Take note: from this point on, I will be referring to the new
X-Men series which launched this week simply as THAT CLAREMONT
BOOK. This reflects no judgment on the quality of the content.
I simply find the title so crashingly terrible and so horribly
embarrassing that I feel a rising well of nausea whenever I
attempt to type it. With a view to being able to review the
thing without suffering from repeated involuntary retching, I
am resorting to referring to it by another name. A name, I
might add, which is still better than the one they're actually
using.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the worst name the X-books have
ever seen. The previous record holder for worst X-books name
is Gambit & The X-Ternals, which was merely rather bad. Even
its working title, X-Posse, looks positively impressive next
to That Claremont Book.
Hell, just call the bastards X-Factor. Hold onto that there
trademark. Just change the damn title.
Okay, but what about the content? Well, let's get the cards on
the table from the beginning. It's a Claremont book, and it's
on a par with the better X-Men stories he did in his recent run.
Chris Claremont, as well know, has a highly distinctive writing
style. If you like his style, you will like this book. If you
do not, you will not like this book. The story itself is
perfectly okay but nothing that's likely to change your views
either way from how you already about Chris Claremont.
It does not suffer from the sort of glaring disasters that
marred his stories in 2000. There is no hideously misconceived
Neo, no parade of characterless henchmen, and the story makes
reasonable sense. I'm not saying it's a flawless structure,
but it's not the ramshackle mess that we saw last year. It's
a story, just a story, told in the style of Chris Claremont.
Either that appeals to you or it doesn't, and if you're reading
this, then chances are you already know which camp you're in.
One of the criticisms that's been made of this book is the
sheer volume of exposition that's in there. Certainly there's
a fair amount in there, which on any view was going to be
inevitable. This book has a cast of seven to introduce, and it
needs to set up the characters' central quest to track down the
missing diaries of Destiny. Much of this information needs to
be in there, and if anything the book's open to criticism for
leaving out central information about some of the characters
(for example, it never clearly establishes how Rogue's powers
have recently changed, and a passage on Bishop's fake ID gets
more prominence than anything explaining who he actually is).
The problem, though, isn't with the amount of exposition so much
as the way in which it's done. Claremont dumps a whole load of
this stuff in a scene of the X-Men travelling to Spain, as
Thunderbird plays the naive rookie and asks for an explanation
of where they're going. That doesn't really work, because he's
already agreed to drop everything and go off on this quest.
Consequently, he looks a bit of a prat for not knowing what the
quest actually is or why it's so important. The material needed
to be there either way, but Claremont would have been as well off
wheeling out the omniscient narrator to explain the plot for
a couple of pages rather than forcing characters to have
artificial conversations about it.
There's also a fairly obvious structural problem which makes the
exposition look so obtrusive, which is that it has nothing to
do with the actual story in this issue. The premise of this
book is perfectly sound - the X-Men have found out about these
diaries which contain cryptic but accurate predictions of the
future. They want to find them. Yes, it's the old "search for
the macguffin" story, but the X-Men have a reasonable motive
here, the macguffin makes sense, and once the books are
actually recovered you can springboard into a whole load of
other stories about how the diaries are to be interpreted and
what, if anything, should be done using the information they
contain.
Slightly more questionable is the decision to have them sever
all ties with Professor X, which is presumably influenced largely
by a desire to have an in-story explanation for the existence
of two separate X-Men teams. That probably justifies it as a
necessary evil, but the logic is rather fuzzy. Storm's team are
arguing that Xavier is too powerful to trusted with the diaries,
because power corrupts. This begs the question of what happened
to the volumes of the diary that Mystique had already given to
Xavier. Did they just leave them with him? Isn't that
inconsistent with their reasoning? If not, won't he be looking
for them? And if he was looking for them, wouldn't he be pretty
much guaranteed to find them? Some explanation of the status
of those volumes would not have gone amiss, especially since
their existence is expressly drawn to our attention.
But the structural problem which makes all the diary exposition
look so odd is that this story seems to have nothing to do with
the diaries. Despite a good strong premise which gives the X-Men
all sorts of excellent reasons to go marching into interesting
situations, Claremont has opted for a variation on that old
favourite which dominated so much of the 1980s, "The X-Men are
sitting around minding their own business when some bastard
attacks them." In this particular variation, the X-Men have set
up base in Valencia (for reasons never clearly explained, though
I suppose it's as good a place as any) and are immediately
attacked by the local authorities, who are paranoid about the
arrival of prominent mutants in their territory.
There is nothing wrong with this story as such, but what it has
to do with the diaries - if anything - isn't at all clear. So
we have a shedload of exposition setting up the premise of
the series, and yet the premise of the series plays no role in
the plot. This seems a very odd choice for the first story arc.
There's nothing wrong with doing a story like this from time to
time, but when you're writing a quest book, shouldn't the first
issue feature the characters pursuing their quest rather than
minding their own business and being attacked? Yes, a competing
hunter turns up towards the end of the story, but that's the
subplot. I'd have preferred to see the diaries as a central
story point in the first issue.
Most of the other problems with this issue are your typical
Claremont style issues, and you'll know whether they bother you
or not. Sage comes across as a generic Claremont strong female,
with nothing much to mark her out from the many who have come
before her. Given that she gets a fair amount of panel time, it's
surprising that she remains such a watery figure.
It's wordy, although that's only really noticeable in the
exposition sequences where it's inevitable. Liquid have done a
rather nice blue colouring theme for a page of Psylocke and
Thunderbird on their boat, which is completely wrecked by half
the page being covered in white dialogue bubbles. Most of the
dialogue is your typical Claremont style, though there's a couple
of lines which are really staggeringly bad.
("Day or night, fair weather or foul, she stayed at the wheel, as
if she was performing silent penance for some unnamed list of
sins. Our lives swirled around her as unnoticed as the wind.
She offered no counsel and accepted less." To put it mildly,
this is somewhat overwrought.)
Art comes from Salvador Larroca, but in a rather unusual way.
Larroca's work is being shot directly from pencils and then
computer coloured directly by Liquid. This does not mean that
we are seeing Larroca's pencils on the page; Liquid have gone
over it dutifully turning all of the pencil lines into the
appropriate colour for that part of the picture. The effect is
rather unusual at first, since without the black lines and with
some pencil shading still present, at first the art looks
rather hazier than we're used to seeing. Once you get used to
it, though, it's rather effective.
Some of the costume designs are a bit questionable - while the
general theme seems to be relatively practical clothes in a
black and red colour scheme, Larroca seems unable to resist the
temptation to bring in the fetish influence for the female
costumes. Rogue's costume is okay, since plot requirements
demand that she wears clothes. Tessa's domme outfit is a bit
on the obvious side, and Psylocke's leather suspenders are
faintly silly.
Comparing this against last week's Uncanny is a dangerous
business. Claremont doesn't have the weight of expectations
(admittedly, self-imposed expectations) to contend with. What
people expected from this series was more of the sort of thing
Claremont was doing in last year's X-Men stories, and that's
what it is. Since it's better than most of last year's books,
it's exceeded expectations straight off the bat. In terms of
the actual content, though, it's not too sensible comparing
chapter one of a serial with a self-contained story. This book
has a stronger central idea than anything Casey's shown us so
far, but then it doesn't do very much with it in this issue.
I'm going to take the cop-out route and rate this book higher
on the basis of the art.
