Our second Claremont book of the week plays rather more obviously off Morrison's New X-Men.  X-Treme X-Men resumes, with the first part of the "Schism" storyline, addressing head on the obvious difficulty of where Claremont's splinter team fit into the new order.

The general argument put forward by Sage is that the X-Men have swung too far in favour of mutant rights rather than trying to establish an equilibrium, and are therefore likely to cause as many problems as they solve.  This is arguable enough, even if it does give rise to the interesting situation of an X-Men book by one writer being premised on the idea that another one has got it wrong.  But then, why not?

I'm a little less sure about Claremont trying to drop hints that Xavier's change of behaviour is due to Cassandra Nova's interference, which smacks of an attempt to lay the groundwork for a mass retconning when Morrison leaves.  As a paranoid implication by Sage, it makes sense; as a serious suggestion of the interpretation of the plot of a different comic altogether, it's a bit more questionable.  Unless, of course, they're collaborating on that - but that sort of ongoing crossover storytelling, where one book's subplots advance the story in entirely separate titles, is rather out of fashion these days.  Claremont also hammers the point a bit too hard in having Bishop and Sage turn up at the School only to be denied entry outright by Emma.  Yes, alright, it's Emma, and she's a bitch, but she's got no obvious reason to refuse to let them in altogether.  After all, only last month we were being told that they'd be welcome back.

Still, the basic story idea is a good one.  The X-Men have taken in a mutant boy who's responsible for a series of murders, albeit that they may have been mercy killings.  Claremont's team aren't entirely wild about the idea of offering sanctuary to mutants who really do have a legitimate case to answer for to the authorities; Morrison's disagree, presumably because they know he's innocent and don't want to inflame public opinion by allowing a trial to take place.  Actually, their reasons aren't really addressed, but this would be the natural explanation given the way Claremont's portrayed the core team in the past.  Plus, it would fit the pragmatism-versus-principle storyline that Claremont seems to be setting up.

The issue suffers a little from an insanely complicated piece of exposition at the murder scene which never quite gets the point over as clearly as it would want, and some odd art from Larroca which suggests yet another lost-in-translation communication breakdown.  Claremont's plot seems to involve the mutant, a teleporter, mercy-killing his fellow torture victims by teleporting them naked onto a glacier, where they froze to death.  The art shows them frozen into a block of ice, which doesn't make any sense at all, since there's no earthly way a teleporter could have formed a block of ice around them.  (The water from the swimming pool would have fallen to the ground long before it froze to ice.)  I suspect Larroca has simply been given a confusing translation of "frozen to death"; if this is what Claremont actually asked for, then it does nothing but confuse the plot by leaving the reader wondering why the hell the X-Men are looking for a teleporter instead of somebody with ice powers.

Shaky in the execution, then.  But I like the general idea of this storyline a lot - if the unstated premise of this book is that it's the X-Men comic for people who like things the way they were and aren't keen on the Morrison approach, why not make it explicit?  Morrison would probably love it, by the way, and then launch into a lecture about how this is a classic example of extra-fictional factors influencing continuity through Hypertime.  Which is just another way of saying: if the books want to pull in completely different directions, why sweep that under the carpet, when you can make it into a story?

Rating: B

back | continue