Confession time: I really thought with the benefits of decompressed storytelling, I could fit an entire contemporary arc into the same length as I write for a single bronze age issue. Wasn't that adorably naive of me? Maybe if I had chosen a title that hadn't begun in the wake of a continuity soft reset, or wasn't dealing with a lot of very complex long-term continuity elements from some very disperate corners of the Marvel Universe, or a character who habitually leans on/over the Fourth Wall, I could have been a bit more succinct. I'm hoping now that I've covered the bigger continuity recaps, I can go through this a lot more quickly. Although, this issue involves a character who is both a time traveler and a member of the Summers-Grey family, so I make no guarantees.
Issue #2 of
The Uncanny Avengers (the title is
The Uncanny Avengers, which apparently sets it apart as its own title from
Uncanny Avengers, volumes 1 and 2) once again has Duggan on the script, Stegman on pencils, and Isanove as colorist. The cover art is honestly pretty good, demonstrating our newly introduced antagonist standing dead center and dominating the tableau while behind him, bathed in an eerie purple light, the team is being bound and strangled by giant animated vines... including Human Torch, who could burn right through them. That doesn't make sense. I would say this is impressive, certainly better than the plastic mannequin/action figure bodies that we see inside, except that Shredded Man is very much a case of body horror. And I don't do well with body horror. I think it's gross and excessive, and makes my skin crawl within the context of horror cinema, so I'm less inclined to appreciate it in a superhero team adventure book whose tone doesn't come anywhere near warranting it. The emaciated limbs I could deal with, but seeing his torso and what appear to be his organs spilling out from underneath his cloak really upsets my stomach.
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| There's kicking it old school, then there's Nokia flip phones... |
The issue starts off with Steve hanging out on the rooftop of the Avengers Theater listening to a news update on the situation his team is dealing with in Boston on the radio when his cell phone starts to ring. It's interesting to note that both pieces of technology are significantly outdated. He has Nokia flip phone, for crying out loud. A FLIP PHONE. I enjoy touches that remind the reader that no matter how long he's been here, he's still a man out of time and isn't quite as tech-dependent as the rest of us. But on the other hand, in Marvel's weird floating timeline, it's been somewhere between 10-15 years since he's been unthawed. He's good friends with Stark and has been the Director of SHIELD. I would have thought by now he'd have developed an appreciation of the value of a data phone in his line of work.
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Old Cap isn't the bastion of hope he once was.
Comes with age... |
Speaking of Stark, guess who's on the other end of the line? We see Tony doing his favorite non-alcohol-or-combat-or-sex related activity: looking smart by pressing buttons on holographic screens. He too has been keeping abreast of current events and asks if he should have his team suit up. Steve says if the Unity Squad can't handle this, it might be time to call it quits, but wants to give them a chance. Yeesh. For one of the biggest symbols of hope in Marvel, that sounds awfully pessimistic. Although, considering has had three volumes in four years, I completely understand the need for contingency planning.
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| There's a time and a place, Synapse... |
In Boston, the Unity Team are being overwhelmed by the hostile flora and demon dogs dominating wreaking havoc on the city. Rogue attempts to get Synapse to use her abilities to shut the demon dogs down, but they don't have brains for her to tap into. When Rogue asks if she's sure, Synapse asks why Rogue doesn't trust her. Instead of giving into this invitation to in-fighting, Rogue asks Synapse to explain how her powers work, to the benefit of the reader. From the explanation given, it sounds very much like she can read and manipulate bio-neural electricity, which I think is what I guessed last time I covered these guys.
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She can heal the sick and talk to animals.
She's a magical sword away from being She-Ra. |
Conveniently the two are approached by a woman and her child who have been infected with... whatever has turned Boston into
Day of the Triffids, but haven't been able to get to a hospital because of the Floral Apocalypse. The mother looks like she has a nasty infection. Her hands look a little gnarled and her face is covered in greenish brown pockmarks. Then Synapse looks into the baby carriage and we find out that the mother got off pretty easily, in comparison, as her little cabbage patch baby is literally halfway between cabbage and baby. Synapse uses her powers to reverse the effects of the infection of the baby by boosting her immune system, then Quicksilver rushes them to the hospital.
My understanding and appreciation of Synapse's powers grow increasingly more muddled the more I think about this move. I understand that her powers allow her to read and control the brain and neural electricity, and that the brain effectively regulates the entire body's functions. I'm not pretending that either of those facts are unknown to me. However, compared to what the reader has seen Synapse do thus far, this is a dramatic leap that makes her abilities seem less superhuman and more godlike. The team newbie demonstrated in only her second appearance that she quite literally that she cannot only control and rewrite people's minds, but also has the potential to have powers over life and death. I'm not saying that it wouldn't have been an interesting development eventually, but that would be something I'd like to see slowly evolve over the course of a few arcs.
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| Count Reed bids you velcome to his castle. |
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| The crux of his arc, such as it is. |
Deadpool is suggests setting a (Human) Torch to the entire city, but Rogue points out that it wouldn't be good for civilians, while Brother Voodoo shows how the killer plants are converting by-standers into their food source. Human Torch's focus is elsewhere as we cut to a memory of Reed Richards... without ever seeing Reed. Okay, that's certainly one way of visual storytelling... It's basically an entire page of Johnny Storm in various panels. Remove the word balloons and this could have been about anything. Although Reed's shadow (or maybe Gary Oldman's
Dracula shadow) is in one of the panels, so at least we know he's there. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if it was etched in an afterthought after the original art was completed. Additionally, it doesn't even earn its place. The long and short of it is that Reed tells Johnny someday might not have Reed around to do all the science. His resolution to the lack of science doers is to grab an infected civilian and fly off.
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She isn't getting paid enough
(or at all) for this shit. |
Annoyed, Rogue comments that either she or Johnny should have quit. Yeah, the theory that they had a relationship in the 8 month gap is becoming more textual. Quicksilver has made his way back and tells the remaining Unity Team members that there is someone they should meet, and blazes a trail for them to follow, ignoring Rogue shouting for him to wait up.
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| Rogue and Wade would make a good buddy roadtrip comedy. |
Meanwhile, Johnny touches down on the campus of MIT to recruit a team of scientists to help in their cause. That is his major arc in this story. The epiphany that deserves its own page-long flashback is that Johnny realized that there are more eggheads where Reed came from. Yay?
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Wade is at his best when he's
kind of the worst. |
Back in Boston, Rogue is exasperated that her team members keep on blazing off without waiting to confer with the group, let alone wait for a leadership command. She asks if they'd act that way for Cap and wonders if it's because she's a woman. I think it's hilarious actually kind of hilarious considering she an X-Man functioning in an Avengers world. The X-Men historically have been profoundly better at being gender balanced both in terms of power sets and command ability, whereas the Avengers really tend to forget about eras with strong female leadership, especially since teams post-Avengers Disassembled did away with elected chairpersons, resulting in Cap and Iron Man being cemented as the designated leaders in the collective consciousness. So as paranoid as her question may sound, it's also valid.
Deadpool counters that maybe it's because she's a mutant. Because Deadpool is the master of being both the best and worst person in the room. While this fun bit of banter is going on, Synapse tries to get in contact with Quicksilver using her pseudo-telepathy, but only gets radio silence.
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| Suggested Team Name: Los Leafadores |
Meanwhile,
Shredder The Shredded Man interrupts a news update from the mayor outside her office flanked by his Chia Zuul dogs and two pod people. Remember that poor security guard at the end of last issue that was woefully unschooled in the ways of superhero and creepy villain's lair tropes? Now we see what becomes of those who fail to do the homework. He and some other uninformed rent-a-cop have been coopted, turned into a plantman golem. It just goes to show you, when your city is besieged by a disaster of either supernatural or comic book super science variety, do not approach strange cloaked persons in shadowy lairs. It will not end well for you. Also, remember the poor woman's green baby? She looked pretty much how these guys do. If Synapse hadn't stepped in, would an infant plantgolem be crawling around doing Shredder's bidding?
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Even with the latest retcon, Pietro can't help
making battles about his (non) daddy issues. |
His plant patrol assaults the film crew while he corners the mayor. He seems very focused on how humanity has been taxing the Earth's natural resources, which is a valid complaint for an environmentalist to have and would certainly not sound out of place on an episode of
Captain Planet. However, threatening to turn humanity isn't a message that even Wheeler would have supported. As he says this, he's holding her by the face and within two panels, she has turned green, presumably killing her. For a newly minted villain, he has a flair for the dramatic, because as he finished his pronouncement, the dome of the mayor's office blasts off as a giant tentacle/vine monster springs forth, knocking the remaining building to rubble to make way for it.
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| Where's the Southern Poverty Law Center when you need it? |
He continues on about his evil plan of evilness when he gets knocked down by a Quicksilver sucker punch. Quicksilver has the upper hand and uses it to trade barbs (and remind the reader how glad his is that he so isn't Magneto's kid) when a vine creeps up and slices open his neck. Pietro tears it away and tells the Shredded Man that things will go a lot better for him as he lunges forth, but suddenly is stricken with paralysis. Shredded man gloats and taunts Quickie's mutancy, saying "I try not to feed my darlings
junk food... but just one bit of gene trash can't hurt." Okay. villainy is one thing, racism is another. I want this guy mulched never to return. As he says this he is putting Quicksilver in a pod. When Quicksilver protests, Shredded Man says "That's just the hallucinogens talking. You're already dead," as the pod seals itself shut.
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| So, is she a living image or a gif file with 10 positions? |
What happens next? I have no idea, but I can tell you that in the 70 year time skip, things apparently went to hell in an handbasket after Boston failed to maintain its quarantine and was the first city destroyed. A figure we totally can't see, but has seems to have time traveled here, has a big metal arm, and couldn't possibly be Cable is conversing with what appears to be a sentient tattoo of a WWII-era bombshell pinup girl on his metal arm. She goes by the name "Belle" and is quite the fiesty A.I. program, unafraid to give him a hard time even while complying to orders. In that regards, she reminds me of Friday (or maybe F.R.Y.D.A.Y), Stark's new A.I. in the MCU now that J.A.R.V.I.S. has become the Vision.
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Are they in a relationship?
How does this work? |
They chat back and forth about whether this was the M-Pox or if the Kree would terraform the planet but not claim it, all the while never panning up from totally not Cable's feet. This mysterious time traveler with a metallic arm uses telekinesis to navigate through the inhospitable terrain. I'm just stumped-- who is this guy? He guns down a Zuul chia dog with his improbably large plasma gun (why aren't they dropping any clues?) and we finally see an over the shoulder shot of him and can make out the white hair and glowing eye of... oh, who could it possibly be? How many issues will go by before we find out who this mystery man is?!
He finds a newspaper that just happens to be from the day of the Avengers appearance there and has somehow managed to survive outside of archival preservation and still pictures Quicksilver and Deadpool in vivid color AFTER SEVENTY YEARS. Then suddenly the big reveal of our intrepid mystery man as... whaaaaa? Cable?! Great googly moogly, what a twist!!! Oh, and of course they include a big title drop using the cubed lettering from his header of solo titles, just in case we didn't get it. Good grief.
It occurs to me that some readers might not be familiar with Cable, since to my knowledge he has only had a small handful of cameos in the 90s animated series, and the fact that for some readers, X-Men TAS seems as old as Superfriends does to me. Okay, understandable. I was going to try to keep this entry brief, but since clearly I already failed at that task, I might as well. But keep in mind I'm doing a streamlined version. I have to because every other sentence opens up a new can of worms...
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| My sense of surprise is non-existent. |
Nathan Summers (born Charles Nathan Christopher Summers) was born the son of Scott Summers and Madelyn Pryor, who was a clone of Jean Grey created by Mr. Sinister because he'd been manipulating both the Summers and Grey families' bloodlines in order to birth the chosen bane of Apocalypse, and he wasn't going to let Jean dying on the moon get in the way of generations of planning. Following some Mutant Soap Opera that brought Jean back into the picture and turned Madelyn into a demonic villainess before getting her out of the picture, Nathan was being raised by Scott and Jean until Apocalypse infected him with a techno-organic virus, giving making his left arm and eye a cybernetic appearance. Then he was taken into the future by the high priestess of a cult who later turned out to be his own half(ish) sister from a defunct timeline in order to help him... Okay, let's try this again. Cable is Scott and biologically Madelyn's/Jean's adoptive son who was raised in a far distant post-apocalyptic future by an elderly version of his other-dimensional half sister (plus Scott and Jean in rental bodies) to be the messianic figure of a cult dedicated to overthrowing Apocalypse because he was genetically engineered for that specific purpose by Mr. Sinister. He is an incredibly powerful psi-talent, but usually doesn't use get to show it off because he generally uses it to fight off the techno organic virus that turned his left arm, shoulder, and the area around his left eye appear cybernetic. He is a time traveler and a career soldier and is so grizzled he could give Sam Elliot a run for his money. In recent continuity (as far as I know), Apocalypse is dead, so spent 16 years raising hopping around the timestream and Hope Summers (who herself was a messiah for mutant-kind) while playing cat and mouse with Bishop, has been cured of the TO virus, and uses a cybernetic casing around his arm to compensate for the chicken wing that was left over after he was cured.
My question now that Cable has landed as a protagonist in this series is where exactly are we in his personal timeline? Cable is a very messy character to write in general because, as the paragraph above might indicate, he is basically a bunch of retcons that pulled a Voltron and joined together in order to take human form. Especially considering he bodyslided in from a distant future, we really have no sense where he is relative to our knowledge of his history, let alone whatever might have transpired if he's from significantly further in his personal timeline than his most recent appearance.
Being the middle chapter in a story is a difficult, thankless job. You don't get to have fun establishing a status quo nor do you have the big battles, the epic smackdowns, or the sense of resolution of the conclusion of a story. This story is no exception, however what seems to be further impairing it is the fact that it seemed like there wasn't enough story to flesh out the issue. Johnny's flashback and trip to MIT contribute very little to the narrative and feel like they were last minute additions to pad out the issue. Cable's sequence also seems like it was written two pages longer than it needed to be to stretch the book to its designated page count. In fact, I would argue that as written, I think it would fit in better as an epilogue to a completed arc, setting up a second arc instead of stopping midstream to insert him into the present one. I honestly think it would be more interesting to see him just pop in during the present and grumble on about how the team done fucked up the future. Especially since I picked up a team book for a reason, I would have preferred that prolonged five pages of interaction to be with the team instead of his A.I., as amusing at Belle may be. This issue isn't the worst story I've ever read, but it feels like the creative team under-served the main story of this issue in order to give Cable more of a set-up than was actually needed and thus it dragged on, resulting in a very "meh" issue overall.
The Oans get hypervigilant about maintaining the integrity of the
multiverse and anti-matter universe, since one of their own was responsible. At
first they created the Manhunters, which were machines, but later abandoned
them in favor of creating the Green Lantern Corps. [Quick case of backtracking
for something I forgot to mention in an earlier recap. GL John Stewart and
other corpsmen have been having trouble using their rings. A trip to
present-day Oa in issue 5 or 6 revealed that the Guardians are trapped in a
stasis field. These two facts will probably tie into this somehow.]
To Summarize Pariah’s Three Sins:
She turns around, telling Dr. L to make a run for it and Anti-Monitor takes the
advantage, killing her. Without a body, that took a lot out of Anti-Monitor. He
blasts off screaming “you’ll pay for this next time” like a Captain Planet
villain.
The
five Earths are no longer at risk of destroying each other and the weird time
anomalies have stopped, but they’re still interlocked and frozen in time and
space. A memorial is held in Chicago on
Earth-1, news coverage airing. Batgirl delivers a eulogy intercut with images
of the Daily Planet folks watching from their offices as well as heroes from
multiple earths mourning for her in attendance.
The
five Earths are no longer at risk of destroying each other and the weird time
anomalies have stopped, but they’re still interlocked and frozen in time and
space. A memorial is held in Chicago on
Earth-1, news coverage airing. Batgirl delivers a eulogy intercut with images
of the Daily Planet folks watching from their offices as well as heroes from
multiple earths mourning for her in attendance.
Superman takes her body, wrapped
tightly in her cape now repurposed as a burial shroud, to the Fortress of
Solitude. He reflects on all the hope and optimism of her when she first
arrived on Earth, a young girl of 15 with nothing but her future ahead of her.
From there, he takes her body out past Earth’s atmosphere and just lets it
float around in the vacuum of space for eternity. Good lord, Superman—cremation
is your friend. It wouldn’t surprise me if an alien villain had found her body
and used it to reverse engineer an anti-Kryptonian weapon or zombifies her.
Minor Spoiler: However, that didn’t happen. After this event, Supergirl is
literally erased from existence. She never happened. That heroic sacrifice is
utterly trivialized and her heartfelt requiem is obviated from memory. 
