Battle of the Atom Review: X-Men Battle of the Atom #2 by Jason Aaron, Esad Ribic, and Giuseppe Camuncoli

Reviews, Top Story

X-Men_Battle_of_the_Atom_2

X-Men: Battle of the Atom #2

Written by Jason Aaron

Art by Esad Ribic, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Andrew Currie, Tom Palmer, Ive Svorcina, Andres Mossa & Guru eFX

Epilogue One by Jason Aaron, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Andrew Currie, and Matt Milla

Epilogue Two by Brian Wood, Kristopher Anka, and Matt Milla

Epilogue Three by Jason Aaron, Chris Bachalo, Mark Irwin, Victor Olazaba, and Matt Milla

Epilogue Four by Brian Michael Bendis, Stuart Immonen, Wade Von Grawbadger, and Matt Milla

 

The short of it:

The bombs are falling on Cape Citadel! Literally! The SHIELD helicarrier is unloading the entire arsenal, including the kitchen sink, at the combined groups of X-Men below, and they have no idea how or why! Well, we the readers know that it’s Future Xavier and his telekinesis making things fire, and making SHIELD unable to stop it from happening. The Brotherhood talk like the humans are doing it, having ‘forced their hand’, and want the X-Men to help them destroy all humans. The X-Mens are following a different plan, ‘destroy all missiles’, but something big drops that Maria Hill is told is ‘anti-mutant ordinance’. Beast rants some more, but he’s cut off for good as that ordinance makes its presence felt. Big Sentinels with SHIELD written on them!

Fighting happens, everyone against giant robots and the Brotherhood. Bodies hit the floor as people from the future start acting the role of cannon fodder. Eventually Future Jean takes on Wolverine and Cyclops in an unlikely duoship and proceeds to vent her telekinetic frustrations on them. It’s their fault, they’re why she was brought to the future, they’re why her life went wrong, and if she can’t take it all back, she’ll just kill them. That’s about when the X-Kids come in and beat on her like she was Magneto in their debut. At least until she goes nuclear and clears out everything. Eventually the dust settles and SHIELD comes in, ready to open fire upon a bunch of mutants they roundaboutly provoked, but all that’s there is Xorn’s broken helmet.

Epilogue time! Everyone is back at the Jean Grey Institute; Wolverine’s X-Men, the Uncanny X-Men, the All-New X-Men, even the Future X-Men! There are dead bodies to sort out, and speeches to give. So much preachiness from Wolverine, so much vilifying of Scott.

The second epilogue is one of the future X-Men enrolling in the Jean Grey Institute of today, while Jubilee has a final moment with the adult version of her infant son.

Epilogue three is the X-Men of the future taking their dead back home. Illyana says goodbye to her brother’s body, Iceman asks his future self for reassurance, and…well, future Iceman tells him to grow a beard, and teases the upcoming Amazing X-Men series, and then they’re gone.

And finally, in the last of the epilogues that are so far making this book, we have a very pissed off Kitty Pryde. She stepped down from being the Headmistress to be in charge of the X-Kids. She’s stood with them, helped them, defended them, and despite this, Wolverine and company ignored her, lied to her, and overall disrespected her and her opinions on what to do with the Kids when the Brotherhood showed up. They tell her to take a vacation, she chews them out and makes it clear that she’s done with Wolverine, Storm, and even her now ex-boyfriend, Iceman. The X-Kids let her know that they’re going with her, and then they call for their ride….and if someone is happy, it sure isn’t Wolverine. I take that back, someone IS happy, and it definitely is NOT Wolverine.

 

What I liked:

  • The ending. Can I open with the ending? We knew that the X-Kids were going to be sticking around indefinitely, but we didn’t know how their status quo would change in the aftermath of Battle of the Atom. Up until the last epilogue started I figured…nothing was going to change. Bendis pulled off a swerve so sweet that Russo is screaming in jealousy somewhere, and it completely made the entire issue.

  • The epilogues as a whole were all pretty nice. Jubilee with adult Shogo, the funeral of Colossus, the new cast member of Wolverine and the X-Men, and the SWERVE with the All-New X-Men. Now, only two of these things are going to have noticeable effects on the status quo moving forward, but that doesn’t take away from nice moments presented by the other two.

  • The All-New X-Men vs Xean made for a nice little throwback, the panel reenacting the cover to X-Men #1 was brilliant.

  • Hey look, Jubilee is clearly a vampire!

  • Immonen and Bachalo stole the show as far as visual go, which just makes it a damn shame that they combine for five pages. Actually, add Kristopher ‘epilogue three’ Anka to there, I could not tell you who he is, but I enjoyed his work.

 

What I didn’t like:

  • The blatant rush job that is the art for the main story. To call it sloppy is an understatement, the finale to a big event looks like it was thrown together at the last minute. Inexcusable.

  • Beyond that, the creative bait and switch from the cover is a huge disappointment. The cover promises Bendis and Cho, and they combine for three pages in this issue. The three Bendis wrote for Stuart Immonen. That’s right, Frank Cho is the artist credited on the cover and he contributes NOTHING to the issue!

  • Overworked Giuseppe Camuncoli is sloppy and it shows. I know his work, I enjoy his work, but this? This issue is a bad representation of his talent. It feels rushed and thrown together, like they called him because they knew he was quick and no other reason.

  • We were promised death in the last three issues of this series, and it was a freaking tease. Kill off future X-Men that were never going to be seen again anyway? Yeah, like I really cared about any of them save for mustache Colossus.

  • SHIELD isn’t at fault for what happened, but it was most definitely their weapons that just rained down the boom on everyone, and everything. So why do they go in, guns drawn, ready for a fight, and acting like the good guys? Maria Hill is regressing to her Civil War era of ineptitude.

  • Future Xavier just won’t die! He’s been introduced to two different Soulsword’s in an intimate manner, and all he has to show for it is paralysis? How can they keep cutting him down but not taking him out?

 

Final thoughts:

So the Brotherhood’s plan was to make the X-Men understand that the humans hated them by attacking them and saying the humans did it? I understand that nobody in comics ever bothers to ask the obvious questions like “did you attack us or was it the guys we were fighting”, but REALLY?! The bad guys were never the humans, it was a crazy overly mutated Hank McCoy and a crazy time bomb Jean Grey.

The bait and switch with the creative teams REALLY bothers me. Cho had two issues, and so did everybody else, but his were the furthest apart. How does that happen? How does an issue this important wind up being thrown together at the last minute by two artists that were busy on other books? I mean, Esad Ribic drawing the X-Men is something I wanted to see, but I wanted him at his best, not him with whatever he could manage between his other projects in a last minute situation.

Gandalf the Cold > Ice Master.

Wolverine seems to have his healing factor in this issue. Then again, so does Scott, future Xavier, and Quentin Quire.

So many speeches. Evil Hank has one, Evil Jean has one, Wolverine has a few, and even Kitty has one. Kitty’s is the best one.

Finally someone remembered that Kitty and Yana were BFF’s. Now, if only someone would have remembered that Rachel was also her bestie before this event started, we might have gotten some actual Kitty/Rachel stuff in. Her arrival into the book just before Battle of the Atom did nobody any favors, and her siding with Wolverine and company didn’t either.

That said, there is absolute brilliance is having a class on the Ethics of Time Travel taught by Rachel Grey.

Words can’t express my disappointment at the finish to this event. I was in LOVE with Battle of the Atom for more than half of it; it featured everything I love, and have loved, about the X-Men. Various creative teams working together to tell a multi part story that flows as fluidly as if it were by a single team, artists with similar enough styles that the collected edition won’t feature jarring artistic shifts, and a clear cut end game that every book is able to spin out of differently. The last several issues felt padded, and then this one was just a rush to get through the main story so that the epilogues could provide any real meat to the issue. Esad Ribic’s rushed art is about as jarring of a shift as you’re going to get, as the series moves from the light and colorful X-Men art style of the modern day to the grim and gritty Hickman Avengers feel by the grim and gritty Hickman Avengers artist. As for endgames? I have no idea where X-Women is going next, what the plan is for Wolverine and the X-Men, or even what separates All-New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men anymore.

It was just a mess of an ending, but hey, still better than Schism.

Overall: 6/10

A lifelong reader and self proclaimed continuity guru, Grey is the Editor in Chief of Comics Nexus. Known for his love of Booster Gold, Spider-Girl (the real one), Stephanie Brown, and The Boys. Don't miss The Gold Standard.