Review: Battle for the Atom, X-Men crossover event (2013)
X-Men events usually end up being lots of fun.
In the past ten years or so we’ve got some good ones out of the modern X-titles – Messiah Complex, AvX – so it makes sense that the post-AvX world would get an event of its own.
Enter: Battle for the Atom.
There’s a lot of the cataclysm we’ve come to expect from these storylines, plus explosions, Sentinels, time travel – like the team busted out the “crossover cookbook” and turned to page one.
But first a quick recap…
… the original X-Men have been brought forward in time by a disgruntled Hank McCoy. McCoy sought to use their innocence and idealism to inspire change in the fractured X-Men of the here and now. See, Cyclops killed Charles Xavier before starting his own rival X-Men faction in the north somewhere. Needless to say, some youthful perspective might have done Cyke some good.
But the young X-Men have decided to stay in our time, and since that decision there’s been an underlying feeling that the other shoe is about to drop and these kids are going to be sent home.
“Battle for the Atom” certainly seemed like it was going to be that other shoe, but after 10 issues, the original team not only didn’t go back to the past, but for some reason can’t go back to the past.
The Plot
Early in the story, the X-Men are visited by mutants who say they’re the X-Men from the future.
They explain that if the original X-Men aren’t returned to the past, their displaced presence in the time stream will cause the future to suck royally. Teen Grey TM gets a weird vibe and takes her Cyclops and hits the road. Some arguments erupt within the current X-Men as to whether or not it’s ethical to force the kids to go back to the past. Despite some disagreement in the group they all go and hunt down the missing Scott and Jean.
Scott and Jean then become scalding hot potatoes.
The X-Men capture the kids, then they’re gone again, then they’re captur—no wait they’re gone. Then Present-day crazy-pants Cyclops and HIS team show up—you get the gist.
It’s eventually revealed that these time travelers are ACTUALLY the brotherhood of evil mutants from the future. One of said mutants is the all-growed-up Jean Grey – the one from the past who was brought to the present then grew up. That bit of time-fooleryTM was easily the most inspired moment of the storyline, but we’ll get to that later.
The baddies try to send the kids back to their own time but something goes wrong and we learn that the kids can’t go back to the past even if they wanted to. Eventually the potato falls into an all-out brawl at Cape Citadel between the past, present and future X-Men. By this point, the good-guy future X-Men come back from their time to help the past and present X-Men defeat the future Brotherhood.
S.H.I.E.L.D then gets involved and out pop a new army of Sentinels. These new Sentinels and the mystery of their origin have played a major role in Bendis’ Uncanny X-men over the past year. Again, here was that other shoe ready to drop and pay off a major plot line from current issue of Uncanny X-Men. But again it doesn’t drop.
Even though we find out that the Sentinels came from S.H.I.E.L.D, we never find out why, or anything else about their origins.
The battle eventually crashes to a close and the various X-Men hobble back to their respective corners of the world. A handful of the future characters are killed in the mêlée, and the remaining baddies slunk into the shadows, presumably to become new mainstay villains for the franchise.
The consequences of this storyline emerge in epilogue sequences: Kitty Pryde defects to Cyclops’ team because of the disagreement she had over whether or not to send the kids back to the past, and the teen X-Men run away from home. And storm’s kid from the future is staying with her giant glowing wolf companion because hell yea giant glowing wolf companion!
What I liked
While I have mixed feelings about Battle for the Atom, there were some character moments I really enjoyed, brought to us by some of the best character writers in comics.
Future Jubilee showing off the raw leadership that’s been working so well for Wolverine’s character under Aaron’s pen over in Wolverine and the X-Men was a nice surprise. We see how years of vampiric immortality, mixed with a lot of battle scars, have hardened Jubliee’s exterior, but molded her role on the team into one of decisive action and balanced judgment.
Emma Frost had some excellent moments beside her Stepford Cuckoos – once again locked in battle with Jean Grey. Those two characters should ALWAYS be together.
(note to self – start campaign for Emma Frost/Jean Grey “Spy versus Spy” style comic strip)
The future Brotherhood makes for some villains, and I’m happy they’ll be sticking around. Xavier’s grandson is an unnerving threat, since such a little evil brat is the spitting image of the ultimate embodiment of peace and unity for mutantkind.
Where I’d like to see them go next time
Overall I felt the premise, the unique mixture of writing talent involved and the timing of this event called for a bit more story progression than I think we got.
I’m a great admirer of the wonderful and inventive storylines that Bendis, Wood and Aaron have been building towards in their individual titles in the past year and I would have loved to have seen those subplots play out on a crossover stage in more prominent and organic way, with the time travel used as the catalyst.
They do it in places -the schism between Rachel and Storm, Kitty and her relationship with the kids- but overall I wanted to know where those mystery Sentinels came from, and what the fallout from the kids being in the present was truly going to be.
With some fancy footwork, Bendis, Wood and Aaron actually brought back Jean Grey, at the age we know her as, to the X-books without having to literally resurrect her corpse for a third time. It’s crazy, it might even have been unnecessary, and Grant Morrison would have lost his lunch, but it looked like we were getting her back. It was one of those JJ Abrams Star Trek moments where you break the rules to follow them. But alas, Jean of the Future Past TM turned out to be just another psycho and exploded.
Why go through all the trouble of setting up such an interesting, elaborate solution to that problem only to blow her up? And if she’s coming back later, well that’s fine but I’m not sure it did Battle for the Atom, as a story, any service.
I feel the same way about the Sentinel storyline – why not take the crossover stage as an opportunity to have that sentinel subplot come to a head? There’s an all-star team at play here, a little more consequence would have gone a long way with this one.
I’ll be an X-Men reader until I croak, so in the end I count my lucky stars than I’ve got top talent working on whom I feel are the best characters in comics. And Battle for the Atom was a fun ride all things considered. My hope is that the next time a crossover opportunity like this comes along, the creative team will use it as a platform to showcase a culmination of all the fantastic subplots going on in these titles month after month, wrapped up in a bright, shiny, gimmicky bow.
And when all else fails, just have Emma and Jean fight for 10 issues.
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