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.

Chapter one writer Brian Michael Bendis opens the story in almost stereotypical big action flick style: we see the Phoenix force destroy a planet before heading toward Earth, we meet our heroes (at least the Avengers appear to be our heroes based on how Cyclops acts later in the book… but we’ll get to that in a minute) in the calm before the storm, and then disaster befalls New York City. That disaster specifically being an airliner crashing toward the city while the Chrysler Building is hit by something and all but collapses.

Now, even putting aside that this opening mixes pieces of both Independence Day and Armageddon, I want to address the elephant in the room: really, Bendis? A plane going down in the midst of a building collapse in New York? While I recognize the long and storied action movie tropes that this sequence pays tribute toward, doesn’t this particular confluence of events seem a little tone deaf? I know it’s been almost eleven years, but that didn’t stop some people from getting pissed off over a Mad Med ad not even a month ago. While I personally didn’t have any trouble with it, the stark similarities between the scene and 9/11 were enough to yank me out of the story, which is not how you want to start an epic story.

But let’s put that aside, and get back to the overall action movie feel, which in general Bendis hits admirably. After setting the stage, demonstrating the stakes and introducing the protagonists, we get the obligatory briefing with the President, the exposition to further demonstrate the stakes, the immediate and convenient confirmation of the stakes during the Presidential briefing, and the mobilization of forces to stop it. Now on one hand, it would be easy to dismiss this kind of writing as “typing while watching a Roland Emmerich DVD .” But I choose to believe that Bendis did it on purpose; for good or ill, years of disaster flicks have trained us to understand that these story beats equal “The end of the world is coming, and we are about to see shit ‘splode.” By tapping into that pop cultural shorthand, Bendis is able to viscerally raise the stake of the story in a very short time with very few extraneous bits of business required. I found it to be effective… if a little distracting. It’s a bit hard to get into a story when you’re constantly stopping to mutter, “Armageddon… Godzilla… saw that one in Deep Impact.”

And then there’s Cyclops. There’s no getting around this: Cyclops, one of the oldest and most storied heroes in the Marvel Universe, is show in this book as an obsessed, delusional, abusive, vainglorious dick. A dick who, unilaterally and unprovoked, fires the opening shot. At Captain America. Might as well take a dump on the flag while you’re at it, ace.

We see Cyclops physically beating on a teenaged girl, embracing the idea of a force that he has personally witnessed destroy worlds and kill the love of his life, and bullying the aforementioned teenaged girl into accepting the entry of that force into herself. Even putting aside the whole pimpy / rapey vibe of a lot of this, it makes Cyclops at best unlikable, and at worst a completely unrelatable cartoon villain. It feels like we should be seeing Cyclops either strapping Hope to a stone wheel while muttering, “Kali Ma…” or telling her that if she embraces the Phoenix force there’s 72 virgins in it for her.

If Bendis and the other Marvel Architects who will be writing future chapters aren’t careful, they run the risk of bumping up against what Mark Millar hit during Civil War: making an old character act wrong for the sake of a plot advancement point. In Civil War it became so problematic that Matt Fraction had to literally reboot Tony Stark’s brain to redeem him from his Civil War bastardy; I can already see a possible Emma Frost psychic lobotomy in Cyclop’s future. And while I admit I don’t follow the X titles (That’s Amanda’s bailiwick), I can’t imagine Cyclops having acted this way without somewhere along the line being gelded in his sleep.

Now, I’m gonna brand myself as a know-nothing moron with no comics credibility here, but when it comes to John Romita Jr.’s art? I am not that big a fan. His stuff in this issue is much as it is in his prior work: somewhat blocky, with a million little fine detail lines that alternate between adding impressive detail and making it seem like Romita Jr. gets paid by the pencil stroke. His figures, again, tend toward blockiness, and his facial expressions are detailed up close, yet broad and abstract at even a medium distance. That said, there is a great image of Namor when Captain America and Cyclops are arguing where you can tell that Namor is just fucking loving it that was probably my favorite image in the book. Look: if you like Romita? You’ll like the visuals in this comic. It’s just not for me.

It is early yet and the story can easily go in a bunch of ways from here. However: if you have a character embracing a sequence of events that readers know means the end of the world? You have, by nature, made that character the bad guy. I think this story is going to live or die based on ambiguity between which side is in the right. Otherwise, it runs the very real risk of turning from “Avengers Vs. X-Men” into “Avengers Save The World From A Delusional Fanatic,” in which the only novelty is that the villains wear costumes we’re familiar with. And again, it is early, but this issue kicks off firmly on the Delusional Madman foot.

At this point? Let’s just do what we do at the start of every major summer crossover: settle in and see how it goes.