So. Schism.
Dec. 5th, 2011 02:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopWhile I'm in this groove for getting some thoughts down about recent Marvel events I wanted to say a bit about Schism. On the whole, I'd give it a sort of surprised and tentative thumbs up, but it's such a weird balance of things that worked really well and things that really didn't that it makes an interesting case to pick through.
The basic concept for Schism as being "Civil War, but with mutants" wasn't much of an inspiring start, but I'd say it did manage to avoid most of the pitfalls of it's predecessor. The character focus in Schism is much better, for a start. Whereas Civil War had the heroes had pick sides and at each other's throats so fast one got the impression no-one had even bothered to try talking the matter through first, Schism goes out of its way to show us how deep the friendship and trust between Logan and Scott has grown over the years, shows us how the conflict between them escalates over the course of the story and only brings them to blows in the final pages. The split that ultimately divides the X-Men has everything to do with the irreconcilable viewpoints of two of its leaders and only a loose connection to the politics of the outside world.
Schism also does a better job of keeping both sides sympathetic. Marvel have always walked a fairly fine line between letting their characters face 'realistic' problems and justifying the tropes the genre depends on – the good guys will prevail, the teenager with the fluorescent costume and the combo-platter powers will be more effective than the proper authorities, and secret identities will stay secret. Getting their audience to buy that the good guys were suddenly the ones advocating mutant registration was always going to require a very careful approach, and when the pro-registration side were acting like supervillains by the middle of the event and then being cheered as the victors at the end, the question of exactly who we're supposed to be rooting for was so muddled the whole thing dissolved into an unmitigated mess. Schism, to it's credit, splits the X-Men along more nuanced lines. Cyclops' position is that the mutant race is on the brink and Utopia is their last refuge, and anything that has to be done to defend that is justified. Wolverine's is that this is short-sighted bullshit; Utopia's just a rock, and the mutant kids deserve at least a chance to be kids, not soldiers. That's a lot harder to summarise in a snappy line for promotional purposes, so it's understandable that what the schism was actually going to be about was left as one of the mysteries to be answered on-page. Read in full, though, it works – the conflict feels believable and character-driven, and that's something not many comics can boast.
Where Schism flounders is in the surrounding detail, which simply doesn't support the core conflict as well as it needed to. The strengths of the event, as I was just saying, is that it makes the conflict character-driven and believable, so why on earth did anyone think this was a good time to introduce something so comically ridiculous as a new incarnation of the Hellfire Club masterminded by a group of four supervillainous ten-year-olds? The whole conflict driving the schism hinges in the question of whether it's reasonable for the X-Men to expect their kids to take on adult responsibility, and to expect that story to share page time with a gang of over-achieving pre-teens who have somehow cobbled together a credible threat to the X-Men out of the blue undermines the whole concept on a staggering scale. The X-Men never do learn exactly who's behind all their woes, which generates an appropriate backdrop of paranoia for their own escalating troubles, but this keep parts which deal with the new Hellfire Club so divorced from the main plot that one sometimes feels one is reading the pages of two unrelated comic books that have been spliced together by accident.
Speaking of the role of the kids, Schism is another one of those titles suffering from that thing I was ranting about last time, where no-one in the X-verse seems to be talking about the ramifications of what's been going down with Gen Hope – and here, where members of Hope's team have a key role to play, where the future of the X-Men is a major dividing issue and Wolverine ultimately leaves to re-open Xavier's old school, that seems like a baffling oversight. The obvious connection between "young new mutants are appearing again for the first time in years!" and "we're opening a new school" is not so much as lampshaded. Even allowing for some kind of editorial mandate keeping Hope and her crew on Cyclops' side, that's just weird.
And that brings me to my other big complaint which is that the concept of Schism would have benefited an awful lot from being put in context of other recent events going on in surrounding X-titles – and yet, beyond addressing the obvious main question of whether Scott's long term plan for Utopia is a good thing, Schism feels oddly like it's being presented a stand-alone story. In particular, while I feel the charaterisation and focus on Scott and Logan was one of its strengths, there's so much more that could have been done to demonstrate where both of them were coming from. Long before Schism hit the stands a lot of fans had already guessed that some part of the split would hinge on the question of whether it was 'okay' for the X-Men to use lethal force in extreme circumstances, but when both Cyclops and Wolverine had been centrally responsible for the creation of the (seriously controversial, both in-universe and out) black-ops X-Force team not so long before, the idea of either of them taking the moral high ground on the matter looked hypocritical. Unsurprisingly then, there's been plenty of debate since on the subject of Wolverine taking such a hard-line stance against young Idie having to kill in self-defence. This gets even worse when you remember that Wolverine is the one running X-Force at the moment, even without Cyclops' knowledge.
Personally, I think there's a fascinating case to be made that Logan's stance makes a lot of sense. Yes, he's running a team of killers, but when it comes to the issue of kids doing the killing he was never happy about X-23 being on the team and he made a point of kicking her off as soon as Scott wasn't involved. Whether or not the team was justified in killing a kidified incarnation of Apocalypse has been a major sticking point in some of those more recent X-Force issues too. There's a lot in Logan's whole tough-guy-with-a-heart-of-gold schtick that marks him as a man who'll make a point of taking the responsibility of making those hard decisions on himself so 'purer' people – the ones who don't already have blood on their hands – won't have to. He's running X-Force in secret now in a large part so that the rest of the X-Men can keep their hands clean. It's entirely plausible that knowing that someone as young as Idie had to kill because he wasn't there in time is the moment that pushes him over the edge.
On the other side of the field you have Cyclops, who made a point of officially disbanding X-Force at the end of that last big X-event. Thing is, it's clear he's still very much in agreement with Wolverine that killing will still sometimes be necessary. The difference is that Cyclops thinks the best way to deal with that ugly issue is to spread the responsibility for making those occasional hard decisions over everyone who might ever find themselves in that position, which is, to put it bluntly, everyone. Wolverine disagrees. That leaves us with a conflict where the man who is currently running a team of dedicated killers is functionally the idealist in this debate.
I love that. That is a gloriously nuanced, grey-vs-grey kind of conflict. Like, seriously, if anyone can rec me any other series where that's been done, I would love to know about it.
My own theories aside, I've seen others point out that the treatment of kids has been a recent theme in Wolverine's solo title (very rough summary: he was recently tricked into killing a whole lot of people who turned out to be his own children, from various relationships he's been in over the years), and that that would certainly play into his behaviour in Schism. But the problem with all of that is that it's all, ultimately, little more than Fridge Logic – the stuff you come up with on your own steam after you've finished reading. None of it gets raised directly on the pages of Schism, or even much alluded to. I can't recall any time any incarnation of X-Force is ever mentioned, and certainly not with the weight it needs, nor does Wolverine get to so much as mention that he's had his own stuff weighing on his mind lately. Meanwhile, by all accounts Prelude to Schism was little more than a lot of hand-wavy nonsense that made no sense to anyone, and if anything, probably damaged the sales of the main event rather than the reverse. It seems phenomenally unlikely any of it will get raised in the comparatively cheery pages of Wolverine and the X-Men either. Another opportunity goes to waste.
Finally, as much as Schism undeniably improves over the original Civil War, I still came out of it wondering what's going through the head of any character who stayed on Scott's side and who wasn't already established to be some variant of dangerous and insane (or isn't Storm, who stayed only because Scott begged her to). The younger mutants in particular have every reason to resent all Scott and Emma's leadership have put them through since M-Day, to the point where I can only assume those who stayed are doing so out of Stockholm Syndrome. Even from an editorial perspective, their departure leaves Wolverine's class list sadly underpopulated.
Like I said, Schism has given me a really fascinating example of what does and doesn't work all in the one package.
The basic concept for Schism as being "Civil War, but with mutants" wasn't much of an inspiring start, but I'd say it did manage to avoid most of the pitfalls of it's predecessor. The character focus in Schism is much better, for a start. Whereas Civil War had the heroes had pick sides and at each other's throats so fast one got the impression no-one had even bothered to try talking the matter through first, Schism goes out of its way to show us how deep the friendship and trust between Logan and Scott has grown over the years, shows us how the conflict between them escalates over the course of the story and only brings them to blows in the final pages. The split that ultimately divides the X-Men has everything to do with the irreconcilable viewpoints of two of its leaders and only a loose connection to the politics of the outside world.
Schism also does a better job of keeping both sides sympathetic. Marvel have always walked a fairly fine line between letting their characters face 'realistic' problems and justifying the tropes the genre depends on – the good guys will prevail, the teenager with the fluorescent costume and the combo-platter powers will be more effective than the proper authorities, and secret identities will stay secret. Getting their audience to buy that the good guys were suddenly the ones advocating mutant registration was always going to require a very careful approach, and when the pro-registration side were acting like supervillains by the middle of the event and then being cheered as the victors at the end, the question of exactly who we're supposed to be rooting for was so muddled the whole thing dissolved into an unmitigated mess. Schism, to it's credit, splits the X-Men along more nuanced lines. Cyclops' position is that the mutant race is on the brink and Utopia is their last refuge, and anything that has to be done to defend that is justified. Wolverine's is that this is short-sighted bullshit; Utopia's just a rock, and the mutant kids deserve at least a chance to be kids, not soldiers. That's a lot harder to summarise in a snappy line for promotional purposes, so it's understandable that what the schism was actually going to be about was left as one of the mysteries to be answered on-page. Read in full, though, it works – the conflict feels believable and character-driven, and that's something not many comics can boast.
Where Schism flounders is in the surrounding detail, which simply doesn't support the core conflict as well as it needed to. The strengths of the event, as I was just saying, is that it makes the conflict character-driven and believable, so why on earth did anyone think this was a good time to introduce something so comically ridiculous as a new incarnation of the Hellfire Club masterminded by a group of four supervillainous ten-year-olds? The whole conflict driving the schism hinges in the question of whether it's reasonable for the X-Men to expect their kids to take on adult responsibility, and to expect that story to share page time with a gang of over-achieving pre-teens who have somehow cobbled together a credible threat to the X-Men out of the blue undermines the whole concept on a staggering scale. The X-Men never do learn exactly who's behind all their woes, which generates an appropriate backdrop of paranoia for their own escalating troubles, but this keep parts which deal with the new Hellfire Club so divorced from the main plot that one sometimes feels one is reading the pages of two unrelated comic books that have been spliced together by accident.
Speaking of the role of the kids, Schism is another one of those titles suffering from that thing I was ranting about last time, where no-one in the X-verse seems to be talking about the ramifications of what's been going down with Gen Hope – and here, where members of Hope's team have a key role to play, where the future of the X-Men is a major dividing issue and Wolverine ultimately leaves to re-open Xavier's old school, that seems like a baffling oversight. The obvious connection between "young new mutants are appearing again for the first time in years!" and "we're opening a new school" is not so much as lampshaded. Even allowing for some kind of editorial mandate keeping Hope and her crew on Cyclops' side, that's just weird.
And that brings me to my other big complaint which is that the concept of Schism would have benefited an awful lot from being put in context of other recent events going on in surrounding X-titles – and yet, beyond addressing the obvious main question of whether Scott's long term plan for Utopia is a good thing, Schism feels oddly like it's being presented a stand-alone story. In particular, while I feel the charaterisation and focus on Scott and Logan was one of its strengths, there's so much more that could have been done to demonstrate where both of them were coming from. Long before Schism hit the stands a lot of fans had already guessed that some part of the split would hinge on the question of whether it was 'okay' for the X-Men to use lethal force in extreme circumstances, but when both Cyclops and Wolverine had been centrally responsible for the creation of the (seriously controversial, both in-universe and out) black-ops X-Force team not so long before, the idea of either of them taking the moral high ground on the matter looked hypocritical. Unsurprisingly then, there's been plenty of debate since on the subject of Wolverine taking such a hard-line stance against young Idie having to kill in self-defence. This gets even worse when you remember that Wolverine is the one running X-Force at the moment, even without Cyclops' knowledge.
Personally, I think there's a fascinating case to be made that Logan's stance makes a lot of sense. Yes, he's running a team of killers, but when it comes to the issue of kids doing the killing he was never happy about X-23 being on the team and he made a point of kicking her off as soon as Scott wasn't involved. Whether or not the team was justified in killing a kidified incarnation of Apocalypse has been a major sticking point in some of those more recent X-Force issues too. There's a lot in Logan's whole tough-guy-with-a-heart-of-gold schtick that marks him as a man who'll make a point of taking the responsibility of making those hard decisions on himself so 'purer' people – the ones who don't already have blood on their hands – won't have to. He's running X-Force in secret now in a large part so that the rest of the X-Men can keep their hands clean. It's entirely plausible that knowing that someone as young as Idie had to kill because he wasn't there in time is the moment that pushes him over the edge.
On the other side of the field you have Cyclops, who made a point of officially disbanding X-Force at the end of that last big X-event. Thing is, it's clear he's still very much in agreement with Wolverine that killing will still sometimes be necessary. The difference is that Cyclops thinks the best way to deal with that ugly issue is to spread the responsibility for making those occasional hard decisions over everyone who might ever find themselves in that position, which is, to put it bluntly, everyone. Wolverine disagrees. That leaves us with a conflict where the man who is currently running a team of dedicated killers is functionally the idealist in this debate.
I love that. That is a gloriously nuanced, grey-vs-grey kind of conflict. Like, seriously, if anyone can rec me any other series where that's been done, I would love to know about it.
My own theories aside, I've seen others point out that the treatment of kids has been a recent theme in Wolverine's solo title (very rough summary: he was recently tricked into killing a whole lot of people who turned out to be his own children, from various relationships he's been in over the years), and that that would certainly play into his behaviour in Schism. But the problem with all of that is that it's all, ultimately, little more than Fridge Logic – the stuff you come up with on your own steam after you've finished reading. None of it gets raised directly on the pages of Schism, or even much alluded to. I can't recall any time any incarnation of X-Force is ever mentioned, and certainly not with the weight it needs, nor does Wolverine get to so much as mention that he's had his own stuff weighing on his mind lately. Meanwhile, by all accounts Prelude to Schism was little more than a lot of hand-wavy nonsense that made no sense to anyone, and if anything, probably damaged the sales of the main event rather than the reverse. It seems phenomenally unlikely any of it will get raised in the comparatively cheery pages of Wolverine and the X-Men either. Another opportunity goes to waste.
Finally, as much as Schism undeniably improves over the original Civil War, I still came out of it wondering what's going through the head of any character who stayed on Scott's side and who wasn't already established to be some variant of dangerous and insane (or isn't Storm, who stayed only because Scott begged her to). The younger mutants in particular have every reason to resent all Scott and Emma's leadership have put them through since M-Day, to the point where I can only assume those who stayed are doing so out of Stockholm Syndrome. Even from an editorial perspective, their departure leaves Wolverine's class list sadly underpopulated.
Like I said, Schism has given me a really fascinating example of what does and doesn't work all in the one package.
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no subject
Date: 2011-12-05 05:03 pm (UTC)But I can't help but slightly disagree with your point on Generation Hope- I think it wouldn't have made any sense for any other light but Idie to go with Wolverine. The thing that bothers me is whether or not when(or if) Hope finds another light, will they even have the option of going to that school, or would they just take it as granted that they must stay on Utopia?
no subject
Date: 2011-12-05 07:31 pm (UTC)man, i hadn't even considered this.
i like to think that the fact that scott and logan broke up somewhat civilly and that storm (who will be an avenger alongside logan) is in the extinction team mean any new light will be informed of their options.
what worries me is the thing with hope's mental control of these kids. idie got away, but a) a Marvel architect is very fond of her and b) hope herself thought idie was better off at the school. she had discussed idie's issues when she was lecturing xavier and everything.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-06 03:31 am (UTC)But I can't help but slightly disagree with your point on Generation Hope- I think it wouldn't have made any sense for any other light but Idie to go with Wolverine.
If you ask me nothing that's happened in Gen Hope to date has made much sense (see: that other ridiculously long rant of mine), but I think you may be missing my point here. I'm not going to argue whether Hope's team should have gone to the new school, what irritated me is that no-one in Schism ever even suggested they should have or gave us a logical reason why not. Same goes for all the other new mutants they're presumably going to find in the future.
Quoting the relevant bit from the post above, because I'm not really sure how else to state it: The obvious connection between "young new mutants are appearing again for the first time in years!" and "we're opening a new school" is not so much as lampshaded. Even allowing for some kind of editorial mandate keeping Hope and her crew on Cyclops' side, that's just weird.
(Oh, and in case that lampshading thing needs a definition, have a TVTropes link (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging), which I will apologise for in advance.)
no subject
Date: 2011-12-06 03:38 am (UTC)Especially when you factor in the whole idea of 'letting' a mutant kid decide between going to school, or living on a rock in the middle of the ocean with a bunch of paranoid separatists and a 'messiah' who appears to be keeping the rest of the kids there with mind control. Heck, half of Wolverine's whole point is that the kids shouldn't have to make those kinds of choices.