REVIEWS: The X-Axis - 3 February 2008

[Paul O'Brien]

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

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This week:

WHAT IF? SPIDER-MAN VS. WOLVERINE
"The Spider Who Went Into The Cold"
by Jeff Parker, Paul Tobin and Clayton Henry

X-MEN: EMPEROR VULCAN #5 (of 5)
by Christopher Yost, Paco Diaz Luque and Vicente Cifuentes

Y: THE LAST MAN #60 - "Alas"
by Brian Vaughan, Pia Guerra and Jose Marzan

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For the most part, Marvel's What If? one-shots are an exercise in
squeezing a bit more mileage from recent storylines. They tend to range
in quality from mildly diverting to utterly superfluous. But almost
invariably, they take a fairly obvious story as their starting point.

So I was more than a little surprised when What If? Spider-Man vs.
Wolverine showed up in the solicitations. Of all the stories to
revisit, Spider-Man vs. Wolverine? If you haven't read it, then rest
assured, you won't be alone. The original story is a one-shot by Jim
Owlsey and Mark Bright, which came out in 1987 and was reprinted in
1990. It's best known for advancing the Hobgoblin storyline, and by all
accounts, it's quite good. I've never read it.

But this story doesn't involve the Hobgoblin stuff. Instead, its
starting point lies with obscure, largely forgotten details of the plot.
In other words, what we have here is a What If? issue, based on a story
that came out when I was eleven and which has been out of print for 18
years, hinging on plot points which almost none of today's audience will
remember.

Are they mad?

And yet, in fact, this is quite interesting. Let's get one thing out of
the way: it's not a Wolverine story. He's only really in it because he
was in the original. No, this is a Spider-Man story. And the writers,
Jeff Parker and Paul Tobin, do have something to say about Spider-Man.

A lot of What If? stories are rather tiresome exercises in carnage.
Usually, the answer to "What if things had happened differently?" is
"The villain would have won and everything would have been a bit
miserable." But there are more interesting ways to use the format,
because the What If? device allows you to take characters in directions
that could never be used in a regular series. Spider-Man has to be
open-ended; he can never come to a decisive finish, and he can never
stray irreparably from the original concept. But in these stories, you
can do all that.

The original Spider-Man vs Wolverine story, putting it very broadly, saw
Spider-Man getting drawn into an adventure involving Wolverine's black
ops past. The basic angle was that Spider-Man, still a fairly light
character at the time, felt a bit out of his depth among these people,
and rather uncomfortable about the whole situation.

The point of departure here is that instead of returning home at the end
of the story, Spider-Man finds out that the girl he failed to save at
the climax has a sister, also from the twilight world of black ops, and
he sticks around with Wolverine to rescue her. From there, he's drawn
into Wolverine's world, and the two of them never go back, forming a
little family with Alex (the girl they just rescued) and Nebo
(Wolverine's mentor figure).

It's quite cleverly put together. Many writers, having come up with
this premise, would have chosen the boringly obvious route: at first
things look fine, but then Spider-Man realises he's chosen the wrong
route in life, and it all ends tragically because it's too late to go
back. There's nothing particularly wrong with that story, but it's a
bit uninspired.

Parker and Tobin take a more difficult route, and pull it off. In the
traditional Spider-Man set-up, most of the drama comes from the tension
between Peter's normal life and his superhero career. But in this world,
he's chosen decisively between the two, and it works out just fine.
With that basic conflict resolved, Spider-Man's life comes out quite
well. He's got friends. He's got the woman. He's still a hero.
Ultimately, it all works out quite nicely for him. The happy ending is
soured only by a sense that Peter has lost some of his innocence and
sacrificed his family in the real world - but since he gets a perfectly
good life out of the deal, and arguably a better one than the endless
parade of melodrama in his "real" stories, it's entirely ambiguous
whether that sacrifice was worthwhile.

As usual, artist Clayton Henry takes a bright, open approach. I find
myself in two minds about Henry's art. He's certainly a sound
storyteller and his art is attractive enough to look at. But he's not
hugely original, and he leans somewhat towards house style. He's never
been particularly good at atmospherics. Then again, many artists would
have drowned this story in darkness in order to hammer home the idea
that Peter and Logan are living in a Dark Place. The story is meant to
be more ambiguous than that, and Henry's more neutral style is better
for the purpose.

So what's the catch? Well, it's a spin-off from a relatively obscure
comic from two decades ago, and it has to hammer the reader with a
terrible infodump right at the start. It's a great idea for a story,
but too compressed in the course of a single issue. It's very rare that
I say this about a comic, but this story needed to be longer.

Crammed into the space of a single issue, it's merely a good execution
of a great concept. Or, put another way, it's the last part of a good
story, without having time to do the necessary set-up. For those
reasons, and pretty much only for those reasons, it doesn't quite work
as well as it should. But the idea is great.

Rating: B+

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I wasn't especially thrilled about the EMPEROR VULCAN miniseries when it
was announced. The "Rise and Fall of the Shi'ar Empire" storyline was
overlong at a year, and a further five issues of the Starjammers didn't
seem especially appealing.

Still, the book got off to a somewhat promising start. Writer
Christopher Yost touched on the question of what the ordinary Shi'ar in
the street thought about their new ruler - a point which the original
story had glossed over entirely. And he brought in a potentially
interesting antagonist, in the form of a race of aliens convinced that
the Shi'ar were occupying their ancestral religious lands. Yes, it was
an obvious Israel/Palestine metaphor, but there was story potential in
it.

And then we come to issue #5. Oh lord.

I'm honestly at something of a loss here. I'm not quite sure what Yost
was trying to achieve with this story, which amounts to "And then the
villains won, the end." Obviously, in purely mechanical plot terms, the
series aims to solidify Vulcan as the Shi'ar ruler and get rid of the
civil war that Brubaker set up. But that's just an exercise in
shuffling the pieces for future stories. Judged as a miniseries in its
own right, what was this story about?

I really don't think it works as a character arc for anyone involved.
The Starjammers spend the story planning to achieve good deeds, fail,
and end up in chains, through no particular fault of their own. And
that's where their story ends. Okay, they get to blow up the macguffin,
but that's hardly a satisfying resolution.

Vulcan remains a character based on one-dimensional hate, bulldozing his
way through the plot without really changing in any way. Notionally,
the idea is that his approach to the invading aliens proves him to be a
"worthy" Shi'ar leader, and wins over the dissident army factions, but
this seems an incredibly nihilistic message.

Perhaps Yost was trying to say something about the way religious
conflicts can drive people to legitimise obscene and insane behaviour.
But if that's the idea, it doesn't come across. After some initial
exposition, the Scy'ar Tal effectively become just another invading
alien race. Their religious motivations, interesting as they are,
barely affect the plot. They might as well have been random invaders.

It's just a bit of a mess, really. I suspect there was a point in there
struggling to get out, but it doesn't come through.

Rating: C

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As concepts go, Y: THE LAST MAN sounded decidedly corny. Some sort of
disaster wipes out every male on earth, and Yorick Brown is left alone
as the last survivor on an all-female planet.

Of course, the potential silliness of the concept is precisely what
makes it work. Brian Vaughan and Pia Guerra took a dreadful cliche and
inverted it by taking it seriously, and following through on the logic
of the premise. So we have a largely average protagonist who becomes
remarkable simply by virtue of not being dead, attempting to follow
through on a fairytale quest, and we have societies slowly adapting to
half the population vanishing overnight, leaving women to take on roles
from which they'd previously been actively excluded.

Admittedly, there's always been a bit of fudging around the edges; the
series tended to gloss over the practicalities of getting rid of the
corpses, which wasn't as thematically interesting. And yes, there are
some dodgy stories scattered along the way. The bondage/intervention
issue sticks in my mind as, er, perhaps not entirely successful.

But here we are, after five years, as the book draws to a successful
close. "Alas" is an epilogue, set sixty years in the future, in a Paris
where life is finally back on track. Mass cloning has produced new
generations of women, and scientists have finally started to release a
tiny handful of new Yoricks into a world where they're clearly doomed to
be curiosities. The story sees Yorick #17 coming to visit the geriatric
original. It's a framing sequence for some flashbacks which, to varying
degrees, tie up the fates of the supporting cast.

The younger Yorick is played more as a son than a copy; having grown up
in his world, he seems to accept his position in life. But he's also
hopelessly naive, which provides a neat device for the original to look
back on the way he matured over the course of the series and how his
life changed after. The flashbacks range from relatively
straightforward closure to a beautifully affecting sequence with the
final death of his monkey. Pia Guerra is at her best with these
understated emotional sequences, though her elderly Yorick is also
impressive stuff.

Of course, it wouldn't be a Brian Vaughan comic without a gratuitous
factoid or two. His tendency to shoehorn almanac trivia into stories
used to be his most glaring tic, and while he's toned it down a bit,
it's still a recurring feature. I'm not sure we necessarily needed to
be regaled with details about the division of labour among the Bushmen -
especially as it begs an unanswered question about the new world. Are we
really saying that the Bushmen are being replenished by Bushclones? Or
have they died out? The happy ending which Vaughan gives to his world
(if not necessarily to his hero) is a touch Eurocentric.

But that quibble aside, this is a fine ending to the series - not so
much a resolution as a farewell to the characters and their world.

Rating: A

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Also this week:

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: SWING SHIFT - This is the "Director's Cut" edition
of the Free Comic Book Day story, which got virtually no distribution
over here. As an afterword explains, this version restores some
original dialogue which was cut after Marvel figured out that it would
give away upcoming storylines. And it's a perfectly good story,
although Overdrive doesn't quite work as a villain. (Maybe I'm missing
something here, but how does his power to control the car he's sitting
in offer any advantage over simply driving it?) Perhaps the most
interesting bit of the issue, if you're into that sort of thing, is a
five-page essay by Tom Brevoort written as a manifesto for the relaunch,
perceptively analysing where the Spider-Man books lost their way. B+

ULTIMATE X-MEN #90 - The first part of "Apocalypse", which will be
Robert Kirkman's final storyline. (After that, we're into the
"Ultimatum" crossover.) Kirkman picks up on Brian Vaughan's version of
Mr Sinister in what seems mainly a concession to the fact that
Apocalypse has been touched on before. In fairness, Kirkman is
certainly working with what he's inherited, but I can't help feeling he
really wants to get rid of it so that he can move on to the story he
really wants to tell. And, typically of this parlour game series,
Sinister goes charging after the Morlocks because, well, that's what
happened in the late 1980s. It's a strange series, this -
professionally constructed, perfectly effective, and yet it feels like a
collage of plot elements drawn from other sources. To Kirkman's credit,
his story still works, even while showing its influences. B+

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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, it's back to the aftermath of "Messiah Complex" with Uncanny
X-Men #495. Plus... oh, hold on, they've rescheduled X-Force #1 to the
next week. So just Uncanny, then.

--
Paul O'Brien

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