Astonishing X-Men #18
Well, that was predictably disappointing. As usual, some great dialogue, but Joss Whedon really needs to learn that witty banter isn't all there is to writing a good comic. At least attempting to make your storyline fit with ones that came before is nice. Not wasting time on cutsey (but supposedly shocking) in-jokes with yourself is also nice. And in general, paying attention to pacing is a very good idea. Especially when putting one issue out every other month counts as "on time".
Regular readers of this blog (all six or seven of you ;-) will know that I've not been impressed with Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men. Originally slated for two 6-issue storylines, it's been extended to four, of which this issue "completed" the third. I say "completed" in quotes because the single biggest problem here is that it doesn't complete a damn thing. The story's on the verge of some actual plot revelations and resolutions, and then... they all get teleported up to a starship that heads off to another planet. No, really. That's the end of the arc.
Now let me say that I'm perfectly fine with long storylines. Ed Brubaker is working through a 12-issue arc on Uncanny X-Men right now, and while it's not perfect, it's moving along as advertised. The problem with Astonishing is that 1.), there's not 24 issues worth of material here. Not even close. It seems pretty clear that Whedon just took his 12-issue plot and stretched it out into 24 issues. And since the first 6 issues were actually quite well-paced, it really seems like the last 6 got stretched into 18 (possibly with the addition of the lame "sentient danger room" plot in the 2nd arc, which has yet to add anything worthwhile).
When your initial target audience is a monthly comic, you need to keep enough things happening each month to maintain interest, and a frequent enough payoff to prevent your readers from feeling that nothing ever resolves. A six-issue arc (which for several years was pretty standard as it fit well in a trade paperback) means only two plot resolutions per year, so they better be worthwhile. Astonishing X-Men ships, on average, every other month. Which means it takes a whole year to get through a six issue arc. After a year, I expect some payoff. Yes, when there's a nice hardcover collection of the whole run, this won't be as much of a problem. But it's certainly a problem now.
This is not a resolution. We saw Scott show up and start shooting people last issue- this issue we find out why he's OK with blowing people away (he's figured out they're all illusions). Also, Beast and Wolverine snap out of their personality problems in scenes that are cute but really rather anticlimactic. And Kitty's mad at being put through the emotional wringer by the mental scenario that tricked her into opening the box last issue. The only real revelations are how Cassandra Nova got a hold on Emma (and it's actually a perfectly reasonable explanation for a change- a genre-standard hypnotic suggestion placed during their last mental battle), and who she wants to control next when she gets out of the alien blob.
Now about that blob, a.k.a. Stuff. Here's where Whedon either failed to get the point of Morrison's "Here Comes Tomorrow" or he just doesn't care and is once more gratuitously retconning the New X-Men run. It was made quite clear there that Cassandra Nova was Ernst. Ernst was the strange, simple girl in the Xavier Institute's "special class" who looked very old and had no observable mutant power. She was close friends with Martha Johansson, the disembodied brain who floated around on a little hover platform. In New X-Men #153 (set 150 years in the future), we see Cassandra Nova (still in the Stuff body, but shifted to look like herself) still working with Martha. At one point, while observing how run-down they both are after so many years, Cassandra tells Martha "Why of course you can still call me Ernst, dear. He was my favorite artist." Given Ernst's strangeness and the parallels of working with Martha, this is really a pretty clear reveal.
Which, of course, means that Stuff can't still be stuck in a box in the basement. Ernst is still around- we saw her briefly in one of the post-Decimation New X-Men (2nd series- not directly related to the 1st) issues. Presumably, she hasn't worked her way out of the brain trap enough to remember that she's Cassandra Nova yet. I will allow that in NXM #155, Chuck Austen had Scott and Hank frantically searching the ruins of the mansion to see if Cassandra Nova as still locked up, but they never found even the right part of the old building, and seemed to lose interest anyway, and it was never followed up on. And the letters page of that same issue emphasized Martha wanting to call C.N. Ernst as well. Austen's run was notorious for crack-addled retcons anyway, so ignoring him is usually a good idea.
So I'm going to go with the "Whedon does another needless retcon" theory again here. Another one was declaring that Emma's secondary mutation (which allowed her to survive the massacre on Genosha) was engineered into her by Cassandra Nova sometime earlier. Neither of these things are necessary. Secondary mutations, while never well explained, were a standard plot device of the time. A conspiracy theory was really not necessary, and nothing else in Whedon's run has really depended on it. And in this case with Stuff still being stuck in a box in the basement, Whedon could have just as easily written a Cassandra Nova plot centering around her conciousness emerging within Ernst. Which would have been a lot more interesting, I think, as well.
So this arc has consisted of six issues of:
* "Emma might be evil" ambivalence that was, quite frankly, tediously boring given the character's history.
* Repeated reveals/cliffhangers involving Emma as evil, illusions of Jean/Phoenix, and Emma as a Hellfire Club flashback (yawn).
* Gratuitously retconning Scott's uncontrollable power to be something he could have controlled at any time, which horribly undermines a character who's been a mainstay for over 40 years.
* Cutsey scenes like Wolverine making paper dolls with his claws, or a feral Beast playing with a ball of string.
* The annoying establishment of Whedon's new pet secret agency (S.W.O.R.D.) as being vastly more important and with a higher authority than the long-established Marvel Universe fixture S.H.I.E.L.D.
* The stupid Danger Room robot freeing Ord from S.W.O.R.D. custody, which still does not justify it's existance as "Danger" has done nothing critical that required a sentient danger room robot to do it.
With the end being, "S.W.O.R.D. teleports them all away and we'll spend another six issues sorting this out".
Oh yeah, and Blindfold (the telepathic and maybe precog student) saying that one of them won't make it back. Oh, so Whedon will kill someone. Yawn. The body count these days is stupidly high so this is not exactly new ground. Plus, I'm betting it's Whedon's own character Hisako who gets killed, given that "Xavier Institute Student" is the red shirt position of the Marvel universe.
Blech. At this point, I'm buying this almost entirely for Cassiday's art, plus morbid curiousity. I keep forgetting this book is even around until it shows up on the shelf, and I think, "oh dear, what has Whedon done this time". The only other X-Book that consistently disappoints me this much is New X-Men (2nd series), and at least there they 1.) have some decent ideas that are just taken too far and paced poorly, and 2.) are inspiring me to care enough to be angry about it. Astonishing just makes me roll my eyes.
Regular readers of this blog (all six or seven of you ;-) will know that I've not been impressed with Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men. Originally slated for two 6-issue storylines, it's been extended to four, of which this issue "completed" the third. I say "completed" in quotes because the single biggest problem here is that it doesn't complete a damn thing. The story's on the verge of some actual plot revelations and resolutions, and then... they all get teleported up to a starship that heads off to another planet. No, really. That's the end of the arc.
Now let me say that I'm perfectly fine with long storylines. Ed Brubaker is working through a 12-issue arc on Uncanny X-Men right now, and while it's not perfect, it's moving along as advertised. The problem with Astonishing is that 1.), there's not 24 issues worth of material here. Not even close. It seems pretty clear that Whedon just took his 12-issue plot and stretched it out into 24 issues. And since the first 6 issues were actually quite well-paced, it really seems like the last 6 got stretched into 18 (possibly with the addition of the lame "sentient danger room" plot in the 2nd arc, which has yet to add anything worthwhile).
When your initial target audience is a monthly comic, you need to keep enough things happening each month to maintain interest, and a frequent enough payoff to prevent your readers from feeling that nothing ever resolves. A six-issue arc (which for several years was pretty standard as it fit well in a trade paperback) means only two plot resolutions per year, so they better be worthwhile. Astonishing X-Men ships, on average, every other month. Which means it takes a whole year to get through a six issue arc. After a year, I expect some payoff. Yes, when there's a nice hardcover collection of the whole run, this won't be as much of a problem. But it's certainly a problem now.
This is not a resolution. We saw Scott show up and start shooting people last issue- this issue we find out why he's OK with blowing people away (he's figured out they're all illusions). Also, Beast and Wolverine snap out of their personality problems in scenes that are cute but really rather anticlimactic. And Kitty's mad at being put through the emotional wringer by the mental scenario that tricked her into opening the box last issue. The only real revelations are how Cassandra Nova got a hold on Emma (and it's actually a perfectly reasonable explanation for a change- a genre-standard hypnotic suggestion placed during their last mental battle), and who she wants to control next when she gets out of the alien blob.
Now about that blob, a.k.a. Stuff. Here's where Whedon either failed to get the point of Morrison's "Here Comes Tomorrow" or he just doesn't care and is once more gratuitously retconning the New X-Men run. It was made quite clear there that Cassandra Nova was Ernst. Ernst was the strange, simple girl in the Xavier Institute's "special class" who looked very old and had no observable mutant power. She was close friends with Martha Johansson, the disembodied brain who floated around on a little hover platform. In New X-Men #153 (set 150 years in the future), we see Cassandra Nova (still in the Stuff body, but shifted to look like herself) still working with Martha. At one point, while observing how run-down they both are after so many years, Cassandra tells Martha "Why of course you can still call me Ernst, dear. He was my favorite artist." Given Ernst's strangeness and the parallels of working with Martha, this is really a pretty clear reveal.
Which, of course, means that Stuff can't still be stuck in a box in the basement. Ernst is still around- we saw her briefly in one of the post-Decimation New X-Men (2nd series- not directly related to the 1st) issues. Presumably, she hasn't worked her way out of the brain trap enough to remember that she's Cassandra Nova yet. I will allow that in NXM #155, Chuck Austen had Scott and Hank frantically searching the ruins of the mansion to see if Cassandra Nova as still locked up, but they never found even the right part of the old building, and seemed to lose interest anyway, and it was never followed up on. And the letters page of that same issue emphasized Martha wanting to call C.N. Ernst as well. Austen's run was notorious for crack-addled retcons anyway, so ignoring him is usually a good idea.
So I'm going to go with the "Whedon does another needless retcon" theory again here. Another one was declaring that Emma's secondary mutation (which allowed her to survive the massacre on Genosha) was engineered into her by Cassandra Nova sometime earlier. Neither of these things are necessary. Secondary mutations, while never well explained, were a standard plot device of the time. A conspiracy theory was really not necessary, and nothing else in Whedon's run has really depended on it. And in this case with Stuff still being stuck in a box in the basement, Whedon could have just as easily written a Cassandra Nova plot centering around her conciousness emerging within Ernst. Which would have been a lot more interesting, I think, as well.
So this arc has consisted of six issues of:
* "Emma might be evil" ambivalence that was, quite frankly, tediously boring given the character's history.
* Repeated reveals/cliffhangers involving Emma as evil, illusions of Jean/Phoenix, and Emma as a Hellfire Club flashback (yawn).
* Gratuitously retconning Scott's uncontrollable power to be something he could have controlled at any time, which horribly undermines a character who's been a mainstay for over 40 years.
* Cutsey scenes like Wolverine making paper dolls with his claws, or a feral Beast playing with a ball of string.
* The annoying establishment of Whedon's new pet secret agency (S.W.O.R.D.) as being vastly more important and with a higher authority than the long-established Marvel Universe fixture S.H.I.E.L.D.
* The stupid Danger Room robot freeing Ord from S.W.O.R.D. custody, which still does not justify it's existance as "Danger" has done nothing critical that required a sentient danger room robot to do it.
With the end being, "S.W.O.R.D. teleports them all away and we'll spend another six issues sorting this out".
Oh yeah, and Blindfold (the telepathic and maybe precog student) saying that one of them won't make it back. Oh, so Whedon will kill someone. Yawn. The body count these days is stupidly high so this is not exactly new ground. Plus, I'm betting it's Whedon's own character Hisako who gets killed, given that "Xavier Institute Student" is the red shirt position of the Marvel universe.
Blech. At this point, I'm buying this almost entirely for Cassiday's art, plus morbid curiousity. I keep forgetting this book is even around until it shows up on the shelf, and I think, "oh dear, what has Whedon done this time". The only other X-Book that consistently disappoints me this much is New X-Men (2nd series), and at least there they 1.) have some decent ideas that are just taken too far and paced poorly, and 2.) are inspiring me to care enough to be angry about it. Astonishing just makes me roll my eyes.