Ah, thank god.  X-Statix.

And we're into a new storyline here, with the launch of the X-Statix movie.  While it's almost certainly no coincidence that this storyline is coming along at the same time as the new X-Men movie, that's not the real point here.  It's more of a continuation of the book's usual themes - public persona, and metafiction, with the sanitised X-Statix movie providing a mixture of both.

X-Statix is a series which has always been knowingly contrived, and so there's obvious irony when the movie is presented as an even more contrived version of the same plot.  By the way, if you want to see the artificiality of cinema story structure explored in real detail, go and watch Adaptation, which is still out in the UK.  This story is in rather less subtle territory, and the idea that films simplify and distort reality is fairly familiar to everyone, but it's still a natural story for the book to do.

Not only does the movie base itself around X-Statix's public image rather than the real plot, it's also committed the terrible sin of bringing back a dead character and inventing a completely new one to get round the lack of Hispanics.  Those two provide the crossover points between the film and reality, as El Guapo ends up joining the team itself, while (in a typically absurd yet somehow plausible plot twist) Guy is seduced by the actress playing Edie.

Meanwhile, Tike takes over as team leaders, and his anxieties about race are placed centre stage.  It's less than subtle stuff, admittedly - X-Statix re-edit footage of the real battles to make sure that the African paramilitaries they're fighting are replaced with white men, and explain it away as a "dissident Mormon group involved in the uprising."  But it's funny, and keeps the book on its tricky balancing act - knowingly contrived and absurd, yet still hanging in there as a proper story as well.

Rating: A-

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