Comic Review -- Avengers vs. X-Men #3 / Ed Brubaker, John Romita, Jr., Scott Hanna, and Laura Martin

I really like the cover of this issue.  It's intense, personal, and vicious as Cap and Wolverine struggle for dominance.  Costumes are torn, sweat and what appears to be blood are flying, and both men are determined to beat the other.  The artwork itself is wonderful, and it really sells the idea that this issue will contain some violence.

Wolverine recovers from his ordeal with Hope and is told that Cyclops and the X-Men have surrendered.  While Cap and Iron Man argue about how to handle their new prisoners, Wolverine immediately recognizes that the X-Men are merely playing possum, and isn't able to prevent them from escaping by using Magik to teleport away.  Both teams set out to locate and retrieve Hope, but she's gone and found a way to scramble Cerebra's sensors into putting her at five different locations across the world, forcing them to split up.

While talking with her over the intercom from Wolverine's school, Wolverine detects some attitude from Rachel, who it turns out is feeding information to the X-Men.  Cap confronts Wolverine about his inability to follow orders and how he tried to kill Hope, and Wolverine responds that he knows how to deal with the Phoenix, and that Cap won't be able to save Hope from the Phoenix Force.  A fight breaks out between them, and Wolverine is expelled from their shuttle.  Calling Cap a blind old-fashioned fool, Wolverine pulls himself up and sets out after them, convinced that their fates are all up to him.

I will say, the writing in this issue has gotten a little better than what I saw in Round 2, but that's actually not saying much.  I think Ed Brubaker is doing what he can to ameliorate the poor direction of this story, which has clearly been written by committee.  Great swaths of action get glossed over, and some plot points are just flat-out ignored.  So the X-Men all surrendered, off the page?  Not impossible, I suppose, but given the amount of event skipping already portrayed in this series, I'd think the writers would want to keep bridging events on the page.  And why was the fight between Dr. Strange and Magik not shown?  If she can beat the Sorceror Supreme, I want to see how!

Also, if Emma was effectively de-psionicized in the last issue, why does she only regain her abilities after they've escaped from the Avengers?  If she actually had recovered her telepathy at that point, she could have just shut all the Avengers down psychically.  Why didn't she?  It just seems the logical effects of the storyline are discarded or ignored at the whims of the writers, no matter how ridiculous it looks.

I was happy, however, to see that Wolverine's conflict with Cap didn't directly involve him having a change of heart and deciding he wanted to fight on Scott's side now.  It came about for a perfectly plausible reason, though I am more than a little skeptical that Captain America is only now realizing how far Logan would go to defeat the Phoenix Force.  It really raises the question of just how much research Cap's done about the Phoenix Force and the X-Men's brush with it.  Any idiot should know that the X-Men have faced this thing several times, and are both more experienced and more vicious in dealing with it.

I was also glad they at least acknowledged the parallels to the Civil War in this issue, as they were becoming very obvious.  While Scott is not free of blame here--he was written like a crazy person in issue #1--Cap is increasingly showing his lack of preparation and realism in this arc.  He's brushed off the input of two X-Men experienced in dealing with the Phoenix; he was willing to imprison the X-Men for getting in his way, when there was technically no call to do that--I'm glad Iron Man was the one to call him on that; and he basically pulls a Spock on Wolverine when he won't start marching to his orders, ejecting him out the shuttle.

Art-wise... John Romita, Jr. is again drawing far too wide a scale for his work to come off as anything but rushed, blocky, and distracting.  Nuff said.

Overall, I'd say this is an improvement over the last issue, though between JRJR's art and the flawed storytelling, it still leaves a lot to be desired.  The fight between Wolverine and Cap is pretty cool, and while I'm not surprised to see the X-Men still have a few tricks up their sleeve, they didn't really do much this issue.  Recommended.

GN Review -- X-Men: Deadly Genesis / Ed Brubaker, Trevor Hairsine, & Scott Hanna

What happens when you find out that a significant moment in your history is nothing like you actually remember it, and that you've been lied to, or even flat-out manipulated to protect someone else?  What if that someone is a mentor, a friend, and benefactor whose integrity has been, until this moment, unimpeachable?


X-Men: Deadly Genesis explores this question by reintroducing and adding to a critical period in the X-Men's history: the period during which the original team was kidnapped by Krakoa the Living Island, which led directly to the formation of the new team that everyone knows and loves to this day.

When a shuttle mysteriously crashes in upstate New York, the X-Men scramble to investigate.  Cyclops, Wolverine, and Rachel Summers are quickly overpowered and rendered unconscious by the shuttle's occupant, who leaves Wolverine for dead and takes the other two prisoner.  Meanwhile, Banshee has been investigating Muir Island for Charle Xavier's whereabouts, and comes across a disturbing recording about him left by the facility's caretaker, Dr. Moira MacTaggert.  He is killed along with the occupants of his flight by the X-Men's jet, the Blackbird, crashing into his plane just as it is about to land in New York, prompting Wolverine and Nightcrawler to sneak around the wreckage to retrieve the tape.

As the X-Men begin to piece together the remnants of Moira's recording, Scott and Rachel learn through the more aggressive methods of their captor that he knew Charles Xavier, and hated him intensely.  What's more, he had known Scott, who has no recollection of this powerful, unstable mutant captor of theirs named Vulcan.  Rachel manages to escape, and leads the other X-Men to Muir Island, where he's taken Scott and to where Xavier suddenly shows up.  Vulcan demands Professor X tell him what really happened on Krakoa, and he does so, revealing that he'd sent a previous team of X-Men--consisting of Vulcan and several other mutants--to retrieve the original team.  They had been children Moira had taken off the streets, and they were viciously killed by Krakoa.  Furthermore, Xavier had altered their recollections of the island so that it had appeared sentient to the X-Men, when in fact it had been no more intelligent than an animal.  Finally, he had erased some of Scott's memories of the events.

The X-Men, shocked at this revelation about their founder, nevertheless fight Vulcan to rescue him.  An enraged Vulcan flies off into space, proclaiming his hatred for the X-Men is renewed.  Meanwhile, the X-Men discover one of Vulcan's teammates, Darwin--a mutant with a continually evolving body--has survived, and is growing a body from pure energy in front of them.  A funeral is held for Petra and Sway, the two X-Men who died on Krakoa, and Scott tells Xavier that after his crimes, and because he isn't a mutant any longer, he no longer has a place at the Institute.

While I suppose Charles Xavier's character is far from unimpeachable by the time this story was originally told, I was nevertheless bowled over at the depths to which his character sank by the end of this story.  He took Moira's mutant students, used an experimental training procedure to "ready" them for their mission, then sent them to a powerful, living island that had made easy work of the original X-Men, who by that point had been veterans of combat against numerous powerful foes.  That Moira should think him a complete and total bastard is pretty understandable.

I think the writing here is amazing.  Ed Brubaker is known for writing strong noir and crime themed scripts, but this is a major retcon about a milestone moment in the X-Men's past, and he really knocks it out of the park, as far as I'm concerned.  Using erased memories, a desperate man's willingness to compromise his moral code, and the long, fading fingers of the past, he shows that this could have plausibly been pulled off--and kept hidden--by Xavier, but for Vulcan's reemergence.  Even that reemergence is given an explanation, albeit a comparatively flimsy one, having to do with the energy released by the Scarlet Witch's infamous "No more mutants," proclamation.

I also like that this story was dark enough and high-stakes enough that a member of the X-Men got killed in the course of its telling.  Sean Cassidy was never one of my favorite X-Men, but I know he was a favorite to many, and that Banshee had been a fairly constant presence on the team over the years.  To my knowledge, he hasn't been revived by the powers that be yet, and that shows me that, at least at the time, this was not an easy or idle decision on the part of the writers and editors.

The mini-backstories of the "lost X-Men," as I prefer to think of them, are also a nice touch.  They make for an appropriate addendum to each tale, and set up the denouement to the main story very nicely.  I actually found myself quickly becoming attached to Darwin, Petra, and Sway, and horrified at their demise on Krakoa when it was finally revealed.

The art in this story is really good, particularly the covers by Marc Silvestri, the first of which depicted a grotesque skeletal homage to the original Giant-Size X-Men cover and basically guaranteed that I would be reading this story.  Everything is modern X-Men with a hint of homage to the vintage looks of the late 70s and early 80s.  Hairsine knows these characters and draws them well, from appropriate expressions and body language to harrowing action shots like the destruction of the Blackbird crashing into Sean's flight.

Overall, this is a must-read story, and an unsettling insight into the formation of the "new" X-Men team that was made so famous.  It's also a good read for anyone who likes a decent crime thriller or mystery, as Vulcan's claims throughout the story are pretty hard to believe until the end.  Highly recommended.