Reading Through 2021 99: Acts of Vengeance: Avengers, by Marvel's 1989 crew

Acts of Vengeance: Avengers, by Marvel's 1989 crew

1989

A company-wide Marvel crossover in the 80's that didn't revolve around the X-Men. What a fresh concept!

That was a good image

Marvel first got into the crossover business with Secret Wars and Secret Wars II, but it blossomed with the in-title X-Men crossovers. First was the Mutant Massacre, which was loosely connected between Uncanny X-Men and X-Factor, both telling aspects of a single event, but the characters never really crossed over. It was followed by Fall of the Mutants, which featured those two books and New Mutants, but was mainly a crossover in theme and format. All the books featured independent stories. A year after that came, what was for me, the pinnacle of X-crossovers, Inferno. All three books crossed over into a mega-storyline which pulled in every New York-based comic from Avengers to Spider-Man. At this point, editorial was convinced this was to be an annual event, but there was some fatigue in the X-offices. 

Who could these mystery villains be?

In 1989, the Avengers were made the center of its own crossover, Acts of Vengeance. The concept was brilliant, in terms of a crossover event. Villains would fight heroes they had never fought before, hopefully succeeding with the element of surprise. For Marvel's creators, it was a mandated crossover, but they could basically take any villain from Marvel's history and have fun with them. It was a corporate mandate that creators could enjoy.  Some books were better than others, as always, but it was fun to read.

The crossover has been split into three books, this one focusing on the Avengers, another one being Spider-Man and X-Men, and the last being the rest of the Marvel Universe. I have some nostalgia for the Spider-Man of this crossover, where he gets goofy Captain Universe powers, but none of it is essential. This book, I'd read about half of it at the time and had some fond memories of it, and wanted to revisit it. 

A random assortment of creators

The main creators in this are basically a who's who of people who worked under Jim Shooter. Three of the writers, Gruenwald, Mackie and DeFalco, were never major players in comics, just dependable Marvel Bullpen writers. Gruenwald is really interesting in that he was obsessed with Marvel, and spearheaded the nerdiest Marvel project of all time, the Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe. He did a lot to create a space where Marvel obsessives could explore their fandom. DeFalco at this point had replaced Shooter as editor in chief. I had no love for his work as a kid, but I've reevaluated it after enjoying a lot of his Thor run. I never enjoyed a Mackie book, and can't say I did here either.

Dwayne McDuffie was a newer writer at the time, and went on to be influential with creations like Damage Control and Static Shock, but this might be some of the first work I've read of his that I remember. He went on to work in TV and at DC before passing away too young.

And of course John Byrne, who famously threw a party with a burning effigy when Shooter was fired. I loved Byrne in 1989, and I like it a lot still, but there is a snideness in his work which turns me off. He seemed to think other creators were less than him, and it comes out in his work whenever he "fixed" what he thought was wrong with a book or characters. In this volume, he was writing Avengers, and both writing and drawing West Coast Avengers Avengers: West Coast. (His first act upon taking over WCA was to change the name, because it was a poor decision in his mind. Since he left, Marvel has gone back to the original title for its revival.)

Why would the Sub-Mariner attack his best human friend?!

So all the creators get to have fun. Gruenwald was writing Captain America and Quasar. His Cap run is not exactly beloved, but multiple ideas he introduced have stuck in the decades since, like John Walker and Crossbones. The first two issues feature the Controller, an Iron Man villain I've never heard of before or since, but the third features Magneto and is the high point of the whole crossover. I'll get back to that at the end. 

Eon basically just kills the conversation here. Awkward!

He also does Quasar with bland artist Paul Ryan. Quasar was not a comic I would pick up off the rack to even flip through. The costume, the hair... It was incredibly uncool. I have heard some Quasar fans in the years since say it was an interesting series, so I gave it a chance here, and there were positive and negative things about these issues. Quasar himself couldn't be more bland. A handsome, blond suit-wearing 80s corporate type. It was a dynamic that would have worked in the 50s or 60s, but he comes across as Marvel madlibs here: Tony Stark's aesthetic, Steve Rogers' hair, Peter Parker's bad luck. The peek into the cosmic stuff in the book is interesting though. Quasar's office has a cosmic doorway through which he can chat with tree-like entity named Eon.

Hey gloopy alien, I'll catch you in a net!

Quasar fights the Absorbing Man, the Red Ghost and the Living Laser, but Gruenwald rips on Venom. The pettiness on display here was shocking. The most popular new character at Marvel in a decade, and Venom is promised on the cover. Quasar fights Venom and wins in two pages! He just catches him in a net and then ties him up. Gruenwald is basically just saying Venom sucks and he hates him without explicitly saying it. Hey, Venom does kind of suck, but all the same, Quasar defeats him without breaking a sweat, but also without acknowledging Venom's power set whatsoever. They must have gotten a pile of angry nerd mail after this. The Quasar issues weren't great, but they were competent 80s comics. I can imagine getting into it if I were 10 or 11 years old, but not when I was 14.

The street has no life, the brick building has a hedge behind it. No effort was made on this, this looks like a paycheck

The issues of Avengers Spotlight weren't all competently done though. Spotlight was an Avengers spinoff meant to highlight Hawkeye and other Avengers. The Hawkeye stories here, written by Mackie, and drawn by Al Milgrim and inked by Don Heck, are the kind of comic that made me mad as a kid, but I didn't know why. Some Marvel books just had lazy art on them. Milgrim was a Marvel editor who liked drawing, and Heck drew the Avengers after Kirby left. Heck had some skills, but these stories look rushed and not up to par. Backgrounds are inconsistent or missing, the world looks like nobody lives there. I think if a young artist submitted them to Marvel in 1989, they would have been turned down and told to come back after some practice. It's a shame, because I want to find something to admire the old artists continuing to work in comics for decades, but I just don't think Don Heck is my kind of artist. I already knew I didn't enjoy Milgrim's work.

Dwayne McDuffie's dialogue was surprisingly fun. It calls back to Stan Lee's quips in the 60s

Iron Man was being done by Dwayne McDuffie, with Herb Trimpe pencilling and Al Milgrim on inks. I was not looking forward to these at all, but I really liked them. I wouldn't say they were good exactly, but there was some good stuff going on in them. They were basic stories of a good guy beating on a bad guy. McDuffie had a great sense of humor here, while Trimpe surprised me with some nutty illustrations. 

Just for this single image, I'll never have any doubts why Trimpe was working at Marvel for decades

Back then, I would read Iron Man for a few issues and then drop off. I wanted to like it. I loved the suit and technology, I hated the mustache. I was so turned off by 80s machismo as a kid, I never watched Magnum PI, and I couldn't vibe with Tony Stark. As an adult though, it's a lot easier to wade through the testosterone of it all enjoy what's going on.

Is this what they mean when they say PC culture is killing America? Would Iron Man be allowed to show off his junk to a random hot blonde in a convertible these days?

Meanwhile the Avengers themselves are fighting off random baddies. On the west coast, they fight Hulk villains the U-Foes, an evil version of the Fantastic Four, and the Mole Man's monsters. They are inconsequential stories. In both cases, the villains were duped into attacking the Avengers, and when it's revealed to them, they give up and go home. 

Byrne can draw some exciting stuff. X-Ray is one of the cooler character designs in the Marvel Universe

On the east coast, they fight Freedom Force, the renamed Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and later the Mandarin and the Wizard. These are also drawn by Paul Ryan, with heavy inking by Tom Palmer. Palmer has such a strong brush that I can enjoy the meat and potatoes layouts Ryan gives. Byrne, for whatever frustrations I have with his attitude, always tries to do something inventive and new with characters. Shrinking Blob down and having him sink through the ground fits that bill.

Palmer brings a great John Buscema vibe to his inks

Next we come to Thor, by DeFalco and Frenz, who were in total sync at this point in their run. It's not a knock on them, but I definitely like their space and Asgard stories more than their New York stories. Here though, they bring the Juggernaut against Thor, which seems like a "why hadn't this happened already" idea. Not only that, they introduce a new team to the Marvel Universe: the New Warriors.

Ever since I read this, I want to send people a message the reads: It's war! Total war!

Thor can hold his own against the Juggernaut, but his infinite arrogance treats Juggernaut as a problem he can solve with punches, when in truth, nothing can stop the Juggernaut.

Skateboard to the Juggernaut's face! Frenz kills it in action scenes. These panels are hyper-kinetic while still being totally coherent

They fight for two issues, and Thor solves it by creating a vortex and dropping Juggernaut onto an asteroid. No matter how grounded a Frenz-DeFalco Thor story was, they always made sure something happened that was absolutely crazy.

How you gonna get home from there, tough guy?

One other book dropped in here is an issue of Cloak and Dagger, who were labeled as mutants at this point. Inker Terry Austin is writer, and I don't think it was very good. After a bunch of pages where it felt like the story never ended, I checked and it turned out to be a double sized issue. Avengers play a substantial role, which I guess was the logic for including it in this collection. It's competent, but very inessential.

The Hulk robot from the worst issues of the Eternals is brought back and stuffed with gags

The collection ends with the big revelation of the crossover, that the mastermind behind it all is Loki, who has never forgiven himself for causing the Avengers to unite in the first issue of the series. Byrne does a pretty good job portraying Loki as a person consumed with hatred and frustration that they just can never win.

Byrne is a fanboy at heart, and he gives the crossover a sensible foundation rooted in the Avengers history. Compared to the X-crossovers, which often seemed cobbled together under their editor's orders, this feels like a naturally occurring Avengers storyline. And Byrne gets to draw a fairly traditional lineup of Avengers doing their thing, as the east and west (and Great Lakes!) branches have come together at this point.

This image of Thor and Loki felt retro in 1989

All in all, this was a great crossover. It managed to do the things a crossover is meant to, without falling victim to the common weaknesses of them. It helped sell books to people following their favorite villains to other books, and create a feeling of a unified continuity. At the same time, none of the crossovers were essential, and you didn't need to read the central books to grasp what happened in the crossover issues. It was good for the managers, good for the creators, and good for readers too!

Kids paid for this sort of thing!

The book includes an epilogue that was printed as a back up story in an annual, that basically just tells what happened. This was published a year or two after, and is exhibit A of why Marvel's annuals became a waste of money. In order to pad out 64 pages, they created "stories" like this that only left readers confused about why they paid triple price for filler.

Not even the Wizard thinks Nazis are tolerable

The best thing in the book has to be the loathing of the Red Skull. It's questionable if a Nazi should be made a villain to sit along with Doctor Doom and Loki. Nazism is a real thing, Latveria and the Lord of Mischief aren't. But, at the very least, the writers are fully aware of how no matter how despicable Marvel's villains are, Nazis are at the bottom of the totem pole. 

Magneto is not taking this crap sitting down

Magneto is a character whose revamped 80s origin was that Nazis were the prime reason he has no faith in humanity to treat mutants humanely. If the story had had them working together without any of this commented upon, in retrospect, it would have gone down as one of those tone-deaf stories that failed so hard that "it was a different time" wouldn't let it go, like the time Carol Danvers gave birth to her rapist and everyone was fine with it.

Here, the writers make an issue out of it, and in the final Captain America tie-in, Magneto takes down the Red Skull.

Magneto levitating out of the room is a great image, as is the dark falling on the Skull

Magneto loathes the Red Skull and all he believes in. Upon confirmation that this Red Skull is the same as the one from World War II, Magneto tracks him down and promises to make him suffer. He locks the Skull in a windowless room with nothing but water, and I'd like to think the Skull is down there to this day. As this was still a point in time when millions of Americans weren't confused about whether Nazis were bad or not, Magneto is an anti-hero here.  Always, the cry of some folks in the industry is to keep politics out of comics, but these comics of the 80s were some of the things that started to make me politically aware as a kid. The politics were always there.

Yeah!

All in all, I burned through this, and liked it even where it was a bit shoddy. It's not on my top ten Marvel books of the 80s, maybe not on my top twenty. But if you have an appetite for the format of the time, that is, complete stories every issue; art which makes sense, and colors which are never muddy; and fun; you would probably get a lot of pleasure out of this.

That mess has been cleaned up

I've spent so many years reading superhero comics being written for adults, and sometimes they're amazing. But as I get older, I'm finding that I love the work that was made under the comics code and when comics were aimed at young teens. Superheroes were never intended to be obsessed over by 40 year olds. I'm enjoying these older comics that embrace that fact.

Reading Through 2021 98: I, Rene Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB, by Jaques Tardi

I, Rene Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB, by Jaques Tardi

2012, English edition 2018

It's a great story, and it has great art. Is it a great comic?

The oversized hardcover is perfectly printed

Previously I read the first volume of Tardi's Streets of Paris, Streets of Murder, and I loved it.  It really clicked for me.

I promptly ordered this series to see more personal work from Tardi and it's great. The cover notes promise "an artistic triumph," and it's hyperbole, but maybe accurate. The book is 180 pages of impeccably drawn and researched images of WWII era France and the camps of Germany.

The vast majority of the book is black and white, except a select few pages with accents

For Tardi, the book couldn't be more personal. This is his deceased father Rene Tardi's story of WWII. Tardi had asked his father to record as many memories of the war as he could, and his father obliged with detailed accounts supported by illustrations to make things clearer.

Father Rene's image on the left, and Tardi's own image based on it

Tardi then went and did his own research to create a more fleshed out image of the period, and proceeded to make three books out of it. This first volume covers the start of the war until the fall of the Reich in 1945.

Tardi inserts himself in the narrative as a boy, critiquing or questioning his father's story

The book maintains a consistent three-tiered, three-panel page throughout, and is narrated by the father as it happens. While the father goes about his life as a soldier or later, a prisoner, Tardi himself has dialogues with him about exactly what is happening.

Actually killing a person for the first time leaves the father with something like PTSD

As a story, it's as compelling as any other serious war narrative that takes the time to show the human cost and that there is no easy solution. Rene Tardi was a young man in his early 20s, and five years of his life are wasted fighting and later imprisoned in a neighboring country. France is occupied early on in the war, and the French soldiers are interned deep behind enemy lines where they are often used as slave labor. 

Tardi adds a little humor to his role as the artist of the book

Rene has few illusions about the reality that his life there sucks, but that it's also a lot better off as soldier from a country at peace (through its occupied government) than to be an interned soldier from a warring country like Russia. He is suffering, but realizes he could be suffering a whole lot more.

Tardi cuts no corners with the art. Every picture is drawn with attention to detail

Relative to war stories, it's not overly horrific, or I'm just getting numb to it all in my old age. Rene acknowledges all the other horrors of Nazi Germany, but is lucky to be shielded from the worst of it.

Camp life

This is an amazing story, it's a comic, but comparing it to his noir work, he avoids making this compelling or exciting with comic techniques. It's told in a dry manner. I read Paco Roca's excellent Twists of Fate this year, another book about a personal recollection of WWII. That book attempts to put you in the action, to let you experience what the main character did. In contrast, I, Rene Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB seems more comparable to a Ken Burns documentary. It is full of scenes of the war, but doesn't so much show them as they happened as it does show that they did happen. 

The use of photos is one of the rare instances of comic panel-like images

I can't know why, but I imagine Tardi simply didn't want to "write" what happened to his father. He wanted his father's words to speak for themselves. Rene left ample personal notes on his time, and it seems to be an appropriate choice.

Nationality divides even prisoners in this world

A true story of war is not a happy one, but even acknowledging that, I was disappointed at first with this book. So much of the energy that I loved in Streets of Murder wasn't in here. As I sat down with it, I enjoyed it for what it was, and furthermore, understood that this approach to the book was the appropriate one. 

Tardi has managed to pay tribute to his father, and also give a vivid and personal account of WWII. We're all the richer for him sharing it.

Reading Through 2021 97: Asadora 1, by Naoki Urasawa and N Wood Studio

Asadora 1, by Naoki Urasawa and N Wood Studio

2019, English edition 2021

Some creators are just so polished and developed, that their work seems like a force of nature.

Urasawa is a fairly well-known creator in the West from series like 20th Century Boys, Monster, Pluto and others. He's prolific, and started a new series in 2018, Asadora. It's already five volumes in in Japan, and two with the English editions. What's this about? I have no idea, but book one reads like the tip of the iceberg. The book opens in 2020, with a beautiful scene of a kaiju attack. 

I wish there was more full-color manga than just the opening five pages

From there it goes to Showa era post-war Japan to focus on a latchkey young girl named Asa living in, I think, Nagoya. She quickly is given some character hooks: she is one of a dozen siblings and considers herself lost in the shuffle. Her siblings are said to have good names, but hers, Asa, is simply "morning," referring to when she was born. She is naturally a fast runner, and is taken with an English pop song she sometimes hears on the radio.

People confuse her for her siblings. Urasawa has a way of animating every character and keeping them perfectly on model

The last Urasawa book I read was Mujirushi, a story about a precocious young girl who never lets anything stop her, and almost immediately I was frustrated that this character is so similar, but Urasawa does it so damn well that notion falls to the wayside. This is a plot-based book, doused in character, so there is no time to dwell on what similarity one character has to another. 

Asa has a run in with a lowlife robbing a house, and instinctively calls for help. The burglar panics and ties her up, and already, stakes are established. 

The thief has a great character design; you know he's had a rough few years from his weathered face

But these are all people. Throughout the book, there are stock characters filling in minor roles, but any character that appears for more than a few pages becomes well-rounded. Asa has a later scene with the owner of a rice ball shop who similarly starts as a one-note character, but within a few pages begins to show her own nuances. 

The marvel of this book is that it is so successful in the main challenges of popular genre fiction: it has the vivid characters, it has the effective storytelling, and it has the stakes that matter to all characters. The themes are there too, about being who you want to be rather than what life might push you to be.

Halfway through volume one, an event occurs that sets up the second half of the book, organically allowing character development, and also laying the groundwork for the second volume and beyond.

A flashback reveals some of the loser burglar's back story, and an incredible transition of worthless race tickets falling into balloons rising

Urasawa has multiple characters that are distinguishable at a glance, all with animated expressions that can tell a story even without dialogue. What gets me about his art is that it is quite loose. I can see the hand in what he's drawn. These are not mechanical lines. Despite that, things have a consistency comparable to a Miyazaki movie. This is the hand of someone who's drawn countless hours.

The pacing of a scene like this is so perfect, it almost moves: panel one established the traffic jam, two introduces the little car, three shows the car in contrast to the trucks, and four shows it managing to do what the trucks can't

That's not to mention the storytelling itself. This is a comic, it is not a storyboard, but it would be very easy to see this adapted to animation. Scenes flow from panel to panel, and he often uses cuts within scenes to give scenes depth. Like many of the best comic artists, it's difficult not to read his work at a glance, though Western readers need to keep the reversed right to left movement in mind.

The eye of the storm

My reaction to a book like this is something like I might to a Disney movie where the immediate reaction might be, "Oh, another one of these." And given a few minutes with it, that morphs to "Yes, another masterfully produced story."  Urasawa is doing something a lot more idiosyncratic than Disney or the like though. I slowly started to read the book a chapter at a time, but by the fourth chapter, I just burned through the rest and ordered the next volume. It was that good.

It's so frustrating when you try so hard to do something, and someone else does better than you without any effort

And the thing is, the kaiju from the opening page of the story is not a factor in the rest of the book. That's a taste of what's to come. Future volumes are going forward in time, and on the cover of book five, Asa is a student. It's likely going to get to the year 2020 before it's done.

On sale now!

I've never read a manga with the story in progress, I'm excited to read this one. I liked it so much that I've decided to try to read the Japanese version and get ahead of the English editions.

Reading Through 2021 96: Phoenix Resurrection, by Matthew Rosenberg, Lenil Yu, and more

Phoenix Resurrection, by Matthew Rosenberg, Lenil Yu, and more

2018

2015 to 2019 were the dark ages of X-Men for me, and this book might just be the eye of the storm.

It burns! It burns!

Let's go back to those dark days of 2018 and think about what was going on. The franchise was headless. The books had been spilt into Blue and Gold books to try to capitalize on aging fan nostalgia, and there was a concurrent Astonishing X-Men book out to capitalize on slightly younger fans nostalgia for that title. Basically, the line had been overextended for years, and the concept of a central "main" title had been lost.

At the same time, in order to "shake things up", the franchise had 

-killed Wolverine, only to immediately replace him with Old Man Logan, a time displaced version of him as an old man.

-killed Cyclops.

-left time displaced versions of the 1960's X-Men in the books rather than having Brian Michael Bendis finish off the storyline he'd begun with them. This was particularly egregious, as nothing those characters did after Bendis stopped writing them was compelling to me, or to most readers. The solo Jean Grey book had its fans, but I only lasted a few issues with it.

-left Jubilee a vampire.

-made Sabertooth a good guy, as opposed to a bad guy on a leash like he was the times he was an X-Man before.

-made X-23 the new Wolverine, despite Old Man Logan immediately filling the role on the team.

We have vampire Jubilee, teenage original X-Men minus Jean, and Wolverine is dead, just the old version of him

Most of this was pretty ugly stuff, though I was fully approving of killing Wolverine off for a few years, and letting X-23 step in. Ultimately, the company went with Old Man Logan, and never really let X-23 become the star she might have.

Kitty, Colossus and Nightcrawler were in a pretty traditional place.

With this special mini-series, that's the environment it was trying to thrive in, and it's an uphill battle. It's not a great book, it's not an all-time classic, but it has elements in it which place it firmly in the neighborhood of Claremont X-Men (good), as compared to Bob Harass X-Men (very bad).

Why would X-Men still bury bodies? Why wouldn't they at least have alarms and scanners on the corpses at this point?

The book is very continuity heavy, as in, if I weren't already a hardcore X-Men reader, I wouldn't even bother with it. Beyond the fact that a casual reader would have no idea who half the characters are, the versions of the famous characters aren't themselves, and there's no attempt to explain any of it. Why are there two Iceman characters? Figure it out, check Wikipedia. The book assumes you know exactly who everyone is, and why most of the main characters are nothing like they were five years earlier, much less twenty. Every Marvel team book needs a character page at the front or back, this one being a prime example.

Annie (in the glasses) is the key to the story. Annie's death during Jean's childhood triggered Jean's powers originally

The prologue and much of the story is focused on Jean Grey's origin story, which is also not explained in the book. If you're a diehard fan, you'll know that Jean was playing frisbee with her friend Annie when Annie ran out onto the road and was hit by a car. Jean's telepathic powers were triggered and she experienced her best friend's dying pain. You've read the black and white Marvel magazine from the 1980's Bizarre Adventures #27, which had the origin of Jean Grey, right? I'm sure it's been retold elsewhere, if only in single panel flashback, but it's just not that well known. Writer Rosenberg's choice to make this a key part of the story is the correct choice in order to make a story with an emotional core that's true to the character. The choice not to retell the story in the book, or even reprint a single page for newer readers in the ancillary material at the back, is... I don't want to say baffling, because Marvel makes comics for 40 year olds these days. I'm too accustomed to it to be baffled by Marvel. But it is symptomatic of a bad publishing strategy.

The art is very understated for a modern X-Men comic, and that is really nice

So far, almost all the problems I've described are things that are the responsibilities of the editor and publisher. Given that the X-offices decided Jean needed to come back, that the "X-Men" were in a sorry state, how did Rosenberg do with these lemons? I think he did fairly well. The plot of this is that dead mutants are appearing and disappearing, and it's the Phoenix Force at it again, the cosmic entity that can't quit Earth.

In terms of double page spreads, I found this one lacking

The dead mutants are merely a distraction from the Force's real plan: bringing back Jean from the dead to be the new avatar for it. The Phoenix has had multiple avatars and they've never been stable, not like it was with Jean. So it's incubating her a new body to bond with. Why the Phoenix creates a town populated with dead mutants and a diner run by a grown up version of her dead childhood friend is vague, but sure, maybe the emotional resonance is soothing. It's a superhero comic. 

It's such a weird concept to make another book about dead X-Men... Necrosha was probably a year ago in Marvel continuity

What I liked about this is that, despite the fights, this is not a fight book. When it's all resolved, it's an emotional resolution. I've been reading pieces of the Claremont run recently, and when that book was at its best, it wasn't because characters were punching each other. It was because the characters talked and expressed themselves. It was a sensitive book. 

I'm not going to make the thesis that that is what an X-book has to be; books and characters evolve with the times. But if you think about what made X-Men stand out on the stands in the 1980's, when it was the number one selling book in America, it was the heart of it. It was the way the characters expressed longing and fear, and supported one another through it all. 

The book has battles, but ultimately it's about personal relationships and philosophies on living

Rosenberg, at least with this book, got that, and made it a story about Jean's heart, not about overcoming a cosmic being. 

He went on to write the short run of Uncanny X-Men before House of X/Powers of X, and I think it was pretty terrible. So I don't know if it was the assignment here that raised his game, or if the assignment of killing time (and a ton of characters) before HOXPOX left him uninspired.

Even if it is only for one book, I like seeing this variation on Phoenix's costume

In the current HiX-Men continuity, death has been removed from the narrative of the X-Men. All characters now can be reanimated in a snap, so I wonder why this book was even editorially mandated to be made. Shortly after, Cyclops also would be mandated to return, using some other comic book logic. Why did they bother to do that when in HOXPOX, they brought back everyone any writer wanted to use? 

It's baffling, and makes me question just what the point of this book even was, when it's unlikely to ever be referenced in continuity ever again. But, if you ignore the convoluted continuity it was based in, and that within a year, all of the continuity in this would be ignored, the book itself is pretty good! It has some of the stuff that good X-Men comics are made of.