With that out of the way, back to this week's theme of "Why does this spin-off title exist?"  Rogue #4 continues "Going Rogue", a six-part storyline which now turns out to be the only one Robert Rodi and Cliff Richards will contribute, before a completely new creative team take over with issue #7, with a promised new direction.  Hmm.

To be fair to Rodi, this book is certainly not without its interest, and he has at least tried to do a definitive Rogue story by revisiting her roots and filling in key parts of her background.  The problem is that he seems to be producing some kind of magical mystery story, which doesn't have a great deal of resonance for Rogue's character.  It's nothing that's going to damage her, since it's really a story about her parents rather than Rogue herself.  Besides, it's a decent enough story.

But it does feel as though a story from a different genre entirely has been forcibly attached to the character with a rivet gun.  It doesn't feel like something that emerged organically from the character.  It's as though Rodi was looking for something to say about Rogue, couldn't find anything in the character that inspired him, and plugged her into a different concept that did.

Perhaps surprisingly, the strongest part of this issue is Rodi's use of the blind Gambit.  The whole blindness subplot has been rather silly thus far - we all know it's not going to stick, and it was absolute folly to start it at all at the same time as launching an ongoing Gambit series which completely ignores it.  Because we don't believe in it as a permanent change, we don't care.  He's going to wear a blindfold for a few issues until he gets better.  Whatever.

Rodi takes a different approach - rather than inviting us to feel sorry for Blind Gambit, he has Gambit cheerfully hitchhiking his way to Mississippi to follow Rogue, relying on sheer charm.  It's a lovely Gambit scene, and makes me wish Rodi was doing a Gambit story instead (he did some very entertaining, if inconsequential, caper stories in Elektra over the last couple of years).

Other than that, we have a title which is certainly isn't bad - if anything, it's above average.  But... why?  Again, I'm not convinced anyone has a good answer to that.

Rating: B

back | continue