Astonishing X-Men 64, Uncanny X-Men 8, Wolverine 6

Astonishing X-Men 64
Liu (w) and Walta (a) and Peter (c)

To start, some bad news. Marvel has announced they are canceling Astonishing X-Men in October with issue 68. It's pretty unfortunate as I've found myself liking this series more than any other X-Men team title of late (I have high hopes for Brian Wood's X-Men but we're only on issue two over there, so I don't want to say yet). It's felt a little more toned down in its approach, which I think has a lot to do with the softer art of it, and Marjorie Liu kills it when she has the chance to write character over plot. Definitely sad news as Marvel cancels another fairly strong one. Anyway, on to this issue. Bobby is still covering the world in ice and snow and his teammates are trying to bring him down. They manage to wound him a bit, but nothing long term, as Kitty dives through his giant ice body and touches the purple force within. It stuns her and he flees. Wolverine and company hunt down Dark Beast, last seen in the X-Termination event, and Wolvy accuses him of placing within Bobby a fragment of Apocalypse power when they jumped through a portal back home. Dark Beast agrees to help them find out if the power can be removed but he's never really one to be trusted. Meanwhile, Bobby goes to visit his parents, still hoping to connect with someone. He's shooed away by his father which results in Bobby using the snow and ice to kill him. While Bobby Prime has been doing all of this, little Bobby fragments have tried to salvage the last bits of memory and caring they hold, taking some of the people Bobby had once loved and trying to protect them from him. Mystique is with one of the fragments and asks him about all of it but his memories are fading as Bobby becomes stronger. Bobby finds them and Mystique convinces him to allow her into his plan, wishing to share the power with him. Back home, Wolverine and his team talk about what needs to be done; if they can't save Bobby, they have to be prepared to kill him to stop Apocalypse's influence. Of course, it eventually does come down to a fight, with Thor joining in the battle as well. Mystique and Bobby attack the X-Men and Thor, quickly gaining the advantage, before Opal tries to talk to Bobby. Bobby lashes out at her but, while he's distracted, Thor takes the opportunity to blast the Apocalypse power out of him. Before Thor can advance, Mystique spears him with an ice shard and moves ahead. She picks up the small bit of power and pops it into her mouth.

Certainly a strange ending made all the more tense by contemplating a Mystique with the sort of power Bobby had. Not entirely sure what it could grant her; this power seemed to amplify Bobby's natural abilities and corrupt his soul, but it didn't seem to cause any new powers. We'd seen everything he did here before, just to a far lesser scale. So will Mystique shapeshift even better? I don't know. Will shapeshifting give her the power of whoever she shapeshifts into? Because I'd like to know more about how that works. And her soul's already pretty corrupted, though not to the level that Apocalypse would have it. Anyway, definitely some interesting stuff as Bobby seems to go past a couple of points of no return here. Only Thor, outside of the X-Men, seems aware that this is Bobby's doing as a news report in the issue says witnesses saw a giant ice man but no one can guarantee it was anything more than severe cold hallucinations. On top of that, Dark Beast makes a sinister comment to Gambit, asking whether the second Apocalypse personality ever goes away or not, so even if Bobby was acting completely under the influence of the power (which maybe amplified the way he was feeling already) it's not guaranteed it will all go away as quickly as it came. We're in for an interesting conclusion next issue.

Uncanny X-Men 8
Bendis (w) and Bachalo (a) and Townsend (c)

Scott and Emma drop Fabio (the gold ball new mutant) back off at home on his request, telling him that they'll be around if he wants to reconsider. They return and discuss with the rest of the new mutants and the original team how everyone needs to train more. Magik leads the Cuckoos to the new mutant we glimpsed last issue, who apparently has control over cars, and rescue him from a situation with the police, though not before the police shoot him. When they return home, their healer Christopher manages to fix that up because healers tend to take the tension away from more minor injuries. Meanwhile, Fabio is being grilled for far too long by his parents and his sister about where he's been and about what's happening and so on. None of them listen to him when he tells them that he's a mutant and the X-Men aren't bad people and they saved him and so on and this scene goes on FOREVER. Then Dazzler, agent of SHIELD, shows up at his door asking to talk.

I will say, the plus side of that back-and-forth dialogue I've decried so much on this blog is that it's easier to review an issue chock full of it because there's not much space for things to happen. Plot things. It's still not easy to read because you get halfway through the book and feel like you've read several issues of a very boring and slow moving book. I know I've talked about it plenty already, but I have to again say that the sort of dialogue prevalent here is not a natural dialogue to be reading. I tend not to buy, even in Sorkin's work or in shows like Gilmore Girls that feel like a direct influence on this writing style, that people talk this way but you forgive it in TV because listening to it is somewhat easier than reading it all. It's fast-paced, it's quick, and it conveys an energy. It doesn't do any of those things in comics because regardless of how short the bursts of speech are, you're still taking the time to read it all. It feels forced and unnatural while also feeling unrepentantly smarmy. It's hard to look past all of that to even dive into the issue but, more than that, it feels like less happens in the issue because of it. If you like this style of writing, you'll probably like this book. If you have numerous problems with this style of writing, you will pretty clearly hate this book.

Wolverine 6
Cornell (w) and Pierfederici and Palmer (a) and Mossa (c)

Wolverine is still trying to fight his way through the SHIELD helicarrier to reach the parasite in Nick Fury or to get off or to turn the helicarrier around or something. He's trying to defeat it, anyway. However, the parasite isn't taking too kindly to his attempts and is, as the issue begins, trying to drown him. His team of protected SHIELD agents help him get to safety and he borders on berserker as he leaves the water. Main SHIELD agent McDougall wants that rage to come out, sure that they need an angry Wolverine. Somehow, her hyping him up seems to calm him down and he gets a grip on himself. I don't know, it just happens that way. The parasite sends more foes for them to face, including a specially enhanced SHIELD team called SHIELD team Namor, meant to fight in watery conditions. They tear through the team, killing most and severing the air tank from another, meaning the parasite can take him over. Soon it's just Wolverine and McDougall left. The pair make their way through the helicarrier and attempt to go to the microverse and back but they're blocked by the parasite, sending them to see their real forms, which are hideous. Wolverine allows them to supervillain out their whole plan, which is largely about infesting Earth and taking over people so they can all live together peaceably even if it removes the consciousness of the humans, before attacking. McDougall hijacks one of their ships and manages to navigate it to a point in the microverse where they grow back into normal space, now moved in the real universe to the helicarrier's bridge. It's a bit confusing and pretty poorly defined, but it places Wolverine and McDougall behind a now-somewhat-panicking Fury (still controlled by the parasite) so Wolverine can knock him out (the host body losing consciousness forces the parasite out, apparently). The flood the ship with stun gas and knock everyone out, allowing them to awaken as themselves again, where Wolverine explains to Fury's what's been happening. Before they were all expelled, though, they said something about triggering the process, which seems to come to fruition at the end of the issue as Wolverine feels himself start losing blood and realizes he's not healing.

I don't know what it is about this series but there's something in there that makes it hard to really get behind. I can't see the parasite as a legitimate enemy at this point, not because they've been unthreatening but more because they're so incredibly vague. It's vague in a not-mysterious way, which would create some amount of tension or fear of them. Instead, they seem like another obstacle and one that's somehow lasted this long. It could be the writing between Wolverine and the other characters, which feels almost entirely dry and emotionless. When emotions do break through, their clichéd and expected. It's hard to feel anything about this story, which seems largely due to what I've said about the enemy but also in large part to its hero. I'm not sure how you can make a book about Wolverine, one of Marvel's biggest characters ever, and make the audience feel uncomfortable with him. I'm not saying uncomfortable in the sort of "I don't know if I condone those choices" sort of way, which is rather what Wolverine is all about, but uncomfortable in a sort of squirming, can't sit still kind of way because he's not really doing anything of note, even when he is. Also, a more cynical man than I would point to the similarity of the parasite taking away his healing factor as a similarity with the new Wolverine movie coming out, wherein he seems to lose his healing factor. That's not new, to have a storyline in a book that corresponds to a major motion picture that's coming out, but it always feels a little like a cheap move. I can't say I recommend this book, which is too bad because there has been some interesting stuff in the series overall. It gets far too bogged down by itself, preferring to explain every bit of action in a "you see how smart this series is?" sort of way that really makes the series crawl along.