A Steve McNiven cover, you know it’s serious. And look, Deodato manages to get some pages in. It’s him and Terry Dodson with Rachel Dodson, and colorists Justin Ponsor and Christina Strain. Hey, after 5 issues, maybe the Uncanny X-Men will participate in this event after literally just watching most of it on TV! We begin with a flashback…
Hilariously, not the last time an X-Men comic will ask me to go pick up some other comic to see a crucial scene. I did not do so in either instance. Deodato takes over as the Dark Avengers fly to the still unidentified in-story ruins of Asteroid M 1.2 miles off the coast of San Francisco. The 2 teams prepare for battle.
Cyclops orders Angel, who I guess can turn into his more sinister Archangel persona at will now, to take Bullseye off the board, so he whisks Bullseye off to the woods where Return of the Jedi was filmed so they can fight. The rest of the teams engage. Various Poser models stiffly float around each other. One of my favorite/least favorite things about the increasingly common, at this time, tracing of 3D models is how the anatomy wasn’t too natural back then. I had Poser, I knew full well. You put your models in various heroic poses, and the muscles didn’t move right. Pectorals in particle did not stretch properly when you put your lil 3D man in a Superman flying pose, or whatever. And these guys, Deodato, Brandon Peterson, they just copied that bad anatomy verbatim, adding mightily to the uncanny valley of it all. Dani Moonstar shows up, back to riding a winged horse and looking like a valkyrie, the rest of her New Mutants pals in tow, saying she borrowed power from Hela to beat Ares. I don’t know how that works, but ok. Colossus fights Venom, a whole buncha people dogpile on Mimic, Daken makes a pretty out of character mean comment about girls not being able to fight before being stomped by Armor, it’s a buncha fightin’. Meanwhile, Emma Frost teams up with a recovering Professor X to force the Sentry back into the white room she made for him in New Avengers 10, where he says he’s not going to make it.
Emma pulls Bob into the white part of the room, and makes it seem like he’s only helping Norman because of the Void’s influence, which really seems completely counter to what we see in Dark Avengers normally, and helps him “retake control.” In the real world, Sentry stops fighting immediately, chased off by the Void, but Emma is trapped in her diamond form, because, as Xavier says, “there’s a sliver the Void still inside you!” Uh, ok. Osborn is predictably losing it as Sentry goes off the board, and it doesn’t look any better as Dani wipes the floor with Ares. As things keep turning the X-Men’s way, Moonstone stops Norman, telling him they’d have to kill all the mutants to win, and then points out…
Having the 2 art teams swap characters for these pages was fun.
As Emma alluded to, not the first time the X-Men went to live on an island. Not the last, either. People love sending them to islands. So, what’s the net result here? As an X-Men reader, you got your mutant plight, twists and triplecrosses, and a big new status quo. As a Dark Avengers reader, you could have skipped this entirely and not missed anything. Sentry is even back with the team at that press conference, literally nothing important happened to the Dark Avengers here. Because any story with the X-Men in it is an X-Men story.I shoulda followed my instincts and just not bought any of it. Ok, jeez, enough of all that. That’s the dubious place we end this block. Time to read some comics that actually have Spider-Man in them.