Saturday, March 15, 2014

Remender's "Uncanny Avengers" Rise from the Ashes of "Ragnarok Now"

CBR: By the end of Uncanny Avengers #17, the concluding chapter of "Ragnarok Now", the villainous Apocalypse Twins Eimin and Uriel exploited the strife between the members newly formed Avengers Unity Squad to accomplish a two fold plan: doom the Earth to destruction and transport the planet's mutant population into an interstellar "ark."

What happens now that the Earth is gone? What kind of world will the surviving mutant population build for themselves? And what role will the time traveling conqueror Kang and his newly forged Chronos Corps play in these events? For the answers to these questions and more, CBR News spoke with Rick Remender about the apocalyptic conclusion of "Ragnarok Now" and exploring the consequences in upcoming arc "Avenge the Earth."

CBR: Does the Planet X setting of "Avenge the Earth" mean that we'll get some new characters front and center and perhaps some fun cameos from various mutants?

Rick Remender: Yeah, but I don't want to bog the story down too much with getting into that. We're going to have a big Havok and Cyclops confrontation here, or possibly several. There's a lot of that coming. We're going to get a lot of contextual stuff based around the mutants on Planet X and some of our cast. Then when the action picks up I had to of course throw Psylocke in there. So she's around, a couple versions of her actually. If you read "Uncanny X-Force" this will be a nice continuation of the "Kill the Future" arc. There's a lot of Easter eggs, but as always, I try to make sure that the story is accessible to new readers.

1 comment:

FSaker said...

Uncanny Avengers was uninteresting in its first issues (maybe Havok lecturing Cyclops had something to do with it, or Scarlet Witch acting like decimating mutantkind was a good thing), and I was very irritated with the way Rogue was killed some issues ago, but it seems that now Remender will finally do to this book the magic he did for Uncanny X-Force.

That's great! And it's even better to know that Psylocke will be a part of it! I was already happy when he showed Magistrate Braddock as part of Kang's team, but now it seems that the real Betsy (...well, Magistrate Braddock is also Betsy, but just in an alternate future) will also take part of the action.

The only problem is that this book has serious problems with continuity - and I'm not talking about Earth being destroyed, but how Cable and Psylocke are still leaders of separate X-Force teams in it, when they're on the same team now. Or how Wolverine still wears the uniform he had before All-New Marvel NOW!, stuff like that.

(plus, it must be frustrating to Wood that he had to stop using Rogue just for Remender to kill her, then reveal that eventually her death will likely be retconned as never happening at all... I like Monet, but I still prefered the X-Women with Rogue, and even Kitty "self-righteous" Pryde, in the team)