Let's take a rare visit to the X-Axis mailbag, and a passionate supporter of Chuck Austen.

Chuck Austen Rocks! So shut you're mouth BITCH

I've been reading comic books for over half my life, hell I'm even writing my senior undergraduate thesis on the X-Men. And to be quite frank I can tell the difference between a bad comic book writer and a great one, and Chuck Austen is a great one. SO STOP YOU'RE FUCKING BITCHING YOU LITTLE WHORE AND SHOW SOME FUCKING RESPECT. For some reason I dounbt that you could do any better.

Thanks for that feedback!  I'm sure we all look forward to the thesis.

In an appropriate spirit of FUCKING RESPECT, I'm not going to be negative this week.  I'm not going to be positive either, admittedly, because that would be bending reality a little too far.  But let's try and aim for the middle ground of "constructive."  "She Lies With Angels" isn't very good.  But here are some genuine suggestions on how to make it better.

Number one.  The premise of Romeo & Juliet is that the two lovers cannot be together because of the pointless feud between their families.  They end up dead together because only in death can they escape the irrational restrictions placed on them by society.  (This, by the way, is a very good thematic reason why they should both kill themselves, rather than being killed by the opposite family.)  It's a story about - in large part - the power of prejudice and hatred to destroy love and deny individuals the chance to pursue their dreams by casting them in limited social roles.

It works because both families are equally to blame and the feud is genuinely pointless on both sides.  In "She Lies With Angels", the Guthries are virtually canonised, and the Cabots are irredeemable villains - except for Julia, who is also a candidate for one-dimensional sainthood, and her grandmother, who does a U-turn solely to show off the alleged beauty of Josh's dialogue.  The Guthries, in particular, are having an entirely justified feud, defending themselves against a bunch of assholes who want to kill them.

The early scenes of this story attempted to put some degree of blame on the Guthries for provoking the situation, but almost immediately abandoned that idea.  The "bad" Guthrie is promptly forgotten about, and since the Cabots were planning to murder the Guthries anyway, he evidently didn't provoke anything after all.  The Guthries need to be much more ambivolent and kneejerk if this is going to work.  The wholly one-sided feud misses the point of what Romeo & Juliet is saying, and what makes the story work.

Number two.  Josh and Julia's relationship isn't sufficiently tied in with the rest of the plot.  It incites nothing and changes nothing, because as I've said, the Cabots were already planning to slaughter the Guthries even before they knew about it.  So Josh and Julia never face the necessary dilemma: by pursuing our dreams to be together, will we spark this long-running feud into a disaster?  It's already a disaster and they have nothing to lose (save for Julia's excommunication from a family she'd be better off without).

The inciting incident in this story should have been Josh and Julia's relationship being discovered by the Cabots, leading the Cabots to take steps to break it up, with reprisals from firebrand junior members of the Guthrie family, escalating into the armoured-suits attack on the Guthries.  That way, Josh and Julia actually have something at stake in choosing to pursue their relationship - like Romeo and Juliet, they're not merely rejecting bigotry, but to an extent rejecting their families as well.  Do they choose love for one another over love for their family?  In the story as published, Josh faces no choice at all, and Julia's is one-sided.

Number three.  Josh and Julia are too saintly.  Nobody cares about a romance between one dimensional puppets.  They don't act like real teenagers, and there's never any real sense that they face a choice.  Josh has no choice, Julia's dilemma is simply right over wrong, and as she's a saint, the answer is a foregone conclusion.  Drama is all about choice, and making the characters face decisions which bring out their true character.  No choice, no drama.  "Shall I approach the girl I love, when there's no obvious reason not to?" is not a choice.

The overripe dialogue has got to go.  Shakespeare got away with writing poetry for two reasons.  Firstly, the rest of the play was in similarly poetic language, and it was established as the basic standard for how his characters spoke.  Josh has to embark on rambling and purple speeches about beauty in a context where everyone else speaks normal English, and the result is to make him look stupid.  Secondly, Shakespeare was really, really good at writing poetry.  Just as there's no such thing as nearly funny, there's also no such thing as nearly poetic.  Their relationship would be far more believable if they just talked like normal people.  And, by virtue of being more believable, it would also be more dramatic and more romantic.

Number four.  The story has a huge structural problem in that it's desperately searching for a role for the X-Men.  This is a very difficult one to get round.  The story inevitably marginalises them to a large degree.  My feeling is that Austen has brought them into the plot far too early here, leaving them to sit around the Guthries' farmhouse twiddling their thumbs for three issues.  My solution would be to have Husk as the only X-Man appearing for most of the storyline, trying to play peacemaker as a character who's been away from the area and has returned with some degree of perspective.  She should fail to calm the situation and call in the X-Men when she realises that everything's getting out of control (and the Cabot's are wandering around with anti-mutant armour suits).  The rest of the team show up in the last act, in time to stop total slaughter, but too late to save Romeo & Juliet.

It's still not much of an X-Men story, but it could be turned into a fairly strong Husk story - Romeo & Juliet from the perspective of a supporting character who's trying to stop the tragedy.

Number five.  Brainless backwoods hicks building anti-X-Men body armour strains credulity too far.  Have an anti-mutant group come in and supply them with the armour.  Use it as a subplot to build up that group as villains for a future storyline.

There you go.  Better?

Rating: C-

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