So the latest epic Marvel “event” Avengers Vs X-Men has come to a close, and to say opinions are mixed is putting it mildly. I’m gonna go on record here and say the series was mostly entertaining, but there were also a ton of storytelling misfires along the way.
Unlike the past few years, the events of AvX actually felt like they mattered, and had actual repercussions on the Marvel Universe. This hasn’t been the case for some time…I mean, can anyone tell me what the point of last year’s “Fear Itself” was? Or “Siege?” How pointless did “Secret Invasion” ultimately feel?
By the way, SPOILERS for the entire series of AvX in this article. If you haven’t read it, please do so now. Or you can just read the Wikipedia entry, I don’t care. I’m certainly not going to explain what happened here in detail, I’m going to assume if you’re reading this you know the basic plot and outcome of Avengers Vs. X-Men by now. All good? Ok, then let’s talk about the good, the bad, and the downright ugly of AvX….
The Good
AvX Was A Series That Lived Up To It’s Premise
So many of these crossover events don’t live up to their premise. Secret Invasion from 2008 is a perfect example, a series that promised that many of the characters we’d known and loved for decades had been replaced with duplicate Skrull agents. This could have been a truly wild revelation in the Marvel Universe. But it turns out, pretty much only C-lister Mockingbird was actually replaced by a Skrull. Yawn. But AvX really only promised Avengers fighting X-Men, and boy howdy, it sure gave us that (maybe too much of that) At least it was a series that delivered on the inside what the cover said it was on the outside. And far be it from me from denying the simple pleasures of super heroes beating up other super heroes.
The Return of the Mutant Race
Back in 2005, Marvel EIC Joe Quesada decided that there were way too many mutants in the Marvel Universe, therefore making them seem less like a feared and hated minority and more like a powerful majority. So in 2005’s House of M mini series, he had a now crazy Scarlet Witch use her reality altering hex power to erase the mutant gene in 99% of the world. (leaving only the X-Men and their villains as the world’s sole mutants. Convenient) Suddenly, there were only 198 mutants left in the Marvel Universe. Problem is, 198 mutants isn’t so much a race, as it is a really good turn out for a party. What Joe Quesada didn’t understand is that prejudice isn’t always about numbers; women are 51% of the population after all, and they are discriminated against, in some countries even treated as barely human, merely because they’re not in positions of power. It’s not always just about numbers.
I’ll admit that this new “mutants as endangered species” scenario led to some interesting stories, although it seems the writers and editors at Marvel were too scared to make the comparisons to the Jewish Holocaust that to me were obvious. The mutant population is nearly exterminated, and the hardened survivors form there own tiny nation, armed to the teeth in an effort to make sure no one fucks with them ever again. Meanwhile, Wolverine takes his mutants to New York state, where he feels that integrating as part of regular American culture and not separating is the way to go. If this all doesn’t sound like an allegory for the Jewish post WWII experience, then you’re not paying attention. The X-Men have always fully embraced their allegories to the civil rights movements of the 60’s and the gay rights movements, but it seems they were too scared to fully commit to the Israel metaphor for fear of offending people. (people do understand that all metaphors are not exact) If you’re too scared to really go where you wanted to go for fear of backlash, then at least give us back the idea of a mutant race that’s thriving and growing day to day.
The Death of Prof. X
This has been a long, long time coming. How many near deaths has the man had? He was shot way back in the early 90’s only to recover, then again he was shot in the head at the end of 2007’s Messiah Complex, only to survive that too. He hasn’t been an interesting or vital character for a really long time, and with his original students now in teaching positions, he no longer really has a real role either. I know that as far back as the mid 80’s, X-Men writer Chris Claremont wanted to take ol’ Chuck out, but Marvel didn’t let him. Instead, he was sent off into space for six years with his alien girlfriend, and all the X-teams at the time talked about it as if he were dead, even though they knew he was just on a really long and far away vacation.
Marvel has always played with idea that Charles Xavier was this Martin Luther King type figure for the mutant community, and Magneto as kind of the Malcolm X. Well, to take that metaphor to it’s natural conclusion, then that means that Xavier has to die tragically, a martyr to his people. For decades, the various X-Men teams have been talking about “carrying on Xavier’s dream.” You only carry on someone’s dream if that person isn’t around to do it, and he was. But now that he’s finally gone, Xavier can be a more powerful a character in death than he could be in life.
The Redemption of the Scarlet Witch
Another event that was a very long time coming was the redemption of longtime Avenger Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch. She is to the Avengers what Sue Storm is to the Fantastic Four, or Jean Grey was to the X-Men. And yet for the past eight years, ever since 2004’s Avengers Disassembled, she’d been treated like total crap. In that series, years of misfortune (finding out her father was Magneto, having her android husband’s mind wiped, and finding out her children weren’t real for starters) caused Wanda to have nervous breakdown and cause major death and destruction to the Avengers with her Chaos Magicks. She then wiped out the mutant gene to piss off her father in House of M.
On the one hand, it is commendable that Marvel has made the most powerful character on each of their signature teams a woman. But on the flip side, it seems Marvel always has their most powerful females unable to cope with such power, as if estrogen + cosmic power must always lead to global catastrophe. I don’t recall Silver Surfer or Thor constantly going off the rails whenever bad things happened to them. When the original Dark Phoenix saga happened, it was new and innovative, but by the time they did the same story with Scarlet Witch, it felt like a rehash, with the character damage nearly impossible to overcome. But at least with the conclusion of AvX, they’re seemingly on their way to restoring this character’s reputation.
The End of the Storm/Black Panther Marriage
And good riddance too. When Marvel decided to marry their two most popular African characters, mostly because they just both happened to be African, it was one of the dumbest story ideas ever. It killed Storm as a vital member of the X-Men (“hey everyone, just dropping in to say hi, even though I’m Queen of a whole nation now. Remember when my character mattered?”) and forced Black Panther stories to involve mutants. It was all so lame, and in my opinion, kinda racist. I have to admit, one of the best moments of the series was when Panther tells storm the high priest of the Panther clan has annulled their marriage, and Storm says “but you’re the high priest” or words to the effect, and he just glares back. Cold T’Challa. Cold.
The Bad
The Inconsistent Art
There were three artists in total on AvX, and much like the writing, the art was all over the place. The first few issues were drawn by John Romita Jr. who I’m afraid wasn’t bringing his A-game to the drawing table. While Romita can draw bulking giant characters like the Hulks and Thor to perfection, as well as the square jawed types like Cap, his women are almost always ugly looking, and his layouts, at least with this series, are kind of boring. Then came Olivier Coipel’s stunning art at the halfway point of the series, and suddenly everything looked much better. Andy Kubert finished out the series, but while the art wasn’t ugly, it wasn’t really his best either. When people read this book in trades in the future, it is going to feel really schizophrenic due to the art ranging from ugly to great to just ok.
Sloppy Storytelling
Ultimately, the main characters of AvX were Cyclops, Wolverine, Captain America, Tony Stark, Hope and Scarlet Witch, with everyone else there just to punch each other, give some needed exposition, and throw out a one liner or two. But for much of the series, Scarlet Witch was sidelined, so her importance at the end of the series felt like it came out of left field at the end. Xavier’s death at the hands of Cyclops was a huge moment in the Marvel Universe, yet in terms of this series, Xavier barely played a part, rendering his death scene less impacting than it should have been. And then there’s Nova, someone who was positioned to be an important part of the series at the very beginning, but is all but forgotten until a cameo at the end. Maybe if this series had one writer instead of many, it would have felt a lot more consistent. Too many different writers and artists made the whole thing feel really messy, with moments of greatness and equal moments of awfulness. And with so many different writers (the book was written by Jason Aaron, Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Jonathan Hickman and Matt Fraction) how can it NOT feel as if written by committee?
This Series Should Have Been Six issues, Not Twelve
As entertaining as parts of it were, there is no reason this story took six months and twelve issues to tell, aside from milking it for as long as possible to get more money from loyal fanboys. It could have been told in half the time and with a lot less filler in the middle.
The Ugly
The Character Assassination of Scott Summers
Poor Cyclops just can’t seem to catch a break. Despite being the original X-Man, he’s taken a back seat to Wolverine in terms of popularity for decades now. But in the early 2000’s, Grant Morrison took steps to make Cyclops an equally compelling character as Wolverine or anyone else in the pages of New X-Men, and that was taken even further by Joss Whedon in his run on Astonishing X-Men. But subsequent writers have slowly taken “being strong” to just “being a dick.”
And for every fan who is now saying that at the end of this series that Cyclops was right all along, well yes… he was. The Phoenix force was indeed coming for Hope, and Hope reignited the mutant race. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Phoenix could have just as easily destroyed the Earth instead, and when Captain America and the Avengers showed up to remind him of this fact, he had a giant temper tantrum about it instead of acting like a rational human being.
What Cyclops should have done when Cap showed up on his doorstep is say “ok, you want to take Hope into custody to potentially save the world? Maybe take her into space or someplace she won’t do any damage? Fine, but she’s a mutant, so wherever she goes, we go to protect her.” But no, Cyclops had to act like a belligerent asshole, and be all “get off my lawn!” and hit Captain America with an optic blast. So all the actual Avengers fighting X-Men stuff that the series was named after was Cyclops’ fault.
What isn’t Cyclops’ fault is anything he or the other Phoenix Five did while being under the control of the Phoenix. The only reason they got possessed at all was because of something Tony Stark did, and yet I’ve seen little guilt on his part for his actions here. When Jean Grey went all Dark Phoenix back in the day, she destroyed a whole world with billions of inhabitants. When she got better, she got a pass. Yet under the influence of the Phoenix, the worst thing Scott Summers did really was kill one man. And yet, he’s now imprisoned like a war criminal. If the Phoenix was responsible for these actions, then none of the Phoenix five should be held accountable any more than Jean Grey was, especially now that the Phoenix is gone. You can’t have it both ways Marvel. Either the Phoenix controls you or it doesn’t, and if it does, then there is a huge double standard going on between Scott Summers and Jean Grey right now.
Having said all that, it seems bizarre that Cyclops has shown little to no remorse over the death of his mentor and father figure, whether he was really fully responsible or not. (there was some remorse shown in the tie in issue of Uncanny X-Men, but it was too little, too late) His attitude at the end of AvX seems to be “It was all worth it, because my people were restored.” All of that would be consistent if he hadn’t killed Charles Xavier, who was practically his father. But he did kill him, so it makes him seem strangely callous and almost like another character entirely. There is no way that the Scott Summers who has existed at Marvel for nearly fifty years would be so unrepentant about Charles Xavier’s death at his hands as he was. At the end of AvX, Cyclops is as broken a character as Scarlet Witch was for years, and I hope it doesn’t take eight years to restore him to true heroic status. Because none of the good things that came out of AvX are worth years and years of “villain Cyclops” we are now about to get.
Final Verdict
Now that it is finally over, I’d say there was as much good and bad to AvX, with only the shoddy treatment of Cyclops tipping the scale to more bad than good. However, on the plus side, This series finally brings about an end to almost a decade’s worth of stories in the Marvel Universe, creating an almost clean slate for a refreshed new world for the creators at Marvel to play in. Instead of separate X-Men and Spider-Man and Avengers universes within the Marvel U, we are getting one unified Marvel Universe again, as it was back when Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko created it, and to me that’s good. If it took AvX to get us there, then it was all worth it. Well, unless you’re Cyclops that is. Then it just sucks to be you right now.