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.

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,

An Asskicking By Any Other Name: Avengers Vs. X-Men #2 Review

Avengers Vs. X-Men #2 is a big old action movie of a comic book, where the first punch gets thrown by the second page and the hits keep on coming until we’re reminded by the last page that all this hot, sweet superhero-on-superhero action (wait, I think that came out wrong) is in service of a plot related to the Phoenix Force coming to destroy the world before the Avengers movie even has a chance to come out.

This book is filled with satisfying, balls-to-the-wall action… but it is also filled with overblown, florid and somewhat pretentious captions that read like a sixteen-year-old either trying to use his comics addiction for an easy C in Intro to Poetry, or to charm the Drama Club skank into turning a backrub into a front rub. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

If you’re looking for any kind of story advancement in this issue, you’re not gonna find much. The issue opens with the X-Men and The Avengers beating the unholy shit out of each other, and pretty much ends the same, with only the minor plot points of, “Yup, Phoenix Force… still coming,” and “Yeah, Hope… still getting jacked up on the Phoenix Force,” being advanced. If this was a modern Grandmasters’ chess game, this issue would be the equivalent of Bobby Fischer darkly muttering about Jews while some scabrous geek flips on the opposing IBM supercomputer.

One-Eyed Wonder Worm: Avengers Vs. X-Men #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Children of The Pixel. Feared and hated by those they have sworn to protect. These are the strangest spoilers of all!

Cyclops is a fucking dick.

– Crisis On Infinite Midlives Editor Amanda, every New Comics Wednesday since I’ve known her

So Cyclops, like Han, shot first. Except, unlike Cyclops, people actually like Han. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

Avengers Vs. X-Men, Marvel’s tentpole summer crossover event, is finally here, and now that it is, it’s hard for me to really know what to think of it. It has a lot of action, although almost none of it is the aforementioned Avengers Vs. X-Men action (Note to self: remember the “Vs.” “Avengers on X-Men” action is an entirely different animal), and loaded with character moments, which is important in the opening chapter of a story that requires one character to act like he’s simultaneously on the upswing of a bipolar cycle and the downswing of a complete psychotic breakdown to make his behavior believable in the slightest.

Come On, Vern. The Kids Haven’t Changed; You Have! – Review Of Generation Hope #15

Let me preface this entire review by saying: I know that it’s unconscionably wrong to hit a child. No matter how snot-nosed and entitled they may act, children are defenseless and we should not only protect them from harm, but behave as temperate role models so that they might understand how to conduct themselves in dealings with others as they make their way into the world. That being said, there is a moment in this issue where Emma Frost lays into Hope Summers with a queen bi-atch of a backhand (for being snot-nosed, entitled and mouthy – hat trick!) that will make any worn down adult with a recent weekend at the mall under hir or her belt and a fair sense of decency stand up offer writer James Asmus a hearty and heartfelt, “Well done, sir.”

Also, Hope Summers, the mutant messiah who will almost certainly become the embodiment of Earth’s next brush with the Phoenix Force, is far from defenseless. So, slap away, Emma – while you still can, anyway! Pretty soon she’s going to be able to apply her lipstick hands-free using her cleavage and level planets with a thought. God help you when she snarkily asks you if you get your wardrobe by raiding Barry Manilow’s RuPaul’s closet, then.

Generation Hope follows Hope and her team of young mutant super heroes, assembled from the first new mutants to arise on Earth since the events of M-Day decimated the Earth’s mutant population to a total of 198 remaining mutants. In their last outing, Hope and her gang of brains, athletes and basket cases round out their crew with a criminal – one Sebastian Shaw. Or is it?

Cha-cha-cha-changes…and spoilers…after the jump.

Don’t Need No Civil War: Avengers Vs. X-Men #1 Cover

According to various Twitter feeds, the winter Marvel Editorial Retreat is starting today in New York. So, possibly to fend off questions from the outside world like, “So if Cable’s a time traveler with less than 24 hours to live due to a crippling and debilitating illness, and he wants to take out The Avengers, why is setting up a boat with a bunch a deathtraps a better plan than whacking Captain America’s mom in 1920? It probably wouldn’t be hard; Steve Rogers didn’t need the Super Soldier serum because he came from hearty stock,” and, “What Marvel character will Matt Fraction be killing next? And is Matt aware of what ‘dead’ actually means?” they’ve released Jim Cheung’s cover to the upcoming first issue of Avengers Vs. X-Men for us to drool over.

Wednesday Night Fights

EDITOR’S NOTE, 1/12.2012, 10:20 p.m.: Three new Avengers Vs. X-Men fight promos have been added to the media gallery below!

It has been a busy and interesting week, including the release of a bunch of Avengers Vs. X-Men promo posters, which we’re just too shitfaced to post for you.

Don’t look at us like that.

Okay, since you’re so nice, and not calling us racist, sexist pigs (Don’t ask. Please).

Now that we have the business out of the way, it is, in fact, Wednesday night, which means this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But it’s a decent-looking take (Then again, so was last week’s and other than Fatale? Guh.): New Frankenstein: Agent of S.H.A.D.E. with O.M.A.C. guesting (More Goddamned periods to type? Seriously?), Bendis’s and Bagley’s Brilliant, Batman & Robin, and Crisis on Infinite Midlives’ favorite: The Strange Talent of Luther Strode!

Plus we’ve got new Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Batwoman, Batgirl, and many other female-friendly comics! That we read and enjoy (I told you, don’t ask)!

But to review them, we gotta read them. Which means: see you tomorrow, suckers!

Brain Bleach: Marvel Legal Department Edition

Look out! Next he'll be after your wimmenz!

Sherry Singer and Indie Sing were the two international trade lawyers working for Marvel Comics in the ’90s (and they were ladies, we feel obligated to mention by the mandate of the site), who took a look at the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a book full of customs regulations, and realized that “dolls” were taxed 12% on import, while “toys” were taxed only 6.8%. The difference between the two was that a doll “represented only a human being,” while “toys” were ”monsters, robots, angels, basically anything that isn’t “only representing a human.” Probably, at some point in the past, some American doll manufacturer had felt threatened by overseas competition, and had lobbied the government to put a tax on imported dolls.

There’s also a link at The Mary Sue to a podcast that explains how the case turned out, so click on over there to find out the resolution.

Sometimes A Cigar Is Just A Cigar And Sometimes The Scarlet Witch, Well, You Decide.

Bleeding Cool wants to know: Did Frank Cho realize when he drew the Avengers vs. X-Men 0 cover that Hope Summers appears to be, well, flying out of the Scarlet Witch’s special lady place…or at least a cape, gently waving in the breeze of the Phoenix Force or something, that’s shaped like a vagina?

Yes. These are the questions that need to be answered.

Here’s Frank Cho’s response:

“It never occurred to me that I was drawing a giant vagina when I drew this cover. I could kind of see it now in its final colored form. It’s funny how people project their fears, concerns and fantasies into other people’s art.

“Okay. Rebuttal.

“Like Georgia O’Keefe, I love vaginas. What’s wrong with vaginas? ;-)”

You decide, after the jump.

Five Guys On One: Marvel Announces Avengers Vs. X-Men

Yesterday Marvel announced that their big crossover event for 2012 will be: Civil War! Wait – I mean: Avengers Vs. X-Men!

In a streaming press conference with Editor-In-Chief Axel Alonso, SVP of Publishing Tom Brevoort, Senior Editor Nick Lowe, and Marvel’s Architect writers Brian Michael Bendis, Matt Fraction, Jason Aaron, Ed Brubaker and Jonathan Hickman, they gave the gist of what we’re in store for: about 300 clams to read the whole story! Wait, that’s not right…

…the seeds for this story have been growing for a while. When [the 2007 X-Men event] “Messiah CompleX” introduced the so-called “Mutant Messiah,” a little girl with green eyes and red hair named Hope, it raised the obvious question, “Who is she?” and, of course, the specter of the Phoenix.

So if I had to hazard a guess, the Phoenix Force is returning to Earth, probably to infect the little girl who looks just like Jean Grey, if Jean Grey were redrawn by commission for loathsome perverts. The X-Men will want to protect their messiah, The Avengers will want to stop a potential extinction-level threat to Earth, stuff will explode, and dudes will get kicked.