For the last two weeks, I've opened the X-Axis with a lengthy rant about the adverts.  Well, good news, kids!  This week, we're going to shake things up, and start with Astonishing X-Men #18.  You see, Astonishing #18 is late, and so it still has last month's adverts.  Ah, the happy days of October.  I'm feeling nostalgic already.

This is the concluding part of "Torn", a six-parter which started all the way back in February.  Now, the young and naive among you might be assuming that just because it's part six of six, something might actually end.  Heavens no.  What actually happens is that the fight which started, ooh, four months ago is still going on, a couple more villains show up, the fight keeps going, and then everyone gets dragged off to the Breakworld where they'll presumably keep fighting next issue.  Yes, that's right, it's not a six-parter at all - it's a twelve-parter arbitrarily chopped in two for trade paperback purposes.

Frankly, this is a bit of a mess.  The plot of "Torn" is pretty rudimentary.  The X-Men get attacked by a new Hellfire Club.  It looks like Emma might have betrayed the team.  But no, it turns out that Emma hasn't betrayed the team after all.  She's just being used by Cassandra Nova, who's trying to escape the prison where she was trapped back in Grant Morrison's New X-Men run.  And that's... basically it, really. 

There's some amusing business with the X-Men having their minds messed with, some entertaining comedy skits with Wolverine thinking he's a child.  The idea of the Beast having a pre-prepared ball of wool to help him fight off mental attacks is cute.  But the actual story is very straightforward indeed.  It relies for drama mainly on teasing the possibility that Emma has become a villain again - a story which would be horrifically dull and obvious, so it's not exactly an intriguing tease.  And the big reveal boils down to "Nah, we're not doing that after all."  So really, we've just spent six issues going round in a circle. 

Now, it's not all bad.  As the opening half of a storyline, it does the job well enough.  It introduces the players, it sets up some conflict between Kitty and Emma.  It builds to a resolution of the Breakworld story in the next few issues.  It has plenty of neat little character moments and, naturally, John Cassaday's art is beautiful.  Unlike many X-Men stories from recent years, it has a clear sense of direction.

But what it lacks, in spectacular style, is pace.  I've made the point many times before that monthly comics are a serial format.  You can't simply ignore that, although it suits the agenda of many people to try.  The future may well lie with trade paperbacks, but this is not the future.  Astonishing sells upwards of 120,000 copies in serial format in the North American direct market alone.  Plainly a vast proportion of the audience are reading it in serial format.  It follows that pacing for the serial format is a real, genuine issue, and cannot be brushed aside with vague witterings about the trade paperback format.

Judged as a serial, this is wildly unsuccessful.  The creators have taken over half a year on a single fight scene, and it's not even bloody finished yet!  That's absurdly slow.  Even if the book had come out monthly, it would have been far too slow.  On a bi-monthly schedule, it's glacial.

And things aren't much better in trade paperback format.  It'll be an entire book devoted to the set-up half of a story, without any real resolution.  So what we have here is a story that isn't written for the single issues, and isn't even written for the trade.  It's written for the twelve-issue hardback - about the only format where the pacing stands a chance of working.  Now, if people want to write stories for that format, fine.  But don't do them in monthly titles.  Do them in original hardbacks.

Now, if you're reading this story in the hardback format, then yes, it'll be decent.  Even then, you still won't be getting much story for your hard-earned money.  There's limited entertainment in watching Whedon tease a bad idea, and then not do it.  The enjoyment here comes from the details, and the details are often very good indeed.  The art is gorgeous.  But it's less than the sum of its parts, and in serial format it falls far short of what it could have been.  In this format, "Hellfire" should have been three issues tops, maybe even two.  Unfortunately, this is the sort of comic that results when people pretend they're working in the format of their dreams and ignore the format of their reality.

Rating: B

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