X-Men: Onslaught: The Complete Epic, v. 3

Collects: X-Men #55, Uncanny X-Men #336, Cable #35, X-Force #58, X-Man #19, Incredible Hulk #445, Iron Man #332, Avengers #402, Thor #502, Wolverine #105 (1996)

Released: August 2008 (Marvel)

Format: 248 pages / color / $29.99 / ISBN: 9780785128250

What is this?: The penultimate volume of the Onslaught story, a “Mutants Gone Wild” cautionary tale.

The culprits: Too many to name, not enough to blame

Completism is a hell of a drug.

It’s one nearly every comic-book fan has felt the pull of. There are steps, gradations, but they’re all rationalizations and symptoms that don’t lead to an understanding of why completism has such a firm hold on our souls. It’s common to all sorts of collecting, and when you cross collecting with serial literature … well, like I said: a hell of a drug, although not without its highs.

We live in a Golden Age for completists, a time when we can go out and buy trade paperbacks of storylines that would be too Godawful or tedious to collect issue by issue but are relatively painless to swallow in one gulp — as long as we hold our noses. For us Gen Xers, it’s truly wonderful, with Marvel releasing compilations of ‘90s stories that seemed too horrible to contemplate at the beginning of the decade; the House of Ideas has released the hell out of the Clone Saga and has kept the Onslaught “Saga” in print, so all that remains is for someone at Marvel to find the unmitigated gall (or suffer the crushing brain damage) to complete the trifecta of crap by releasing a collection of The Crossing.

*ahem* Anyway. X-Men: Onslaught: The Complete Epic, Book 3, is indisputably part of the Onslaught crossover, which is indisputably an X-Men story. Well, you could dispute that, since it did end v. 1 of Fantastic Four, Avengers, Thor, and Iron Man (the last issues of the latter three are collected here), but the number of ancillary X-titles is convincing. What is disputable is whether anyone should buy it.

Despite the reputation of the Onslaught crossover, I’m not saying this book is bad. No, far from it; there’s nothing of the offensive stench of, say, Ghost Rider: Danny Ketch Classic, v. 1, or Captain America & the Falcon, v. 1: Two Americas. The skill involved in the individual issues is even better than Gambit Classic, although admittedly that’s setting the bar low.

Still, I’d advise reading any of those books before Onslaught, v. 3. Why? Because they are interesting in their awfulness. Nothing happens in the 248 pages of Onslaught, v. 3. Well, nothing happens except Onslaught loses Professor X as a prisoner and gains X-Man, which is more of a rearrangement of Scrabble tiles than a plot development. Oh, and Teen Tony Iron Man makes very ‘90s headpieces out of vibranium. But that’s really it, unless you like crowd control, attacks that achieve nothing but also lose nothing, illusory telepathic landscapes, and mutant mutant angst angst. And I suppose if you like catchphrases, Onslaught screams, “Behold my mighty hand!” several times, but as a catchphrase that ranks just below “Around the survivors a perimeter create.”

The blame for this doughnut hole of a collection has to be placed on the editors — four different editors, according to the title page: Mark Gruenwald (Iron Man and Avengers), Bobbie Chase (Hulk and Thor), Mark Powers (Cable), and Jaye Gardner (X-Man). Interestingly, Bob Harras — Marvel’s editor in chief and chief X-titles editor at the time — is listed in the credits of the remaining titles’ individual issues, but he isn’t credited on the title page. Which is a shame, because the buck has to stop with him, as both a book editor and editor in chief … I mean, who else can you blame for this an entire collection devoted to marking time, waiting for something or other — Iron Man and his party hats, I guess.

But much as I’m loathe to do it, maybe Gruenwald has to share some of the blame. While he has Terry Kavanagh and Joe Bennett actually contributing to the plot in Iron Man, Mark Waid and Mike Deodato are filling space in Avengers #402 — the last issue of Avengers, v. 1 — with a pointless fight. It’s bad enough the Avengers are going to bite it in an X-Men one-shot (fifteen-year-old spoilers!), but there’s nothing here that hints at the momentousness of the plot or the title’s history. This was when renumbering meant something! Marvel was licensing the Avenger titles to non-Marvel creators! There had to be a better way for the title to go out.

To be fair, Bill Messner-Loebs and Deodato do better with Thor. It’s cute they think there’s a purpose to continuing their subplots, like the Enchantress’s amnesia and captivity and Odin’s loss of his divinity and mind, and insisting Red Norvell is important. But there’s a sense of the title’s history included in the final issue. Thor runs into Jane Foster, Don Blake’s first love, and he remembers his history and an early adventure with his foster brother; the frogs from Thor’s days as the Frog of Thunder stop by. Messner-Loebs even has Hela, in a truly ridiculous Asgardian outfit, offer to make Thor her king if he wishes to avoid his death the following day. It gives the issue import and a sense of doom as it rolls into the inevitable, and I appreciate that. I think it could have been done better, by laying on the prophecy and references to Ragnarok, but the effort is there, and it’s more than we see in the other two dying Avengers titles.

I’m not going to single out any other individual writing or art, except to say that I have always disliked Angel Medina’s overly cartoony and grotesque work on Hulk There’s just too little to say about these issues; they fit together, I can see the skill there, but they’re not saying anything. Instead, I’m going to make two points that probably would be better in a footnote:

• First, it would be a rarity to see all those high issue numbers in a trade paperback collecting comics from the last decade. Sure, Marvel’s big on reinstalling the old numbering, but Marvel switches to new #1s so often it’s uncommon to have many comics with their original numbering at the same time.
  
• Secondly, there is some confusion on the Internet as to what is collected in Onslaught, v. 3. The Amazon listing includes Punisher (v. God knows what) #11, (Peter Parker:) Spider-Man #72, Fantastic Four #416, and Green Goblin #12; it leaves out the issues of X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, Cable, X-Force, and Thor. Even the impressive Unofficial Handbook of Marvel Comics Creators has it wrong; it makes the same mistake as the Amazon listing plus it adds Amazing Spider-Man #415.

In any event: This is one boring book. The plot goes nowhere. Art from Joe Madureira, Andy Kubert, and Deodato is not going to change that at all. I think you’d be better off jumping from the awful Onslaught, v. 1, to v. 4. You’re not going to miss anything important. But that’s not why people buy this book — they buy it because the drug that is completism has them in its claws.

In this case, though, completism is very much like a sleeping pill.

Rating: Zzz … (You can read that as either I was too bored by this book to rate it or that I graded it Triple-Z. Either one is fine by me.)

Essential Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, v. 1

Collects: Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe (v. 1) #1-15 (1983-4)

Released: January 2006 (Marvel)

Have you ever wondered what were the names of Peter Parker’s parents? (Richard and Mary Parker.) Or what Mystique’s real name is? (Raven Darkholme.) How about why Elektra is running around, alive, after Bullseye made her imitate a shish kebab? (Ninjas with magic powers, which are possibly the coolest things in the world.) Or what an Avengers ID card looks like? (It looks easily forged, is what it looks like.)

The answer to these questions (and many others) can be found in The Essential Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. A black-and-white reprint of the original OHotMU, which was published in the early ’80s, this Essential is packed, crammed, and stuffed with information on Marvel heroes and villains who were active at the time of publication. You can’t really grasp the level of detail compiled by Mark Gruenwald and his team until you page through it; the book is saturated with histories and descriptions of the powers of the denizens of the Marvel Universe. And not only the heroes and villains: each issue had a section on the aliens that have been seen, and most issues had an appendix which listed cross references and a sentence or two report on the truly minor characters.

Yes, if you’re interested in what happened after 1984, this book is not for you. The Deluxe Edition of the Handbook (abbreviated OHotMUDE) came out a few years later, and to be truthful, is a better organized version of the same information. And the OHotMUDE will be released in black-and-white Essentials in a few months — in three volumes. For a quick reference, this is much nicer. For the fanatical devotee in you, the Essential OHotMUDE v. 1-3 might be better, but for the casual fan, this is better.

The entries contained several sections, most of which were of the brief, fill-in-the-blank variety: Name, occupation, identity (secret or not), legal status (alien, criminal records, etc.), aliases, place of birth, marital status, known relatives, group affilations, base of operations, height / weight / hair / eyes, and first appearance in comics. Two major sections are history and powers. Early descriptions get bogged down on the minutiae of the characters’ powers, straining to make the pseudoscience involved relatively plausible. (The best ones often admit there is no explanation of how the power works.) As the series went along, however, the history section of each entry grows, especially for characters that have no or few superpowers. Depending on your engineering interests, the diagrams of equipment (Spider-Man’s webshooters, Sentinels, Iron Man’s armor, etc.) might also be fascinating. I tended to skip these, but then again, I’m not a technical kind of guy.

The comics inside are more than 20 years out of date, but on the other hand, this is Marvel — there haven’t been any Crises or Zero Hours to worry about, so while it may be out of date, none of the information has been erased from continuity. The text layouts of the original weren’t as professional as the reader might like, with many entries crammed into 6-point type so it will all fit on one page. Lines are occasionally repeated or dropped entirely, leaving the reader bewildered trying to make sense of it all. The black and white illustrations obviously can’t convey skin or costume colors, although with certain skin tones, that’s probably for the best. There are a very few pages where the lack of color makes the illustration useless; the examples of SHIELD’s uniforms for different ranks is useless because all that differentiate the uniforms are the color schemes. These are rare, however.

There is a special treat for those who remember the original issues. The OHotMU (and the OHotMUDE, for that matter) featured wraparound covers with many / most of the characters within the issues rushing off toward the right. (I have no idea why.) These are reprinted on facing pages so you can see the full image at once. But the fun thing was that you could see certain features continued on the previous / next issues, like Mr. Fantastic’s stretched limbs. In the back of the Essential OHotMU, the first 12 covers are laid out as they were originally drawn, in rows of three stacked upon each other. (For instance, parts of Galactus appear on #4 and #7.) For the first time, you can see how it all fits together without getting all the issues and laying them out on the floor; characters are fill every available space that isn’t needed for the masthead. It’s remarkable. And the covers for #13 and #14, which covers the dead and inactive characters, fit together to form another image, with all the characters floating above a giant death’s head. (An additional neat touch is the dead characters all have their hands folded over their chests on the cover, and inactive / retired characters have their hands at their sides.) The cover for #15 is the also used as the book’s cover.

Overall, this Essential is an excellent buy. For the obsessive, wait for the Essential OHotMUDE. For the rest, this is a remarkable accomplishment.

Grade: B+