We’ve reached the mountaintop. With “AXIS” #9, we (and by we, I mean me) are done reviewing, recapping, and analyzing every facet of this deranged comic. With that in mind, let’s do our usual objective and spoiler-free review followed by a spoiler-filled recap.
Review
Written by Rick Remender
Illustrated by Jim Cheung, Terry Dodson, Leinil Francis Yu and Adam Kubert.ACT III: NEW WORLD DISORDER
• Who will live? Who will die? Who will remain inverted? A shocking climax that promises to crack the Marvel Universe to its very core!
• An old foe must claim the mantle of his greatest enemy to save the lives of all he cares for!
• An X-Man’s horrifying fate! An Avenger’s appalling choice! If you read only one comic this century – This is it!
Oh, “AXIS”, you hot mess. You never really did have a chance, did you? Shoved right between whatever “Original Sin” was and all of Marvel’s big “Secret War” plans for 2015, you were expected to tie-up several of Remender’s long-running Marvel story lines while also introducing huge sweeping changes like sudden heel and face turns for certain characters, the resurrection and deaths of other characters, and whatever the hell Feige has planned for the Maximoff twins. And you were expected to do all of this and tell a coherent story within the span of three months. Nine issues in three months, to be exact! It’s hard to blame you for how you turned out, really. The odds were never in your favor and yet still you pushed on, fulfilling all your editorially mandated goals and, for better or for worse, finishing the story you started. It’s actually pretty hard to blame “AXIS” for doing what it set out to do.
That said, I spent $45 on this comic and most of Christmas Eve/Christmas Day, not to mention countless Thursday nights, writing this column. And I imagine a lot of other people laid down a similar amount of cash to see a story that ended with every character from the beginning going “Well this is over, let’s stop.” Seriously, the conclusion to this comic is somehow more rushed than anything that has to do with Scarlet Witch’s real dad or Carnage’s sudden Larry the Cable Guy impression. It almost feels like “AXIS” is a story that doesn’t want to be told, and considering the dissonance between its creators’ pedigree and the product itself, this is likely the case. You can make the case that event comics always ruin their creators but at least they usually feel like a story that wants to be told. “Infinity” was a glorious space opera with tons of revolving puzzle pieces and “Original Sin” was a delightful little murder mystery. Hell, “Civil War” may have the most rushed BS ending of all time but that had less to do with Millar wanting to get his story over with an more to do with how weird any comic that calls itself “Post 9/11” has to be. The tone of the final issue of “AXIS”, appropriately titled ‘Grinding Halt’ is one of a story that’s simply tired of existing.
And again, I don’t want to sound like some smug blogger who’s hating on this comic so I can get Twitter followers or whatever. I think this column got like four weekly readers and two of them were David Harper on his laptop and phone simultaneously. No, “AXIS” is honestly the ultimate product of a company that puts out three “event comics” a year while telling most of their stories through press releases. Absolutely nothing in “AXIS” was a shock, save for the Maximoff thing which even then felt less like character development and more like something meant to piss off Fox. “AXIS” was the the ultimate corporate comic – one that did not care about its audience, its creators, or itself. If, in five years or so, Remender came out and acknowledged that he wrote a bunch of jokes around bullet points handed to him by Marvel and he didn’t have time to check it in between caring about his much better books, the comics community would ask him what the hell an “AXIS” was. It’s a comic I doubt we’ll remember for very long.
Continued belowReally though, that might be the best for a lot of the artists involved. Terry Dodson, Adam Kubert, and Lenil Francis Yu have definitely done much better work than in “AXIS” but with such a frantic schedule, it’s easy to see why their art may seem relatively rushed. Even Jim Cheung, who is only now coming in for the final “AXIS”, can’t draw the entire thing himself despite despite being solicited as the sole artist. He, nor any of the other artists, can really be blamed however. The way “AXIS” was told, from both a storytelling and a publishing standpoint, was simply not stable enough to produce a story that was anything other than a quiet train wreck.
All that said, Marvel was never looking to tell anything close to a story. They had their editorial checklists and, through “AXIS,” they got crossed off in time for 2015. For the past three months, it doesn’t feel like we’ve been reading Rick Remender’s passion project so much as a requirement on his contract. Sure he can try and spice it up with whatever hobo piss humor Remender adds to situations he doesn’t really care about, but that can’t save a crossover that is broken at every fundamental level. Sure, the tie-ins may have been fun but all we’re left with a main mini-series covered in hobo piss. A sad, subtly racist, not so subtly misogynist, miniseries drowning in hobo piss.
So let’s go make fun of this stinking damp corpse of a comic, one last time.
Recap
Last time we left off, heroes were bad, villains were good, and everyone wants to kill the inverted Red Skull because reasons. Just go read through the other recaps in the Axistential Crisis tag. It’s Boxing Day, it’s not like you’re busy.
Our final issue of “AXIS” opens with a flashback of Sabretooth and what I hoped to be D-Man but ended up being Wolverine in his 80’s outfit. Sabretooth’s killing some random NPC while Wolverine tells him all about this “Chuck Xavier” who can help him tame the beast within. Has Wolverine actually believed that Xavier’s first name was Chuck the entire time? Did no one seriously correct him? Because Wolverine could seriously just call the man Charles if he’s actually trying to reform his murder brother or whatever their relationship is. If I were Sabretooth, I wouldn’t believe that anyone named Chuck could solve my problems unless those problems were related directly to rat-themed pizza and arcade games. And since neither seem to be in his sight, Sabretooth kills the random mustache guy while declaring that there ain’t no good inside of him. Oh boy, I hope this issue ends with a bookend related to this flashback where Sabretooth realizes there is good inside of him. Then I could pretend Scott Snyder wrote this.
Now with the flashback out of the way, let’s check in with how our heroes are doing.
Quick note: Since Mjlonir still hasn’t been picked up by the new Thor and the ending to “All-New Captain America” #2 seemingly hasn’t happened, “AXIS” takes place before Sam Wilson’s new series. This means the very high-profile new black Captain America’s first mission is to immediately go evil, try and murder everyone, and beat up an old man in his LifeAlert Battle Amor™. My recurring theory is that Remender built up the super-perfect super-Aryan Ian Rogers to be the new Cap but Marvel told him to make it Sam Wilson because grumble grumbleTheWinterSoldier and mumblemumbleTumblrmumblemumble. Remender’s expresses his frustration by making sure that Sam Wilson’s only actions thus far are being an utter cock or reminiscing about his dead dad. Either way, if anyone’s counting, it took two months for Remender to put Rogers back in the armor and defeat Sam.
However, the Rogers that Wilson is fighting turns out to be an illusion created by the now awake White Skull who we are seriously calling the White Skull. Wasn’t wanting everyone to be white the reason Johann Schmidt was a bad guy? Did he look at a newspaper from September right after getting inverted and decide he didn’t want any of the heat the Washington Redskins were getting? Will everyone save the day by joining the White Lanterns and earning their White Power Rings? Well at least White Skull has some white guilt over this whole thing.
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Remender.jpeg.
Before the scene can focus on two tearful old men making out, we go to this week’s rubbles of Manhattan where “Apparently In This Comic” Luke Cage, Superior Iron Man, and MY BOY Kluh meet up with Sam who tells them of Rogers’ plans to revert everyone. Iron Man wants to stop this so he can preserve his new lifestyle of snorting cocaine and banging hookers while Kluh wants to preserve his new lifestyle of snorting cocaine and banging anything.
Elsewhere, Mystique and Sabretooth regroup and discuss how far they’ve come from being utterly bastardly to being forced to do good because of a spell caused through psychic Nazi magic or something. They mention how they’ll soon have to give up this new life to save everyone, and they also mention the first time they met.
Now, I ain’t the world’s #1 romantic but I feel like you should never refer to a partner’s vagina as a black hole. Before the duo can rekindle their choke-session, they’re thankfully interrupted by Rogue who immediately slams Creed’s head into a wall. He tells Mystique to run off, saying “Give me a hero moment before it’s all gone!” which is the least practical and least heroic thing you can say while getting murdered by a character who is literally just Rogue. Before Sami Zayn Victor Creed’s road to redemption gets cut short, he’s saved by Spider-Man who quips “Holy guacamole! That’s a spicy meatball!” which is offensively stupid. If, conversely, he had said “Holy guacamole! We’ve got chips!” I would’ve lost my goddamn mind.
Speaking of offensive, Havok took some tips from the Summers’ Family Guide to Talking to Women and explained to the Wasp why he saved her.
Holy shit. The, uh, less we talk about this panel the better.
While doing her best to ignore everything that Havok just said, Janet notices a red goo all over the floor which turns out to be Carnage, who splattered everywhere after sacrificing himself to destroy the gene bomb. Realizing that Murderous Jeff Foxworthy stopped the bomb and not Alex makes Wasp understand that Havok is actually just being an opportunistic scumbag. Something she probably would have realized when he freed her just so he could impregnate her. Honestly, she probably needed time to let what he said sink in, no pun intended.
Elsewhere, Groovy Deadpool’s head (which is still alive because duh) gives Apocalypse a speech about how he’s really a good kid underneath the Apocalypse armor. I really enjoyed this scene because it had a reference to Fantomex and “Uncanny X-Force” which reminded me of the time I was reading a better comic book.
Over on the set of “Original Sin”, Loki somehow manages to top his own levels of fan service.
Yes, the inverted Loki is worthy of lifting Mjlonir and uses it to battle the evil Thor. It’s a really great scene that encapsulates the whole “hero’s journey” that Loki’s been trying to accomplish since this series started. It utterly shifted the power dynamic within the Odinson family and, if the final page is to be believed, set up some great new story lines for all the characters involved. Or at least that happened in the “Agent of Asgard” tie-in. In “AXIS”, Loki remembered he had daddy problems, picked up the hammer so people on Tumblr would reblog that panel, and then dropped it because the book was over. I’m honestly not that malicious when it comes to “AXIS” but having the entirety of the amazing “Agent of Asgard” #9 basically spoiled because we needed to make this issue over-sized or whatever is just disheartening. Tie-ins should support the main story just as the main series in a crossover should give tie-ins the platform to tell good stories, not just trample all over the tie-in and show a “Best Of” reel. In conclusion, please buy and support “Loki: Agent of Asgard”.
Over at the Avengers Mansion, Steve and White Skull continue their frankly amazing homoeroticism. But unfortunately, they forgot to invite a certain monster to the lemon party.
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Yes! Yes! YES!
Kluh rut and rolls all over the party while the other Evil Avengers burst through a second wall. Iron Man, who honestly has not changed much throughout the series, tells whatever’s left of Xavier in Skull’s brain that he’s going to manufacture the Stark Sentinels. You know, the sentinels he already manufactured and apparently named after himself? Real twist, right?
Also, Steve Rogers defeats Sam by asking what his dead father would think of all this. Honest question: does Sam Wilson have a previously established heroic dad or is Rick Remender incapable of writing a comic book character who doesn’t hate their father? I don’t want to say I’m right, but in bursts one character who killed his parents and another who hated his foster father for trapping him in a VR simulation, punching the crap out of a character who hated his Nazi scientist dad.
Apocalypse bursts through what is at this point the third wall in whatever ill-defined room the Avengers are in. But since the room somehow doesn’t collapse in on itself, Apocalypse holds off the Avengers so the Rogers family can save White Skull. They make it to the helicopter on the roof when Luke Cage bursts through the ceiling because we literally ran out of walls to tear down. After Spidey swings in to web up cage and Iron Man flies in to beat up Steve’s garbage son, Magneto, Doctor Doom, Quicksilver, Brother Voodoo arrive with Voodoo’s brother Daniel possessing Scarlet Witch’s body which somehow manages to be the most fucked up part of a comic with Kluh.
Out of everyone who was inverted, Wanda was easily the least evil. She lashed out at Doctor Doom, a man who kidnapped her and caused her subsequent decimation of mutants, spiral into insanity, and that time Hawkeye fucked a Doombot. Now she’s been knocked unconscious by Brother Voodoo, who was brought back through the sheer power of convenience, and carried away by her abuser and the man who claimed to be her father for, at most, ten or so years. Now, her body is being used against her will so she can perform the inversion spell and fix everything. I don’t want to just say this comic is misogynist, but how the hell does anyone look at this character arc and go “That’s right.”
Magneto threatens to kill Iron Man but Red Skull says he can’t since killing Red Skull is what caused this whole debacle. First off, Doctor Strange and Rogue’s brainfarting is what led to this asinine inversion thing. If it weren’t for that, we would’ve been praising Magneto for slaying the giant tentacle Nazi who was terrorizing his people. Give the man some peace. Second, what could killing Stark unleash? Sure Red Skull was psychic and had that whole Onslaught thing backed up in Xavier’s brain but what could Stark’s death bring out? Teenage Tony Stark from that time in the 90’s when Stark went evil and the Avengers needed a replacement? Oh my god. I know how “Superior Iron Man” ends.
Anyway, White Skull is able to change Magneto’s mind by reminding him of Xavier.
Did White Skull just save the day by doing a really good Patrick Stewart impression?
Magneto gives the go-ahead to Doctor Doom and Daniel Drumm possessing his daughter (ugh) but are interrupted by Havok who is just the worst. Sabretooth stops him and the spell is cast, unleashing a bunch of weird energy stuff that I guess represents magic and reverts the inversion, as seen when they straight up reprint the page from this week’s “Agent of Asgard” of Loki dropping the hammer on the moon, dialogue and all. However, because he just got Tom Taylor to write him, Iron Man deploys a device that allows him, Havok, and Sabretooth to stay inverted.
Sabretooth, now good and chill, just sits around while Havok immediately flips out, grabs Wasp who he was just raving about impregnating, and retreats into the Microverse. She’ll be fine, this is just how Marvel heroes express romance. Just ask Marcus and Carol Danvers. Also of note, Doctor Doom, Red Skull, and Stark have now escaped so their stories could go get resolved in some other comic.
Continued belowNow that the main conflict of “AXIS” has been resolved (?), how will the Marvel Universe react to their heroes now that they’ve basically destroyed Manhattan?
Country Carnage, you are the gift that keeps on giving. Before the inverted villains came into the fight, they pulled a Walter White and took the credit for everything bad that occurred. I know that Sabretooth got the bookends this issue and Remender can’t let Steve go in favor for the actual Captain America but how amazing is it that the main hero of a Marvel crossover in 2014 was a dixie fried Carnage?
Now that the inversion is done with, there’s some new status quo changes in the Marvel Univese. Well, two at least. Doctor Doom has kidnapped Red Skull and is using his brain for his own purposes while the Summers Brothers reunited.
Major questions: Where the hell is Janet? Does Alex have her tied up god knows where? Did he follow up on the “Would you let your wife die to save your people?” conversation from last issue and kill her? Is Cyclops congratulating Havok for finally having a dead girlfriend and becoming a real Summers? If Havok is still inverted are we just painting Cyclops as a straight up villain when he had the potential to be one of the most complex characters in Marvel until we pissed that all away after “Avengers vs. X-Men”? Why aren’t any of them wearing a coat? It’s snowing.
Those questions aren’t likely to be answered anytime soon as we learn that Scarlet Witch (possibly still under Drumm’s possession for all we know) is starting a new Uncanny Avengers team to make sure “this never happens again”. Reminder that this was the exact mission statement of the Avengers Unity Squad after “Avengers vs. X-Men” and that worked so well last time. Except now they’ll have good Sabretooth on the team? That…that doesn’t seem like it would change anything.
Well I guess that’s the end of Marvel’s strangest story of 2014. There’s nothing left to say that I haven’t already passively aggressively typed so I figure we should just wrap it up here.
Final Verdict: 3.4 – “AXIS” took what was a promising, if not maniacal, start and ends up with a confusing mess that always felt slow in spite of the thousand things happening around it. Furthermor-
Nevermind. This is our new Multiversity Comics Mini-Series of 2014.
New Final Verdict: 10.1 – Marvel, my e-mail is listed under my bio. If you want to send me a Carnage statue, all you need to do is ask.
