Uncanny Avengers vol 1 – “Counter-Evolutionary”
First of all, no, that’s not a typo. This is volume 1 – the second volume 1, even though it features a creative team that worked on the previous run. And if everything is getting a fresh #1 after Secret Wars, it will presumably be the only volume 1 of the second run, to be followed promptly by a third volume 1. This is confusing. I was tempted to call it volume 6 but (a) that’s not the title, and (b) volume 6 should logically be Axis, which wasn’t billed as an Uncanny Avengers collection at all.
Oh well. Bitching about the numbering helps me get through a paragraph before turning my attention to the more important point, which is that this book completely lost my attention somewhere along the line.
I keep genuinely forgetting that this volume of Uncanny Avengers is coming out. It shows up in my Comixology subscription and I think “oh yes, that”. And then I read it and realise that I can’t remember what happened in the previous issue, and I don’t really care either. And then it hits me again that I’ve just turned through half the pages and didn’t really take any of them in either.
So let’s read this arc again and see if it works any better in one go.
The book picks up after Axis, where Wanda and Pietro learned that they weren’t Magneto’s children after all. Rick Remender does his best to present this as a world-shaking revelation for them, though if you know their history, he’s really overplaying it a bit. “What if one day you awoke to discover your entire life was a lie?” asks Pietro. This probably plays better the less you know about continuity, since the unfortunate reality is that not only did they only learn about Magneto in adulthood, but this is at least the third time the characters have learned that their real father is somebody else. You’d think they’d be used to it by now.
Of course, we all know why this is being done. It’s because the characters are in the unusual position of being included in both the Avengers and the X-Men movie licences, and since Marvel (understandably) care far more about the Avengers version, they want to detach the characters from Magneto. That’s fair enough from a business standpoint, but who really wants to see these two characters do this same story yet again?
God, I’ve lost interest already and I’m only on page 5.
So anyway. Wanda and Pietro are looking for answers from the High Evolutionary, since he figures into their origin story. And so they’ve travelled to the latest version of Counter-Earth in the hope of questioning him. Counter-Earth is still filled with humanoid animals “evolved” by the High Evolutionary, though as we find out, the Evolutionary is in the habit of purging the planet and starting over from time to time.
Meanwhile, because Wanda and Pietro just left without explanation, Rogue has rounded up a few Avengers to go after them – the Vision, Dr Voodoo, the new Captain America, and the recently-inverted Sabretooth (on the grounds that they need a tracker, which apparently is beyond the magic guy). This at least gives us the chance to see how Remender thinks an inverted Sabretooth should be written, and broadly, the answer is that he behaves exactly the same as before, except without the murderous impulses. So he’s still pretty obnoxious, but co-operative. As is so often the way, their journey to Counter-Earth leaves them scattered, so everyone has a separate plot thread converging.
The overall theme, however, is about the Evolutionary’s periodic slaughter of his people as he keeps wiping the slate clean and starting from scratch in an attempt to get it right this time. And there is indeed a wonderful lack of empathy in the Evolutionary’s farewell speech to the current population, in which he laments their failings, blames himself, and concludes with “Say your goodbyes and accept my gratitude for the lessons you have taught me.” Unsurprisingly, this peaceful view of matters is not shared by his creations, but there’s not a great deal they can do about it.
That sequence is pretty great. But otherwise, while there’s a lot going on in this story, not much of it is very interesting. There’s a fairly generic rebel cell led by the Evolutionary’s son trying to rescue as many as they can, and get rid of the High Evolutionary for good. There’s a robot called Eve who’s set up as an immediate and largely unearned love interest for the Vision, in some sort of side experiment by the Evolutionary. Dr Voodoo spends a lot of time talking to the dead. Rogue has Simon Williams’ mind removed from her, in what feels like it ought to be a bigger deal but largely gets lost in the shuffle.
The explanation for Wanda and Pietro is basically to credit them as creations of the High Evolutionary, and to introduce a third character called Luminous who’s supposed to be an improved version with both their powers, but is basically just a one-dimensional stormtrooper. In fairness, in an attempt to avoid us having to into this mire in future, the story has them as children who were experimented on by the Evolutionary and then returned to their natural parents when they were judged as failures – so apparently they’re not real mutants, and their birth parents were the Maximoffs after all. That at least gets us to a point where they have a vaguely stable origin story and are largely freed up from links to other characters.
It’s all a bit of a mess. The continuity fix is largely a case of stripping parts out of Wanda and Pietro’s origins while leaving the core intact. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t make for a very interesting story in itself. And after the Evolutionary’s petri-dish idea of society is set up with such a strong opening, the series simply deteriorates into filling time until the heroes are ready to join forces and fight him. Which they do, and then everyone goes home. Presumably the Evolutionary is being set up for a return match in future, but I can’t say I’m looking forward to it.
It doesn’t work as an Avengers story. Remender is notionally introducing a new team here – for a book which is about to be rebooted yet again anyway – but most of the characters have nothing to do, and the structure requires them to be kept away from the core cast to boot. Voodoo is reduced to performing plot mechanics. Vision at least has a sub-plot, but one that feels like it’s wandered in from a knock-off Ultron story and been pressed into service to give him something to do. Cap’s involvement serves no discernible purpose whatsoever – he gets separated from the group and turned into a brainwashed soldier, and just stays that way for the rest of the story until he’s casually cured in an epilogue. If that’s all you had for him to do, leave him at home and give the pages to somebody else.
Acuna’s art is colourful and some of the initial Counter-Earth sequences are strikingly done, but for the most part this arc is overcomplicated and underdeveloped. Sometimes a re-read of a story that bored me to tears on first reading reveals points of interest that weren’t apparent in monthly instalments. Not this one. It’s a dud.
[I} it does get a little “Dad hasn’t like the X-Men since 2000″ in here sometimes…..
That’s fair for drive0by lists like my post above, but I think it can be interesting to discuss why we think something does or doesn’t work. In some cases, a book feels a lot like someone’s personal vision or at least like the best something is going to get for a while. In others, there’s a tonal shift or a sort of critical mass of plot mess that gets in the way.
In practical terms, most of us jump on and off of titles as the creative direction turns. The “jumping-off” points that stick tend to be the things that break the reader’s expectations completely. Not surprisingly, a lot of them stem from editorial mandates that seem to show that the creative staff think of the characters’ appeal or the series premise very differently than some readers.
That’s why stuff like “One More Day” and Flashpoint end up at the center of such discussions so often. If you’re following a character or a story, it’s jarring to be reminded that you’re really just following an IP; and when the books themselves foreground that, it gets easy for a reader to become disenchanted and not come back.
All The End really made me think was that every major writer of a given character should be invited back for his own take on the concept.
Grant Morrison and Chris Claremont wrote their respective versions of the last X-Men story. What would Stan Lee’s look lie? Fabian’s Scott Lobdell’s?
well. Nuff said about Stan Lee’s version
If you’re following a character or a story, it’s jarring to be reminded that you’re really just following an IP; and when the books themselves foreground that, it gets easy for a reader to become disenchanted and not come back.
If I recall correctly that’s part of what drove Kurt Busiek off of Superman, although that was a long time ago.
Relatively speaking.
But he was a writer that used a character’s history to bring stories of its present to full effect and they didn’t tell him exactly what was in Superman’s history anymore… except that it was not exactly the 86-99 to era…
Flashpoint came right off the heels of the Final Infinite Identity Crisis so one continuity blender after another….
I realized that much of what’s being done with the Scarlet Witch’s parentage (and Quicksilver along for the ride) and powers sort of doesn’t bother me as much the more that I read bits and pieces of how her powers have been used in weird ways in the past. It sorted cemented for me when I was reading the Byrne-Thomas run of AVENGER WEST COAST over the last week (the “Dark Scarlet Witch” stuff coming out of ACTS OF VENGEANCE that then ran into the final showdown with Immortus).
There’s a scene where Pym is testing Wanda’s powers by having her hex a metal beam to cause structural breakdown, then he compares it microscopically to an image taken hours before, to see how specifically she’s impacted it. He thinks at first that she’s done nothing, until both realize that her powers have actually gone back and retroactively damaged the beam *before* Pym examined it in the first place (changing the first set of images). I got to thinking about the temporal nature of her powers (and how Immortus than wants her under his control to help the regulation of all the timelines as Master of Time).
Marvel Time has always been a matter of branching timelines based on events, often with “core timelines” based on the most likely event (very quantum). It makes sense that a probability-effecting power is at heart actually choosing while branch of the River of Time events will be directing down. The danger of Wanda’s power is that she can “swim upstream,” as seen in the seen with Pym’s test-beam. In a more dramatic way (using magic to facilitate such large changes and not “break time,” AGE OF ULTRON-style – magic makes for nice space-time lube), she’s altered probability and so time to make and unmake mutants and multiple time tweak the past to change who fathered her and Pietro.
It sounds really screwy on the face of it, but this is a universe where Kang the Conquerer, his myriad self-variation in the Cross-Time Council, and his self-competitors from other points in his life run around through time and timelines playing with the narrative, so I think it actually makes perfect sense! Especially note that Pietro, when he was under exposure to Terrigen, gained temporal powers – there’s a genetic connection to time there…
Could that affect why Magneto never seems to age?
(and did it also affect whether Magneto was Xorn or not? or killed by Wolverine or not in Plant X)?
My personal explanation for that is that Magneto, being a pre-atomic age mutant, is an External, therefore immortal.
The ultimate “jumping off” point in media for me was the end of The Abyss. I always tell people to stop watching when Ed Harris is dying at the bottom of the ocean and ignoring what happens after that.
I got some heat a few years ago when i wrote a “jumping off after 40 years” article about the nu52 on The Beat.
That Scarlet Witch theory might also mean that Magneto can retroactively be turned to and from Wanda’s father whenever she wills it. Which means she’s one of the rare kids who can say “You’re not my dad!” and make it so.
I don’t know if odessasteps was doing a deliberate pun naming The Abyss as a jumping off point, but I salute them either way.
“And stop whining about the people who are whining…”
Oh, I enjoy the cries of the manchildren around here, and I enjoy pointing it out even more.
Yet you use the phrase “stop whining”. Oh, the English language and its numerous vagaries.
If you’d take the time to actually comprehend some of these posts, rather than just look for ‘manchildren’ key phrases you can spout off at, you’d realise people aren’t saying that these are points beyond which no good stories are, or can be, told again – so one can continue to buy and read them, and still enjoy some of them. It honestly is possible to do that, and also be able to identify an ‘end’ point. You don’t have to take it quite so literally.
Also, you contradict yourself by moaning about people buying comics they ‘know’ won’t be any good, and also moaning about people who stop reading comics BECAUSE they ‘know’ they won’t be any good. It’s ALMOST as if you’re just moaning FOR THE SAKE OF IT.
Jaime? Moaning for the sake of it? Perish the thought!
People, please. Stop feeding the troll.
Marvel Time has always been a matter of branching timelines based on events….
This is simply not true. The “branching timelines” idea really belongs specifically to a bunch of 1980s and 1990s stories, with the initial stories by Mark Gruenwald and Ralph Macchio setting a standard that the X-books used thereafter. They cemented this idea in the Marvel Handbooks. Gruenwald and Macchio were, in turn, riffing off of Roy Thomas’s setup for What If?
But before, during , and after this period, Marvel stories have used the single timeline for the obvious reason that it lets a time-travel story have stakes. You won’t find a Stan Lee or Jack Kirby time-travel story, for example, that doesn’t assume a single timeline. Steve Engelhart’s epic Kang Dynasty arc in Avengers relies on there being a single timeline, as does his follow-up in West Coast Avengers. So does Walt Simonson’s Fantastic Four run. Roger Stern generally treats the timeline as a single stream in his time-travel stories as well.
Even writers who used the “alternate paths” idea also used the single-timeline one. Roy Thomas, the first Marvel writer to introduce the branching timelines idea, did so in Avengers Annual #2….but that story followed directly from Avengers #56, where Roy patches some perceived holes in Captain America’s trip into the ice by having the present-day Avengers travel to the moment of Bucky’s death, where “present-day” Cap is responsible for untying his past self and Bucky from that drone,thus explaining why they were able to do the things they did in the past.
Likewise, Claremont tended to use whichever time-travel model he thought would work best in his stories. “Days of Future Past” and its sequels seem to use “branching paths;” stories like the True Friends miniseries require a single-timeline approach.
Marvel has never been terribly consistent on all of this, in other words.
As a fan, I just assume that the difference between single timeline and branching timeline depends on an off-panel setting in the particular macguffin.
and probably not a setting that the characters in-universe are entirely certain how to replicate.
and I now love the idea that all pre-atomic age mutants are Externals. I’m going to read the comics with that idea in mind just because
Wait. So under the current weight of all the retcons that say the H-E is just a spin-off of Mr Sinister…. the H-E created someone that re-writer all of history with a wiggle of her fingers?
And this is considered a failure?
that “God Complex” series that was meant to commercially tie Thor 2 and Iron Man 3 (or whichever)…. shouldn’t he have just used Scarlet Witch for his new bio-god?
I mean Immortus did.
I should just do what Tin O’Neil does and write these questions on my blog…. but writing them here means a greater chance that someone like Omar or Tim or Person or Brian will answer them with an equally informed grasp of the Marvel continuity.
“Wait. So under the current weight of all the retcons that say the H-E is just a spin-off of Mr Sinister…. the H-E created someone that re-writer all of history with a wiggle of her fingers? And this is considered a failure?”
The real story of this volume is a man coming to terms with the fact that his perfectionist tendencies are hurting his career and sense of self-value.
“The real story of this volume is a man coming to terms with the fact that his perfectionist tendencies are hurting his career and sense of self-value.”
So it’s a biography about the male professional in his thirties then.
or, well, me.
huh.
“Marvel Time has always been a matter of branching timelines based on events….
This is simply not true. The “branching timelines” idea really belongs specifically to a bunch of 1980s and 1990s stories, with the initial stories by Mark Gruenwald and Ralph Macchio setting a standard that the X-books used thereafter. They cemented this idea in the Marvel Handbooks. Gruenwald and Macchio were, in turn, riffing off of Roy Thomas’s setup for What If?”
You are correct, Omar. I meant to say “Marvel time-travel has always been…” I missed that on scanning back through my comment (cue joke about an alternate timeline wherein I posted the correct phrase).
The External theory is actually pretty tight, if you look into it. The advent of nuclear weapons is typically given as a reason for the sudden appearance of so many mutants. There are only a few mutants born in the thousands of year before then, and many of them are functionally immortal, just like the actual Externals themselves.
Namor has been alive for almost a hundred years and hasn’t really aged past his early 30s. Apocalypse is eons old. Etc.
Namor has been alive for almost a hundred years and hasn’t really aged past his early 30s. Apocalypse is eons old. Etc.
These two aren’t really the best evidence for the theory. The Atlanteans in general don’t seem to age, mutant or no; and Apocalypse not only has a power that would inherently resist aging, he’s also been heavily modified by Celestial technology.
Also, isn’t there a selection bias? Since we generally only see the mutants that are still around in the present, of course the pre-Atomic Age mutants we see are all immortal. Otherwise they wouldn’t be around in the present in the first place.
Leaving aside Atlanteans and shape-shifters with (and without) life-prolonging tech, the Magneto-as-External theory works really really well, considering how there still are very very few pre-Atomic mutants there still are in the Marvel canon, and it can certainly make the existence of pre-Atomic mutants and mutant immortals still very very special.
Special mutants among special mutants.
Like the Neo, only without being poorly-explained, poorly written and poorly-remembered.
And there’s always a selection bias when we assume that people or beverages we are the most familiar with are the best in their field or classification.
So we’re assuming that the background characters or whatever just are not as interesting as the regulars in an ongoing serial.
Still, the characters either have to be on a sliding timeline with shifting origins, ethnically and chronologically… which is why Iron Man built his armor in a cave and half the FF are not World War II veterans…. or these characters are all like the Justice Society.
Which raises another question:
Why is it that Magneto, who was almost an adult when in the camps during the 1940s, waited until the present minus twenty years to sire children?
At least the movie Magneto had made a teenager before the 1970s.
How many bastards does old Magnus have running around?
“Oh, I enjoy the cries of the manchildren around here, and I enjoy pointing it out even more.”
Jamie, grow up or shut up.
You are not welcome here until you learn to behave.
” If you’re following a character or a story, it’s jarring to be reminded that you’re really just following an IP; and when the books themselves foreground that, it gets easy for a reader to become disenchanted and not come back.”
Essentially this whole story is an exercise in reminding you not only that you’re following an IP, but that the IP is currently itself involved in legal wranglings between two movie studios and if Marvel want to be petty with their characters just to thumb their nose at Fox, then that’s what they’re going to do. Unless, of course, you think that Marvel had a GREAT idea for making QS and the SW into non-mutants and so HAD to tell this story…
“Unsurprisingly, most of Marvel’s attempts at a “last” FF story have been of the “and the adventure continues” sort, whether that means handing off to the next generation or just some sort of “eternal exploration” thing where they all fly off happily into space or something.”
Reminds me of the endings of the various Star Trek iterations. ST VI has the original crew sailing off into the sunset. All Good Things was similar, except in their case it was more of a “the adventure will continue” (and, also, mild diversion, still my favourite TV ending. You can take your big twists, shock deaths and big wrap ups. I’ll take “I should have done this a long time ago.” “You were always welcome” any day of the week.) By contrast, the more serial DS9 had a definite, proper ending.
And Voyager did something something meh.
If I recall correctly that’s part of what drove Kurt Busiek off of Superman, although that was a long time ago.
You’re confusing Kurt with a small group he interacted with on the old DC messageboards. They were frustrated that he wouldn’t list off exactly which issues from the past twenty years were no longer canon. Kurt said that kind of minutia didn’t really matter. He and the other Superman writers knew the broad strokes of what had changed in the canon and they’d be revealing that kinda thing through the stories they told in the books.
I remember one weird sticking point with that group was that because Man of Steel and Birthright were explicitly out, Superman no longer had a canon origin story. This was a big deal to them for some reason, and it needed to be fixed as quickly as possible. Kurt would tell them over and over that there would eventually be a new origin story and that there was no hurray.
I forget why Kurt left the book. Health problems, maybe? I think it was around that time he was decreasing his workload because of them.
I’m not confusing anything.
I read the Kurt Busiek Offical Facebook.
Complete with personal pronouns and references to Kurt Busiek in the first person.
Mr Busiek doesn’t refer to himself in the third person, he refers to himself in the first, so I am certainly not confused.
I can misremember, as Omar can attest when I insisted that Danny Rand was not the first Iron Fist…. but I definitely know whether or not Kurt Busiek wrote his own recounting about his time writing a Superman comic.
wasn’t doing comic book message boards since before Infinite Crisis anyway….
I read the Kurt Busiek Offical Facebook.
You’re likely misremembering something Kurt said then. He definitely wasn’t driven off the book because DC wouldn’t tell him what stories did and didn’t count.
Maybe he said DC was flip-floppy, approving something for a story and then later wanting it removed, and that contributed to his leaving. That was a pretty common complaint writers had about the company at the time.
I never said he was driven off the book.
Not sure how you can definitely declare a negative aside from I, Rusty, never saw that and was not there
This is like arguing over religion. Your counter to an assertion that I cannot prove is an assertion that you cannot prove.
We should just compromise and mutually agree that the reason Kurt Busiek had a short run on Superman was because of Manhunters.
His entire hometown was brainwashed by Manhunters.
Although I concede that Busiek might have left for a reason other than what I recall, and THAT I misremember, I’m certain he complained about not having a definitive Superman canon to draw upon, because he was told that the stuff from Man of Steel to Infinite Crisis wasn’t it, but not sure if the pre-1986 stuff was it or not.
Just the same that all the things I complained about for a particular job are unrelated to why I left.
So given all of that, I blame Manhunters for Kurt Busiek’s short Superman ran.
and Ebayd.
Regular Manhunters or Martian ones?
like the group Mark Shaw defected from and kidnapped everyone in Smallville just to control Superman.
But I wouldn’t call them regular Manhunters. They do use killer robots after all
not this Manhunter:
http://static2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20080910053748/marvel_dc/images/b/b0/Manhunter_Vol_2_0.jpg
#notallmanhunters
…Sorry.
Oh God, now I just want someone to make a Mark Shaw Twitter account chastising ninja assassinations with liberal use of the #NotAllManhunters hashtag…
@Omar: Days of Future Past was originally meant to be a “single timeline” story, but a single caption change made it something else.
http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2009/12/03/comic-book-legends-revealed-236/
About the idea that mutancy is closely related to the “atomic era”, I never warmed up to it. It makes Marvel mutancy even less similar to its real world namesake. Although I suppose that is beating a dead horse.
Again, not another series I’ve read. But I’ve always felt the Maximoff twins as characters aged well.
I got into comics in the 90s, which admittedly had its own problems, so I didn’t read the 60s-80s stuff until much later. Even so, the characters always seemed kind of bland. Their only interesting characteristics were their connection to Magneto as the neglected mutant children of a mutant supremacist.
*as characters didn’t age well.
I dunno, the 90s was when we got Peter David explaining Quicksilver’s jerkitude in X-Factor. And I alkso thought Pietro was hanled well in Avengers Academy. He’s sort of endearingly crap as a superhero because he’s too much of an asshole, but he’s also crap whenever he turns evil because he’s impossible to see as a serious threat. I suppose he’s Marvel’s version of Guy Gardner.
Wanda, on the other hand, has always struggled to find something to be that isn’t the The Love Interest or the Woman Driven Mad by Her Powers, two roles superhero comics tend to default to for female characters.
Jean Grey had rather the same problem under quite a few writers, and even with Teen Jean around these two roles are all anyone ever looks back to in reference to the adult version.
PAD is one of the few people who can write an interesting Quicksilver.
@Luis – It fits in perfectly with the idea that mutancy isn’t random, but rather the unlocking of the Celestials’ genetic legacy. As in, the Celestials probably intended this to happen at just this point in the history of their subject races’ evolution.
I’m The Guy who thinks 500-foot tall Space Gods inserting magic DNA into our caveman ancestors more plausible than random genetic mutation giving people the ability to fire force blasts from their eyes.
I’m alrgith with the force blasts from the eyes… but the notion that Chicken Boy and Eye Blast Man are the same subspecies of humanity gives me pause.
The Deviants are supposed to be a species or a subspecies of homo sapiens as well, with their “shared trait” being that their phenotype is radically unstable and children might have virtually no traits other than vaguely humanoid form in common with their parents.
Clearly “species” means something different in the Marvel Universe. But then, comic-book genetics often tend to have more Lamarckianism than Darwinism to them, not to mention vitalism. Even worse, discredited notions of eugenics seems to actually be true in the Marvel Universe.
It’s probably best not to think too hard about it.
Oh.
I thought they were different kind if Deviants.
They lived in Lemuria for access to fish
“@Luis – It fits in perfectly with the idea that mutancy isn’t random, but rather the unlocking of the Celestials’ genetic legacy. As in, the Celestials probably intended this to happen at just this point in the history of their subject races’ evolution.
I’m The Guy who thinks 500-foot tall Space Gods inserting magic DNA into our caveman ancestors more plausible than random genetic mutation giving people the ability to fire force blasts from their eyes.”
@Tim – Whether it’s plausible, at least it’s a better narrative. Honestly, the MU works best when it goes gonzo on these things. The Stan Lee World Outside Our Window works when Ben Grimm wants to get a cab, but it’s better to go Full Kirby when trying to deal with the giant with the purple skirt coming to eat our world.
Longtime reader, infrequent commenter. Love this site.
I’m really enjoying the “jumping off point” discussions. Partly because I’ve noticed that every comic review on comicbookroundup.com and every TP review on Amazon feels the need to suggest that “this would make a great jumping on point for new readers” these days, like that’s the only thing that matters. It reminds me of people reviewing movies who only seem to be concerned with box office totals, like that’s some reliable bellwether of quality. And partly because the lead up to Secret Wars and Marvel’s general lack of interest in doing much of anything interesting with the X-Men have me feeling like I’m at my second jumping off point, or maybe should have been for the past year or two.
The first came sometime just after Inferno, around the launch of adjectiveless. I’d had a good ten-ish year run since Byrne/Cockrum/Smith, with several incredible Art Adams high points, and it was college time anyway.
Then I got back into it with Morrison. And the House of M and Whedon eras made it all seem great again (Austen’s garbage notwithstanding). I enjoyed the lighthearted Fraction era, didn’t mind the Greg Land cheese factor, loved PAD’s X-Factor, and loved the really dark and gory X-Force run during Messiah Complex and Second Coming.
But… something happened. I’m not sure where, but I think it might have been Schism. As fun as it was to see the rivalry and then the initial split into factions and Aaron’s loony take on the school, it just never really went anywhere. I grew very tired of the Hellfire kids (despite the little girl’s wickedly disturbing psychotic-ness), Cyclops’ revolution was more concept than thing, the old X-Men in the present has felt suspiciously like an excuse to start fresh (which would mean discarding the older versions I watched grow all these years). So I think AvX might have been MY jumping off point. For the X-Men anyway.
I’m still really curious to see what they do with it all post-Secret Wars, but the previews don’t leave me hopeful. I’m not at all interested in an Old Man Logan standing in for Wolverine, I really like Cyclops, and I’ll definitely be looking to sites like this one to see whether it’s worth it or not (THANK YOU, Paul, for all the effort on this and HtA).
*sorry, I meant here and the podcast.