It's a bit of a toss-up whether X-Treme X-Men: X-Posé has the worst title in the history of the X-books.  After all, the Age of Apocalypse storyline did nearly result in a miniseries called X-Posse.  (Marvel thought better of it, and released it under the very marginally better title Gambit & The X-Ternals.)

Anyhow, this book is something of an enigma.  By which I mean, nobody really has a clue why it exists.  The official line from Marvel is something along the lines that they wanted to keep the record of Salvador Larroca as sole artist on X-Treme X-Men, even though he's away for a few months working on Ultimate Daredevil & Elektra.  That doesn't strike me as all that good a reason, particularly since the orders on this miniseries have been notably lower than on the regular series.  Which is strange, considering that this is effectively X-Treme X-Men.  Presumably retailers are gambling that readers will see it as a skippable exercise in treading water.

On the strength of this first issue, they may have a point.  The plot is pretty basic.  A news producer decides to make a programme about the X-Men spin-off team that's set up base in his city.  Occasional Claremont supporting characters Manoli Weatherall and Neal Conan head off to make the programme, but the evil editors plan to turn their show into a hatchet job by the use of creative editing.

It doesn't really work.  For one thing, this isn't the X-Men's story, it's Weatherall and Conan's.  The issue of editorial integrity in journalism hasn't got all that much to do with the themes of this book, and even if it did, this story approaches the subject with sledgehammer subtlety.  The show's executive producer might as well have "scheming bastard" tattooed on his forehead.  A more interesting approach would have been if he was hacking up the footage in order to convey a message that he honestly believed was true, even if it didn't match the facts.  There's one line of dialogue which vaguely hints in that direction, but the producer is largely portrayed as a ratings-chasing asshole, and so the core of the book is a moral issue which is entirely clear-cut from the word go.

Meanwhile, Weatherall and Conan go around interviewing various cast members who expound on their views of the X-Men.  This comes down to a series of talking heads lecturing the audience about the premise of the series, and still not giving us all that clear of an idea quite what the purpose of the book is, now that the diary quest plot has been abandoned.

Artist Arthur Ranson, who produced some excellent work on the recent X-Factor miniseries, looks just as good here.  He's a good match for Claremont in that Claremont tends to write very dense scripts, and Ranson is unusually comfortable producing pages that are packed solid with panels.  But there's not really all that much here for him to get his teeth into.  Also, it's fortunate that the cast are kept largely out of costume in this story, since the Larroca-designed uniforms jar horribly with Ranson's more realistic style.

Eminently missable.  No doubt there's a certain frisson to seeing Claremont set out his agenda for the X-Men when the core books are doing something totally different.  But really, it's nothing that you haven't heard before, and you probably already know how you feel about it.

Rating: C+

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