeing that scene repeated made me shudder.
And to call the X-Force art murky is a gross understatement. Most pages were flat out incomprehensible, just big swatches of black with splashes of red in them. And the golden ghost of Thunderbird rising to Heaven was cheesy and dumb even by X-book standards.
In all fairness to whedon, shadowcat did say several times that the metal was weird. I assumed this was the excuse for why she wouldnt have starved to death and it was somehow sustaining her
On Magneto being able to grab the bullet. I haven’t read the issue yet, I just read the previous issue, but didn’t Scott and Emma say he had been up there for longer than 24 hours? Yes, it is still extremely far-fetched but if this is something that took Magneto quite a while to accomplish at great physical exertion I’m willing to give Fraction a pass.
” (…) but has to be dealt with in order to get Kitty back into circulation.”
I find this very frustrating as a reader: the x-office or Fraction (?) needing something to happen without having an actual half-decent story to tell about it. Shouldn’t a story be ‘story-driven’?
I enjoyed 2nd coming. But I hope they realize this is strike three. Hopefully they don’t strike out.
Well, sometimes a previous story is just a roadblock that needs to be eliminated in order to tell the story that you really want to do, and overturning it is never going to make a satisfying story in its own right. In those situations, you’re best just charging through it with guns blazing rather than wasting six months trying to wring a decent story out of it.
I find this very frustrating as a reader: the x-office or Fraction (?) needing something to happen without having an actual half-decent story to tell about it. Shouldn’t a story be ’story-driven’?
Exactly. At the conclusion of Giant-Size Astonishing, I thought this was a set-up for a lengthy outer-space story where Kitty is found alive on another planet, and this revelation is a major plot-point for solving whatever crisis was impending.
If I were a writer (and I’m not), I’d allow Kitty to develop some sort of relative density aspect to her phasing powers so that when the bullet passes through the next planet she can use the “drag” to allow the bullet to pass through the planet while leaving her behind. This would be told in a flashback.
In fact, given that her best friend Rachel is busy running around with the New Starjammers, that could have been tied together with Rachel sensing her extrication and bringing the Starjammers to the rescue. The Starjammers arrive on the planet and resolve some kind of crisis with Kitty and Rachel being key to the resolution.
Sounds like a perfect 4-5 issue New Starjammers mini to me.
Or an alternative, the New Starjammers arrive on a planet that is threatened by the bullet; Rachel senses Kitty inside, and they work together to concoct the relative density scheme I proposed above. Havok and Polaris deflect the bullet into a star.
See, story driven ideas.
I think the Nightcrawler Origin special was a “Second Coming” tie-in because they’re going to kill off Nightcrawler, at least I think they are.
In the Second Coming preview story that Mike Carey wrote Wolverine referred to the dead X-Man as a friend, which limits the possibilities to Nightcrawler, Storm, Colossus, Kitty, Rogue, Psylocke, Havok and maybe Beast. Colossus & Psylocke both died and came back recently. Kitty just came back. Storm is a Black Panther character now. Rogue is the main Legacy character. Havok’s in space. And Beast is a maybe.
They haven’t done anything interesting with Kurt in years, and they gave him a whole page to doubt whether Hope is important, so he can suddenly realize she is and die protecting her.
At least that’s my opinion.
Paul: I just had a discussion about that on another fan site (uncannyxmen.net); specifically with Inferno. Everyone knew that a resolution to the Scott-Maddie-Jean mess was necessary; X-Factor was getting mired into a soapy trap at the time. But Inferno was so goal driven, that the multiple elements never meshed very well. Really, they should have had Maddie’s corruption more directly related to her clone status and to Sinister, and it should have had clearer parallels to the corruption of Phoenix. The whole demons and limbo was an awkward fit, and was really only there to tell Magik’s story.
I guess this is the opposite problem; goal-oriented storytelling can be (1) abrupt and unconnected to any good stories, or (2) long, and convoluted and containing lots of unrelated components that are present trying to justify the inclusion of this or that goal in this story.
Oh, and is Kitty in the exact same predicament she was after the Mutant Massacre? Will they have to go to Dr. Doom again to heal/cure her?
When I opened this month’s issue of “X-Factor”, for a moment I thought I’d missed an issue somewhere.
@–D:
Rachel’s no longer with the Starjammers – Ch’od & Raza were by themselves in Realm of Kings: Imperial Guard, and said that R, Havok & Polaris were “on Terra” (or, at least, on their way back to Earth since they haven’t popped up yet).
Presumably, the X-Office were only prepared to loan them out for War of Kings and not one moment longer.
@Reboot: Be that as it may, I think my idea for a story makes narrative sense, plays well off the powers, history and personality of the characters, and is better than “Magneto solves it all with a (strenuous) wave of his hand.”
I was just going to chime in that I always thought Rachel should have been the one to rescue Kitty, seeing as she was in space already and had the appropriate powers to do something about it. Also, would be nice echo of Kitty “rescuing” Rachel from Bogan or whatever was happening there. So yes, I echo D’s sentiment!
(Or could have just used Magik).
The thing is, I feel Kitty will have just returned only to be shuffled into the cast of thousands that is Uncanny X-Men. I love it when Carey gets to write characters in X-Men Legacy: they seem to get development and nice “moments”. The bit he wrote with Psylocke about the sword and the butterfly in “how to draw comics the marvel way” was the best character moment for her I’ve seen in, well, years.
I sometimes wonder how I would feel as a new reader approaching Uncanny X-Men. I’d seriously have no idea who anyone was or their general relationships, beyond maybe Scott, Emma and Beast.
Well, Kitty was going to come back eventually and, yes, the giant space bullet was a stupid idea. But just to play Devil’s advocate, if Fraction was looking for a way to get the X-Men trusting Magneto, having him bring the bullet back to Earth is a fairly decent solution that serves a larger story. At very least, it’s quite a bit higher profile than a storyline where Rachel rescues her.
Granted, Kitty is a character who could stand to be on the shelf for a while. And I say that as a fan of her from her Excalibur days.
It seems like far too much is happening for the use of “cycles” in the backup strip in Uncanny to mean days, and in order for the planet in question to have years short enough for five of them to have passed since Kitty’s departure, wouldn’t it have to be too close to its sun to support life? I think it makes the most sense to assume “cycle” means “lunar cycle”; or, in other words, “month.” (Of course, this being an alien planet, it could easily mean “season” or “financial period” or “length of time from one season of The Amazing Race to the next” or anything the writer wants it to mean – the whole point of using words like “cycle” in sci-fi is that you don’t have to tell the reader exactly how long it is).
And I’m really not looking forward to the inevitable story where some writer takes it upon himself to explain why Magneto was able to reach Kitty’s bullet after it had already passed another inhabited planet (without the backup story, you could at least mumble something about it slowing down to sub-light speed as it passed through Earth’s gravity well) without having to extend the range of Magneto’s powers to other solar systems (wasn’t he specifically limited by Earth’s magnetic field in the past?). My bet for how they’ll do it is to say the bullet had entered an orbital path and he caught her on the next pass; “random wormhole” and “intervention by cosmic entity” are also good options, with “went off one side of the universe and came back from the other like Pac Man” being a longshot.
with “went off one side of the universe and came back from the other like Pac Man” being a longshot.
Hahaha!
Not a lot of substance, but it needed to be said.
Bad end to a bad plot device. Since they weren’t about to farm the resolution out to one of the cosmic titles that could have actually done so, they cut bait the best they could.
I think the hand-wavey explanation will probably be something like “as long as Kitty is phased her metabolism slows to a crawl, and she was fully phased for the entirety of her time in the bullet.” That works.
At the end of Astonishing, didn’t they say Kitty had “fused” with the bullet (rather than just sitting inside it and continually phasing it)? I assume that “being part alien bullet” is all the explanation we’re going to get on why she didn’t quickly die of natural causes.
“went off one side of the universe and came back from the other like Pac Man”
If I’m remembering my astrophysics coffee table books right, this may actually be how it works, as the universe could be (kind of) spherical. Of course the universe won’t exist long enough to ever travel that distance, but still…
Hey Paul, Cloak and Dagger ARE mutants. It was probably a sales-boost stunt, but they were revealed as mutants in the late 80s — their 1988 series even bears an introduction to the title, on the cover of every issue, “The Mutant Misadventures of…”
I believe they said that the experimental drugs taken by Tyrone and Tandy unleashed their mutant abilities.
You might want to correct that; They’ve been mutants for over 20 years….
I agree with D, it would have been nice to have the Starjammers rescue her (personally I would have liked to see the FF involved and a collaboration between Fraction and Hickman, this would have doubled the amount of pages used for the story).
But, like Paul said, at least only one issue was used, which makes me think that Kitty needed to be back for 2nd coming, which makes me think she’s the one scheduled to die (oh, the irony).
Regarding 2nd coming, I believe the conclusion can be very straightforward now that Phoenix/Hope is back. Phoenix has the power to decide over the viability of a species, if I remember correctly. So either the mutants are judged to be unworthy to continue as a species (wich won’t happen) or the effects of Wanda’s spell are simply reversed.
@Billy Bill
I think you’re correct: the experimental drugs unleashed Cloak and Dagger’s abilities. I also seem to remember that the only reason they survived was because of them being mutants (other subjects died after administering the drug).
There was an attempt in the late 1980s to boost Cloak & Dagger’s sales by claiming that they were actually mutants, but that retcon was reversed years ago. They’re not mutants – a point which this week’s one-shot goes out of its way to stress.
I stand corrected, thanks for the update.
“At the end of Astonishing, didn’t they say Kitty had “fused” with the bullet (rather than just sitting inside it and continually phasing it)? I assume that “being part alien bullet” is all the explanation we’re going to get on why she didn’t quickly die of natural causes.”
Yes, yes, and– wasn’t the alien metal somehow “incompatible” with Colossus? So howzabout Kitty’s currently available two states are “phased” and “Colossus-repellant metallic”? So they can no longer touch each other flesh-to-flesh? Re-chastened love! Endless longing! Twilight-y pathos!