Bendis and Sorrentino bring Tempus’ time-displaced sojourn from the main universe full circle. It’s a wild ride, but what does it mean for the future?
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Illustrated by Andrea Sorrentino
THE SECRET LIFE OF EVA BELL – Part 2. With limited control over her powers, and even less control over her destinations, Eva had believed herself lost in time. But just when she had come to accept this as truth, her world was once again ripped asunder as she is once again sent tumbling through time.
When the concept for the “All-New X-Men” roster was originally released I was, admittedly, pretty skeptical. One of my main criticisms of both Marvel and DC’s storytelling techniques is the way they cling to characters that have been around since time immemorial, often tangling themselves up in awkward storylines that rely on even the casual reader having a working knowledge of over half a century of comics, so the idea of bringing back the five ‘original’ X-Men so that they could rehash their past/future for a new generation didn’t sit too well with me off the bat. Thankfully Bendis and his collaborators have managed to make “All-New” the fun, angsty romp that I look for in any teen X-book, but it still rankled me somewhat that the newer X-Kids of ‘All-New’s’ sister book didn’t seem to be getting anywhere near the character study that the original X-Team were.
And then “Uncanny X-Men Annual” #1 came out.
And I was so excited. A whole issue about a new, and essentially unknown, mutant is exactly what these books needed to prove that there are stories to be told about Bendis’ most recent creations. while all the freshly recruited “Uncanny X-Men” have pretty interesting power sets, it’s long been theorised that Eva Bell’s time control powers have the most potential, and this more focussed pair of issues allow Bendis and Sorrentino to explore the concept of a new, possibly omega level, mutant in much more depth.
The previous issue saw Eva lose control of her powers and bounce back and forth through time (and potentially alternate dimensions, because what’s an X-Book without a few wildly reimagined variants of well-known characters?) until she ended up in the far flung future with Magik, who had become 2099’s Sorcerer Supreme. Eva spent seven years honing her skills, and even started a family, before a catastrophe occurred, apparently due to Hank McCoy’s previous temporal tampering, forcing her to jump away from the life she’d spent the better part of a decade building.
“All-New X-Men Annual” #1 picks up seconds after the previous one finished and it’s split pretty evenly between the dim and distant past and another incarnation of the future that Eva’s just left. This issue features some incredible spreads from Sorrentino, who uses a rolling panel of quasi-recognisable historical events both from the real world and the Marvel universe to evoke a sense of narrative grounding as Eva rockets through time. Sorrentino’s detached backgrounds flow through the entire issue, culminating in an interaction between Eva and yet another unexpected Sorcerer Supreme that plays out over a backdrop of multiversal fragmentations that dissolve off into oblivion.
As far as storyline goes this issue is a little light on meat, allowing the previous issue to do most of the heavy lifting as far as narrative is concerned and turning its efforts more to the tying up of loose ends and explaining the situation. However, while much of the real intrigue of Eva’s journey is displayed in the initial issue of this crossover, this slower paced second half allows for further character development for one of Bendis’ newest recruits, a narrative element that has been sorely missing from more recent issues of ‘Uncanny’. It’s great to see Marvel giving these kinds of opportunities to their lesser known characters and I hope that this crossover, along with Steve Rogers’ recent aging and Al Ewing’s remarkably future-focussed run on ‘Mighty Avengers’ to name but a few other instances, might actually mark the beginning of an era of Marvel that is considering looking to the future instead of to the past.
Both of the big interactions in this issue deal with two sides of the same issue: namely, the effects of time travel. Bendis’ scripting manages to articulate an interesting hypothesis regarding the impossibility of revisiting a specific future, suggesting that the potency of the butterfly effect essentially renders any future non-existent once you leave it, without getting too bogged down in psuedo-science to stop it from being enjoyable.
My only criticism for the combined issues would be that it felt like a lot of people talking at Eva, rather than us learning about her. She spends the majority of the first issue reacting to events beyond her control and then, after seven years of training, still seems unable to do much more than fall headfirst through time. While I believe this crossover was definitely a big step in the right direction, I’m excited to see what her newfound skills, experiences, and views regarding the ethics of using her powers turn out to be. Eva bell is definitely a character with a huge amount of potential and I hope that she doesn’t end up getting sidelined to allow the more well-established members of the team continue their infighting indefinitely.
Final Verdict: 7.7 – Unpredictable, thought-provoking and beautifully rendered. This mini crossover is a slice of uncharacteristically risky Marvel that gives an unknown character a chance to shine.
