The eternal question…
(For sticklers and fanboys, this can be taken as the entire franchise, or just the films, or just the comics, or any combination of things involving the two caped crusaders)
Winning with a resounding five votes to zero, The Dark Knight has been crowned your best superhero. You lot have good taste in men wearing tights and capes.
When Marvel first announced the Avengers Vs X-Men series, I was scared. Very scared. It’s no secret Marvel have kicked up the amount of universe-wide story arcs within the past decade and some people think this is for the, good whereas others are less enthused. I am one of those who enjoy it; Secret Invasion was to me what the Bible is to Christianity and I will be buried with that book. The reason I was scared at the AvX announcement was because I am a die hard X-Men fanatic and have been since I was old enough to read. So with the popularity of The Avengers growing because the film and its multiple prequels I feared they would bury the X-Men like they buried Moon Knight (Remember his part in Shadowland? No? Me neither. It never happened! Haha!).
The first few issues were a bit all over the place, to be honest, especially the whole back and forth between the Avengers and the X-Men over who was to win the super-powered custody battle that would decide the fate of the Earth (which was quite appropriate given that everyone was clad in their Fathers for Justice superhero costumes!). Basically a big fiery cosmic space-bird threatens to destroy the Earth and these guys are fighting over custody of one Hope Summers, who is believed to be the key to stopping/harnessing said space-bird’s power. Captain America thinks its going to burn everyone’s faces off whereas Cyclops reckons it’s here to save mutantkind from extinction. So after a couple of fights and some verbal sparring, the big nasty space-bird appears and decides to disregard the plot and inhabit six of the X-Men, solidifying them as the villains. This made me very happy as the characters who were inhabited by aforementioned nasty-big-great-angry-cosmic-space-bird were all pretty sinister in their own ways (apart from maybe Colossus). Here’s where Marvel shoe-horn in the ol’ Spidey “With great power comes great responsibility” angle, as the six inhabited X-Men now have the power to shape the world as they please. But the power is absolute and as they say: power corrupts.
From this point on things get real as heck. So real. Too real. I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t read it but now you’ve got the idea, let me talk about my feelings on the whole arc. First off, I like that Iron Fist was given some importance, even if it was a little Mister Miyagi-type mentor role. Daniel Rand and his iron fist have been getting more and more recognition as of late and it’s about time. Another star of the story is definitely Spider-man. I loved him and his heroics and blatant disregard for his own safety; Peter Parker truly embodies what it is to be a superhero whilst remaining human. Yes, he has crippling insecurities at times and he talks too much but I think that’s more of a coping mechanism for himself, rather than a projection of his terrible jokes. The angle of Cyclops becoming so fanatical about saving the mutant race that it turned him into the opposite of what he stood for was quite well done and I feel that it couldn’t have been anyone else other than him to be the main villain. Turning Xavier’s golden child against the dream he’d been fighting for his whole life was magnificent and not entirely a surprise as cracks were showing as early as the Utopia arc.
The Avengers themselves weren’t really that prominent in proceedings as I’d have liked; it was more of the honorary Avengers doing big things for the story such as Spider-man, Iron Fist, Black Panther, Nova etc. This may have been to make the situations look more dire though. A lot of the time the big names in Earth’s Mightiest Heroes weren’t able to deal with things such as Tony Stark’s inability to stop the Phoenix force on several occasions, Thor’s defeat by Magik and Colossus & Cap’s constant rescue missions resulting in losses.
In conclusion, it appeared we were in for quite a wobbly story for the first few issues but AvX blossomed into an interesting arc with a lot of character exploration on some key names especially Peter Parker, Cyclops and Hope Summers. I’m very excited to see the what the aftermath brings as there are a lot of threads left to explore, and a lot of great things that could be set in motion. I think it would be unwise to have a universe-wide story again any time soon but given Marvel’s habits in recent years, we may see another very soon.
Morbid reminder of the day: This infographic (created by Designbysoap) sorta kills the image of the invincible superhero doesn’t it? Also shows that unless you have either a) superpowers, b) genetic mutation or c) shedloads of cash and training, then your tenure as a hero will be very very short.
