Bah, time travel! (Really ought to be the rallying cry for the entirety of Age of Ultron).
Another look into the differing ways that various characters have turned out in the new time line - what's actually thoroughly interesting here is that Havok seems to have grown up. I've never been a fan of Havok. Being an elder brother, I understand how sibling rivalry works, and my younger brothers, having attended the same high school I did, regale with the expectations teachers placed on them as a result of my performance.
However, my brother outgrew any resentment they may have felt over that and became remarkable individuals in their own rights. Alex Summers, Havok, younger brother of seminal Marvel hero Cyclops, never seems to. This could have to do with what Frye, in one of the rare moments in which I disagree with him, calls the "endless form in which a central character...never develops or ages [and] goes through one adventure after another," what he also terms as a "refrigerated deathlessness" in comic strip characters (Anatomy of Criticism, p.186). I've talked a bit about the archetypal nature of Cyclops when we see an alternate of him in the "Age of Apocalypse" storyline, and now I'm wondering if this adolescent jealously of his brother is Havok's archetype. Are they the Cain and Abel of the Marvel universe? Here, in the Age of Ultron/Age of Le Fey timeline, however, Havok seems to have grown up, taken charge of his life, and found purpose, leading and protecting the Morlocks, the less-fortunate of an already less-fortunate species.
Now, let me be very clear that I have not followed any of Havok's progress through the X-universe over probably the last decade or so. It could very well be that he's escaped his seminal brother's shadow, but I somehow doubt it. This is the defining trait of his character, and while "refrigerated deathlessness" is a bit of a harsh way of putting it, there is that sense of stasis surrounding comics characters that won't let them change very much. What I suppose I'd argue is that this stasis itself is a way of developing the character, in that the static traits themselves become the development, paradoxically. The longer a character exhibits this stasis, the more developed and ingrained the trait becomes, the more the character teeters on the verge of archtypifiying.
Heady stuff for early morning superheroes.
There's some brutal deaths in this issue, and a general feeling of grittiness that keeps me from wanting to read the rest of Remender's Uncanny Avengers. Aren't we done with the grittiness for a bit in superhero universes? Can't the pendulum swing back to epic, mad, joyful adventures of gods and goddesses, reveling in their powers and their ability to do good?
I think Age of Ultron is getting to me. More tomorrow.
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