Yes, I know it's a day late. I warned you last week. I've been
at the convention in Bristol over the weekend, which is why you're
not getting this until Monday evening - my time, anyway. At some
point I'll do a piece for NinthArt with my views on the highly
eccentric results of the voting for the UK Comic Art Awards or
whatever they're called (which, shall we say, betrayed a certain
level of bias towards 2000AD, the only comic which actually
published the voting forms). For the moment, I believe my next
Article 10 column is due up on their site on Friday, so do have
a look.
Fortunately, this is a very quiet week for X-books, leaving the
field clear for X-FORCE and its drastic change of direction.
Altering an ongoing title in this way is not entirely
unprecedented - X-Factor did it - but it's certainly getting there.
This is not even trying to be any kind of continuation from what
has gone before, and it does beg the question as to why they didn't
just give it a new name and a new series. If anything, I think
reusing the name and having the completely new series kick in
with issue #116 hurts the book, and I can't see a single piece
of benefit the series is getting from coming out in this way, but
there you go.
The concept here is basically the old Youngblood idea that sounded
so promising in Rob Liefeld's interviews and seemed to be entirely
missing from his actual stories. Starting from the premise that
superheroes would be media celebrities, here's a book about a
bunch of superheroes who went into the business not out of any
particular altruism, but for the fame and fortune. The X-connection
is that in this version of the idea, they're mutants, and
consequently about the only mutants accepted by the general
public.
Sections of the fanbase have criticised this premise as being
completely implausible within the X-books' framework. I disagree;
I don't have a difficulty with the idea that a specific team of
mutants could be the exception to the rule. I'm rather keen on
the Jackson 5 analogy here - the fact that America remained a
rather racist nation during their rise to fame did not prevent it
from happening. It's not as if there aren't precedents in the
Marvel Universe, either - for years, the Beast has been written as
being socially accepted due to his former membership in the
Avengers, a team with good PR.
Having said that, even though I can accept it a concept within the
established universe, I think a bit more work was needed to
justify it in the first issue. Marvel have spent the last 25
years hammering home just how hostile to mutants the American
public is, and as this story is presented, X-Force just breeze in
and overcome enormous public prejudice with no apparent effort
required. This is a storytelling difficulty rather than a
conceptual difficulty; while the book acknowledges that X-Force
are an exception to the rule, it never offers any proper
explanation of how they achieved this undeniably remarkable feat.
This issue sees them coasting on an established reputation, not
building it in the first place.
Leaving this aside, it's a great idea for an X-book. One of the
most obvious criticisms of the X-Men is that, despite their
primary motivation supposedly being to achieve social change,
they never actually take any action to get there. Their modus
operandi is to be really nice people and hope that ultimately
everyone will notice. This series thoroughly and rightly pisses
on that approach, by giving us a bunch of rather unsympathetic
characters who have managed to change public ideals through the
power of PR, which is something the X-Men should at the very
least have tried harnessing years ago. As with an awful lot of
celebrities, their public image is entirely divorced from the
reality. This is partly a satire on celebrity, but it's also
making the cynical (but basically true) observation that a bunch
of cynics who put their minds to changing the public attitude
will achieve a damn sight more than a bunch of idealists who sit
around waiting for it to happen on its own.
This is a book about the power of PR and how it's created the
facade of a genuine superhero team around a bunch of damaged
bastards you would not want to trust in a fight. On that basis,
Allred's artwork fits in nicely, giving the book the superficial
image of something from the innocent days of yore and then
dutifully going on to render all kind of incongruous scenes in
that style. Allred seems a weird choice for the X-books at first,
but thematically he's definitely in synch with Milligan.
A word on the absence of the Comics Code seal from this book.
Given that the final page features an assortment of scattered
corpses, guts everywhere, dead characters lying in pools of blood,
and people with half their faces ripped off, if Marvel submitted
this thing to the Code in the first place, they did it for a
publicity stunt knowing it would be rejected. If the Code were
dumb enough to mention a problem with a jacuzzi scene as well,
that's a side issue. There is no conceivable way that this story
could ever have been intended as a Code-compatible book, at least
not unless it's been substantially redrawn after the rejection,
which seems unlikely.
It may not be the same book it was last month, but it's infinitely
better as a result. Intelligent, cynical and very funny.
Excellent stuff.
