REVIEWS: The X-Axis - 27 April 2008

[Paul O'Brien]

THE X-AXIS
27 April 2008
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X-Axis mailing list, visit http://www.thexaxis.com

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This week:

UNCANNY X-MEN #497 - X-Men: Divided, part 3 of 5
by Ed Brubaker and Mike Choi

WOLVERINE: FIRST CLASS #2 - "Surprise!!"
by Fred Van Lente and Andrea Di Vito

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS #11 - "...Canon."
by Jeff Parker and Nick Dragotta

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It's an odd week for the X-books - five titles came out, but most of
them aren't doing a great deal. However, since the rest of the industry
wasn't having a particularly thrilling week either (and I've been too
busy to make much headway on my trade paperback pile), we might as well
see what the de facto flagship title is doing.

UNCANNY X-MEN has a slightly odd position in the line these days. After
all, notionally Astonishing X-Men is meant to be the flagship. And the
sales tend to back that up. But Astonishing is largely self-contained,
and besides, it never comes out. That leaves Uncanny to carry the
burden of being the real major X-Men title, in the sense of doing the
hard work of driving the line - particularly now that X-Men has been
relaunched as something different, however vaguely that something may be
defined.

However, Uncanny X-Men has an anniversary coming up. Issue #500 is just
around the corner, and apparently it sets up the new direction for the
X-Men titles. This might explain the rather odd position that the
X-books currently find themselves in. "Messiah Complex" read for all
the world like a storyline which was designed to move things along. To
some extent, it did that - it launched a couple of spin-off titles, and
it provided the thinnest possible pretext for closing down the school.
But it didn't replace it with anything new, or even set the X-Men off in
any particular direction. So, on the face of it, we are now being
regaled with a few months of thumb-twiddling while we wait for issue
#500.

Actually, I give Brubaker more credit than that; I'm sure this plays
into his new direction somehow or other, not least because San Francisco
continues to feature in the solicitations. But that's not readily
obvious from the story itself, and I remain a little dubious about the
way the X-office is approaching this. They had a lot of momentum coming
out of "Messiah Complex"; but "Divided We Stand" has come across as a
gentle detour - not just in this book, but generally.

Uncanny is now halfway through its five-part "Divided" arc. In
practice, it consists of two seemingly unrelated storylines. On the one
hand, Scott and Emma show up in San Francisco to investigate a mutant
who's apparently turned the clock back to the sixties. For the moment,
they've kept her identity rather vague, so it remains to be seen whether
this is somebody we've seen before (in which case the obvious candidate
would be Mastermind), or somebody new (now that Young X-Men has
established a precedent for treating it casually again).

Superficially, this is a fun little story, with Scott and Emma dressed
as hippies, and everyone looking rather silly. Scott's still acting
decidedly out of character, mind you, and if he's not a Skrull, it's
going to take a lot of work to convince me of this take on the
character.

Meanwhile, in Russia, the other half of the story sees Colossus being
attacked by the authorities during a trip home. This turns out to be a
rather interesting plot, as the Russians have picked up on an obvious
glitch with M-Day which most stories have tried to brazen past. If
almost all the world's mutants lost their powers, how come the X-Men
were virtually unaffected? Of course, we know it's because they're the
stars. (As Tom Brevoort recently confirmed on his blog, they did
seriously intend to depower Iceman, but then bottled it.)

The Russians, naturally enough, see things differently. These guys are
either ludicrously lucky, or they must know something. Again, this is
the sort of story that actually gets some short-term use out of M-Day by
turning its problems to advantage. It'll still have to be reversed in
the end - we've still seen nothing whatsoever to suggest that it's
viable as a long-term status quo - but stories like this are at least
making something of it while we're stuck with it.

After a shaky start to the arc, Mike Choi and Sonia Oback have hit their
stride and are producing some rather good artwork. Yes, it's perhaps a
little bit too pretty, and might benefit from being a touch rougher
around the edges. But they do a great Colossus, and they've gone to
town on Scott and Emma's sixties costumes, which are nicely designed.

I'm not sure where any of this is heading, and really, it's one of those
stories where you need a little faith in the writer to accept that it's
heading anywhere in the wider scheme of things. It may be a little too
far removed from the bigger picture. But it's a fun little story, which
gets the X-Men out there to fight some bad guys, and it looks lovely.
As a bridge between bigger stories, though, I'm perfectly happy with it.

Rating: A-

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You know how every Marvel book opens with a standard caption explaining
the concept of the book? "Bitten by a radioactive spider, etc, etc,
Spider-Man"? Well, imagine having to write one for WOLVERINE: FIRST
CLASS, and having to explain the title.

Here's what they came up with: "Kitty Pryde wants to become one of the
mutant super hero X-Men, but she'll have to survive as the original
member of Wolverine First Class."

Uh... no. Because, point one, she is already an X-Man, and point two,
nothing in the story actually suggests that Wolverine's been
specifically assigned to teach her. But nice try.

What the blurb does make clear, though, is that this is a Kitty Pryde
and Wolverine book, with the emphasis firmly on Kitty Pryde. The stories
are from her perspective, and the main focus of the book has been her
attempts to figure out Wolverine and connect with him. It's an "odd
couple" book, playing with their relationship in a way that would only
work at this point in continuity, when Wolverine was more of a
curmudgeon, and Kitty was a naive child. Not that they actually had
this sort of relationship in those early issues - Wolverine was actually
mellowing by that point. But they could have done.

I'm not quite sure who this book is aimed at, mind you. Come to think
of it, given the content of this week's X-Men: First Class, I'm kind of
confused about the target audience for this imprint generally. But
let's start with Wolverine: First Class for now. It's set in early 1980s
continuity and seems to assume at least a broad familiarity with the
characters. The basic idea of this issue is that Kitty throws Wolverine
a surprise birthday party in an attempt to get on his good side, unaware
that Sabretooth always attacks Wolverine on his birthday. That's an odd
thing to bring up in a title like this, since it comes from a handful of
stories in the late eighties. It's the sort of thing you do in a series
aimed at hardcore fans.

On the other hand, the book is clearly targetted at a younger audience.
And that poses some problems, because an all-ages Wolverine doesn't make
a great deal of sense. After all, his main weapon against the bad guys
is to cut them up with his claws. This book ends up in the odd position
that Wolverine has to use his trademark claws somewhere in the story,
but can't use them in a fight. And so you get odd sequences of
Wolverine chasing Sabretooth with his claws extended, and then
retracting them to belt him on the chin. I can't see a way around that,
if you're going to write Wolverine in a child-friendly way, but it
perhaps raises the question of whether the character is suitable for
that kind of story in the first place.

Still, there's a lot to like in this book, as it captures the tone of
early eighties X-Men stories while adding something of its own. Van
Lente is writing Kitty emphatically as a teenage girl, playing up her
dance classes and her normalcy, and using them to irritate Wolverine.
The basic gag is the incongruity of the two, and it works fine. It's
nice to see Kitty actually having some sort of social life with the
local kids - after all, she did go to those dance classes in the
original stories - and it's also amusing to note that Van Lente is
desperately trying to give Mariko Yashida a bit of backbone, which she
singularly lacked in her early appearances. (She was pretty, demure and
Japanese, and that was about it.)

Longtime X-Men fans with a liking for the early eighties will enjoy
this. How well it'll play to more casual, younger readers - who are
presumably supposed to be buying it too - I'm not quite so sure. But
hey, it works for me.

Rating: B+

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If Wolverine: First Class left me wondering about the target audience,
X-MEN: FIRST CLASS #11 leaves me utterly baffled.

Beneath the rather generic cover, this is an issue of metafictional
weirdness. Meet the Continuiteens, three comic store clerks who have
learned about the future by accidentally ordering real Marvel comics
from a Diamond warehouse in the Nexus of All Realities. No, seriously,
that's the premise.

This isn't really an X-Men story, although it does make the obvious
jokes about X-Men: First Class not fitting with continuity in the first
place. It's really an issue of Jeff Parker exploring his odd conceit
and blurring the line where the characters start to become aware that
they're fictional, and the pseudo-Silver Age world of the strip starts
to become polluted by characters who won't be invented for thirty years.
It's even got art from Nick Dragotta, an artist who usually turns up on
things like X-Statix.

Actually, it's not so much a story as a joke about the flimsy nature of
Marvel continuity. Continuity glitches just get sorted out in the end,
as the universe inevitably tends back to whatever makes the most sense
and inconsistencies are simply forgotten.

A running gag about the Continui-Teens reading the issue we're reading -
slightly botched by giving it a different cover - ends with the
revelation that you don't need to read the ending because "It never
ends! It's all cyclical! Don't you see? Everything eventually comes
back! Exactly what happens doesn't matter!" Of course, we all know
this, but it's still a very strange thing to bring up in the middle of a
story.

In fact, it rather sums up the book's ambivalent attitude towards the
Continui-Teens, and by extension, the hardcore superhero fans they
represent. On the one hand, it finds their obsessiveness rather
endearing. After all, as a writer, don't you want your readers to throw
themselves into the story as deeply as possible? On the other hand, it's
a reality check about how little any of this really matters. Yes, it
says, X-Men: First Class doesn't actually make any sense as part of
sixties continuity - but does it make any difference? As the story
says, the details always sort themselves out in the end.

This is a very weird and extremely geeky issue, and I'm not altogether
convinced it works. Frankly, I'm not entirely clear what point Parker
was trying to make with the Continui-Teens - the story ends by trying to
put them over as saving the day with their "extremely thorough" approach
to continuity, which doesn't really fit with what came before. But
points for trying something a little different, even if X-Men: First
Class is the last place I would have expected to see a story like this.

Rating: B

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Also this week:

NEW EXILES #5 - The start of a second arc, as the other half of the team
- Morph, Cat and Sage - all head off to a sword-and-sorcery world. And
do you know, this isn't bad at all. Unlike the last storyline, we've
got a clearer focus on the characters, some subplots that make sense,
decent pacing, and a world with a simple, straightforward theme.
Basically, while the last story was a bit of an unfocussed mess, this
one seems to know what it's about. It's still fairly traditional
territory and it's the sort of thing you might have got during the
Cross-Time Caper in Excalbur (although with the rather generic Roberto
Castro on art). But it's perfectly fine, and at last I'm getting a sense
of where Claremont is going with this version of Kitty Pryde. B

X-FORCE #3 - A mixed issue. On the one hand, the plot is developing
into something a little more than hack and slash, and it's making an
effort to draw on the X-Men's mythos in a way that makes sense. Come to
think of it, putting Bastion with the Purifiers works quite neatly,
given that Scott Lobdell always intended the character to have messianic
tendencies. But the tone is still very monotonous and bleak. The dark
art merely gives the impression of a book that takes itself far too
seriously. And there are some real lapses of clarity - the first panel
verges on incomprehensibility. C

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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, Exodus takes on Professor X in X-Men: Legacy #210, and the
Apocalypse story continues in Ultimate X-Men #93.

--
Paul O'Brien

THE X-AXIS - http://www.thexaxis.com
IF DESTROYED - http://ifdestroyed.blogspot.com
NINTH ART - http://www.ninthart.com