X-Statix ships for the second week in a row, and apparently we can expect another one next week too.  In other words, now that they've finally got the rewrites out of the way, they're ploughing ahead in order to get back up to speed.

Two issues into "Back From The Dead", I'm pretty much convinced that the creative team have indeed taken a conscious decision to botch the rewriting.  True, on the surface, everything has been conscientiously distanced from Princess Diana by relocating her home country to "Europa" and replacing her with pop star Henrietta. 

But you barely need to scratch the surface to see that the story is still drowning in references to Diana.  Henrietta's pet charities are listed as landmines, AIDS and eating disorders.  She commissions garishly horrible costumes from a designer who works for her friend Elton John.  This is scarcely subtle stuff, and without the context of a Princess Diana story it makes little sense.

And in fact the story doesn't make much sense, at least if you take it literally.  The general impression is that nothing has been done to revise the plot in order to let it make sense for a character other than Diana.  A bare minimum has been done to comply with executive edict, but the story which has been produced is one that only makes sense if the reader disregards all of those changes and mentally rewrites everything to reference Diana instead. 

It's as if Milligan and his editors have concluded that everyone reading the book will already know from the publicity that it was going to be about Diana, and have chosen to forcibly remind the audience of that at every turn by doing the most hamfisted job imaginable of removing her from the comic.  If they can't do the story openly, they'll make sure that nobody paying the slightest attention could possibly miss the point.

For readers of the ongoing series, that's probably a fair assumption.  For anyone buying the trade paperback in a year's time - assuming that Marvel even produce one for this storyline, and I wouldn't bet on it - it may be a lot more confusing.

In fact, as written in this story, Diana would have been a fairly sympathetic character by the standards of X-Statix.  True, she's image conscious and gratingly irritating, but if you disregard Spider-Man's bafflingly gratuitous appearance, she's genuinely written as the only person in the story who seems to have any real interest in doing good.  Of course, like X-Statix themselves, it's entirely possible that she's doing it primarily because it fits with her image strategy.

The actual story here is inevitably overshadowed by the gimmick and the rewriting.  It's rather easier to mentally cut-and-paste Diana into this issue than it was with the first part, and the story is more successful as a result.  But the sheer oddity of both the story and the circumstances in which it sees print are very hard to see past.

Rating: B

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