The Four Color Media Monitor

IGN's comics columnist actually considers the X-Men's latest relaunch, as a follow-up to Brian Bendis' awful Avengers: Disassembled event from 2004 is a waste of trees, though this article still has some absurdities and confusing parts to it:

Marvel's Uncanny X-Men relaunch seems poised to go down as one of the great comic book-related disappointments of 2018. Even after three issues, the series has done little to rectify the problems that have been apparent from the beginning. There's little sense of direction to the series beyond the rehashing of old tropes and a constantly revolving door of old characters making their return. It seems that the weekly format simply doesn't suit the X-Men as well as it has Spider-Man and the Avengers in the past.

Hmm, so they've been resorting to the same approach used for Spider-Man following the atrocious One More Day in Spider-Man, with weekly installments? All that led to was poorly written oversaturations of a market that won't let go of the dated pamphlet format.

However, depending on the situation, I must disagree with their take on resurrections, if that's the complaint they're making here. If it's a badly, offensively written character death that took place, I firmly believe a mistake should be repaired. If they're saying it shouldn't be, that's ludicrous, and exactly why superhero comics have been destroyed.

When Marvel first revealed that this initial ten-issue storyline would be titled "X-Men Disassembled," the hope was that the execution would diverge a lot more from "Avengers Disassembled" than it actually has. This story follows the same basic pattern, with the X-Men facing overwhelming threats from all sides and a mysterious enemy working feverishly to bring the team to its knees. But for various reasons, none of the chaos and destruction carries much weight. The story never lingers on any one character long enough for the reader to form a strong connection. The best that can be said for the story is that it's at least become more digestible since issue #1 now that it has a more straightforward, linear structure. But "digestible" is still a long way from "compelling."

If this is another tale where a much-liked character turns out to be crazy, as Brian Bendis did to Scarlet Witch back in 2004, that's all the more reason to avoid this book. And even if it's not, it should still be avoided due to prevailing contempt for the audience they harbor regardless. These kind of stories are the lowest of cliches. And it's absurd they should say the chaos doesn't carry much weight as though that wasn't the case with Bendis' Avengers farrago, because by turning Wanda Maximoff into a cheap basket case culprit, that's one of the biggest reasons it was such a ripoff, and reflective of what became a new custom at the time - depicting heroes facing not real villains, but members of their own ranks depicted as mental hospital escapees. We've come a long way from the time Norman Osborn was the Green Goblin.

It's telling that the few scenes in issue #3 that do stand out are those that focus on a smaller cast of characters. Writers Matthew Rosenberg, Kelly Thompson and Ed Brisson use Legion to solid effect, showcasing just how fleeting his brush with respectability and stability truly is. This is a sign that the series really needs a smaller, more manageable cast of characters, rather than throwing almost every currently active X-Man into the mix.

Do they mean Daniel Haller, the son of Gabrielle Haller, who was exploited as the crazy jerk with a spiky punk mohawk who served as the catalyst for Age of Apocalypse in 1995? On that note, I must make clear again, that was one of the most time-wasting stories around, putting the ongoing X-books on hiatus for a few months while some special miniseries substituted for them, just so they could depict Magneto as leader of the X-Men, and more darkness.

Kudos to IGN's writer for admitting this kind of "event" is bad. But a shame he's not going far enough in panning Marvel for continuing their modern custom of wasting so much potential for nothing.

Labels: crossoverloading, marvel comics, msm propaganda, X-Men