Amazing X-Men vol 3 – “Once and Future Juggernaut”
(NB: This volume also covers the Axis tie-in and Annual #1, but we’ve covered them separately.)
As Secret Wars looms, and the second-tier X-Men books find themselves with an arc to kill before they get there, filler mounts. Chris Yost isn’t even writing one of the stand-in Battleworld X-books, but here he is with “Once and Future Juggernaut”.
But for whatever reason – perhaps he’s carrying out an editorial remit, perhaps he just wanted to set something up for future writers to use – there’s actually a point to this one. It’s an exercise in rehabbing (and re-setting) the Juggernaut, and to a lesser extent Colossus.
There’s a problem with the whole premise of the Juggernaut, which is that his powers aren’t a great fit for his role in the story. According to his powers, he’s literally unstoppable – that’s what makes him more than just a really big strong guy. And it’s a lovely idea; you’ve got this character whose powers are defined as an absolute, who literally can’t be stopped, and who qualifies as an outright force of nature, but whose ambitions are always ultimately too bitter or petty to live up to it.
But he’s a villain. And the function of villains in superhero comics is to lose. And the function of recurring villains is to lose recurrently. And if this goes on long enough, the mystique is lost, because at some point his eminently demonstrable stoppability becomes too hard to ignore. So while Yost is pretty shamelessly trying to hit the reset button on the Juggernaut here, his task is harder than it seems. He doesn’t just want to restore the Juggernaut to having the old status quo on paper; he wants to make the Juggernaut function in the way he used to.
The Ruby of Cyttorak inexplicably reappears in its old temple Somewhere In Southeast Asia (for reasons of continuity and sliding timeline, we don’t use the word “Korea” any more), and potential hosts are immediately drawn to it. Naturally enough, that includes Colossus, who promptly alerts the X-Men. But Storm decides that Colossus should stay at home, because he’s been written as a perennial screw-up for years and it’s probably best to keep him away from the mind-altering power gem that messed him up before. So the X-Men go off without him, and after a bit of sulking he enlists Pixie to teleport him along to help.
Naturally he arrives just in time to help with the other bozos who are after the gem, along with Cain Marko, who’s there for pretty much the same reason. The obligatory misunderstanding leaves Cain and Peter to waste time fighting each other while the Living Monolith, of all people, gets the gem and briefly becomes the Juggernaut, until Cyttorak is persuaded to give the power back to Cain instead. Officially this seems to be the end of the story – what follows is notionally the epilogue – but you wouldn’t guess if it wasn’t signposted. The re-Juggernauted Cain is now stronger than ever, immune to telepathic attack (so that old chestnut is out of the window), and very, very angry that Scott killed his brother. Naturally, Colossus gets to fight a heroic rearguard action to stave him off for a few pages and complete his own redemption, but the revamped Juggernaut is presumably coming for Cyclops sooner or later. When some future writer gets round to it.
So, yes, something vaguely important does happen as a result of this story. And in many other ways it reads strangely like six issues of a longer, ongoing series, as well as being refreshingly keen to find something for all the characters to do. There’s a minor subplot, for example, about Nightcrawler inviting Scarlet Witch to teach a guest class at the school and getting backlash from the likes of Northstar; this doesn’t really go anywhere in terms of this story, but it’s decent enough in terms of giving those characters something to do beyond stand around in the crowd. The death of Wolverine is used as a springboard in creative ways, by presenting him as the person in charge who had the most faith in Colossus, and by having Colossus try to emulate him by dragooning a teenage girl (Pixie) into serving as his sidekick for the day.
Yost also has some interesting ideas about what Cyttorak is supposed to be getting out of this whole deal. Initially the story simply indicates that he wants to be worshipped, and that the function of the Juggernaut is simply to impress people. This in itself is a viable starting point, since for the reasons I’ve already pointed out, the Juggernaut has, over time, wound up under-impressing. The epilogue tweaks it a bit further, suggesting that in some sense he loves humanity and the Juggernaut is his clumsy, inhuman effort to reach out to it. There’s something quite intriguing about the notion of the Juggernaut as a demon’s botched olive branch.
On the other hand, there are some oddball creative choices. The catalogue of characters who are drawn to the temple by Cyttorak’s gem are a motley crew indeed. Crossbones? Man-Killer? Jinn, an obscure villain from Yost’s largely unremembered Psylocke miniseries? These are pretty lowly villains, even if Yost does at least work hard to give them individual agendas. (Crossbones, for example, is just planning to sell the gem, and has no interest in being the Juggernaut at all.) Perhaps that’s the idea – that part of Cyttorak’s problem is that he’s created this wonderful magical object but can only ever seem to summon the bozo squad – but it sits oddly with the Living Monolith’s role and it never really comes to the fore.
The Living Monolith’s role is also curious. He hasn’t been seen in years – not since the Twelve crossover, if I recall – and doesn’t get much set-up here, despite his major role as the Temporary Juggernaut. Then, everyone responds to him by refusing to take him seriously and having a nice chat instead. This is obviously intended as a comic anticlimax, and I think the idea is that the Juggernaut is left a bit pointless without somebody to fight, but without establishing much about Monolith to start with, it doesn’t quite work.
Jorge Fornes’ art has its strengths; he’s not bad on emotion, and there’s sometimes a rather sad and soulful quality to his characters. He’s pretty good with location design. But the sense of scale and dynamism you’d want for a Juggernaut story isn’t quite there. He can tell a story, but it isn’t as polished as you’d hope.
Still, on the whole this winds up being pretty decent. It’s not the greatest plot in history, but it does have a lot of interesting little ideas as it goes along, and a bit of life and distinctiveness in its cast. And if somebody runs with it, it may even achieve (for a while) its goal of restoring the Juggernaut’s aura of invincibility.
I like the idea of rehabbing Colossus into a viable superhero again, and Juggernaut into a usable (sporadically) villain. The 90s and 00s were not good to those characters.
I was a little unclear what exactly happened to Juggernaut at the end, if he fell into the ocean or a volcano or what, but didn’t seem like anything that would reasonably slow him down for as long as the X-Men seemed to think it would. (But then, Spider-Man took him out of commission for a good long time with wet concrete, so…)
Been reading your articles for awhile, and this is perhaps the most positive x-axis review ive read.
And of course, Korea is not in Southeast Asia. It’s not just glossing over continuity; it’s an outright retcon.
Presumably it became Southeast Asia when the sliding scale moved Cain Marko’s military service into Vietnam. At this point they can’t slide it any further (there aren’t many jungles in Kuwait and Iraq), so the decision to make it more generic is probably for the best.
You raise an interesting point here: the story itself does little to set-up the Living Monolith’s motivations or status, but for someone who remembers the Monolith from waaaaay back in the day (I have my copy of the RETURN OF THE LIVING MONOLITH GN just a couple feet away as I write this), it made perfect sense to me. Anyone who hasn’t at least read RETURN OF THE LIVING MONOLITH is probably lost, to say nothing of whatever the fuck happened in THE TWELVE (which was the story that first made me stop reading the X-Men after over a decade of reading the X-Men). Failing to set up a character whose last significant appearances were 15 and 30 years ago, respectively, is playing to the old-timers, and because of that’s its easy for readers like me to overlook the lack of set-up.
there aren’t many jungles in Kuwait and Iraq
I might be wrong, but I don’t think there are any jungles in Korea either. Dense forest, yes, but not jungle or rainforest.
It’s funny, I put 2 and 2 together and it came to be as a bit of a shock as I was reading this that Cain’s origin was originally placed in Korea not because Vietnam was too recent, but because the Vietnam War had not happened when the story was written!
Anyhow, his origin is not innately tied to place; it’s tied to war. Writers can move it around to suit their needs. Perhaps Cyttorak can be in the Falkland Islands for the next retelling.
Ha, the Falklands. Anyone else thinking of Norse Dave from ‘No Heroics?’
“Somewhere In Southeast Asia (for reasons of continuity and sliding timeline, we don’t use the word “Korea” any more)”
Korea is plain old East Asia, not Southeast Asia.
I think the storyline lost me a bit when the response to “the Living Monolith has the power of the Juggernaut!” was “let’s lie down on the grass and discuss our ennui.” On the one hand, I could really see that working for me if the absurdity of the moment was played up a little more. On the other hand, they’re superheroes and there’s a megapowerful, murderous supervillain running amok, and it would it would behoove them to at least pretend that they’re interested.
Not one of the more interesting stories I’ve read in the past few years, but if it were filler, then it’s some of the best filler I’ve read in the past few years. I hope future writers address the new “no helmet necessary” addition to the Juggernaut.
I’m still not a big fan of Yost’s wannabe-Whedon snark or Kurt being depicted as not having two brain cells to rub together, but I did very much like that the Juggernaut’s been put back to unstoppable status without having his previous character development completely trashed. The X-Books have been hurting for decent villains for a while, and I think there’s potential in Cain being against the X-Men again for semi-sympathetic reasons.
I still think James Tynion VI’s one-shot in this volume was the best story this title has produced, though.
I actually enjoyed this arc, and I will be a bit disappointing that Amazing will be disappearing just when Yost was finding his feet with this grouping of X-Men. One thing I wish Yost would stop with though is all the adult X-Men’s “Oh Rockslide we hope you die” schtick. It was bad enough in the Wendigo arc, but if he’s that annoying why not just replace him with Armor or Warpath or M or Frenzy or any of the other dozen or so mutant Tanks with super strength.
Crossbones used to be one of Captain America’s most formidable foes.
What happened?
Wait.
The Twelve was 15 years ago?
I’ve been not excited about the X-Men for 15 years now.
I keep thinking that Morisson and Whedon’s respective runs were like 2 years ago and Avengers vs X-Men just wrapped up but there was a lot of uninteresting comics in between weren’t there?
What happened?
Bendis happened.
In my opinion, about the time of the twelve is when Cyclops started getting interesting and developed as a character
I had a good laugh when the X-Men’s response to the Living Juggerlith was to just take a break and sit by the fire. It was like they finally realized the sheer absurdity of everything, and were refusing to play the usual “hit him very hard” game while they came up with a new solution. It was made even more absurd by having the -former- Juggernaut there to recap how they usually beat him in the past. And then to have the Living Mononaut stop and go “Hey, why is no one fighting me?” when he realizes they don’t even give a shit… It was a nice change of pace.
But the X-personalities all seemed a little too over-the-top and abrasive, as though their voices were exaggerated a little more than necessary. But if this gets Piotr over his martyrdom thing, all the better.
It’s like some of the worst meta ever!
@chris.
The whedon run happened. 2 years turned into like 5 years and the entire line sat around waiting for it while doing its best to ignore HoM. Carey kind of got it back on track but once they sent Hope into the time stream we basically sat around waiting for things to finally finish. Which meant 2007-2012 or whatever the gap between messiah complex and AvX was.
Then Bendis happened. Good lord….
No wonder I’ve been enjoying Hickman’s Avengers. Look at what it’s up against. Hickman building to the end of the universe. Bendis having people sit around and discuss things at the dinner table.
That’s right! Whedon wrote the central “This is the one that really counts” X-Men book while the others were treated as the ancillary spin-off books, despite being 40 and 12 years old…. and his three stories took 5 years to tell. Which ground everything to a halt.
And then the rest of the stuff you said, which really involved waiting for Cable and Hope. Then waiting for Hope and Generation Hope.
Then….. the X-Men comics really burned up its own potential for the past decade and a half.
And to be honest, I blame the movies too to an extent, although Morrison did his best…. the greatest impression I got from his comics was less “this is high concept” and more “this is so insular and he is writing what he sees as THE LAST X-MEN STORY”.
Now if I was professional comic book writer, and I’m not…. I’d do the opposite of Morrison. While I’d tie up my own loose ends from my overall story arc as I envision it…. I’d write a cliffhanger to challenge the next writer.
I’d probably end up disappointing as the next writer would probably cheat and retcon one of the threats to be five feet further back….
But compared to Bendis Avengers AND Bendis X-Men, both freshly available to compare to, Hickman Avengers is a breath of fresh air.
But I still miss the Masters of Evil, Ultron, and some variation in the villains.
Although I wondered why since the end of the first chapter or so…. why not get the High Evolutionary or another of their cosmic buddies to help them evacuate the planet, build a replacement somewhere else, and detonate the original earth?
That would presumably… save the universe from the incursions?
The only plot hole is that Reed and Tony didn’t think of it and I did.
I mean, Reed and Dr Strange have both walked on artificial duplicates of earth.
Gah
“and his three stories took 5 years to tell”
Hey, to be fair, it was four stories 😉
“and more “this is so insular and he is writing what he sees as THE LAST X-MEN STORY”.”
Doesn’t he write all of his titles like that?
“No wonder I’ve been enjoying Hickman’s Avengers. Look at what it’s up against. Hickman building to the end of the universe. Bendis having people sit around and discuss things at the dinner table.”
Although as we’ve been discussing in another review thread on the site lately, neither Bendis’ nor Hickman’s Avengers make for particularly good Avengers stories. There’s a lot of standing around and talking – the only difference is the topic of conversation (dinner versus the end of the universe). Opposite ends of the scale, but still a lot of talking and not a lot of superheroing.
Morrison wrote his JLA to complement Mark Waid’s vision for the book.
And it left eggs which he hatched in later DC works that popped out as Final Crisis, JLA Classified, Batman and Seven Soldiers.
His Batman stuff also fit into others’ serial work.
Although we have had a devil of time figuring out what makes an Avengers story an Avengers story…. and still haven’t really nailed the defintion, Hyperion and Thor taking a science field trip to the Savage Land for science is not actually it.
Also, the “worlds are ending we are all going to die” is the opposite tone of an Avengers story.
Usually in those the Avengers stop the Grim Reaper or the Masters of Evil or Modred or Morgan le Fey or Ultron or Korvac.
Under Hickman’s reign, Captain America gathered a group of Avengers who unquestioningly attacked an unarmored, fairly helpless Iron Man, pummeled him a bit, judged him, and then Captain America magically shot forward in time for three issues while the setting narrated at him incomprehensibly.
The heck kind of Avengers story is that?
To be fair, if you accept Civil War as an Avengers story, it’s… that kind? Without the setting narrating part, which is the kind of Avengers story that Age of Ultron was.
Age of Ultron just blurs together as murdering robots and Wolverine vs Giant Man
Which BTW, if it weren’t for the “Wolverine is unvincible” thing that we’ve been having for about 14 years now, there’s no way Giant Man would have been murdered so casually by a short stumpy dude with 6 knives.
But Age of Ultron is a Bendis Avengers story so I… conveniently don’t count it either….
I mean. Seriously. The time gem just pulls Captain America to a new setting and then the character gets exposition launched at him that he doesn’t get and I barely care about anymore, and then he gets sent back in time. This takes how many issues?
Shouldn’t this be in his own comic book while in the pages of the Avengers some actual evil shows up and then the team combats it?
Wasnt that the premise of Avengers Assemble? I never read it. Was it/is it still going? If they’re going to have a dozen titles I’m fine with Hickman focussing on his story. I loved Uncanny Avengers up till Axis. It had an old school feel to it. Axis just felt like Remender had moved on but was still obligated to fill pages.
And while I’m okay with Wolverine beating Giant Man, it’s tiring that Bendis uses Wolverine as nothing more than the “someone’s a problem? Then just kill ’em”. It wasn’t original nor compelling plotting.
I don’t know — I happen to think people talking is more interesting than another boring fight against some guy with superpowers. Sure, Bendis and Hickman perhaps could execute better, but I would always rather watch characters talking at the dinner table than see them narrating at me about the way they focus their energy blasts. When did comics fans get so conservative?
Because this is Avengers. Like JLA, the whole point is to see them have big fun exciting fights against other people with superpowers. Seeing them have breakfast/lunch/dinner/tea together every once in a while might be fun, but more than that? No thanks.
“When did comics fans get so conservative?”
When did the first retcon happen?
I’m all for the character moments and small talk. These moments elevate something from good to great. But balanced correctly. Sitting around talking about saving the world and not actually saving the world is like reading the comic version of your friend who is always talking about weight loss and diet fads while not actually losing any weight.
I thought the Uncanny X-Men issue featuring Cyclops recently handled the “sitting around talking about saving the world” issue in an interesting way–characters were finally calling Scott out on calling for a mutant revolution that never happened. But the moment wasn’t as effective as it could have been because it seemed like a swerve instead of something Bendis had been building towards. After all, as late as the last story arc, characters were accusing Cyclops of ruining everything with his non-existent revolution.
I suppose standing around and talking is preferable to the terrible fights (standing around shooting energy blasts) that we saw in the 90s. I just think back to the 70s and 80s (like Claremont X-Men) when there was actual choreography and strategy to the fight scenes, and not just a bunch of action figures bashing into each other.
Ideally, I’d like some of everything – some character moments, some big ideas, and some actual superheroing (punching and zapping). Back in the day, you’d get some of all of that in each issue. In this decompressed era, it seems like you can only get one thing at a time – 50 issues of talking from Bendis, or 77 issues of big ideas from Hickman.
Uncanny Avengers felt old school like that to me. (Until axis – and without getting in to the M word speech)
Writers these days don’t write fight scenes. 3 double page spreads with no dialogue is not an action scene.
Uncanny Avengers felt old school until the 20 issue time travel Kang Apocalypse twins story….
but it still had old school ideas told well. The story just would not end.