THE X-AXIS
20 May 2007
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This week:
EXILES #94 - Enemy of the Stars, part 5 of 5
"We'll Die Another Day"
by Chris Claremont, Paul Pelletier, Rick Magyar and
Gary Martin
UNCANNY X-MEN #486 - Rise and Fall of the Shi'ar Empire,
part 12 of 12: "Endings and Beginnings"
by Ed Brubaker, Billy Tan and Danny Miki
X-MEN: FIRST CLASS SPECIAL
"The Museum of Oddities"
by Jeff Parker and Kevin Nowlan
"The Soul of a Poet"
by Jeff Parker, Nick Dragotta and Mike Allred
"A Girl and her Dragon"
by Jeff Parker and Paul Smith
"The Key", "Men Fear the Blob", "Mental Might of Marvel Girl"
by Jeff Parker and Colleen Coover
THE PLAIN JANES
by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg
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When Marvel announced that Chris Claremont was taking over EXILES, I
thought it was a good match for him. Times have changed since the
1980s, when Claremont was synonymous with the X-Men. But he still has a
solid audience, easily enough to justify Marvel continuing to publish a
Chris Claremont comic or two.
Exiles seemed like an ideal vehicle for him. Writing a book set outside
the mainstream Marvel Universe, he would be free to tell whatever
stories he wanted, without having to fit in with the rest of the X-Men
landscape. And thanks to parallel worlds, he could indulge his obvious
interest in swashbuckling high adventure and so forth - just as he did
in Excalibur's notorious "Cross-Time Caper" period.
I still think that Exiles ought to be a good match for Claremont, but
his opening arc, "Enemy of the Stars", isn't a very convincing
demonstration. Understandably enough, Claremont has brought in one of
his pet characters, Psylocke. But that aside, it's a fairly standard
Exiles story. They visit a world in mortal danger, they meet different
versions of familiar Marvel heroes and villains, and they do some
fighting. Everything turns out okay in the end.
It's all a bit... standard, really. It's an Exiles story, and it
doesn't do anything particularly unexpected. Of course, it's got
Claremont's typical dialogue tics. And yet again, he's used mind
control as a central plot point. (Surely, by now, the editors should be
politely suggesting that he gives the mind control a rest.)
Otherwise, it's just an Exiles story. Nothing wrong with it, so far as
it goes. It's got perfectly nice art from Paul Pelletier, and does the
usual routine well enough, but I was hoping for something a little more
distinctive. Five issues seems a bit excessive for something relatively
formulaic.
And if we're being honest, there are a few glitches in the storytelling.
The big finale involves characters talking about how almost the entire
population of Earth-1720 has previously disappeared. That rather major
point wasn't properly established in the previous issues. It's alluded
to in passing at a couple of points - for example, in issue #91, the
Exiles observe that New York City is deserted. But that's a long way
from setting up the complete absence of billions of people.
Then there's Valeria Richards, who is apparently enormously important to
the plot because of the jewel on her necklace - except when she was
rescued from the bad guys last issue, she wasn't wearing a necklace.
(And yes, the dialogue in this issue does insist that she had it "around
her neck" while she was a prisoner.) It's completely trivial, but it
makes me wonder why the Macguffin wasn't clearly signalled in last
issue's script - is it a last-minute rewrite, or did it somehow slip
through?
Still, on the whole, the story still hangs together. Nonetheless, I
don't feel Claremont's getting the most out of the format yet. There's
plenty of scope for him to do more with Exiles, and with any luck he'll
start indulging himself and pushing the format further - although,
please, not with another mind control story.
Rating: B-
------------
Over in UNCANNY X-MEN, Ed Brubaker and Billy Tan have finally completed
their twelve-issue epic "Rise and Fall of the Shi'ar Empire."
I have a lot of time for Ed Brubaker. He's an enormously talented
writer, albeit that his reputation was built more on down-to-earth,
street-level stories than on intergalactic space opera. Still, the early
chapters of this storyline earned a lot of brownie points by actually
pacing themselves for the monthly title. Unlike many of his peers,
Brubaker rightly kept an eye on the need to make his issues somewhat
self-contained, instead of just treating them as arbitrary page breaks
in the trade paperback.
But as the story has gone on, I've increasingly found myself wondering
what on earth Brubaker is trying to achieve here. It's become harder
and harder to see how the story could possibly reach a satisfactory
resolution in the remaining space. And now, with the final issue, we
have the answer: it doesn't. The effect of "Rise and Fall" is to change
the status quo of the Shi'ar Empire, but in a way that seems mainly
designed to set the stage for future stories.
Basically, by the end of the story, Vulcan is ruling the Empire, and the
Starjammers have a new line-up (with some of the unwanted X-Men banished
to join them). And that's essentially it. Professor X gets his powers
back as well, but in a way that makes me wonder why Marvel bothered
removing them in the first place.
Reading the story as a whole, and without the expectation of a proper
pay-off, you can see rather more clearly what it's trying to do. It's
attempting to cement Vulcan as an A-list villain by putting him in
charge of a whole intergalactic empire. Even so, twelve issues is an
awful lot of space just to end up with what reads suspiciously like a
pitch for a New Starjammers title.
As for Vulcan, the character still doesn't quite work. The history is
just a little too convoluted and contrived to make him a truly
convincing character. He started out aiming to take revenge on the
Shi'ar, and now he's running the empire without any particularly
convincing epiphany to explain his change of heart. And for this story
to work, not only do we have to believe in Vulcan, but we also have to
believe that the Shi'ar people will accept him as their leader. In
fact, considering this story's political aspirations, the actual Shi'ar
people are noticeably absent. I have real trouble with the idea of them
blithely accepting Vulcan, or even D'Ken or Deathbird, as an authority
figure. They don't seem like a nation, so much as a bunch of generic
aliens who do whatever the plot asks of them.
This story doesn't leave me wanting more of the Shi'ar empire, let alone
Vulcan. The whole story isn't really Brubaker's forte, and I'm hoping
things will click better in his next arc, when we get back to earth.
Overall, though, I'd have to class this arc as an ambitious failure.
Rating: C+
------------
Filling the gap between the X-Men: First Class miniseries and next
month's ongoing title, we have the X-MEN: FIRST CLASS SPECIAL.
At first glance, this issue is nothing more than First Class #9. But in
fact, that's not entirely fair. On this collection of short stories,
writer Jeff Parker is joined by a range of different artists. There's
also a subtle difference in tone. This issue doesn't feel like an ersatz
Marvel Adventures title in quite the same way as First Class did -
perhaps inevitable, when you've got a story drawn by the spiky Kevin
Nowlan, and another where Nick Dragotta and Mike Allred are being
vaguely psychedelic.
Nowlan's story, "The Museum of Oddities", is a fairly standard First
Class piece - the X-Men investigate something, there's a mutant angle to
it, and everything works out happily in the end. It's only five pages,
and it's straightforward, but Nowlan's art sells it.
"The Soul of a Poet" is a stranger proposition, as it attempts to update
Bernard the Poet. Bernard appeared in a handful of issues in the 1960s,
rarely interacting with the team, but readers of a certain age tend to
remember him because, as a character with a name, he got listed in the
X-Men Index. Since the beat poetry scene was on its last legs even when
Lee and Kirby created the character, Bernard takes an awful lot of
updating, and becomes a pretentious spoken word artist.
The story also gives Bernard mutant powers, in a way that's rather hard
to square with any of his original appearances. The relationship
between First Class and established continuity has always been a little
strained, but this really is pushing it. (And since the final story has
a present-day framing sequence, there's a real sense of the book having
its cake and eating it.) But it's a fun little story, and Dragotta and
Allred work wonders with the visuals.
"A Girl and her Dragon" attempts to gives us a relationship between
Marvel Girl and, of all things, Dragon Man. This doesn't really work.
It feels like an awkward exercise in manufacturing a parallel with Kitty
and Lockheed, for no obvious purpose. But it's got art by Paul Smith,
which is always something.
Colleen Coover also contributes art for three single-page comedy strips,
which are very cute, but to be honest, probably not quite as funny as
they really need to be.
On the whole, though, it's a decent package, and an encouraging sign
that First Class is going to broaden out from its rather restrictive
format, without losing sight of its broad appeal.
Rating: B+
------------
DC's new Minx imprint has attracted a lot of attention in the run-up to
its launch.
Quite plainly, Minx is DC's latest answer to a question that most
American publishers have been wrestling with: how do we get all those
young female manga readers to spend their lovely, lovely money on us,
instead of sending it to Japan? Minx's approach is to adopt the
black-and-white digest format of the manga publishers, but to fill the
pages with content that seems like something Oni might have put out a
few years ago.
This is not necessary a bad idea. Oni was making some very good comics
a few years ago. The point is, none of the previews look obviously like
manga, and only one has an obviously manga-style premise. (That would
be Good as Lily, where the one-line pitch is "What would you do if
versions of yourself at ages 6, 29 and 70 suddenly became part of your
already complicated high school life?") So, if nothing else, Minx
should avoid the stigma of being a manga clone imprint. The stories
also seem to be self-contained - or at least, there's no volume number
to be seen.
First to hit the shelves is THE PLAIN JANES, written by Cecil Castelluci
and drawn by Jim Rugg. Since Minx has attracted a degree of criticism
for using so many male creators on a girl-targetted imprint, it's
perhaps worth pointing out that Cecil is a woman. Jim Rugg isn't. He
was one of the creators of the cult indie hit Street Angel, although
he's simplified and cleaned up his art for this book.
The story is about a teenage girl called Jane (obviously), whose parents
panic and relocate to the suburbs after she's caught up in a terrorist
attack. Now cut off from all the good stuff in the city, and with a
ridiculously overprotective mother to deal with, Jane hooks up with the
school outcasts, all of whom are also called Jane. They form P.L.A.I.N.
- People Loving Art In Neighborhoods - who go around town carrying out
essentially innocuous artistic stunts of the sort that people who've
spent too long at art school probably call interventions. (Fortunately,
the story steers clear of such jargon.) Reactions vary, from those who
see the beauty of the art to the paranoid control freaks regard it as a
threat.
Thematically, this is quite ambitious stuff. The story wants to explore
the role of art in society, the degree of paranoia in post-9/11 America,
and the reclaiming of public space. It raises those issues well enough.
But it doesn't always deal with them convincingly. The argument is
presented in a one-sided way; anyone who disagrees with the lead
characters is presented as either crushed by paranoia, or a raving
idiot. The book shies away from actually endorsing graffiti, since the
girls never do anything that would cause more than trivial inconvenience
to anyone until right at the end of the story - and even then, it kind
of sidesteps the obvious question of "Yes, but who's clearing this up?"
Still, it does raise the issue, and it's got some valid points to make.
The big problem with the book is that it's trying to cram far too much
into a single story. The other three Janes don't have much personality
of their own besides one-note gimmicks (the clever one, the theatre one,
the sporty one), and frankly, they seem to have been included primarily
to justify the pun in the title. There are whole subplots about a guy
in a coma, the school cheerleader, the token school homosexual, the main
character's possible love interest, and the mother's trauma, all
jostling for room. Tons of content is a good thing, but Plain Janes
doesn't seem to follow through properly on a lot of these ideas.
The terrorist angle also feels a bit odd. I can understand why
Castellucci wants to avoid using 9/11 - it's very loaded, it's overused,
and she's trying to make a broader point. But terrorist attacks in the
USA are so rare that the small bomb can't help seeming like a 9/11
stand-in, since there's really nothing else that it could represent.
And using a small-scale IRA-type attack in that role seems off-key to
me, since they don't actually happen in America. I suppose the story
needs actual terrorists to set against "art terrorism", but it doesn't
quite ring true to me.
Still, it's a sparky and engaging book with plenty of ideas. And
emotionally, it does work - Jane's mother may be a largely
one-dimensional character, but it works because the story is being told
through Jane's eyes. The family works, and "Main" Jane herself is a
nicely rounded character. There's a good sense of inspirational youth
rejecting paranoia, and it carries you along with that. There's also a
fair amount of teen angst, but so there should be.
It's biggest flaw is trying to do too much, and having so many elements
that it can't develop them properly. But it's easy to imagine the book
appealing to the target audience of teenage girls, and overall, it's a
strong start for the new imprint.
Rating: B+
------------
Also this week...
CABLE & DEADPOOL #40 - After several months away, Cable returns to the
book for a surprisingly underpublicised crossover with X-Men. They don't
even mention it on the cover. Basically, this is the current X-Men
story from Cable's perspective, and it comes down to a monologue in
which Cable bemoans his inability to escape his role as an angry man
with big guns. Depending on how you want to look at it, either Nicieza
is taking Cable's role in X-Men and using it as a fresh obstruction for
the character to face in this series, or the story features an
only-just-subtext in which Nicieza laments the interference with his
direction. Interesting, though, and it turns out that artist Reilly
Brown does a rather good Cable. B+
ULTIMATE X-MEN #82 - Nightcrawler meets the Ultimate Morlocks, who for
some reason are led by Sunder. Seems a weird thing to change,
especially when Callisto is right there next to him. Meanwhile, Bishop
and Storm recruit a new X-Men team, which turns out to mean that we're
doing Australia. All perfectly adequate so far as it goes, but none of
it really captures my imagination. The art is a bit scratchy, though -
Pascal Alixe is drawing perfectly decent figures, but marring them with
overly fiddly details on the faces. B
ULTIMATES 2 #13 - Not as good as it needs to be, after such an
inordinate delay. It's been eight months since issue #12, and more than
two years since this storyline began. Now, Bryan Hitch may be good, but
to justify taking that long to produce a comic, the finished product has
to be simply exceptional, and this isn't. It's just a big fight scene
with good art and an eight-page gatefold in the centre. (Really.)
There's nothing to it in story terms, but at least it's finally
finished. B-
X-FACTOR #19 - X-Factor confront the ex-mutant members of the X-Cell, as
Peter David trawls the archives for mutant villains who still pose a
threat without their powers. So if you're been waiting for the return
of Reaper all this time, then good news, because he's back. It's all up
to David's usual high standards, and the storyline is tying in nicely
with Quicksilver's increasingly insane plans to restore all the mutants.
Khoi Pham's art is less reliable - it's generally fine, but there are
some really odd panels dotted around, such as the Blob appearing to fall
on Siryn from a great height in a scene where that doesn't make any
sense. The good far outweighs the bad, though. A-
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There's more from me at If Destroyed, and if you're desperate for more
Article 10 columns, you can always hunt through the archives on Ninth
Art.
http://ifdestroyed.blogspot.com
http://www.ninthart.com
Next week, X-Men #199 builds towards the anniversary issue, while Wisdom
#6 completes the tragically under-purchased miniseries.
--
Paul O'Brien
THE X-AXIS -
http://www.thexaxis.com
IF DESTROYED -
http://ifdestroyed.blogspot.com
NINTH ART -
http://www.ninthart.com
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