A bit of unexpected fangirling on the subject of Marvel's Second Coming event
Marvel's big Second Coming arc recently wound up in a depressingly predictable way, and since, being me, I was planning to respond by writing fix-it fic, I figured I should probably actually read some of the issues leading up to the event so I could be sure to get my facts right. And I wound up enjoying the hell out of them. Like, could-not-put-them-down, there-goes-the-whole-day kind of enjoying the hell out of them.
I was not expecting this.
For the sake of context, Second Coming is supposed to be the conclusion to a three part series of crossovers which came out of the wake of M-Day, starting with Messiah Complex (in which Hope first shows up, and everyone wants to kill her) and Messiah War (probably the most utterly pointless zero-sum game worth of comics I've ever skim-read). I've always been pretty ambivalent about the idea M-Day as a whole; I can absolutely see the appeal of messing with the status quo once in a while to keep things fresh, but when you've got executives justifying the concept with statements to the effect of, 'there were getting to be too many mutants in Marvel, and that's a problem and M-Day was our way of fixing it', you have to wonder if they've not somehow missed that the whole idea of the X-Men is that there are enough mutants in the Marvelverse for them to classify as a distinct racial group, rather than just another small gang of superheros who acquired a bunch of mismatched powers at random. As for Hope, well, when even the characters in the story are questioning why so many people have put so much time and effort into protecting her when no-one seems to have the slightest idea what good its going to do, that probably isn't a great sign.
The great shame of the whole Cable/Hope series to date is that in theory I should have loved it - big, badass Cable bringing up a cute little girl? SIGN ME UP! Only... not if you're going to write it like that. And yeah, a part of that is bound to be my bitter inner C&DP fangirl whining about how they cancelled my series for this? But execution is always the clincher, and the execution on Cable has been not exactly good. When everyone from serious reviewers to the same fangirls who voted Deadpool into Messiah Complex are finding flaws with the result, that's not a good sign. When the first issue you pick up contains a bunch of space aliens that can detect Hope from across a galaxy but not from across a room, are immune to Cable's big-ass guns but can be killed by a little girl with a bit of pointy metal, and the whole issue is narrated by a character who had neither any way to see nor any chance to be told about most of the events he's narrating, and space sharks, then you have a the kind of plot holes that only really really good overarching story or character work will make up for, and this comic had neither.* It did have good material in patches - the relationship between Cable and Hope worked overall, even if Cable was regressed to a one-note character for the purpose - but the stupid set in early, and it stayed.
Then there's also the fact that Epic Marvel Crossover Events tend not to work so well for me lately. My last old-Cable-canon post completely deteriorated into a whole lot of rambling about why X-Cutioner's Song (waaaaaay back in the early 90's) was a better crossover event than any I've read since (short version: it was well written, enjoyable, and didn't confuse me with a dozen extra spin-offs and tie-ins that I had no idea whether I actually needed to read to follow the central story). (This is not to say there haven't been any like that since, just that if there are, I haven't read them, and I'm not really that keen of tracking down every single one to make sure.)
So yeah, with that as the context - not to mention all those laughable ONE OF THESE X-MEN WILL DIE promos - my expectations for Second Coming were pretty low.
* Tune next week to see a character with no established psychic powers of any kind mind-control a space whale by letting it eat his own brain! (This would all have been awesome in a comic with as much sense of humour about itself as C&DP did. In a comic as serious as the new Cable, not so much.)
Hence my great surprise and confusion at the realisation that Second Coming... actually did check pretty much all the same boxes as X-Cutioner's Song. Both in format (takes over a bunch of regular X-titles and tells the story round-robin style) and content (several different X-teams involved, all of them made relevant, and Cable's weird-ass family is right at the centre of the story) - and also in the fact I pretty much couldn't put it down. I'm trying to find a way to concisely summarise just what it was about it that worked so well for me before I end up rambling, and I think the best I can do is this: both the good guys and the badguys came across as well-equipped, competent and smart, with everything on the line, and the resulting collision was pretty damn epic. I can't think of a single time that anyone on either side suffered a setback because someone had been forced into a moment of plot-induced stupidity in the name of making the story go where the writers wanted. This may sound like damning with faint praise, but in a medium like comics, this is a rare and glorious thing.
The result? The suspense felt real. The danger felt real. Better, the pacing was just about perfect and the emotional impact hits all the right notes. When Cannonball calls up Cyclops to say he's not confident they can take out the facility they've been sent to without casualties, then the victory costs them a lost limb and a case of PTSD but gets them vital info and takes a good chunk of the enemy's resources off the board, the whole attack actually feels well judged and justified. Particularly nice was the solid focus on the importance of characters with the more interesting powers like teleportation, telepathy or technopathy (over the usual batch of super-powered bruisers) as the most strategically important resources the X-Men had. They don't fail to get Hope back to Utopia on their first couple of tries because they didn't send enough teleporters, they fail because the enemy was targeting their teleporters right from the start. Hope, Rogue and and a badly worn-out Nightcrawler don't get isolated from the rest of the team by accident, they do because communications were damaged, Nightcrawler was their second-last teleporter left (and their last was a teenaged girl who even Cyclops couldn't bear to send out to the front line), the enemy had a way of tracking Cable by his TO, and alternate options were running very thin.
So when Kurt doesn't make it - even after when all those promos had done such a bad job of publicising the idea that someone that OMG YOU MUST READ SOMEONE IS GOING TO DIE (PS. TOTALLY KURT!) - it actually felt like a coherent part of the narrative. By the time they got to Wolverine's speech at his funeral, it was genuinely heartbreaking. I was really not counting on this. I'd already seen those scans up on scans_daily - I knew every major plot point that was coming, and yet the execution of the story when read altogether still managed to have a whole lot of impact.
As a whole, all the emotional reactions characters were having rang true; I might not be sure if I agree with all of Cyclops' and Wolverine's decisions, but I can make sense of how they've gotten to that point (I might not agree with Hope's reaction to him sending Cable on a suicide mission either, but she's a teenage girl who's about to lose the only family she's ever had, and her overreaction is completely understandable). Quieter moments were scattered through - Hope's first night in a real hotel, her arrival on Utopia in the middle of the story - at the right intervals to break up the action. If there were any big plotholes leftover, I was enjoying it too much to notice.
The conclusion was still pretty open-ended, most of the big questions about Hope still up in the air, but big events are always like that - half the point will always be to get people interested enough to keep buying comics after the event wraps up, and I can't really begrudge them that.
A few more things I loved about Second Coming:
On the scale of what often goes wrong with these kinds of crossovers, that's mostly just nitpicking.
Second Coming can't do much to fix any of the fundamental problems with M-Day as an idea, nor can I say it's left me much more confident that I'm going to like where they take the story next. If I still even find myself liking what they're doing with Hope a year from now, it's going to be a small but pleasant surprise. But taken on its own merits, it makes excellent use out of its setting, tells a very satisfying story, and concludes with what I'm fairly sure must be (if you'll pardon the pun) one of the more hopeful outlooks the X-Men have seen in a while.
Plus, y'know, awesome fight scenes. And some nice little cute moments too.
I was not expecting this.
For the sake of context, Second Coming is supposed to be the conclusion to a three part series of crossovers which came out of the wake of M-Day, starting with Messiah Complex (in which Hope first shows up, and everyone wants to kill her) and Messiah War (probably the most utterly pointless zero-sum game worth of comics I've ever skim-read). I've always been pretty ambivalent about the idea M-Day as a whole; I can absolutely see the appeal of messing with the status quo once in a while to keep things fresh, but when you've got executives justifying the concept with statements to the effect of, 'there were getting to be too many mutants in Marvel, and that's a problem and M-Day was our way of fixing it', you have to wonder if they've not somehow missed that the whole idea of the X-Men is that there are enough mutants in the Marvelverse for them to classify as a distinct racial group, rather than just another small gang of superheros who acquired a bunch of mismatched powers at random. As for Hope, well, when even the characters in the story are questioning why so many people have put so much time and effort into protecting her when no-one seems to have the slightest idea what good its going to do, that probably isn't a great sign.
The great shame of the whole Cable/Hope series to date is that in theory I should have loved it - big, badass Cable bringing up a cute little girl? SIGN ME UP! Only... not if you're going to write it like that. And yeah, a part of that is bound to be my bitter inner C&DP fangirl whining about how they cancelled my series for this? But execution is always the clincher, and the execution on Cable has been not exactly good. When everyone from serious reviewers to the same fangirls who voted Deadpool into Messiah Complex are finding flaws with the result, that's not a good sign. When the first issue you pick up contains a bunch of space aliens that can detect Hope from across a galaxy but not from across a room, are immune to Cable's big-ass guns but can be killed by a little girl with a bit of pointy metal, and the whole issue is narrated by a character who had neither any way to see nor any chance to be told about most of the events he's narrating, and space sharks, then you have a the kind of plot holes that only really really good overarching story or character work will make up for, and this comic had neither.* It did have good material in patches - the relationship between Cable and Hope worked overall, even if Cable was regressed to a one-note character for the purpose - but the stupid set in early, and it stayed.
Then there's also the fact that Epic Marvel Crossover Events tend not to work so well for me lately. My last old-Cable-canon post completely deteriorated into a whole lot of rambling about why X-Cutioner's Song (waaaaaay back in the early 90's) was a better crossover event than any I've read since (short version: it was well written, enjoyable, and didn't confuse me with a dozen extra spin-offs and tie-ins that I had no idea whether I actually needed to read to follow the central story). (This is not to say there haven't been any like that since, just that if there are, I haven't read them, and I'm not really that keen of tracking down every single one to make sure.)
So yeah, with that as the context - not to mention all those laughable ONE OF THESE X-MEN WILL DIE promos - my expectations for Second Coming were pretty low.
* Tune next week to see a character with no established psychic powers of any kind mind-control a space whale by letting it eat his own brain! (This would all have been awesome in a comic with as much sense of humour about itself as C&DP did. In a comic as serious as the new Cable, not so much.)
Hence my great surprise and confusion at the realisation that Second Coming... actually did check pretty much all the same boxes as X-Cutioner's Song. Both in format (takes over a bunch of regular X-titles and tells the story round-robin style) and content (several different X-teams involved, all of them made relevant, and Cable's weird-ass family is right at the centre of the story) - and also in the fact I pretty much couldn't put it down. I'm trying to find a way to concisely summarise just what it was about it that worked so well for me before I end up rambling, and I think the best I can do is this: both the good guys and the badguys came across as well-equipped, competent and smart, with everything on the line, and the resulting collision was pretty damn epic. I can't think of a single time that anyone on either side suffered a setback because someone had been forced into a moment of plot-induced stupidity in the name of making the story go where the writers wanted. This may sound like damning with faint praise, but in a medium like comics, this is a rare and glorious thing.
The result? The suspense felt real. The danger felt real. Better, the pacing was just about perfect and the emotional impact hits all the right notes. When Cannonball calls up Cyclops to say he's not confident they can take out the facility they've been sent to without casualties, then the victory costs them a lost limb and a case of PTSD but gets them vital info and takes a good chunk of the enemy's resources off the board, the whole attack actually feels well judged and justified. Particularly nice was the solid focus on the importance of characters with the more interesting powers like teleportation, telepathy or technopathy (over the usual batch of super-powered bruisers) as the most strategically important resources the X-Men had. They don't fail to get Hope back to Utopia on their first couple of tries because they didn't send enough teleporters, they fail because the enemy was targeting their teleporters right from the start. Hope, Rogue and and a badly worn-out Nightcrawler don't get isolated from the rest of the team by accident, they do because communications were damaged, Nightcrawler was their second-last teleporter left (and their last was a teenaged girl who even Cyclops couldn't bear to send out to the front line), the enemy had a way of tracking Cable by his TO, and alternate options were running very thin.
So when Kurt doesn't make it - even after when all those promos had done such a bad job of publicising the idea that someone that OMG YOU MUST READ SOMEONE IS GOING TO DIE (PS. TOTALLY KURT!) - it actually felt like a coherent part of the narrative. By the time they got to Wolverine's speech at his funeral, it was genuinely heartbreaking. I was really not counting on this. I'd already seen those scans up on scans_daily - I knew every major plot point that was coming, and yet the execution of the story when read altogether still managed to have a whole lot of impact.
As a whole, all the emotional reactions characters were having rang true; I might not be sure if I agree with all of Cyclops' and Wolverine's decisions, but I can make sense of how they've gotten to that point (I might not agree with Hope's reaction to him sending Cable on a suicide mission either, but she's a teenage girl who's about to lose the only family she's ever had, and her overreaction is completely understandable). Quieter moments were scattered through - Hope's first night in a real hotel, her arrival on Utopia in the middle of the story - at the right intervals to break up the action. If there were any big plotholes leftover, I was enjoying it too much to notice.
The conclusion was still pretty open-ended, most of the big questions about Hope still up in the air, but big events are always like that - half the point will always be to get people interested enough to keep buying comics after the event wraps up, and I can't really begrudge them that.
A few more things I loved about Second Coming:
- Hope. In concept, she was always a character that should have been great if they got her right, but so easy to get wrong. The important thing about Hope is that the person she's grown into is neither entirely helpless and forever needing to be protected, nor uber-competent and overpowered, but just the right balance of the two. You can see Cable's influence on her - her skills, her mindset, her easy familiarity with big guns - and you can also see her frustration with his paranoid overprotectiveness (though the 'over' is debatable), but without it ever rising to the point where she does something stupid and suicidal just for the sake of rebellion, as is so often the case in similar stories. Cable often comes across as being a little too hard on her (and a little too fond of repeating his favourite soldier-ish epithets) but it's nicely offset with the odd moment when he makes a genuine effort to show he cares about her as a daughter as well as a strategic asset. It's very clear she's not taking the pressure to be worth everything it's cost the X-Men to keep her alive any better than you'd expect, but she handles it without getting overly whiny or angsty. She comes across as a very human character, who's lived a hard life so long that it's toughened her up until she can almost - but not quite - cope with it. I'm not sure exactly where they're going to take her from here, but in a lot of ways she's shaping up into exactly the kind of female character that comics need more of. (I do rather wish they'd make up their minds about her costume though. She seems to have two of them, both green with yellow decorations, but one is mostly hexagons and thin lines around her shoulders, whereas the other just has a couple of vaguely Phoenix-y arrow shapes over her chest. If there's any logic to why she keeps switching between them it's gone right over my head.)
- The Crowning Moments Of Awesome. (TVTropes link removed to save your afternoon.) Characters I liked got them. Characters I didn't know I liked got them. Characters I always used to hate got them. (A couple of characters I still wouldn't recognise if I backed over them with my car got them too, but what the hey.) Whole teams got them sometimes. A few particulars:
- 2a. Rogue. Goddamn, she's badass these days. I have to admit I'd have been happier with her role if they'd let her finish a few more fights on her own and emphasised the fact she now gets to use multiple different mutant powers at once over her bond with Hope, but she was still pretty awesome. (And if she's not in the team taking Hope to find her birth parents, I am going to be very disappointed.)
2b. Magneto. You know, I don't even read many X-Men comics usually, then I hit a story like this where's he's being written really well, and it dawns on me that I am, in fact, an utter complete Magneto fangirl and I do not even know how that happened. (See also: the most recent Young Avengers issue.) Scans_daily is probably to blame.
2c. Warlock. Big surprise here - I know Warlock only from a few New Mutants issues I skim-read through for Cable-backstory, and found the guy so annoying I was relieved to see him killed off. Now he's not only back, he's suddenly capable of being incredibly scary, and this works so well for me I may have to revise my whole opinion of him.
2d. Cypher. Pretty much goes without saying. Hardly even know who the guy is, but I've already mentioned how much I liked the role the characters with the more subtle powers got in this event, and his stood out more than most.
2e. Wolverine. Actually, the moments I've got in mind aren't so much traditional CMoA as quiet little moments like his speech at Nightcrawler's funeral, but from a character like Wolverine those can be the ones that stand out.
2f. Thor. Which is a surprise, because the Avengers are only on a couple of pages, and they don't even do very much. The important thing is that it's not for lack of trying, and 'That was only the first blow' was such a great line. - The fight scenes. Because I can talk about plot and character all I like, but at the end of the day, this is a Superhero comic, and awesome fight scenes are what we're here for, and SC did not disappoint. Particularly impressive were the scenes between the X-Men and the army of Nimrod Sentinels, porting in wave by wave. While the X-Men are definitely holding their own - with a liberal helping of those awesome moments, even - it was abundantly clear just how genuinely deadly the enemy was and how hard they were having to fight to keep their heads above water. It all did a very effective job of building tension and the idea that time was rapidly running out.
- THE FACT I DID NOT HAVE TO READ ANY TIE-IN ISSUES TO FOLLOW THE PLOT. Did I mention this before? I'm mentioning this again. I know there were a few, but I didn't feel punished for not bothering. Actually, I did read the Hellbound mini out of curiousity, and while I didn't love it, I thought it worked quite well - it answers the question of what the X-Men's last two surviving teleporters were doing with themselves while the team needed them without cluttering up the main story with what would be unnecessary detail.
- Greg Land's art. This should probably go without saying, the man is nearly as infamous as Liefeld, but I don't think I've ever actually read a full issue of his work before, let alone several in a row. Most of the time it's not actually that bad, but every few pages, right out of the blue you will be hit by the sight of one of his women drawn with blatant porn-face, and it throws you right out of the story. It's too obvious to ignore, and those poor women's expressions never make any sense whatsoever in context. If the artist can't figure out the difference between 'angry woman yelling loudly' and 'woman experiencing mind-blowing orgasm', then I do not want to speculate about his issues.
- The accents. Can't we just stop writing 'Ah' every time Rogue tries to say 'I'? And isn't 'y'all' only supposed to be used as a plural? Okay, she's from middle America. She has an accent. We get it. You can stop reminding us every damn speech bubble.
- Cannonball's characterisation. I'm not quite sure what they've done to the guy lately, but he's one of very few characters I managed to give half a damn about when I was reading through all those X-Force back issues, and Christ when did he turn into such a dick? Even if I did like his whole bit with the 'we know we may take casualties but we're doing this anyway because it's important' thing, I just can't make the guy who did that connect to his younger self. He comes across as even more militaristic and even less willing to compromise than Cyclops or Cable, and I haven't the faintest idea where that came from. Counting the Hellbound mini he's in the arc a lot, and yet somehow, he's not there at all.
- The denouement. I dunno, a lot of the last issue was clearly there just to set-up the comics they want to write next, and the feeling that editorial mandate was driving the characters was a bit too strong. Cyclops chewing out Rogue for letting Hope fight just didn't feel necessary, and Wolverine taking his own initiative to keep X-Force going (a SUPER SECRET TEAM including Deadpool? That's going to end well) read far more like a promotional page than an actual part of the story.
- I do also have to admit I wish they'd bothered to let the characters have some sort of proper reaction when Cable and Hope finally meet the X-Men, in recognition of the fact that none of them seen Hope or Cable since she was a little girl, and most of them not since she was a baby. In a similar vein, it's probably for the best that they're ignoring what an emotional wreck Hope should logically be, having spent so much of her life with no-one but Cable for company, but it might have been nice to show her getting a little more culture shock at the very least.
On the scale of what often goes wrong with these kinds of crossovers, that's mostly just nitpicking.
Second Coming can't do much to fix any of the fundamental problems with M-Day as an idea, nor can I say it's left me much more confident that I'm going to like where they take the story next. If I still even find myself liking what they're doing with Hope a year from now, it's going to be a small but pleasant surprise. But taken on its own merits, it makes excellent use out of its setting, tells a very satisfying story, and concludes with what I'm fairly sure must be (if you'll pardon the pun) one of the more hopeful outlooks the X-Men have seen in a while.
Plus, y'know, awesome fight scenes. And some nice little cute moments too.