Oy.
For the time being, Remender clearly wants us at least to pretend to believe that Magneto may not be Pietro and Wanda's father. (Even the intro page doesn't seem totally convinced.) After all, Pietro and Wanda are on Counter-Earth to get more information, and Remender clearly also wants us to believe that the High Evolutionary has the information that they seek. First, he refers to the twins as "masquerading" as mutants and then reveals that they have a sister named Luminous; the Evolutionary sends her to kill the twins, though I'm still not entirely sure why he's so threatened by their presence. After all, he already just committed genocide. What would the twins stop him from doing?
Moreover, we learn more about the Evolutionary himself. Brother Voodoo communes with the spirits of previous generations of New Men that the Evolutionary has slaughtered in his drive for perfection. His daughter, Doniva, tells Voodoo that he killed her when she tried to stop him from continuing the cycle where he creates and then kills generations of New Men. In addition, the Evolutionary sends Sabretooth to his chief scientist so that they can replicate his hunting abilities to find the Evolutionary's son.
Added to the mix, we've also got someone calling himself the Low Evolutionary. He and his squad are clearly dedicated to stopping the Evolutionary's occasional cullings, and he seems to think that Pietro and Wanda can help him with that.
It all seems pretty straight-forward, though a lot of motives are unclear to me. For example, the Evolutionary killed the New Men because they felt emotions like greed and love. But, Remender doesn't offer any insight into why the Evolutionary would find emotions themselves as unacceptable failures of evolution. We also don't know anything about the Low Evolutionary and his squad, particularly how a group of humans came to Counter-Earth and why they committed to saving the New Men.
Without these insights, everyone is reduced to archetypes, with the High Evolutionary as the unfeeling villain and the Low Evolutionary as the intrepid revolutionary. When you add in there the tired "mystery" over the twins' origins, it's not exactly the type of story that makes me anxious waiting a month until the next issue.
** (two of five stars)
I read the first 8 issues of the 2012 Uncanny Avengers series. I think Remender did a good job especially on the first 5 issues. Seems like the new series isn't as good as it should be.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I just read your post about MPH and it was great. You seem to be a bit of an expert in Millar and Fegredo (I loved your observation about Fegredo's artistic evolution through Kid Eternity and Enigma). Anyway, I also wrote about MPH in my blog (wich I encourage you to visit):
www.artbyarion.blogspot.com
Cheers.