The X-Axis – 31 July 2011
If you haven’t listened to this week’s podcast yet, then it’s just one post down. Reviews include Daredevil #1, Amazing Spider-Man #666 (the first part of Spider-Island) and Our Love Is Real…
…none of which are going to be covered here, since it’s another of those weeks when there’s a ridiculous quantity of X-books, so I’m going to focus on those.
Astonishing X-Men #40 – Why is Astonishing X-Men?
This is not entirely a sarcastic question (though it’s that too). With a fifth monthly X-Men title about to launch and no sign of anything being junked to make room for it, one has to ask what the point of them all is. On a purely commercial level, of course, the answer is “completists will buy them”. But let’s consider the point of view of the editors and creators tasked with filling those pages.
We know that Uncanny X-Men and Wolverine/X-Men will be the flagship titles, each starring one of the post-schism X-Men teams. Legacy has a reasonably defined role as the place where Mike Carey explores concepts from the back catalogue. But what about X-Men and Astonishing X-Men? Are they anything more than tree-killers?
X-Men was at one point supposed to be a book where the X-Men interacted with other parts of the Marvel Universe – X-Men Team-Up, I guess – but there was no sign of that in the most recent arc. Its present remit and identity could politely be described as nebulous.
Astonishing at least has an officially stated role: it’s the self-contained book, the one you can read without having to buy the other titles. So the idea seems to be an X-Men equivalent of Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight. But who’s the intended audience for that book? Leave aside the completists, because they’ll buy anything; they’re the baseline below which no X-Men title can fall. Presumably we’re positing the existence of an audience who are potentially interested in X-Men stories but put off by inter-title continuity.
This would make a certain degree of sense if Astonishing was a book which gave creators with a following or a particularly strong creative voice the chance to do an X-Men arc in a style you wouldn’t see anywhere else. The Warren Ellis run fits that model. I’m sure his fans would rather he did six issues of Astonishing than six issues of Uncanny where he’d have to worry about the wider plot. But the two arcs currently appearing are just generic X-Men stories in the Marvel house style, and what’s the point of that? We’re now imagining an audience of X-Men non-completists who want to buy glorified fill-in issues?
Even stranger, Marvel appear to suppose that the notional Astonishing audience, people who are put off by inter-title continuity, will nonetheless want to buy two completely unrelated storylines by different creative teams appearing in alternating issues. How in god’s name does that make any sense?
This book needs a rethink. Or the axe.
Issue #40 is the second part of Christos Gage and Juan Bobillo’s Brood storyline. It advances things slightly, but it’s hardly earth-shattering stuff, and it frankly doesn’t make a great deal of sense.
Having set up the Brood in the opening chapter as Marvel’s thinly-veiled Alien analogues, this issue brings on the hook: the X-Men have to save a mutant Brood kid who was born with compassion. This isn’t an original idea either – it’s the same premise as the original Warlock story from New Mutants – but at least it’s something new for a Brood story.
Trouble is, having decided he wants to do a story about renegade “nice” Brood, Gage then ends up creating a convoluted plot justification which doesn’t actually stack up. The argument goes like this. The X-Men can’t simply wipe out the Brood, because even though the Brood are evil, they’re a necessary part of the eco-system; without them, even nastier species would thrive. In fact, the Brood are now an endangered species who need to be preserved. Yet the Brood are evil. How do the X-Men square this? Through a baffling scheme which involves rescuing the one “good” Brood and using him to create a new hivemind which in some unspecified way is apparently going to result in a kinder, nicer Brood.
Except… the reason why the Brood are apparently so important to the eco-system is precisely because they go around killing things. So a race of “nice” Brood who aren’t murderous lunatics are completely useless to address the problem. So the plot doesn’t work. And even if did work, the mechanics are so vague and fiddly as to be a problem in themselves. “If we make this compassionate Brood creature the new template for a Brood hive-mind, we could create that race.” What? How? The bottom line is, I don’t really understand what the heroes are trying to do here, and to the extent I do understand it, I don’t understand how it solves their problem.
Throw in rather ugly art from Juan Bobillo, whose work on this arc doesn’t appeal to me at all, and you’ve got a dud.
New Mutants #28 – A therapist issue! For the X-books, the classic example of this sort of thing is the X-Factor story by Peter David and Joe Quesada from the early nineties, so there’s quite a bit to live up to.
Do these things badly and they become just an excuse for the characters to explain their problems to the audience. But Abnett and Lanning know what they’re doing, so while the characters do get to explain how they see the plot, they also get pretty heavily challenged on it. It can still be a touch formulaic – even Gus, the therapist, vaguely questions whether his brute force approach really constitutes “therapy” – but as a device to explore character arcs, it largely works.
Oddly, the focus is largely on Cannonball, Magik and Karma – the characters who were written out of the team during Abnett and Lanning’s first arc – which seems an odd choice. Some of the characters who were kept on the regular team, most obviously Magma and Warlock, got very little to do in that arc, and it seems odd that the writers actually seem more interested in the ex-members than in the characters who are notionally the stars of the book. Nate Grey also gets a fair bit of space here; having been conveniently depowered last issue, he’s apparently joining the regular cast, which at least explains why three issues were devoted to finding him. In one of those awkward stories that has to be done somewhere but doesn’t quite fit in any book, Nate also gets brought together with Hope Summers, who naturally recognises him as a younger version of her father-figure Cable.
On the whole, some interesting character ideas here.
Uncanny X-Force #12 – Part 2 (or 3, if you use real world counting) of “The Dark Angel Saga”, which doesn’t have Angel in it at all. X-Force (minus Angel) are still in the Age of Apocalypse timeline looking for the Magic Widget that will solve Angel’s problems. But they have several problems: they don’t have the Magic Widget; the local version of the X-Men want it for their own purposes (the story suggests there are two, but seriously now, we know where this is heading); and it sounds suspiciously like the Magic Widget might “cure” Warren’s possession by killing him.
That last bit, I have a problem with. X-Force don’t want to kill Warren – and if they did, they could have done it anyway – so it kind of undercuts the plot. Still, Rick Remender is doing a nice job of team-book juggling here. In addition to the threads I’ve already mentioned, there’s also plenty of material with the team interacting with other versions of people they know, a continuation of the Angel/Psylocke/Fantomex subplot, and some villains who are fun twists on familiar characters. (I particularly like the Iron Man with Ghost Rider’s head.) There’s also some lovely art by Mark Brooks, who seems to have changed his style to add a level of detail that wasn’t there before. It works for him.
Another good issue from a strong team book.
Wolverine/Deadpool: The Decoy – This is a reprint from Marvel Digital, oddly premised on the idea that a team-up between Wolverine and Deadpool (who have been co-starring in X-Force for the last year) is an amusing novelty. I wouldn’t be altogether shocked to learn that this is an axed story from the cancelled Deadpool Team-Up, actually.
A malfunctioning alien robot is looking for Jean Grey, for reasons that aren’t really explained but don’t matter. Wolverine needs a distraction while he takes it down, and since the actual Jean Grey isn’t available, well… you’ve seen the cover. This is the version of Deadpool where he’s a raving lunatic, and Stuart Moore writes that pretty well, with Wolverine pretty much reduced to shoving him in the right direction and hoping for the best. It’s kind of a one-joke comic and it goes without saying that this is not an essential purchase, but it raises a smile, and Shawn Crystal draws a good robot.
In addition to the full-length lead story, there’s also an 18-page back-up strip reprinted from the Deadpool/GLI Summer Fun Spectacular from a couple of years ago, which is silly but has some decent gags along the way.
Wolverine: The Best There Is #8 – The idiotic “Parental Advisory!” label still appears on the cover, but the creators seem to have lost interest in pandering to it. What actually happens in this issue is that some weird techno-organic thingy has shown up in San Francisco, and Wolverine fights it for a whole issue alongside two rather camp space policemen who’ve shown up to help. And… yeah, that’s pretty much the entire issue.
Charlie Huston is certainly searching the darkest corners of the Marvel Universe for guest stars, since the two space cops are existing characters, but they’re about as obscure as it gets. One is Monark Starstalker, a Howard Chaykin character who appeared in Marvel Premiere #32 (October 1976) and a single issue of the recent Nova series. The other is Paradox, who appeared in Marvel Preview #24 and Bizarre Adventures #30, and doesn’t even merit a listing in the Unofficial Handbook Appendix website. Nothing wrong with that, since nothing in the story turns on you recognising them, and if you do, it’s an easter egg.
Fundamentally this is just a fight scene, but at least the book seems to have eased off on trying so hard to be “edgy”.
X-Men Legacy #252 – Part three of “Lost Legions”, as the team head to Paris to confront Styx and try to rescue Professor X. As with earlier parts of this storyline, there are some neat concepts – such as freezing time for everyone in Paris except the X-Men and the people they’re looking for. Magneto and Frenzy finally have a proper conversation, though I’m not quite sure I buy the dynamic considering that she used to be one of his cultists. But on the other hand, Khoi Pham’s art remains weirdly sketchy – in a couple of points, Paris appears to be a flat plane with one major building rising from it – and I’m starting to wonder whether the cute ideas associated with Legion’s splinter personalities are really heading anywhere in particular.
X-Men Schism #2 – Frank Cho is this issue’s guest artist, and since the story doesn’t give him much opportunity to indulge his cheesecake tendencies, he spends the issue demonstrating that he knows how to tell a story. It’s also nice to see him working hard to differentiate the characters in terms of build and body language, though his Cyclops goes a bit overboard with the skinny nerd look, and just feels off model.
The new Hellfire Club, it turns out, is a mixture of old-fashioned elitist racists, and insane evil children. You can question whether this really has anything much to do with the Hellfire Club as previously depicted in the X-books, and the answer is that it doesn’t. But then, one of the problems with the Club was that they became a sort of secret society for morally dubious mutants which sat uneasily with the original concept of an evil corporate Illuminati. This version is firmly in “cartoon villain” territory, and at times feel like they could have wandered out of a Mark Millar script; but when you’re dealing with sociopathic children, credibility isn’t exactly the aim.
That said, I do find myself wondering how villains like that are going to sit with the philosophical divide that’s supposed to be the cornerstone of this book. This issues seems to signal what it might be: Kid Omega shows up on Utopia and cheerfully takes the X-Men up on their offer of asylum. Wolverine’s got no problem with turning the brat over to the authorities; Cyclops is a separatist who thinks it’s a mutant problem and none of anyone else’s business. That’s apparently the divide: how serious are the X-Men about their mutant Sealand? It’s an issue which I can believe would split the group, and if that’s where we’re going, I’m interested.
You can question why it hasn’t come up before given the number of criminals on Utopia (has nobody asked to extradite them?), but I can live with that – most of them had been through the 198 refugee camp, after all, so the authorities have already had plenty of opportunity to arrest them if they were bothered. Strong premise, nice character work with the stars… still not sure the comedy villains fit in with this particular plot, though maybe it’s a deliberate decision to stop them introducing any unwanted complications into the argument.
Through a baffling scheme which involves rescuing the one “good” Brood and using him to create a new hivemind which in some unspecified way is apparently going to result in a kinder, nicer Brood.
This is the exact plot of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “I, Borg”. It wasn’t very good then either.
Also pretty much the same as Prof X and the mutant Skrulls back in the Ages of Apocalypse story.
thanks paul, for another good write-up and the podcast.
nerdy complaint: im bothered with karmas scene in new mutants. her statement that shes the only way face can communicate with the world is so utterly stupid (as the therapist points out) that i find it hard to believe she (or anybody else, for that matter) would say something like that. besides, the underlying sentiment seems out of character for her. but im glad she hasnt been written out, after all; always had an inexplicable fondness for her.
good scene between nate and hope, although im not sure i want them in this book. nate actually might make a good supporting character on generation hope.
Actually, I too remember of the Borg when I think about the Brood. They are villains that are meant to be scary, all powerful and nearly unbeatable. And yet, the more they are used, the less credible the threat, and it’s not like you can have too many such instances in a shared universe. The Brood, the Borg, the Replicators (in the stargate series) are one time Villains that have been used up.
I have stopped reading Astonishing a while ago but the plot summary that you give doesn’t seem all that bad to me. It’s something that seems to recognize the problems with using the brood so much and tries to do something different, to take them one step further. Yes, the same happened with the Borg and the Replicators, but those stories also tried to address the same problem. Unfortunatelly, the next wrier that decides to use the brood will either ignore this story or pay lip service to it by saying that the new brood will become the same as the old one because the hive mind overrides the template. Still, it doesn’t sound that bad
Pretty sure the comedy villains in Schism are going to prove to be canon fodder of a sort. Once they’ve been overcome Cyclops is going to want to execute them on Utopia since Mutants have to handle their own problems while Wolverine decides that they should be turned over to the authorities since mutants can’t been seen murdering children.
I think the Borg were twice-useful, actually, since the first time they simply resoundedly kicked the Enterprise’s ass, which added to their credibility. But after the Enterprise defeated them, yeah, sure, time to put ’em away.
Reminds me of Venom, who for quite some time was the bad guy Spider-Man had never been able to KO.
But the reason I’m commenting is just to thank Paul for linking to Sealand. I knew nothing of that. Interesting.
You often dismiss things as for completists only, without giving thought to those who might only buy that book. Some people don’t care what the “core” book is, they just get the one they like, or the one they happened to get first and stuck with it. Like the Wolverine one-shots. I like Wolvie, but haven’t bought the ongoing for years. I always try the one shots though.
I have to agree that Astonishing sounds like it needs the axe though.
I’m confused with all these Brood stories–whatever happened to Hannah Conover, the similarly-compassionate human Brood Queen that was the focus for the X-Men/Brood: Day of Wrath mini-series years ago?
According to Bishop in that mini-series, she allegedly becomes the progenitor of a new, “kinder” Brood species. Don’t these new writers even bother to do some research on past stories?
I think that the (rather shaky) reason the X-Men think the kinder, gentler Brood could keep the unnamed boogeyman species in check as well as the current nasty ones do is that if the Brood are responsible for killing something that are EVEN WORSER (Gott in Himmel!!) than they are, it implies that they have some unique capacity do deal with that species, like they’re immune to whatever that species does that makes it so nasty (think of how the rather innocuous Lockheed is portrayed as a That Which All Brood Fear), and that since they’re an intelligent species that’s aware that it’s supposed to be keeping the Even Worseans in check (remember, the X-Men learn that fact from the Brood hivemind), the nice Brood will hopefully consent to keep killing them, albeit as a grim duty and not a recreational activity.
And I think that the reason they expect the nice Brood to be able to replace the old Brood is that the story implies that the Brood are so endangered that the X-Men stand a decent chance of literally wiping them out, so they think that if they get this nice young Brood to raise the Broodlings currently inside the X-Men (the reason part of their plan was to get infected and then surgically remove the parasites), they can create a nice Brood hivemind, then wipe out all the evil Brood and let the new hivemind do their job (presumably using nonsapient species for reproduction). And since there’s apparently only a handful of Brood left, the fact that they’re replacing them with a handful of nice Brood is a lateral move.
I THINK that’s the premise. Like I said, it’s shaky as all getout, but at least there’s an internal logic of a sort.
Of course, that all leaves the small question of how the heck two species from entirely different planets can constitute an “ecosystem.”
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: how lame is it that this EVEN WORSER species is such a major plot point without even being named or depicted?
I can’t help but suspect that they’re either trying to get away with putting the minimum amount of effort possible into the story (“They don’t even appear on panel! Why do we need to think of a name? Names are hard!”) or that they’re keeping the species nebulous to set up a last minute reveal, like that it’s Lockheed’s species – or even humanity or mutants – that they’re talking about, and only the Brood think it’s important to keep them in check.
My guess as to the role of the kiddie villains in Schism is that Idie ends up killing one during the inevitable battle next issue. Idie’s fate, rather than Quentin Quire’s, will end up being the divisive issue that cleaves the X-Men in half.
I am basing this on the cover of Generation Hope which brands Idie a “Murderer.” It would certainly make the separatist more sympathetic to the reader as they would be harboring a hero-in-training rather than a character that Aaron has portrayed as completely unlikeable and unredeemable.
That has kind of been foreshadowed to the point of a spoiler hasn’t it? The minor character given an inexplicable amount of screen time and portrayed as a ticking time bomb barely resonsible for her own actions (in a “slave to her upbringing” way, not a “helpless puppet” way) with cover previews branding her a murderer-to-be. We don’t know exactly who she’ll kill, but it’s hard to think the Generation Hope cover isn’t related to her role in Schism.
There’s something that keeps bothering me that I keep forgetting to mention when I post here: the X-Man have a hyper-religious girl who’s filled with self-loathing because her provincial upbringing has taught her that mutants are monsters and therefore she must be evil even if she intends to do good. HOW ON EARTH have they not introduced this girl to Wolfsbane who went through the EXACT SAME problem and eventually overcame it? I know that over in X-Factor Rahne’s kind of busy at the moment, but their current storyline is a one-thin-after-another deal that seems to be taking place over only a few days if not hours, and Idie’s been on Utopia for weeks and they haven’t even mentioned trying to get a hold of Rahne or said that it would be nice if they could but they haven’t been able to.
I couldn’t help noticing that the X-23 post has gone uncommented on. The pop chart and wrestling posts usually muster SOME sort of reaction. Is nobody reading that title? Personally, my X dollars are stretched too thin to even consider it. The art looks nice, though.
I hate to post another comment when I’m already responsible for three of the last five (assuming no one posts while I’m typing this) but I read and enjoy X-23. I just didn’t really have anything to add to Paul’s analysis of it worth the time it would take to type it. (Not that I think all the comments I DO make are vital or anything, just that I tend to have more free time on Sundays to clutter up the Net with my ramblings.)
Its the fact that 5 monthly X-men titles even exist that prevents me from buying any of them. I have no idea what each their focus is supposed to be, so I don’t bother.
Hey! First time poster, long time reader… but I just have a little tidbit to complain about.
I’ve been reading comics for umpteen years, and I’ve even gotten to the point where I’ve collected older comics and read them over the years. And it’s great that these writers try to evolve these X-Men and -Women to different levels, but is it just me… or does the whole Wolverine being the logical “let’s turn him over to the police guy” schtick not work for anyone else? I mean he was put in the Avengers because he’s the guy who can kill a bad guy when the other Avengers are “unable” to do so. And then over in X-Men he’s this benevolent samurai “let’s play by the rules” guy. To me, this split has come out of the blue. I mean he’s heading up freakin’ Uncanny X-Force, which is the super secret kill team! And now, he’s trying to convince Scott to turn Quire over to the cops. For real?
This is my problem with Marvel at the moment. I’m severely peeved with the crossover fad they’ve developed in the last ten years. You can’t have self-contained issues without plotting out something for the TPB’s to sell later. I know it’s a cliche thing to complain about, but seriously, what happened to having down time with these characters? I don’t care if they go off and play baseball, but I mean… if EVERYTHING is a BIG DEAL, then nothing is. If EVERY threat is global CATASTROPHE then the readers are going to start (and already are) saying, “Oh, well, we’ll lose one major character, loads of canon fodder, and then next summer the X-Men/Avengers/FF/Spider-Man will have something more terrifying to face.”
Personally, I don’t get the Schism event. I even wrote into Marvel saying, “What the hell…” Between Astonishing, Uncanny X-Men, X-Men Legacy, X-Men, and Uncanny X-Force (with satellite titles, New Mutants, Gen Hope, X-Factor, and the solo titles of Wolverine, Namor {CANCELLED}, Daken, and X-23) there are just TOO many X-Titles out. When Joe Quesada came in, he wiped the board clean. He cancelled titles that were hemorrhaging money (according to him) and left X-Men, Uncanny, and Wolverine (I think), and that was after revamps and reloads didn’t work. So why is it now that we have essentially 8 comics (not counting solos) nothing is really being done?
I just… ugh, I can’t wrap my head around it. I’ve recently started reading old Avengers comics and new Avengers comics, and I personally prefer those story lines than this crap!
I like Astonishing X-Men as it is now. And the reason is because it is just an X-Men story. I like the X-Men as a concept, I like the characters, but I don’t want to follow the continuity over to event books or over several core titles, where, as far as I see it, it’s always the X-Men as an end in it self.
Gimme a fight against the brood over mutants talking about mutants any day.
I’m reading X-23 too – and I too looked at the lack of comments on the X-23 post, and felt kinda bad… But I don’t know whether I have anything to say about it that I haven’t said here before. It might well be my favourite X-title currently, partly because the mopey/soapey-ness of it reminds me of the time I started reading X-Men comics… And because I’m beginning to think Marjorie Liu may be exactly my sort of writer – I like her character choices too (as well as her ability to capture those voices better than most, as I definitely have said before). X-23’s a character I’ve always liked mostly based on her first solo mini – I’ve been a bit disappointed with everything she’s appeared in since, and this is the first time since that I feel justified in my warm feelings toward the character. And Jubilee and Gambit make a great supporting cast (and actually makes me think Liu may have begun reading in the same early nineties moment that I did) to my mind.
But I’m still not sure that I have much else to say about the book – “I like it but can easily understand why many others would not” hardly seems like the most insightful of statements.
The thing to remember about Astonishing X-Men is that Marvel probably doesn’t view it as the umpteenth X-Men book, but rather as the flagship book for their Astonishing line.
Of course, that whole line is a bit of a mess. The nominal raison d’etre is to give high profile creators the chance to play with the high profile characters in a continuity-light way. But that assumes there are big name creators with empty slots in their schedules and a burning desire to write certain characters that are otherwise off-limits. That seems unlikely, since Marvel already has their biggest names on the main books of their high profile characters, or on the big events that necessarily also involve those characters.
So who, exactly, are these big name creators with spare time and an unmet need to write certain characters? Apparently, James Asmus.
As for (Adjectiveless) X-Men, it seems to me that if they want the X-Men more integrated in to the Marvel Universe, the way to accomplish that is to, umm, have the X-Men more integrated into the Marvel universe. Put some more of them on the Avengers – exclusively, like Beast, not like Wolverine. Have them show up in Fear Itself proper. Invite David Alleyne to join the Future Foundation. But whatever you do, don’t just create yet another X-Men book in which they mainly fight characters created specifically for that new book.
I’d love to see Colossus or Storm on the Avengers.
“This issues seems to signal what it might be: Kid Omega shows up on Utopia and cheerfully takes the X-Men up on their offer of asylum. Wolverine’s got no problem with turning the brat over to the authorities; Cyclops is a separatist who thinks it’s a mutant problem and none of anyone else’s business. That’s apparently the divide: how serious are the X-Men about their mutant Sealand? It’s an issue which I can believe would split the group, and if that’s where we’re going, I’m interested.”
Didn’t Chris Claremont do this a few years ago, except with Storm on one side, and Cyclops/White Queen on the other?
Andy, isn’t the Astonishing line dead by now ? All the various projects (Wolverine/Spider-Man, Thor…) have concluded, and I don’t recall any announcement for more of them. Heck, if the history of the Carnage mini is to be believed (it apparently started its life as an Astonishing Iron Man/Spider-Man mini before they thought better of it), Marvel are clearly moving away from the brand.
So we’re left with a zombie Astonishing X-Men series. Again.
JD, it was my impression that Astonishing Captain America was delayed, but still in the works. It was also my understanding that the Astonishing line was always intended to be mini-series that come out when there was a story to tell, anchored by an ongoing X-Men title. However, I don’t currently have a source for either statement, so perhaps I made them up.
The notion that the Brood are “evil,” just because they like to eat us, is all kinds of eye-rolly to me. They’re a predator species that happens to prey on (among other things) humans; these things happen. Considerations of the cruelty of mass-factory-farming aside, are humans universally evil because they eat regularly eat cows, chicken, pigs, and fish without any serious moral compunction? Are vegans the Warlock/Hugh-like mutations among us who’ve been born with the seeds of goodness within them? Should enterprising chicken adventurers wire our brains up to those of vegetarians in order to introduce compassion into our collective unconscious?
The child supervillains in Schism are beginning to push the whole thing a bit too far into camp territory for me – somehow when it was just the one I felt fine, but a whole cadre of murderous prepubescents seems a bit much.
I’m also really not sold on the fight over Quentin Quire. It’s not like he’s killed anyone; he pulled the telepathic equivalent of a public pantsing. To hand him over to transparently corrupt foreign governments who apparently want to imprison or execute him for a glorified practical joke, when the X-Men blithely extend amnesty to mass-murderers like Magneto and, well, Wolverine, would be nuts. I’m not seeing much at all to schism over here.
@WhitePhoenix86: I think the key to making Schism work, if whether or not to protect Quentin Quire is going to be the breaking point is to make it look like Scott is being the idealist (“We must police our own!”) and Wolvering look like the grim pragmatist (“Kill ‘im, hand ‘im over, kick ‘im out – we gotta wash our hands of this guy!”). You’re quite right that making Wolverine out to be law & order guy is a misstep, but I think they can pull it off if (and this is a big if) they make it clear that he wants to hand Quire over not because it’s “the right thing to do” but because it’s preferable to having to fight the Avengers and the armies of the world to protect someone they don’t like anyway. Also I can understand Wolverine being reluctant to lie to Steve Rogers’ face.
@moose n squirrel: The Brood aren’t potrayed as evil because they kill living creatures, they’re potrayed as evil because they intentionally target intelligent species and are openly sadistic about it, and because they have a hive mind they actually can all be evil. It’s like if Sabretooth had hundreds of bodies he could control at the same time. You could argue that they’re less evil than Sabretooth because they at least do something productive (from their point of view) with the people they kill, but by that logic the vampires the X-Men recently fought, Selene, Magus, and Hannibal Lechter weren’t really evil either. If all you have to do to not qualify as evil is eat or impregnate your victim … that’s a pretty loose definition of morality. As far as we know the Brood don’t have the option to not kill anything (at least as long as they want to keep reproducing – although has it ever been established that a Brood can’t implant an egg in another Brood? Presumably a volunteer?) but they could at least keep it to nonsapient species.
And if the point of the question was to provoke a debate about why it’s better to kill nonsapient species than sapient ones, I’m sorry I wasted your time but I have no interest in debating that point.
I agree with WhitePhoenix86 that it’s a shame the characters never seem to have down time anymore. I grew up on the early 90s stories, where a quiet Scott Lobdell “X-Men hang around and talk about their feelings” issue followed every major crisis. I was always a fan of these stories as that’s where you got the best character work. With the staggering number of X-Men comics coming out every month, it’s pretty astounding that we haven’t seen one of these “taking stock” issues in ages. New Mutants #28 is the only post-Utopia example I can think of.
Mika, your comparison between X-23 and early 90s X-Men has piqued my interest.
@ZZZ, I can see where you’re going with this whole Wolverine being the tie up loose ends kind of guy (with the whole, let’s be decisive about our actions), but what’s more decisive than hacking someone’s head off (which Wolvie is good at doing). I just think that it’s a BIG step to suspend my disbelief for Wolverine to be the law abiding citizen, when he’s in Young Avengers calling for Scarlet Witch and Wiccan’s head on a platter. (Now, I won’t go into having more X-Men on the Avengers, because I’m not really comfortable with sharing my X-Men with the Avengers… they don’t seem keen on letting Speed or Wiccan joining the X-Men… but that’s just my selfish 8 year old self creeping up.)
Personally, I think I’m just a bit hacked off with the writers and editors of the X-Men right now. Prelude to Schism was a waste of trees and ink and my money, and honestly, I’m not finding Schism to be any more riveting. To me, if this division between the X-Men is going to be so damned important that it causes there to be yet ANOTHER X-book, I want to see the underlying issues starting a few months ago. No one has really complained about Scott’s methods, except Beast, and he left. I just find this whole division of X-books to be a plot to get more of my money. Maybe I’m just full of sour grapes and nothing will please me, except the return of Jean Grey, and I need to switch to Avengers for a bit.
On that note, I’d like to switch over to event fatigue, because I think there have been too many crossover, line-wide events going on lately. It feels like since Avengers Disassembled we’ve had crossovers and mega-events ever since. House of M, Decimation, Civil War, Secret Invasion, Dark Reign, Siege, Chaos War, Fear Itself… and that’s just the crossovers that have happened overall… this isn’t including Spider-Man’s stuff, FF’s issues, Avengers strife, and general X-Men storylines at all… and now they’re calling Schism the X-Men’s Civil War? Weren’t the X-men involved in Civil War and the 198? Didn’t they already have a Civil War with Bishop saying that everyone should register (which made no sense to me since Bishop grew up in a concentration camp future where registering basically meant you’re hunted or killed for being a mutant)?
Something Scott said in Schism #1 resonated with me. I’m paraphrasing but he said something along the lines of, “Fear and hated. We use that phrase so much it loses meaning.” Look at the crossovers and events that they’ve scheduled recently… everything is the X-Men Event of 2010… or the Biggest Avengers shake up since Disassembled! It loses meaning… we know at the end of the crossover, the X-Men/Avengers/FF/Spider-Man will be A-Okay and we’ll get a neat and swift resolution that will cause spin-offs, tie-ins, and general boost in TPB sales.
I don’t see the Brood as “intentionally” targeting sentient species; sentient species are what they happen to prefer to eat. Every animal has its own preferred and/or required food sources: sea turtles like to eat jellyfish, whales like to eat fish and squid and krill, humans like to eat – well, damn near everything. From the perspective of the thing being eaten this is a pretty rotten state of affairs, but I don’t see where morality comes into it.
There’s nothing about having a bigger brain that makes me more alive than, say, a fish, and if I catch and kill and eat that fish I’m still killing and eating a living creature. It doesn’t make me evil, and if another, bigger animal ate me it wouldn’t make that animal evil either. Hell, you could easily argue that “sentient” species are, by their nature, more evil than “non-sentient” species (whatever “sentient” or “non-sentient” means – in a world where lab rats have demonstrated empathy and metacognition, applying sci-fi notions of “sentience” to the real world seems awfully silly), since humans are capable of building, say, mass stockpiles of nuclear weapons capable of extinguishing life on this planet several times over, whereas your average species of songbird appears interested primarily in more practical matters like eating, reproduction, and having a little fun. Hell, maybe the Brood are doing everyone a favor just by eating sentient species, period.
The most obvious problem with Schism is that Cyclops and Wolverine are behaving like plot devices more than they’re behaving like Cyclops and Wolverine.
Sure, Wolverine has a history of taking young girls under his wing, but has he ever done so intentionally? To the point where he would be shown scouting out the young girls on Utopia and consulting with Kitty Pryde over which one should be his next project? It’s one thing for Kitty or Jubilee to fall into being Wolverine’s nubile sidekick, but quite another for him to be seeking out someone to groom for the role. Shouldn’t someone take him aside and say “Dude, you’re 150 years old…quit scoping out the 14-year-olds, okay?”
But they need something to be a bone of contention between Scott and Logan, so they suddenly conjure up a relationship between Logan and Idie, so Idie can have something bad happen that Logan can get huffy about.
And while there are any number of reasons Cyclops might lie to Steve Rogers about Quentin Quire’s whereabouts, “He will get a trial by his mutant peers” doesn’t really feel like one of them, nor does it seem like something that Wolverine would give much of a crap about one way or the other.
They want to have a major event that splits the X-Men over a philosophical basis, which is a decent premise, but from a commercial standpoint they also want to have it center around Wolverine, and he just doesn’t fit the bill. They want a schism, but the problem is that none of the characters it would make sense to build that around are ones that they think could carry a title.
So they’re manufacturing reasons for Wolverine to disagree with Cyclops, but the stubborn fact is, given all the things that HAVEN’T caused a schism between these two characters, nothing that’s going on here feels like anything that would. For this event to happen, Wolverine has to stop being Wolverine.
wwk5d says:
August 1, 2011 at 9:14 PM
“Didn’t Chris Claremont do this a few years ago, except with Storm on one side, and Cyclops/White Queen on the other?”
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. If I recall correctly (and, I do, actually) that X-Treme X-Men arc was titled, wait for it … “Schism.” Ugh. So, 2011, we’re still recycling Claremont stories and spinning the wheels and calling it spectacle. Thank goodness for X-Factor and Uncanny X-Force. The two best X-MEN books out.
“For this event to happen, Wolverine has to stop being Wolverine.”
Maybe it’s going to be a double swerve, and it’ll be Cyclops reverts back to the more traditional Cyclops at the crucial moment.
Maybe the schism spins from Cyclops having a problem with Wolverine’s penchant for scoping out 14 year old girls?
I’ve been wanting Aaron on X-Men for a long time now, so glad it’s finally happening. Here’s the thing, any issues I would have with the comedy villains in Schism are being thrown out because the X-Men are all being written IN CHARACTER for the first time in about 3 or 4 years. I guess since Whedon left. How hard is that? I feel like the old characters I used to like have finally returned.
“I feel like the old characters I used to like have finally returned.”
Yet we always complain that things never move forward. Let’s face it, we, as comic fans, are a rather silly bunch. Why would anyone want to bother writing material for us?
“I’m confused with all these Brood stories–whatever happened to Hannah Conover, the similarly-compassionate human Brood Queen that was the focus for the X-Men/Brood: Day of Wrath mini-series years ago?”
Hey, somebody else remembers Hannah Connover. Beautiful. The real world reason is that the mini was put out around the Onslaught crossover when nobody was paying a lot of attention to it and it was forgotten quickly. Didn’t that have Hitch art?
What’s interesting is not long after Hannah was placed in Stasis, Bastion cleared out the mansion and nobody remembered she was supposed to be there. Like Triumph in JLA, or Grey on Torchwood.
The way I see it:
-Only sentients can be good or evil; non-sentients are incapable of moral considerations.
-Non-sentients can’t choose their diet anyhow, but sentients can.
-If a sentient being preys on other sentient being, that’s morally wrong.
-If it’s not wrong for a sentient being to prey on another, then it’s not wrong for a human to kill another human for food, either.
Granted, this is somewhat simplified, but I don’t think we need to get bogged down on the definitions of “sentience” and “morality” before we condemn murder.
@The original Matt
There’s a difference between the main characters being written in character and things never moving forward. Morrison wrote the whole X-Team dead-on but still had them move forward. Fraction was writing them all out of character and had plots that weren’t really advancing anything. I think good writers can do both. I’d be happy to see long-term changes, hell Claremont used to do it all the time in his original run, but Fraction just seemed to be writing one-note ciphers and pandering to Land and Dodson’s cheesecake tendencies.
I remember reading a quote about a quote from the creators of the Venture Bros (which everyone should watch) saying i amuses them whenever they write something which they feel is out of character and the fans misconstrue it as being character development.
How do you gauge what is in character given the depth of history a lot of the characters have? There will be bad writers somewhere along the line. What do you count as development? What do you discount?
I wouldn’t exactly agree with Jeff saying Morrison wrote the X-Men ‘spot on’ but at least he left easy retcons and ambiguous ideas dotted throughout his narrative.
Cyclops was recovering from possession by Apocalypse. Magneto was on kick. Beast was heavily stressed and upset over his break up with Trish.
How much those factors were effecting the characters is relative to how much you liked/hated Morrison’s take on the characters.
i think fractions characters were often a little flat, but i dont recall thinking them being ‘out of character’. i actually think he wrote cyclops and emma really well. as for ‘moving things forward’, he relocated them to sf and gave them a tricky haven/ghetto-situation; i think thats as big a move as relocating them to australia, or opening the school for students.
@kingerella
In fairness to Fraction, I may have thought the characters were “off” because of the stupid grins that Land kept plastering on their faces at all times.
This guy did a review of that brood story.
http://notblogx.blogspot.com/search/label/x-men%20vs.%20brood
Not Blog X! Yay! A good site worth visiting.
My main problem with Schism is that, as others pointed out, the whole Cyclops/Wolverine feud seems more driven by marketing than by anything else. It would make more sense if the split was with Emma, or Storm, or even Professor X…but it seems like marketing is dictating some story elements.
@Valhallahan
To be fair, nearly every woman Wolverine meets is underaged for him.
And doesn’t he date back to a time when 14 was a marriageable age?
If you look at the number of X-books over time (and presuming you include tie-ins like Wolverine, Gambit, Bishop, etc.), you’ll see it always expands. It contracts from time to time but always then just adds books again to exceed the previous titles. It is a cash cow and any show of cutting low-selling branches will be accompanied by later trying to plant new seeds. Hell, if Astonishing X-Men, is supposed to be the continuity-light series, isn’t that the same excuse “X-Men” has for being published? Add in two series trying to create “jumping-on” points and one wonders what the point of the exercise is. (And let’s not even get into Ultimate Comics Presents Ultimate X-Men Which Is A Ultimate Book Ultimately.)