Review: X-Men: Days of Future Past

Writer: Chris Claremont
Artists: John Byrne, John Romita Jr.
Collects: Uncanny X-Men #138-143 and Uncanny X-Men Annual #4 (1980-81)
Published: Marvel, 2013; $19.99

Although The Dark Phoenix Saga is most often cited as the high-water mark of Chris Claremont’s comics-writing career (and, in particular, of his much-celebrated collaboration on The Uncanny X-Men with artist John Byrne), it’s a story of relatively little social force, a fantasy more in line with the likes of Star Wars than with the more politically radical genre narratives whose attitudes Claremont would seek to emulate in his later work. Of greater political and ideological interest, I think – especially given the allegorical weight the X-Men franchise has been invested with in recent decades – are the issues Claremont wrote directly afterward, collected in X-Men: Days of Future Past. Here we see Claremont’s writing in a state of transition, grasping at the social consciousness he would achieve a year later with X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, and yet also falling noticeably short of it.

At the heart of Days of Future Past is a two-part storyline set, in part, in a dystopian future in which mutants have been hunted nearly to extinction by giant robots known as Sentinels. The last remaining X-Men – Kate Pryde, Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, Franklin Richards, and the red-haired psychic Rachel – conclude that their only hope is to change the past, and so Kate is vaulted back through time to prevent a political assassination in the series’ present day. Now possessing the body of her younger self – who has only recently joined the team’s ranks, as “Sprite” – Kate leads the X-Men in thwarting an attack on the U.S. Capitol, saving the life of the anti-mutant Senator Robert Kelly in the process. Whether Kate has succeeded in changing the future, however, is left an open question. (Later storylines, beginning with 1990’s nearly unreadable X-Men: Days of Future Present, would reinforce time and again that she did not.)

The reader is reminded with some frequency that events in the “present day” take place on October 31, 1980, described by the narrator as “the final Friday of one of the closest, hardest-fought presidential elections in recent memory.” And yet, despite setting the story at such a culturally charged moment, Claremont misses the opportunity to make anything more than a vague political statement. The only presidential candidate introduced to the reader is Senator Kelly, and what role his McCarthy-esque anti-mutant hearings play in his presidential campaign is never made clear. Ronald Reagan appears not once, although, as in real life, he would apparently win this election (he appears much later in Claremont’s run on this series, in 1986’s Uncanny X-Men #201).

Confusing things even further, a brief epilogue set a month after the election depicts the president re-activating the Sentinel project. The president appears only in shadow in this scene, although he is obviously (and, by historical necessity, must be) Jimmy Carter – who, if he has indeed lost the election to Reagan, could not realistically possess the political influence necessary for such a move. The attempt to conceal Carter’s identity is all the more baffling considering the fact that he had made a full appearance in the series just a few years earlier, at the height of the original Phoenix Saga.

Any potential for a coherent political commentary in Days of Future Past is thus lost in the book’s ambivalent attitude towards real-life figures and events. Furthermore, I think a great deal of its falling short in this sense can be contributed to artist John Byrne. While he’s credited as “co-plotter” on the issues collected here, the partnership between Claremont and Byrne had in fact all but broken down by this point, with Byrne often drawing scenes in direct contradiction to Claremont’s scripts; the issue following the two-part “Days of Future Past” would be his last on the title. One of the major contributing factors to the book’s confused politics, I would argue, is Byrne’s avowed refusal to draw figures from real life: the aforementioned Jimmy Carter appearance was in fact ghost-penciled by inker Terry Austin. Byrne was notorious, as well, for using his favorite characters (especially Wolverine, who Claremont didn’t care for and planned at one point to write out of the book) as vehicles for his own right-wing views.

It should come as fairly little surprise, then, that a book “co-plotted” by Claremont and Byrne would possess something less than clear political sensibilities. Nor should it surprise us that the story’s most pointed political statements occur only in its script. A caption accompanying an otherwise innocuous establishing shot of the Pentagon, for example, ends with a surprisingly perceptive diagnosis of America’s renewed militarism at the turn of the 1980s:

This is the Pentagon, the largest building of its type in the world, command headquarters of the mightiest military machine that world has ever known. To many people, it is more truly representative – for good or ill – of the reality of America than the White House or Congress just across the Potomic [sic] River.

Claremont addresses the post-Tonkin breakdown of the checks-and-balances system even more pointedly later, in this exchange between civilians fleeing the story’s climactic battle: “‘Good grief! That sound – someone’s bombed the Capitol!’ ‘Yeah – and it was probably the White House that did it!’” As in the narration, Claremont’s politics begin to come through only where Byrne is literally unable to erase them.

While initial printings of Days of Future Past included only Uncanny X-Men issues 141 and 142, an additional five issues have been included since the publication of the 2004 trade paperback edition; the added content begins three issues before the book’s two-part title story, and ends with the issue that follows. Despite the inclusion of a John Romita, Jr.-drawn Annual that relates only tangentially to the rest of the book, the new contents make for a more thematically coherent narrative than in previous editions. The first issue collected not only wraps up The Dark Phoenix Saga with Jean Grey’s funeral and the departure of Cyclops from the team, but serves also as a flashback-filled recap of the franchise’s nearly twenty-year history to this point. It ends with the arrival of a new student to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters: Kitty Pryde, whose character arc forms the crux of the 2004-and-beyond editions of Days of Future Past. The effect is to de-emphasize the dystopian and alternate-future aspects of the title story itself; newly framed, rather, “Days of Future Past” serves as a super-powered bildungsroman starring Kitty Pryde.

However, this shift in focus also further reduces the impact of a story already weakened by its artist’s failure to endorse the politics of its script. As we can see from later texts, Claremont’s politics would only become clear after he became the sole plotter of his work; in fact, as if to herald what was eventually to come, the first issue of Uncanny X-Men following Byrne’s departure was drawn (but not co-plotted) by Brent Anderson, who would go on to collaborate with Claremont on God Loves, Man Kills. We might well view Days of Future Past as not just the end of the Claremont/Byrne era, then, but also as the start of a progressive sensibility that would be fully realized only in the years that followed.

Review: X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills

Writer: Chris Claremont
Artist: Brent Anderson
Collects: Marvel Graphic Novel #5: God Loves, Man Kills (1982)
Published: Marvel, 2011; $19.99 (HC), $14.99 (TPB)

The collapse of America’s confidence in public institutions in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate set the stage for a corresponding shift in American genres. Within the crime genre alone, the early and mid-1970s saw the emergence of several new subgenres in film, including the “vigilante revenge” film (Billy Jack [1971], Walking Tall [1973]) and the “paranoid conspiracy” film (The Conversation [1974], All the President’s Men [1976]), as well as the transformation of more traditional subgenres, such as the film noir. In The Long Goodbye (1973), for example, the detective Philip Marlowe – a character previously portrayed by an even-headed Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946) – is reimagined as a bumbling wiseass virtually incapable of putting two and two together. On the whole, genre narratives of the time displayed a largely pessimistic attitude toward state institutions, which were depicted as naive and ineffective, if not wholly corrupt.

By the late 1970s, however, the New Left’s failure to effect any real social change – as evidenced by the fizzling of the movements for black, female, homosexual, and labor rights – had resulted in a renewed public desire for strong leaders and institutions. That wish came to fruition as economic (and thus political) power shifted to the union-free South, leading ultimately to the election of a right-wing president at the decade’s turn. Among the many institutions restored to power in the era of Reagan was organized religion – which, although not state-sponsored, gained unprecedented political power in the 1980s as organizations like the Moral Majority attempted, for the first time, to legislate the moral dictates of the Christian Right beyond the borders of the Sunbelt.

As quickly as American genres had adjusted to the cultural shift of the early 1970s, so they conformed by the decade’s end to the triumph of social and political conservatism. Fantasy genres such as science fiction, in particular, lost their political edge as blockbusters like Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Superman (1978) came to define the mass entertainment landscape. What was true for the American cinema held for mainstream superhero comics as well, which by 1980 had all but abandoned the social and political undercurrents that had once defined such Stan Lee/Jack Kirby creations as the X-Men.

Chris Claremont’s graphic novel X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, originally published in 1982, is a superbly articulated comment on this shift in political power and ideology. It is remarkable, as well, for the fierceness with which it launches itself against the intense conservatism of its time, producing what remains an incredibly radical message for a mainstream superhero comic. The book pulls few punches in its portrayal of a hateful televangelist, William Stryker, who believes that mutants are genetic affronts to God – beings with, in his words, “no right to live.” The parallels between Stryker’s views toward mutants and those of the real-life Jerry Falwell toward homosexuals are impossible to ignore. Furthermore, Claremont’s setting of Stryker’s headquarters within the World Trade Center aligns the villain – and the evangelical right, by association – not with religious devotion or moral teaching, but with the corporate concerns of big business.

When Stryker sets his target on the X-Men, the team goes down without much of a fight. In a single stroke, Stryker’s radicalized followers kidnap Professor Xavier, Cyclops, and Storm, leaving the rest of the team to believe the three were killed in a seemingly random accident. While they eventually learn the truth, it is only when Magneto, their archenemy, arrives to help that they make any real headway. This is one of the first stories by Claremont to depict Magneto not as a megalomaniac, but as a man whose system of ideals has been thought out just as clearly as Xavier’s. Originally, the character was actually meant to die in God Loves, Man Kills (the original artist, Neal Adams, even drew the story pages), but Magneto’s role was de-emphasized in the final version – a decision that works strongly in the book’s favor.

Before the story is through, two more characters – Kitty Pryde and Colossus’s sister, Illyana – are captured by Stryker’s forces. The team’s relative ineptitude throughout the story (after all, have the X-Men not dealt with greater threats than a few zealots with guns before?) recalls, in many ways, that of the incompetent protagonists of 1970s genre narratives – the sort of characters Thomas Elsaesser has described as “unmotivated heroes.” With the addition of a superpower or two, it’s safe to say that the Philip Marlowe of The Long Goodbye would be right at home on this team.

The consistent inability of the X-Men to measure up to Stryker and his forces is underlined most obviously in the story’s conclusion, when it is not a super-powered mutant who saves the day, but a non-powered human with a gun. Although the book ends with the X-Men engaging Stryker in a televised debate about the hypocrisy of his views, their efforts fail: it is finally a nameless police officer, tired of Stryker’s rhetoric, who guns the man down in his own megachurch. The suggestion that social change can only be effected by the average American who “wakes up” and “strikes back,” so to speak, is surprisingly radical for a superhero comic, especially for one published at the height of Reaganite conservatism.

According to Claremont, God Loves, Man Kills was essentially written as a treatise on racial tolerance – there is even an early scene in which the slur “mutie” is passionately compared to the N-word – but today, as mentioned earlier, it resonates even more strongly as a comment on the continuing struggle for gay rights in America. Its ethos is all the more admirable for its adherence to that particular brand of political pessimism espoused by 1970s genre narratives, an attitude which had all but disappeared from popular entertainment by the time of the book’s publication in 1982. That it remains so relevant more than thirty years later is, on the one hand, a sad testament to the state of modern society; on the other, though, it serves as a welcome reminder that even popular forms and genres carry the potential to advocate for social justice.

Review: X-Men: Road Trippin’!

Writers: Scott Lobdell, Chris Claremont, John Francis Moore, Larry Hama, Mary Jo Duffy
Artists: Chris Bachalo, Marc Silvestri, Rob Liefeld, Bryan Hitch, Adam Pollina, Adam Kubert, John Byrne, Ken Landgraf
Collects: Generation X #5, X-Force #71 & 75, Wolverine #78, Marvel Treasury #26, Uncanny X-Men #138, 244-245 & 323 (1980-1998)
Published: Marvel, 1999; $24.95

Published in 1999, X-Men: Road Trippin’! was one of Marvel’s earliest efforts in what would eventually become a fairly comprehensive collected editions program. Like a number of Marvel’s other “greatest hits”-style trades from around this time, though, it suffers from a complete and utter lack of focus. The only thing supposedly linking the issues collected in this trade is that they all involve X-Men characters “hitting the road,” taking some time off, that sort of thing. I say “supposedly” because that’s only the case for a couple of these stories – really, this trade is just a cobbling-together of random issues that span the range of Marvel history from Chris Claremont’s celebrated run in the 1970s to the time of this book’s publication in the late 1990s. Furthermore, only half of the issues are actually about the X-Men; the others feature either Wolverine going solo or ancillary X-teams like Generation X and X-Force.

The first issue collected is Generation X #4, the first issue of the series to be published after the “Age of Apocalypse” crossover that swept through the X-titles in 1996. It’s not necessarily a bad story, but nothing of much consequence happens: Jubilee, Skin, and Synch head to New York City, fight some random mutant, and then the issue ends on a cliffhanger. (Oh, and Chamber broods in his room while Husk gets drunk by herself at the X-Mansion, for some reason.) It’s clear that this issue was only included because someone at Marvel thought the NYC aspect made the story fit the “road trip” bill, but seeing as the characters barely interact with the city itself (not to mention the fact that Generation X is already based in New York to begin with), the connection is a tenuous one at best. No context is given for the story either, making it all the more frustrating. In fact, even though I recently read the first three issues of the series in Generation X Classic, Vol. 1, I still felt sort of lost here.

The Generation X story is followed by two late-‘80s issues of Uncanny X-Men, both written by Chris Claremont but drawn by different artists. The first one, penciled by Marc Silvestri, focuses solely on the team’s female members – Storm, Psylocke, Dazzler, and Rogue (well, Ms. Marvel possessing Rogue’s body, technically…but that’s a long story). The ladies decide, on Dazzler’s suggestion, to relieve some stress by hitting up the mall. Again, I’m not exactly sure how going to the mall qualifies as a “road trip,” but that’s the least of this story’s problems. The women transform into materialistic airheads the second they arrive, and Dazzler in particular is almost unbearably annoying at times. They also run into Jubilee (in her first appearance) and fight the M Squad, a group of bumbling mutant-hunters who serve as a thinly-veiled Ghostbusters parody. Their “hijinks,” unfortunately, aren’t all that amusing; although perhaps I was too distracted by the fact that Dazzler, who in every other appearance she has ever made has been Caucasian, appears to be African-American throughout this story.

The second issue of Uncanny X-Men seems to aim for humor as well, but again, Claremont’s writing simply falls flat. The story revolves around a group of moronic aliens who try to take over the world but are put to a stop by the male members of the X-Men, who are all drunk after going to a bar. Rob Liefeld handles the art, and while it’s not as bad as some of his later work, there are some truly cringe-worthy moments as he tries to sneak characters like Darth Vader, Chewbacca, and Alf into the alien invaders’ ranks. A Wolverine/Chewbacca throw-down would actually have been pretty cool, now that I think of it, but alas, all we have is this lame waste of paper instead. (I would be remiss not to point out that this issue also shamelessly sets up Wolverine/Havok: Meltdown, a 1988 miniseries which is a far better story if you’re looking to read a comic featuring those characters.)

The next story, taken from a 1995 issue of Uncanny X-Men, has little to do with the trade’s supposed theme either. As far as I can tell, it was included because it contains five pages of Iceman and Rogue talking as they drive cross-country (where they’re going is never fully explained). The rest of the issue isn’t bad, and the art by Bryan Hitch is fairly impressive, but taken out of context from what was going on in Uncanny X-Men at the time, the story has little real impact.

Next come two issues of X-Force (issues 71 and 75), and to be honest, these were the stories I was least looking forward to reading. I’ve never read much of New Mutants (the series that became X-Force in the early ‘90s) or of X-Force itself, so naturally I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. Much to my surprise, though, these issues ended up blowing me away. They are by far the best thing about this trade, and might even be reason enough alone to pick it up. The first issue follows the team as they hitchhike across the country in the wake of having left the X-Mansion for good. By the second issue, they’ve made their way to a Woodstock-esque desert festival, which ends up giving way to unexpected romantic developments and a fight with a mysterious enemy. The character development in these issues is so fantastic that, despite my previous unfamiliarity with the series, I felt entirely invested in what was happening to the cast by the end. If Marvel ever sees fit to collect this creative run again (call the series X-Force Visionaries: John Francis Moore, perhaps?), I’ll be first in line to pick up the trades.

The X-Force issues are arguably the most in keeping with the “road trip” theme, but the final two issues – one a 1994 Wolverine story, the other an issue of Uncanny X-Men from 1980 – really don’t fit at all. The Wolverine issue sees the title character being chased by the vampire known as Bloodscream across the snowy wastes of Canada, while the X-Men issue is simply one long flashback retelling of the team’s history up to that point, ending with Cyclops informing Professor X that he’s leaving. In other words, there’s no “road trip” to be found anywhere in these stories at all! And then, of course, there’s a ridiculous six-page story about Wolverine and Hercules fighting each other in a barroom brawl…but honestly, it’s probably best if I don’t go into any more details on that one.

Although most of the stories don’t fit with the theme of the trade, the X-Force issues are so good that it’s hard to write the entire thing off. That being said, you might be better off just buying those issues separately – they can’t be more than a dollar apiece these days. Heck, you could probably buy John Francis Moore’s entire run on the title for less than the cost of this trade. Come to think of it, why not just do that, and leave X-Men: Road Trippin’! in the discount bin where it belongs?

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Review: Blade: Black & White

Writers: Marv Wolfman, Chris Claremont, James Felder, Christopher Golden
Artists: Tony DeZuniga, Rico Rival, Gene Colan, Ladronn
Collects: Vampire Tales #8-9, Marvel Preview #3 & 6, Marvel: Shadows & Light #1, and Blade: Crescent City Blues #1 (1974-76, 1997, 1998)
Published: Marvel, 2004; $15.99

For fans of the Blade movies or the character’s other recent depictions in various animated series, video games, and even a short-lived live-action TV show, Blade: Black & White is likely to be a bit baffling. Collecting a rather strange hodgepodge of issues from throughout the decades, this book sticks with stories that portray a more “classic” version of the character than most people are probably used to seeing these days. Unlike the movie and TV versions, the original version of Blade was an afro-sporting, goggle-wearing, occasionally jive-talking black British vampire hunter. In other words, Wesley Snipes in a trench coat and sunglasses this character is not.

And while I’m sure I could appreciate such a “far out” character under the right circumstances (in fact, I do enjoy Blade’s 1970s appearances in Tomb of Dracula), the stories in this volume just didn’t really do it for me. One of the biggest problems, in my opinion, is that the writers don’t play up Blade’s inherent wackiness nearly as much as they should. Especially in the first few issues (a multi-part story that takes up the first half of the book), written at first by Marv Wolfman but then taken over by Chris Claremont, the mood is simply too gloomy for its own good. Blade’s first solo outing after a handful of guest appearances in Tomb of Dracula (a title which Wolfman was also writing at the time), the tale follows Blade’s adventures in London as a coven of vampires attempt to take over the city.

Here we see Blade’s origin recounted for the first time, albeit so confusingly that I didn’t even realize (until I had done some research) that this story wasn’t simply recapping some other comic that I hadn’t read. The story drags on for much too long, pulling in a variety of useless characters, including Blade’s exotic dancer girlfriend Safron and a barely-clothed female cop, who serve as little more than vampire food and/or hostages for Blade to rescue. It’s unbearably formulaic at times, with each fight between Blade and the vampires playing out in almost exactly the same way. Even the vampires apparently realize this partway through the story and, deciding that it would be too much trouble to keep trying to kill Blade, they settle on framing him for a child murder instead. (At least it’s original, anyway.)

The worst part, though, is that the reproduction for this first storyline is simply awful. As the title makes clear, this trade is a collection of black and white comics, and in this case the stories come from several issues of Marvel’s ongoing B&W horror magazine Vampire Tales. (A big chunk of the story also comes from an issue of Marvel Preview; I suspect these chapters were shunted out of Vampire Tales when someone at editorial realized how extraordinarily dull they were.) The standard practice for black and white collections like this one is for the company to reproduce the art from the original pencils and/or inks, but here it looks like Marvel has decided that poorly xeroxed copies of the original magazine pages will do instead. The linework is so washed out in places, in fact, that the action becomes utterly incomprehensible.

The second half of Blade: Black & White fares a bit better than the first. Immediately following the Wolfman/Claremont issues is a Wolfman-written issue of Marvel Preview with absolutely beautiful art by Gene Colan, who has been called the master of depicting shadow and light in comics, and not without good reason. Freed from Claremont’s penchant for overwriting and melodrama, Wolfman delivers a pretty interesting story here in which Blade comes face to face with a group of child vampires; sadly, the story is only six pages long.

The next story, a 12-page inventory piece published in the 1997 one-shot Marvels: Shadows & Light, is another success. James Felder’s plot follows Blade as he teams up with a local priest to infiltrate Dracula’s castle to finish off his archfoe once and for all. Although Ladronn’s style is much more akin to the likes of Mike Allred than Gene Colan, he manages to pull off an incredibly atmospheric feeling nonetheless. The setting is regal and spooky at the same time, and reminded me in a lot of ways of Castlevania (which just so happens to be my favorite video game series!). Strangely enough, the story ends on a horrifying cliffhanger, one that I don’t believe has ever been addressed since.

Colan returns on art duties for the trade’s final issue, a 1998 one-shot entitled Blade: Crescent City Blues which finds Blade and his old friend Hannibal King pitted against their old enemy Deacon Frost. The vampire directly responsible for the death of Blade’s mother, Frost is now leading his undead legions in an attempt to take over organized crime in New Orleans. (I can’t remember exactly what the rationale behind his plot was, but whatever it was, it didn’t strike me as particularly compelling.) Colan’s artwork, while not bad by any means, unfortunately isn’t as well-done as his earlier story; that, plus the fact that the story requires a bit of outside knowledge regarding some of Marvel’s lesser-known supernatural characters (including King, Frost and Doctor Voodoo), placed this one in the slightly-below-average category for me.

So, in the end, there were only 16 pages of Blade: Black & White (out of 144) that I legitimately enjoyed. But although I can’t recommend it at full price, it may be worth noting that I frequently see the book listed online for about the same price as a standard comic book issue. If you do come across it for that price, it’s probably worth considering – after all, if you end up liking Crescent City Blues more than I did (and really, I didn’t think it was too bad), that’s another 40 pages of potential enjoyment. If melodramatic Marvel vampire comics don’t sound like your bag, though, I’d have to say skip it.

Rating: 2 out of 5

Review: Gambit Classic, Vol. 1

Writers: Chris Claremont and Howard Mackie
Artists: Bill Jaaska, Mike Collins, Jim Lee, and Lee Weeks
Collects: Uncanny X-Men #265-267 (1991) and Gambit #1-4 (1993-94)
Published: Marvel, 2009; $24.99

As I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before, I think Gambit is an incredibly stupid character. It’s become strangely fashionable lately for comic book creators to claim there are no bad characters in comics, just bad stories – but that’s a lie and everyone knows it, especially if they’ve ever read a comic featuring Gambit in any capacity whatsoever. So why, of all things, do I now find myself reading and reviewing a book called Gambit Classic, Vol. 1? I don’t know, to be honest. Maybe I was hoping to be proven wrong. Or maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment – and punished, I truly was.

The story begins with Storm (who has for some reason regressed mentally and physically to childhood) robbing criminals in Cairo, Illinois. Since the character originally hails from Cairo, Egypt, I guess this is supposed to be ironic or something. I’ve never found Storm particularly interesting as a solo character, and the amnesiac child angle in these issues is exceptionally boring. The story is written by Chris Claremont, who has always seemed to think (incorrectly, most of the time) that he excels at writing strong female lead characters. He also has an unfortunate tendency to reuse certain villains to the point that they’re no longer the least bit menacing – in this case, Nanny and the Orphan-Maker, two characters who are about as dumb as you might guess based on their names.

At this point, you may be wondering: where exactly does Gambit fit into all of this? The short answer is that he doesn’t, really. He just happens to show up as Storm is getting a beat-down courtesy of the minions of the Shadow King (another incredibly lame character), and he helps her escape. He doesn’t speak too much, other than to exert his “Cajun charm” to try and persuade the Shadow King and his mind-slaves to let him and Storm go. Aside from that, he mostly just chain-smokes and occasionally blows things up. At the end of the third issue, he and Storm (who is no longer amnesiac, but still a child) head off to join the X-Men.

Now, here’s where Gambit Classic becomes really frustrating. Instead of reprinting the issues where Gambit becomes a member of the X-Men and we actually get to know something about his character, there’s a page of text explaining his activities over the next few years before the book skips ahead to the four-issue Gambit miniseries from 1993. I suspect the reason that his appearances in X-Men and Uncanny X-Men were omitted is that many of them have been reprinted elsewhere (namely, in the out-of-print trade paperback X-Men Visionaries: Jim Lee), whereas the ones with amnesiac-child Storm have not. But while I understand Marvel’s desire not to collect the same material a hundred times over, this book is still the first volume in a series called “Gambit Classic.” To my mind, that means it should collect the character’s early appearances rather than being some sort of career-spanning “greatest hits” compilation.

This leads me to the same fundamental problem I had with Deadpool Classic, Vol. 1. In both that book and this one, so many of the character’s early issues are omitted that I felt out-of-the-loop by the time I got to the later stories. That’s an even bigger problem with Gambit Classic, since the 1993 miniseries is basically a sequel to a crossover story that took place in two issues of X-Men and another two issues of Ghost Rider – none of which, of course, are collected here. (Interestingly, those issues were collected in a trade called X-Men & Ghost Rider: Brood Trouble in the Big Easy – a book which has been out of print for nearly twenty years.)

Even if those issues had been included, though, I doubt they could have salvaged my lack of enjoyment for the miniseries. The story is so mundane, it’s barely even worth summarizing; all you really need to know is that the Assassins’ Guild and the Thieves’ Guild are at war in New Orleans, and Gambit is the cause of it (sort of). The Thieves’ Guild apparently has some deal with a perpetually half-naked immortal French woman named Candra, who supplies them with an elixir each year that gives them longer life. But now the Assassins want the elixir, and so does Gambit, and so do some other people, etc. – you get the picture.

The story isn’t so much bad as it is astoundingly boring. I suppose that’s sort of a compliment when you’re talking about anything written by Howard Mackie, but I’d like to think my taste in comics is exponentially better than even Mackie’s least offensive work. The miniseries’ only (slightly) redeeming quality is that it’s drawn by Lee Weeks, an artist whose work I normally like very much. Even that doesn’t save it from mediocrity, though, since Weeks’ art is only occasionally good in this series; most of the time, it’s mired in over-the-top, vein-popping ’90s ridiculousness.

It’s worth noting that even by 1993, it’s clear that no one really has any idea of how to write Gambit. Half the time he sounds like he’s auditioning for Hamlet, and the rest of the time like he has some sort of speech impediment; the animated X-Men show was the only time I think anyone has ever gotten his accent quite right. It’s also fairly obvious that Gambit’s “mysterious” past is just a cover for the fact that the writers have no idea where he came from or what to do with him. Readers at the time were apparently eating him up, though, so I guess it’s hard to blame them for trying to capitalize on that.

In short, don’t be like me – don’t read this book, for any reason. I can’t even think of a single nice thing to say about it, honestly. I just hope that Marvel never releases a second volume, if only because of the remote chance that my curiosity may get the better of me again.

Rating: 1 out of 5

Review: X-Men: Mutant Genesis

Writers: Chris Claremont, Jim Lee, John Byrne, and Scott Lobdell
Artist: Jim Lee
Collects: X-Men #1-7 (1991-92)
Published: Marvel, 2006; $19.99

No matter what you think of comics in the 1990s, it’s impossible to deny the influence of Chris Claremont and Jim Lee’s X-Men. The pair had been working together on the Uncanny X-Men series for several years already by 1991, but the launch of a second ongoing X-Men series was, in itself, something altogether revolutionary – as hard as that is to imagine today, with there being certainly no fewer than a dozen X-titles published each month. X-Men #1, with its five different covers (ooh, collectible!) and its darker take on everyone’s favorite team of mutant heroes, was in many ways the springboard for the franchise’s proliferation in the years that followed.

But as much as it was a time for new beginnings, the series also ushered in at least one significant ending. The ‘90s are often seen as a time in which comic book artists rallied to exert more control over the stories they were illustrating – and when they began to feel their efforts being proscribed by writers and editors, the most popular artists abandoned DC and Marvel to found their own companies. X-Men is a case in which the opposite happened, at least at first. That is, with artist Jim Lee increasingly doing whatever he wanted without consulting anyone else first, it was the writer, Chris Claremont, who left the franchise that he had been writing for the previous seventeen years.

It’s a shame, really, because the first three issues collected in X-Men: Mutant Genesis – the only ones written by Claremont – are by far the best in the book. These issues comprise a storyline in which Magneto declares Asteroid M a sovereign state and a haven for Earth’s mutants, sparking an international incident that brings with it the threat of global nuclear warfare. While it’s a long way from Claremont's best X-Men work, it still provides one of comics’ single most fascinating glimpses into the mind of Magneto. Although he’s an antagonist to the X-Men in the conventional sense, with Claremont writing him it’s difficult to view the character simply as a “villain.” In Mutant Genesis, Magneto is a deeply disturbed man who sees the course he has taken as the only way of bringing about peace between humans and mutantkind. It’s really a question of means rather than ends, since his goals are ultimately much the same as Professor Xavier’s.

But the story isn’t perfect. There’s a ridiculous subplot in which it’s revealed that Moira MacTaggert tampered with Magneto’s DNA to try to make him a “good guy,” which leads Magneto to question every decision he’s made in the years since he was in her care. (Of course, if he thought for even a second about his own actions, which include the sinking of a nuclear submarine along with its entire crew, he would realize that neither Moira nor anyone else has been even marginally successful at curbing his actions or mental state over the years.) In the end, Moira’s DNA-tampering / brainwashing process turns out to be little more than a plot device for turning some of the X-Men temporarily to Magneto’s side, leading to a predictable fight with the other half of the team.

Speaking of which, it’s probably worth mentioning who exactly the X-Men are at this point in their history. The first issue opens with the division of the team into two groups, the Blue Team and the Gold Team. Although both are involved in the first story, issues four through seven mainly feature the Blue Team: Beast, Cyclops, Gambit, Jubilee, Psylocke, Rogue, and Wolverine. (Shockingly enough, Wolverine was only an active member of one group of X-Men at this point!) If you ever watched the animated X-Men television show that ran throughout the ‘90s, then you essentially know these characters.

Forge and Banshee (two personal favorites of mine) also appear in supporting roles, although Banshee’s part is minimal after the third issue, in which Gambit breaks his jaw. It’s not too long before Gambit’s presence starts to get really annoying, actually; he’s a stupid character, pure and simple, and what I’ve found over the years is that most people who think otherwise are working from fond memories of the animated show. In the comics, the character is an unlikeable jerk, and I can’t say I would mind if I never saw him in the pages of a comic book again.

Fortunately, Gambit’s role is pretty minimal in the second half of Mutant Genesis, a Wolverine-centric story that pits the team against Omega Red – a multi-tentacled Soviet super-soldier who’s been in suspended animation ever since he fought with Wolverine thirty years earlier. These issues are plotted entirely by Jim Lee, with John Byrne and Scott Lobdell simply writing the scripts. The story and writing suffer as a result, although the comic never descends into anything near the depths of idiocy the entire X-Men franchise would be reduced to in just under four years’ time. I’m actually tempted to say that this is the franchise at its ‘90s peak, which is entirely true, but I’m afraid of that coming off as too much of a compliment; instead, let’s just say that things only went downhill from here.

In fact, you can already see things turning sour in the Omega Red story. In addition to the plot, which is fairly by-the-numbers (although it does introduce Maverick, a character I’ve always been strangely captivated by), the art too shows signs of slipping. Perhaps it’s just that Lee was more rushed for these issues, but his work seems less like his own and more like he’s trying to channel the influence of other popular artists from the time. As a result, you can expect about ten times as many popping neck veins and constipated-looking facial expressions.

The back of Mutant Genesis includes a cover gallery and some sketch pages by Lee, as well as some truly awful art by Jeff Matsuda that was commissioned to balance broken spreads in earlier printings of the trade. I can’t even imagine how jarring it would have been to see these pages in the middle of the story; Matsuda would go on to design characters for such animated shows as The Batman and Jackie Chan Adventures, which should give you a pretty good indication of how poorly his art style meshes with Lee’s.

A new hardcover edition of Mutant Genesis came out just this week, and its page count is slightly higher than that of the trade paperback. Since the issues collected are the same, though, I can’t imagine the differences amount to anything substantial – probably just a few pages of original pencil art and a couple of additional covers. Either way, you’re essentially getting the same product. And it’s a product worth looking into, if you’re interested in seeing the passing of the torch (or, to be more accurate, the dying of the flame) in regards to the X-Men franchise, or even if you just want a better idea of the slippery slope the comic book industry in general was treading in the early 1990s. But if you’re coming at it simply with the expectation of being entertained, rather than learning something about a period that was (like it or not) crucial in comic book history, I recommend approaching with caution.

Rating: 3 out of 5