Flashpoint: Avengers Vs. X-Men #12 Review
EDITOR’S NOTE: No more spoilers. Actually, a lot more spoilers.
Avengers Vs. X-Men #12 is a hard book to review because it endeavors to do a whole lot of things all at once. First, it needs to resolve the fact that Dark Phoenix is running around in the body of a petulant dink, and it generally accomplishes that. Second, considering the story was about two linchpins of the Marvel Universe, they had to, pretty much for the first time since the series started by showing Cyclops acting like he was one bad night away from handing the X-Men Nikes, track suits and tainted Kool-Aid, introduce some ambiguity as to who the good guys and the bad guys were, and it accomplishes that damn well.
However, one of the things it needed, and tried, to do, was rehabilitate the Scarlet Witch after the events of Avengers: Disassembled in 2004, when she single-handedly wiped out pretty much all the mutants in the 616. It also needed, given the commitment by Marvel editorial to integrate the X-Men back into the more mainstream, non-mutant based books, to make sure that there were actually X-Men around to add to the Avengers books. And it certainly accomplishes both of those things, but it does it in a strangely unsatisfying way, a way that feels like the decision was made that many of the main events of the past seven or eight years of Marvel stories simply don’t matter. It is the final nail in the events of Disassembled – Hawkeye’s alive again, the Vision’s back, and now the mutants are all returning – and it feels like someone at Marvel, be it Axel Alonso or Joe Quesada or Brian Michael Bendis or Ike Perlmutter, dusted off their hands and said, “There! Now we’re back to 1999!”
We make a lot of jokes here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives about how vehemently Marvel protests that they don’t reboot, but make no mistake: Avengers Vs. X-Men #12 is a reboot. The only question is: it is a good one?
The issue opens wth Cyclops as the sole proprietor of the Phoenix Force, and having gone full Dark Phoenix (it’s similar to Full Retard, only with 90 percent more explosions and unitards that make you look like a veiny cock with a glow-in-the-dark Nightwing logo tattoo). Cyclops has decided that in order to save the village, it has become necessary to destroy it, so he’s raining fire down on the world while simultaneously punching it out with Avengers and X-Men alike (and unless I’m misinterpreting Adam Kubert’s pencils on story page eight, stone murdering Iceman), while Tony Stark works on a plan to send Hope, who has been training with Iron Fist, and Scarlet Witch, whose hex power is the only thing that has injured the Phoenix Force, as a last-ditch attempt to stop Cyclops… although given Cyke’s history, maybe sending some redhead who pretends anything he says is deeper than a urine sample could kill him with a broken heart.
So let’s start with the absolute finest moment of the book: when the Avengers and X-Men are down and all but out, and Captain America needs someone to bring Cyclops back to Earth… and Nova comes blasting in. As a child of the 70s, I have a soft spot for Nova, and while this one isn’t Richard Rider, seeing the character rocket across two pages and say, “I’m a hemisphere away. I’ll be there in a few seconds,” is genuinely thrilling. And Green Lantern knockoff or no, seeing Nova shout, “Can’t hear you! Too busy kicking your ass!” to that weasel shitbag Cyclops was the moment of the book for me. Sure, it all comes straight from Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon rescue from Star Wars, but it is Goddamned good. I haven’t been keeping up with the digital Ultimate Comics stories about Nova since the first issue, but these couple of pages alone make me want to see more of this guy.
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