In an era where a whole lot of things were, as people said, “written for the trade,” this comic is particularly rough. They released the issues twice a month to try to offset that feeling, I think, but even so. Like I think if you read all 8 parts in one sitting, it would be fine, but even reading them just a day apart, as I am, the way none of the individual issues really stands on its own is frustrating. Comics is such a flimsy business with such terrible financials that, by this period, single comics more or less funded the eventual collection. Your buy-in to 8 issues of this series at $2.99 apiece was the only way Marvel could make a profit selling the 8 issues in a single handsome volume in your local bookstore a few months later for a fraction of your cost. And yet, you weren’t even reading it in its optimal format, waiting 2 weeks between chapters. And like I said before, Bendis was usually good, better than a lot of his peers, at making your single issue worthwhile. As we’ve seen in USM, he has a real knack for making any given issue feel full of incident and usually landing on a cliffhanger that has you begging for more, which is part of the fun. He’s trying to do it here, too, but with a huge cast and a whole world to introduce, the issues have too much ground to cover to be very satisfying on their own. And, like, I don’t even know what you could do to fix that, the scope would probably defeat any attempt to make the singles feel more complete. But it nevertheless seems like they should. I think things have swung a bit back in the other direction of late. Comic stories still tend to be 4-6 issues long, but the individual issues feel more substantial, like they did pre-2000s, going back to when Romita and Lee could string an ASM story out over 6, 8 issues, but each single issue of that epic had more going on than some of the 6-part stories of the 2000s. It’s a balancing act. I think this tension is why, when I made comics, they wound up routinely having 6 and 7 panels per page in an era where 4 is considered normal. I wanted my chapters to feel substantial. Hell, I wanted my PAGES to feel substantial since I was releasing one at a time for a long time. But we’re not here to talk about that, we’re here to see Hawkeye, back from the dead, trapped in a world he never made. First, tho, a 3-page spread at Castle Magnus in Genosha, where one of Wanda’s kids runs up and presents Magneto with a model ship he says he made with his mind. Magneto responds to this with silence, and a sort of haunted look. Then we get back to last issue’s cliffhanger, where Wolverine is once again commanded to remove the tracker in the back of his neck. When he doesn’t comply fast enough, Hawkeye shoots him in the neck, over Cage’s objections, and Logan passes out.
The roof is torn open by sentinels, who hunt humans in this world, and they prepare to do whatever they do to people. But Cloak gets most of them out of there, as many as he could, teleporting them to Wilson Fisk’s office. It’s the only place he could think of he knew would be empty.
Logan tries to explain what the real world is like, and learns Wanda is human in this world, which completely shocks him. He keeps explaining the events leading up to now, how Wanda killed the Avengers and they went to Genosha and all, and then he has to inform Hawkeye that he’s dead in the real world.
So, the human underground and Logan and walking McGuffin Layla there head to the Summers residence in Connecticut. No one’s home, but Logan wants Layla to show Emma Frost what she showed Cage. Layla has no idea how she does what she does or what she does or anything, and Logan explains to her that she’s a mutant. Then Emma gets home. She telepathically freezes everyone, thinking they’re trying to rob her, but then she senses Logan’s thoughts that he knows her. She reads his mind, then Layla does her thing, and Emma relives her whole real life and almost passes out.
I have said, for many years, that any story with the X-Men in it is an X-Men story. It’s almost impossible for it to go any other way. The X-Men are such an incredibly insular, self-referential property, a world of their own within the world of Marvel, that for anything to crossover with them, they have to go into the X-Men’s world rather than the X-Men coming out of it. So of course this Avengers/X-Men crossover boils down to Wolverine and Emma Frost wanting to kill Magneto with various non-X-Men watching them talk about it. It’s inevitable.