…Isn’t Even Past: All-New X-Men #8 Review

I have a recurring dream where I wander into a keg party at my college in 1991, grab a Natural Light, and wander around until I find myself, at 20 years old, in a corner somewhere. And I say, “Rob: for the love of God, don’t stick your dick in Lynn Mansfield. She will make you into a whinier, more irritating moron than usual for at least a couple of years. Now for Christ’s sake, give me a fucking cigarette. You don’t smoke yet? Well c’mon, let’s get you a pack. You like Marlboros… no, trust me: you like Marlboros.”

Because that’s the fantasy, isn’t it? If we could just go back in time and spend a few minutes with out younger selves, we could impart the wisdom that we wish we had when we were younger, and maybe avoid pain, heartache and perhaps an embarrassing social disease. And in this fantasy, we always assume that we will be grateful for these pronouncements from on high… even though, if you stop and think about it for a second, these pronouncements are largely the same as the ones that came from your father at the time. And not only did you ignore those bits of wisdom at the time, now you look like your father, meaning that the response to your benevolence would likely only be, “Um, when did we decide that lard was part of the food pyramid, fat man? And no, you can’t have any of my cigarettes! They’re, like, a buck-eighty a pack!” And then you will kill your younger self in a fit of rage, and then where will you be? But I digress.

The point is that All New X-Men has, for eight issues now, been an excuse to address that fantastical question: if you could talk to yourself 20 years ago, what would you say? And would it make any difference? Which is not particularly new ground for a science fiction story – hell, Van Damme did it in Timecop, and attempting to follow in the footsteps of Van Damme-age has never been a good long-term plan for anybody. But here, writer Brian Michael Bendis addresses the situation in s slightly different way: what if meeting yourself when you are older corrupts you? What if seeing that things didn’t turn out the way you planned when you were 20, rather than inspiring you to try harder to achieve your plan, instead hardens you, and makes you more cynical and ruthless? Or maybe it just fucking horrifies you, to the point where you’ll do anything to avoid whatever makes you into whatever you become?

It’s an interesting take on your standard Travel-Into-Your-Own-Past (or Future) story… but the question is: with five different original X-Men to follow, along with a bunch of new X-Men, is there enough of a focus to really make any particular point?
Once and Future Angel (which will be the name of my next prog rock band) are enjoying a flight where Future Angel is enjoying some company in the sky for a change and Once Angel is wondering why Future Angel has metal wings and apparent desperate need for a Ritalin prescription, when they encounter Hydra agents attacking Avengers Tower. Once Angel counsels caution and perhaps the rallying of reinforcements, while Future Angel moves to immediately attack, following the protocols and strategies of the voices in his head. They defeat Hydra, only to meet The Avengers, who despite having fought The Squadron Supreme and U. S. Agent and a million evil doppelgangers over the years, stop and politely ask why there seem to be two Angels – double our recommended daily allowance of Champions members. The Avengers then confront The X-Men over what they have done, extracting a promise that they will at least be careful with a bunch of time travelers running around, while Once Angel loses his shit and tries to use the Time Cube to go back to his time. He is stopped by Jean Grey… who seems a little more ruthlessly expedient than I remember from the early days of X-Men.

What really works here is the reactions to their future counterparts (and their friends’ counterparts), and how seeing their futures is affecting them. Bendis has been alternating between each of the characters – clearly issue #8 is Angel’s turn – and seeing Warren just lose his shit in seeing how he turns out is an interesting reaction. Like I said before, we all like to believe that our younger selves would react to seeing us now with some interest and reverence, when, if you stop and think about it, it is just as likely that they would react in absolute horror. Seeing himself mutilated and disassociated just terrifies Warren, to the point where he not only wants to leave the future, but leave the X-Men to avoid this fate. It makes a lot of sense, and it turns what could be a simple wish-fulfillment scenario that we all feel – “Lord, if I knew then what I know now…” – into some compelling character work.

This kind of characterization continues to Jean Grey, who in contradiction to almost any characterization applied to her in the past, indiscriminately uses her power to fuck around with Angel’s mind to stop him from going back to the past. It’s a short sequence, but the matter-of-fact manner in which she meddles in peoples’ thoughts implies an opposite reaction to Warren’s: rather than recoiling in horror and denial over the future, it is implied that she has decided that the way she was contributed to this future, and she is now willing to avoid it by any means necessary. And sure, there’s a certain amount of inference on my part to reach this conclusion – for all I know, Bendis might reveal that Jean is more ruthless due to the recent presence of the Phoenix Force – but if I’m reading this right, it’s a testament to Bendis’s writing that he can have different characters have different interpretations to the same event, and they all make logical and emotional sense.

But therein likes some of the problem: with so many characters who have to react to this time travel experience, it’s hard to completely keep track of each one. We get an issue-by-issue focus on individual original X-Men, but it’s a real gear-change to spend most of an issue with Angel and his horror, only to quickly shift to Cyclops’s steely optimism that he can change things and then Jean Grey’s ruthless pragmatism. The quick tonal shifts are a little jarring, and while it might work when the whole thing is collected in a trade, it makes things seem a but unfocused.

The only real bust in the issue is that Angels’s battle wth Hydra, wherein they take out no less than 54 armed Hydra agents (yes, I counted them on panel one of story page five… although Madame Hydra claims there are a hundred on page 11) before The Avengers get involved. These are guys whose powers are wings and… yeah, wings. For them to be able to take out that many soldiers, the soldiers would have to make walk-on paintball players look like Navy SEALs… and Bendis knows it, having Madame Hydra make a reference to how bad they suck. Now, I recognize that superhero comics are, at their core, adolescent power fantasies, but the suspension of disbelief required for two guys with wings and hollow fucking bones to be able to take out armored mechs single handedly was almost enough to take me out of the story before we got to the good character stuff in the back half of the issue. Hell, in the real world, you could hospitalize a guy with hollow bones in 90 seconds with a fungo bat; it is not reasonable to see one take out a mech… and Bendis knows it. This battle should have been scrapped and replaced with something a little more realistic, rather than try to justify the whole thing with a comment by the bad guy acknowledging that they suck so badly.

And then there’s The Avengers who, upon speaking to Current Beast about how there are people from the past running around learning things from the future, are told that Beast really has no idea what he is doing or what the endgame of this whole situation is… just tell him to be careful. Now, I will grant that Bendis was smart about exactly which Avengers were present for this meeting – Cap, Thor, Spider-Woman, but no Iron Man, Hank Pym, Spider-Man or any other scientists around – but it is a long stretch to believe that the entirety of the reaction would be “just keep [us] in the loop.” However, Bendis writes the sequence in a clever, entertaining manner – rather than hearing most of the actual conversation, we instead get Iceman and Kitty Pryde aping what they think the conversation is in a sarcastic back-and-forth – but it takes a lot to believe that Captain America, who traveled through time first in an iceberg, and then when he became unstuck in time during Captain America: Reborn and got fucked up about it each time, would simply ask to be kept informed with five people from the past running around.

David Marquez’s art is a reasonable match for the story. He works in a fine, yet simple line, without a bunch of extraneous detail marks or overstylization, and his faces are a bit on the side of cartoony, with exaggerated expressions and often wide eyes. His figures are realistic, to the point where the original X-Men are skinnier and less developed than any of their modern counterparts. He delivers well choreographed action during the Hydra battle, although several of the panels use a long shot that accentuates the numbers involved, while deemphasizing detail in the combat. His panel layout is generally easy to follow and his pacing appropriate… although being a Bendis book, there are a couple of pages with what look like double-paged spreads. However, Marquez errs on the opposite side of where many of Bendis’s spreads fail: where we often see spreads where one panel ends on the spine, making it hard to tell you’re supposed to read across page one to page two, here we get two sequences where one panel crosses the spine… but the rest do not. Meaning, in two different sequences, we get visual cues to read across the spine, before the page layout goes back to conventional page-by-page. It is damned confusing, and it forces the reader to stop and figure out how to decode the page. I hate this kind of storytelling snafu, and while the book generally looks good, it loses a lot of points with me because of the layout.

All-New X-Men #8 delivers some serious red meat for anyone who ever idly wondered what it would be like to talk to yourself while you were younger. The characterizations of the original X-Men, particularly Angel in this case, as they react to seeing their respective futures is logical, compelling, and interesting to read. However, to get to that good stuff, you need to be willing to plow through two sequences that make little physical, character or emotional sense for many of the characters involved. Those sequences aren’t dealbreakers, but they come damn close, and they stink of either expediency or deadline pressure that prevented a rewrite. So while I’m digging the X-Men themselves, I’m guessing that if Bendis could go back in time, he’d tell himself, “Dude: spike the Hydra thing. No way even two Angels would be anything but a Boston Market dinner after that confrontation. And how’s about you wait to introduce The Avengers until you figure out how they would really react to time travelers you need to send back to the past.

“Oh yeah: and if you see Rob from Crisis On Infinite Midlives at Comic-Con in 2013? Give him a cigarette. It’s just better for everybody.”