Fair And Balanced, Or: Wolverine Vs. Everybody: Avengers Vs. X-Men #3 Review

The biggest problem with the first two issues of Avengers Vs. X-Men was, to me, that in order for it to make any sense, the writers needed to make Cyclops into a monomaniacal zealot, vis a vis Hope-as-mutant-savior, so focused, rigid and intractable that he made Timothy McVeigh look like Winston Churchill with a quualude habit.

It is now the third issue, and it appears that the Marvel Architects in charge of this story have found a way to temper our perceptions of Cyclops’s fanatical tendencies: by making Captain America a focused, rigid and intractable monomaniacal zealot.

In short, Avengers Vs. X-Men #3 displays the first real and disappointing cracks in what has been a tight, if sometimes logic-stretching little tale (if you can call an event comic destined to cover all Marvel titles for the next four months “little”): and that is that it attempts to mask Cyclops’s believability-stretching reactionary behavior with similar, yet opposite,  behavior by Cap. And instead of balancing the scales, it shows the Man Behind The Curtain by making two characters do stupid and unbelievable things in the interest of advancing the plot.

With that plot apparently being to make it so Wolverine can fight anybody. Because that shit sells some comics, yo. But we’ll get there in a minute,

We open this issue I imagine at some indeterminate time following the events of the second issue, because somewhere along the line the X-Men surrendered the Avengers’ beachhead from issue #2 without my noticing, as if in a story written by Grant Morrison, or in real life starring the French. I’m guessing that the cease-fire occurred in some ancillary Marvel comic, but it might have all happened in the bleed, because all that matters is that Stuff Happens and it allows the X-Men to escape. This allows both teams to split up and sets up individual battles between an X-Man and an Avenger across 426 individual $3.99 issues ad infinitum, world without Joey Q. not having Mets season tickets, amen.

This issue does the unenviable task, after a couple of tight, almost self-contained weeks of exciting fights, of setting us up for following this event across umpteen different title over umpteen different months to see the hot, sweet superhero on superhero violence we’ve already bought into. And one of the key story (and revenue-enhancing) tasks it is here to accomplish is to make Wolverine a wild card between both sides. By any means necessary.

Part of the point of this issue is, after a couple of issues clearly putting Wolverine on the Avengers’s side, to make him able to fight anyone, anywhere, in any comic that needs the sales bump of a Wolverine fight. Which makes sense, since as a member of both teams, Wolverine’s loyalties would naturally be in flux and open to interpretation. However, writer Ed Brubaker has apparently decided that the best way to put Wolverine into play is by making Captain America – Captain Fucking America – the kind of guy who punches a guy for not agreeing with him and ejecting him from an aircraft above an empty arctic region as if no comic geek had seen the Star Trek reboot movie.

This issue feels like the Marvel Architects sat down and decided that the only way you could get both sides to start fighting would be to make Cyclops a single-minded prick. But rather than determine whether that made any sense or not, they decided that Cyclops’s behavior would be okay so long as they took the mainstream media view of any zealotry, screeched, “Both sides do it!” and make Captain America just as unrealistically a single-minded prick. Which I’m guessing was meant to make the story seem balanced, but instead just feels like twisting characters to service the plot that Marvel corporate green-lit, in the interest of making Wolverine available to fight all comers by the time school summer vacation rolled around.

John Romita Jr.’s art, well, I think I’ve made it clear how I generally feel about it. It is not to my taste, and there is a single panel here that demonstrates partially why I feel that way. On pages 18 and 19 of the printed comic (You ComiXology bastards are on your own) there’s a double page spread of Captain America reading orders to the assembled Avengers. And other than Cap, there isn’t a character on the page who doesn’t look like an individually posed convention sketch, with each of them staring in different, nonsensical directions. They are there, yet clearly not there, drawn to my eye to be only part of a $5,000 page sale on artists’ alley, staring at anyone but Captain America… who himself is drawn as if reading, but looking instead like he’s wassailing door-to-door, or perhaps preparing to eat a sandwich, or maybe getting ready to earn five American dollars at a bus station men’s room glory hole. In short, this art isn’t working for me, but your mileage may vary.

This issue of Avengers Vs. X-Men is the first one I’ve read so far that feels like a simple case of taking care of business. It allows plot requirements to utterly overcome character, and stinks heavily of a committee telling Brubaker, “This is the issue where Wolverine fights Captain America. Why? Because look at that Jim Cheung cover of Cap and Wolverine fighting that we already commissioned, that’s why! You figure it out!”

This issue is a disappointment, but based on the characters in play, it is a necessary disappointment in order to keep both sides fighting and Wolverine available to snikt at any character that needs a sales boost. Let me do you a favor: I’ll tell you, “Some stuff happened in issue #3 and because of that stuff, booth sides are still fighting,” and now you can skip this issue and come back for the next one, having missed really not much at all.