Avengers vs. X-Men #11: This issue begins oddly, starting with Captain America asking for the Hulk to help fight Cyclops and moving onto Rogue asking for safe harbor from Professor X and the Avengers. In terms of the Hulk, it's odd because he plays almost no role in the rest of the issue. In fact, I'm not really all that sure why they thought that he would be useful against a Phoenix-empowered Cyclops, given that he doesn't exactly get a lot of opportunities to "smash." In terms of Rogue, it's weird because it seems to ignore several issues' worth of events. After all, we've seen Rogue in an alternate dimension for the last three issues of "X-Men Legacy" and Bobby defected to the Avengers' side at least before the events of "Wolverine and the X-Men" #15. As such, it's a little jarring to see them "defect" here.
However, Bendis quickly moves us past these awkward moments by immersing us almost immediately into an emotion-driven battle of wills between Cyclops and Professor X. We essentially watch Scott have a nervous breakdown and Bendis doesn't pull any punches in showing it. Before Professor X arrives, we watch Scott dismiss Emma too quickly, no longer capable of pretending that Phoenix isn't affecting him in the same way that it's affecting her. But, it's the arrival of Professor X that pushes him over the edge. Coipel and his team do an amazing job with the moment. The image of Professor X standing on the beach, watching the sunset, conveys the calm before the storm that comes, mirroring Professor X's hope that he will be able to convince Scott to end the dispute quietly. But, the storm comes and we see Scott violently reject Professor X's offer of help. It's a particularly adolescent rant, and Bendis does a great job of showing us a Scott increasingly unhinged as it progresses. By the time he seemingly kills Magneto, you know that we have passed the point of no return. Iceman expresses anger at Scott and Storm begs him to stop, but he ignores them both. His next act is to take the Phoenix Force from Emma; the image of him standing with his hands around her neck with blood pouring from her lips is not one that I'll soon forget and perhaps the one that shows that he will in all likelihood be irredeemable after this event ends. It all goes quickly from there, with Scott seemingly killing Professor X and Wolverine in short order. In the end, it's the image of a visor-less Scott as Dark Phoenix that makes you realize that he's lost. Without the visor, Scott's last shred of humanity has been flayed from him
On one hand, I'm less concerned than I should be about the fact that we still don't know, with only one issue left, what roles Hope and Wanda will ultimately wind up playing in this event. Despite the pages upon pages dedicated in the early days of this event to building the mystery of their connection to the Phoenix Force, Bendis winds up making this entire mini-series solely about Scott. It may not have been to start, but it is now. On the other hand, we really do have a lot of ground left to cover in this last issue. We still don't know what Phoenix's motivation actually was in coming to Earth, though, thanks to "Uncanny X-Men" #17, we know that it did have one. We still haven't seen the mutants of the world benefit at all, other than whatever secondary benefit they received from the Phoenix Five curing the world's problem. It seems unlikely to expect a reversal of M-Day at this stage, despite the fact that it seemed to be the whole point of this event when it started. It seems difficult to believe that issue #12 will successfully address all these issues.
Finally, I find it hard to believe that Magneto, Professor X, and Wolverine are all going to wind up being dead after the dust settles. However, Coipel doesn't seem to leave much doubt that Scott kills them, unless I'm seriously misreading his panels. As such, it is hard to know which "death" or "deaths" to take seriously, and I'm left to wonder if a Phoenixed-up Hope or Wanda isn't just going to undo them.
Ultimately, this issue is redeemed by Bendis' careful handling of Scott's meltdown, but I do think that I'm going to need to see at least SOME of the issues that we expected to see addressed at the outset of this event addressed for me not to feel disappointed with it in the end.
Uncanny X-Men #18: After the emotional blockbuster that was "Avengers vs. X-Men" #11, this issue feels like a faint echo.
The most interesting sequence is the one between Colossus and Magik. Over the last 30 years of comics, Illyana is the character who has arguably suffered the most at the hands of revising authors and lax editors, rarely serving as more than a plot device meant to inject some human tragedy into the current arc. Magneto may die every now and again, but he's still Magneto when he returns. Even with his recent conversion to a good guy, he's still as arrogant and irascible as he's always been. Illyana, however, has never really been one character. She's been several depending on the emotional impact that the revising author is trying to convey, from the canny teenager trying to control her dark powers to the innocent girl denied a new chance at life by the Legacy Virus to the resurrected teenager who seemed to hold even darker secrets than her previous incarnations. In other words, she's been all over the map. During the "Fall/Rise of the New Mutants" story, it seemed that she might be returning to her original personality, given that she had gotten back the parts of her soul that she had previously lost. However, since then, she's still seemed a little...off. Here, Gillen gives us the most reasonable explanation, namely that the years of trauma that have been inflicted upon her have left her insane. It doesn't matter if her soul is no longer fractured; her mind certainly is. Just as she once manipulated the X-Men into facing the Elder Gods so she could seek revenge against them, we learn here that she manipulated Peter into becoming the Juggernaut so that she could make him understand how she felt. It was a desperate ploy of a destroyed girl, but it was also a selfish one, given that she allowed Peter to lose his own soul in the process. I'm not sure where Illyana goes from here, but I feel like Gillen has made her character a lot more believable. We no longer have various mystical explanations to explain her behavior; we have one believable one.
However, the Cyclops/Emma sequence weighs down the issue, given that it covers much of the same ground that we saw covered in "Avengers vs. X-Men" #11 and doesn't really add all that much. Frankly, I would've preferred Gillen spent more time on Colossus and Magik, whose story isn't being told in the main mini-series. All in all, you get the sense that they're really spinning their wheels at this point in an attempt to justify stretching out this event for as long as they have.
Wolverine and the X-Men #16: OMG, will the Kiddie Hellfire Club please, please, please go away?
No comments:
Post a Comment