X-MEN 2000. "I am Stryfe! As for what I do, the name says it
all." No, really? You don't say. Truly the master of
characterisation has all guns blazing once again.
Claremont is bringing back some old villains in this issue.
Well, surely that's got to be an improvement on the frigging
Neo. Or maybe not, since it's Operation: Zero Tolerance and
Stryfe. I mean, Stryfe, for god's sake. Marvel must have been
deluged in mail asking for him to come back. After all, he was
in all those great stories like, uh....
In fairness, though, there are some fairly good reasons to bring
Stryfe back at this stage. For one thing, Cable's on the team
now, which gives the X-Men a better reason to be fighting him.
(Although Cable's not actually in this story.) For another,
Apocalypse is out of circulation until they get around to the
inevitable return of Cyclops, and Claremont seems to be playing
Stryfe as an instigator of pointless conflict, which is kind of
Apocalypse's role. So he's filling a much needed void there.
And perhaps the strongest argument for bringing him back is that
the Legacy Virus plot is going to have to be resolved at some
point, and it's going to be easier to get a decent story out of
that (if it's possible at all) with Stryfe around to serve as
antagonist. And I suppose, once Apocalypse finally comes back,
you can do something between him and Stryfe, which might even
be interesting.
So yes, I can see a case for using Stryfe, and if this issue is
meant to serve to introduce him into the X-Men's regular
villains, that's fair enough. Unfortunately, Claremont makes a
total hash of Stryfe, making him a supremely boring ranting
lunatic (whose rants aren't even very good). Worse, this bunch
of X-Men shouldn't be able to beat him in a million years, but
Claremont obligingly holds him down to pathetically low-grade
uses of his power to make it possible. Why bother having him
boast that he can destroy all the cells in his opponent's bodies,
when all he actually does is chuck a few rocks around and put up
a forcefield? He's meant to be an insanely powerful telepath
and telekinetic, and he can't even beat Nightcrawler. He looks
like an idiot. Of course, if Stryfe was written at his full
power levels he'd be invincible - but that's a good reason for
not using the character at all, not for using him wrongly.
Oh yes, and Lady Deathstrike is wandering around doing the
"reforming villain" routine. Nothing particularly wrong with
this, but nothing very interesting either. Good to note that
Claremont is still congenitally unable to get through an issue
with a Japanese character without raising the concept of giri,
though, even when it's irrelevant to the story.
There's some good character work for the X-Men themselves, with
Thunderbird and Psylocke flirting, and some veiled tensions
between Psylocke and Nightcrawler. And the idea of the
partially transformed Sentinels being aware of their situation
and thinking that they're being marched to their deaths is a
nice one - but one exclusively conveyed to us through
Deathstrike's dialogue, when the space should have been found to
show it. It's the best idea in the issue by a long way.
Art comes from Scot Eaton and Scott Hanna. The storytelling in
some of their action sequences is pretty mangled, but it's
perfectly okay the rest of the time. There's only so much you
can do with a character design as hopeless as Stryfe's, and they
make the best of a bad job there.
It's not even a particularly coherent plot - Claremont never
does get around to explaining why Stryfe wants Lady Deathstrike
in the first place, nor is it at all clear how she made it to
the X-Men's mansion in the first place. There's a few good ideas
in here, but once again, nowhere near enough.
And yes, it really is titled "Mutie.Dot.Dead".
