Jesus, this issue couldn't have been worse.
First, Remender continue to do an uncharacteristically terrible job matching up characters with one-liners. To whit, I don't believe for a minute that the Enchantress would say, "That's the kind of oversight that gets you uninvited to fondue parties." But, it actually gets worse from there (if you can believe it).
We still don't have a good reason for why some of the super-villains are trying to stop the Skull. Carnage offers a half-hearted excuse that he doesn't want to live under the boot of the Skull, but I'm not sure that I buy that. Wouldn't Cletus be perfectly happy serving as one of the Skull's Horseman, if you will? Slaughtering innocent Inhumans and mutants? Why would the Enchantress care if the Skull took over Midgard? How about Jack O'Lantern? He's a pretty second-rate villain. Wouldn't he benefit from an association with the Skull? I get why someone like Doom, with his own designs on the world, would oppose the Skull, but Remender really needed to give us a better sense of why the less powerful villains joined the fight.
But, the wheels really go off the bus in the last few pages. First, Evan suddenly appears as Apocalypse with no explanation. Did it have something to do with Doom and Wanda's spell? No idea. In fact, the "inversion" spell that they cast might have put Charles in control of the Skull's body, but no one is really sure. Then, Sam suddenly becomes an asshole and declares that the Avengers are taking Xavier's body into custody, annoying the X-Men who desperately want to see if Xavier is alive. (The fact that the brain that the Skull stole from Xavier's decaying body might actually "contain" Xavier is starting to get increasingly more difficult to believe.) Thankfully, "Sir Steve Rogers, Patron Saint of Authority" arrives to sort out everything just in time.
Or not. Despite Steve giving his word to Alex that the Avengers will do whatever they have to do to see if Xavier is inside the Skull's body, Alex flies off the handlebars when Steve suggests that they still have to take the body to Avengers Tower. Given that Alex is an Avenger, this anger makes little sense to me. It's like reliving the fight over Hope from "Avengers vs. X-Men" all over again. But, it makes even less sense when Apocalypse suddenly takes control of the X-Men. Yup. Everyone just blithely follows him when he says that he has some sort of plan. (Remender better plan on revealing that the Skull was silently manipulating this development or I may have to burn every issue of this series that I own when it concludes.) Thus, thee issue ends with Alex leaving the Avengers because apparently following orders is equivalent to tyranny (as he tells Cap). Notably, Alex also leaves his wife in the process. Yup. Just leaves her. He disagrees with Steve, so he leaves his wife. It makes total sense.
Also, did anyone see Nomad? He's in the list of characters at the start of the issue, but I don't see him anywhere in the issue.
I just don't know what else I can say. I want to hope that this series can get better, but I just don't see how it's possible. We've already got too many unexplained developments weighing down the narrative, and it seems like that we'll resolve them before we add more. [Sigh.]
* (one of five stars)
No comments:
Post a Comment