Happy Halloween everyone!
I've only been following a couple of the "Secret Wars" tie-ins, notably the afore-blogged Weirdworld and Squadron Sinister, though I was really hoping for slightly more of the Shadows in that title. What these titles have in common, as do the series I sort of delved into (Inferno, Secret Wars: Battleworld, Battleworld Journal), is that they're very explicitly invested in the narrative universe within which they exist - they utilize the setting as a plot point, referencing the fact that there are different realms in Battleworld, having communication and conflict between those realms. Up until this point, E has only tangentially referred to this situation, with the occasional replacement of the word "God" for "Doom." In this issue, however, the Battleworld situation is made an intrinsic plot piece, as versions of Hank "Beast" McCoy from all over the planet converge on the realm of Mutopia (setting for this series) under the influence of an enhanced virus called "Sublime."
Now, it's been quite a while since I read New X-Men, and I do remember the character of Sublime in that series, a particularly grim portrayal of a human being in the Marvel U, but I don't recall him being a virus. Perhaps after I've finished my look at Waid's Flash (hey! Stop snickering. I'll get there!), I should do a read of Morrison's X-Men. I was thinking about doing his Superman, using Action, All-Star, and JLA....y'know, there's sometimes just too much to write.
This issue has been my least favourite so far, in that it seems to have been a tangent in order that the series be more fully inserted into the crossover, rather than anything fundamental to the plot of Magneto and the Phoenix Egg. Who stumbles out of that egg, or rather emerges majestically, will be fodder for tomorrow's post, but it's going to be interesting.
From a collecting standpoint, I've filed these comics in my Grant Morrison Collection. I'm impressed enough with the quality of the series that I think it deserves to be kept with its source material, a What If?, or even What Should?, and one that adds some depth and nuance to the original run. I'll admit that one thing I am excited for is to read New X-Men up to the point where the two diverge, and then see where things go in either direction. But I'm a literature geek that way.
See you tomorrow for the conclusion of E is for Extinction. I'll probably go out today and grab the last issue of Weirdworld, too, so that we can make a clean break from the "Secret Wars" crossovers. And then back to Alpha Flight, I think. Onward!
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