After making it through three-fifths of the story, I finally understand what X-Men: Schism is all about… because I read Kieron Gillen explain it in an interview with the LA Times:
[T]he core disagreement is about how much of the present should you be willing to give up for the future. As I said, Cyclops made all sorts of hard, leaning gray decisions — which he’s doing to make sure the mutants have a future. Wolverine, while involved in most of the gray decisions, thinks that Cyclops is still working in some kind of bunker-siege mindset and acting against principles which should be sacrosanct.
I don’t know why I feel as if this could’ve been made clearer in the books themselves, considering that Schism – by its very nature – is all about setting up and purposefully not resolving the conflict between the two sides, so of course it’d take time for the conflict to become obvious. And yet, I still feel as if Schism is oddly draggy, which leads me to wonder whether there’s something… not wrong, exactly, but wrong-ish about the expectations readers have about the series given the way the series and subsequent Regenesis branding has been hyped: We’ve known from the start – before the start! – that this series would lead to a separation of the united mutant front that’s been living on Utopia for years, and that it would split the X-Men into two distinct camps. With that in mind, is it the reader’s fault for being impatient to actually see that conflict as quickly as possible?
I’m genuinely torn – I know that, in order to sell Schism, the idea had to be given away to catch readers’ and retailers’ attention (especially considering the low orders; remember the last-minute attempts to convince people that it was really, really important?), but in doing so, I think the actual story got screwed because we all knew the end, and getting there suddenly became an entirely different thing. Would it have been better for Marvel to have kept quiet about Regenesis and the spin-off books until later? Should Schism have been shorter? Am I the only one who feels impatient for the actual schism to happen already?
September 1st, 2011 at 9:07 am
Yes, it’s taking tooooo long.
And no, you’re not the only one thinking so.
September 1st, 2011 at 9:10 am
That epic waste of time ‘Prelude to Schism’ really didn’t help either.
September 1st, 2011 at 9:52 am
I thought this was pretty clear from the way the last issue ended. I’m enjoying it.
September 1st, 2011 at 10:29 am
I’m enjoying it too, far more than Fear Itself, which has been even worse at explaining what the conflict is about – I’ve heard theories that the Marvel writers spend so long thinking about these stories beforehand that they forget the readers AREN’T intimate with the core conflicts. Makes sense.
September 1st, 2011 at 11:25 am
I think it would have been better if Marvel just had “Schizm Month” in the regular titles: the event that triggers the schizm occurs in the first X-title that month, soul searching and short tempers in most of the rest of the books, Cyclops vs. Wolverine in the second to last book of the month, and the teams break up in the last book.
September 1st, 2011 at 11:41 am
While Gillen stated it much more clearly that I would have, the nature of the conflict has been obvious to me, if not from Schism #1, then at least #2.
That being said, yes, I do think that this reveal risks undercutting the drama of the story, especially if you draw out your schedule to make sure it wraps with Fear Itself. But I’m still interested in the why of it, and how that leads to the new split status quo.
September 1st, 2011 at 12:10 pm
The nature of the business says that they couldn’t wait until the end of Schism to start promoting Regenesis. You would have had to suspend most of the X-Books for a few months to do that, and you know Marvel can’t afford to do that.
Also, when it was announced I thought Schism was supposed to be on an accelerated release schedule, like every 2 weeks That’s why you had 5 different high profile artists.
September 1st, 2011 at 12:47 pm
After seeing the headline, I expected the article to read, “duh!”
That said, compared to some other recent Marvel events, it almost feels tightly-edited.
September 2nd, 2011 at 8:24 am
What is really taking time is the crappy slow leak of who is on what team. Boring.
September 3rd, 2011 at 4:11 am
It’s because we heard about it first like, in April. And they danced around it for three months before we got the first issue. Now they’re getting ahead of themselves again by telling us what comes post-Schism when we shouldn’t have heard about that until the solicits forced them to spill.
That said, understanding Schism isn’t difficult at all. Once I read issue 3, that’s when I got what they were fighting over. Cyclops needs to be checked before he goes full-on Magneto.
September 4th, 2011 at 11:53 am
Too long? The main series is only 2 issues?! Vs. something like Messiah War/Complex over 3 years and counting.
September 5th, 2011 at 11:29 pm
When your protagonist is trying to get from area A to area C, you know everything in Area B is pointless filler. it can be well made filler that is fun to read, but that does not change the fact that it didn’t need to exist. We know about utopia and we know wolverine is leaving. everything in between is pointless. They could have done this all in one comic.