Why "Uncanny X-Men" #14 Is Just Too Much Bother To Review

Please do be warned; there will be spoilers and there will be dubious and disagreeable cod-intellectualising. Get away, while you can, because the blogger's going to discuss the thoughts that went through his head when he decided that he wasn't going to be reviewing Uncanny X-Men #14 after all;

There's a great big problem for the little-league blogger who's thinking of writing about Kieron Gillen and Dustin Weaver's Uncanny X-Men #14, and the problem is, where to start?

Perhaps with the audacity of a story which features a villain-centric tale without the presence of a single mutant from either Utopia or the Jean Grey School For Higher Learning? After all, that's in many ways a thoroughly perverse decision, sidestepping as it does the more obvious sales-boosting opportunities offered by the crossover that's Avengers v X-Men. Or what about a focus on the process by which an unprecedented degree of depth and fascination's been lent to that least interesting of uber-villains, Mr Sinister? And yet, the brief appearance of clones of both Gambit and Madelyne Prior, amongst others, notably succeeds in making characters rendered toxic by over-use and ill-attention appear far more intriguing than worn-through. So why not an attempt to explain how it is that the brief scene showing Sinister's progress through his "prize collection" seems so intriguing? But then, why not also touch upon the way in which Sinister's new underworld kingdom ties into the previously-established backstory of Marvel's subterranean nations? In a time in which continuity is too often thought of as a regressively archaic indulgence, there's surely a point to discussing how a shared-Earth's common history can be used to strengthen rather than smother a story's appeal?

         

But push aside the most immediately fannish aspects of how Gillen and Weaver are helping to rejuvenate the X-Franchise here, and there's some remarkable technical achievements to pay attention to. Yet where to start? Weaver's impressively meticulous and evocative world-building is an unprecedented triumph, fleshing out as it does the inspired fusion of 19th century industrial Britain and Functionalist hubris which Gillen's script presents us with. To create the visuals for such a complex culture from scratch, and to do so with such conspicuous success, obviously required a demanding degree of research and design far beyond that which the typical single-issue commission tends to insist upon. To present such work in a way which never draws attention to itself when it should be serving the beats and meaning of the script must have required an untypical degree of self-discipline. And yet, once the end of the issue's been reached, there can't be too many readers who've been able to resist luxuriating in Weaver's stage-sets, and in the twisted, sanitised chocolate-box perversion of the reality of mid-Victorian London's chaos, atavistic energy and filth which he presents. It's an accomplishment which surely deserves paying considerable and respectful attention to.  

But there’s also a quite frankly jolting degree of ambition present in Gillen’s state-of-the-nation script too. To load up the conventions of the “mainstream” super-book with this degree of intellectual relish and moral purpose, and to do so while never burying the narrative under story-miring tub-thumping, is something which hasn’t been consistently seen on this scale since Alan Moore’s DC work in the mid-Eighties. (*1) Yet it's not just the weight and purpose of the content that's being loaded into his stories that's worth recognising. For Gillen's playfulness with the structure of Uncanny X-Men #14 is similarly canny and purposeful. Resolving the conflict of the tale with 25% of the story still to go, for example, ran the risk that the rest of the issue would be nothing other than anti-climatic. Yet Gillen clearly calculated how he could best accentuate both the power of Sinister and the inhumanely repressive nature of his regime. The elongated epilogue to the issue works to hammer home how substantial an opponent Sinister is, while constantly pressing the horror and hopelessness of living under such a tyrannical, pseudo-rational rule. To avoid any sense that the momentum of the story's long over, those last pages are also seeded with enticing teasers for coming events. Because of that, the reader's directed away from noticing that the story's now free of conflict and jeopardy, and so the desperately miserable end of the coup against Sinister hangs oppressively in the air without the tale feeling as if ended long before the pages run out. It's just one of a series of strategies adopted by the writer in what could easily be read as a manifesto directed against the inexplicably narrow ambitions of the great majority of super-book creators.

*1:- Folks will no doubt have also been following Gillen's dissection of  the myths of Two Nations Britain in recent Journey Into Mystery issues too.

            

But none of the above possibilities for discussion would take into consideration the sub-text as well as the text here, the aspects of intertextuality in addition to the mechanics of the narrative. So why not take a moment to consider how Gillen appropriated aspects of 19th Century pseudo-empirical dogma here?  He's already explained on CBR, for example, that his portrayal of Mr Sinister reflects the “Victorian mindset and Determinism.” It’d take an idiot to disagree with him. In particular, Gillen’s been upfront about the influence of Notes From Underground, and that’s all there on the page too. After all, the story does kick off with a statement repudiating the utopianism of post-Enlightenment structuralist delusions, before going to paint Sinister’s newborn arcadia as a tellingly Comtean delusion. Weaver’s artwork offers us a world in which a self-perpetuating autocracy parades under Imperial architecture which evokes both the Great Exhibition, in all its cultural and technological arrogance, and Dostoevsky’s famous anti-Chernyshevskian symbol of the "Crystal Palace". Gillen even has Sinister declaring himself to be, with what seems to be a conspicuous lack of irony, Doctor Frankenstein’s heir. After all, a super-villain who can declare himself  “a modern Prometheus” without seemingly twigging the nemesis he’s calling into being is one who's far too much the faux-rationalist to pay attention to the unquantifiable virtues offered by fiction. Chance and individual meaning, it's impossible not to suspect, will eventually do for Sinister, who, for all his genius, can't even grasp the teleological flaws in his own arguments.

And yet, how to attempt to discuss any of that without seeming to be the greatest bullshit artist in the blogosphere?

         

But paying attention to Gillen's discussion of the philosophies of the 19th century brings with it the spectre of 21st century politics too. Much that Gillen has Sinister subscribe to remains central to the public discourse of 2012. The so-called scientific racism of the New Right and the reductionism and determinism inherent in the economics of austerity. The reification of society by elite members and theorists alike in order to justify the concentration of advantage into the hands of the few, and the rejection of the rights of the many in favour of the supposedly society-strengthening virtues of the elite. Even the gleaming marble of Sinister's smog-less, ordered, sickly-cosy appropriation of 1851's Imperial Britain evokes the nostalgarama of the recent Jubilee celebrations and Danny Boyle's planned John Major-friendly opening ceremony for this year's Olympics. To stare at the aristocracy of Sinister and his clones as presented on the final page of Uncanny X-Men #14 isn't to be immediately reminded of Cameron and his cabinet of millionaires and collaborators, of course, but then, that doesn't seem to be Gillen and Weaver's intention anyway. (For one thing, the Coalition just isn't competent enough to present such an air of uniformity and menace.) Similarly, Gillen and McKelvie's response to the sickening business of homophobic bullying in 2011's Generation Hope #9 didn't rely on replicating a real-world example of prejudice either. As with the story of Zeeshan, Gillen presents as much of the relevant values and behaviour of his critique as the story, genre and medium can bear, but what he doesn't do is bellow out an insulting literal and simple-minded polemic. By placing Sinister in a mock-Victorian setting while accentuating the horrors which his ideology inspires, the creators succeed in emphasising how regressive and reactionary are the lords and masters of 2012, who justify so many of their decisions with reference to disturbingly similar Victorian values. What clearly made no sense at all in moral and logical and practical terms in the context of 1851 surely makes even less in the now of some one hundred and seventy years later.

          

All of which is why it's just not worth this particular blogger writing about Gillen and Weaver's work here. A discussion of how both men have rejuvenated Sinister, for example, is something for writers with a far more comprehensive knowledge of the super-villain's career than I have. To charge in trying to say something productive about the storytelling is to inevitably appear to be laying claim to technical knowledge that I just don't have the experience and credibility to support. To delve into the literature and politics of it all brings only the strong probability of looking foolish matched with the likelihood of appearing pathetically pretentious. And to suggest that commenting on current affairs was undoubtedly part of Gillen's intentions is to court an all-mighty slapdown for misrepresenting my own beliefs as someone else's. In short, there's just too much to write about, and too little time and space - and indeed authority - to justify doing so.

       
Worse yet, whatever aspect of Uncanny X-Men #14 is discussed, there's such a risk of sounding like a cheerleading sycophant that it probably makes sense to hold back and wait for a less impressive comic to write about. Because it's the rare likes of this book which show that both the sub-genre and the monthly pamphlet itself are anything but exhausted of their value. Quite simply, this is a story that's more than just fit to stand with all those other wonderfully odd and smart, idiosyncratic and moving tales which have helped establish the super-book as something more substantial than simply wham-bam - awwwww!- thank you Superman.

And so, that's why I'm not going to attempt to review the comic as I might once have tried to. It's beyond my capacity to applaud without making an unnecessary, and quite probably contentious, mess of it all.

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