It's a very quiet week for the X-books, with only two titles out, and both of them in mid-storyline.  Since I've already written about Uncanny X-Men's "Rise and Fall of the Shi'ar Empire" storyline several times, let's go go back to issue #2 of X-23: Target X, the second miniseries featuring everyone's favourite autistic murderer.

X-23 is a character who really shouldn't work.  Not only is she a knock-off of an established male hero, but she's doing the old "damaged and angsty" routine which comics have run into the ground over the last decade or so.  Come to think of it, this is a particularly good week to look at X-23 again, because she's a relatively rare example of doing it right.

It would perhaps be going too far to call X-23 "subtle."  After all, she's a very extreme personality.  She's meant to be a genetically engineered weapon, raised from childhood as an assassin, and with no proper understanding of the real world, other than what she picked up to blend in for short periods while on missions.  In fact, on one view she's not damaged at all; she's just been built that way, and there is no "real" personality underneath it all.  This is one of the key themes that Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost have been exploring with this character, and it's one of the things that makes her more than just another nut.

Crucially, though, the character is firmly in the "show, don't tell" camp, which is the way to make this sort of thing work.  This follows unavoidably from the fact that she's meant to be emotionally inarticulate.  She doesn't really understand how screwed up she is, and to the extent that she does, she refuses to talk about it.  That's central to the character, and it stops the writers from hammering the point by having her wringing her hands and wailing about her sorrows.  She just wanders around, doing what she does, leaving a string of baffled and appalled supporting characters in her wake, and leaving it up to the readers to make what they want of her.

This issue, more or less sidelining the story about people hunting her, X-23 sets up home in San Francisco with her mother's very confused relatives.  It's basically a whole issue contrasting her with the existing teenage daughter - who's more conventionally an angst-ridden teen, and ends up feeling terribly overshadowed by the new, weird girl - while X-23 goes to school and singularly fails to fit in.  It's played for gentle comedy, but without losing sight of the need for X-23 to be an unsettling personality.

Arguably X-23 looks more complex than she really is, because we're denied access to her thoughts, and so much is left to interpretation.  But that's a strength.  If we're going to do these dark, miserable characters, then this is how to make them work - by allowing them some mystery, and by putting them in a situation that provides a contrast.  This is how to do it right.

Rating: A-

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