Civil War II: X-Men
Oh, it’s one of those miniseries. Event Crossover: Non-participating Series. Never a dull moment with those. Remember World War Hulk: X-Men? Me neither. I mean, I remember it existed, obviously. Don’t remember a thing about it beyond that. Imagine it probably had some Hulks.
Turns out, though, that this one isn’t quite such blatant filler as usual. It’s written by Cullen Bunn, the regular writer of Uncanny X-Men. It’s the first X-Men title since the relaunch to feature both Magneto’s and Storm’s teams with any sort of extended interaction. It mildly advances the Magneto/Psylocke storyline in Uncanny (not that you’re missing anything). And it’s bringing the Inhumans proper – rather than just the Terrigen Mists – into an X-Men book, to start the build for the upcoming Inhumans vs X-Men stuff.
All of which, there’s no denying, is a lot more content than you normally get in one of these books. If nothing else, the mere fact that the X-Men teams have been kept apart for this long means that there’s a bit of weight in just seeing them interact again.
Civil War II, then. I already talked about this series when I looked at the Wolverine tie-in arc a couple of weeks ago. It’s a perfectly serviceable concept, and while anyone reading loads of tie-ins has most likely seen it beaten to death by now, there’s nothing wrong with it when you’re just reading two. I haven’t read the core series, I have no intention of reading the core series, I do not care about it in the slightest. This is not a huge problem for either of the X-Men tie-ins, which simply require you to know something that can be explained in one panel: the Inhumans have got a new member called Ulysses who can predict the future, and some of the heroes want to take pre-emptive action based on what he sees. Beyond that, the mechanics of the Civil War II story are neither here nor there.
This book has two main goals: first, to lay some groundwork for the Inhumans/X-Men crossover to come, and second, to justify its existence as a Civil War II tie-in by making something of Ulysses. These two goals are at least consistent, since the Inhumans feature in both. On top of that, Bunn throws in a degree of tension between the two X-Men teams, since that Civil War II banner has to earn its name – but fair enough, there’s not much point in having a Magneto-led X-Men team if it’s going to do exclusively things Storm is fine with. And a couple of characters we haven’t seen in quite a while – Rachel Grey and Gambit – are brought back in major roles. There’s a lot going on here, and the book sets itself a challenge in juggling all these threads.
It kind of succeeds in that – it is nice to see these guys again, and the interaction between the two teams is reasonably well handled, with Storm torn between trying to give Magneto the benefit of the doubt, and recognising that this is probably a recipe for disaster because it’s Magneto. The central idea is that, on discovering that the Inhumans have got a boy who can see the future, Magneto immediately jumps to the conclusion that this is going to be a Bad Thing For Mutants, because Magneto thinks everything is a Bad Thing For Mutants. And, as usual, he has something of a point: the Inhumans are responsible for the Terrigen cloud, and while they may pay lip service to regretting the consequences for mutants, they persist in treating the cloud as if it was, on balance, a very good thing.
So Magneto, not unreasonably, concludes that the mutants and the Inhumans have starkly opposing interests that are bound to lead to a big conflict. And from there, he jumps to the much more dubious conclusion that the Inhumans are out to get him and will therefore either exploit Ulysses’s predictions to get the upper hand on mutants, or exploit his reputation by using false prophecies to manipulate people into acting against mutants. This bit is paranoia, but there’s a muted undercurrent which harks back to Bunn’s much more enjoyable Magneto solo series from a couple of years ago: the whole idea of Ulysses’ predictions play rather too neatly into Magneto’s fatalistic and apocalyptic mindset. Magneto is big on destiny and in some ways Ulysses serves as confirmation; in a nicely understated parallel, plenty of characters spend the series (correctly) predicting Magneto’s own actions without any recourse to Ulysses at all, simply because they all know deep down that he’ll never fundamentally change.
Where do we stand with the Inhumans and the X-Men right now? This seems like an opportune moment to go on a diversion and look at the sales figures. Have you seen the sales figures lately? For a start, Marvel is currently losing the battle to DC’s Rebirth, to the extent that Civil War II was the only Marvel Universe title in the top 20 for September. (Yes, some of the DC books are returnable – but the ones which aren’t returnable any more are holding up, so it doesn’t seem to be massively exaggerating the position.) The highest selling X-book in September – at least through the North American direct market – was, surprisingly, Old Man Logan at number 57, with estimated sales at about 47,000. Extraordinary and Uncanny were a little way behind that, with estimated sales at around 40,000. All-New and Wolverine come in at about 35,000, along with this book. Which isn’t great by historical standards, but there you are.
And the Inhumans…
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Well, there’s Uncanny Inhumans at number 96, with estimated sales of 26K. And the second Inhumans book, All-New Inhumans is at…
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… it’s at …
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… oh, there it is at number 137, with estimated sales of 15,489. Meanwhile, the movie keeps getting pushed back, and the Inhumans have shown up on Agents of SHIELD instead.
Now, I’m not averse to Marvel trying to build a franchise by picking a concept (even I’d prefer it to be a genuinely new one) and persisting it with it in the face of initial resistance. It’s not even that the two Inhumans titles are especially bad. From reading them on Marvel Unlimited, they’re perfectly decent books.
But we long since passed the point where it was transparently clear that the Inhumans weren’t catching on and where the main question came to be how long Marvel would drag this out. The decision to build their summer crossover around the Inhumans – and then see it squashed flat by DC Rebirth – would be the last straw for some publishers. But then lead-in times mean that major directional changes for the Marvel Universe take an age to feed through, so we’re stuck with the bastards for the foreseeable future whether we like them or not, and the X-Men are heading for an extended crossover whose main – perhaps exclusive – interest lies in whether it will be used to finally draw a line under the whole fiasco. You’ll note Marvel are already hyping a line-wide relaunch called “ResurrXion” which comes after the Inhumans crossover, which sure seems intended to prompt speculation along those lines. But time will tell.
At any rate. For all that there are a few vaguely interesting ideas lurking in this book, and a lot of Stuff Going On, it ultimately feels anticlimactic. For one thing, Andrea Broccardo is a perfectly solid storyteller, really quite good with the character work, but I find the art lacking something in scale and grandeur when it comes to the big set pieces. So the bit where Magneto finally confronts a nervous, awkward-looking Ulysses is really pretty good, but the X-Men versus X-Men fight scene (which turns out to be a red herring anyway) is clear but it’s lacking something. The double page spread of Ulysses’s vision of the X-Men tearing each other apart is fine but you want it to step up a gear. There’s plenty of smaller moments that I like; Broccardo feels like he’d be better served on a less action-oriented book that would play to his strengths.
For another, the bottom line is that it’s a story which exists to trail an upcoming story, and where the plot is ultimately that Magneto decides to go home and everyone calls it a day. That’s underwhelming, despite Bunn’s best efforts to sell us on the idea that seeing Ulysses’s vision of the mutants tearing each other apart has given Magneto an epiphany – especially since the story promptly undercuts that by insisting that the big fight is still coming in the not too distant future. Which it is. Which is the real reason why it can’t happen here.
Still, if you’re reading the line with an interest in its overall direction, this is actually a book you’ll want to have read, and it’s certainly got a lot more to offer than the throwaway stuff that normally appears in event tie-in minis. But sitting in the margins of one story, and with a remit to trail another, it never quite finds a way to satisfy on its own.
“Remember World War Hulk: X-Men?”
I do, actually, quite well. That was a good one. It was entirely a fight scene, which brought in as many mutant characters as it could squeeze in, and managed to use each and every character’s abilities in creative ways. By Andrea Di Vito and… Christos Gage, was it? [checks] Yes. I continue to hold that up as how superhero action scenes ought to be done.
As for Civil War II, it’s so horrible that I find the few series just barely tying in – like All-New Wolverine and All-New Avengers – are getting out of it with the most distinction. The one high point of the “very related” set is the digital Ulysses comic by Al Ewing, which is fantastic. There’s a print version, but I have to imagine it loses a lot in the conversion, because the innovative usage of the technique is a major part of why it’s so good.
Isn’t World War Hulk:X-Men that issue where Hulk somehow decides that he wants to know if Xavier would have voted for his exile were he present at the decision table at the time?
Yes.
But the fight is excellent.
How much damage has marvel unlimited done to sales? I know that I personally quit buying comics a bit ago because I was spending more in a week than marvel unlimited costs for a month. Surely I’m not the only one?
Mory Buxner: My feeling is that it’s not unusual for the ancillary not-at-all-necessary tie-ins to be better than the main event. Hercules’ God Squad story was (for me, anyway) the best thing about Secret Invasion.
The original Matt: I think it must have done damage. But then there are people like me, who used to buy the occasional trade (and not necessarily a Marvel trade at that), but otherwise relied on libraries.
I’m now a steady stream of regular income for Marvel, because of Unlimited. The thing is, there are a lot of Marvel titles that for me are worth reading *once*, but I can’t justify paying full price for something that I’m only going to read once, given how much full price is.
Paul O: Any comments on the fact that it looks like the X-Implosion is now over, as we’re already up to seven announced “ResurreXion” titles?
(For those not keeping track, in decreasing order of survivability: X-Men Blue, X-Men Gold, Generation X, Weapon X, Cable, Iceman, Jean Grey, None of which are explicitly Wolverine titles, although Weapon X may be, so there’s probably one or two at least to come)
I loved World War Hulk X-Men…
Best Hulk fight scene in years….
Best X-Men fight scene in years, for that matter
Oh, that is where Hulk beat Wolverine almost to the point of becoming literal paste, isn’t it? It was a rare interesting Hulk-Wolverine fight.
Not that the cross-over story is suppose to hold up to such scrutiny, but the number of omega-telepaths and time travelers the X-Men have make Ulysses obsolete.
I just had a look at Paul’s link. ‘Spider-Man & Deadpool #9’ was Marvel’s fourth best preforming book at #28! I mean, ‘SM&DP’ has been brilliant from the start and that’s a great position. But; ouch Marvel.
The original Matt: I’m in the same boat, only reading Marvel stuff through Marvel Unlimited because of cost matters. Of course, I’m actually now reading just about everything that they put out (albeit six months later) instead of buying just a handful of issues. That I’m not stacking up new filled boxes of books is part of the matter too.
I wonder if I’m a rare user regarding how often I deep-dive in the back issues (having previously done so with Silver Age runs of Fantastic Four and Avengers, I’m now in the midst of finally reading the first decade or so of Spider-man on the app in my spare time); Marvel Unlimited totally works both for ‘new’ comics and what used to be back-issue collecting.
Brendan: Well, but the X-Men can’t predict the future. If you ask them to do so, they get this confused look on their faces and say “Please, please, don’t ask us that. There are too many futures, and we can never keep track of whether they’re alternate futures or not.” 🙂
(Sorry about the double post – I didn’t see Brian’s post before I wrote my earlier one.)
Brian: You’re not the only person for whom back issues are a *big* part of the draw. When I did buy trades, the Marvel trades that I bought were disproportionately Essentials – because I knew they would have rereading potential (for historical interest), plus they were very good value.
The other thing for me was that I dropped out of reading superhero comics during the ’90s. (Since it came up in the podcast, I’ll say that the Simonson/Blevins New Mutants was not the smallest reason). So there’s a gap there that I can plug with Unlimited of stuff that is never likely to be collected and which mostly isn’t good enough to pay comics prices to own in its own right – but stuff that’s worth sampling to find the odd semi-precious gem.
I’m reading ClanDestine at the moment, for instant, and it’s reasonably interesting, at least on the level of story concept, and it goes without saying that Alan Davis’s art is lovely (if a little heavy on the cheesecake – I feel we give him a pass on that too much because everything else about what he does is so good). One of those things that didn’t take off, but in an environment less hostile to new concepts (the ’70s, say) might very well have done so. It would make a decent pitch for an MCU tv show, right up to the moment when you had to admit that it didn’t come with a built-in audience.
“the X-Men can’t predict the future. If you ask them to do so, they get this confused look on their faces and say ‘Please, please, don’t ask us that. There are too many futures, and we can never keep track of whether they’re alternate futures or not.’ ”
“…and they’re all terrible. Especially that one where Scott kills the Professor … no, look, I know you think of that as being the present, but…”
Immediately after posting, of course, I realised that non-time-travelling characters actually think of “Scott kills the Professor” as being the past.
I would like to see a story in which the X-Men visit a future in which they have actually succeeded and mutants and humans get along well. And then mess everything up with paranoid and hostile behavior because they can’t believe that there could possibly be a good future, and are certain that it all has to be a trick somehow.
Brendan: The difference between Ulysses and mutants is that Ulysses has certified 100% accurate prophecies which can be averted through action (excepting X-book crossovers.) Mutants have seemingly unavoidable futures that cannot be averted (even when they conflict with other seemingly unavoidable futures.)
Thinking about it, I wonder if Marvel really mistimed the Inhumans movie.
Marvel’s profits and futures are so heavily based in TV and film properties that it can make a kind of business sense to want to create an X-verse equivalent that actually meshes with the main Marvel universe. This doesn’t even hinge on the whole Fox licensing matter, though that certainly had to have been a part of the decision.
But you can’t always just make people like something because you say it is great. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, and sometimes it creates an equivalent backlash against what you were trying to promote. Marvel knows this as their successes are mixed with plenty of failures.
And the Inhumans as characters aren’t replacements for the X-Men and X-villains. People who like Wolverine and Magneto aren’t going to just jump ship to Blackbolt because the latter is suddenly important. (Nor are people who fantasize about Psylocke or Kitty going to jump ship to Crystal.)
Marvel *might* could have pulled off the switch in comics if it had been a slow burn that was in the works for a decade or more. If they’d gradually built the Inhumans into increasing importance. Such a build wouldn’t need to be so much subtle as it was natural. It isn’t about hiding the push as much as it is making it not look forced. (Marvel did do some build work for the Inhumans current role, but it either largely went unnoticed as “yet more Inhumans background stuff” or as really forced.)
The other option would have been to lead with the movie. Marvel could have done whatever they wanted with an Inhumans film, setting up whatever status quo they desired. They could have re-invented the characters similar to GotG, upsetting old fans but appealing to a larger audience. They could have made it relevant just by teasing interaction with the Infinity films.
And if that film succeeded, they could then merge the film characterization and portray back into the Marvel comic book universe.
But instead of starting where they effectively had a clean slate, Marvel instead try to quickly and poorly force the change where they had decades of history and indifference.
Building off what Billy said, I wonder how much of it was bad timing. It looks like the Inhumans started getting pushed around 2007 with Silent War, which is shortly after Fox released X-Men: The Last Stand, which was awful.
By the time Marvel began to really position them as a replacement for the X-Men, Fox had released X-Men: First Class – which was REALLY good.
I think the Inhumans work well for the MCU in Agents of SHIELD, as a simple uncomplicated explanation for how somebody has superpowers that allows the show not to waste time on that and get on with the story.
But, of course, the reason why they can do that is that they got to introduce their Inhumans from the ground up, and could make them “mutants, plus other stuff about aliens that we don’t have to use, but can when we want to.”
In the comics, you have the baggage of what the Inhumans were for decades, which has nothing to do with being replacement mutants. And what they were is Jack Kirby doing some of what were to be his favorite ideas for the first time, wonderful, wild, weird ideas that do not naturally transfer well to a quasi-grounded set-up like the MCU.
There’s quite a lot of the comics universe that they don’t work well in: they suit the larger-than-life context of the Fantastic Four for which they were created. As most kinds of X-Menish metaphor for prejudice, they don’t work at all, because they’re [expletive deleted] royalty. You *could* do something with them as a metaphor for refugees, and that could be very timely.
I say that as someone who quite likes the Crystal-led Inhuman book: high politics and diplomacy suit the characters. But you know, they also suited the characters when they were taking over the Kree Empire and fighting a galactic war against the Shi’ar, and somehow, that felt more suitable.
I recall WWH: X-Men because I thought Mercury telling off Hulk was a really well-done scene. I do wish Gage had gotten more time on the X-Men books, preferably in a capacity where he wasn’t editorially mandated to follow the previous writer’s lead.