I'm about 100 percent sure "X-Men: Disassembled" is the worst X-Men event I've ever read, following up the recent not-quite-as-bad-but-still-awful mini-event "X-Men: Extermination" -- all of which follows the worst two-three years of other Marvel events and regular stories I've experienced in my 30 years as a comics fan.
Since "Secret Wars" ended three years ago, I've been almost constantly dissatisfied as a Marvel reader. "Venom Inc." early last year and then "Spider-Geddon" very recently were genuinely great, and the general direction for Spider-Man of late has itself been good, but I'm extremely hard pressed to think of anything else that fits the bill.
There have been a couple of excellent-to-good individual 12-issue books in Tom King's "The Vision" and Ethan Sacks's "Old Man Hawkeye," but I barely even enjoy Jason Aaron's work on Thor any longer. That book hasn't been working for me since the end of Jane Foster's time with the hammer, and Aaron's Avengers book is plainly terrible.
Saddest of all, though, is having difficulty even coming up with an X-Men book outside of "Rogue & Gambit" or "Mr. & Mrs. X" that I've enjoyed in years. "X-Men: Disassembled" is something of a culmination of all the problems I've been having with Marvel lately, and perfectly encapsulates examples of them. Everything I could describe as being wrong with the writing in Marvel comics these past three years somehow manages to make its way into these ten issues -- ten issues, by the way, that manage to pull off the dubious paradoxical achievement of simultaneously being too bloated while also lacking nearly any substance to speak of.
For a major event that comes during an era of the X-Men
that was billed with the promise that your back issues matter as one of its selling points, there is almost complete disregard for continuity in "X-Men: Disassembled." There are completely untelegraphed face-heel turns. Out-of-character behavior on an immense scale. Inconsistent behavior (yes, this is a separate matter from the out-of-character behavior just listed, as I'm referring to characters behaving inconsistently within the confines of this event alone and even within individual issues of the event).
Within "X-Men: Disassembled," everything from where battles are taking place between the end to one issue and the beginning of the next (in an underground laboratory or in a city street on the surface) to character power levels are inconsistent -- e.g. a hero who has been mostly ineffective throughout the first nine issues becomes a nearly unstoppable force of havoc in the final issue after being brainwashed; meanwhile, the main villain makes far more powerful displays early in the event than toward the end despite supposedly receiving a massive upgrade at the end of issue #9.
Unexplained motivations of antagonists abound in this event, as do unexplained plot elements central to the main plot threads -- along with abruptly abandoned plot points that were initially set up as central to the event. Plot-induced stupidity reigns constantly. Momentary arbitrary rules (e.g. [X]'s powers aren't working right now, but they will again in a couple of pages), seemingly conceived on the fly, are played completely straight.
Lacking the slightest hint of self-awareness or irony, these happenings (I dare not call them "developments," for nothing in the storytelling here is gestated or earned) simply move the plot along from moment to moment, scene to scene, toward its mandated outcome with no consideration extended to how cohesive those story beats are or whether they can be said to lend themselves to one another. Certainly not a coherent story, there can barely even be said to be connective plot tissue here. What we have is mostly a series of repeated messy crowd action vignettes featuring essentially interchangeable characters repeat battle phrases while marching assembly line-style through a repeating of past events' highlights.
"X-Men: Disassembled" is much like the recent disastrous "Infinity Wars" event in all these respects; yet it is somehow even worse, for it has led to my saying this: I'm pretty sure I'm done with all of Marvel's comics.
I had been considering this decision for a while, thanks to my stated ongoing dissatisfaction with Marvel these past three years, but had intended to at least see things through the upcoming line-wide all-hands-on-deck event "The War of the Realms," which Jason Aaron has been building up to for several years. Now, though, I'm not so sure.
Somewhere along the line they left me behind or maybe I outgrew them. "Secret Wars" and the developments leading into it had been everything I had waited my entire life as a comics fan for. Not only that, "Secret Wars" offered Marvel so many opportunities for a creative fresh start, and they have squandered it all beyond recovery.
There were opportunities there to put the genie back in the bottle on Marvel's overabundance of alternate universes, the overuse of time travel, the baggage of Marvel Earth's pre-history being bound up in the activities of the race of space gods known as the Celestials -- and instead of embracing these opportunities, Marvel immediately doubled or even tripled down on all of the problematic artifacts of its decades-long history that even decades-long readers such as myself have felt hinders their ability to steer a tightly edited line of fiction on a consistent basis.
Thank God for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's looking to be all I have left of the modern myths that captured my heart and imagination since the days of my earliest memories.
They don't need it. It doesn't give them life. It doesn't even make them superhuman. They're superhuman from the start; it just mutates them. Karnak was never exposed to the mists, yet he can still lift one ton, is easily one of the world's most dangerous martial artists, and has the inherent ability to identify the weakness in anything.
