REVIEWS: The X-Axis - 4 May 2008
Paul O'Brien
4 May 2008
==========
For more links, cover art, archived reviews, and information on the
X-Axis mailing list, visit http://www.thexaxis.com
------------
This week:
FREE COMIC BOOK DAY 2008: X-MEN
by Mike Carey and Greg Land
X-MEN: LEGACY #210 - From Genesis to Revelation, part 3 of 3
by Mike Carey, Scot Eaton, Greg Land, John Dell, Andrew Hennessy
and Jay Leisten
DC UNIVERSE ZERO - "Let There Be Lightning"
by Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, George Perez, Doug Mahnke, Tony
Daniel, Ivan Reis, Aaron Lopresti, Philip Tan, Ed Benes,
Carlos Pacheco, JG Jones, Scott Koblish, Christian Alamy,
Oclair Albert, Matt Ryan, Jeff de los Santos and Jesus
Merino
------------
According to the schedule, Ultimate X-Men #93 should have been out this
week, featuring the conclusion of Robert Kirkman's run. Well, it didn't
show up at my store, so we'll just have to wait until next week for that
one.
However, as it happens, this works out rather nicely. Because I went
back to the store to double check that I hadn't simply missed the issue,
and ended up with a copy of the X-Men's Free Comic Book Day giveaway, by
Mike Carey and Greg Land. I'm not quite sure what we're meant to call
this thing, but the indicia opts for FREE COMIC BOOK DAY 2008 X-MEN, so
I suppose that'll have to do.
This issue is actually worth getting. It's a full-length story which
would have made a better than average regular issue. Now, it's billed
as an X-Men story, and in fairness, they do appear in half the issue.
But it's really a Pixie story, where the X-Men show up to help at the
end. Technically, I suppose it also blows the ending of "Divided We
Stand", by revealing that the X-Men get back together again. But if you
didn't see that one coming, god help you.
After the closure of the school, Pixie has returned home to a small
Welsh village, where there are Strange Things Afoot. In plot terms,
this is straight out of Doctor Who, but there's nothing wrong with that.
People are going missing, but Pixie is the only one who seems to have
noticed. Being a perfectly sensible young heroine, she phones the X-Men
for help, and then tries to do her best on her own until they show up.
This is precisely the sort of story you need for Free Comic Book Day.
It's not some obscure deleted scene, or an attempt to explain the series
to newcomers. It's just a solid, self-contained story, steering clear
of any complicated history. It sets out to convince readers that if
they buy X-Men comics, they will be entertained. No more, no less.
There's a bit at the end which (depending on how literally we're meant
to take it) might be very important indeed to the wider continuity; but
it's a moment that will make equal sense to casual readers.
My main reservation - and it's irrelevant to the casual audience - is
that Carey and Land seem to have given Pixie a rather drastic makeover.
Although she's generally been a background character, Pixie does have an
established personality and appearance. Generally speaking, she's one of
the younger kids, she's a bit naive, and she's prone to excitable
babbling. Carey is clearly familiar with all this - he gives her a
couple of moments of typical Pixie-style behaviour in the course of a
full-length story, and he's up to speed on her history. But he's
evidently set out to broaden her range dramatically, and the effect is
to turn her into something closer to 1980s Kitty Pryde.
As for Greg Land, he appears to have put a good three years on her age.
Now, the cheap shot here would be to say that Land's favourite sources
of photo reference tend to be light on 14-year-old girls for legal
reasons. In fairness, though, I really didn't mind his art on this
issue. It tells the story perfectly well, the characters look good, and
the small-town setting is effectively realised. The real problem with
Land's work is that everything tends to look a bit airbrushed and
excessively prettified, and that's what he's done with Pixie.
Now, granted, if ever a character could get away with looking elfin, I
suppose Pixie would have to be that character. But still, the
cumulative effect of Carey and Land's tweaking is to produce a character
who, but for her wings, name and powers, is all but unrecognisable as
the Pixie we've seen before. Part of me thinks that's cheating
slightly; part of me thinks that if Pixie's going to be more than a
background character, it's better to reinvent her than to try and
develop her from the one-note comic relief she'd (understandably) been
established as.
That aside - good issue. I'd be very happy if the regular series was
like this.
Rating: A
------------
Mike Carey has two X-Men stories out this week, the other being X-MEN:
LEGACY #210.
With this issue, Carey at least answers one of my fundamental questions
about the title's new direction: what is the new direction? Is it
really going to be Xavier hallucinating ad infinitum? Well, no, it
isn't. The new direction is that although Exodus has put Xavier's mind
back together, he has gaps in his memory, and so he sets out to revisit
people from his past in order to fill in the blanks. The broader theme
seems to involve Xavier learning how all these various people see him.
This is a fairly interesting idea, and I can now see how it works as an
ongoing series - at least in the same way that Wolverine: Origins
functions as an ongoing title. There's a remarkably heavy emphasis on
history and continuity here, to an extent that we haven't seen in the
X-books - in fact, in Marvel generally - for several years. This seems
to have been earmarked as the book for hardcore X-Men fans who really
care about seeing it all brought together.
Now, for readers like us, there's a lot to enjoy here. But I'm not so
sure what casual fans are supposed to make of a book which offhandedly
blurts out montages of references to stories published 10, 20, 30, even
40 years ago. And given what I'm about to say about DC Universe Zero, I
really have to address that point.
Here's the thing. On the one hand, all you really need to know in order
to follow this story is that Exodus is trying to convince Xavier to
change his ways, by showing him images of things that went wrong as a
result of his pacifist approach. And casual readers will get that,
because it's carefully explained at the end of the issue.
But they might get a little lost along the way. The opening page alone
references X-Men: Deadly Genesis (twice), the "Danger" storyline from
Astonishing X-Men, and the Legion arc from mid-1980s New Mutants. Later
in the issue, we get an out-of-context blast from Deadly Genesis again,
followed another montage page with the Dark Phoenix Saga, and some
panels which would be utterly meaningless unless you recognised them as
scenes from Legacy Virus stories. And the context isn't there to enable
casual readers to do that.
I'd be terribly confused reading this comic as a newcomer, because I
would assume - correctly - that large chunks of it were going over my
head. Now, as it happens, the bits the casual readers won't understand
aren't particularly important. They're simply examples of Exodus'
general point. But the casual reader doesn't know that. Really, this
is a book which cries out, if not for footnotes, then at least for a
couple of paragraphs of notes on the letters page.
There's also a bizarre argument about the Sentinels which doesn't make
any sense at all, even if you do know the story. Exodus shows Xavier a
clip of the original Silver Age Sentinel story followed by the
destruction of Genosha at the start of Grant Morrison's New X-Men. Then
he complains that Xavier should have hunted down Bolivar Trask's family
and killed them all, thus averting the attack on Genosha. Er... what?
Leave aside the "would you shoot Hitler" moral argument - what possible
reason did the X-Men have to think that Trask's family were a threat to
anyone? This is just baffling, and I can't help wondering whether the
scene was originally based on a misunderstanding of Sentinel continuity,
awkwardly fudged over in the final dialogue.
Anyway. If you get a warm glow from continuity and - perhaps more to
the point - from the sense that everything fits together into a bigger
story, then this is the book for you. I fall into that category, but
then I'm the hardest of the hardcore. I'm much more sceptical of the
appeal which this book could hold to a less obsessive audience.
Rating: B
------------
I didn't set out to buy DC UNIVERSE ZERO. I would have ignored it, but
my store was offering it as a giveaway. Presumably they thought it
would help drum up interest in DC's upcoming slate of superhero titles.
Now, the reaction to this book has been rather amusing. The hardcore DC
fans seem to be generally pleased with it, not to mention vociferously
defensive about it. And hey, if it meant something to them, that's
great. But given some of the arguments that have been put in the book's
defence, it's perhaps worth spelling out what DC actually advertised it
as containing.
The solicitation promises "a journey through the past and present of the
DCU", "the emergence of the greatest evil in the universe" and "the
stunning return of a force for good." Meanwhile, in his DC Nation
column, Dan Didio says that the book has "all the ingredients for a
great comics event", which he specifically cites as including "a big
story." He describes the book as a bridge from Countdown to various
upcoming projects, which "sets the stage" for those books. He promises
that "mysteries unfold and secrets are revealed."
And he says - I quote - that "best of all, whether you're a longtime
reader or a casual fan, Zero is a book for everyone to enjoy. We have
built DC Universe Zero to be your primer for the greatest comic universe
of all."
A book for everyone to enjoy! Well, huzzah. Surely this is the comic
for me, built to introduce me to the stories that DC is most proud of.
Thank heavens that DC's notoriously convoluted, crossover-riddled
continuity is finally to be explained to me. And it's written by Grant
Morrison and Geoff Johns, so it should be a decent story into the
bargain, right? A story. Like they promised.
Or perhaps not.
Where to begin? It isn't a story. It's a series of three-page trailers
for what seem to be largely unrelated stories, all tenuously linked by a
common narrator. The pay-off at the end, as you've surely heard, is
that the narrator is hinted to be Barry Allen, regaining a sense of
self-awareness after some time being merged with the universe.
Quite how a casual reader is supposed to work this out, or what
significance they're supposed to draw from it, I have no clue. But
that's a minor point. Fundamentally, this isn't a story. It's a trailer
reel artificially bolted together with a framing sequence that adds
nothing to the individual elements - or at least, nothing meaningful or
discernible to me. They advertised this as a story. They failed to
deliver one. Bad start.
But let's leave that aside and approach the book for what it is - a
string of adverts. Does it even work on that level? Well, no, it does
not. Let's break it down.
The book opens with a condensed summary of earlier Crisis stories. So
far, so good. Then, we get three pages of Superman and the Legion of
Super-Heroes fighting bad guys in the future. I have no clue what this
is supposed to be about, why Superman is in the future, or what possible
meaning I'm supposed to take from it beyond "some heroes team up and
fight a villain I've never heard of." It conveys nothing, absolutely
nothing whatsoever, other than that Superman and the Legion will be in a
generic team-up this summer.
Then, we get three pages of Batman and the Joker, plugging Batman: RIP.
I presume they're talking about stuff that happened in Grant Morrison's
Batman series, which I dropped a while ago. This one, to be fair, is at
least comprehensible. Batman thinks Joker is trying to warn him about
something nasty; he tries to question the villain about it. It's
inoffensive, but doesn't really do much to sell the story. Really, what
does this tell us beyond "Batman will be fighting a villain this
summer"? It's also a particularly strained inclusion within the framing
sequence, and so it suffers badly from the format, which implies
connections that it doesn't appear to have.
Next up is a plug for Wonder Woman: Whom the Gods Forsake. In the
course of three pages, this manages to feature six villains, without
giving a meaningful introduction to any of them. Shame they wasted a
third of their space on a splash page, really. In fairness, at least
this one conveys the basic premise of the story: some bad guys want to
wipe out the Amazons, and meanwhile the Greek gods (presumably) have
decided that the Amazons have failed and so the boys should take over.
Now, that's not a story I have any particular interest in reading - I've
always thought Wonder Woman is a godawful character - but as I say, at
least these pages got their point across.
But then we have the book's undoubted low point: a Green Lantern plug
which is literally incomprehensible. Two out of three pages are given
over to a bemusing montage sequence that casual readers have no hope
whatsoever of understanding. The best I can get from this is that it
has something to do with the rainbow-coloured lantern corps that I
vaguely recall reading about on a message board somewhere. It is
difficult to imagine how a "primer" for "casual fans" could fail in its
remit so spectacularly. Absolutely dire.
Following that, we have three pages of the Spectre, which goes the other
way: it explains, broadly, what the Spectre is about. It says nothing
about the story it's trying to promote.
And finally, we have Final Crisis - a scene of a villain encouraging
other villains to sign up to a new religion, and an incomprehensible
page of a burning man falling through horizontal panels. The dialogue
seems to suggest that if I'd read a recent storyline about a war in
heaven, I might know what was going on here. Unfortunately, actually
explaining any of this seemingly vital information appears to be beyond
the wit of anyone involved.
This is a garbled mess. It fails completely, both as a story, and as a
primer for new readers. Hardcore DC fans appear to have derived some
enjoyment from it as a trailer reel. Good for them. I was left more
determined than ever to leave DC's line well alone. If this is what DC
consider to be a primer for casual readers - and that's what they claim
it is - then they have lost the plot to an unfathomable degree.
I had always thought that, at the very worst, a teaser issue would
simply leave me cold. With DC Universe Zero, we have something
completely new. I got this thing for free, remember. When I'd finished
reading it, I was sorely tempted to bill DC for my time. The best thing
I can say for it is that (a) some of the art is quite attractive, and
(b) it's saved me some money, by killing my last flickers of interest in
Final Crisis stone dead.
Promoting it as a proper story may have been a large part of DC's
mistake - the book is especially confusing if you try to interpret it as
a story, and many of the clouds lift when you figure out that it isn't
one. But this is the definition of inaccessibility. I have been reading
comics for a good twenty years. I have slogged through some of the most
ill-thought out crossovers in history. And never, never have I been as
baffled, confused and outright annoyed by a comic as I was by DC
Universe Zero. I was left reeling, wondering how perfectly decent
creators could have produced something so utterly misjudged.
And I'm a devoted comics fan, for god's sake. If I can't make sense of
it, what the hell is a genuine "casual reader" supposed to do with it?
At least X-Men: Legacy made sure to spell out the point - newcomers
might have been confused by the barrage of detail, but they would have
got there in the end. With DC Universe Zero, they have no hope.
I really went into this book wanting to like it, and by the time I'd
finished I wanted to kick something. That is not the desired response.
This company really needs to get its act together.
Rating: D+
------------
Also this week:
BLUE BEETLE #26 - One for the bizarre promotional stunt file: a fill-in
issue which is only available in Spanish. Now, to my mind, if you're
going to publish comics in languages that most of the readers don't
speak, you've really got to do a story that plays off the fact that the
readers can't understand the dialogue. At first the story seems to be
heading that way, with Jaime introducing his Anglophone girlfriend to
the wider family, but then it just drifts off into a regular superhero
story in Spanish - and one that has to keep it very simple, so that
English speakers can follow it without cross-referring to the
translation at the back. There's probably a good story to be told using
this device, but it's not this one, I'm afraid. Still, when you read it
with the translation, it's a perfectly decent story - it's just that the
gimmick hinders it. C+
THOR: AGES OF THUNDER - Misleadingly labelled as a one-shot, this turns
out - on the last page - to be a prologue issue for Matt Fraction's
Thor: Reign of Blood miniseries. That's annoying. But on the bright
side, after finishing this, I was quite keen on the idea of reading more
Matt Fraction Thor stories. This is a straight mythical story, with no
superhero elements at all, and it's very well done. Fraction fudges his
continuity rather cleverly, by taking advantage of the idea (introduced
a while back) that Marvel's Asgard goes round and round in cycles, each
one ending with another Ragnarok. So if you want to do a myth without
worrying too much about the details, just set it in an earlier cycle.
Quite where Fraction picked up the idea that the Enchantress is meant to
be Idun (she isn't), I'm not sure, but that minor glitch aside, this is
an excellent piece of work. A+
------------
There's more from me at If Destroyed, and if you're desperate for more
Article 10 columns, you can always hunt through the archives on Ninth
Art.
http://ifdestroyed.blogspot.com
http://www.ninthart.com
Next week, hopefully, Ultimate X-Men #93 makes it to my store. The
"Divided We Stand" storylines continue in Cable #3 and Young X-Men #2;
Brian Vaughan and Eduardo Risso's Logan miniseries concludes; and
supposedly something important happens in a Quicksilver one-shot,
X-Factor: The Quick and the Dead.
--
Paul O'Brien
THE X-AXIS - http://www.thexaxis.com
IF DESTROYED - http://ifdestroyed.blogspot.com
NINTH ART - http://www.ninthart.com
Donnacha
"Paul O'Brien" <pa...@esoterica.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:qFldmfAW...@esoterica.demon.co.uk...
> THE X-AXIS
> 4 May 2008
> ==========
>
> For more links, cover art, archived reviews, and information on the
> X-Axis mailing list, visit http://www.thexaxis.com
>
> ------------
>
>
shawn h
make
any sense at all, even if you do know the story. Exodus shows Xavier
a
clip of the original Silver Age Sentinel story followed by the
destruction of Genosha at the start of Grant Morrison's New X-Men.
Then
he complains that Xavier should have hunted down Bolivar Trask's
family
and killed them all, thus averting the attack on Genosha. Er... what?
Leave aside the "would you shoot Hitler" moral argument - what
possible
reason did the X-Men have to think that Trask's family were a threat
to
anyone? This is just baffling, and I can't help wondering whether the
scene was originally based on a misunderstanding of Sentinel
continuity,
awkwardly fudged over in the final dialogue. "
I think what's happening here is that, since Cassandra (who was
Xavier's deep dark secret) used a Trask descendant to gain control of
the Master-Mold, Exodus' master solution is typically extreme and
simplistic: wipe out the bloodline. Exactly the kind of thing, of
course, Charles won't do.
shawn h.
Billy Bissette
91dbd8...@w74g2000hsh.googlegroups.com:
There is also the simple detail that Exodus' master solution
doesn't actually have to be entirely logical.
Trasks make Sentinels. Sentinels kill millions. Aggressive
personality decides Trasks should have been killed long before the
second of those two things happened, without even considering that
mutants killing the Trasks would probably have led to *more*
support for Sentinels. (Which fits with his general
characterization, that he'd either disregard or never even
envision such potential consequences of his actions.)
mimf
The obvious thing to do would be to frame a non-mutant for the crime,
which shouldn't be too difficult for someone with mental abilities like
Exodus has. He could even have the non-mutant do the killing.