Overstimulated, Exhausted Children: Avengers Vs. X-Men #3 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review constitutes a confirmed extinction-level spoiler.

I don’t have kids myself, but many of my former drinking buddies do, which has in turn made me decide I can never have kids. Because I just can’t talk to them. You ever try talking to a little kid, particularly after they’ve had a shitload of candy? Candy you gave them in the hopes they would take it, go away and stop trying to talk to you?

You can’t make any sense of it; they spin wildly from point to point, with no real logical gristle connecting them, with weird exaggerations that beggar belief to hear (“Wait, wait, little Billy… you’re saying Deathstroke rode his pony… sorry, his My Little Pony… to Cybertron? To fight fucking Voldemort? Who plots your shit, Billy? Rob Liefeld?”). After a while, it starts to hurt the mind to keep track of what’s happening and why, because if you stop and think about it for even a minute, it doesn’t make any sense at all.

In that same vein, if I told you that the plot of a story was, “You know what would be cool? If the Avengers battled the X-Men and Phoenix – no, not some redhead in a green body stocking, but the actual giant flaming bird, like the one from Battle of The Planets – on – get this – the fucking moon,” you would think that you were overhearing a schoolyard monologue by some kid who was on the first step of a road that’s started with Ritalin and will eventually end with methamphetamine extract.

Welcome to Avengers Vs. X-Men #4: where every plot point was written with a prefix of, “And you know what else would be cool?” regardless as to whether it makes any Goddamned sense at all.

This book exists to put the Avengers, X-Men and the Phoenix Force on the moon for a battle inevitably to follow in issue 5. And it accomplishes this task in ways that simply do not hang together if you think about them for more than five seconds, even while drunk (I know this; how do you think I first read the book?).

For example, at the start of this issue, Wolverine finds Hope. Wolverine’s mission is to kill Hope so she cannot be possessed by Phoenix. This has been stated in more than one issue, including this one, where he has flat out said that he intends to kill Hope. Hope convinces him to wait by saying that she has beer. This plot point is meant to be humorous, but it is simply awful, no matter how you look at it. I found three possible interpretations where this interaction makes any real logical sense:

Wolverine is such a drunk he can be bought with a beer.
Wolverine is such a raging alcoholic that he would allow the Earth to potentially be completely and utterly destroyed for a beer.
Wolverine is such a terminally wetbrained hallucinating alcohol-dependent junkie that he would not only allow the world to be destroyed for a beer, but his brain is so damaged and unworking that he no longer maintains even the infant’s object permanance required to understand that if he kills Hope, her beer will still be there.

Hey Mom! Apparently I’m Wolverine!

Seriously: this is such a terrible bit of character betrayal just to advance a plot that it sours the book… and believe it or not, it gets worse.

Turns out that Hope wants to be taken to the moon to intercept the Phoenix force in the hopes of trying to control it before it gets to Earth, giving the option to try to kill her if she cannot. Now, let’s ignore that this is a good plan, and one that, had it been pitched to both the Avengers and the X-Men, would probably have been not only embraced, but would have probably prompted the Avengers to pony up the spaceship they used to send the Secret Avengers into deep space so that this gambit could be tried at an even safer distance. Yeah, ignore that, because that’s not the bad part.

The bad part is that Wolverine, rather than secretly taking Hope to the moon, instead called Captain America to meet them there. Hope is horrified by the betrayal, to which Wolverine replies, “You took a nap. I made a decision.” So let’s get this straight: Wolverine, who is best at terms with the idea that Hope must be killed, took advantage of Hope being asleep to quietly sneak up… and make a phone call. To a man who would never kill Hope. Well, hell; what choice did Wolverine have? If only he’d had some kind a lethal weapon at his disposal while Hope was sleeping. Something like knives, maybe.

What’s the remainder of this book’s plot? Well, its seven pages of Emma Frost using Cerebra “to try and locate Hope,” by which I mean “to show panels of Avengers fighting X-Men in different locations with no context whatsover.” It’s lazy writing masked as clever conceit: giving comics fans the red meat of superhero fight images without having to write any plot, characterization or context around any of it. Considering this issue was written by Jonathan Hickman, Marvel’s “Big Idea” man, it is extremely disappointing; giving John Romita Jr. an excuse to draw seven fight pages he can sell at Artists’ Alley for ten grand a piece is just about the polar opposite of a “big” idea.

By now you know how I feel about Romita’s art: not my thing. I find it blocky and alternating wildly between overly busy and irritatingly abstract. As with previous issues, if you’re a Romita fan, the stuff you like is here… and even I’ll admit that he’s got a panel of Wolverine in silhouette and one of Captain America bitchsmacking Gambit that were poster-worthy. Assuming you like that kind of thing. Regardless, his storytelling is good and easy to follow, so while I don’t like the style, it doesn’t get in the way of the story.

But the story is the problem. This book is the epitome of plot-advancing filler. It exists to set up a sweet superhero battle on the moon, and unlike little Billy, who has the decency to just bite the bullet (or the candy bar) and say, “and then they go to the moon,” this costs four bucks to do only that. Further, it forces characters to act like complete and total fucking morons in order to accomplish it. Even Little Billy, presented with the events of this story, would probably wipe his snotty, chocolate-stained nose and ask, “Why didn’t Wolverine just snikt her? That’s stupid.”

Bottom line: this is exposition, and poor exposition at that, with minimal superhero fighting. Skip it.