Writer: Rick Remender
Artist: Daniel Acuña
Release Date: January 28, 2015
Publisher: Marvel
During the notably “meh” Axis crossover event at Marvel, the Scarlet Witch discovered that she and her twin brother, Quicksilver, may not be the scions of Magneto — contradicting an assumption she had taken at face value, along with the rest of us, ever since the Master of Magnetism declared his fatherhood back in 1983.
I do not approve of this retcon.
I do not care that nobody in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is allowed to say the word “mutant” due to a licensing agreement made between Marvel and Fox in the ‘90s. I do not care how much Marvel Studios hates 20th Century Fox for whatever legal loophole they used to include Quicksilver in X-Men: Days of Future Past. I do not care that the MCU will make more sense with Pietro and Wanda Maximoff rendered as Inhumans (a race of superhumans whose copyright remains fully available to Marvel when they sashay onto the big screen in The Avengers: Age of Ultron). Mutants and inhumans are two completely different species.
Some people are upset about the all-female main cast slated for Ghostbusters 3 because it’s part of the transatlantic feminist conspiracy to dominate popular culture, make public breast feeding mandatory and eventually take away men’s right to vote, or whatever. How do you think those people would feel if, instead of women, the Ghostbusters were changed into, I dunno, cats, to appease some opaque corporate agenda? That’s how I feel, and how proportionately angry the (likely) Maximoff/Inhuman swap makes me.
Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch are mutants, their father is Magneto, and I refuse to acknowledge Uncanny Avengers Vol. 2 #1, or any other comic book that infers otherwise as legitimate in any way.
But even though it is illegitimate and ruins my childhood, UAV2 #1 is a pretty cool read! The AXIS clustermuck left the Unity Squad in need of restaffing, and the new lineup replaces familiar archetypes with fresh faces: Sam Wilson as Captain America, Sabretooth as the ill-tempered animalistic dude with stabby claws, Doctor Voodoo as the de facto Sorcerer Supreme. The gang hits many of the same time-tested Marvel group dynamic beats, without including any overexposed characters.
Writer Rick Remender has demonstrated an unconventional knack for juggling personalities — arguably the most taxing aspect of writing team books — with Uncanny Avengers Vol. 1 and Deadly Class, and deftly carries on his punchy dialogue-penning ways. Daniel Acuña’s artwork does its job with a distinctive pastel crayon-ish flair, but leaves a bit to be desired. He leans too heavily on shadows to establish contrast, and seems to really hate drawing eyes. The Avengers are almost always either squinting, or shadows are covering their eyes, or they’re wearing goggles, or their eyes are conveniently glowing red orbs instead of regular eyes.
Ongoing Marvel stories have a tendency to derail whenever they’re mandated to synch up with a major crossover. For instance, Cullen Bunn’s Magneto was pretty rad until Axis reared its ugly, stupid, bloated head. But UAV2 could avoid that pitfall if it’s designed from the start to segue into Secret Wars, and that may well be the case. Its table-setting issue alone features at least one, and possibly five, other Earths, depending on how forthcoming events play out. At this point in time, all we know for sure about Secret Wars is that shit is about to get reeeeally weird on Earth 616, and if nothing else, UAV2 #1 establishes a solid jumping off point toward the demise of normalcy.
