“So… this is the X-Men now…?”
Vulcan, in a rare moment of open reflection, reveals his state of disbelief regarding being attacked by his comrades. The top panel is especially prescient: Xavier holds back Havok (Alex Summers) from doing more damage, making sure that Havok does not kill his brother, Gabriel Summers. Things really are quite different from the days when all of the X-men were still green and Vulcan was being sent off to save their asses. But one thing hasn’t changed:
Xavier is a fucking prick.
The tragedy of Vulcan is inextricably wrapped up in what a manipulative sociopath Xavier really is. The guy commissions a team of kids to save HIS team of kids that he already irresponsibly sent into unknown danger. In the process, he slapdashedly puts them through an accelerated training program (a Danger Room in his own fucking mind), gets them killed, then wipes out everyone’s memory that they ever existed. Two actually survive, of course: Gabriel Summers, a.k.a. Vulcan, a very powerful energy manipulator, and Darwin, a.k.a. Darwin, a being who can only be killed by one single thing in the universe: Kevin Bacon.
When the events of “Deadly Genesis” come to a head, Xavier is beside himself, full of remorse, fully aware that this is the most fucked up thing he has ever done and that Scott, who might as well be his son, has every reason never to speak to him again. He then asks Rachel to show Vulcan his origin story so that he can get his bearings after being stranded in space for so long.
But he gets shown too much. He essentially gets a live reenactment of being pulled from his mother’s womb, then sees her die at the hands of the Shi’ar. Xavier’s game is to appeal to empathy; straight, no chaser. Human beings (or mutants, or bird aliens, whatever) are at their strongest when they directly confront strong memories or emotions and make constructive decisions about who they are going to be as a result. Xavier makes this appeal to Vulcan, insisting his life is already so tragic that he needn’t go killing more people than he already has.
If there was any lingering hope that Xavier was a redeemable character, I think the reader really has to lose it right there at the end of “Deadly Genesis.” Xavier proves himself to be the epitome of manipulative. He brings out the best in people when it’s convenient for him to do so. Otherwise, he condescends to them in the ultimate fashion by removing their agency completely. If he deems an event too dark or an emotion too powerful, he walls people off from it so that they don’t have to confront it. Showing Gabriel the men that killed his mother and asking him to face up to it, to overcome it—it’s in such bad faith.
Nothing can change how massively screwed up Xavier’s initial choices were. He made such a big mistake that he saddled other people—especially Vulcan’s squad and Moira if she were to ever remember—with a tremendous amount of baggage that they would never be able to work through even if they tried.
The message that the relationship between Xavier and Vulcan sends is one that never gets old: the party that fiddles around in something and fucks it up doesn’t just get to say to the victim, “hey, listen, you need to be better than this.” Generally speaking, the offending party needs to find a course of action to help make things right if they are going to act like they care. Xavier is responsible for the events of “Deadly Genesis,” but even they could have ended better if he hadn’t decided to step in and paint a huge target on the Shi’ar empire. The entire “Emperor Vulcan” saga through “War of Kings” probably doesn’t happen if Xavier doesn’t fill the kid’s head with images of his dead mom.
None of this is to absolve Vulcan of responsibility for the horrible shit that follows his return: he is certainly a mad man through almost no fault of his own, but is the one doing all the killing. Still, I like that he is a villain that the story is committed to portraying as unambiguously villainous. As much as we all love our allegedly ambiguously evil villains like Magneto, or our weirdly power-hungry, but also mad, but also sort of benevolent Dr. Dooms, or our mission-from-the-stars, ultra powerful Apocalypses, it’s refreshing as hell to have a crazy motherfucker who just thinks Augustus Caesar is cool and wants to take over the most powerful space empire in the galaxy. Vulcan is a petulant child who has been given tremendous anguish and power tremendously quickly who then goes on to cause several intergalactic wars among the most powerful races in the galaxy.
In the first intergalactic conflict, a team consisting of Havok, Rachel Grey, Polaris, Warpath, a Phoenix-sword-wielding-duder named Korvus, and the Starjammers try to hunt down Vulcan, who instead succeeds in ascending to the throne of the Shi’ar empire. In the process, he murders his father, Corsair, referring to him as simply being a man who was too weak to protect his mother. We see in this huge character moment that reliving his mother’s death is pivotal in the most despicable of his actions, and we can trace that shit right back to Xavier. Of course, Xavier didn’t kill Corsair, but Jesus Christ did he mess this kid up.
Here the two heroes who each wield the power of the Phoenix trade their memories, instantly falling in love and bringing Korvus onboard as a member of the new Starjammer crew for the next few conflicts. Korvus completely drops off the radar after “War of Kings” completes, but for the duration of these events serves as a glaringly obvious Wolverine stand-in who feels tremendously fresh and interesting given his Shi’ar background and ties to the Phoenix force.
Korvus signals another one of the most compelling thing about “Emperor Vulcan,” “Kingbreaker,” and “War of Kings”: the Shi’ar have a mythology that is not 100% familiar to the reader. When Korvus begins to explain the origin of the Phoenix sword, it becomes clear that the Shi’ar have had their own issues with the Phoenix Force; butt not that much is revealed about them. Unlike the Earther mutants who have origin stories for their origin stories for their cousin's mom's time-dislocated retconned origin stories, the Shi’ar are opaque. New characters and situations constantly leave the reader wanting to know more.
Of course, where the familiar is concerned, the brotherly drama comes through strong in a welcome new flavor. Scott Summers is a goddamn cardboard cutout. He’s daddy’s little boy, and since his de facto daddy is a major sociopath, Scott is kind of an uninteresting dickworm. Yeah, he’s a talented tactician and makes good use of a fairly one-dimensional mutant power:
But he’s the least interesting of the Summers brothers, and I can’t say enough of what an incredible choice it was to have Havok be the one to hunt down Vulcan. Alex and Gabriel are both stubborn and tremendously fallible. Of course, Vulcan is more like Scott, in that he often doubles down on awful decisions. Alex doubts himself in the most relatable way of the three; hell, even one of the Starjammers makes a remark at one point about how odd it is to be around Havok who openly shares his self-doubt unlike the King of Stubborn, his father, Corsair.
The art in the "Kingbreaker" event is wildly inconsistent. Above is a mix of both good and bad. A circular panel emanating from Havok’s power as he stands over Vulcan with the power of an entire sun, ready to defeat him, until the page devolves into a weird cartoonish mess. Two pencilers were on duty for this comic event, and whether they switch duty on drawing characters while trying to keep them in the same style or something else, it’s often jarring how rushed some of the pages feel. Of course, when the pages in "Kingbreaker" are good, they’re GOOD.
Yost is at his best when he’s juxtaposing these two brothers in his script, so it’s no shocker that the panels that juxtapose them come off just as successful. Though early parts of this series are cluttered with some odd white space, this is one page where I really enjoy the effect. There’s nothing else I want out of this page, and Yost is firing on all cylinders. All I feel when I look at this page is Vulcan’s anger, mixed with Alex’s confused emotional cocktail of love, empathy, and murderous intent. Havok’s motivations here as both an older brother and as someone seeking justice for his friends are way more complicated than what I usually see a superhero going through in a comic event. There’s really no “choose a side!” going on here: Alex has his mind made up regarding a situation that would break most siblings.
That decision, however, is not some large, arbitrary, childish machination like the one that Vulcan is making to run an empire. It’s also not the kind of reactionary-posing-as-innovative thinking that so often characterizes the actions of his brother, Cyclops, who is constantly staying one step ahead of the game, only to come crashing into the same situations over, and over, and over again. The sort of heads down, “let’s get this fucking job done” attitude exemplified by Alex and his impromptu Starjammers crew is weirdly graceful, and seems perfectly in place for a big bloody space adventure.
War of Kings sends Vulcan on a collision course with one of my other favorite Marvel characters, Black Bolt. As is usually the case with major events trying to ship units, this comic eventually gets too big for its britches. The art never feels rushed, but sometimes feels uneven, particularly when switching between the locales of the Kree and the Shi’ar. This might have been intentional, but it plays less like contrast and more like the comic has no idea what tone it wants to set. Still, when Pelletier is on, he is on. Above we see the faux-climax of the big Black Bolt v. Vulcan showdown. Seriously, they took Vulcan so seriously as a character that they had him go toe-to-toe with Black Bolt, even pushing him to yelling. I love seeing Vulcan drawn as being flayed by Black Bolt’s yell within Black Bolt’s yell. It’s a really gutsy choice and my goodness does it pay off.
Like the art, "War of Kings" is all over the place. At some point in the middle of "Kingbreaker," everything that has resulted in all of these cool Shi’ar and Starjammer and X-men characters colliding starts to feel like just any other tie-in: it’s really all here to set up the new status quo in the broader universe. Of course, I know it’s not “War of Brothers,” so the fact that Vulcan leaves Havok for bigger and better fights with Black Bolt shouldn’t be all that shocking to me.
After everything Havok goes through to try and take down his brother, after having him at his mercy on two separate occasions, he has to sit back and watch him (maybe?) die at the hands of someone else. Alex’s obsession, at the end of everything, had an endpoint. Though stranding himself and several people that he loves in hostile space infinitely far from home, he mans the fuck up at the end, hugs his main squeeze, and accepts the reality that there is nothing left for him to do. Despite the lives at stake, despite the possibility that his audacity might have doomed not only himself but billions of other lives, he faces reality.
He’s really the one Summers brother free from Xavier’s fuckery, and it shows in this moment. Maybe facing reality means something different back on earth (Scott certainly thinks so, especially “Schism” and after), but in that moment, Havok and the Starjammers really ascend the whole thing, as the Inhumans, Kree, and Shi’ar all slide into disrepair.
Oh, the other thing I like about everything Vulcan is in:
FUCKING SPACE WARS!!1 *PEW PEW PEW*
No comments:
Post a Comment