I am so behind on my comic reviews. I'm finally wrapping up my review of this series, though (the last issue came out last month).
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In reviewing this storyline, entitled "Counter-Evolutionary," I'm going to try to be as fair as possible. Being the follow-up to last year's "Avengers & X-Men: AXIS" chosen to explore that crossover's editorially mandated decree that Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch no longer be Magneto's children, this book was always going to face an uphill battle. Not solely in managing its burden with plausibility, but also in being well received -- with Marvel fans in general, and with myself in particular, being as I am, a lifelong fan of the Magnus family.
So, having made every effort to be fair here, let me begin this review by saying that vol. 2 of Rick Remender's "Uncanny Avengers" -- consisting only of the five issues comprising the "Counter-Evolutionary" story -- sucks some coconut-sized balls.
There's bad writing, continuity blunders and illogical retcons galore -- for example, not only are the twins not Magnus's children, they aren't even mutants! Just infants the High Evolutionary kidnapped and experimented on. Of these craptastic decisions, probably less than half can be blamed on editorial mandate. Remender, sadly, just has to step up and claim a lot of this shit.
Let's start, though, with the problems that can't be attributed to him alone. Namely, the notion that Wanda and Pietro Maximoff are not the children of Magneto nor even of his late wife, Magda -- being instead the biological offspring of their adopted parents, Marya and Django Maximoff. How does this "revelation" square with past storylines that have firmly established Wanda and Pietro as Magnus's children? Answer: It simply flies in the face of too much of Marvel's history to
ever be taken seriously.
Some would suggest -- and have -- that the story of what took place the night of the twins' birth was always somewhat unreliable anyway since it was only ever
recited to Quicksilver (
in "Avengers" #186) and later Magneto (in "Vision and the Scarlet Witch" #4) by Bova, a creation and servant of the High Evolutionary. This claim isn't true, however.
The story "Demon Night" from "Uncanny X-Men Annual" #12 shares the events of that night in more detail than Bova ever did or would have been able to, and is told from no individual character's perspective. Being neither a flashback nor a secondhand description, we are outright shown the events of that evening from an omniscient perspective along with the internal thoughts of several characters, including the High Evolutionary, the sixth century magician Magnus (not to be confused with Magneto), and Magda herself.
Not only does Magda give birth to twins that night, and not only do the events Bova is personally involved with match those she recounted first to Pietro and later to Magneto, but the issue's narration also explicitly identifies the girl Magda gave birth to as the future Scarlet Witch.
Moving on to the other awful editorial mandate, if Quicksilver isn't a mutant, why did he lose his powers on M-Day when Wanda cast her spell that removed most mutants' powers? It wouldn't make sense that the spell simply targeted everyone she perceived to be a mutant, as most of those who lost their powers would have been people Wanda had never met nor heard of. For that matter, her "Strike down my family" spell in "AXIS" missed Magneto entirely despite her perception that he was her father.
On a similar note, if the Scarlet Witch isn't a mutant, why has Cerebro been able to detect her in the past (e.g. "X-Men: First Class" #7)? For that matter, even if there wasn't a verifiable occasion on which Cerebro or Cerebra had detected one of them, with all the time Wanda and Pietro have spent with the X-Men, it's not plausible in the least that none of the telepaths would have ever noticed if the device wasn't detecting the twins.
Now, for the most obvious question of all: What was to be gained by misleading Magneto or the twins into believing
any of this,
especially if the Evolutionary saw the twins as failures and discarded them?
This is hardly the end to the list of questions that arise, though.
What happened to Magda and her children? Was she actually pregnant? We know she was. She was shown to have given birth to Wanda and Pietro not just in a flashback or through the account of an untrustworthy narrator, but in "real time."
And as with Magda giving birth to the twins, we have seen Chthon touch the Scarlet Witch at the moment of her birth, thus being the cause of her affinity with Chaos Magic. If Wanda's reality warping powers came from the High Evolutionary instead, what then does this make of Wanda's history with Chthon? If her Chaos Magic still came from him, how did this new character Luminous -- another experiment of the High Evolutionary -- gain both access to it and superior control of it? And if her control over it is superior to Wanda's, why didn't the Evolutionary simply have Luminous restore Magneto's powers back in "Uncanny X-Men" #507 instead of conducting a risky technological procedure to reverse what Wanda had done on M-Day?
Speaking of Luminous, where has she been all this time? Where has she been hiding while growing up? The point is made that she isn't as old as Wanda and Pietro, but she's still clearly an adult -- so where has she been? Why didn't Quicksilver come across her or get introduced to her when he was living at Wundagore Mountain after the Onslaught saga?
And if the Evolutionary is neither the twins' father nor sees himself as such, why does he refer to Luminous as
his daughter and
their sister? Why does she refer to him as father to all three of them?
For that matter, who the hell is she? Is she actually Wanda and Pietro's sister? Is she another human he kidnapped to experiment on? Did he evolve her from an Earth animal like his New Men? Did he create her from scratch?
What also are the implications of all this for Marya and Django Maximoff's biological twin children, Ana and Mateo?
We learned long ago ("Avengers" #186) that these children died, though the circumstances were never explained. Did the couple have two different sets of twins?
Are we instead to understand that Wanda and Pietro actually
are Ana and Mateo? When the High Evolutionary gave the twins to the Maximoffs,
he did say that Wanda and Pietro were born on a Saturday, just as the biological twins born to them had been ("Uncanny Origins" #2). If this is so, though, why did the High Evolutionary rename them and return them to their parents under the pretense that they were not the same children?
Speaking of which, why did the Maximoffs not recognize the two as their lost twins? Despite them still being infants, it stands to reason Marya and Django would have known their own children.
Supposing that the Evolutionary's experiments on these infants of perplexing origin altered them so significantly as to make them unrecognizable -- and even if we accept that this explains why the Maximoffs didn't recognize them as Ana and Mateo -- why did the Evolutionary bother with returning them to their birth parents in the first place if he saw them as disappointments?
Would not any adoptive couple have served just as well? If he was being considerate of the Maximoff's feelings, why would he not tell them these children
were Ana and Mateo? For that matter, why would the Evolutionary as presented in this storyline even care about their feelings? Particularly in light of his willingness to -- one might actually say "preference to" -- periodically slaughter the "disappointing" population of Counter-Earth and start over in this series?
And while we're on
that topic, where did this callous indifference toward his creations come from? In the past, he always showed a merciful, paternal love for even his more flawed creations, such as the Man-Beast, who tried to kill the Evolutionary numerous times.
Along similar lines, why this sudden animosity toward Pietro from the High Evolutionary that has never been seen before? Especially throughout the "Quicksilver" solo title from the '90s, there was mutual respect and affection there. Pietro regarded the Evolutionary as the closest person he had in his life to a father figure. Why was none of this referenced in Remender's story?
For his part, the Evolutionary prioritized the safety of Luna, Pietro's daughter, during Exodus's invasion of Wundagore in "Quicksilver" #1, and Pietro was also the one person able to get through to him in "Heroes For Hire & Quicksilver Annual 1998" when a bout of insanity had taken him.
For that matter, if the Evolutionary is supposed to be insane here once again, what is the cause of it? He was healed of that malady at the end of the aforementioned annual. I'll grant you this question could -- and should -- have been asked about his more villainous turn seen in last year's "New Warriors," vol. 5, but even there, he certainly wasn't presented as this cruel and callous.
Oh, and before we forget the twins'
other set of not-actually-their-parents from before they learned Magneto was supposed to be their father -- what does all this mean for Marvel's timeline since Wanda and Pietro were presented to Robert Frank, the Whizzer, as his and Miss America's children sometime not too long after World War II? Again, we aren't just relying on Bova's flashbacks here.
Frank's own account (
"Giant-Size Avengers" #1) matches her story.
As is plain to see here, whatever the intent for Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch's origin may have been with this latest volume of "Uncanny Avengers," streamlining and simplifying it was not a consideration.
How much of this catastrofuck is to be blamed on Remender and how much is editorial decree that he tried (and failed) to make the best of is unclear. Though he had no hand in the
"Mutants No More" nonsense or the choice to undo the twins' longstanding (
since "Uncanny X-Men" #125 in 1979!) parentage, all the finer details that weren't worked out can fairly be laid at his feet -- particularly in light of the truly
bad story he wrote to field editorial's demands, and all the time wasted therein on unnecessary subplots that go nowhere.
The Vision had a completely expendable side story unrelated to the main plot, yet it nonetheless took its share of page time away from it. His dalliance with the android Eve, and their production of numerous children (yes, really), is a complete narrative dead end, and -- along with his arriving on Counter-Earth near her -- could fairly be described as the most random, meandering and all-too-convenient element in a story full of such things.
Remender, if you really felt Vision needed this much of his own side-plot in a story that was supposed to be about the Maximoff twins' origin, you could have stuck with what you gave brief lip service to at the beginning of the first issue -- his lingering feelings of anger toward Wanda, his ex-wife who got him killed several years ago.
Captain America (Sam Wilson) was given nothing to do. His subplot of getting turned into a fauna zombie and his very presence were completely unnecessary -- a role that literally could have been filled by anyone, if not cut from this book altogether. He doesn't even receive a complimentary moment to shine. The Vision, who rescues Wanda as Luminous is about to kill her, at least gets that.
Rogue's subplot is almost equally without direction beyond assembling what she calls "a stopgap Unity Squad" to track down the twins at the beginning of the story. She then spends nearly the whole arc in the clutches of some nutter working for the High Evolutionary who apparently expunges Simon Williams' consciousness from within her, effectively killing him. Simon's death is paid hardly any lip service, and, as if that weren't bad enough, what the creepy researcher had planned to do with Rogue is never made clear.
Worse still, Rogue's big contribution after she's freed is to attack the High Evolutionary, quickly get knocked out, and then have to be rescued by Quicksilver for the second time in as many issues.
Sabretooth actually gets surprisingly decent exploration out of all this, and Remender does a genuinely good job at capturing his voice, but the circumstances of his breaking free of the Evolutionary's mind control in issue #4 are unclear thanks to a confusing presentation. If Vision had something to do with it, that point is not adequately made. The whole thing comes off as a random, albeit fortuitous, mechanical malfunction.
I'd like to say Doctor Voodoo's presence is better utilized. He at least makes the obligatory contribution of teleporting the team to Counter-Earth at the start of the story, but he then spends the whole time communing with the spirits of the Evolutionary's victims in yet another subplot that goes nowhere.
Voodoo assists them in their choice to forego a peaceful dissolution so that they may instead strike back at the Evolutionary on physical terms, but their presence in the final battle makes no difference. It neither turns the tide nor saves anyone who was about to be executed. They just attack, momentarily hold the Evolutionary at bay, and are then destroyed.
As for the newly introduced Luminous, she is such a non-character as to give the reader absolutely no reason to care about her, nor to care whether she's ever seen again. In fact, I hope she isn't. She's just Generic Cackling Villainous Lackey #1,234,567, who vanishes along with the High Evolutionary when he makes his sudden retreat.
For that matter, what became of the Low Evolutionary's rebellion after the High Evolutionary's departure? This plot point was dropped entirely and left unresolved, as was the current status of Counter-Earth.
And that's not even getting into all the straight-up continuity errors at work here:
-In issue #1, it's twice said that Wanda and Pietro were raised on Wundagore Mountain. They were not
-Issue #4 indicates that this is Rogue's first meeting with the High Evolutionary. She met him before, back in "Uncanny X-Men Annual" #12
-Issue #5 shows a flashback of Magneto coming to Avengers Mansion to tell the twins he was their father. That actually took place in the city of Attilan on the Moon ("Vision and the Scarlet Witch" #4). Also, the conversation shown here never happened
-How is this Counter-Earth on the other side of the Sun (like the original planet that the High Evolutionary created) when the Counter-Earth created by Franklin Richards has been occupying that space for years? Did the Evolutionary take over that Counter-Earth and execute its original populace? Is this supposed to be his original Counter-Earth, which was taken from him to put on display in a space museum by the Beyonders many years ago? If so, did he slaughter its original populace?
-Lord Gator as seen here looks nothing like he did in past appearances, where he was clearly a humanoid alligator. He now appears to be a humanoid horned frog
Remender, I know you'd like to be Bendis, but that doesn't mean you have to write like him. You sure as shit did here, though. You can do better.
As I said at the beginning of this review, I intend to be as fair as possible here, so I will give credit where it's due: Daniel Acuña's art is beautiful, atmospheric and conveys both action and emotion well. It is the high point of this work.
For Remender's part, he does leave the possibility written in at the end that everything we think we've learned about the twins during this storyline may not be true.
The Vision apparently uncovers the High Evolutionary's secret files after he's fled at the end of the story (I say "apparently" because it's quickly related by way of The Vision's internal monologue) -- and we're made aware that there is still a secret "truth about the twins." We just don't get to find out what it is.
In that sense -- again keeping credit where it's due -- this story fails to fulfill its basic promise: Providing the origin for Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. "Uncanny Avengers" vol. 2 is just a bust.
