Amazing X-Men vol 2 – “World War Wendigo”
When last I reviewed Amazing X-Men, in May, it was to cover the first issue collected in this volume – a fill-in story in which the cast of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends hunt a goat – and I wondered what on earth a book which had only just been launched with great fanfare was doing running such a throwaway thing.
But that story at least had a sense of gleeful nonsense going for it. The five-part “World War Wendigo”, by contrast, is about as mediocre as multi-part X-Men stories get.
Sure, Craig Kyle and Chris Yost have been doing this a while, and they can usually be relied upon to produce something that hangs together. But what we have here is an undistinguished five parter in which the X-Men and Alpha Flight team up to stop a Wendigo outbreak. The problem isn’t that it’s an unimportant story; there’s nothing wrong with doing some stories from time to time where the X-Men just show up and do some superheroing. It’s just a rather flat and uninspired affair which, at a push, had enough good ideas to fill two issues, maybe three, and drags alarmingly when extended to five.
The book has a superficially cute idea as its central premise – if the Wendigo curse transforms people who eat human flesh into monsters, what happens if someone contaminates a meat-packing plant?
Well, according to this story, you get a whole load of Wendigos. I’m fairly sure that’s actually a continuity error, and that the established ground rules are that there’s only one Wendigo at a time, so the existing one gets cured every time someone else gets cursed. Still, let’s let that one slide, since at least this story is pretty clear on its own terms about how the outbreak works.
But where do you go with that idea next? Once you’ve done the contamination – which is on page two of the first chapter – then, well, you’ve got an awful lot of Wendigos running around. But since Wendigos are basically mindless, that leaves you stuck with the structure of a zombie apocalypse story. So the story has to keep escalating the problem with the Wendigos spreading, until finally everything gets sorted out on the mystical scale and we can all go home.
And this doesn’t really work, for a whole bunch of reasons. Like I say, the story requires the curse to spread. But the Wendigo curse comes from eating human flesh; that’s the whole point of the “contaminated meat” angle. So how does it spread? The story answers this, but by introducing a completely arbitrary new rule that everyone the Wendigos scratch or bite gets turned into a Wendigo too. This is a departure from continuity too, but a more problematic one – it’s an import from the zombie plot (in a PG form), it has nothing to do with the basic Wendigo concept, and it undermines the need for the meat-packing angle in the first place.
Okay, turning Wolverine into a Wendigo kind of works, though the story doesn’t do much with it, and he ends up being shunted aside in the final chapter. And there’s a certain dumb appeal in the idea that the horde of Wendigos can’t cross the border over to the US, at least until the curse gets stronger. I mean, it’s stupid too, because the actual mythology is Algonquian and actually straddled the border… but at least it fits with Marvel Universe ground rules.
But other than that, you’ve got a rather generic subplot in which Northstar helps rescue a little girl, and a last-act trip to the mystical scale to take on the Great Beasts and solve the problem. And the Great Beasts are just not very interesting, at least when they’re stripped down to random magic giants, as they are here.
This is the fundamental defect. There’s no real content to any of this. The Wendigo is a genuine myth. What’s the myth about? Well, it’s a cautionary tale about the horrors that will befall you if you eat human flesh. More abstractly, it’s saying that there are certain lines you do not cross, no matter how desperate you may be – that if your choice is to eat human flesh or die, the right choice is to die. Always. And if you violate the natural order in this way, terrible consequences ensue.
That’s the content that’s supposed to underpin the Wendigo story. So if you do a story where a whole load of people become Wendigos through accidentally eating human flesh, though no fault of their own… well, you’ve missed the point. For the concept to function, they need to be at fault, or at least arguably so. They can be people who made the wrong choice faced with an impossible dilemma, but there has to be some fault involved.
It might work if it was some sort of consumerist satire, and you somehow made it about greed or fashion. (Contaminated foie gras, maybe?) Conceivably there might be a vegetarian angle, though a distinction between human flesh and other meat is kind of hardwired into the myth. Or if you want to go another route, maybe a story about somebody deliberately setting out to weaponise the myth; perhaps there’s something about appropriation in there. It’s not like any of this needs to be at the forefront. It just needs to be buried in there somewhere.
But if it’s just randomly infected people randomly infecting other random people, that’s not a Wendigo story. It’s a zombie story, but zombies have been done to death too, and even they need some kind of social or satirical angle to save themselves from just being retreads. There’s no angle here; it’s just the bare bones of a stock zombie story except with Wendigos and for five issues. And that’s not enough.
With this issue of Amazing, and the next issue of WatXM, I’m done with X-men for a while. After the super strong start of Marvel NOW! I’m afraid that once Axis is done all I’ve got left is Hickman’s Avengers. (Not that I’m complaining too much. There was more more in Marvel Now than I could afford. So it’s back issues time!)
It’s a shame that the X-Men title with the actual X-Men doing actual X-Men things is relegated to the C-List at best, behind the book about the time-displaced 60’s team, the book about Cyclops’ paramilitary farce of the X-Men, and the book about the Avengers with a few mutants thrown in because why not. Not sure how we got to this point….
The book of actual X-men doing actual X-men things has been 6 months of boring nonsense. Probably has something to do with that.
The Wendigo “horde” has been a thing since they had a bunch of Wendigos in Las Vegas during Jeph Loeb’s run on HULK. So . . . yeah, I think if your only, or most recent, exposure to the Wendigo is through that, you might be ruined.
If your only, most recent exposure to any comcept is the Jeph Loeb take on it, you’re definitely ruined.
Anyone miss Jason Aaron yet?
Yeeeeah, I’m a huge Alpha Flight fan, and a fan of Northstar in particular, and this story did absolutely nothing for me. Tonally, it was all over the map, the cast was bloated beyond reason, it missed what actually made the Wendigo scarey in the first place by turning it into a generic superhero brawl, Aurora was just horribly portrayed, the writing team opted to go for Whedon-wannabe quippy dialogue over character development 9 times out of 10, and the one attempt they did make at character development (Northstar and the kid) was actually regressive, as we’ve had multiple writers already do the “Northstar isn’t actually as self-centered as he seems” bit since he joined the X-Men. It’s just not new territory.
I still maintain that Yost is a decent writer, but man, there’s just something about his team-ups with Kyle that seem to show a lot more of their weaknesses than strengths.
Ah, well. Still looking forward to James Tynion IV’s horror outing next month.
Uncanny X-Men 139 scared the shit out of me when I was a kid. Byrne’s use of first-person POV as the creature stalked his prey in “Wendigo-vision” was creepy as hell. Several years later, the film “Predator” came out and did something similar. Makes me wonder if the director was a fan.
Yeah, these Wendigos are a far cry from the one in the Hulk/Sasquatch team-up story that actually scared the hell out of me at the time.
As someone who really enjoyed their New X-Men run, this was a real disappointment. It was nice to see Kyle/Yost writing Rockslide again though — they tend to write him with a more unique and likable than other writers, even if the characters were overall a little too quip-y.
This story reminded me a lot of the Australia-era Brood arc. It doesn’t compare well, but I think the reasons it falls from good to just OK tell us a lot about how Marvel works these days.
First, it’s too long. The story as is could probably be done in three issues, and it could also probably be improved by just hacking off the last two issues’ worth of spirit realm nonsense. If the curse doesn’t get changed, dealing with 10,000 naked Canadian curse refugees in northern Minnesota is an interesting enough finish. Presumably it’s a five-issue arc in order to get six issues into the collection.
Second, while the Brood arc (and all of vintage Claremont’s arc) was able to connect to what preceded and followed it, to be foreshadowed by that ship crashing into Havok and Polaris, and to engage in real, ongoing character development. This arc can’t do any of that, because this book is one of six (including solo books) that feature the X-Men of the Jean Grey School. Kyle and Yost have no control over any of these characters outside of this arc, and may not have any sense that they’ll be continuing in the medium and long term.
Third, editorial doesn’t seem to care about anything other than the arc as it’s happening right now, either. Why is Colossus suddenly back? Who cares? Certainly not any of the other characters in the story. Kyle and Yost wanted to use him, or somebody decided he should be back at the school, so here he is. This is of a piece with the Wendigo continuity errors — somebody wants to do this story in this way without bothering with the mechanisms of writing in an ongoing, shared universe. This seems to be the guiding principle at Marvel these days, once the needs of the films have been addressed. Pairs of characters randomly couple up, shift from team to team or motivation to motivation, power up, power down, etc. It’s what makes books like Daredevil (or Deadpool, Hawkeye, even bigger names like Thor) such a breath of fresh air. When things happen they’re story elements, not Wikipedia bullet points-to-be.
All that said, trimming the fat on this story would make it a pretty decent alternative to the Bendis X-Men approach if that’s what you wanted. This book could be done as something similar to Carey’s X-Men if done right; of course, the same could be said of the current adjectiveless X-Men book.
In other news, when did Alpha Flight come back?
CHAOS WAR
So, somewhere around the time Northstar joined the X-Men, the Beaubier siblings went from having three personalities between them to only having one, which Jean-Paul currently has custody of, right?
I don’t know where it fist popped up, but the thing about the Wendigo curse being contagious via bite was in a “Hulk and the Agents of SMASH” cartoon episode too, so it didn’t originate with this story. The episode guest-starred Wolverine and featured heroes getting turned into Wendigos and a “Wendigo King” who got more powerful as more people got infected (I’m pretty sure he was trapped in the spirit world trying to break into the physical world too, but I’m fuzzy on the details). I’m not saying the cartoon inspired this comic, but if it didn’t I guess that proves there’s only so many things you can do with the Wendigo.
I’m happy enough blaming Jeph Loeb for every bad comic.
Leave Jeph alone.
He’s only responsible for 24% of bad comic books.
So when can we expect a squeal to this titled “War of the Wendigos”?
“Anyone miss Jason Aaron yet?”
Nope. I stuck with his unfunny mugging for way too long the first time.
I’ve never got the Kyle/Yost love. They seem utterly generic.
And Cyclops mutant revolution is a great idea for a core book but Bendis isn’t really interested in writing about that topic.
Why is it whenever someone writes a bland X-book they always try to sell it as the “fun, big-action, superhero book?” as if that phrase is enough to count as a direction.
Colossus’ return is especially confusing. The last we saw him, he was a fugitive following the Phoenix Five action from AvX. Then he was a part of Cable’s X-Force team while he was hiding way. Now he’s just back and it’s like, “Oh hey Piotr, what’s up?”
@wwk5d I am expecting a War of the Wendigos promo before January 2015. Marvels to keep pumping out their summer 2015 promos.
And WOTW will lead into Marvel’s next crossover, Planet Wendigo.
“I’ve never got the Kyle/Yost love. They seem utterly generic.”
They’re hacks. When they took over New X-Men and pared down the cast, they basically did the classic Claremont-era team all over again. The personalities may have differed but the characters were either physically or thematically similar.
Surge/Cyclops (leader with unmanageable power requiring tech to keep under control)
Hellion/Jean (telekinetic, had a thing for the teammate with the claws)
X-23/Wolverine (the teammate with the claws)
Dust/Storm (foreign female who finds western culture a little strange. Sooraya insisted on being clothed from head to toe. Ororo didn’t understand why she needed to wear anything at all)
Rockslide/Colossus (strength)
Anole/Nightcrawler (agility)
Pixie/Kitty (spunky youngin’)
Mercury/Rogue (intimacy issues)
Of course readers liked this cast. It’s Claremont’s old cast with younger substitutes.
” The book of actual X-men doing actual X-men things has been 6 months of boring nonsense. Probably has something to do with that. ”
Even before that, the X-Men– or at least several of the long-running characters we know as the X-Men– were marginalized, in favor of a series of shake-ups with very specific casts and directions. Amazing X-Men was originally announced as the X-Men book starring the majority of the classic X-Men, because at the time, we had the Bendis books, Jason Aaron’s Wolverine and the X-Men (which was basically dominated by a cast of new fanfic OCs), and the Brian Wood all-female team (which, to be fair, could’ve easily fit into the role, were it not for several of the characters being poached for other books). Perhaps if Jason Aaron had stayed on the book past the first arc, it might’ve taken off and given the book and its cast more attention.
I vaguely recall a Red Hulk story written by Jeph Loeb where there was a Wendigo outbreak in Las Vegas, of all places. Perhaps that established the new Wendigo rules? I’m not sure if it predates the Hulk tv show, but he’d be heavily involved in the cartoon as well.
Honestly, as bad as Bendis is – I find Loeb’s work unreadable.
Third, editorial doesn’t seem to care about anything other than the arc as it’s happening right now, either. Why is Colossus suddenly back? Who cares? Certainly not any of the other characters in the story. Kyle and Yost wanted to use him, or somebody decided he should be back at the school, so here he is. This is of a piece with the Wendigo continuity errors — somebody wants to do this story in this way without bothering with the mechanisms of writing in an ongoing, shared universe. This seems to be the guiding principle at Marvel these days, once the needs of the films have been addressed. Pairs of characters randomly couple up, shift from team to team or motivation to motivation, power up, power down, etc. It’s what makes books like Daredevil (or Deadpool, Hawkeye, even bigger names like Thor) such a breath of fresh air. When things happen they’re story elements, not Wikipedia bullet points-to-be.
This ^^^ +1000.
At least in the X-Men team books, character development over time has given way to a sequence on unrelated adventure arcs. This may be a better way to write comics for a borad audience, but it alienates old-time readers like me, who preferred the soap-opera aspects of X-Men to the adventure comics like Avengers.
Surge/Cyclops (leader with unmanageable power requiring tech to keep under control)
Hellion/Jean (telekinetic, had a thing for the teammate with the claws)
X-23/Wolverine (the teammate with the claws)
Dust/Storm (foreign female who finds western culture a little strange. Sooraya insisted on being clothed from head to toe. Ororo didn’t understand why she needed to wear anything at all)
Rockslide/Colossus (strength)
Anole/Nightcrawler (agility)
Pixie/Kitty (spunky youngin’)
Mercury/Rogue (intimacy issues)
You know that Claremont team you describe never existed, right? Kitty Pryde and Jean Grey appeared together in exactly eight panels during CC’s first X-Men run (and Kitty wasn’t even a student at Xavier’s yet). Rogue joined the team years after Jean died, and they didn’t serve together until 1991, where CC wrote exactly three issues, and neither Kitty nor Kurt were on that team.
Honestly, I’m ok with a team set up that leans heavily towards archetypes (the strong guy, the tactician, the telekinetic, etc) if that means some decently choreographed fights. (Although that was sadly not the case for some of this arc.) A lot of writers nowadays have an approach to battles that reminds me of a five year old playing with action figures–just throw them at each other until you’re worn out.
“You know that Claremont team you describe never existed, right?”
You’re nitpicking. I’ve accused Kyle/Yost of Xeroxing the classic Claremont-era cast. Jean, Kitty and Rogue are all characters associated with that era even though they weren’t featured in the series at precisely the same time.
“A lot of writers nowadays have an approach to battles that reminds me of a five year old playing with action figures–just throw them at each other until you’re worn out.”
Amen. Add in a fantasy-sports fascination with rosters (“now Captain Marvel is a member of the Guardians!” “now Daredevil is a member of the Avengers!” without any follow-up, and climactic fight scenes that are basically choreography-free splash pages of carefully arranged action figures facing off, and you have Bendis writing at its worst.
Reminds me, I haven’t read any Avengers comics with Daredevil as a member, and I have a question perhaps someone could answer.
When Busiek was still writing Avengers, he had Daredevil make a cameo appearance wherein Daredevil explained why he’s not a team player. He identifies people by heartbeats and in a team-fight situation he’d be quite useless as it would be very difficult for him to discern friend from foe in the heat of battle (when he’s alone, he can just punch everyone).
Did Bendis or any other writer ever address this after sticking Daredevil on a team?
@wwk5d We are getting closer to your dream of a major Marvel crossover featuring Wendigo. Marvel released a promo for AOA’s return next summer (http://cdn.bleedingcool.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Age_of_Apocalypse_2015.jpg?9098e0). Spoilers, Logan is back 🙂
If Marvel ever does a Wendigo crossover Logan would have to part of it or it would not work.
@halapeno,
I may be nitpicking, but I think you’re overgeneralizing. You’ve identified a bunch of archetypes that are common to both K/Y and CC, but they’re also just common archetypes generally. The fact that they appear in both runs is no more significant than the fact that these archetypes appear in lots of comics generally.
But if you try to tell me that a particular set of archetypes was copied, well you’re factually wrong; the set of archetypes you’ve listed didn’t exist in Claremont’s run. He shuffled the deck and drew an assortment that varies every dozen issues or so. Yes, he used them all, but he never used them in the combination that you say K/Y used them (I never read most of K/Y’s comics, so I take your word for it that this lineup existed).
Furthermore, there are lots of archetypes that CC used that K/Y didn’t (to the best of my knowledge). The cosmic powered character (Phoenix, then Binary), the human supporting cast member (Stevie Hunter, Alletys Forester, Maddie Pryor), the reformed villain (Magneto), and so on.
Your attempt to find parallels leaves you glossing over crucial differences, and your take on the characters is too reductionist. For example, Colossus and Rockslide are nothing alike except “strong man.” Then, of course, Jean/Phoenix was way more than just a telekinetic with the hots for Logan (in fact, Jean’s “thing” for Logan was a late-era retcon. Logan, from early on, had a crush on Jean; but it was not reciprocated until the Classic X-Men reprints added bonus material and backup stories). There are, I’m sure, way more differences between these casts than I’m mentioning; but not being all that familiar with K/Y, I’ll stop there.
Nu-D, the K/Y NXM cast more closely resembles Claremont’s old set than any super team I’ve ever seen since. In any series. And you’re splitting hairs over the differences in personalities (even after I acknowledged those differences in my original post) and again you’re picking at the precise configuration of members and so forth.
So forget it. You win. They don’t resemble the Claremont classic cast in any way. God knows what I was thinking and I apologize for distracting you from whatever it was you were doing. Likely arranging the contents of your kitchen cupboards in alphabetical order.
So… Can anyone tell me what is happening next year that requires ads for every mega crossover ever to be announced as happening next year?
AOA is returning? Why? Haven’t they been to that well enough times already? And…wasn’t that whole universe destroyed in a crossover a tear or 2 ago?
Er, year or 2 ago…
You’re moving the goal posts. There’s a difference between “resemblance,” and “Xeroxing.” Sure there’s a resemblance on some level; but it’s not a knock off. Your claims that “It’s Claremont’s old cast with younger substitutes,” is overstating the case.
No Halapeno. Don’t concede, you’re right.
If you ignore all the differences in Kyle/Yost’s cast: personalities, power set, and cast members (Elixer, Prodigy, Emma Frost, Cyclops) then their cast is EXACTLY like Claremont’s.
Although, I’m not sure what you two are even disagreeing about. If you ignore the content of yours and Nu-D’s post, You’re essentially saying the same thing.
I was drawing parallels. Flagging up similarities. I thought that was clear. Yet for some reason Nu-D is reading my descriptions as shitty Official Handbook entries that don’t convey enough information about the characters…
“Jean/Phoenix was way more than just a telekinetic with the hots for Logan”
Yes, thank you, Nu-D, but those were not meant to be character summaries. If someone asked me to explain who Storm is in fifteen words or less, I would not write “Foreign chick with different clothing sensibilities.”
If someone asked me to explain who Storm is in fifteen words or less, I would not write “Foreign chick with different clothing sensibilities.”
Yet that’s exactly what you did. You can only say Storm and Sooraya play the same role in the cast if you reduce them to the broadest possible strokes.
It truly amazes me that you can’t comprehend the difference between “here’s how these two characters are similar” and “here’s what this character is all about.” For the last time, I was flagging up the similarities between the characters, not attempting to reduce them to just what I’d written.
You’re unbelievable. It’s not that you’re disagreeing with me. It’s that you’re trying to tell me what I actually meant by what I said. Who DOES that?
This board is so hostile lately.
Agreed, The original Matt. It’s a shame. It’s not like the internet is short on hostile discussion boards about the American comics industry.
Halapeno:
Since no one else answered you, I will. Daredevil was inducted into the Avengers at the tail end of the Bendis run, in the aftermath of FEAR ITSELF, by Luke Cage, in appreciation of the fact that DD saved his daughter’s (and Squirrel Girl, IIRC) life when the mansion was attacked. This was over Captain America’s objection, as Mark Waid covered in his early DD run, where Cap confronted Matt because of the whole Shadowland debacle. (They’ve made up since then.) The point was not that DD wanted necessarily to be an Avengers but that Luke gave it to Matt out of sincere appreciation.
DD only served on a handful of Avengers missions, most notably during AvX, and was pretty useless. Interestingly, he actually got more usage out of Avengers membership in the pages of his own book, where he’s discovered that >ahem< membership has its privileges.
Thanks, Tim. Sounds like he was about as useful as Busiek figured he’d be, I guess.
Oh, and I have a patch for the thread. I’ve rewritten Nu-D’s argument removing all elements of him telling me things I already know, imposing his own meaning over my words, failure to grasp hyperbole, irrelevant nitpickery, over-literalness, and a hidebound notion as to what constitutes swiping (i.e. must be exact copying or it doesn’t count) Here it is:
Nu-D: “Halapeno, all you did was list off a bunch of superficial similarities between characters that I see as a string of minor coincidences, at best. Your list is far and away from being damning evidence that Kyle and Yost consciously swiped from Claremont. And even IF they used that group as their template, the differences between the characters were significant enough that the cast did not come off in any way as an imitation of Claremont’s old team, so your argument holds no water regardless of whatever the case was.”
Me: “Oh, shit. :(”
There. I’ve been owned. Let’s move on.
I don’t get what you’re upset about. I thought your point was wrong, I made an argument explaining why. I apologize if my tone appeared accusatory or aggressive. Usually, I think we have good discussions and often see eye-to-eye on this board. I’m not sure what turned this conversation sour.
Anyhow, we’ll move on.
Wendigo is a great little bronze-agey Hulk sparring partner of a character and Uncanny X-Men 139 was a great little throw away story that worked well because it played on the creepier mythological aspects.
It elevated the character by adding an almost 70s horror sensibility to the idea of a Wendigo.
You would therefore think that there should be some nice stories to be had out of the Claremont/Byrne take.
But you kind of have to throw up your hands when present day writers miss the mark so badly. There’s a recent-ish Wolverine mini or special by Ben Acker/Ben Blacker that treats the Wendigo as a noble beast or a wounded lion with Wolverine essentially setting it free at the conclusion of the story.
It’s not the fault of the writer who submits a story that needs a generic super strong monster and lands on Wendigo or a Mindless One or Super Adaptoid or what have you. He/She got it past the editor, everyone gets paid it’s a win.
The only problem that arises is that the further you head down that track the less the stories seem to matter. I’m not a fan of the current iteration of Havok (for instance) I figure I’ll wait a year and he’ll revert back to type.
If the editor doesn’t care, why should I ?