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whydidireadthis · 6 years

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Dark Reign...a brief look.

Events.

The word alone is enough to make a superhero comic reader fight their understandable gag reflex.

In the 80s, confronted with a capricious market, the genre powerhouses Marvel and DC experimented with “events” -- limited crossovers of numerous characters for a singular storyline. DC had been doing this annually as a tradition, typically between the Justice League and the Justice Society. However, their company crossovers were cranked up to eleven around the mid-80s, and Marvel decided to give it a try.

Both companies decided that events were the thing of the future. The main reason for this is because they could very easily make series seem to tie into the main crossover’s storyline and, thus, wring out a few more bucks from hapless readers who didn’t know any better. It’s also worthy of note that this same initial period is the period where the expression “red-sky crossover” comes from.

If you didn’t know what that meant, it means “a book advertised as being a part of an event that only includes some superficial aspect of it”, which specifically refers in its name to the many “crossovers” of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Many had nothing really to do with the main story, which was ridiculously dense and a massive clusterfuck that could have used decompression into other books; instead, the labeled “crossover” would feature something like the red sky from the main Crisis books and have someone comment on it, then the rest of the story continued on as normal.

Classy.

But after that little bit of setup, let me just segue into saying that Civil War was the event to end all events. And by that, I mean it was the absolute nadir for the superhero genre and unequivocally the worst “event” ever conceived, figuratively and literally destroying countless characters and making it impossible to repair the genre into what it should be: super-powered champions in iconic costumes fighting back against evil, villainy, and oppression.

Days of Future Crap

Civil War took an old, tired X-Men plot (which was probably why the X-Men were largely absent from it) and decided to rehash it one more time, except worse somehow. And as much as I hate the “Marvel cinematic universe”, I have to admit -- without it coming along to build some characters back up, they would have been completely and utterly unusable after Civil War made them into nasty little fascists...the exact thing most superheroes love to punch right in the face, for good reason.

But after Civil War tore the real Marvel Universe apart, alienated longtime readers in droves, and brought extremely short-lived sales boosts that petered off almost instantly, Marvel found themselves stuck for what to do. Eventually, they went with the sure bet of Skrull fuckery, because Skrulls could change shape. That worked, right? Sure! Even if it did completely ignore or contradict decades of established continuity in so doing, as with garbage -- which you would rightly clock as garbage from the title alone -- like Skrull Kill Krew.

And after the yawn that was Secret Invasion, which was basically just an excuse for more graphic violence and “shocking” twists, then came the brusque push into Dark Reign.

In many ways, Dark Reign kind of exemplifies the worst tendencies of the superhero genre since 2000, that period of over-the-top violence and flagrant disrespect for beloved characters and teams, but also tries to include some genuinely good ideas and concepts. There’s good stuff in there, which is far more than anyone could say about, for example, Civil War or Secret Invasion.

Unfortunately for Dark Reign, it also stuck around just short of for-fucking-ever, and it gave us remarkably little in return for our investment of time. And money, because over 200 issues, at a very reserved estimate, carried the Dark Reign tie-in label.

And that’s really its biggest problem: it was an idea that was conceived with no scope in mind. Marvel editorial wanted, they claimed, to get away from the concept of “events” as essentially limited series storylines with tie-ins, which came and went relatively quickly.

Well cry me a fucking river, since they started that shit in the mid-80s and rode it for over twenty years while readers complained every god damn time an “event” came along and derailed the story and characters to tell its comparatively stupid one.

Ahem. But I digress. The main problem was that Dark Reign was an event, without actually being an event. It’s a lot like my feelings about superhero stories that are totally superhero stories, they know they’re superhero stories, but they act like they’re too good to admit that and look down on superhero stories, constantly sniping at and avoiding genre staples out of contempt. Fuck you. Call a spade a spade. You’re not some amazing auteur because you wrote Superman without a costume.

And that’s really the big problem here: in trying to avoid making Dark Reign seem like the usual type of event, it’s a vague, nebulous mass of barely-related issues where the villains of the piece may only pop in at one point to twirl their moustaches, and nothing can actually be accomplished because, at the end of the day, it is an event and its plot will not advance until the event is resolving. It’s virtually impossible to figure out where the story starts, where it advances, and there’s no real order to it. Multiple would-be authorities on the subject have put forth their proposed reading orders, but it’s all conjecture at this point. The only order you have is when there is a limited series specifically tied in to the event (and there were several) or when an already-running series has tie-in issues that go in sequential order.

What makes it even more complicated and frustrating is when you have tie-ins only sometimes. For example, with the then-running series of War Machine, issues 1-5 and then 10-12 are the only ones considered part of Dark Reign. They’re the ones that directly pertain to the Dark Reign plot. But there are a lot of times in the various series where the issues with the Dark Reign label cut off before any real resolution...making it either poor organization or just poor planning. Some series, like War Machine, just abruptly end with the end of that tie-in, as if that was the only thing keeping them going. In War Machine’s case, that may have been true.

But it’s a huge mess. Even if you were to decide “oh hey, I’ll just grab the trade paperbacks, that’ll be easier to read them in order”...not really. Sure, it’s all collected, and in order. But not always a coherent order, and not always including all of the parts of the story that you need to have it actually make sense.

For example, one of the high points of Dark Reign is the X-Men leaving San Francisco and establishing an independent sovereign island nation of Utopia. However, for whatever reason, it’s ridiculously difficult to find any of those issues included in any collection. Maybe it’s Marvel’s stupid rights mismanagement with the X-Men and Fantastic Four, but it’s just as likely to be a really tremendous lack of organization with regards to the event.

And I’m not giving them a free pass on this, either; the Utopia storyline suffers from terrible inconsistent characterization and oftentimes, just painfully bad writing, like Daken’s inexplicable voiced contempt for female fighters...which had not previously appeared and never popped up again afterwards. It had some great moments too, though, like Emma making a strong showing but still remembering that she had a heart and feelings, as well as being an excellent strategist and tactician. It was also nice to see that Sentry, for all his overblown bullshit, wasn’t a match for Namor and Rogue, on the rare occasion she’s written well, is able to hold her own against serious heavy hitters.

But I’ll come back to the Sentry later. Oh yes. He’s not getting out of this unscathed.

The Un-Crossovers for the Un-Event

The thing is, everything feels adrift in a sea of crossover labels. Oh, this book’s part of Dark Reign! Well that’s cool...too bad it doesn’t have much context beyond the basic premise of the event, and almost nothing in any story ever seems to have any consequences or repercussions beyond that individual story! It’s this feeling of futility that really makes it hard to enjoy Dark Reign, especially since it was conceived with no scope in mind. They really wanted it to feel less like an event, and more like just something happening in the world of the characters. And that’s cool and everything, but...

It doesn’t work.

The reason why events even work at all is because, love it or hate it, once it’s over, things are going to continue on without having to tie into it. People will be relieved, they’ll pick their series back up, and they won’t be constantly bothered with some extraneous story that doesn’t focus on the character or team they really care about. Plus, the company can compile the event into a couple of trade paperbacks and wring a little more profit from them, since that’s why they did the event in the first place anyway.

When you have an event so nebulous and yet so ubiquitous, it really shows the weakness of the event mindset. Stories function better when the villains, who are built up as being detestable -- you want to see the heroes get one up on them, you want to see the big bad guy punched in the gut and brought low -- are defeated before they become too much and it just becomes depressing and miserable.

When a story drags on for over a year, readers become used to it. It becomes a new normal, and that’s a depressing reality, especially when the villains are constantly being built up for readers to hate them. You have to give readers something, and that something increases in scope with every evil, detestable act the villains commit. You have to balance it out with victories, even small ones, so that hope can be maintained and it doesn’t become a drudgy slog.

And I’ll say this too: Alan Moore was right in the fundamental message of Watchmen. Which I will also say I hated as a story, I think it’s overrated miserable crap, and it’s fodder for the endlessly pretentious to harp on when they think they’re too good for superhero comics. Like I said before: fuck you. Call a spade a spade and be done with it.

But the fundamental message was this: it’s better for superheroes to fight supervillains than it is for there to be no superheroes or villains, because then all you’ve got are politicians and shitty regular humans constantly trying for a pathetic little bit of what they think is power over each other.

And fundamentally, we read superhero comics not to see bureaucracy, politics, or the inherent shittiness of people. We read them because they are a modern mythology, of heroes we vicariously identify with, whom we join on their adventures through the medium of comics. We see them at their high and low points. We join them in their moments of tragedy and triumph both, and we delight in those highs and understand those lows.

When we are enjoying superhero comics, we can fly above any unhappiness or inadequacy that our real lives give us, and in those moments, we are invincible. It is because of this that superhero fans are so passionate about their heroes.

There has always been some element of things like government and military shit in superhero comics. The fact that they really kindled as a genre during World War II is not lost on me. But since shortly after 2000, Marvel tried really hard to militarize superheroes and brought in a heavy governmental angle too. SHIELD was promoted and became more overblown than it was in the age of the superspy. Suddenly, everything had to revolve around one or the other, and it was not a wise or welcome turn.

So I will say this for Dark Reign: it illustrated very well, especially in tie-in storylines like Avengers: The Initiative, why militarized superheroes and government lies are not a good thing to have around. Sure, we shouldn’t need to have it spelled out for us, but it’s nice to have that precedent set that no, superheroes shouldn’t be government-controlled, no matter who is in power, because even if we have an administration that isn’t overtly malevolent, that won’t last. Inevitably, someone will get power that doesn’t deserve it, which is something especially painful to say in this day and age.

But having Norman Osborn be constantly, repeatedly built up to be even more of a piece of total shit than we already knew him to be...was a huge mistake. Because we knew that, despite everything, despite Marvel’s tendency for that 2000s “kill-’em-all” attitude and despite their unending contempt for readers, shown very well with Civil War alone...

We knew nothing was going to come of it.

We knew Norman Osborn was going to get the easy way out, survive the whole ordeal, and be locked away somewhere until someone wanted to bring him back as the Green Goblin or something.

And you can’t do that with this kind of storyline.

You can’t make it a shitty, real world-feeling storyline like this, mired in politics, bureaucracy, militaristic bullshit, and the bad guys winning, not to mention taking things way too far in tone with everything from rape to cannibalism, and not have the big bad guy die to resolve it.

You cannot, with the unlimited scope of superhero comics, leave someone like that alive. They have caused, directly or indirectly, horrific things to happen, and they committed crimes that are completely inexcusable; if you want them to stick around, if they’re the kind of “love to hate them” villain, then you have to do less to make them the kind of person that even the best and most heroic would say “yeah, nothing of value would be lost if you just offed that guy.”

Because it’s pretty fucking unsatisfying and pretty god damn smug when you try to have the good guys act like they’re the better people for not just ending evil -- and this is a fictional evil, so it’s absolutely, completely, and objectively evil -- but every reader of every age knows that doesn’t do anything at all to fix the things that person did. It doesn’t bring back people from the dead, it doesn’t undo their trauma, it doesn’t heal their injuries. It doesn’t repair the damage done to the world at large.

When you have someone who essentially steals a position of great power and influence, they must have absolute accountability. Which...is also pretty relevant to modern life, but painful to have to spell out.

The thing is, with Dark Avengers, they could have balanced this out a bit. The characters in that series (who were almost invariably as written completely different people in any other series) were pretty fucked-up, but they were often treated as more nuanced, three-dimensional people, with only a couple of exceptions. I’m looking at you, Sentry.

In Dark Avengers, even the team of villains and grey area antihero types didn’t know how to deal with Norman. Which was a bit stupid, since any one of them probably could have destroyed him effortlessly, but it made for a more psychological conflict. Unfortunately, the glue holding it together was the Sentry...one of Marvel’s worst characters and worst character ideas, who comes off as a bad idea somebody had while stoned, but who became a high-profile character anyway.

He’s not altogether the worst idea ever, but he’s up there. Conceptually, it’s pretty interesting to examine a high-powered superhero everyone somehow forgot about, but in actual execution, the Sentry is just a crazy twat. He’s impossible to like, he’s uninteresting because he’s overpowered, and nobody knows how to write him well, because his fundamental premise is one of not understanding his character. It’s obvious that whoever thought up the Sentry was someone who didn’t understand how to write Superman, didn’t know what made Superman great as a character, and thought it was ludicrous that such a character could exist in the Marvel Universe.

But it’s not. There are cosmic-level characters all over Marvel’s whole cosmos. And while superheroes are all about the action, that’s not all there is to them. How hard a character can punch something isn’t really what the character should be about, despite superheroics tending to revolve around resolving problems with fighting and powers. If you don’t have a context for those fights, it’s just meaningless, hollow visuals. If a character doesn’t have a motivation to do something that tells you something about that character, you probably won’t care about that character.

How hard does Superman punch? As hard as he needs to. How much can he lift? As much as he needs to. What can he do? As much as he needs to. That’s why Superman is an excellent character who has stood the test of time, and the Sentry is a terrible character who only pops up when people think they have something clever they can do with him.

His function in Dark Avengers, as in Dark Reign, is Norman’s imagined ace in the hole. He uses Sentry as a bully, to just casually destroy anyone or anything that gets in his way, and he constantly holds that threat over everyone...except when the story needs him not to do that, which it does often. Sentry is fairly easy to take out, but when it matters, he’s impossible to get rid of, and for no reason that really develops him as a character or makes him more interesting. He’s a schizophrenic idiot and contributes essentially nothing to the story. He is a placeholder until or unless he’s used as a deus ex machina, when he becomes insufferable because he’s nothing but a crutch for weak writing.

The worst and most glaring part of it is that Norman is batshit crazy, and it’s frankly unbelievable that he is somehow able to handle the Sentry, by using Sentry’s crazy against him. It’s just unbelievable, and it’s ridiculous that it goes on as long as it does -- a year, which in superhero comics is an eternity.

Sentry has no pathos and no real levels to him. All the depth he has is manufactured, artificial, and wholly “who cares” at every point. The one series that ever managed to make me care about him was the whimsical series The Age of the Sentry, done in a spirit of fun and real, palpable love for bygone eras of comics, and that was a series of stories told about the character and of dubious veracity.

In Dark Reign, he’s written like Superman when Superman is badly written: a crutch to quickly resolve stories the writer has no idea how to get himself out of, or alternatively the one that has to be taken out as soon as possible because the writer can’t write, usually because he wants to show that the person doing it is a serious threat. Either way, it doesn’t work.

Cul-de-Sac Reign

In a similarly dead-end sort of way, most of the tie-in stories are nothing but plot cul-de-sacs. They can’t actually advance the plot appreciably until editorial wants it to advance...so instead, they just end up being prolonged exercises in futility.

For the same reason I hated The X-Files, in which the protagonists were constantly prevented from accomplishing anything by increasingly ridiculous plot devices, I hate pointless stories. The Young Avengers miniseries is pointless, for introducing characters who all but came from nowhere and vanished back there, in a worthless plot where characters were inspired into complete inaction despite having a resolution to the entire event available. Similarly, the Elektra miniseries takes the widely-hated horrible joke of a character, makes her somehow more unlikable, and wastes everyone’s time with a story that goes nowhere and accomplishes nothing but character destruction, mainly of Elektra and Wolverine.

Who is, by the way, now absolutely complicit in multiple premeditated murders of people justifiably pissed off at Elektra being a complete piece of shit. Not that they bring this up with any of the gravity it should have -- just look at any time Rick Remender writes Wolverine or, for that matter, anyone in any series. Or don’t. No one should have to read Remender’s pretentious garbage.

Even the Punisher, whom I can’t stand, is dicked around by Dark Reign’s insistence to avoid having things happen. It’s pretty shitty when multiple issues of his title advertised him going after various members of the Dark Avengers to take them down, and he wasn’t even able to make any significant impact with anything he did. He couldn’t even take down Norman, who had no believable excuse for being able to escape mortal danger! You know, for all I give superhero comics shit for killing off characters needlessly, having the Punisher actually take out Norman -- or Sentry -- would have actually been shocking, and that could have led to so much more interesting conflicts and storylines about what this means, if it was right if the other heroes were thinking about it (and they were), and they could have had the Dark Avengers scrambling to try and hold onto their legitimacy and almost make it...but be defeated by the good guys, who prove their goodness and show the public what they bought into.

And can we just talk about the animal cruelty that popped up from time to time? It seemed really overt and conspicuous, and it’s absolutely not okay. Extreme violence is never okay, even in superhero comics (or maybe especially in superhero comics), but animal cruelty is really going a step past a step past too far.

Get your shit together, Marvel.

To say nothing of the inherent lameness of the Hood, probably the absolute worst character to be introduced and featured prominently in these past couple of decades of superhero disaster. It’s some lame whiner of a shit garbage character that dresses in everyday clothes but wears a red cloak over it and, of course, dual wields guns. Because that doesn’t look stupid or anything. And of course his background is basically the one thing I despise more than almost anything else in tired-ass writing cliches: straight people baby daddy issues. Please go fuck yourself. Nobody cares about the asshole who knocked up some bint who shit out a kid and became a by-the-numbers deadbeat dad. Because they’re lame.

The underlying basic concept, that of someone finding a magical cloak that gives them powers, is wondrous and fun. It’s just that the Hood himself is the exact opposite of wondrous and fun. He comes off, every time, like some asinine mary sue author insertion character you hate the moment they’re introduced. It’s cool when Doctor Doom shows that he’s not only a scientific genius, he’s also a skilled sorceror. It’s not so cool when some asshole dumbasses his way through magical power because of some cape he found randomly that anyone could have found.

It makes him seem even worse, and even more of a character almost metaplot levels of desperate to intimidate that he keeps trying to spook the people around him because they don’t take him seriously. Here’s an idea: create an imposing costume. If you can’t do that, you really can’t expect to be taken seriously. If you can’t even make imposing fashion choices or bring together an ensemble that will impact others, you have no business expecting them to just take you at face value because you’re wearing a red cape that you have matched with literally nothing else you’re wearing.

Plot, Unmoving

But none of it really adds anything to Dark Reign, and it really pisses me off to see stories where direct resolution was available, but heroes couldn’t actually do what they would logically or reasonably do...because editorial wanted to stretch out the event to make it seem like it wasn’t an event.

The whole concept of “Dark Avengers” is made even more stupid by the fact that they’re wearing obviously outdated costumes. As cool as Moonstone looks in Ms. Marvel’s old outfit, she also looks like she just stepped out of a disco. And while the different lineups of Avengers have sometimes been really strange and seemingly random over the years, you can’t expect me to believe that literally nobody noticed how awkward this one was, and how their costumes were almost all completely out of date and out of touch with the figures who are well-known public figures.

There’s also this weird aversion to the actual heroes confronting the people masquerading as them, because Norman’s good at PR spin. I’m sorry?! This just doesn’t make sense, and it keeps making less sense when some of the heroes are actually willing to strike out on their own to kill Norman, rather than to actually make it public that they are being impersonated...which makes it even more ridiculous when you consider that some of the people being impersonated have public identities.

The Dark X-Men team was actually was more plausible, in large part because much of the public didn’t know the X-Men well, and also because there actually was an actual X-Man in the group. Wouldn’t it have been more interesting to have Wolverine really in the Dark Avengers, and maybe have the X-Men or some other group have to work with his dangerous and unpredictable son Daken to get one over on him and take him out, thereby reducing the power level of the team significantly?

But no, they couldn’t have that. The X-Men had to have their own inane events, and Wolverine, despite being a dumpster fire of a character at this point, is somehow sacrosanct for vicarious dick-waggling of insecure writers who live through him just like the same pack of wankers do for Batman.

There’s also this bizarre insistence that somehow, despite people overtly getting plenty of proof that the “Dark Avengers” aren’t who they say they are, and some of them are committing pretty serious crimes in costume, in a day and age where everyone has a camera and a microphone and there’s recording everywhere...nobody gets any real dirt on them until they write it into Spider-Man for Peter Parker to do it.

I think it’s great Peter does it. But at the same time...how exactly is it that a top-level investigative journalist isn’t able to do it for a small eternity, and how exactly is it that it doesn’t have more serious repercussions in the public eye? It may just be the chaotic nature of the incoherent narrative, and I’m just not seeing it in any sort of cohesive order, but it sure seems like one of the many plot elements that doesn’t really matter until editorial decides it suddenly has any bearing on anything.

And I’ll just address the elephant in the room: the Dark Avengers lineup is not, to be totally honest, the most powerful or able he could have assembled. Most of them being mentally unstable doesn’t exactly help the plausibility. Given, the Marvel Universe tends towards more street power level and less cosmic, but there are plenty of real hard hitters that have been in the Avengers’ membership over the years, not to mention their foes that a villain supposedly so resourceful should have been able to recruit.

It’s basically just a sort of take on the Masters of Evil or the Sinister Six or something. And I have to say again that having an actual hero, or even a fallen hero desperate for redemption, would be a vast improvement. Instead, we only have elements like that in side stories or tie-ins that go nowhere and are easily missed by the central narrative.

Additionally, Norman Osborn is not the most believable as a long-term leader, even if he does use strongarm tactics, blackmail, and manipulation to get his way. He’s just not that smart, certainly not as much as he’d have to be in order to keep his team of people together and not killing him, and incidentally avoiding anyone else outside the team and thus his control similarly killing him. This is where I’ll bring Doctor Doom up again, since when he gathered a group of people together, he had a damn good reason and, as a reader, you could believe he could actually control them...or at the very least, keep them from posing a serious mortal threat to him.

Members of the Dark Avengers fight other teams and heroes, but rarely do they ever bother to clash en masse with any other group to any narrative end. There’s such a feeling of futility that pervades it all, that if you read any story supposedly tying into it, you start to expect it to go nowhere and accomplish nothing. Because even if it seems to actually make a difference, everything it does is either handwaved, ignored, or somehow doesn’t work into the next story you read under the Dark Reign banner.

Dark Reign is an event, make no mistake. It has a central storyline that we should be seeing unfold with every tie-in and every crossover. Instead, Marvel’s complete aversion to admitting what it is leaves us with a meandering, disjointed tale that promises something unique and superior and instead leaves us thinking of what it could have been, and probably should have been, instead.

#dark reign #marvel comics #writing critique #comic review #critique

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whydidireadthis · 6 years

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Iceman: Gone and Forgotten?

As you probably know by now if you read this blog, I’m a Daken fan. If he’s in something, I’m probably going to sooner or later get around to reading it.

So imagine my interest when I heard he was going to appear in an issue of an unexpected solo series focusing on newly-out Iceman Bobby Drake. Here was a gay character finally getting a solo series! Who knows why Northstar didn’t get one, since Marvel loves to exploit a buzzword more than anything, but if I’m honest, it probably would have gone about as badly as Iceman’s.

Which is pretty bad.

He’s Coming Out

I’ve said many times that Northstar’s coming out issue in Alpha Flight v1, written by Scott Lobdell, was one of the most shameful and embarrassingly terrible issues of anything ever, but especially a terrible mishandling of an important event in a gay character’s life. It basically just dumped a bunch of gay stereotype story elements into one issue in the clumsiest way possible, written by someone who really shouldn’t have been writing it.

I feel now like Iceman is a series that is consistent with that...and the issue of Alpha Flight was around two decades ago.

Sina Grace may be a perfectly okay writer with other things (though I wouldn’t know), but he, like Scott Lobdell before him, should never have been given the reins of such an important series. He makes Bobby’s entire struggle seem fakey and forced, with obstacles that seem artificial and contrived, and characters -- and dialogue -- that are like...

Well, it’s like the line from Mean Girls, which was one of the only good things it did: “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. It’s never going to happen.”

Dialogue is incredibly awkward throughout Iceman. It’s like Grace wanted to imitate Joss Whedon’s clunky attempts at clever phrasing, but he didn’t even manage to reach those levels. Nobody speaks like they do in Iceman, even in other comics. And sure, I’ll give you that people in comics don’t always speak the same way they would in the real world, or in other media. There’s just something about the writing for Iceman that makes every speech bubble that much worse.

The characters are just painful. And even Bobby’s parents, who existed long before now, are the victims of wholesale character destruction by making them stereotypically intolerant parents...when they were never anything like they are in this series. I get that a series like this wants to bring relevant issues to light, and there are still unfortunately ignorant assholes who treat their kids like that, but the Drakes? Really?

I get it. Not everybody, not even writers for the company, are going to have any impulse to look back on years of previous comics, even if they are relevant. Now, more than ever, there’s just no quality control or continuity control in superhero comics...but especially at Marvel. And there should be at least some continuity between series, especially when they’re trying to do these lengthy events.

And like Bobby’s parents, Daken is another character who is a victim of Iceman’s terrible writing and flagrant disregard for anything that ever happened to develop the character. The only ones given any remote respect are the characters that Grace invents or reinvents in his own idea of what they’re supposed to be; everyone else is either a caricature, a disaster, or a throwback to over a decade previous.

Which makes me think that he did read some comics from past appearances...but none that were relevant.

The Two Dakens

Daken is basically schmoozing around the Hellfire Club -- which is nothing like the Hellfire Club has ever been -- as if he owns the place. He’s apparently taken one of Bobby’s former students under his wing and is teaching him all the wrong things. So, naturally, Bobby decides to go after him and get him back or something? Like I’m pretty sure the kid can decide for himself, but what the hell does Bobby really expect to do?

Daken is made a fool of by the writing, which not only gives Bobby far more abilities and finesse than he’s ever had, but also seems not to get who Daken is or what he can do. And all that aside, Bobby takes a huge chance basically hitting him with what would, on anyone else, be lethal force at the end. Guess it was good that Daken wasn’t going through one of his several “my healing factor’s shit right now” phases. But really, Bobby? You’re supposed to be an X-Man! Sure, idiots like Rick Remender seem to have forgotten (or never knew in the first place) what that means, but I somehow feel that making the assumed good guys casual would-be killers rather limits their appeal as heroes.

Not to mention it would be, you know, a very public and extremely prosecutable crime to go to a club, assault one of its...owners? Proprietors? I’m not sure what Grace wants Daken to be in this issue, since it’s completely out of nowhere. But to assault someone clearly in charge, in public, and then literally try to kill him, again in public, would not exactly be the best thing for the X-Men’s PR at this point. Especially since the Hellfire Club in past have not been their best friends, and having the security footage and multiple firsthand eyewitness reports would be beyond even Kitty Pryde’s massive Mary Sue powers to defeat.

But aside from this, there’s one small but crucial detail.

At the time, Daken was busy, you know, being a hero. He may be an antihero, and he has had a checkered past...but he was risking his life and his newly-recovered healing factor to help his sister Laura. And as you may notice here, he’s very affectionate with her and genuinely cares enough to put his life in danger for complete strangers by sharing his healing with them, to fight an alien super-illness.

So who exactly was that in the Hellfire Club? Because it wasn’t Daken.

Oh, you think maybe it happened after that stretch in All-New Wolverine?

Nope.

See, Daken was always a complex character, and that’s okay. He sometimes still kills people...and that’s okay too. Sometimes, some characters do that. Daken was never a lily-white “good guy”, and you know what?

That’s okay too!

But Grace writes Daken as if he’s pulling every bit of his character from Dark Reign. Dude, that was about ten years ago. And as fond as I am of some stuff that Marjorie Liu has done (and Daniel Way)...her writing of Daken wasn’t consistently great. In fact, Dark Wolverine was pretty hit or miss, as was a lot around that time. There were things in that period that were so dark, I don’t think Marvel would do them again now, and I’m glad to think that. Even if it is probably a delusion of mine, I would like to believe at least that they would never be that stupid again.

But they did Civil War 2, so what do I know.

Daken and Cover

Well, for one thing, I know Daken, despite all his powers and fantastic abilities, can’t be in two places at once. And you’d think that they’d know this too, since they were trying to tie the story obliquely into the Apocalypse Seed crap they were doing. Yawn.

So we have some people who have no idea what the fuck they’re doing, and meanwhile in All-New Wolverine, Tom Taylor actually gives enough of a shit to write the character with sensitivity and care, keeping him consistent and an evolution of his personality. It’s easy to see that Daken in that title is a reasonably-developed character who has progressed over a period of several years’ worth of writing. He’s come a long way from the dangerous, angry, and wild days, and a long way from the callous machiavellian ones too. This is a character who has actually grown and become better for the passage of time and his extraordinary experiences.

Not that Grace has the slightest idea about any of that. He just knows that Daken made some monocles pop and pearls get clutched for kissing Bullseye about ten years ago, and the fact that he’s bisexual with a preference for guys apparently just makes him the perfect choice -- in Grace’s mind -- to be the crazy villain who’s basically just an insane serial killer.

What is this, the 60s? Do all of our queer and coded characters have to be nutjobs who are also incidentally psycho killers?

It also kind of says a lot about the series and its writing that the other bisexual/bi-adjacent Shatterstar-Rictor thing was obliquely demolished away by this same shit writing. Too bad Northstar hasn’t jumped on the new craze of gay divorce, or I’m sure Grace would have tossed that in. Maybe. He seems to really have a problematic track record with bi dudes is what I’m saying.

So really, Iceman as a series is a wreck, and not just for its mishandling of Daken...who couldn’t have appeared in the series during those stories the way he did. Who was that? Not Daken. But it’ll be great if we can just try to forget that happened, which is hopefully what will be done with the series in its entirety. It’s what Marvel has at least tried to do with most of their missteps, but again, Civil War 2 apparently happened for some reason, so who knows.

It’s really something when Kevin Wada is tapped for covers, I guess because he’s queer-friendly or queer himself, but manages to disappoint so strongly. I have seen him do far better than his Iceman work. Just look for yourself!

And really? The entire concept behind this was “let’s draw Iceman getting penetrated by Daken LOL BRILLIANT” plus none of the characters actually look remotely like that in the actual comic.

Honestly, in a way it’s sort of a leitmotif for the whole run: half-baked concepts paired with phoned-in creative direction, flagrant disregard for the characters, and a half-assed mind to gaysploitation. If it’s queer or somewhere in that vague area, it’ll sell!

And it’s exactly why -- and it’s a tragedy this is true -- this doesn’t happen more often. Gay characters, and in fact a number of minority characters, often are given to poor creative teams to do solo ventures. They inevitably disappoint, and the company thinks that it didn’t do well because people aren’t interested in gay characters, or that they can’t carry a series.

But I’d like to point out that just because Iceman, who has always been a strongly team-oriented person, can’t carry a book, it’s not really to say a gay character couldn’t. Or even a bisexual guy who prefers guys...like Daken. Who carried his own series a decade ago.

Honestly though, I’d rather see Daken in All-New Wolverine, with the family dynamic he has there and the evolution of his character. He feels right, and he’s a character who has developed, not just stagnated at a point, never to advance. I can only hope that the Daken appearing in the new X-Men book will be more of a Taylor approach to the character and not a Grace one.

As for Iceman, let’s just hope it’s brushed quietly under the rug, to fade away in obscurity with the other failed ideas Marvel thought would be a quick cash grab from whatever audience they could trick into thinking they gave a shit about. And Iceman himself can be a part of the X-Men, like he always was (aside from that stretch on the Defenders -- the real ones, not the Netflix Heroes For Hire), and feature there. It’ll be better that way.

Team books are really more likely to succeed than solo series anyway, and it’s good to show that gay characters, at the end of the day, are part of a bigger group in which they’re included.

And seriously, we need to get Jean-Paul and Bobby together. You cannot get me to believe we waited twenty fucking years after Marvel toyed with all that unresolved sexual tension between Bobby and Jean-Paul, only to have Bobby come out and not get with Northstar. Fuck that. Make it happen, Marvel.

It cannot be a worse story than the ones told in this series. It just cannot.

One-A-Gay

Given, I would like to see more gay characters presented well. But to be honest, I’m not going to hold my breath with Marvel or DC, who seem to have stalled with regards to gay awareness, somewhere around 1990. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part it’s probably best if they just don’t try it instead of giving something like this to someone who really doesn’t deserve the privilege of doing it.

I can think of a number of writers who would have and could have handled Iceman far better than Grace. But the thing is, this might have been okay as it was, if editors had actually seemed to give enough of a fuck to, you know, do their job. Keeping characters consistent is what you’re supposed to do. You’re also supposed to inform writers if they can’t use characters, due to them appearing in different circumstances in other titles, where they can’t have possibly been in both stories.

Characters in comics are not just interchangeable pieces, to become whatever the story needs. I’ve always held it as a pet peeve when writers change characters to suit their story, instead of changing the story to suit the characters. Grace used Daken solely because he was known for liking dudes and was close enough to gay for most people, because we can’t have a gay hero and not have him fight at least a gay-ish villain.

Really though, Bobby himself was the villain in this disappointing disaster of a series. He was thoroughly impossible to like or sympathize with, his new boyfriend (whom we knew wouldn’t last, because few people, least of all superheroes, stay with their first boyfriend or girlfriend) a flat, boring placeholder because of what the writer thought people expected. Daken in Iceman was only entertaining because clearly Grace didn’t care about him and didn’t bother actually thinking about him as a person or even a character; he was free to be outrageous, if only because Grace didn’t give a shit if he was usable after his run.

Which is really vile to me.

Making a quip about shitty writing doesn’t make the writing you do less shitty. It just points out that you know what you’re doing, and you know better, but you’re still doing it anyway.

I hope Grace has learned his lesson, but I doubt it. Either way, I hope he doesn’t make the same mistake twice, and I hope Marvel doesn’t either.

But again...Civil War 2.

I won’t hold my breath.

#iceman #daken #writing critique #comic review

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whydidireadthis · 6 years

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All-New Wolverine (#19-30)

One of my hugest pet peeves with superhero comics is “male character, but with tits”. I hate it. I’ve always hated it, and I’ll always hate it. The invention of X-23 in X-Men Evolution was a painfully awkward inclusion following that same creative approach, and I despised it; it was, like so many others, taking a character and creating a female clone -- literally -- so that insecure straight boys could feel less insecure lusting directly after the character.

It’s happened plenty of other times in comics, most notably when Rose Wilson, who had her own identity and powers, had all of her character annihilated so she could become Ravager, Deathstroke with Tits. This numbers as one of the worst characters ever massacred into that role. It’s insulting; Rose had something distinct going on, and then idiot Geoff Johns came along and decided that he needed an x, with tits character.

The thing is, this stunt always ends up being insulting for both the character being imitated and the character either created to fill the role or forced into it. It’s even more insulting when they’re already established as being someone and something else, but they’re required to redefine themselves anyway, especially when they’re expected to be accepted as a replacement for the character they’re obviously meant to out-appeal because they can be openly lusted after by the imagined primary demographic.

Sibling Clonery

So the long and short of it here is that I’m saying I am not a fan of X-23, or Laura as she’s come to be known. Going into this, my expectations were rock-bottom. But I love Daken, and I always considered him a far more subversive and interesting necessary examination of the character of Wolverine and everything around him: the machismo, the insecurity of writers overcompensating through Logan’s often comedically excessive libido and attitude, and of course the overselling of the character. Daken is openly bisexual (and actually leans more gay, more often), comfortable with his sexuality, uses his mind at least as much as, if not more than, his claws, and in general undermines all of the bullshit that’s been built around Logan.

He dressed up in Logan’s old costume design and masqueraded in his superheroic identity, and in so doing forced readers to examine what really made Wolverine. It forced scrutiny on the concept of the identity, and who was behind the mask and the name.

Daken is a complex character, but he’s also easy enough to understand and is often surprisingly sympathetic, or at least identifiable. Even when he’s doing awful things, it’s not really because he’s a consummately bad person or has no reason for doing what he does. I don’t think all of his writing is great or even good, and he’s been wildly inconsistent for periods over the years, but he seems to have finally found a place where he can find some blessed consistency and appreciation.

Aside from that garbage Iceman series that will be gone and not missed very soon, which seemed not to get the memo that Daken couldn’t be a villain running the Hellfire Club while at the same time being kidnapped by a group of Laura’s foes, but whatever. Like I said, that series is gone and soon to be forgotten, and it’s good riddance to bad rubbish.

We’re looking at the good Daken appearances recently, and they just so happen to be in All-New Wolverine.

Marjorie Liu did some solid work with Daken, even if I didn’t agree with her direction at all times, and the crossover between him and X-23 called “Collision” was an interesting look at the characters. Liu’s run on the X-23 series, which is really in many ways a precursor to All-New Wolverine, gave her a lot more to work with than the typical runaround she’d been given in most of the other titles. Before Liu got to do things with Laura and develop her as a person (and at the time, also developing Gambit in a way that treated him like a person and not the embarrassing caricature people have exaggerated from foggy memories of the 90s X-Men cartoon), she really wasn’t much more than Wolverine, but with tits. That was it. She couldn’t really outrun her stigma, because she was just another piece of window dressing from Logan’s titles.

But it’s important to note that Daken, too, really didn’t flourish until he got out from the shadow, out from Logan’s titles, and did something else.

Not Wolverines, because god knows that was hot garbage that turned into a dumpster fire, and I’m pretty sure nobody had any idea what the hell was going on by the end. It was about enough to make me throw my hands up and walk away again.

But writer Tom Taylor wisely just handwaves Wolverines and tosses Daken into the story “Immune” as a spectacular and dramatic appearance, and that makes all the difference. What went before is addressed, touched upon, and then moved past, and we see that Daken is also has developed as a person since the frankly lackluster, incoherent writing of Wolverines.

I found myself actually caring about Laura as a person, more and more, because while there is a kind of naiveté in Taylor’s writing, it’s the kind that makes you want to believe in it. It’s the way things really should be, and the way I’d like them to be, as someone who has read superhero comics for far longer than is probably wise.

Full of Character

The characters are engaging and enjoyable, and I like the fact that they also have humor in their interactions. I’ve said it many times before: without at least some humor, things are not only unpleasant, but also unrealistic and difficult to believe. Utterly humorless events only tempt resistance from an audience, and speaking plainly, it’s just silly to have a genre so steeped in action and the outrageous take itself too seriously.

All-New Wolverine, however, knows its audience. As seen here, there’s plenty of mixing it up and making things different from how they have been up to now, but there’s also a consistency that is comfortable. These aren’t the clunky female characters written clearly to pander, or to tempt people into arguments over genitalia or hormones or anything else. It probably happens, and I’m lucky not to have seen it, but the characters in All-New Wolverine have solid personalities and relate to each other like people. And nicely enough, even though there’s no such thing as black and white in Logan’s circles, the characters have redeeming qualities and make you want to like them.

And I’m not going to lie here, I think one of the best things about the title right now is the fact that “our” universe’s Logan is dead, dead, dead. The X-titles, Logan, and Charles Xavier all need a hard time out so that things can do a little soft resetting and they can slip back in and not be horrible, ruined characters impossible to like, as they are now. I think the “Death of Wolverine” thing they did around it was stupid and tacky, but I always think that of death events, and they should’ve learned this long ago: death is not an event, and killing off a character shouldn’t be made into one.

But that’s a conversation for another day.

All-New Wolverine’s “Immune” storyline places Laura at ground zero of a super-infectious alien disease and, through it, showcases really what defines the character under Taylor’s direction as a writer. It’s especially nice to see her show not a pandering sort of sensitivity, but instead emotion easy to identify with, which makes it easier to sympathize with her. It gives her more personality and character, as well as strength of character; her interactions with Daken and Gabby humanize her, which is something that has always been needed.

She spent too long coasting on nothing but the fact that she was Wolverine, but with tits. Even Liu’s stretch still relied at times on the fact that Laura wasn’t sure if she had a soul, which while engaging, is still a fairly done-to-death story. The clone who isn’t sure if she has a soul, the clone trying to determine her place in a world that also contains the person she was cloned from, the clone trying to figure out who she is when that person is suddenly gone -- they’re all potentially interesting starts, premises, beginnings, but they were most of the story for a long while. Too long.

Gabby is great, not to mention hilarious, and it really delighted me that they have a pet wolverine named Jonathan, who accompanies them on their adventures. Some might bristle at the thought of a team of Wolverine-themed characters having what amounts to a mascot, but it really makes them a lot easier to sympathize with, not to mention a lot more fun. A mascot, or even just a cute animal, is an appealing feature that, again, humanizes characters through their relations.

The especially nice thing is that, even though I came for Daken, I stayed for Daken’s interactions with Laura and Gabby. They form a great core to the team of similarly-themed characters, and there’s so much that is said between them that hasn’t been even mentioned before. It’s like nobody ever thought about half of the things Taylor does, with what he works into the dialogue.

The title also isn’t afraid to show a bit of genre-awareness, but it knows moderation. This isn’t like the adventures of Deadpool or She-Hulk, which overtly show existential awareness and depend on (frequently absent) clever writing. All-New Wolverine is not a parody, but it can at times examine itself and shorthand that is rarely questioned and, by doing so, makes it easier to swallow.

It also doesn’t skimp on the Daken. And to be sure, Logan’s always been prone to nudity in his titles. There used to go hardly a month between seeing his hairy ass in something or other. So it’s nice to see it being used for something beautiful and even inspiring. I like the art a great deal, especially with the “Orphans of X” story, and what’s more, I respect them taking advantage of having Daken in the title to contribute a little heart-thumping eye candy.

But it’s not exploitation, it actually has a purpose and the art is really quite beautiful, like the sequence where he heals his arm back. It examines, in a way that only comics can, a zen meditative philosophy.

There’s unpleasant and violent stuff in All-New Wolverine, of course, but it’s not the tacky, gaudy, just plain nasty nonsense that seemed ubiquitous and overdone in the first decade of the 2000s. It has a purpose, and it has a role.

The Bad and the Good

It’s not all perfect, though. I will say that Taylor seriously needs to develop his pacing. Things take a long time to get moving, then reach a climax...and bunches of things happen between issues that would have been better dealt with at length instead of some of the things that were drawn out. He’s not the best at crafting a satisfying end to stories either, though it is important to note that his resolutions aren’t unsatisfying...they’re just not entirely satisfying either.

In “Hive”, which is basically the second leg of “Immune”, Laura goes into space with the Guardians of the Galaxy and fights the Brood. Things roll gradually in parts, then seem to pick up way too much speed. Events get a little confusing, and sometimes people seem not to say or do things because if they do, it will require the writer to develop those points. But in not doing them and not addressing some of them, it makes for a weaker story, with less impact.

I will totally admit, I laughed out loud at the resolution to “Hive”. It was the funniest thing I’d seen in a long time, and I’m probably a horrible person for that. It did actually give a fairly fulfilling ending, but it also failed to deal with several of the other issues brought up by the proceedings. The question was just never as simple as it’s often regarded by the story and its participating characters, and sometimes the unaddressed issues are the most glaring and most obvious when you’re reading it.

“Orphans of X” is exciting, thrilling, entertaining, and develops the characters significantly, every one of them. But it also has tacky turns and, in its extremely naive finale, seems to ignore the serious problems that it presented repeatedly before getting there. It’s too facile a resolution, and it’s one that is impossible to really accept; it can only be a temporary solution, because these people are not trustworthy or reliable, and they can’t be depended on. It makes Laura look a bit stupid for it, and it also damages the credibility of the proceedings somewhat.

But if you think about it in less of a “compare to real life” way and more of a “think of how superheroes are supposed to be” one, it’s a lot more agreeable. Honestly, it’s how things should go. People should be able to come together and make sense to each other. People who have been victimized by others should be able to unite against those others and be stronger for the experience, instead of fighting amongst themselves. Superheroes are supposed to inspire others to greatness; they are supposed to inspire bravery and courage, dignity and integrity, and all the majestic things that they show overtly, which we all must try to metaphorically exercise in things like strength of character and personal integrity, mercy, kindness, empathy, and a refusal to give up even when the odds are against us.

From Vat to Very Fond

So for the time being, I’ll just accept it that way. It’s not a perfect story, and neither is “Immune”/”Hive”, but they’re entertaining, the characters involved most all benefit from and are enriched by their inclusion, and I genuinely liked the comics. I enjoyed reading them.

I liked Laura. I’ve started to find her genuinely engaging and interesting as a character, for the first time since she came into being. Do I think she’s good to carry a title by herself? No! Not at all. But that’s also not the point of who she is. She’s not supposed to be alone. She functions better in a family, and the family dynamic is what makes her so much more interesting.

She’s fascinating in how she interacts with the others she is so close to, like Gabby and Daken. They all enrich each other, and they grow as characters in this mutually beneficial relationship.

I feel the same way about Batman, for example. There are plenty of characters who just aren’t really that compelling or interesting when they’re alone, or they’re fundamentally not likable. Batman needs a Bat-family, because he’s dull as a beige room when he doesn’t have anyone to interact with but his enemies.

Laura needs a Wolverine-family.

With Jonathan too, because he’s just too wonderful to leave out.

Many, even most, characters should not be in a title totally alone. There are remarkably few characters who can really carry a story solo, and a lot of those stories are just not interesting. Logan is one of those characters who has never been that interesting, but he’s been an extension of so much straight boy insecurity that he’s become indispensable to Marvel. In a similar manner, Batman has become so overblown and oversold that it’s a miracle when, in stories like The Hiketeia, he actually is dealt with realistically.

We do need an escape, and we need characters we can identify with, even vicariously live through. I’m not going to deny insecure people their escapes.

But I think the time has come, and I think it’s shown in the quality of the writing, the solidness of the art, and the sheer enjoyability of the whole product, that All-New Wolverine has at least a promising start of maybe bringing us something new and better in superheroes. It’s not perfect, but it’s the first title I’ve read in years that made me want to follow it and had me waiting eagerly, not dreading, the next issue.

I sincerely hope that Taylor can keep up his quality. He’s made me care about a character I despised for years and then felt neutral about for years more. He writes Daken beautifully and makes me fall in love with the character all over again. And of course, Gabby is a wonderful character rather than the annoying young character she could be, and Jonathan the wolverine is delightful.

In the words of RuPaul, Tom, don’t fuck this up!

Because you’ve made this jaded comic fan, who once upon a time was completely done with superhero comics, believe that good things are possible again. And you did it with the Wolverine title and X-23...two things that were among my least favorite in the world.

It’s worth checking out All-New Wolverine. Now if we can only have that kind of excellence in the X-titles so that people will actually give a fuck about the X-Men again, instead of being embarrassed they exist in the same universe at the moment.

But baby steps. Baby steps.

#all-new wolverine #writing critique #daken #x-23 #comic review

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whydidireadthis · 6 years

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Fantastic Four: Reconstruction (Fantastic Four v1 #544-550) + Black Panther v3 #27-30

Since I’m nothing if not timely for running a blog dedicated to critical analysis of mainstream superhero comics -- a more questionably-relevant medium every moment that passes -- I thought I’d look back at a once-prominent moment for Black Panther.

Remember when he married Storm of the X-Men?

Remember how it was yet another stunt of the Marvel Comics that had then relatively recently discovered how they could manipulate readers and randos alike into vicious internet fights over stupid writing stunts and thus generate free publicity?

I’ll touch on the stunt itself briefly, but then I have a surprise for you.

African Best Friends

So first, I’ll say this: T’Challa and Storm marrying each other is the comic book equivalent of two friends each knowing a single, different gay man and being certain that, for the single quality of them both being gay, they have loads in common and are perfect for each other.

Tangentially, by this time, marriage events were passé and Northstar’s own supergay marriage non-event was done to, effectively, kill him off. That’s what marriage is now, in comics, and it’s worth examining at some point. But unlike Jean-Paul’s Donna Troy paramour who came from nowhere and seemed to be little more than the typical minority hyperfocus so they don’t have to write multiple minority characters, T’Challa and Ororo were pretty prominent characters who had actual personalities and stories.

They’re both African and are superheroes.

That’s it, that’s the background for the great love story of our century. Of course, if you didn’t know, their marriage was wiped out a few years later (which, in comic book time, translates to about a few months). I honestly don’t know who thought it was a good idea, but it’s worth considering that it may have been done in order to pull both T’Challa and Ororo from languishing in relative obscurity, with dead-end series (or in T’Challa’s case, none at all for long stretches of time) only damaging the essential identity of these often-interesting characters who also managed to bring much-needed diversity in representation to superheroes.

T’Challa is the reigning sovereign of a secret, technologically-advanced nation called Wakanda, which has the richest source of vibranium -- an incalculably precious metal -- on Earth. Ororo, who for a time lived as a goddess in the African wild, is one of the leaders of the X-Men. Neither had too much exposure to the other prior to their sudden interest in each other, though I’m willing to buy that some people just fall in love quickly and strongly. It happens.

Not gonna lie, though: it felt really contrived at the time, and it’s not much different to look back on. It was clearly a Marvel stunt, typical of the time, and done around the same time as they were picking up the pieces from the trainwreck of a shitshow Civil War.

Which neatly dovetails into today’s topic -- the Fantastic Four had been torn apart by the events of Civil War, with Reed (nonsensically, and in a way that directly contradicted his stance very uncharacteristically, after a clear event that happened just a few months before in comic-book time) having sided with the assholes, Johnny and Sue having gone against them. Ben moved to France to remain neutral, for...some reason. I will give them the admission that it was at least an interesting enough idea conceptually, which might shake up the team a bit. For all sixteen of us who read the title at the time, it would’ve been surprising, if still sensationalistic and tacky.

And yeah, at the time, the Fantastic Four were not a priority to Marvel. Like the X-Men completely fucked over in the Fox deal, with Marvel not wanting to accidentally support their characters if it meant somebody else might profit from other media sales, the Fantastic Four languished in the utter depths of unpromoted hell for years.

Honestly, more surprising than the way Civil War pulled the team apart was the way Marvel actually allowed a decent writer to do something that brought the title and team some attention and, far better than Civil War had, gave them a renewed relevance. I was surprised by how much I liked the “Reconstruction” arc overall, because Civil War was pretty much the nadir of the Marvel decline; it reflected the lowest point superheroes could achieve and superhero writing could dip...at least, until Avengers Arena a couple of years later. But as a major event, it was certainly the bottom of the barrel, dragging everything else in the universe down with it. The repercussions from Civil War were long-lasting and far-reaching, and not in a good way.

Something Old, Something New

But I’ll talk about that (or not) another time. This time, it’s all “Reconstruction” with Storm and Black Panther taking Reed and Sue’s place on the team while that half of the Fantastic Four take a trip to Titan, moon of Saturn, and work on their strained marriage. It was a good idea to have the two couples in such a situation, with one having been married for quite some time and the other just newlywed. There were several times in the story where distinct similarities arise between the two couples, and their relationships are explored in quite a subtle way. McDuffie’s writing usually did very well at showing the like and the different, as well as making all of the characters pretty interesting.

If I had a complaint about it, it would be the (at the time common) overbuilding of Sue and downplaying of Reed. He backed the wrong horse and in the wrong way, and he realizes that. He loves Sue and understands what he did wrong, and he is a good person. Given, that doesn’t excuse what happened in Civil War, and all is really not forgiven...but they’re both mature enough to acknowledge that it isn’t smart to dwell on something they can’t change, and it’s also childish to twist the proverbial knife when someone highly intelligent realizes what they’ve done wrong. That’s not what I had a problem with, because the writing handled it pretty well.

What I was kind of irritated by is the fact that Reed never really used his powers much. Most of what he did was cerebral and, while that’s very Reed and contributes to most of the Fantastic Four’s adventures...it doesn’t make for a fun comic book, really. But to be fair, this also wasn’t so much about Reed and Sue, and they were largely background characters throughout most of the story. Sue really didn’t use her powers overmuch either, but a whole lot more fuss was made about her than Reed, when both of them are really a Big Deal.

I could have also used a bit more of Reed coming to more personal realizations and developing more after the debacle of Civil War. Reed and Sue never really seemed much more than playful with each other, and while that showed their strong love for each other and a mature perspective from both, it didn’t really sell that they were having serious enough problems to take time off from the team that defined their lives, even leaving their children behind for the interim. Like I said, they were background characters during the story, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t have used an issue concentrating on them dealing with their problems between themselves.

And I’m one of the big opponents of relying of those “straight people baby daddy problems” for stories. I just don’t care, most of the time. One of the biggest reasons marriages in comics became a non-event was because marriage became a non-event in real life.

But that said, Reed and Sue are one of the few exceptions as a couple. It makes sense for them to be together, and they’re so suited to each other, they function far better as a pair than separately. Like Ralph and Sue Dibny or Nick and Nora Charles, Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman are definitive together. What McDuffie did in drawing parallels between the two major couples of the title was a step in the right direction. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped readers both to see their beloved Reed and Sue working things out, and to come to know (and, ideally, like) T’Challa and Ororo.

The great thing is that Johnny and Ben also get respect, and it’s a respect that they are all too rarely given. Ben was stated to be one of the strongest beings in the universe, for example, which is very true...and almost never mentioned at all, ever. The Fantastic Four are all extremely capable -- there’s a reason they are regarded as the First Family of the Marvel Universe -- and they should always command superlative respect for doing what they do so well and so ably, giving of themselves so much for the greater good. The Fantastic Four stand for the greatest of things and, as is stated accurately in “Reconstruction”, are a family, not really so much a superhero group or team.

Ben isn’t written like an idiot, and it’s not just handwaved by saying he has “street smarts”, he genuinely comes off as intelligent and not an idiot, and while he has primarily physical powers and an appearance to match, he’s also got levels. Johnny is actually a bit understated in the story and doesn’t show much beyond the surface, but it’s still something I can’t really blame them for as the Human Torch is usually the most popular amongst young readers and so has gone through a lot of stretches where he’s the only one of the four getting any actual focus. He at least doesn’t suffer for the storyline, which is something good; writers shouldn’t throw characters under a bus to try and make their story look better, or change characters to make their story work.

It’s one of the major reasons why I’ve always hated the “events”, since most of them do the most unforgivable thing in writing superheroes: they change the characters to fit their story that they thought up with no regard to the characters involved. Don’t change the characters to fit the story, change the story to suit the characters. Otherwise, you won’t have any meaningful development of those characters...it’ll just be things happening to people forced into vague roles they are ill-suited to occupy.

A significant plus to “Reconstruction” is that it is definitely, obviously a story written around the Fantastic Four. This is another reason why I liked the story at the time and found it surprising, particularly given its main selling feature.

The tone is also a solid balance of adventure, dramatics, and humor, and it comes off as realistic and engaging, more as it goes on. At first, it’s a little rough and Storm and T’Challa felt like they were too close to Reed and Sue in personality, but that fades quickly as the writer eases into the cast of characters he’ll use for the storyline. By the end of it all, it felt like he had come to know them much better, and it was a shame that the crossover didn’t last longer.

And now I’ll discuss what didn’t work.

Bad Guest T’Challa

First and perhaps most importantly, Black Panther was the worst and most ill-considered part of the story. Bar none, he came off looking the worst of anyone involved, and it was largely due to writing that just refused to have him be wrong, have to come off his high horse, or not excel beyond everyone around him.

T’Challa is a king, and that’s a major part of the character. At the same time, part of what makes such lofty characters relatable is their humanity and the layers of their identity. Characters that live life on a pedestal and never show moments of weakness or humility usually come off as being so far up their own ass that they’re about to find Narnia, which is the impression T’Challa gives in “Reconstruction”.

He doesn’t communicate with the others effectively, he grandstands all the time (and more than Johnny, which is saying something), and he has armed and aggressive guards stationed in their home. That’s not what a member of a family does, and it’s also extremely disrespectful to the Fantastic Four to assume that they won’t have adequate security...when it’s a significant point in the story that the decimated Wakandan embassy was almost destroyed by terrorist bombers. Great security, right?

He also has to be right all the time and isn’t called on his bullshit, to the point where characters break character to give him props for being brilliant. I know T’Challa is an extremely capable person of genius-level intelligence, but it could have been shown far better than it was. At times, unfortunately, he comes off like a Mary Sue character, and that really isn’t what he is. That’s not what he’s supposed to be.

But the story is full of T’Challa being an asshole, and there’s very little about it that indicates anything else. Even when Ororo tries to rein him in and remind him that he’s part of a group and not just acting unilaterally, he does it anyway. There does seem to be more hint of trying to develop him personally more in the Black Panther title, appropriately enough, but that brings us to the story that tied in with “Reconstruction”.

(Okay, so there were a couple, but the one I’m covering is really the only one that was particularly relevant.)

If any of you remember Marvel Zombies, first I’d like to convey my condolences, and second, that’s the tie-in. It was kind of a major thing at the time, since the titular zombies were eating their way across infinite parallel universes. But since their origin series were fucking awful, I can’t say I expected much from their Special Guest Villain appearance in this story.

In it, T’Challa’s magic frogs fuck them into another dimension instead of returning them home. No, seriously, that’s actually what happens. Magic frogs copulate the Fantastic Four into another universe and deposit them on a Skrull world.

The first and most notable difference between McDuffie’s writing on Fantastic Four and Hudlin’s on Black Panther is that the latter seemingly has no concept of subtlety in people’s interactions. He doesn’t excel at writing any of the characters, and the humor he attempts to inject is consistent with that of Marvel Zombies...which is to say it’s unfunny to the extreme. Parts of the story that should be affecting, or meaningful, simply come off as casual or something winding up a punchline, which is especially inappropriate given the story. There’s just nothing fun about it, and the characters barely seem like who they’re supposed to be.

What’s more, the glimpses of Wakanda only make T’Challa seem like even more of an asshole, as well as later introducing his nemesis Killmonger...and making him seem like a pretty decent guy.

I could go into a tangent about Africa Problems right now, or why Killmonger has the potential for nuance that isn’t well-realized by Hudlin but has promise on the conceptual level...but it suffices to look solely at T’Challa himself and how much his writing lacks. He’s rarely in Wakanda, and his sister Shuri refuses to do anything unless there’s no other choice. It could be perfectly fine for T’Challa to roam the globe and have entertaining adventures, but you can’t do that and simultaneously keep touching on the fact that it’s a problem he’s not home, and they’re not doing okay in his absence.

You can’t have it both ways. You have to choose.

Okay, you might be able to try having it both ways, but you have to be a better writer than Hudlin, who can’t even manage to get the major parts of Civil War right, since he apparently wants to paint T’Challa, Ororo, and the Fantastic Four somehow on the “losing” side. His run also firmly establishes Shuri as a bigger asshole than her brother, which is an impressive accomplishment at this point.

Deus Ex Gravitas

The other major problem with “Reconstruction” is that it revolves around a character called Gravity, who functions as a deus ex machina. It was nice that he got a good story to be brought back in, and they didn’t just throw him out by the end. But at the same time, it felt a little cheap to have him show up to be a deus ex machina not only at the start of the story, but again at the end too. He wasn’t introduced in this storyline and had significant previous story, which we’re barely acquainted with before having to take him at face value immediately. He’s likable enough, but it’s more than slightly jarring to have him around...especially when the story should have focused more on the core members of the Fantastic Four, as people dealing with the aftermath of a major interpersonal falling out.

The fight with the Frightful Four is the high point of the story, because it not only brings the usual Fantastic Four against old enemies, it also introduces a surprise addition that has history with T’Challa, bringing the story together nicely. The other appearances of familiar faces in the story often seem contrived or forced (or make you wonder why they bothered to show up for such an insignificant role), but the Frightful Four were used perfectly.

However, the story around “Reconstruction” that it builds up to isn’t really a very good or especially satisfying story. It also raises a number of concerns that, by dismissing, belittling, or ignoring them, makes the entire team of supposed good guys look like really horrible people. It’s even more concerning that they never really deal with the whole planet of people who have been presumably wiped out (despite swearing vengeance), nor do they deal with the extremely irresponsible use of technology that exacerbated the central problem. It’s something that the Fantastic Four have had happen before, in their worst writing: cosmic considerations made the writer forget his humanity, and thus the characters also forgot theirs.

Galactus isn’t a sympathetic character, and he never will be, as long as he keeps eating planets and wiping out entire worlds and their inhabitants. Similarly, the profound entities like Eternity and company aren’t sympathetic or really even identifiable; if they can’t manage to do better than having humans always fixing their fuckups, maybe it’s time to give somebody else the job, just saying.

Though I don’t have to say it so much, since Ben verbatim calls Galactus “a piece of crap”, in one of the best exchanges of the whole story.

Putting It Back Together

So there’s good and there’s bad. It’s a fun enough read, and it was head and shoulders above and beyond most anything that was running at the time. The Fantastic Four got respect as a team and as characters, and the title got a little bit of shaking up that wasn’t ultimately destructive to the characters, especially compared to the then-recent Civil War trainwreck.

Most of the characters were written as more themselves than usual, especially at the time. Though Ororo was not the Storm I remembered from my younger years, she was still identifiable as the character and relatively consistent with who she was defined as, and that’s something even the X-Men titles hadn’t managed to do for a long time.

Maybe I should say, especially the X-Men titles.

T’Challa was really the only major problem in terms of writing, which is a shame since he’s a more interesting character than either McDuffie or Hudlin seem to find him. Hudlin had a couple of moments, abortive attempts really, exploring his thoughts and insecurities underneath the stoic facade he presents to the world, but they didn’t really add up to much of anything.

By the time the story’s done, you’re ready for it to be finished. It doesn’t overstay its welcome too much, because it’s not easy to notice its major problems until you’ve sat down and thought about it for a while. At the very least, that makes it good entertainment. And at the end of the day, that’s pretty good for a comic book.

#black panther #fantastic four #comic review #writing critique

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whydidireadthis · 6 years

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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (film, 2003)

If I say right off the bat that I’ve never been a fan of Sean Connery and rarely thought any of his roles was any good, I’m sure a wild pack of idiots will be ready to tell me how wrong I am even though none of them cared anything about him when he was actually working. In fact, most of them probably weren’t even old enough to watch and understand any of his films...except this one and maybe The Avengers (1998).

Which, I will also add, was the only role I genuinely liked him in.

Since this is a film based, however loosely, on comic books, I thought I’d give it a spin here. I’m not going to be comparing and contrasting it to the comics, though, as I’m not particularly a fan of Alan Moore either and found the original comics to be fairly boring and unmemorable when they weren’t being exceptional by being obnoxious.

And so, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Sean Connery was a little prima donna bitch from the start, making life unquestionably a chore for his costars and instantly clashing with the director. This much isn’t at all surprising, especially given his past behavior and spotlight-hogging. Considering even the worst actor can be improved by a decent script and able direction, it’s a shame that most of the time and in most of his roles, Connery comes off looking like a self-opinionated brute. So, essentially he’s playing himself.

So, whether or not it’s an accurate assessment of the problems with this film, I assume that a large part of it lies with Connery and his insistence at creative control behind the scenes, which is very reliably documented. While I haven’t sunk even the few bucks into the DVD, it contains at least a dozen deleted or edited-down scenes, all of which were omitted from the blu-ray release. These scenes were mostly ones that could be lost without concern, but some of them apparently provided much-needed background development for some of the characters.

Looking Back and Forward

The movie, as it stands, isn’t particularly exceptional. It’s watchable, though. I’ll even say that Connery does a serviceable Allan Quatermain. One of the best scenes in the whole film is his silent encounter with a white tiger, near the last leg of it all. He brings a depth to his character and the situation that, for most of the rest of the film, just doesn’t exist. Too often, he just comes off as playing himself in funny clothes...which is exactly how he comes off as playing almost every other character he’s ever played. It’s one of the reasons why I liked him as Sir August de Wynter in The Avengers (1998), because it was at least a role that required him to do something different, which he did do with panache.

The thing that most people seem not to get is that a close adaptation of Moore’s work would be a film that few if any would enjoy, even fewer than enjoyed this adaptation, for all of its changes. And of course so many were critical, as if they’d even read Moore’s original works -- which most of the bitchiest and loudest didn’t, unless it was expressly so they could complain about how much better they were, which they’d decided before ever reading them.

And honestly, how exactly is it that people were so dead-set against the concept of the film -- the British government secretly uniting these characters we know, in our universe, as main characters of classic books and book series -- yet these same twats ate Marvel’s 2012 crapfest The Avengers up with a spoon? It’s the same fucking premise, but actually done a lot better here.

Most remarkably, it unites the titular League without really taking away any agency from any of them, unlike Marvel’s effort. It also does it in short order, instead of taking each individual character and undermining them in movies about them separately, which is nice. I can only imagine that if they were to try to do a franchise today, they’d start off with a film about Allan Quatermain and have M cheapen him throughout it, then browbeat or blackmail him by the end into agreeing to join his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Initiative. Lather, rinse, repeat for the rest.

Although actually, they’d probably start with Tom Sawyer.

And frankly, he was more often annoying than he should have been in the film. But he was also more charming than he deserved, and that is mostly due to actor Shane West’s own charismatic portrayal and chemistry on-screen with Connery’s Quatermain. As I’m aware, purists highly criticize Sawyer’s presence, since he was never in the original comics, but he fits just fine. He’s just another book hero, and it is at least not quite as ludicrous as it sounds, since the character’s possible arc was headed in a direction that could be plausibly steered where he ended up as a character in the film.

At least they did something with him, I guess is what I’m saying. The same with Mina Harker, who is made worlds more interesting by having her be a vampire, instead of just going the tired old “she’s a pretty thing but she’s got brains, so look out, girl power!” route. It’s a little improbable that anyone would care enough to ask Mina onto a team of people with fabulous super powers and often, extraordinary combat experience if she were both a woman and powerless, so it’s a necessary concession for both the narrative established and the time period, fictionalized though it is.

It also gave her added depth when interacting with Dorian Gray, comparing and contrasting her with his functional immortality.

The Runtime Railroad

The most unfortunate part of the film wasn’t who it used and how; the most unfortunate part is that, despite going to nearly two hours in length, at no point did the script ever spend enough time with any of the characters to make it anything but a railroad from point A to point C, with a brief stop-off at point B that whisks by too fast to notice. Each of the characters is barely touched-upon, and none of them is allowed the essential quality of pathos that they should have. Even Quatermain’s seemingly sole defining quality, his son tragically having been killed accompanying him on one of his escapades, isn’t given enough chance to make us care.

Of course, as it’s Connery and given his prima donna attitude, Quatermain gets most development. As I said before, he does do well with Tom Sawyer, and it’s easy enough to believe them as developing a kind of bond as the story goes. But we don’t really get that from the other perspective, as Tom gets little in the way of anything to define him. He was a relatively last-minute addition, calculated to give American audiences someone to identify with -- puerile and stupid reasoning, to be sure -- but it really shows if you think about it at all while you watch. You’ll realize that, by the end, the only one who benefited from any development in their interactions was Quatermain, while Tom served essentially as a surrogate for him to get out his unresolved feelings about his dead son. A very uneven relationship, to be sure!

I was glad that Tom seemed, largely due to the actors involved, to get that Mina wasn’t interested in him almost immediately, and the two developed a warmer and more genuine rapport. Too many of these blockbuster films, especially ones influenced by Hollywood, seem to want to shove boy-girl pairings down our throats, whether or not the characters involved have any romantic chemistry at all. Some criticized that the interest seems to be dropped suddenly, but it’s actually one of the things the film handled very well. It’s pretty subtle, but it was a nice touch, especially as they were clearly endeavoring to make Mina a strong character without going down the typical “badass” route that was long since tired, even by 2003.

It made Mina seem stronger and more independent, and it also made Tom much more respectable, as he was told she wasn’t interested and respected her enough not to pursue it after that, though he did show visible concern for her a number of times. So, well done for that!

There never seemed to be even sufficient pathos for Dorian Gray or Dr. Jekyll though, and Nemo seems to just exist without much in the way of any defining characteristic. Skinner is potentially fascinating, but as he literally disappears for most of the film after being so present at the beginning, he gets just about as little to do.

Dorian Haaaay

Dorian is played well by Stuart Townsend, who amusingly would join Tom Sawyer’s actor Shane West in the dire prime-time series Salem, years later. But there’s surprisingly little in the way of fucks given about the fact that Dorian’s involvement was extorted from him by basically threatening his life. You’d think that would make more of an impact than it does, and the actor is given nothing to do with it at all. It makes him seem all the more shallow, which is unfortunate since there are moments that the actor gives to the character that could have been much greater and added so much more to him. In the scene where we first meet him, he says “I’m complicated,” but he doesn’t really ever get the chance to prove that. All he’s presented as is a vain turncoat.

But the thing about Dorian Gray is that he has priorities. Sure, he’s full of himself. But how would he react to finding out about vampirism? Had Mina told him about that at all? What happened when they had their previous fling? These are things that deserved to be presented, to develop both of the characters.

Mina, likewise, comes off as fairly secondary in the story, which is a shame since she’s played beautifully by Peta Wilson. She’s fun and interesting, but it’s more what the actress brings to the part than anything the script gives her. In the touches of her real human warmth, a character is hinted at throughout the narrative. She’s clearly somewhat conflicted by her condition, but it makes you wonder how much more interesting it might have been to ask more questions.

For example, how much is known about genuine vampire lore in this universe where the movie takes place? Did Dorian find out about vampires when he and Mina were together? If so, why wasn’t he more interested in vampirism, to preserve his looks and life? Was that what they separated over, that he wanted to be turned into a vampire, and she didn’t want to inflict that upon anyone else?

Things we really deserved to know!

It was especially nice, though, that Mina was in the sunlight at the end of the film, in a veil but not harmed by the light. It’s something that stories get wrong all of the time, since sunlight sending vampires up like flashpaper was a Hollywood invention for convenience in writing. Laziness, in other words. I’ve always disliked it.

Jekyll is given some pretty terrible dialogue, and it’s down to the delectable Jason Flemyng to deliver it with the gravitas he does. He’s good at the role, and he’s very nice to look at, although the Hyde form is a bit questionable. I won’t say it’s crap, because it’s really not, but some of the effects really show the exact time they came from: practical effects and CG were in a weird place, and it wasn’t a particularly good place for either. Considering how it could’ve gone, though, I have to say that a lot of the effects were perfectly respectable.

But I digress; Jekyll’s not a lot of much, and it’s easy to forget he’s around. He feels like an afterthought, since he’s really the last member of the team. It’s a shame, since he’s tortured by his dark side, but it’s just treated like a punchline. In fact, at one point Quatermain snaps that he’s useless if he’s not willing to transform into Hyde, which makes Quatermain look like a complete shit despite not really being that shitty up to then.

Playing It Safe

But that’s also part of what’s wrong with the film: the characters play it far too safe. Quatermain’s a bit of an asshole, but his tortured past comes up as a handy excuse whenever anything touches back to him serving his empire...which nobody seems to reason out that if he were so keen on the British Empire, he’d hardly have fucked off to Africa, never to return. He doesn’t really have any sort of coping mechanism, though, and the Quatermain from the comics was into opium! From what I was able to find, originally they’d intended for Quatermain to medicate himself with alcohol, but this is rarely seen outside his first appearance in the film. He has a couple of shitty comments to others, like the one to Jekyll, but he seems almost too kindly and avuncular for who he’s supposed to be.

Nemo was softer-edged than in the book or the comics, but I felt like it worked well enough for the actor’s portrayal. It gave him a quiet strength that worked more than the sometimes excessive personality full of his own authority that could occur. The character still played it too safe, though, and never really did anything particularly excessive, or even passionate. When his first mate is killed by the traitor in their midst, his reaction is...let us say understated, but honestly he doesn’t seem all that much more put out than usual. It would’ve been better, in retrospect, to have Nemo show his wrath, as opposed to the restraint he’d shown up to that point.

Dorian gets a few moments to be a bit excessive, but as a Wilde character, shouldn’t he be more clever with his bon mots and comments? Most of the beats we’re supposed to find funny were just...action movie lines. Puns. Silly things that don’t show much thought behind them. It was a missed opportunity to have a fabulously, devastatingly clever character we know Stuart Townsend is capable of playing. Even the regrettable Queen of the Damned (though it was better than the godawful book) had him acting every bit the ridiculous rock star.

Nobody really has much of any edge to them, which is a shame given all the characters and their different circumstances. Even Skinner, the gentleman-thief Invisible Man, shows promise of personality and dares to be a bit more of a character at first...and as I said, disappears from most of the film pretty quickly, only to barely put in an appearance near the end.

The characters should have had much snappier dialogue between them, especially given the little moments that go by too fast, where we can see what might have been. But I suppose I’d rather have less snappy dialogue than what Hollywood thinks is clever, like Joss Whedon’s awkward shit-spewing.

I just wish they’d had more opportunity to develop with each other, which they really should have had, given the runtime of this movie. But again, I can’t really be too harsh on it since I have to ask: what group of loosely-affiliated people, without any prior acquaintance, would care that much for each other after having been together for such a short time? Especially after they find out they were just played like a harp from hell and weren’t chosen for any reason other than what could be harvested from them. It’s admirable that, despite their differences and not great affection for each other (but not great antipathy either), they manage to accomplish what they set out to do.

Bumps in the Road

The film does feel like it’s been the victim of some heavy editing in parts, though, and we might as well blame Connery for this. He’s probably the most likely candidate. Especially in the final act, the last half-hour or so, there are moments that feel weird and incongruous with the rest of it.

One thing that keeps nagging at me is that everything in the story sets Quatermain up as facing his own mortality. In fact, it’s a recurring theme, though a subtle one, in the film, and for most all of the characters. But pretty much everything also sets Quatermain up as not someone who’s going to die, or maybe even as someone who’s not really able to die. Mina’s conversation with Dorian just makes it even more obvious, which is why it’s bizarre that Quatermain bites it in the last battle rather underwhelmingly. Tom saves the day with a lesson that was never really completed, and it all feels like a kind of awkward afterthought. Again.

The very end of the film seems to indicate that Quatermain isn’t dead and that Africa will not let him die, as he was blessed (or cursed) before. Some have theorized that Connery, unhappy with the experience shooting the film, wanted to have his character killed off so he wouldn’t have to pick him up again if the film were enough of a success for them to make a franchise, but that seems unlikely. It’s not unknown to just recast people, and there’s no end to the list of actors that could play Allan Quatermain, and would want to, in a sequel.

It just doesn’t seem to fit the narrative, and it seemed to come out of nowhere...and not in a “trying to be dramatic” way. Especially as Tom had, just before, done the stupid thing where he just keeps shooting with his pistols instead of things like aiming or focusing. But then he’s picking up that lesson from the moment he shared with Quatermain on the boat, about shooting, and of course he nails it.

Likewise, it didn’t exactly fit for Dorian to somehow be defeated by seeing his own picture, which he logically would have seen many times over the years. Maybe this was setting up for his recurrence in a sequel, should there have been one, because it was another thing extremely incongruous by its illogic in terms of a narrative.

But aside from potential sequel setups and potential fumbling from Connery’s overzealous control freak antics, there were some problems with the logic of the film. There were plenty of questions it should have answered that it never did and plenty of things that didn’t work and came out of nowhere, either outright mistakes or just stupid things the filmmakers should have realized looked inane. I don’t want to dwell too much on them, so I’ll just go in bullet points.

Why the living fuck did Nemo and his men not use any of the cover around them? An experienced combatant like Nemo would know better, but he just stood around while a huge number of his men were picked off with automatic weapons.

Why did people seem not to understand the concept of body armor? It almost all looked vaguely medieval in style, so everyone involved should have at least been familiar with the general principle. And it’s not like that kind of armor would have been complete proof against bullets. It wasn’t even proof against a rhinoceros horn and an angry Allan Quatermain, apparently.

What was all that stuff in Venice about? Why was the city basically going down like dominoes, and how did they really figure blowing up that one building would somehow stop the destruction from going any farther?

Why were the people in Venice seemingly laughing and hanging out after the League stopped the chain of destruction? There were people panicking and running around in some shots, and in others they were just hanging around in their masks and costumes, looking in good spirits. Surely they’d be a bit more upset than that, what with massive damage around them and armed troops in the streets fighting with people who seem to have crazy gadgets and inhuman powers!

How exactly had the entire crew plus Nemo managed to miss the various bombs set around the Nautilus? They weren’t particularly sneaky, and the men were shown casually milling about around them. They weren’t even really hidden! They were just sitting around on the floor.

If everyone knew about Moriarty being so prominent a criminal, why exactly did nobody ever mention Sherlock Holmes? And even if he were somehow unable or unwilling to be a part of this League -- which seems unlikely, given that he was both British and trusted by authorities -- how is it that no one else figured out Moriarty’s involvement until the very end? That would be like the Joker secretly manipulating the Justice League into existence, but nobody figuring it out until the last five minutes and never mentioning Batman, who is absent from the entire story.

Why would Moriarty, a high-profile criminal, use the first letter of his well-known name as an alias? Even if Holmes is (oddly) not around, it feels rather like tempting fate. He generally didn’t all but advertise his involvement in the adventures where he clashed with Holmes, where it would come as a thrill for readers whenever his involvement was revealed. It seems a bit facile, given the rest of the trouble he went to in order to deceive the League and then to try and eliminate them. What if someone had figured it out long before Venice? He took his chances, is what I’m saying.

But really, I can’t fault the film too much. I would have liked to see another one along the same lines as the first. I’ve seen far worse films, from around that time and later. X-Men comes to mind, as does Hellboy, and the rest of both series. There’s also Marvel’s much worse Avengers, which basically rips off the story and wastes multiple films beforehand winding viewers up to it.

Disappearing vs. Awkward Lingering

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen isn’t a bad film. It’s just not a great film either, and Sean Connery’s involvement, beyond the shadow of a doubt, led to it being less of a good film than it could have and really should have been, with all the people involved who were a part of it.

The premise is really gold for any company that could go in on it: public domain heroes everyone knows team up to fight a villain everyone knows, in a not-quite-period piece that allows for some good old overt fantasy elements. How could you go wrong with that kind of setup?

I feel like League really didn’t go so horribly wrong as that it didn’t go right enough and, aside from that, had some vocal detractors who latched onto stupid minutiae or jumped on a bandwagon of hate. Because that’s what they love to do, especially the Moore fans. They don’t really like comic books, not really, but they sure do hate it when there’s any alteration as a concession for a change of medium, even if it makes it a better story.

Note though that changing Watchmen so significantly that it contradicts the entire fucking point of the story is neither appropriate nor clever. Zack Snyder’s a shit director anyway, but that was one of the worst examples of pretentious douchebaggery and assuming you know what the story’s about leading to a true work of garbage as a result.

I’m not saying that everything should be changed significantly. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be changed. What I am saying, though, is that the comic book-reading audience and the film-viewing audience are two different groups of people who may sometimes intersect. Just like sequential art and film are two different media.

Very different, in fact. That’s why there have to be changes to allow for different media. If you filmed a movie like you’d create a comic book, you probably wouldn’t have a good film. If you created a comic book like you approach filmmaking and didn’t make any allowances for different media, it probably wouldn’t be a good comic book either. You can’t just take one and plug it into the other medium and expect that to work seamlessly. There are many other considerations you need to address.

Especially when it’s the work of a frankly overblown author, and not one of his stronger works either. The concept was sound, just maybe they should have called it something different instead of tempting fate (and the wrath of obsessive Moore fans) by using something it ended up being rather distinctly different from. I hadn’t even heard of the comic at the time, and I was in the thick of comicdom; given, I’m not a Moore fan, but it wasn’t on anyone’s radar I knew at the time, either. Maybe the better idea would’ve just been to take the extra few steps to distinguish it from Moore’s book altogether and do their own thing with these characters who were available for everyone’s enjoyment.

We’ll never know, and that’s a shame. It’s worth watching the movie, which I saw in fragments the first time at a gay bar, hilariously enough. It was playing on the screens in the room, completely drowned out by the ambient noise. I resolved to look it up later, and the rest was history.

It’s really too bad. We have franchises still going that I’d be tickled pink to be rid of and never hear about again, but The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has yet to surface from the depths of forgotten blockbusters and false starts into planned franchises.

Typical. It’s always the ones that show promise that you never hear from again, while the ones you can’t stand stay around for fucking ever.

#league of extraordinary gentlemen #film review #comic book movies

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whydidireadthis · 6 years

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X-Treme X-Men (volume 1, 2001)

When you hear “extreme”, what springs to mind? Naturally, there’s the dictionary-correct definition of “exceptional” or “to the utmost extent”, but most of us who lived through the 90s (or who learned about them after the fact, I assume) can’t hear the word without hearing it as “EXTREEEEME!!”

We can’t divorce it from Mountain Dew, snowboarding, and ludicrous color schemes, of extremity not in reality, but in artifice -- a commandeering of the term in a vernacular sense to suit marketing and lazy youthful pseudo-rebellion, curated and served up ready for consumption by half-assed youth.

Appropriate then that X-Treme X-Men reads like Chris Claremont’s midlife crisis, but expressed through a small, awkward collection of characters seemingly hand-picked to be the least-favorite mutant superheroes we used to read about.

Note that I’m referring to the first series to bear this title, which started in 2001, in the wake of the then-new X-Men movie series...and the less said about that donkey mess, the better. This series is not the same one that came around a decade later, which aside from the last couple of issues was very good, featuring Dazzler and dimension-hopping. Just to clear that up. I’ll deal with that one another day.

The Genocide Slide

X-Treme X-Men slides in on the supremely awkward period where Marvel was desperate to confuse people into reading the comics by having them bear vague, superficial similarities to the movies. So of course, Magneto had to be their archfoe and doing Bad Guy Things, never mind that the justification for those things -- and quite a lot of the issues the X-Men are supposed to be dealing with -- come from a literal attempted genocide with massive casualties, both mutant and non-mutant alike.

And that’s really the first and most glaring problem with X-Treme X-Men and, indeed, every X-Men story and series from this point in time: a scope problem. After Genosha gets attacked in what absolutely has to be an attempt at genocide, an abhorrent evil in the eyes of every single civilization on the planet and several others as well, anti-mutant hysteria is not going to be acceptable anymore, I don’t care how you try to justify it. An entire race of people being targeted and countless numbers dying means you shut the fuck up about how boo hoo, you’re scared the mean nasty muties will take the jobs from hard-working Americunts.

It really shows, in a lot of the writing, that none of the writers even remotely understand the struggle of a mistreated minority. Like...at all. But especially Chris Claremont who, well past his prime as scribe of the X-people, tries to make his version of fetch happen with the X-Treme team.

And yes, one of them does snowboard. I’m not making this up.

But the biggest problem I had with Claremont’s writing is that, again and again, people who should know better (like Tessa and Charles Xavier himself) are either awkwardly forced into the “straight pride” question or presented with it as if it’s an airtight counterpoint.

I realize some of you might not know what this is, so allow me to digress slightly in order to explain.

“Gay pride event, ugh. Why don’t we get a straight pride event?”

I’ll even allow for you to have a moment to think this may be a reasonable question, before you realize how absolutely fucking stupid it is when anyone asks the best question that logically answers it:

“What, you mean like every other thing ever?”

I’ve long campaigned for a reboot for the X-Men, because Genosha even existing in the first place...was really going too far, but Genosha existing as an anti-mutant hell, then turned into a sovereign mutant nation, then getting wiped out by Sentinels...was way past too far. But in a post-Genosha setting as where this takes place, it really is remarkably stupid to hear Tessa (now called Sage for some reason, probably because it’s extreme!) repeatedly bitch and whine about the mutants they encountered not wanting to join them and Xavier being more concerned about mutant rights and advancing the cause of mutants...after an entire nation of them was brutally murdered. And she repeatedly asks the question, what about the non-mutants, are they just making time until their species comes to an end? Who champions their cause?

Oh, you mean like the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, the Defenders, the Heroes for Hire, the Invaders, or any other superhero affiliation in the world?

This is yet another reason why the X-Men existing in the same universe as the rest of them makes anti-mutant insanity so nonsensical, but it makes it even worse when even one of the characters in a book centered around mutants -- and she is supposed to be a computerlike mind and one of the most intelligent people in existence -- cannot understand this very simple thing.

Could it be that Xavier is finally understanding that he really has to choose something to concentrate on, instead of trying to deal with every other problem on the planet and mutants too?

Well, that’s something that the other (terrible) titles at the time often ignored or failed to deal with but pretended they were addressing. We had Morrison’s absolutely embarrassing New X-Men, which I’m pained to remember. I can only imagine the pretentious college crowd who wanked to it constantly have either forgotten it by now or pretend they have. Of course, we also had Chuck Austen throwing in his mostly-terrible contributions there too, in both the other X-Men titles and, eventually, New X-Men as well.

Basically, the early 2000s were one of the worst times for the X-Men that have ever happened in the entire run of the whole franchise. And I mean that in both an in-character and a real-life sense; the X-Men series were utterly garbage, and the events happening in-world were wretched and miserable, and usually garbage too. It certainly didn’t help when you had people like Tessa actually lending credibility to blatantly asinine non-arguments.

It’s especially funny that when it’s hurled at Charles -- and by Ororo, no less -- he doesn’t even give it the dignity of a response, which I thought was nice. The school, he maintains, will give refuge to a mutant boy implicated in a murder investigation, rather than giving him over to a court that is obviously going to be biased against him because he’s a mutant. It raises a lot of questions which, of course, it never once addresses; it also points out, probably quite unintentionally, that mutants cannot any longer rely on human society to deliver any of the things that society is supposed to. They cannot rely on impartiality or justice. They cannot depend on fair treatment from government. They certainly cannot take for granted that anyone who isn’t a mutant and in much the same situation as they are would even understand or even could understand and fairly deal with such a problem.

I don’t think this is too complicated an issue to expect a writer of the most put-upon, targeted, and abused minority in an entire fictional universe to be able to understand and portray plausibly and in an engaging, accessible manner. But maybe I’m asking too much.

Regardless, I think it’s pretty easy to figure out why, even if it’s terrible writing, when Magneto decides he’s had it with humanity. After a near-genocide caused by an attack -- using giant robots whose development was sponsored by a government -- on a sovereign nation that made it their thing to be pro-mutant, it’s kind of the fault of every government that didn’t issue any sort of statement of support or protection for mutants, in the light of such a tragedy. It’s hard to feel like you can give over your agency and safety, much less the structure of your society, to people who apparently couldn’t care less whether you live or die. And the people who stayed quiet and didn’t voice their support, didn’t decry the horror of it, and didn’t insist on something being done...well, past a point, it’s kind of their faults too. But all this is way too complicated for superhero comics.

Which kind of makes you want to ask, why did they think it was a great idea to do this if they had no idea how to handle it and repeatedly refused to do so?

X-Cluded X-Men

X-Treme X-Men is, in some ways, better off for being separated from much of anything going on in the other titles, but it doesn’t make it a good series. It’s nice that they kept the same creative team for the entire forty-six-issue run, and Larroca and Liquid!’s art really is distinct and presents a unique vision of the world. Having Claremont write the whole run did at least give him the opportunity to introduce plots that he wanted to do and resolve them as he wanted to do. Consistency means a lot in comics, and in the superhero world, even the very specific X-circles, there is a large problem with that. See also Morrison’s abysmal New X-Men.

And before anyone says a thing about mentioning it twice, yes, I think Grant Morrison is horribly overrated, but the man is capable of decent writing and even good writing sometimes. He’s just never reined in and constantly celebrated as if he’s some sort of genius, whatever he shits out. New X-Men was different, and I won’t lie, the X-Men had needed something different because they were getting stale and uninteresting.

But you can’t just do something different and call it great because it’s different. Just because something has become so bad overall that people are losing interest does not mean that doing something different, whether or not it regains that interest, is an improvement. All it means is that you changed something and piqued people’s curiosity for a while. This is how Frank Miller built his career, on doing things that were different...but wholly inconsistent with anything that came before, and not very good to boot. You can’t just take a sharp left turn and expect IT’S DIFFERENT!! to handwave your lack of giving a fuck about what you were supposed to have learned before coming onto the creative team of a story that’s run decades before you came along.

Which brings me to some of the things that really failed X-Treme X-Men, and were indeed failed by Claremont. While turds like Fantomex and Doctor Douchebag or whoever his fucking name is, show up and never fuck off or die in New X-Men (and oh how I wish they of all people would), X-Treme X-Men is saddled with some newer-introduced mutants itself: a man from India named Neal Shaara who goes by Thunderbird for no reason at all, and Heather and Davis Cameron, Lifeguard and Slipstream, respectively. All three were created by Claremont, which makes it even more utterly bizarre that he just dropped them like hot potatoes during the run. They didn’t even get reasonable justifications for leaving or being utterly forgotten, they just fucked off and were gone, and nobody seemed to remember them afterwards.

The thing that really bothered me the most is that Davis actually started to develop some kind of relationship with Storm that she seemed to be very into, but in the space of a handful of issues, Davis just vanishes when his sister manifests a monstrous appearance. Which, considering everything Davis went through, including stimulating a potentially dangerous mutant power to save her and almost being killed in battle, seems like a whole lot of bullshit totally inconsistent with his character. So he left because he couldn’t deal with her having a weird appearance? There’s certainly no way that could’ve developed into an interesting, character-defining storyline examining the Camerons and propelling them into being well-rounded characters or anything.

At least we got some hilarious addressing of how poorly Nightcrawler had become written since his Excalibur days. Here was a character who had kept his faith in God, in good in the world, but it didn’t define him; he was no preacher or proselytizer, and the few times his faith was shown were dire times where he was in need of hope, like when the X-Men were sure they would die because of implanted Brood.

Not so, said the XTREEEEEME 90S!! This was a time when all of the X-Men were distilled down to cartoonish, shallow, barely two-dimensional caricatures of the more complex characters they once were! Kurt quickly became a bible-thumping jackass it was hard to sympathize with, which of course wasn’t helped by his embarrassing appearance in that cinematic cure for insomnia, X2. It wasn’t Alan Cumming’s fault, but that...was not Nightcrawler.

And neither was it Nightcrawler in the comics. So to have him come to Davis and give him the then-usual “God made me this way and I’m studying to be ordained" and Davis just deciding immediately after to leave and more or less never again showing up in any comic since 2002...is screamingly funny for me. It’s balm for my soul.

Compare and contrast with Kurt introducing himself to Kitty Pryde -- a young teenager -- some twenty years earlier, and her managing to deal with it and get past it, and see him as a person and not as a frightening demonic figure, because he’s charming and kind and shows through his actions that he’s worth knowing. The Kurt at the time of X-Treme X-Men is just an obnoxious loser who really gives any sort of spiritual path a bad name. What happened to the fun-loving swashbuckler who made Uncanny X-Men and the first issues of Excalibur so much fun? Oh well, it doesn’t matter since years of legal trouble with one of Kurt’s creators meant they couldn’t easily use the character. Not that they’ve particularly improved him since being able to use him again, but that’s a story for another day.

Honestly, the Camerons and Thunderneal weren’t bad ideas at heart, but it felt like Claremont just lost interest in trying to make them happen and dropped them. It’s sad to see, especially since Davis and Ororo made an interesting pair, and Heather had some intriguing powers. Thunderneal was basically a giant asshole (like many characters of the time, desperate to show how hard and extreme they were), but he had potential to become something and never did. It’s not like they were around for a long time and just stalled out, either; Thunderneal came from X-Men #100, which was just a year earlier, and the Camerons were introduced early on in X-Treme X-Men! And none of them really ever got to become characters.

There was also some guy called Red Lotus, but I kept forgetting he existed, as I just now forgot he existed while writing this. Apparently everyone else also forgot he existed, because even after the asinine debacle that was Scarlet Witch being a fucking menace to reality, nobody thought to check if he still had powers or not. Because that’s how genetics work.

You Can’t Go Homily Again

Really, characters made up a lot of the problems in X-Treme X-Men. Whether it’s the “straight people baby daddy problems” that pop up in place of actual character development, or whether it’s introducing too many new characters and just having people tell us how powerful and impressive we’re supposed to think they are, few of the cast actually get to do anything meaningful.

The ones that we know by this time also don’t really mesh up with how they’ve acted, ever, up to this point. We have weird Stepford Gambit, and I mean that as a reference to the film, not to the Cuckoos, and Rogue’s powers suddenly work completely differently than they ever have before, which is handled by pretending like that’s how they always worked. I could understand if it were lampshaded as a secondary mutation, like Emma’s, but it was only treated like that’s how we were supposed to believe they had always worked. But that was never how they worked, ever, at any point.

Of course, Gambit can’t have his powers most of the series, for some unknowable reason. He gets treated like absolute shit for his appearances in the whole run though, so you can probably understand why I was glad to see him and Rogue flit off in some hastily-excused jaunt, which seems to be the only idea Rogue ever has when things aren’t rainbows and sunshine in the X-Men. At least it means we get rid of Rogue for a while -- I find her utterly insufferable at this point, and her relationship with Gambit is incredibly toxic -- and as this isn’t the “main” X-title, we usually don’t have to deal with Wolverine either.

Thank god for that.

Storm is basically a bitch 24/7, with the occasional glimpse of the character we once loved. You’d think that, being Claremont, who wrote some of Ororo’s best moments and most characteristic stories that explored her strength as a person and as a human being and not as a goddess or a mutant warrior, he could write her strongly as a compelling leader for a team. Nope! She’s an asshole who is totally okay with people being put in mortal danger, sometimes by her, who has remarkably little in the way of authentic emotion.

The only thing that made her tolerable, for a very short time, was the blossoming thing she was developing with Davis. Good thing Nightcrawler took care of that little problem!

Bishop is boring at best and annoying at worst, and Tessa runs hot and cold at any given point in the series. One issue, she’s the only one that makes sense and nobody listens to her, for no reason. The next issue, she acts the same way but has inexplicably become an idiot and clearly isn’t thinking in any manner that a supposed computer mind should be. Cannonball shows up eventually and there’s something something X-Corps et cetera, which is presented with no context and never explained, but he’s another character who is very difficult to give two fucks about, especially with the dull way Claremont writes him...which is, yet again, nothing short of perplexing given that he had written the character much better before then.

Plodding Plotting

But the lack of context is something that struck me, reading through them; there’s no helpful editor’s note to refer readers to issues of the other series, as there had been. I don’t know if it’s unique to the format I was reading these in, but it seems like a stunt filled with the pretentious assurance that “comic books aren’t for kids anymore” and naturally, referring readers to other events in other series would somehow cheapen the whole experience. By giving them context they could seek out, or you know, any sense of what the hell is actually going on. There’s even a “God Loves, Man Kills 2″ that either needed a reference or the subtitle “Electric Boogaloo”.

The problem is that if you make the decision not to give readers any frame of reference, you have to make it abundantly clear in what you’re writing so that they don’t need that external context. As you might have guessed from what I’ve said up to now, this is another point that Claremont fails on, and almost nothing he writes gives readers that essential context. I had to sit and think back over years of comic knowledge I’d intended to forget, and even then I had to look on the internet to fill in the gaps!

Claremont’s plots are also needlessly protracted, beyond any reasonable measure. Things that could have, and really should have, taken an issue or two to resolve, instead are dragged out into issue after issue of nothing much happening. I could understand if anything happened we could care about, but so much nothing happens in X-Treme X-Men that you start to believe the extreme quality of it is that it dares to make a comic about wasting time. They’re superheroes, they have fabulous powers beyond human ability...and they busy themselves with things that have nothing to do with anything. At times, things happen expressly to stand in the way of the plot advancing, and at those times, it’s almost invariably when you as a reader will want the plot to advance most of all, if only just to get closer to the end of the story and move on to something else.

But most glaring and inexcusable of all is that, despite having the same creative team for the entire run, it feels like Claremont never really commits to any of the storylines he starts. He tosses something at the readers during a perfunctory conflict plot and then seemingly forgets about it, or handwaves a facile non-resolution that confirms he’s basically just wasted everyone’s time that gave a shit about seeing the story resolve in any meaningful way. This contributed to a feeling of being adrift in a sea without purpose, without destination or any means to get there. The X-Treme X-Men could ultimately be removed from the universe entirely and, aside from a very few limited circumstances during the run, not be missed.

Which would be fine, if all they were doing was very pinpoint-specific, niche work. But at times they do things like, say, single-handedly fighting off an alien invasion with about a half-dozen members, while groups like the Avengers are shown on-panel just sitting around doing nothing about it. And for the rest of the Xers to be to determined to help out their comrades in the last issue (with absolutely no real stakes and nothing on the line) they sure didn’t have a fuck to give when the tiny splinter group was all that stood between their home planet and a horrific genocidal alien force.

X-Treme X-Men is an oblique relic of a time when the X-Men very unfortunately hit a broader public eye and a wider range of consumers. And I’m not saying that because it’s always a bad thing when something in a niche goes for mainstream recognition (though it often is), but because Marvel could have maintained the comics as a consistent, if not spectacularly creative, home for the X-Men we knew and at least tolerated.

Unfortunately, Marvel went for the brass ring, knowing it was brass but thinking that because it was shiny, it would be just the thing. It wasn’t, of course, and they ended up with several very different writers’ very different concepts of a team that had enough problems before their publisher decided to mix things up a bit. There was a tremendous disconnection at the time, both between the teams and their titles, and between the readers and Marvel’s creative staff.

You could read X-Treme X-Men over and be bored and mildly frustrated by the uninteresting plots dredged up by a tired Chris Claremont, or you could read Grant Morrison’s New X-Men and witness a group of unrecognizable assholes having the opposite of adventures in a world you won’t give two shits about. Those are basically your major options to get a window on the time, not that I think it’s a particularly good idea either way.

At least with X-Treme X-Men, you aren’t reading the painfully horrible X-Men Forever, which would come about half a decade after the end of X-Treme X-Men and show, once and for all, that Chris Claremont was completely out of ideas and had forgotten, if he ever knew, how to write X-Men. X-Treme X-Men’s worst offense is that it’s boring and pointless, and while its writing isn’t great, it doesn’t quite reach the crushing lows that X-Men Forever would in 2009. Overall, you’re probably better off reading X-Treme X-Men than New X-Men, and at the very least, you’ll feel later like you just read the last tired issues of a failing series that went on too long and not the pretentious babbling of someone so far up his own ass that he’s somehow found Narnia.

But it’s still not a good read. It’s consistent, and that counts for something, but consistently boring is still boring.

#x-treme x-men #x-men #writing critique #comic review

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whydidireadthis · 6 years

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All-New X-Factor

In 2014, Marvel embarked on the All-New initiative, perhaps reasoning that novelty would bring and keep readers. There was, at least in some cases, an attempt to go back to the high-flying adventure at the heart of the superhero genre, with less of the soap opera angst and sophomoric antics that seemed to drag comics down more every year.

As usual in superhero comics, they looked for a name. This time, they got Peter David, who had done X-Factor work before and, in my reading experience, did a good job making his first run on the title compelling...at least, until editorial started interfering and promptly ruined it.

Peter David and the Fan Favorites

I’ll say this and get it out of the way: I don’t like Peter David that much, personally. He’s at least as much of an asshole as I am, and he’s a real internet troll, as well as petty. But I’ll also say this: pretty much 90% of all well-known popular figures in superhero comics are some brand of either “crazy” or “asshole” if they’re not just plain stupid. David is extremely overrated for having written Young Justice throughout its run, despite it not being all that good and nobody apparently being willing to read it again without nostalgia goggles glued to them.

But at least he’s not any one of the seemingly endless hordes of names overrated for outright garbage. He does decent work, even if most of the time I don’t find it that exceptional, and doesn’t seem to need a strong editorial influence to keep his work tolerable. His sense of humor can bring a quality of realism and believability to the characters and situations, which is a really good thing. Often, it’s the lack of any humor at all that makes stories seem artificial and stilted.

All-New X-Factor assembles a team of characters that are basically all “fan favorites”, often underrated or relegated to the background in larger casts, and introduces a couple of new characters as well. The team lineup is a solid one that really showed a lot of potential. And I’ll admit, starting at the next-to-last issue and then jumping back to the beginning to read through, that was potential that never really came to any fruition, which is a huge shame.

The thing is, when David joined up with the original run of X-Factor, way back in volume 1 issue #71, he also stayed for 20 issues. And similarly then as now, the stories he told were derailed by the scourge of everything: “events”.

These “events” continue to plague the superhero universes, with meaningless crossovers that accomplish nothing. Storylines are built up in individual titles, then events come along and force those storylines to stand still while the event introduces new ones...and then after the event, it’s forgotten along with everything started during it, and also everything before it. So the title inevitably is cancelled, or the creative team swapped out, because it can’t recover from the ground level it’s essentially been reduced to. It is, in a word, Sisyphean.

And that’s basically what happens here. The Axis event dominates more of the run than any single storyline, and it’s a crossover. And not a particularly good one. What is really the worst about it, though, is the fact that even though the most pressing problems are solved on-panel, much of the resolution of the story takes place between issues and is just obliquely referred to in the next issue.

This is really not an okay way to do things, unless you’re doing a flashback to deal with it for some reason. Remember, “show, don’t tell” is usually a good rule of thumb, especially with comics.

It kind of exemplifies this run, though. Nothing really amounts to anything or leads anywhere. All-New X-Factor is basically one huge plot cul-de-sac, consisting of characters that were treated like shit in previous writing, trading references to some of that bad treatment and commiserating. In that, it usually gets its best moments. That’s essentially what you can take out of it: moments, with incidental connecting plots that don’t really add up to much. You think things are going to go somewhere, but they basically stay where they are.

And it’s fine, setting and sticking to a status quo is fine, but it is also unfortunately paired with a seeming lack of exceptional quality to the writing and characterization. It’s remarkable that Peter David, who most famously wrote that twenty issues of the original X-Factor, shaking up the by-then-stale series and reacquainting us with newly-relevant characters, seems to have forgotten who these characters are, and has no real idea who the others are that he’s saddled with.

At least in his original run, he had things happen that were appreciable, like Polaris breaking her jaw and having to recover from that. There’s nothing to really work with in All-New X-Factor, because the overwhelming impression is that David doesn’t really understand most of the characters and doesn’t want to take any risks with them. Which I applaud, don’t get me wrong -- I’d rather see someone who doesn’t get the characters be more cautious, instead of throwing it to the wind and totally ruining them. But David, in most of his more ambitious turns in the title, ends up forcing some of the characters into situations that don’t really suit them and do them no favors as people.

The Team Lineup

I always thought trying to claim Polaris was related to Magneto...was stupid. It’s facile and obvious, and it does nothing to develop the character at all. But for a while, Marvel were bound and determined to not only tear down any sympathy for Magneto, but also seemingly wanted to find some replacement. Ideally with boobs, similar to their desperate need to make X-23 a thing. So not only is Polaris dealing with her adult half-siblings (which, I will tell you, is not at all how that works in real life), she’s also conveniently comic-book crazy. Meaning that she sometimes goes a little violence-happy and has to be talked down, but only when the story needs her to do so.

It amounts to basically nothing and vanishes pretty quickly. She’s supposedly the leader of the team, but functionally there really isn’t a leader. It’s more like she organizes them sometimes, and occasionally she has some advice on how to do things. She is mostly easy enough to like, and the good thing about having a character who’s been so chaotically inconsistent is that any coherent personality is an improvement. Lorna is basically the same Lorna, personality-wise, that she was in David’s first run, with a weird personality tic.

Quicksilver is basically how he’s always been: a less obviously gay, and significantly less interesting, Northstar. And yes, I know Jean-Paul was created later. It doesn’t matter; that’s how people always tend to write the both of them. Pietro’s entire character in All-New X-Factor is “mildly clashing with Gambit”. That’s it.

Doug, also known as Cypher, gets the most character-building, which is nice since Abnett and Lanning’s fairly crap tie-up for their run on the New Mutants series didn’t leave him much to work with. Of all the characters involved in the title, Doug benefits most from it and actually gets the most to do. It isn’t always good, but at least it’s not essentially rehashing old plots from the first run of New Mutants that were done far better then. It is pretty puzzling that the character still has yet to resolve significant issues with various other characters who were extremely prominent in his life before dying and coming back to life, and I just have to chalk it up to yet another missed opportunity with the potential of All-New X-Factor.

Gambit is one of my favorites, but he’s almost always written badly. Either he ends up a shitty caricature even of the outrageously exhausted trope he came from, or he’s a misremembering of the 90s X-Men cartoon, or he’s just a completely different person than he’s ever been.

Here, Remy is sort of okay, most of the time, but he does some stupid things that aren’t really suited to him, like his lame and uncharacteristic pick-up artist turn in one issue that literally never manifests again at all in the entire series. Not that he isn’t a flirt, but this was phoning it in where it counts, and really disturbing where it didn’t.

He constantly seems toned down from his usual wit and cheer, to the point where he feels almost nihilistic and embittered. There’s little distinctive about his speaking patterns, too, which makes it seem strange when compared to a character like Rogue, whom I am bringing up not because of their extremely unhealthy, often ignorantly-celebrated and stupidly-promoted past relationship, but because she speaks like she just fell off the turnip truck and Gambit barely shows any signs in accent or in syntax of being from the deep Louisiana bayou.

There’s also an on-again, off-again narration from him...at least, that’s what I managed to figure out, because it’s not really made clear and seems extremely questionable at several points. It only appears in a handful of issues, and it never adds anything to the story. It’s almost ironic, really, because if Remy’s focused on as a narrator, you’d think he’d get more of a personal examination and development.

Nope! He gets one issue that really doesn’t focus on him at all.

Danger is a character I’ve always thought was idiotic, but she ends up kind of amusing, mainly for occupying the “fish out of water” role in the group and because of other people’s reactions to her. She’s still a pretty stupid character, and her introduction in the series does her no favors, but she is one of the few to show any real development over the course of the series. Essentially though, she’s one of the series’ deus ex machina characters, because none of the stories really seem to be committed to any sort of resolution. It’s almost ironic, since the team is filled with extremely powerful, highly capable characters, but only a couple ever distinguish themselves in resolving a problem.

Harrison Snow, the head of Serval Industries, basically occupies the other deus ex machina slot in the title. He’s not interesting or likeable, or sympathetic or compelling in any way, and what little development he’s given -- which links him to the godawful 2099 stuff -- is too late and not anything anyone cares about.

Seriously, stop trying to make 2099 happen.

At Least They’re Committed

Remember how I said there was a lack of commitment? It’s the same with the tone of the whole series. There’s no real reason they should be affiliated with this corporation, but they are for some reason anyway. There’s opportunity for scathing satire of the corporate world, but it never really shows up, outside of a couple of throwaway lines. X-Factor being, for some reason, a corporate-sponsored team never factors into the series all that much.

And it starts to get frustrating after a while, especially given that David’s original run actually committed to something. At that time, X-Factor had become a government-sponsored team, and examining the relationship between the US government and the rest of the Marvel Universe was a pretty large part of the team’s arc. Here, the only compare and contrast we get is to the Avengers, which barely factor into anything.

That brings me to Alex, Havok, who is in the series for the first few issues and then vanishes, never to return. He’s now a member of the Avengers (and if you don’t know why, you’re one step ahead of the writers; AvX was the absolute bottom of the barrel, even for an “event”) and decided to get Pietro to join the team in order to keep him informed on Polaris. I wish I could say this went anywhere, or played with any development to make it seem creepy, or sad, or just plain obnoxious, but it doesn’t. Alex is written like Scott, when Scott’s written his worst: a bland yuppie who reminds you of that person you know’s forgettably boring dad.

Alex and Lorna had a long-running relationship that ended at one point and never really rekindled, and that was even further sidetracked by Marvel’s insistent retcons of Magneto and his family, with further ruin thanks to -- let’s all say it together now! -- events. Here, David could have introduced a tension between Alex and Lorna again and had the two advance...but they never really address it or even really talk directly. And when Alex is done with eavesdropping, Pietro decides not to return to the Avengers, and Alex disappears from All-New X-Factor.

When another Avenger shows up, it’s Wanda, of course, since there’s a half-assed need to address Lorna’s sudden investment in her just-as-sudden half-siblings. But trying to make a joke out of something so serious as to be unforgivable is a poor choice, and it’s one of many that David makes during the run. Wanda is, by this point, an irredeemably terrible character and a bad person, someone who would greatly benefit the world by not being in it. If the point hadn’t been brought up, it could have been forgotten...and for the betterment of the narrative. But as it was brought up, it can’t really be ignored. It doesn’t help that, throughout her appearance, Wanda is pretty hard to like, when she’s not being noncommittally boring.

But this brings us to our last members of the team, and they’re two I can’t really address without bringing up the story further.

Warlock is a familiar face to anyone who knows the New Mutants, especially Doug. He’s kind of fun to have around, but it’s a real disappointment having the once-potent Magus turned into...yet another corporation. But as with Serval Industries, there’s no real commentary or satire to this decision. It’s just there, as if the absurdity of it, in and of itself, is supposed to be funny or clever somehow.

Spoiler alert: it’s not.

The story does do some interesting and even fun things, though, and it’s nice to see Warlock, especially with Doug around for him to play off of, as the two are perfect together.

But this also dovetails nicely into one of my most significant problems with All-New X-Factor, which is the fact that David manages to fuck up Doug, Warlock, and Danger all at once. He does this by a probably accidental or incidental storytelling bias, but so much of the series revolves around it: I’ve heard it called, and accurately, “straight people baby daddy problems”. That’s it in a nutshell.

Straight People Baby Daddy Problems

Danger trying to score makes up a level half of the series, and it’s amusing for a small amount of that time. Some of the reactions she gets are genuinely funny, and her fixation on sex does bring up some questions that most comics would never, ever even think of presenting. It also makes her much more likeable as a character, and it humanizes her to an extent, enabling the audience to sympathize with her more effectively. I don’t have a problem with this direction for Danger, especially since she’s basically just the emotionless big gun. She needed something, anything, to make her more compelling, and having her be curious about sexual relations does add an interesting queer dynamic to the whole thing, which I like.

But I’m not sure that was intentional. I’m not sure it was meant to be more than a throwaway joke that just kept coming up when David couldn’t think of anything else to punctuate a scene; sometimes it would work, sometimes it would just make me wonder if this was an attempt at a running gag that didn’t always fit.

The thing that made it not work was that Warlock and Doug were put at odds with each other because Danger approached Doug for sex, after Warlock and basically the entire rest of the team turned her down. It kind of feels creepy (but that’s not new territory in the series up to this point), but the part that doesn’t work is that David has Warlock coming off as jealous. Of Doug.

Maybe I’m not reading it the way it was intended, but if anyone in this situation, Warlock should be jealous of Danger. Warlock and Doug are not just friends, by any definition of the word. They have communed the very essences of their beings, basically mingled their souls, as well as their physical forms. Maybe David planned for the real target of jealousy to unfold, but he was aware that he had a certain number of issues left and kept writing as if he had unlimited time and space to address these things. After so much that amounted to nothing, why bring up something that is exactly the opposite of how these characters would act in that situation, then do nothing with it?

Even in this run, though, Warlock is very attached to Doug. For that to come out of nowhere makes it seem even more questionable. If that’s not what David intended and it was in fact supposed to be Warlock jealous of Danger and protective of Doug...he definitely didn’t present it very well.

I mean, it wasn’t well done by any means, but if he was aiming for that, he definitely missed and botched the shot.

But Doug constantly gets abuse heaped on him, and I really don’t like that. It was lazy, half-assed writing when it happened in New Mutants, and it’s lazy, half-assed writing here. At the very least, David has more respect for Doug than Abnett or Lanning seemed to (and certainly more than the patchwork of writers from New Mutants v1, least of all Louise Simonson), but at the same time, he’s only rarely allowed to be funny, strong, or compelling, much less actually do anything. He’s an immensely powerful character, as are all the members of the team, but they almost always end up playing second fiddle to Danger and Snow.

The last member of the team is Georgia, whose storyline is just...

Okay, I’ll be honest, I hated her. She was an annoying kid character who was fickle as anything and frankly came off as an obnoxious little twat. I didn’t care about her stupid story, her background of abusive, violent bigots, unlikely magic business, or her inane powers. She’s irritating all the time, she runs hot and cold and is utterly impossible to depend on, and there was no reason at all for them to basically make her part of the team instead of sending her to the X-school so she could actually learn to use her powers rather than being a danger to everyone around her.

She basically served no useful purpose and constantly derailed the stories to revolve around her, making her come off a lot like a Mary Sue type of character, a la Kitty Pryde, who is the Marvel Universe’s most painful Mary Sue. Once upon a time, Kitty was interesting and even sympathetic. That was a long time ago.

I suppose the thing that I disliked the most about having Georgia around was that when Luna finally showed up, she ended up basically pushed to the background in favor of Georgia. But if Luna had occupied that position instead of Georgia, then Pietro could have actually, you know, had some development during the series. Imagine the dynamic evolving between Pietro and Luna. The two haven’t had much opportunity to be together. I always thought Pietro and Crystal was a stupid relationship, and even worse that they were married and popped out a kid, but marriage was the big thing in comics at the time, and they often did that with characters they couldn’t think to do much else with.

(Not that they’ve changed much; nowadays, it’s just a method of killing characters off without really killing them off. They tried for years with Northstar, and then decided, hey, gay marriage is hot right now -- that’ll get him out of our hair. Subsequently, they had Iceman realize he himself was gay, but Jean-Paul had been shuffled off into the dead hell of comic-book marriage by then, essentially making useless the one “will they or won’t they?” storyline that gave both Bobby and Jean-Paul any meaning whatsoever in the past twenty-something years.)

Anyway, we’re stuck with Luna and Pietro has to live with his previous mistakes, which he does end up admitting. And I’ll admit myself, I have no idea what he’s talking about because my knowledge of and interest in Marvel from 2000 to now is minimal. It is nice to see him have to own up to his actions, though, and it is really great that he gets to connect with Luna again. But wouldn’t this have been even more meaningful if she had occupied the role of “clever young character learning about herself, her parent(s), and the world”? It would’ve required far less building of an ultimately useless character who basically tended to just shove the characters we know and actually like to the background or into some kind of fucked-up abuse. The elements were there, freely available, for David to use and create a close-knit, intimate group of characters who could develop richly between their party dynamic.

He just...missed it by that much.

Every time.

Dangling Threads

The Gambit story, close to the start of the run, brings up parts of Gambit’s backstory. Basically, the stupidest parts of his backstory, like the Thieves Guild and this floating island they somehow have now. And the aforementioned Danger, who behaves horribly during the story, which really should have added more pathos so that we could sympathize with her ordeal.

But it seemed to treat the people on the island as if they were nothing to be worried about, that it was okay that they were put in mortal danger by, uh, Danger. Everything was somehow resolved by one of the most awkward and frankly ludicrous non-resolutions ever, and it raised far more questions than it answered. And I mean, this is ludicrous even for a superhero comic. I could have got behind it even then, if it had been funny or witty or engaging, but...it really wasn’t.

Harrison Snow's 2099 shit doesn’t even show up until basically the last issue, but we’re treated to an ongoing saga of infidelity with his wife, which involves his secretary and then, later, Gambit. It’s very forced and awkward, but what makes it worse is that even after Remy is made aware of what happened and who she is -- which she was not honest about -- Snow abandons Gambit on a mission and he’s horribly abused and put in danger of his life. Which isn’t funny or amusing, and it’s nothing that anyone would just shrug off.

But that’s exactly what happens in the next issue, with a non-resolution to the subplot that addresses exactly none of the real concerns the characters, especially Gambit, should have. Especially given that he was shown to have concerns about even belonging on any team, least of all this one, in the issues up to then. He showed indications, and rightly, of being ready to leave the team over the debacle...and he should have, with an utter lack of any real dealing with the problem. Instead, he just apparently takes Snow at his casual handwave towards the whole situation. Sloppy writing.

The same can be said for Snow’s own subplot with his secretary and wife. The secretary basically drops out of the story early on, and the wife only pops up to be a hostage later. She’s kind of amusing for what of the story she factors into, but it feels like plot elements that were built up as being major are just dropped unceremoniously. Which is kind of a trend for this title.

But I said I didn’t hate the run, and I don’t. There are problems with it, but it’s not unenjoyable to read. It’s actually one of the more fun series that Marvel’s put out in a long time. It wasn’t perfect, or even close, but it at least didn’t nosedive into angst so deep that only teenagers wallowing in their own self-importance could tolerate it...like most X-titles unfortunately do. It tried to be more of an adventure title with interpersonal things, and that was why it was more enjoyable than not. It’s just too bad that David tended to revolve it around the “straight people baby daddy issues” and not anything more interesting or novel.

Gambit, especially, deserved better. He’s a well-loved character, even if he oddly sees comparatively little fanwork and merchandise. It’s unfortunate that most writers (and a good number of fans, for that matter) just don’t get him or what he’s about, tending to boil him down to just some “bad boy womanizer” type, which he really isn’t except superficially; he has a facade that he’s employed for so long that it’s second nature, but it’s all part of being a master thief. He’s not a simple character, which is probably why superhero comics tend to fail him; they simply don’t have the time, and often don’t have creators that care, to understand who he’s supposed to be.

There was even a bit of acknowledging the fact that Gambit is attractive, and he got to show a lot of skin, even appearing almost naked on a cover...at first. This vanished as the series went on. Even that would have been a refreshing change from most teams’ way of dealing with the character, who in All-New X-Factor became less and less prominent, and less and less relevant. We couldn’t even have eye candy Gambit, and we ended up with Remy in one of his dullest stretches, though mostly inoffensive.

It’s just disappointing that so often, the best and most meaningful traits of the character are overlooked or forgotten. Marjorie Liu’s run on X-23 -- my general dislike of the title character aside -- actually addressed a lot of things that most writers never touch upon or even notice. For example, some of the coded queer tones that come up repeatedly with Gambit and the fact that he’s a mature adult that often functions best when he occupies the role of an “older brother” type. Liu usually at least tried to write Remy believably and realistically, and that character was an interesting person with real feelings that were not easily pinned down.

I will say this, though: for all my disappointment in David’s portrayal of Gambit, he at least managed to avoid having Rogue make a guest appearance. It seems like a token inclusion anytime Gambit is anywhere, largely due to people bowdlerizing the characters and overblowing their relationship, and it always invariably makes Remy into barely an arm-warmer for Rogue. Everything about Gambit is cheapened by attaching him to Rogue so casually and easily, and every bit of development between the two is made even more puerile and obviously dysfunctional, rather than allowing the two to grow as people separately, accepting that they can one day possibly be friends, but they don’t really work together romantically.

If they ever did, if that all wasn’t just a convenient excuse for Remy’s well-hidden thoughts and feelings...but we won’t get into that here. That’s a discussion for another day.

Quicksilver came off well enough, mainly because there was so little done with him that what was done seemed even better. Doug saw some much-needed character improvement and building, though he didn’t get what he really deserved out of the run.

The rest was a mixed bag, mostly not much going on with them. Polaris seemed to stabilize remarkably fast, and that’s certainly a good thing for her. But there’s a plethora of issues waiting for her to address that might have been brought up, which were never really dealt with.

To the Future

I can only hope that whoever takes over the writing for any of these characters, they give it a little bit more thought than Peter David did when writing All-New X-Factor. I do hope that they keep the lighter tone, but even comedies have stakes. The tone in this series was insistently light despite the things that happened, and it wasn’t something that was really appropriate at all times, like dealing with Scarlet Witch.

Things don’t have to be relentlessly dark or oppressive in order to deal with serious problems, but you do have to actually deal with the problems, or else it can get as frustrating and feel as meaningless as a lot of this series did. David’s original run on X-Factor made its cast, who had largely been sidelined and neglected, feel new and interesting again, as well as realistically a group of friends. This run tries to recapture the same magic, but it falls short because of a lack of commitment all around. In some parts it’s overambitious, with its new characters it never develops or makes likeable or at least interesting. In others, it’s lazy and clumsy and fails to invest the effort it needs to realize and complete any of its concepts.

It is a pretty interesting series to read through, though. Would I recommend it? Sure! It isn’t a waste of time, and there are moments that made me laugh out loud, which is really not something most comics make me do anymore. At least, not intentionally. Straight people baby daddy problems notwithstanding, there’s some fun adventure to be had and a little character development that, thankfully, isn’t glacier movement that ruins the characters irreparably.

It just occasionally dents them and writes checks it can’t, or isn’t willing to, cash.

The art is splendid when it’s Carmine di Giandomenico, who did most of the interiors. He has a gorgeous style, and I love the very physical, tangible feel of the forms of the characters. In motion, they are graceful and spectacular, and there’s an obvious great knowledge and appreciation of anatomy. It’s especially nice to see that now, in comics, we have men that actually have genitals. And yes, this is an important thing in art and storytelling. It’s weird when men have smooth crotches that look like they’re made out of flat plastic.

Pop Mhan’s couple of issues are perfectly fine, but after getting used to Giandomenico, it seems almost jarring to have this different, perhaps more conventional, style presented, and it doesn’t quite feel suited to the story or the characters. The two issues Mhan does are two of the weakest, though, so that also doesn’t do the artist any favors.

Giandomenico’s bodies are really pleasing, and everything looks...right. There is also no shortage of amazing, luscious ass in the series, mostly Gambit’s, and it’s great to see for once. Pietro, at times, seems too bony, but he’s strangely not given much opportunity to show off at all; he’s either in costume or in casual clothes, rarely anywhere in-between.

My only complaint comes from Giandomenico’s portrayal of Remy, and while I do like seeing so much of him -- at least at first in the series -- the inveterate Gambit reader in me has to point out that Remy has body hair. Giandomenico only ever seems to put hair on Jean-Luc, which is cool, but Remy has always had it. It stands out especially when Kris Anka’s cover art has Remy with the hair, but the interiors don’t have it. Remy doesn’t depillate, he just trims.

I really wish I liked Anka’s work on the covers more, but it’s kind of uneven throughout. Sometimes I like what he does, sometimes I don’t care for it. I don’t hate his work, and I think he’s very expressive in his style and brings a lot of fun to the subjects. There’s life and liveliness and energy in what he does, which is what superheroes really need. He also doesn’t hesitate to “sexy up” male characters, which is nice. The cover to issue #3 is wonderful and adorable and everything it should be, whereas the cover to issue #9, naked Remy and all, just isn’t right. He’s too bulky, and the composition is uneven and strange.

I do appreciate Anka getting the full frontal sketch out there, though. Bravo! We need less body shame in general. This wave of puritanical bullshit is...well, bullshit. Honestly, maybe if All-New X-Factor had been a mature title and thrown some more adult dealing with things it brought up and danced around, it might have been better. Although the more adult-oriented Marvel titles tend to be up their own asses and filled with enough grimdark edgelord shit to make a high schooler tell them in embarrassment to take it down a few notches, David might have thrived in an environment where he could cut loose a bit more.

As it is, All-New X-Factor is something that is better than it probably deserved to be, but not as good as it could have, and should have, been. It’s something worth reading through at least once, but it may not hold up to repeated read-throughs. If you’re a big fan of any of the characters, at least give it a chance; they each have some moments to be in the spotlight, although not all of those are going to be good or necessarily even in-character for them. It’s just nice to see them, which unfortunately all of the team’s members suffer from not having happen enough.

But whoever was responsible for that Longshot redesign needs to be slapped. Whatever the shit garbage that was supposed to be...brush it under the rug with the rest of Axis and forget about it.

#x-factor #all-new x-factor #comic review #writing critique

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