Bendis (w) and Bachalo, Townsend, Mendoza, Vey and Olazaba (a) and Bachalo (c)
Maybe my problem with Bendis now is that there's just too many words. I've said before that I think he's writing as if comics were a TV show or a movie but the mediums are completely different. Bendis has come out before as a fan of Gilmore Girls, which totally fits with his dialogue. I'm not saying Gilmore Girls is a bad TV show, just that it is a TV show. You can do the snappy dialogue and the fast back-and-forth in TV and in movies but I still maintain that it doesn't fit in comics. In comics, it's just a lot of word bubbles distracting from the point everyone is trying to make. And it appears in ALL of Bendis' comics. Each comic that comes out has someone (or some group of someones) in the background making extra but unnecessary points or quips or "geez, how did I do that...I still don't know how I did that!" kinds of remarks. It doesn't fit because it doesn't flow and because it distracts from whatever seriousness might be going on. All the kids, perfectly ordinary kids before their mutations appeared only days ago, are stunned by the appearance of the Avengers (which they should be) but won't shut up about it. We get it, you've never been in this situation. Frankly, I think most kids would be stunned silent in this instance. Apparently, though, they'd all be telling each other how they don't understand what's going on and making jokes behind everyone. So maybe it's not the right format. Maybe if this was a television show or a movie, this would all make sense and flow beautifully. Or maybe it's too many words for any medium.Anyway, the Avengers show up to take Scott and Emma into custody and Bendis still writes Captain America as a one-dimensional jerk. No one in this comic seems to listen to anyone else in this comic. Cap doesn't listen to Scott and Emma saying that they weren't the ones who broke apart the Phoenix and forced it into their bodies and Scott and Emma don't listen to Cap saying that, no matter what, Scott still killed Professor Xavier. Cap then throws in the fact that Havok is on the Uncanny Avengers and it FEELS like Cap is admitting to making a PR move with his new Avengers team, which the Cap in Uncanny Avengers would probably also admit to, but not as a weapon. He did it because mutants need the press and the world needs to see mutants as friends, the same way they might see Avengers. Here, he says it as if he's saying "WHAT DO YOU MEAN I'M BAD AT MUTANTS? I'M GREAT AT MUTANTS! PRAISE ME!" Look. I have some issues with this issue. And with this series. And with this writer. I think I'm going down a pit of disdain for Bendis that no amount of "oh, but remember his run on Daredevil? And Ultimate Spider-Man?" can save. Magneto comes and reveals to Scott and Emma that he betrayed them to gain the Avengers' and SHIELD's trust. He says that now they'll totally trust him and he's done something no one saw coming and everyone hails it as a brilliant move even though it's so common, we have a regularly used name for it: double cross. I don't know. Guys. I'm having trouble being objective about this any more. Maybe I'm not. Maybe this is my objective reasoning. I think I would still feel this way without knowing Bendis wrote it, or without his back catalogue. But I don't know any more. Let's just move on.
X-Treme X-Men 12
Pak (w) and Araujo (a) and Kholinne w/ Caeli (c)
Things are again heating up in the X-Treme X-Men set of universes. The three evil Xaviers who had teamed up last issue opened a portal to the multiverse and offered sacrifices to it in order to take over the world only to find that whatever was inside was far worse. Dazzler and her team rebelled against the Xaviers but too late to stop the portal from opening, killing the Nazi and Witch Xaviers (the head-in-a-jar Xavier claims to have been manipulated by the other Xaviers but says he has done what he could to prevent them from finding Dazzler's team, which kind of fits, so they keep him alive for now). Now they're going through the portal to save the multiverse but quite possible sacrificing the world they left behind to whatever horrors are coming from the portal. Interestingly, this was billed on the "Road to X-Termination" event postcard as a prologue to X-Termination, the event that will center around AoA Nightcrawler trying to return to his dimension from the 616. So this portal seems to be something of a hinge to those events. We'll see.
Anyway, not too much else to talk about here. Basic character stuff, mostly stuff we already knew. Dazzler is taking the kid's gloves off and swears that, if killing needs to be done, she's willing to kill and to die. She makes sure her team is prepared for all of that too. So we'll see if that changes as the book goes on or if she'll have to kill to accomplish her goals. Lot of mini-X-Forcing around the Universe right now. I guess that's what happens when you have a book that's as great as Remender's come through the wires; everyone wants to use something of a similar formula. It seems the original threat of the ten evil Xaviers has subsided but given way to a whole new threat, which is probably Xavier-related anyway but I guess we'll have to find out later. AoA Nightcrawler might make a good fit for this new, suddenly violent team, should he find his way into it. Two Nightcrawlers on one team! Can you imagine? Probably. It's probably happened before. I don't know, comics are weird, you guys.
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