All-New X-Men #13
All-New X-Men is doing a series of single issue character spotlights, from the look of it. That’s a nice change from the prevailing fashion of working in story arcs the length of a trade paperback. This issue is Bobby’s turn, as Idie and Evan take him clubbing in Miami in the hope of getting him to talk to boys.
Much of the issue is, if we’re being honest, a fairly routine and straightforward piece of observational comedy-drama. So Bobby is hopelessly nervous trying to flirt, Idie and Evan’s advice doesn’t really help a great deal (not because it’s bad advice but because confidence can’t be taught), and he does a bit better when he’s trying to be himself.
It’s all rather mundane, to be honest. I’ve never subscribed to the view that talking to random strangers in bars is a particularly good way of meeting people anyway, so I’m in no place to speak from first-hand experience, but it sure reads like a bunch of well-trodden tropes. More to the point, though, it feels like the characters are being brutally shoehorned into the situation whether it makes any real sense for them to be there or not.
Let’s start with Bobby. Fair enough, his social circle is pretty much confined to the regular cast, so his options for meeting new people are fairly limited. But the story wants him to be hopelessly awkward at flirting, period, and goes out of its way to emphasise that it was no different with girls in his own time. And that’s just wrong. It would be nitpicking to complain that a late-sixties back-up strip establishes that he had a girlfriend at school. But what about Zelda? Bobby’s X-Men were brought to the future from X-Men #8; he had already started flirting with Zelda the previous issue. (Incidentally, this story also has Bobby recollecting the X-Men’s first battle with Unus – the one they would have had later in issue #8 if they hadn’t been brought to the present. Oops.) He was the one who kept dragging the X-Men back to the Coffee-a-Go-Go so that he could talk to her. “Terrified of speaking to girls” is not a recognisable description of Silver Age Bobby.
Another awkward question: how old are these characters exactly? Bobby was the youngest of the Silver Age team, who were (at the time) school children. Idie and Evan come direct from doing classes at the Xavier School. Mark Bagley is certainly drawing them as teenagers. But this story wants him to be a direct peer of Miami clubbers. Does that work? Are Miami clubs notoriously relaxed about fake IDs? I don’t know. But it sure feels like a story that’s trying to put four or five years on the ages of all its characters and hope nobody notices.
And… Idie and Evan? Really? These are the characters who are going to teach Bobby about clubbing, flirting, and being comfortable in your own skin? Idie and Evan?!? What possible experience do either of them have to offer? The story presses them into the role because there’s nobody else to do it, but it’s completely unconvincing.
The second half of the issue sees Bobby run into a character called Romeo (subtle), who’s apparently being set up as his love interest. Romeo is an Inhuman, and he manipulates people’s emotions, which he uses to calm down people whose powers have only just emerged. I can see that there’s some potential in this. We’ve got an Inhumans/X-Men crossover on the horizon, so some links between the camps are worth setting up; and there’s the old standard “how do I trust my feelings with a psychic”, which hasn’t been gone for a while, and makes a perfectly good story.
Is Romeo particularly compelling as a character beyond that? Not really – he’s a bit of a cipher, but depending on what story Hopeless intends to tell with him, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, Bobby’s initial encounter with him is by the numbers stuff.
This feels like a wasted opportunity. In theory, a story about Bobby trying to build confidence in talking to guys is a good idea. In practice, it wrestles Idie and Evan into roles as more confident cooler friends that don’t fit them at all, and overplays Bobby’s awkwardness, all so that some rather familiar clumsy flirting sequences can follow. In fact, if Idie and Evan had been as clumsy and awkward as Bobby, it would have been a more interesting story.
While this doesn’t fit Idie and Evan’s previous character interpretations, I actually prefer them more lighthearted and outgoing than sullen and broody. And, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I even like that new change in Laura!
This issue DOES seem rather disjointed coming off the reveal of Battleworld’s Goblin Queen last issue. Perhaps this issue should have come first.
Oh yeah, you can’t drink til you’re 21 in America. Mind you in US teen sitcoms there seem to be a lot of nightclubs that are exactly like regular nightclubs but you go there to drink Coke. Maybe it was one of them.
“it feels like the characters are being brutally shoehorned into the situation whether it makes any real sense for them to be there or not.”
Just like making Bobby gay to begin with, due to Scott Lobdell wroting a joke about Bobby and interior decorating the in the mid-90s!
This could go back to an earlier discssion about mutants and fake ids.
If we’re being charitable with the 16-months of missing time (8 before and after SW) then we might expect Idie and Evan to have grown up a bit. Idie really does ring-false considering her origin as a 14 year old self-hating religious. But that was already done with Rahne and Aaron’s run did a lot to loosen her up. (That said, everyone should be happy to forget the I’ll chosen leather dominstrix outfits when they shoehorned her into the Healfire Kids story. Who’d have thought that astory eith those kids would actually be more inappropriate than the adult variety? On second thought…
If we read Hopeless characters as he’s writing them without getting too caught up in continuity. They tend to be better for it.
Yes, Idie and Evan were a very strange choice for their roles in this story. It’s quite possible that during their time at the JG school, they adjusted off-page but that has never come across in any of their appearances. Maybe we should just put this one down to Marvel’s version of Superboy punches resulting from Secret Wars.
Idie was 14 when she was introduced (if it feels like she was younger that’s because it seems like they played her as a child for much of Wolverine and the X-Men). That is before Avengers V X-Men, Schism, Regenesis, Axis, Secret Wars etc. Evan seems like he should be of a similar age. They seem to be being played as about 16 now. Now what doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because that would suggest that the events of Schism, AVX, Axis, Secret Wars and the missing months post Secret Wars happened within a tiny period of time.
It gets more mindbending if you consider that Evan and Idie were played as peers to Quentin Quire. Quentin has been around for Riot at Xavier’s, Endsong, M-Day, Messiah Complex, Messiah War, Civil War, Secret Invasion, Dark Reign/Utopia, Schism and Secret Wars. He is, at best, 13 when he is introduced. Allowing for him being 17, that would mean that all of those events happened within 4 years.
It really is a pity that Marvel introduce so many great young characters who seem to be forgotten about quite quickly, not allowed to mature or just assigned a new personality. The New Mutants and Hellions have mostly been forgotten but those who re-appear semi-regularly often seem to have forgotten hard-learned lessons.
I think that readers can deal with Marvel squishy-time as something of a genre convention but there’s a problem with telling coming-of-age stories when the audience knows that somehow the protagonists will always revert to the immature character we meet on page 1 after the end of the story.
Agreed about the tendency to create and then waste young characters over the last 15 or so years. It’s fascinating how big a deal someone like Pixie was for a while there.
Forget Pixie and Armor, what about Hope? And what was supposed to be the big deal about her parents? There are a lot of “big deal” characters who are introduced but then forgotten. Maybe Ulysses can join Layla Millar and Hope as part of a new team after Civil War 2?
Actuallly, I think it would be amusing to have a team of Wolverine’s former sidekicks.
Kitty, Jubilee, Armor, Pixie, X-23 and Molly Hayes. Molly is a bit random but she’s always good to have around.
On another tangent, Molly was 11 when introduced. She’s been around for 13 years in real world time.
That means she’s been about for Avengers Disassembled, House of M, World War Hulk, Messiah Complex, Siege, Fear Itself, Necrosha AVX, Schism,Chaos War, Battle of the Atom, Spider Island, Axis, Secret Wars etc. So really, she should be at least 15 or 16 at this point (And Professor X has died at least twice during that time. He’s a rather unlucky chap). In some art, she’s drawn like she’s 8. One of the points of Runaways was that she deliberately acted younger than her age but some artists don’t seem to get that.
Maybe, just maybe, the existence of Marvel Cinematic Universe will change this. It’s one thing to have non-aging characters in comics, but as the same characters age in real life, will they adjust their comic counterparts to reflect this? If a 13 year old is cast as Molly in the Runaways TV series and it manages to run for 4 series, that would probably mean the actress is about 18 by the time the show ends. At that point, will Marvel allow us to have an 18 year old Molly?
I also wonder if this will mean that some of the legacy changes stick. If the cinematic Captain America is Falcon for the next 10 years and Steve Rogers is dead, will they allow the current status quo to continue rather than revert to Steve as Cap?
I think that the story of Hope (the McGuffin that walks like a teenager) reached a natural conclusion with Avengers vs. X-Men, so I’m fine with her fading into the background.
I said “natural conclusion,” not “good conclusion” 🙂
“which hasn’t been gone for a while, and makes a perfectly good story.”
Do you mean done for a while?
To be fair, her role with regard to the Phoenix was a natural ending – just not one that made sense in the wider context. Taking the Phoenix off the board made sense but then showing us a Quire Phoenix, never addressing the Rachel in the room and importing young Jean Grey just undermined it.
I still want to know who her parents were!
What I think makes it a natural ending most is that AvX-M was the story that caps off M-Day, and Hope from the beginning was a character defined by M-Day. To a much more significant extent than the likes of Pixie or Armor (or Hellion, etc.), Hope was created to serve a particular ongoing story arc.
As far as the Quire Phoenix, Young Jean Grey, and so on goes, I think this is one of those places where one might be best off regarding this as what Marvel does instead of reboots. From House of M through AvX-M, the X-books told a pretty coherent overall story – which, in an odd piece of serendipitous elegance, frames the pretty coherent overall story of the Marvel universe as a whole that runs from Civil War through Siege.
But AvX-M draws a line under that, and we have a new X-books “era”, with the story driven by different things, especially the consequences of Cyclops’s killing of Xavier at the end of AvX-M.
One of the things that’s interesting to me is how, going back to Morrison, (adult) Scott Summers has probably been the closest thing to a central character across the whole line for more than a decade and a half, Even now that he’s dead, he’s still basically the obsessive focus of the X-universe.