All-New X-Men #14-16
Mmm. I had it in mind that All-New X-Men #14-16 were a three parter. And re-reading them, they kind of are, but they’re kind of not. This is the tail end of a string of solo stories, which seemed to be on the one hand spotlight time for individual characters, and on the other a gentle subtext of the team falling apart the longer they spend in their new setting.
Issue #14 is basically Scott’s issue, even if Hank is lurking ominously in the background throughout. Scott is still stuck at home with his leg in a cast, going stir crazy. Probably this book’s best feature is Dennis Hopeless’s ability to find a different angle on the characters’ established traits by sticking them in a different context. In Scott’s case, the workaholic obsessiveness that would have made him the X-Men’s ideal leader (or field leader, anyway) needs somewhere else to go, now that the antics of his older self seem to have debarred him from a leadership role.
So instead we have Scott trying to find out what the heck Hank is up to in his secretive lab, and spending much of the issue patiently trying to outwit all of Hank’s security devices – ultimately to no avail, because Hank is a technical genius. There’s a lovely visual of Scott trying to exploit the Airstream’s Tardis-like properties and accidentally walking into all the rooms at once. Scott doesn’t need to succeed in order for all this stuff to work as character material; he just needs to keep on trying. Moreover, Scott’s more interested in the challenge of finding out what Hank is up to, rather than having any intrinsic fascination in the answer. It’s an echo of an occasional theme with the original character, though not one we’ve seen in a while: that he’s a good guy in part because that’s just the role and the challenge that happened to present itself, and Xavier happened to channel him in the right direction.
Anyway, it turns out that Hank has accidentally raised an Elder God or some such thing, and there’s quite a good sequence of Scott fighting this Cthulhu-issue demon from his wheelchair. It works because, again, Hopeless plays it in the right way for Scott’s character: he remains calm in the face of madness and reasons his way to the solution.
Issues #15-16 are a less satisfying. They serve partly as Hank’s spotlight story, but they also involve the whole team being brought back together, which kind of detracts from that. And they involve two parallel demonic attacks – one the result of Hank’s unwise experiments in black magic in the Airstream, the other the result of the Goblin Queen just showing up for no particular reason. Yes, she was foreshadowed in a subplot a while back, yes, there’s a thematic reason to have her here, but there’s still no good plot reason to have two sets of demons show up at once beyond sheer coincidence, and that’s an irritant.
Then there’s the fact that most of the team, despite being brought back together here, don’t actually have a great deal of interest to do. They spend the two issues fighting a whole load of demons under the control of the Goblin Queen, and it’s pretty much just random fighting until Hank saves the day. And it’s an underwhelming use of the Queen, too. She seems like a sensible choice of villain, since not only does she have the link with the original Scott, but she’s a twisted version of the team’s absentee member Jean Grey. But she doesn’t actually have a plan here beyond causing chaos for its own sake. That’s a bit uncharacteristic of her – yes, she always revels in the madness, but she usually has a clear agenda on top of that. But it’s also not much to hang a story on. Sure, the whole thing is a vehicle for some material focussing on Hank, but it’s a pretty ropey vehicle. A stronger plot would really raise this a notch.
The plusses and minuses are pretty similar when it comes to Mark Bagley’s art. He’s good at selling character moments, and he’s always an effective storyteller. On the other hand, he’s not so good at epic chaos. The original Inferno storyline benefitted hugely from having artists like Blevins and Simonson cranking it up to 11, but that’s not really where Bagley’s strengths lie. He’s always a solid artist, but this doesn’t always feel like his natural territory.
Still, the story does have some good ideas with Hank. The big reveal is his casual announcement that he actually solved the time travel problem a while back, and he could go home whenever he wanted, but he’s become completely sidetracked by his new obsession with experimenting in magic. The idea seems to be that Hank belatedly realises that he’s gone off the rails, and that he’s become distracted by trying to regain a sense of being special in a world that feels like it’s outpaced his intellect. If he can’t catch up with science then he’s going to hide away from it and try something else. There’s an obvious logic problem with this, of course, which is that he could just go home and become special again that way. But it’s the sort of “not logical” that feels like a plausible emotional reaction, rather than a plot hole, so that’s fine by me.
Of course, Hank then gets to somewhat redeem himself by being the one guy who knows just enough about magic to fend of the Goblin Queen – although it’s pretty clear that we’re heading towards the story where Hank has already set himself on the road to ruin and has come to his senses too late to avoid that. No doubt we’ll get back to that after the Inhumans crossover. I’m not altogether convinced by this direction, since it’s obviously meant to be a parallel of what Brian Bendis was doing with the original Beast, which always suffered from the major drawback of not being remotely convincing. But perhaps Hopeless can sell me on the do-over; he’s certainly done a better job of building it so far.
I see where Hank’s coming from. Who cares about being a big fish in a small pond? There’s no merit in having the most advanced gadgets in 1967 if you can’t make it in the 21st century.
Right. You can’t go home again. He’ll always know what the future held.
Although, at the same time, he’ll be back in a time when that technology didn’t exist yet, so he could plausibly expect that by the time he’s an adult, and that tech is being invented, he’ll have grasped so much more in the world of science, that he’ll be ahead of the curve again.
Besides which, Hank was always involved in genetics anyway. He was never at the level of a Reed Richards or Tony Stark.
Hopeless won’t be following up on this plot though, will he?
The Inhumans cross-over will take the book up to the relaunch, and then Cullen Bunn inherits the “time-lost” X-Men, right?
I totally have lost interest in even skimming all the x books except the x-23 one.
It’s weird that Young Cyclops immediately took his future version as a case to be avoided, whereas young Hank saw his future self made blue and furry through self-experimentation and apparently thought “ok, what I need is to experiment with something I know even less.”
Glibness aside, I guess that’s a fair a take on Beast’s character as any, and maybe even what Hopeless is going for, but if it is, I wish he’d push that angle just a bit more.
So, there are two Maddie’s in the Marvel Universe now, this one from Secret Wars and the original (who was resurrected and who Storm let escape along with Selene when the team was battling Arkea). It was pointless to use this version and not utilize her personal connection with the x-men. Not to mention, the main point of the character is her connection to the x-men. What was the point of this particular character? Hopeless could’ve used Belasco, Mephisto, Nightmare, Sym, or Blackheart to serve the same role. Hell, we haven’t had an N’Garai invasion in a while. If your villain can be replaced with no affect on the story, they probably weren’t necessary.
But the beast form of Nightcrawler is a cool visual!
Hmm. I had to go back and reread this storyline as well, because it just kind of stops. “I’m not okay, I’m a long way from okay. My very soul may be forfeit. But enough about me, let’s go punch some Inhumans for no reason.”
I miss when a writer and creative team gave a comic book series an opportunity long term storylines, and years-long subplots, character arcs.
This whole “24 issue season” or whatever has murdered any hope of reclaiming old glories.
I just read these issues to catch up. I thought the explanation for the “parallel” demonic attacks was that there were portals opening all over, and Hank was just running experiments on the closest?
I’m really having a hard time with the Hank plot(s). First, was 1960s Hank ever supposed to be a super-science genius? I thought his role was “the smart one”, but for the teenaged X-men, not for the whole Marvel universe. The kind of genius mostly around to provide exposition, not to be the solution for many problems.
And while I’m not clear on exactly how many years are supposed to have gone by, does it make any sense at all for Hank to be hopelessly lost? If you took the most extreme changes — say, computer technology (my field) over the last fifty years — I wouldn’t have any trouble believing a comic book genius could be up to speed after a year. (“Well, of course I already knew Lisp. I spent a month learning Haskell and Ruby, then started auditing all the Internet-related modules out there. Of course, eventually I had to learn Perl for all the bioinformatics and genomics libraries, that took two more weeks.” Seriously, I’ve known multiple people in real life who could probably have done that.)
“And while I’m not clear on exactly how many years are supposed to have gone by, does it make any sense at all for Hank to be hopelessly lost? If you took the most extreme changes — say, computer technology (my field) over the last fifty years — I wouldn’t have any trouble believing a comic book genius could be up to speed after a year.”
I’m not reading this, but surely they’re not saying that the young versions have come from 50 years in the past? The original X-Men have to be in their 30s, so it’s only twenty years at most. They’re not going to be sent back with the knowledge that man will shortly land on the moon, they’ll be sent back with the knowledge that Sony are going to do really well with this new “PlayStation” console they’re releasing.
Sol, Hank’s genius level has varied over the years. Originally, as you write, he was “the smart one interested in science” in a high school setting; I regret that Untold Tales of Spider-Man ended before Kurt Busiek might’ve taken up my suggestion of Hank and Peter Parker meeting at a high school science fair as they seemed about equivalent in that regard.
But then they spun Hank off into his own series and did two things. 1) While they didn’t state it at the time, and it causes all sorts of “that makes no sense with respect to how the real world works”, he effectively managed to graduate from Xavier’s with a Ph.D. circa age 21 (only later was he explicitly referred to as “Dr. McCoy”) and take a job as what amounted to a Principal Investigator at a major research company. That’s definitely an IQ upgrade. He then went on to, in a pretty short period of time, “distill the essence of mutation into chemical form”, which is a major move towards Richards/Pym/Banner status.
On the other hand, when he joined the Avengers, there was at least one storyline and explicit story about how he felt intellectually inferior to Pym, Stark, etc.
But then, as of the last decade or so, he’s been explicitly bumped up to one of the 10 or so smartest people in the world level (ignoring the various come-latelies Marvel’s been adding to that list over the past couple of years) and treated as a peer or close to it by Richards, Pym, Stark, etc.
Remember how the concept of bottled water was strange to the original X-Men after they arrived from the past.
They certainly seem to be acting as if they arrived from the mid-1960s, rather than only 20 or so years from the present.
“I’m not reading this, but surely they’re not saying that the young versions have come from 50 years in the past? The original X-Men have to be in their 30s, so it’s only twenty years at most. They’re not going to be sent back with the knowledge that man will shortly land on the moon, they’ll be sent back with the knowledge that Sony are going to do really well with this new “PlayStation” console they’re releasing.”
Given Marvel’s sliding timeline scale, the time the kids came from would be 14 to 15 years ago. Which means 9/11 has already happened in the Marvel Universe. So does this mean the ridiculously stupid scene of Dr. Doom shedding a tear there never happened?
The Marvel 911 comic was never canon
Considering Juggernaut staged a terrorist attack on WTC in 1991 without a twinge of guilt
Did the Juggernaut attack even happen anymore? As per the sliding timeline, it would have had to have happened long after 2001.
I miss when a writer and creative team gave a comic book series an opportunity long term storylines, and years-long subplots, character arcs.
This whole “24 issue season” or whatever has murdered any hope of reclaiming old glories.
Well, agree and disagree.
I think some of the writers are doing a bang-up job with the idea that they have a single story to tell in 24-issues. The Whedon-Cassaday example is a perfect model. Come in, tell the tale, and get out leaving all the toys in place for the next guy. I think the continuity and synergy between titles, and across platforms, has grown too unwieldy for the long-form storytelling that was the hallmark of the X-Men from 1975-1991.
Nu-D: “I miss when a writer and creative team gave a comic book series an opportunity long term storylines, and years-long subplots, character arcs.
This whole “24 issue season” or whatever has murdered any hope of reclaiming old glories.”
Jason Aaron is putting on a clinic on how to do this in the new regime in his Thor runs.
Hickman and Remender did it across multiple books, and Ewing still is, despite frequent cancellations.
But, yeah, certainly has become more rare.
Long form storytelling where ideas can be set up years before they pay off, you ask for? Can I direct you towards “More than Meets the Eye”?