A+X 15, Inhumanity: The Awakening 1

Sorry about the lateness of this post! Busy week and I couldn't get my hands on A+X until late so I almost skipped this post entirely. Look for my picks of the week shortly.

A+X 15
Dr. Strange and Beast - Nitz (w) and Smallwood (a and c)
Captain America and Cyclops - Duggan (w) and Yardin and C. Smith (a) and Mossa (c)

In our first story, Doctor Strange teams with Beast to investigate a strange and somewhat haunted yoga session in Greenwich. Beast, given his attachment to science, believes it to be alien technology while Strange, of course, believes it to be magic. The two bicker as they visit Dormammu's realm to find more. There, they meet their counterparts from another dimension, Dr. S of the Strange-Men and Sorcerer Supreme Beast, both of whom want to destroy the 616 because of the yoga business. Our Strange and Beast distract them and get away. Given a moment's respite, they realize this must be the work of the Impossible Man and visit him and manage to convince him to set things right. They return back to their home world, neither of them any more accepting of the other's business. Not a bad little story. Definitely fun, even if it treads a lot of the same ground A+X has been treading (people with differences bickering, mostly).

Meanwhile, the Cap + Cyclops storyline continues as they bring the shot-Skrull back to their base. The LMD there informs the two that the Skrull is still alive, having shifted his organs in his body right before being shot and that he is, in fact, conscious. The Skrull wants fast food at a specific restaurant but promises that afterwards he'll take them to a Skrull secret base. Cap and Cyclops each call in their own help, with Cyclops calling Emma Frost and the Stepford Cuckoos to help give them a telepathic edge and Cap calling in Ant-Man to help destroy the Skrulls guns, as the fast food place ends up being the secret base and they attack pretty immediately. Ant-Man and Emma agree to tag along for the rest of the adventure. Together, they all realize that part of the plan of Cadre K is to take over the cattle industry and poison the meat. The story is starting to gain some legs but, more importantly, the characters are starting to take some shape. They still snap at each other here and there but they're getting more tolerant of their work, which is pretty neat and leads to some nice little lines here and there. Not a bad issue overall, two fairly fun stories. More than I could say about other issues of the series.

Inhumanity: The Awakening 1
Kindt (w) and Davidson (a) and Beaulieu (c)

Following right on the heels of INFINITY THE HUNT, this mini-series picks up with the students of the American schools cleaning up in New York after INFINITY. Pixie is monitoring social networks and realizes there's a newly-Inhuman girl who may be about to kill herself from bullying and her transformation. Pixie leads Quentin Quire, Striker, and Finesse to the girl and see her flying high in the sky. Pixie realizes that she's not flying, she's falling, and saves her. The girl tells her story through Instagram pictures and their comments, where she's been examining her life even before transforming into a feathered and winged Inhuman, which she also documents. Her jerk brother's friends tortured her at one point and she's harassed by a troll online and it's all become to ouch for her. Striker talks about his time in the spotlight and what it's meant for him and how he deals with it and it seems to straighten her out a bit. She reveals to them that her brother also cocooned and they go to see him only to find that he's burst out and is now wreaking havoc in the world.

Followers of this blog will probably notice that I did not care for INFINITY THE HUNT and it seems like I may care for this mini-series EVEN LESS. This one is obsessed with showing all of the recent events (INFINITY and, now, INHUMANITY) through the eyes of social media. So on top of the story being told through a series of Instagram pictures and their comments (not to mention through her narration over the pictures), there's a running Twitter feed at the top of every single page. It's unbearable. There are probably people out there who would be more forgiving about this than I am but I absolutely hate the layout of this issue. Here's the thing: YOUNG AVENGERS has done something like this throughout their series. Each issue starts with a Tumblr-like recap page, which works for this series and, importantly, is one mostly-inconsequential page that's loaded with neat little bits and, again, are not important overall. They also did a set of Instagram pictures to explain away their in-between-issues adventures. It worked and it made sense. Here there's way too much of it and it permeates the entire book. I read online someone saying that it was a powerful book that addressed bullying and other important teenage problems but I can't even really say that. There's obviously a lot of bullying, but it's almost too much a parody of bullying to be taken seriously and it seems like Kindt wants to do too much else in the book to really fully examine bullying or something. Just...not a fun book, you guys. The downside of actually getting my hands on A+X was that I suddenly found myself needing to both read the rest of this issue and review it without just dutifully ignoring it. Oh well, right?