Avengers vs. X-Men: How Wolvie menage’d his way into yet another “Event”!

The Future of Marvel or just another Scam to get you to Read!

The king is dead and the prince is in chains…

If you haven’t finished AvX, or you’ve been hiding in mom’s basement playing to many copious hours of OverPower, please stop reading and go back to picking your own Avengers verses X-Men winners.

OverPower?! Who remembers that? [If not, Wiki that.] I can write a whole future blog on just the benefits of social climbing and chick-picking-up learned through hours of OverPower!

But, back to business.

So AvX started off with a Dick Trickle and ended with a Big Bang. We had both high and low moments that probably had you either saying WOW or WTF. Yeah, I know the combination of Kung Lao Kung-Fu, Spider-Man as a Kung-Fu master, and the uprising of the Phoenix does get a bit out there… But, there where still stand out moments, even after fanboys and girls dealt with the usual bogus “Marvel Event” writing (convolution!), weird price points ($4.99 for more ads!), and rushed plot development (Nova came from.. where?).

If you have not had the luxury of reading Marvel’s answer to DC’s “Flashpoint”, you did miss a series that potentially opens up some fabulous new beginnings. DC tried it with Flash’s strange, often aimless time traveling mindfuck and missed the ball a tad, but Marvel in the end wipes the slate clean and begins anew.

Story lines that have been building since the Scarlet Witch that uttered those fateful words.. oh so many years ago.. have finally come to fruition.

The series starts with the Avengers tasking themselves to bring in Hope, the virgin birth/first mutant to come back from, well “No more mutants!”, due to the Phoenix power heading towards Earth. Obviously this doesn’t tread well with the Supreme Ruler of the Mutant Race, Cyclops. Hail Summers! During the storming of the beaches of Utopia, Avengers

battled X-Men (which made many of the typically pointless tie-ins worthy of purchase) and Hope disappears to find her own flaming bird in — where else — Japan. In the end it will be the middle man in the menage a trois, Wolverine, that finds her and sets off act two.

Act two is the weakest in this Apostle’s eyes. Phoenix lands down on the moon (again) and Hope wusses out so a combination of 5 X-Men stand up to take the torch, or flaming bird. Supreme Ruler of the Mutant Race Cyclops, his continually written wrong and cheating lady friend Emma, I-like -to-wear-mankinis Namor, and the siblings I have rage Colossus and his devil kid sister, Magik. Let it be known that 2 of these said X-Men have some of the weakest story lines, and have barely been X-Men in the time that passes for months in the Marvel Universe. The X-Men and Women go on become there own.. uh-huh.. Phoenix, and go on to decide the Earth could use a little home improvement.

Now, of course, anything readers will see remade will not see in other Marvel titles this side of the Avengers and X-Men tie-ins. Oh, how I miss the days when such events affected all of the Marvel Universe. A boy can dream.

Back at the matter at hand, our “Phoenix Five” decide that capturing all of the Avengers seems like the moral thing to do, in addition to imprisoning them in a hell (small h not big H) is also copacetic. While Hope is on the run, she finds her Chi and has Spider-Man and Iron Fist teach her how to be the very best Kung-Fu Mutant a mom could ask for. That’s when these ol’ tangled webs start getting a bit stretchy. If only Jean realized that Parker’s newfound Chi could control such a demonic sunbird!

Surely, this would have saved us years of bad Cyclops writing and to many reincarnation of Jean to count!

Act three is finally the accumulation of all the piggybanks robbed to see the end. Each of the Phoenix X-Men are knocked out, till only uber-powerful Dark Phoenix Cyclops is left floating in fire. The prince of the mutant race then decides that his only known father figure has had enough and offs him, leading to the most unmentioned catalyst of this whole adventure, Nova (Don’t blink or you miss him in the first issue).

After shit hits the fan — or the sun, literally — I’ll leave those tidbits towards your own imagination. Thankfully, this past week’s issue #12 involves the recently forgotten about Hope/Scarlet Witch Kung-Fu chopblock scenarios, which involve the Phoenix’s final destination, some of which still questionably remains unsolved. Writer Jason Aaron’s conclusion does fair as well as the initial #0 issue (hey, DC’s not the only one going zero!), with some nifty artwork from Adam Kubert and perhaps the sad ramifications of Cyclops undying love for his own people.

But, like most things Marvel, the epilogue is rushed. Cyclops now bears chains and is treated as the most hated monster since Lafayette Ron Hubbard — despite “only” killing one person (as opposed to countless mental states, mind you). Holier-than-thou Captain America admits in the end that he was partly to blame, though for Summer’s sake it’s a little too late for that. Hard to believe he’d be so hard on a guy possessed by a cosmic bird when his own best friends include: Wolverine “I have a death squad” Logan, Bucky “I was a Russian Assassin Winter Soldier”, and Daredevil.. “I was a possessed.. uh Shadowland ring a bell?”

Although I enjoyed many bits and pieces of Avengers vs. X-Men, the Apostle can’t help but beg to ask Marvel:

-Why do you continually decide to let a round-robin of writers conjure up something that should only be handled by one?

-Why do you continually make us suffer through amateurish artwork that isn’t Copiel or Kubert during oddball issues?

-Why do you continually have the audacity to charge us a dollar more for the final issue?

I haven’t even covered all the holes in the story and bogus character development or lack of! But, hey. That’s over; here comes MarvelNOW…..