Tuesday, April 21, 2020 by Paul in x-axis Posted onby Paul in

Well, they can’t all be winners.

If there’s one thing about the first wave of Krakoa X-books that everyone seems to have agreed on, it’s that Fallen Angels wasn’t very good. And there’s a part of me that regrets having to say that, because it certainly wasn’t phoned in. You can see, in theory, what it was going for. You can see how it looked like a reasonable idea at the pitch stage. But the end result is a mess, for a whole range of reasons.

One factor here is that Fallen Angels seems to have been cut short. It’s principally a Kwannon book, but the first arc is plainly structured as a “gathering of the team”. Even on that level it’s strangely put together, with half the cast only appearing towards the end, and contributing very little. But it ends up with Kwannon running a team of vaguely outsidery mutants as part of a side deal with Mr Sinister. And then it stops.

It’s not like Fallen Angels was a sales disaster. In its final month, it was the lowest selling X-book in the direct market, but it was only a few thousand copies behind Marauders – and it was outselling Avengers and Deadpool. Yet it got pulled from the schedules, and the second wave of X-books turns out to feature Hellions, a series in which, er, Kwannon and Mr Sinister run an entirely different team of outsidery mutants, but this time in more technicolour fashion. It’s hard to see that Fallen Angels and Hellions were ever intended to co-exist.

So what went wrong with Bryan Hill and Szymon Kudranski’s series? At first glance it seems to have a reasonable niche. In a world where the mutants are all swanning around in an endless utopian party, this is the book for the characters who don’t feel that they fit in there – not because they doubt the wonderfulness of Krakoa itself, but because they’re too self-loathing or otherwise screwed-up to feel that they deserve to be there. It’s the emo book, in other words, hence a first issue cover of the main characters looking moody under neon.

It’s also tasked with rehabbing Kwannon as a character. The recent re-tooling of Psylocke was an understandable move. “Betsy is turned into a ninja” is one of those late 1980s stories that hasn’t aged very well, particularly as it results in one of Marvel’s most prominent Asian characters not actually being Asian. You can see why they wanted to quit while they were ahead with that one. But at the same time, they didn’t want to throw away the recognition factor of Psylocke’s character design, and so we’re dusting off a convoluted 90s retcon which attempted to establish ninja Psylocke as the result of a body-swap with a bit of mind-mixing thrown in.

How clearly Hill actually understands that original story is unclear – he seems at times to be under the impression that Kwannon was left trapped inside Psylocke’s body, which isn’t how it worked. But the original was garbled enough that I can’t get too worked up about that. At any rate, he inherits a Kwannon who is something of a blank slate, aside from a “career assassin” back story. Time to give her something else.

Here’s where the problems start. Kwannon is outfitted with a backstory which boils down to “raised by baddies who wanted to turn her into a living weapon with no agency”. We’ve seen this before, of course – it’s the back story of X-23. What Fallen Angels brings to it is some ponderous Japanese trappings and some all-purpose glumness. There’s some very heavyhanded melodrama about a lost child and a thuddingly repetitive motif about a butterfly.

None of this, frankly, makes Kwannon interesting. It strikes an awkward balance where the plot content is absurd but the tone is going for poetically melancholy. It’s pitching for Art and while it may have the ambition to back it up, it doesn’t have the content. Scenes of darkened rooms and fragments of impassive faces serve mainly to send the message that all this is supposed to be Tremendously Important. Some of the layouts are interesting, but most of the actual characters seem blank. In fairness, that’s kind of what the script calls for, but that doesn’t make them any more engaging. Action scenes, when they happen, are rather choppy. There’s some needless confusion about whether the wraith that Cable meets halfway through the story is actually Apoth or just a camp follower (though the wraith is probably the single best piece of design work in the story).

The plot of Fallen Angels is ultimately quite straightforward: an AI that Kwannon declined to destroy years ago returns as a split personality with an evil side calling itself Apoth and making vague post-humanist noise that never really come to much in these six issues, and a good side that enlists Kwannon to deal with the problem. Kwannon enlists some other Krakoan outsiders and they, well, deal with the problem. In amongst all this she strikes a deal with Mr Sinister to come and go on her own business without the Krakoans being fully informed.

None of this really hangs together. That might be because it was going to tie together down the line, to be fair, but we can only judge what exists. Apoth’s post-human, eliminate-all-difference routine is presumably meant to tie in with the theme of Kwannon’s trainers trying to eradicate her individuality, but that doesn’t feel like a theme that develops into anything. You can hardly do “maybe Apoth has a point”. There’s a hazily developed idea that Kwannon’s idea of training her team is to repeat the abuse that she suffered, and again, this might be something that would have come to fruition if the book had run for longer. But in the event, most of the other heroes seem to serve little function beyond acting as sounding boards for Kwannon’s exposition and brooding.

Bling! and Husk are rather randomly added to the cast in issue #5, in time to contribute little or nothing. X-23 and Cable are here throughout but nothing about the series suggests a proper grasp of the characters. Now, Kwannon is the main character here, so Hill is interested in the others mainly in terms of how they relate to her – fine. And both have a back story of lifelong conflict that could make them ill at ease on Krakoa. But Hill seems to want to make them ingenues in need of training from Kwannon… which makes no sense, precisely because they’re got so much experience already. And while Cable is supposed to have arrived in the present more or less directly from the war, X-23’s main arc over recent years has been all about her moving beyond this.

None of this would be such a problem if the story was at least using its characters in a way that was entertaining on its own terms. Fallen Angel‘s biggest problem is that it’s so relentlessly one-note. That’s not quite literally true of the art, which throws in the occasional page of daylight, but the book never really departs from a general air of sixth-form poetry. It’s tremendously sincere, but rarely interesting.