I Read This--IRON MAN 2020

 Is there any greater friend for lovers of rare backlist comic issues than a tie-in movie? When the first movie comes out you get all the universally agreed upon "great" stuff collected because it usually ties in directly with the movie. If you're lucky and you get a second movie, some much less likely stuff comes out, especially if it relates to an ancillary character.

 By the third movie, all the good stuff has been put in print, and all the vaguely relevant stuff has been published, so if you're a superhero without a very deep "bench" of classic stories to draw from . . .the pickings get a bit slim.

 It is under those circumstances, that I find myself reviewing Iron Man 2020, the damnedest crazy-quit collection of stories put under one trade paperback cover in some time.

 Iron Man 2020 (or Arno Stark if you're nasty) is an odd character. Conceived initially in the early 80's as "What if Iron Man were a huge bastard and had a nasty mustache IN THE FUTURE" he's survived as a very minor footnote in Iron Man history largely because he looks really fucking cool, and existed as a sort of cautionary fable for how Iron Man the hero of now could be corrupted later on when it's passed to the younger generation and the world's all gone a bit Blade Runner.

 The problem is, is that Iron Man 2020 is pretty much only a cool costume with nothing in it. Given that Iron Man's default characterisation is "raging asshole," the notion that he'll eventually mutate into a bastard seven years from now really isn't that big a deal, and so we're left with a cool suit of armour (that no one save the person who designed it seems overly fussed about getting on-model) and a future Stark whose mustache is 50 percent John Waters, and 50 Percent Salvador Dali, with a little Neil Peart from 1970s Rush in there somewhere.

 It's an amazing 'tache, people.

 There's no point in talking much about Iron Man 2020's character--he doesn't really have one apart from "Tony Stark, but more of a dick, and also he's a bigot against robots" and he whipsaws from conception to conception and motivation to motivation through the stories in this volume, and seeing as how I've blathered on so much we're half a page down, let's just dive right n.

 The book begins with Amazing Spider-Man Annual #20, and if you're all like "whaaat," my response is "exactly." Iron Man 2020 (referred to as 2020 from here on in) returns from the future to find a kid who will blow up everything 30 years hence. Spider-Man shows up and misunderstands, thinking that present-day Iron Man has gone rogue (something 2020 never bothers to correct him about by talking to him and also by cold-bloodily vaporizing the Blizzard. Don't worry, they got another. Several, actually.) 2020 fails spectacularly in this because the whole thing pivots on an ontological paradox (2020 causes the problem he solves by getting the kid injured on account of being a jackass) Oh, and also, 2020 built a doomsday bomb out of used pinball machine parts and y'know, I'm really not sure why Spider-Man was even in this story.

 Mark Beachum draws this issue, and as you'd expect, it's full of ass shots. The man knows what he likes and works in in liberally. You may be more surprised to know that most of the ass shots are of Spider-Man, which is frankly more of a twist than the story he's illustrating.

 Also: Spidey could apparently crack walnuts between his mighty glutes.

 We go from there to 2020's first appearance (no, seriously, that's how the book is laid out) 1984's Machine Man #1-4. Man, what an odd book this is. Machine Man gets rebuilt in the far-flung future of seven years from now, when apparently living in THE FUTURE has made everyone look ri-goddamned-diculous. Sunset Bain, frequent also-ran villainess hires 2020 to fight Machine man and help break up this hacker group that found and rebuilt Machine Man.

 It's all a bit thin, story-wise. On the plus side, it looks friggin' great, with the unlikely duo of Herb Trimpe and Barry Windsor-Smith doing something quite far outside their comfort zones. However ropey the whole thing is, at four issues it's sufficiently briskly paced that one has little time to dwell on how little impression it makes before it's over and done with. And yes, BWS is the only one who seems to be able to draw 2020's armour consistently correct.

 Slight as it is, though, this is the high point of the collection. Everything after . . .well, it gets weird.

 Our next stop is Death's Head #10,  featuring the first of quite a few Simon Furman written stories in this book, with art by Bryan Hitch, still in his "Alan Davis understudy" phase. It's a typical story of Death's Head fighting 2020 for a bit and then they team up, but Furman plays it as completely ridiculous, and that really makes this story the most enjoyable in the book, believe it or not.

 The next book is an odd duck. The not quite one-shot/not quite graphic novel Iron Man 2020, written by Walt Simonson and drawn by Bob Wiacek and William Rosado was kinda dropped into stories in the early 90's with no fanfare to speak of and . . .yeah, I don't get it at all. It attempts to try to create a kind of redemptive arc for 2020, who, it is revealed over the course of a hostage rescue that turns into a typical early 90's race to stop the most dangerous computer virus in all creation, is being manipulated by a still-alive Tony Stark into being slightly less of a shithead.

 It's . . .well, kind of mediocre, really. But not due to the fault of the the creators--it's written clearly enough and drawn well enough, the problem is . . .well, everyone's the same kind of asshole in the story and it's not really possible to find anyone to invest any emotion in, never mind root for. It's a problem comics struggle with today, as so much seems to be bastards fighting assholes, that really, who gives a shit?

 Anyways, we again whipsaw through publication dates with a five-part story from Astonishing Tales (which I believe premiered digitally first before being collected as a book ) "The Endless Stolen Sky": which features 2020 (resplendent in a newer version of his armour which has some good bits to it, but seems to be one of those designs that looks good from one angle only) trying to launch another lucrative business venture (apparently helicarrier tech is gonna be huge in the next decade) and someone else is after him for revenge and at the end of it 2020 decides he's gonna put his REAL PLAN into operation . . .yeah. If it feels a bit familiar, that's because THIS SEEMS TO BE THE ONLY STORY ANYONE CAN TELL WITH HIM and after three or four variations on this theme, it starts to feel a bit punishing.

 Again--it's OK. It occasionally has some cool wrinkles (Jessica Drew being head of SHIELD, 2020's army of Extremis-enhanced babies in jars) the art's good and the whole thing moves at a pretty fast clip, but after you've read this particular tale THREE TIMES . . .one might be too numb to appreciate it all properly.

 Thankfully, the button at the end of this collection is a pretty good one that brings us full-circle and is substantially different than what we've just seen. What If #53 asks the question "What If Iron Man 2020 was stranded in the past?" after the events of the Amazing Spider-Man annual. It's a pretty decent story that tied in with events in Iron Man's book circa issue #290--2020 gets roped in with Morgan Stark (Tony's no-good cousin who occasionally pops up when people remember Tony Stark has a no-good cousin) and they make a power play for Stark's company and kill War Machine, because no What If issue is a proper What If issue without a body count of some sort. It's a thin story and kinda rushes through itself, but it has a decent twist and isn't that bad really.

 It's written by Simon Furman and drawn by Manny Galan, and yes, I'm pretty stunned this isn't a Transformers issue myself, actually.

 In all, I don't regret buying the book--if anyone's liable to buy 400 pages of Iron Man continuity backwaters it's probably me--but I can't pretend it's for anyone other than the most die-hard completist. Looking over these stories it's plain to see that 2020 was really never meant to be anything more than a one-shot character done as a lark, but was brought back based on having a cool visual hook. The trouble is, I don't think they ever managed to give him much beyond that,

I Read This: THE NEW TEEN TITANS OMNIBUS Vol. 3

 We like trilogies, don't we? It seems like a movie isn't considered a success unless it can immediately have a trilogy built around it (whether there's three movies in it or not). Of course, with our love for trilogies comes a certain knowledge that the third part is always a bit crap--I don't know whether it's the fact that once you get all the answers to something they're not as exciting as having all the questions being asked in the first place. Maybe it's just by the third part, things are feeling a little bit laboured or too familiar, or maybe things just feel a bit navel-gazey by this time. Many times we've seen a third installment that seems like it should be strong--all the things that you like in the first two are there--but for some reason, all you can see is the decline and rot setting in.

 I bring this up, because The New Teen Titans Omnibus Vol. 3 is a great example of a third installment that shows both decline and rot. If the first Ominbus showed the book in its first spurt of creative ferment and the second Omnibus showed the book at its creative peak, the third Omnibus shows us a book settling into diminishing returns and decline, a book perfectly happy to cannbalise its own history over and over and ride the horse the long way 'round to the glue factory.

 There are creative reasons for why this is in evidence, and business, reasons, and I've mentioned both before, and as they're actually happening at this point in the title's history, I'll be able to illustrate it as we go.

 We start this Omnibus by going back a bit, and picking up an issue that was excised from its place in the second Omnibus. "Who Is Donna Troy?" is considered one of the best Titans stories (even if it was all soon invalidated) and is quite a striking story in that there's not a single fistfight in the whole thing. It's just as detective story--Robin's trying to untangle Donna Troy's origins (no mean feat, considering even then she was a mistake that ended up being a character. Despite the somewhat overly sentimental tone and the near-toxic levels of Terry Long, it's a very affecting story, and justified, in a sense, that these were characters first and superheroes second, and when that's handled properly, that's just fine.

 The last part of that statement is rather important.

 Anyways, that detour set aside, we return to the book's "present." Tales of the Teen Titans #45-47 features the Titans going up against the H.I.V.E. once and for all (in revenge for the whole Terra thing) Aqualad and Aquagirl guest star, because they were victims of the H.I.V.E.'s vaguely batshit plan to kill everyone in Atlantis for . . .well, we're not sure what reason.Meanwhile, Wally West shows up to fret over things because we haven't quite figured out what to do with him, Changeling's getting all grim and gritty because Terra showed him up, and Raven's turning evil again because  . . .well, more on that in a bit.

 Art this time is by George Perez and Mike DeCarlo (though it's obvious that Perez is only doing breakdowns on this, as a lot of DeCarlo's "sheen" that he gives pencils he works with is in evidence more than Perez's level of detail.) Given what Perez is working on in this time-frame, that he even has this much presence on Tales at this point is pretty impressive.

 Issue #48 is a done-in-one featuring the Titans fighting the RECOMbatants (who are totally not the DNAgents, except they totes are) It's . . .all right, but the big feature this issue is the guest artist--Steve Rude drawing the Titans is something to see, for sure. Issue #49 features the return of Dr. Light and guest pencils by Carmine Infantino, who, thanks to Decarlo's inking, looks a lot less sketchy and shakey compared to how his stuff on Flash looked at the time.

 Tales #50 is a milestone, in more ways than one. For all intents and purposes, this is the end of Tales of the Teen Titans' new material, as there's now enough of a lead time for the "hardcover/softcover" thing to start (more on that in a bit) It's the wedding of Donna Troy and Terry Long and while it's the least romantic wedding I can imagine, George Perez goes all-out on the art side of things and book fully commits itself to its soap-opera side for this long double-size issue. While it definitely feels like a moment long in coming, the overall experience seems a little empty, as Wolfman has never written a convincing reason for why Troy and Long are together (short of having characters lecture at the reader a whole bunch of informed attributes) and if you don't buy into that, the whole thing might seem more than a little self-indulgent.

 So, sic transit The New Teen Titans. After 50 issues, New Teen Titans leaves the newsstand more or less, and the "hardcover/softcover" format is upon us as last. For those who missed the explanation in previous reviews, DC had this idea in the early 80's--take their most popular books at the time (Titans, Legion of Superheroes, The Outsiders) and relaunch them as direct sales only titles, with fancier paper, offset printing, better colour and (most importantly) a higher price. The newsstand issues would then, a year later, reprint the deluxe issues with shitty Flexographic printing that would make any artistic gains utterly muddled and gently punish those plebeians who didn't have comic stories for . . .not having comic stores, which if you remember the early 80's, was most of the country.

 It had one good point, and that point is evident in the next arc we're looking at--it gave artists a bigger canvas to work on and get more elaborate. Whatever the issue with the story, New Teen Titans Vol. 2 #1-5 looks great, with Perez experimenting with un-inked pencils, spot colouring and breaking out of the standard panel borders in expansive and adventurous ways . . .it looks fantastic. So if you had great artists doing great work, the Deluxe format comics were beautiful things (and even though Perez will soon be gone, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Eduardo Barreto are pretty good, as consolation prizes go)

 If you didn't, well, it made shit work look even more awful. Sure, the Flexographic printing made everything even uglier, but set the bar any lower and we'll be in the Earth's mantle.

 Story-wise, it accelerated a process that was going on over in Uncanny X-Men at the time as well--namely, a writer who had stayed on too long was running thin on new directions to take things in and either repeated himself, worked in as many of his own private obsessions as he felt he could get away with, or, in the case of Marv Wolfman, both.

 And this brings us to the story half of  New Teen Titans Vol. 2 #1-5: Oh Dear, Raven's Gone Bad. Again. There's a foreword from Wolfman that prefaces this Omnibus (reprinted from a previous collection) that talks about Raven being a compelling character and all of that, and while I don't dispute she has some uses in the team dynamic . . .she's really NOT that great a character, at least at this point, because Wolfman only seems to have one story he runs featuring her: She gets possessed by Trigon and turns evil. It happened in the original series, it happens here, and it'll happen 100 issues hence in New Titans #100. She's forever turning evil or being possessed or otherwise acting with no agency of her own. The rest of the time she skulks around being remote and trying to discover "what it means to be human" or some Star Trek bullshit like that.

 Raven's inherently passive role is illustrated by the structure of the story: Raven finally loses her shit and turns evil, summoning Trigon and talking like Dark Phoenix for a couple issues. Trigon shows up and bellows that he will enslave the world and etc. etc.  . . .and then takes a nap for two issues (no, really!) while the Titans fight manifestations of their inner evil and self-doubt (not the only time we got to that well . . .not even in this book!) and then the evil Titans show up and kill Raven (and obviously that's gonna stick, right?) then Lilith and Raven's mom put Raven's promise rings back on and she turns into Raven the White and fixes everything and Trigon is killed absolutely for realsies this time.

 I should mention, by the way, that in the first five issues of this book, the Titans utterly fail to notice Raven's been going nutty for at least a year of continuity, immediately get sidelined by her initial attacks, turn evil and murder Raven, and then can't even kill Trigon and win the day in their own book.

 Let me put that in bold type: THE TITANS ARE UTTERLY INEFFECTUAL IN THEIR OWN BOOK.

 This would, it seems to me, be a red flag of some sort, and that portraying your team of superheroes as screw-ups who fail to pull together at the critical moment and mope about it the rest of the time is not the sort of thing that long-running books are made of. Mind you, the Titans had made mistakes before and suffered reversals born of their own oversights and arrogance, but had previous to this, always pulled together at the critical time and been heroic.

 Not anymore, not in this book, anyways. There starts to emerge a persistent thread of failure and obsession with failure that really starts to strangle the book. Most of the rest of the stories in this book concern Nightwing constantly grappling with his relationship with Batman and his attempts to become his own man (even though he'd kinda already done that, he has to do it eight or nine more times for it to stick, I guess?) It becomes a real problem and one that sets the book on a course of navel-gazing and spinning its wheels that becomes so pervasive that the whole books becomes this oppressive culture of failure (really, the same thing happened with Claremont's X-Men, it's just happening faster here) that got so bad, for the last 25 issues leading up to #100, they tried damn near everything to scour the Earth and get back to their roots.

 But we can't deal with that now. After a "catch our breath" issue in the wake of the Trigon attack, we skip ahead (four whole years and a title change to New Titans) to Issue #50, which is Ground Zero for why Donna Troy was (and possibly still is) such a continuity nightmare for "Who is Wonder Girl?" a four-part epic that is not really all that epic and replaces a rather elegant solution to a continuity problem with enough nightmarishly intricate gobbledegook that it could almost be, say, Cable's origin.

 It's also about the time Danny Chase showed up. I talked about Danny Chase back when I wrote up Games. The short version for those of you who missed it--bad as Terry Long was, he's nowhere near the utter shit that Danny Chase was--a pet character that was portrayed as being relentlessly unlikeable and obnoxious and was pushed down everyone's throats. I would say Danny Chase has X-Pac Heat, but it's more accurate to say that he IS X-Pac Heat, incarnate: Just seeing him makes you wish he would go away forever.

 Anyways, to the extent that any of this makes any damn sense at all, let's see if I can make this at all coherent: Donny Troy is a child of the Titans of Myth (who are good guys now, I guess?) who decamped to outer space and raised aliens to be New Gods (but not those New Gods) only one of the godlings has gone crazy so now Donny Troy (and to a lesser extent, the rest of the Titans) must go and save them, except they leave Danny Chase behind, ostensibly to protect him, but more, I think because they can't stand him either.

 So they faff off to outer space and fight aliens and it goes about as well as you'd expect, in that the Titans get the crap kicked out of them pretty consistently and things get worse because it's just that sort of book, innit? Eventually Donna and the rest of the godlings kill the mad godling (it is nice that the main character of the story gets to have some of her own agency, I will say that, even if you don't really give a crap who the rest of the godlings are because they pop up out of nowhere and never show up again) and everything's OK and Donna has a brand new origin that people will immediately begin to ignore and snarl up even moreso.

 This is a lead-in to the next issue, where Donna Troy debuts her Troia look and . . .well, not unlike her new origin (now with 100% more space aliens and confusion) people begin trying to tweak the costume almost immediately, possibly because the damn thing looks very hard to draw correctly. Meanwhile, in Subplot Theatre, Danny Chase tells Nightwing that Jason Todd's been killed with all the taste and conscientiousness you would expect from young master Chase. Nightwing almost beats the crap out of him and throws him out of the Titans (though he still sticks around because Marv Wolfman will MAKE YOU LIKE HIM if it's the last thing he does.) Nightwing goes to commiserate with Batman about Jason dying and Batman punches him in the face because Batman just rolls like that.

 The book gets slightly flabby and shapeless after that, as issue #56 tells the thrilling tale of Gnarrk post-Crisis, and if you're first response was "wait, who?" the answers are "exactly," and "congratulations, you're not crazy?" I would spend more time on this and Lilith's weird mental sex-thing with him, but it's 2013 and neither you nor I should be spending the brief, precious time we have on this planet thinking about stupid fucking Gnarrk.

 Issue #57 features the return of the Wildebeest, perhaps the most frightening of his breed since Gary Gnu. Wildebeest is interesting because initially they did a good job of working around the whole "a cool costume with no one in it" idea because the Wildebeest was always a different guy each time. This time, the Wildebeest is Cyborg, who's been sidelined since they went to outer-space and is being mind-controlled (again, by some weird sex thing! Man, does Claremont know they're biting on all his shit?)

 Also, Jericho's mighty blonde Afro is now an afro-mullet thing. Also he's polyamouous. Wolfman really wanted to sell that as an example of Titan's progressive sexual politics, because dammit, if anyone's going to lead the vanguard of open sexual lifestyles, or, indeed, progressiveness of any kind, well it DAMN WELL BETTER be corporate superhero comics, right? 

 Meanwhile, Danny Chase does stupid shit no one cares about.

 The stuff with the Wildebeest and Cyborg's crazy dreams of electric sex grind on until #59, where, after nearly killing the team and being mind controlled and now bed-ridden, Nightwing makes him leader of the Titans because Nightwing used to be a born leader who made careful decisions, but hes got to nip over to Batman for a few months for a crossover and just can't be hassled with this crap because hey, people actually read Batman.

 But hey, this is about the time Tom Grummet starts working on the book, and he's pretty good--not Perez like, but his fine sense of detail serves him in good stead on this book.

 The Batman crossover "A Lonely Place of Dying," lasted 6 parts and went through both Batman and New Titans. Only the two parts, both of them the New Titans portions, are reprinted here, to annoy you and generally make things needlessly baroque and complicated. It's all rather pointless, as none of the Titans really have much to do with any of it and it's pretty much Nightwing going solo for a bit and fretting about where he is in relation to Batman, then teaming up with Batman and being there when Tim Drake hits the scene. It didn't really need to be six parts, as "Batman turns into a grumpy asshole without a Robin to function a stablising influence" is not really a thing which needs to be drawn out very long to make that point (that said, they've been doing great in making it seem longer and more interminable when they revisit it later) and . ..yeah. "Titans Hunt" could only have helped this book.

 Rather than provide any attempt at closure, we detour to Secret Origins Annual #3, which ostensibly features the post-Crisis origin of the Titans, but what it actually features is Nightwing having bad dreams about how bad he thinks he sucks. I kinda wish that was just me exaggerating for comic effect, but unfortunately, I'm not. 

 We end with neither a bang, nor a whimper, but a "wahaa--?" with New Titans #66 and 67, featuring Raven falling in love with a robot, more or less. If this seems strangely familiar to you, it's because they've done this story before, only it's usually Starfire who ends up dating someone who's evil/a a robot/doomed/all three. It is completely bewildering and serves no purpose--Raven still doesn't have much of a character and her only contact is Jericho, who can't talk, so the whole thing feels a bit empty, really.

 And with that, we're done. The Wolfman/Perez era of New Teen Titans is well and truly done, and this is the story of how it ended. Perhaps had Perez stuck around longer (no sooner was he working on the relaunched book than he was working on Crisis on Infinite Earths, then Wonder Woman) there would have been more of a balance, because as Wolfman, as with Claremont on the other big book had more leeway to follow his interests, the book become more insular and more broken and just plain duller. I can't imagine DC squeezing another Omnibus out of this run, as by this time, Perez is pretty much long gone and while Titans Hunt would be interesting to read again in a more or less complete form, it's not really part of this era and it's kind of a clusterfuck (three or four crossovers break out in the middle of it) and doesn't really succeed in its remit to revitsalise the book in a long-term sort of way.

 So the trilogy ends in the way a lot of trilogies (and long-running superhero comics that have seen better days) seem to end. Not with any sense of finality or closure, but merely a shrug and a slow slide into complacency.

Way Back When--X-CUTIONER'S SONG

Sometimes, just when you think you have nothing to say and you're plotting your exit strategy from writing about comics, a hardcover sale happens and there comes to be something you wanted to talk about after all.

This is one of those times.

"Now let my ensuing explosion rock both heaven and hell . . .both yesterday and tomorrow."

 Looked at more than 20 years later, X-Cutioner's Song is one of the more favourably remembered of the big X-Crossovers (Age of Apocalypse being the other) and is also, more or less, the first of a new generation of crossovers across the X-line.

 Not that there hadn't been X-crossovers before--there had been since 1987 at least, every summer. But those were usually spearheaded by one writer or one lead writer and not necessarily shaped by editorial. X-Cutioner's Song is like them, only very different, because X-Cutioner's Song has the fingerprints of editorial all over it. This is unapologetically a comic planned by committee to run as efficiently as is humanly possible.

 So far who cares,I hear you asking. Well X-Cutioner's Song is worth looking at because of it's place in history. Y'see, X-Cutioner's Song is the final recovery of a fumble Marvel had been suffering under since most of their star X-Men artists decamped to Image.

 For those of you who came in late: About a year before this time, there'd been this big re-alignment of the X-Books, which coincided with Jim lee and Rob Liefeld et al being at their peak of popularity. They all got re-launched books with brand-spanking new variant covers that pumped up the sales numbers and while they were pretty much all shallow spectacle, they sold like golden hotcakes, and they could literally write their own ticket at Marvel.

 Then they found out they could write another, bigger, ticket at Image, and them Marvel was left holding the bag with four titles, three of which didn't have big artists to draw (no pun intended) anymore, and since they'd been writing the books (*ahem* sorta . . .) as well, the books were now pretty well cut adrift.

 Essentially, Marvel had been pantsed, especially as they'd just been thumping their chests about the big summer crossover that they had in the works called "Sins of the Father." No one knew what it was about, but given that they three biggest artists in comics were working on it, it was going to be huge.

 Until of course, they weren't and it wasn't. Scrambling desperately for something to fill that block of time, they moved like lighting and so, X-Cutioner's Song was born, and quickly.

 "Let their wills be forged in the stoking flames of Armageddon."

 It was decided they'd use this forced course-correction as a way to wind up some rogue subplots banging around from the big line-wide shakeup last year, specifically a throwaway bit Rob Liefeld did in New Mutants #100 wherein it was revealed that under his ridiculous helmet, armoured bad guy Stryfe looked exactly like unarmoured good guy Cable. I doubt very much Liefeld had an explanation for it--it was just a cool way to button a series and hype people up for X-Force, but Marvel never met a continuity backwater it wouldn't strip-mine, so there it is. Cable, for his part, also had a few loose plot threads to tie up--namely, it had been heavily suggested he was Cyclops' son sent forward into the future to battle Apocalypse, because Cyclops is an awful, awful human being and fails miserably at the sort of thing you and I succeed at casually.

 That was the plan. anyway.

 Taking the field to make this twelve-issue (four issues per month for three months) were Scott Lobdell (who'd managed to be the last person standing after 4-5 people flaked out before him) and Brandon Peterson on Uncanny X-Men, Peter David and Jae Lee on X-Factor, and, side by side with Greg Capullo on X-Force and Andy Kubert on X-Men, and writing prose so purple it could have been a damn Prince album, Fabian Nicieza.

 "I hold the shiny silver quarter. It catches the devil's light just so."

X-Cutioner's Song doesn't need to be 12 issues--it really doesn't. But it doesn't drag either, because there's usually a lot of frenetic action in every single issue so there's never really a moment when people are sitting around for a whole issue waiting for something to happen. This rather schizophrenic melange means that some things don't quite make a lot of sense, like the whole point of the story.

 The plot is this: Stryfe. who looks like Cable, shoots Professor X, which then frames Cable and X-Force for the crime. Meanwhile, Apocalypse's flunkies kidnap Cyclops and Marvel Girl, but it's not Apocalypse, it's Mister Sinister (one notes with some amusement that X-Cutioner's Song could easily have been retitled "Three Villains With Unclear Motivations Do Stuff That Makes Little To No Sense For Twelve Issues.") After fighting each other for awhile, X-Force teams up with X-Factor and the X-Men and they fight the Mutant Liberation Front (the job guys of the X-Men universe for the past 2 years) Stryfe stuff baby food down Cyclops' throat and gets all emo with him and Marvel Girl, then suddenly decides to go beat the tar out of Apocalypse in a way that's supposed to explain everything but doesn't, Apocalypse cures Professor X, then everyone goes to the moon to fight Stryfe, and it all boils down to Cable punching Stryfe through a hole in space-time because even Cable was sick of Stryfe being emo.

 The payoff for the whole thing was supposed to have been this: Stryfe was Cyclops' son, sent to the future and raised by Apocalypse, who subsequently went renegade and rebelled against Apocalypse and came back in time because of reasons. Cable was his clone who also fought against Apocalypse like Stryfe but for different reasons, and came back in time to stop Stryfe, because of reasons the writers never really seemed to be all that good about staying clear on.

 All would be revealed, they promised, and of course, they backpedaled on it. Cable couldn't be the clone. partly because having a franchise character be a clone would just be stupid and not the kind of thing Marvel would ever do, and mostly because Cable was getting his own book that fall.

 Plus, the idea of Stryfe torturing his own mother and father (more or less) for a few issues might have been too dark for the early 90's That, and the fact that whoever Cyclops' son was, one of them was going to be a clone created from someone who born from Cyclops and another clone and at some point it just becomes this ridiculous Russian doll situation, doesn't it?

 So yeah, by the end of all this, the actual payoff that was promised never comes--with things turned around, nothing Stryfe does makes any sense at all, and at best this only muddles Cable's origins to the point where he'd The Continuity Headache That Walks Like A Man, Cylcops looks like even more of an ineffectual asshole, and hey guys--there's Havok! So the whole ending, even with Stryfe's parting gift of Mutant AIDS (no, really--that's not a joke) the whole thing collapses five minutes after you close the book.

 And in this way would set the tone for all the 90's crossovers to come--promising beginning, competent middle, bait and switch ending.  Whether it be "Bloodties," "Age of Apocalypse," "Phalanx Covenant," "Onslaught," or "Operation: Zero Tolerance," one could be sure that the destination was never quite the one promised when you struck out on the trip.

 "Let the final moves be made. Let time determine the righteousness of my path."

 But I come not to bury X-Cutioner's Song, but to praise it. Despite it's muddled finish and air of general cacophany, it has tremendous energy and everyone does a great job with their parts. Brandon Peterson provides some slick page layouts full of crisp detail, Andy Kubert makes people look completely feral when fighting for their lives, Jae Lee does some interesting things with shadow and negative space in the X-Factor issues that give the rare quiet bits some moody introspection, and Greg Capullo's action scenes are so kinetic they flip the comic from portrait to landscape. It has the courage of it's "crazy action movie" convictions, and thus, I find it difficult to reject it our of hand.

 The real winner for me, and (in my copy of the HC) the crown jewel is the gimmicks. When shipped to stores, every issue of X-Cutioner's Song came with a card featuring some of the main characters of the crossover (and stumblebums like the MLF and the Dark Riders) with text on the back that supposedly came from Stryfe, written in character (and, had this been published ten years after it was published, could have been excerpts from his Livejournal) and they are glorious. You may have noticed I've been using bits from them to transition topis in this essay.

 I'm sure Fabian Nicieza (who I figure wrote all of these) meant that this supplementary material would help flesh out Stryfe's motivations a bit. It doesn't. It does, however, give him even more opportunities to be utterly drama-queeny:

 "The final move. White king against black king. Yet here, nothing but grey reigns supreme.Shades of grey, of uncertainty, confusion, anger, love and hate.

 Shades of me.

Shades of you.

Shades of them."

  Stryfe? BIG Linkin Park fan, I'm guessing. He was from the future, y'know.

 The cards even got their own comic. Stryfe's Strike File was published a little while after and for those of us who hadn't gotten enough goofy purple prose from the original cards got all that, plus a couple of teasers for plot developments to come, plus two characters (Holocaust and Threnody) who didn't debut for another two years and when they did, were completely different to how they were portrayed here.

 It's pretty zany, and like X-Cutioner's Song, is an ideal slice of early 90's kitsch--a brief little moment of Peak Comics before the dark times came along and everyone spent the next fifteen years acting like this kind of stuff didn't happen and we were all very embarrassed when forced to admit it.

 X-Cutioner's Song is an almost real-time account of the great post-Image course correction over at Marvel. rather than depend on "hot" artists to move books, they would instead, enter a state of permanent crossover, wherein if they weren't in the middle of a multi-part crossover, they were building to the next one post-haste. In short, sell the story, not the storytellers, and sell the story in multiple profitable bits and pieces to keep the money rolling in.

 Naturally, being wiser after the event and far more mature and considerate of our audience, they don't do that sort of purely mercenary nonsense anymore.

I Read This--EMPOWERED: HELL BENT OR HEAVEN SENT

 I've written about Empowered a lot here (so much so I've gone through and tagged all the posts for easy access for the next time I talk about Empowered) but haven't yet, to my knowledge (and the blog's search capabilities) said anything about the one-shots Adam Warren periodically runs in between releases of the larger book that usually riff on a piece of the universe he's built up around the titular bondage-prone heroine.

 Part of the reason I haven't is due to the fact that I've never thought to when I sit down to blog (and you would think, given how hard up I am for content, that it would be a "gimmie") and partly the other reason is that they're more entertaining in theory than in practice--technically accomplished (Warren chooses artists for these that match his style, but add some of their own to it as he tends not to draw the entirety of these one-shots).The first one-shot "The Wench With A Million Sighs" was ostensibly an analysis of Empowered by fan-favorite character Caged Demonwolf, who Warren had already overexposed and walloped into the ground in an earlier volume. The second, "Ten Question For The Maidman" featured his Batman riff in a featured role, and while in theory it should have been funnier than it was, it didn't quite get there.

 The most recent one-shot "Hell Bent or Heaven Sent" is the strongest of the one-shots so far, as it features an air-tight concept, some genuinely amusing conceits, and manages to make a pointed comment on the ever-present "male gaze" in superhero comics a literal story point, and if one were so disposed, one might also read guest artist Ryan Kinnard's (he of the quasi-infamous MAX Phoenix book that was blog-fodder a few years and that, all things considered, is best forgotten) presence as an added layer of commentary, if one so wanted to do that, though it might be carrying things too far.

 The plot of the story involves Empowered being introduced to the Superhomeys storage vault--one of the many places they teleport all their debris, junk, decommissioned weaponry and God only knows what else. The vault is overseen by legendary "douchemecha" (I love this book if only for coining that phrase) Mechanismo (who talks like Razor Ramon, which is just damn funny, no matter what), who got his powers from an alien female robot and can't understand the operating system that runs it all. This leads to him just randomly clicking on stuff just to accomplish something close to what he wants, which leads to the crisis this issue, because he exports his porn cache out and, since it's a nanotechnology plague, Empowered is alone against a very smutty version of a Grey Goo Bomb.

 There's a lot of good bits in here (apparently superpowered mechs spend all their time scanning bits of girls they like and merging them in Photoshop, which explains a whole lot about superheroes and Photoshop users, now that I think about it.) and allows Kinnard to do what he does best--draw sexy ladies attacking Our Heroine whilst shouting "SEXY TIME!"

 One must play to one's skill set.

 The whole thing is clever enough and manages (for the most part) to have it's smutty cake while commenting/eating it too, and it's clever without being too impressed with itself, which, in some points along the way with Empowered, Warren sis guilty of doing. Thankfully, things keep moving at a sufficiently brisk pace to where that's not an issue here.

 Which is good--however, the story doesn't "end" as much as "stops suddenly," It's odd, when you consider that the main books of Empowered are collections of short stories with common plot threads and seldom run for longer than the length of this book. I'm not sure what happened in this instance, but it's a shame the ending is stronger.

 But of the three one-shots, it's the best-realised so far, and the one that feels closest to Empowered's core preoccupations, and as such, it's well worth your time and four bucks in a way that say, Justice League, isn't.

I Read This--JUSTICE LEAGUE #13-14

 Y'all may not know this, and I have tried hard to suppress it in my soon-to-be four years of writing here at the Prattle, but I did the "angry guy on the Internet" shtick for quite awhile. Generally, I have tried to be more analytical, and when possible, far more positive than I was in those bygone days of nihilism.

 I like to think, most days, I succeed in this.

 Then I read comics like these two issues of Justice League, and I am compelled, to react thus:



 Oh yeah--I'm ripping this damn thing apart.

  Longtime readers (all three of you) will be familiar with my quibbles over Justice League, the anchor of the New52, a series which deliberately ignores every possible opportunity for characterization, tight plotting, action, or even a unity of time or coherent plotting and does whatever the monthly comic equivalent of laying there and rotting like a dead fish is.

 First, a brief history of the Justice League's run this far. The Justice League, largely comprised of assholes (except for Wonder Woman, who is written as a lobotomite), fussed and feuded and got in pissing contests about who was in charge, then in issue 4 or whatever, Darkseid showed up, farted:

 And then everyone stabbed him in the eye a bunch of times and Darksied sorta wandered off.The heroes decided to form a club based around their mutual interest in being insufferable ass-cocks and became the Justice League.

 Then nothing happens for five years book-time until David Graves shows up so Geoff Johns can indulge in his favourite of all his writing tics: Being A Hero Means Being Fucking Miserable All The Fucking Time. Like Chris Claremont's obsession with mind control and making sure every female character's arc is a word-for-word retelling of The Story Of O, this was OK the first maybe . . .six times he did it, and now it has become his go-to storytelling device. And it's good that he has this to fall back on, as he's willingly ignoring everything he ever knew about writing compelling characters or plotting things with any kind of coherence.

 He also managed to take 12-ish issues of Jim Lee art and completely strip the advantages of it's dynamism overcoming the shortcomings of the story because God knows all that action might get in the way of page after page of people looking sad all the fucking time.

 Anyways, David Graves shows up and makes all the heroes sad because they failed to save his family and he made a deal with the Ashuras and . . .man, I'm not really sure what was going on in that story and certainly, reading the book was no help there. As with all Justice League storylines (including this one) it kind of pisses itself away, bored with itself. At the end of it, Steve Trevor gets kicked to the curb by Wonder Woman so Wonder Woman can play kissy-face with Superman.

 That thread gets picked up in issue #13 and let me tell you: The "romance" between Superman and Wonder Woman makes Anakin and Padme's "romance" look like the kitchen scene in 9 1/2 Weeks, bled as it is of natural dialogue, genuine emotion, or even any kind of behaviour that reads as remotely human.  I was forced to ask, reading those scenes: had Geoff Johns ever talked to another human being before? Has he just lived in this isolated bubble and in his loneliness he invented "friends" like Sammy the Apple, and Bill the Paper Towel Roll and they all grew up together and he imagines people talk in the same way his friends talked because he never got to go outside and learn anything else, and it's . . .it's kind of appalling, but also kind of sad, too.

 But before we inflict a bunch of bleeding puncture wounds on the Superman/Wonder Woman romance, let's talk about the meat of this two-issue storyline (that feels like six, only you're missing three of them.) Because in THIS exciting story the Justice League gets into furry porn!

 Not pictured--mammalian characteristics. Also not pictured: dignity

 Yes, Wonder Woman is tussling with the Cheetah, and because JL is not a book that follows the "show don't tell" paradigm, we have to learn all the shit we should have known later. The Cheetah, Barbara Minerva is a woman who got an FA account was Wonder Woman's first friend in the outside world, unfortunately, while puttering around the Congo she found a knife that was cursed (as well as being made on an entirely different continent besides Africa) and became the Cheetah.

 Oh, and 13 issues in, Cyborg actually gets featured and strained attempts to characteristic him as something other than the black guy the tech guy ensues. Cyborg says he sometimes thinks he's a machine that thinks he's the man he used to be.

 Silly Cyborg--everyone on this team is a goddamned robot.

 No he isn't, Cyborg. Don't LIE

  Issue #13 ends with the thrilling cliffhanger that the Cheetah has bit Superman and turned him into Super-Cheetah-Man and I'll spoil it now--the problem is so hastily brushed aside next issue, you'll feel like an idiot for even caring about it in the first place. Not that you did--that would require knowing more about Superman as a character you invested in emotionally. To you, Geoff Johns says, "eat my ass."

 Before I can move on to the second issue and speed this suffering along, let's have a brief glimpse at the backup tale this issue. Previously in this space, Geoff Johns had been working diligently to make me care even less about Shazam than I had previously and from there, hate the entire world for creating such a bleak, nihilistic story featuring an utterly unlikeable little shit of a hero surrounded by a cast of jerkwads, and opposed by assholes. But more on that in a bit.

 This issue trails Justice League of America #1, in which, it is assumed, Steve Trevor, fresh off of being cockblocked by Wonder Woman decides to fuck off and make his OWN Justice League, with blackjack! and hookers! And this shitweasel:

 And the winner of 2012's award for Most Punchable Face goes to . . .

 Now, in a different book, one that perhaps dealt with such things as "excitement" or "interest," this back-up story might tease the actual team, and whet one's appetite for seeing the team in their own book. To those people, Geoff John's says, "fuck your wants."

 This is six pages of grumpy people taking meetings and sitting in bars and apparently DC has their own ersatz version of S.H.I.E.L.D. now, running things behind the scenes.

 How do I feel about this plot development?

Oh, right.

 Thank God, Issue #14. The end of my agony is in sight. Anyways, back to the story, it's not hard to find/ ninja's not just of the body/but of the mind Cheetah-Superman is kicking the ass of the Justice League on the first page, when the lost tribe that created the Cheetah curse shows up, lest a sustained action sequence break out or anything:

 You know she's in charge because she's wearing the ONE bedsheet the tribe has.

 Speaking of sartorial changes, the Cheetah is also wearing a loincloth now because her absence of bits was freaking everyone out.

  For reasons I don't know, whenever the loincloth is drawn for the rest of the issue, it's drawn at that angle. EVERY TIME. Even when Aquaman tries to drown her.

 Cyborg manages to incapacitate Superman while Not-Storm from the Whogivesashit Tribe of the Outer Congo magics off the Cheetah VD or whatever the hell Superman has and Wonder Woman punches the Cheetah very hard and Aquaman tries to drown her. Ho ho ho, I tell you what, this Justice League, they really ARE the world's greatest heroes.

 This is all a set-up for another of Geoff Johns pet tropes: the idea that Not Everyone Be Saved, Because People Are Basically Shits. You see, apparently, despite being a crippling condition that turns one into a sexy Thundercat, the Cheetah was once the tribe's goddess of the hunt, but then Barbara Minerva came along, and was such a greedy bitch that she's now turned the Cheetah into a bloodythirsty monster.

 Because hunting and killing is totally OK otherwise, until you get too far into it and then you fuck it up for everyone. Lordy, Geoff Johns loves his irredeemable shitheels.

 There's also a suggestion that getting captured was part of the Cheetah's plan to get captured, which . . .yeah, like it's that hard to put one over on the Justice League. But anyways, Wonder Woman gets all mopey because Barbara wasn't really her friend and maybe she's right and everyone's not worth shit, and Superman comes along says "there there, none of that" and takes her to Middle America Stereotype Cafe so they can have breakfast and he can show her that this wonderful (and 95% white) world is worth protecting and it's full of good people, kind people, white people, real down-to Earth people.

 "It's just that simple," Superman says, in the very way that people don't and never have or will do, which leads into this stirring moment:

 Everything's "just that simple" when you're a simpleton!

 Anyways, they do a lot of (mercifully dialogue-free) smoochy-smoochy in the amber waves of grain and Batman is watching and scowling on a computer, because he can't fap to that.

 Later, Wonder Woman writes a letter to Princess Celestia, in which she explains that she didn't learn a damn thing about friendship or anything like that, but does add that she didn't get the point of the Cheetah wearing a loincloth if the damn thing's flapping around in the breeze all the time. Thus is Wonder Woman barred by judicial restraining order from entering Equestria. Best thing for all concerned, really.

 You may notice that I left artist Tony Daniel out of the line of fire in this scathing invective. It's for a very obvious reason: if Jim Lee couldn't make this shit work on the page, no one can, and Daniel does what he can with it, but it just kinda sits there, and isn't very exciting at all. In the olden Image days, artists could overcome weak scripts by being dynamic enough to at least make the book look cool enough that one didn't dwell overmuch on the fact that the plotting was mud-puddle shallow. Not given such opportunities here, he did the best he could.

 It's Johns who shoulders most of the blame for this shambolic mess. First of all, injecting a best friend we never heard of just so she could go bad and make Wonder Woman sad is a stupid hacky trick that I recognised was a stupid hacky trick when they did it in Knight Rider (or was that Street Hawk?) and he should fucking well know better. For another, reducing the role of heroes to treating their role as protectors of the earth the way one might cope with being handed a shit sandwich because it always sucks and people aren't worth putting yourself out for anyways boils the books struggle down to dickheads fighting jackoffs about bullshit, and nothing anything.

 But maybe that's the point. Maybe this is some sort of Dadaist detournment experiment, where we're just supposed to break though our preconceived notions and recognise it for the absurdity it is--that indeed, all human endeavour is. Maybe Justice League is a vehicle to expand our collective consciousness and accept that life is fleeting, truth meaningless, and humans ultimately impotent, ad we cling to the skein of a planet spinning out of control into the infinite darkness and only through embracing life's bleak meaninglessness can we truly live.

 I'm kidding--this comic can go fuck itself.

 Anyways, let me wrap this up briefly by addressing the brutally pointless yet interminable Shazam! back-up in this issue. I'm not one of those people who whinges on about how Captain Marvel works best when it hews to its classic paradigm . . .I don't really care, actually. They weren't publishing it when I read comics early on, so a vital connection was never forged. All I know, is by and large, in my lifetime, Captain Marvel/Shazam/Photon/Whatever has been in a lot of shitty comics.

 Shazan is mercifully fourteen pages of a shitty comic, featuring hateful characters doing mean shit to each other. Black Adam and Sivana show up looking for the Wizard Shazam, who's already given Hateful Shit #5, Billy Batson the power of Shazam, who is Shazaming it away on Shazam like a coat, which is also named Shazam, because I'm getting mighty god damned tired of typing the word "Shazam."

 Black Adam throws some guy out of a window because Geoff Johns would break into each and every one of your houses and ruin something you loved before your tear-stained eyes if he had but world enough and time. Black and Adam and Sivana recruit one of the Seven Deadly Sins, Sloth (Chunk is nowhere to be seen after their bitter break-up twelve years ago) Nothing much happens, and we are not lead to think anything interesting will happen any time soon. Join us in issue #15 when Sazam looks at things, Black Adam takes a shit in a Salvation Army kettle, and Sivana ponders the deeper meaning of Taco Tuesday. The new DC, ladies and gentleman: There's Nothing Interesting Us, Now.

 God, this comic is a big thick brick of depressing. It somehow manages to break through being mediocre, past being bad, into this lower strata where everything is stupid and pointless and Before Watchmen sounded like a good idea. No attempt is made to make anything interesting, or even bad in an entertaining sort of way. It's done with all the craft, care, and attention to detail of a DMV clerk looking down the barrel of a three-day weekend and who couldn't be less present in the moment if they were quantum-locked.

 I did not care for this book: I guess that is what I am saying.

I Read This--THUNDERBOLTS CLASSIC Vol. 3

 How do I know that Thunderbolts was one of the last times Marvel's created a brand? Because they've re-launched the book so many times in so many ways far from the initial remit that it's now just a title that has some catchet, but people probably don't remember why exactly.

 Which is what I guess these reprints are for (though why you'd want to remind people what they never knew the title was because they came in later is hard to fathom). When last we passed this way, I covered Volumes 1 and 2 of Thunderbolts, taking us up and over it's first year of publication, and past the Big Surprise Twist that anchored the first year of the book. Volume 3 takes us into year 2, and the book's other, major-but-not-quite-as-earth-shaking status quo change and keeps its various subplots ticking over.

 After the three-parter in Kosmos, the Thunderbolts return to Earth and try to make a go of going straight. Unfortunately, they're pretty crappy at it, as Zemo and S.H.I.E.L.D. immediately twig on to the fact that they're back and start hunting them down. (Well, S.H.I.E.L.D. more than Zemo at first) It's. . .well, it's fall-out from the first year on the book, and really exists more as a backdrop for the real story--the Thunderbolts are on the point of breaking up, as Jolt's trying to be the positive cheerleader, Moonstone is manipulating everyone so she can be in charge, Songbird's falling back into her pro-wrestling persona (though this does give us some awesome wrestling references) MACH-1 is trying to figure out what's wrong with Songbird and Atlas is mopey because he's feeling like he's a danger to himself and others.

 So they fight S.H.I.E.L.D. in issue #15, and in issue #16 fight the Great Lakes Avengers (and. . .honestly, while I appreciate that some people find the GLA funny, all I see is John Byrne's strained attempts at superhero parody and then, despair) who hitched their wagon to the Thunderbolts, only to find when they were outed, everyone assumed that they were criminals too (they aren't--they're just stupid) Even being fractious and not on the same page, the Thunderbolts beat the GLA, as you'd expect (then again, a dead Thalidomide baby on a string swung with sufficient force could defeat the Great Lakes Avengers) and then they go on to fight a Hulk robot sent by Zemo.

 The Hulk robot is just a sideshow, that somehow brings Graviton (note: not the Gravitron--that's a fair ride) and this leads to a mildly interesting three-way dance between the Great Lakes Avengers (who apparently can't leave me alone) livened up by a parallel plot wherein Zemo is attacked by . . .Citizen V. The mystery of who Citizen V is get strung out a little more than it needs to be (friend of the Prattle Chris Elam got a letter published in Thunderbolts that had basically figured it out a few issues before the proverbial penny dropped) There's a good bit where Moonstone gets rid of Graviton by pointing out that despite his godlike power, he really has no game plan for it, and that's why he fails. Amazingly it works, even if it is really short-term thinking. They also get the Great Lakes Avengers to finally leave the damn book, but no psychological jiu-jitsu was involved there.

 Issue #18 is the buildup to the major status-quo change I mentioned earlier, as the stress fractures on the Thunderbolts are brought to a head just as the Masters of Evil (from way back in issue #3) return to the book. After the contractually-mandated fight between the teams, the Masters' leader, Crimson Cowl, invites the Thunderbolts to join the Masters, and given the loose end the team finds themselves in, they're actually considering it.

 But to string that decision out a bit longer, we have a detour to honour a contractual agreement and roll out the winner of the Wizard magazine create-a-character contest: Charcoal: the Burning Man (not to be confused with Burning Man, obviously) Charcoal is an operative of the Imperial Forces (who eventually turn out to be a gestalt of a lot of barely-remembered Captain America villains like the Secret Empire and the Loyalist Forces of America, which is continuity-obsession bordering on the rabbinical) and the whole thing looks like it's going the Thunderbolts' way, except the Masters show up at the end and tell them they don't get to play hero while they're thinking it over.

 But they're not gonna have long to keep beating that drum, as in the very next issue, the Thunderbolts decide that they won't be dictated to, and take the fight to the Masters, which doesn't go well for the Thunderbolts until; Dreadknight ("Who? Exactly.") to rescue the Thunderbolts, only it turns out it's actually Hawkeye, thus beginning, more or less, the era of Hawkeye leading the Thunderbolts.

 This also means, as I mentioned in the Marvel Universe reviews a few years back, that Dreadknight has shown up as someone's cover identity way more than he has as a character.In the Marvel Universe, Dreadknight must be the equivalent of a french maid's outfit or a sexy nurse costume--it's the go-to choice.

 I'm of two minds about it, really. I can see the logic of it--Hawkeye was the first Marvel villain to go straight (right? Mr. Busiek, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.) and as such, is a natural exemplar of the paradigm the Thunderbolts are aiming towards, and Busiek works really hard to make sure that it's not as simple as Hawkeye showing up and hey presto, the Thunderbolts have legitimacy--if anything, getting involved with them compromises him. So it kinda works.

 But . . .and I say this as someone who read far too many West Coast Avengers books than is healthy for a human being to read--Hawkeye is not terribly interesting in the role of leader, at least for me. Of course, you can't keep him in the role of Avengers pain in the ass indefinitely either, but in general, when you make him a leader, it tends to blunt the "wildcard" edge of the character.

 Anyways, Hawkeye fills the Thunderbolts' head with notions of being pardoned (which is all bullshit) and says that the one known murderer--MACH-1--has to go to jail (also, that someone actually read Deadly Foes of Spider-Man, and that someone is writing Thunderbolts. How 'bout that?) Meanwhile, Hercules shows up to pay Atlas back for beating the hell of him about ten years and change ago, and Hawkeye has to put himself on the line to keep Hercules from murdering Atlas, which is a good story and does tie Hawkeye in with the book's tension more than just making him Happy Smiling Leader Guy.

 We take a break for a bit to catch up with the Zemo/Citzen V stuff in Captain America/Citizen V, which is a serviceable enough romp and a means to deliver some of Citzen V's backstory and how this one relates to the Golden Age hero of the same name. Oh, and Citizen V is actually a woman and has a whole team of people on call. These things will become important later, but . . .just sayin'.

 We go from there to the Wizard mail-in Thunderbolts #0, which features a brief fight with HYDRA in between a clip-art "the story so far" recap, which sets up the first of the big Avengers/Thunderbolts crossovers (of which I think there ended up being exactly two and we've covered both of them now. . .this one from both sides) in Avengers #12, when the Thunderbolts and Avengers fight, then team up, then they team up and fight the utterly confusing Dominus, The Continuity Backwater That Walks Like A Giant Robot. Hawkeye declares his intention to help the Thunderbolts go straight and that's the end of the book.

 Being a collection of an in-progress story, Volume 3 feels a bit jumbled--Hawkeye taking command is supposed to be a proper Big Moment, but it doesn't quite make it there in the end. Instead, it feels like there's a heavier story beat yet to drop (and there is, but that's around issue #24 with the next fight with the Masters) but it's not included in this lot, so the overall package feels a little . . .incomplete. Coupled with the fact that these are not the strongest issues (they're pretty much all transition and as such, a little thin) means this collection doesn't have the punch that the first two volumes had. However, if you can enjoy the welter of references and the long game Busiek is playing with the book, there's plenty you'll get out of it.

I Read This--MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY

 Per the suggestion of the estimable Colin Smith over at Too Busy Thinking About My Comics, I recently read this rather thick tome documenting the evolution of Marvel Comics from cash-in on a trend, to distaff cousin of a line of men's magazines, to a comic company of note, to corporate entity, to junk bond write-off, to bankruptcy, to its current status as Disney's latest--er, not anymore, I guess--IP farm.

 And the (and this is a conservative estimate) 2,000 or so people who got screwed on the way there. The overriding take-away from this book is that corporate comics are everything that everyone demonizes them as, and so much worse. Time and again, people on the lowest rung of the ladder get crapped on, and then, when those who are crapped on get in positions of power, they get ground up and abandoned by the machine they'd been feeding.

 Probably the main thread through all this is the story of Stan Lee, who runs through the book being an impetus for Marvel's initial growth, a flack for the company during a multitude of lawsuits by artists and writers trying to get some financial recompense (especially once everyone twigs that the real money is when the comics characters level-up into exploitable IPs) only to be hoisted up by his own petard when he's forced out from even his figurehead position and files suit for a slice of the pie himself.

 Mind you, reading about the constant exploitation of the creative class and the circumlocutions meant to keep them from feeding at the trough can get a little draining, and dismaying if you hold creative aspirations yourself, but author Sean Howe covers quite a big swath of Marvel's history and depicts the players and positions ably.

 Well, except for that bit near the end when everyone's trying to pull Marvel out of bankruptcy and force each other out--that gets a bit tangled up in the shadow play that is corporate wheeling and dealing. You won't get a huge run-down of Marvel's creative trumps (some lip-service is paid to the big ones)  and some of the older scandals may sound like old hat if you've been reading a lot of  fanzines, but there's some fresh bits I hadn't heard before, like the exact break-point when Grant Morrison finally had enough of marvel (and a startlingly accurate diagnosis of Bill Jemas by Tom Brevoort quite germane to that) and a few others bits of interest.

 I found this to be an eminently readable book, and one I'm probably gonna re-read here soonish. If nothing else, it makes the perfect antipode for Les Daniels' Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of The World's Greatest Comics on my bookshelf. Even if you have no interest in superhero comics, or corporate comics, or Marvel comics, it's still well worth a read, as it's a blueprint of the multitude of ways that creative types can easily get ground down if they're not careful. Highly recommended.

I Read This--THE GIRL WHO WOULD BE KING [Parts 2 and 3]

Our story so far:

Not so terribly long ago, I read, reviewed, and raved about writer/artist/raconteur and Kickstarter success story Kelly Thompson's first novel, The Girl Who Would Be King, the first part of which she was very happy to post for free in an effort to catch some interest for the forthcoming publication of the full book. In my case, it worked.

 For those of you who don't wanna read through the previous post on this, suffice it to say that Part 1 was a great start to the book--working as the young adult novel it is geared to be, but also featuring a very clever examination of superhero tropes and commentary thereupon. One could probably write a book of equal length to the novel just documenting all the references contained within.

 So, having finally read the complete book, what's the verdict? Does it live up to the promise of part 1 and deliver a satisfying story ending in an awesome climax? The answer is, succinctly enough: Yes. SO MUCH.

 The Girl Who Would Be King concerns the intertwining histories of Bonnie Braverman and Lola LeFever, two young women who seem to have histories that strangely mirror one another--both become orphans soon after we're introduced to them, both of them are well familiar with superhero comics, and both of whom soon learn they have powers which set them apart from everyone else.

 Where they differ is in what that power means to them. Bonnie is compelled to do good. Lola uses power as a means to her own impulsive ends, and the more she gets, the more she craves. Separated by 3,000 miles, they soon come to realise they are connected on a deeper level than either can know, and they are destined to battle one another.

 While that may seem like a rather thin premise on which to hang a story, Thompson is playing a deeper game with this story, and one of the things that makes it so intensely readable and engaging is that you can read this, knowing the tropes and the elements she's worked into it and think you know how it's going to go, and somehow you can be ahead of the story, but still behind at one and the same time. In lesser hands, this could have bogged down into a rather tedious game of spot the reference/symbol, but Thomspon takes real care in deploying them, and learning the purpose and seeing the connections of them is part of the engagement one gets in this book.

 Moreover, she manages to do this in the framework of a coming of age story which (and for this I was eternally grateful and most impressed) doesn't conform that Hero's Journey stuff so blatantly. Thompson has a lot to say about growing up, the responsibilities of adulthood, and the struggle to build a life and identity for yourself apart from your circumstances and your parents. Part of the reason this doesn't feel like so much rote coming of age stuff is because she's abandoned that framework--Bonnie and Lola have no framework (short of their respectful head-fulls of superhero comics) to understand their powers and their destiny at first, and just do their best to get their minds around it. This feels rather more realistic and natural than them just meeting a convenient wizard or whatever who just happens to be Superhero Tech Support And Oh Yes teaching You That Being A Hero Is Like, Growing Up, Man.

 While a grounding in superhero lore will help you, Thompson reaches back past superhero history, into the myths and legends that inspired the first superheroes and links it all together in this chain that binds the whole story (and the story about the story--I told you this book was pretty deep) together in a way that once you see the big picture and see where it's all heading, you're furiously turning pages trying to see how it all works out. Pace wise, it's like Terminator 2 in how it barrels relentlessly forward, constantly raising the stakes and building to an amazing critical mass. It's a book that can pause and savor a gentle moment (and Thomspon writes amazingly tender moments with the same skill she brings to the city-smashing superhero fights) and the pace never flags.

 What makes this book so good is that despite the deliberate pace of part 1 (which is really not that slow--every scene seems to be pushing towards something, it's just compared to the next two parts, which move like a pissed-off indy car with a cinderblock on the accelerator, it's a bit more deliberate) parts 2 and 3 strike a very interesting balance, juxtaposing beautiful romantic moments, genuine emotion, and very lighthearted funny moments with immediate dangers, shocking revelations, and the insistent feeling that this is all building to something huge.

 I know you're probably thinking that "Uhm, really, every time they try to do one of these 'realistic' takes on superheroes, it always seems like it shortchanges the superhero bit of it in the service of the realistic bit, almost as though it's so obsessed with being seen as 'grown up' it's embarrassed about the superhero elements." To which I say "Yeah, I know--that's why everyone wore trench coats back in the damn 1990s," and also, "This is not that kinda story. You want superhero action, boy do you ever get it. You are in the hands of someone who said 'realism sheamlism--Dammit, I wanna see people having a fistfight while running at super-speed.'"

 The battle that climaxes part 1 and the final battle actually, are two of my favourite and some of the most well-choreographed fights I've read (and I watch/read/absorb a lot of action stuff) What's more, the action has a certain tough-minded realism that never short-changes the effect of the violence--people get wrecked in this story, and often those who dish it out are equally hurt by it. It's never gory or excessive, but is done with real thought about the toll this takes. In a day and age where you can't leaf through an issue of Justice League without someone getting an arm off or having something or other jammed in their eye, thank God there's someone who realises that when you write violence with taste and conscience, it makes the violent moments that much more powerful and effective.

 I really would like to discuss where all the superhero tropes and elements that run through the book like circuit cables lead to, but some things shouldn't be spoiled. Suffice it to say, the denouement of the story features a major revelation, a meditation on the cyclical--no, make that circular--nature of superheroes, why you don't see many old superheroes, and a climactic fight (which echoes the famous fight from Miracleman, but took the right lessons from it rather than just paining everything red) and an ending which subtly and perfectly encapsulates the themes of the book without having to have someone make a speech.

 As you may no doubt have realised by this point, I really did like this book. It has such confidence, intelligence, thought and care put into every element that it feels very genuine and wins you over very quickly. It's very assured for a debut novel, and whatever level it connects with you on--as coming of age story, as superhero commentary, or as kick-ass superhero story--you will be surprised, thrilled, charmed, but certainly never disappointed.

I Read This--NEW WARRIORS CLASSIC, Vol. 3

 It's been awhile since I wrote something about the New Warriors, having covered the first and second volumes of Marvel's reprint collections awhile back. Thankfully, Vol. 3 has arrived, which is good, because in three volumes, we're just now getting past the first year of the book (You'll remember that Volume 2 was taken up in large part by the utterly empty "Kings of Pain" Annuals, which has as much to do with the New Warriors as a Spirograph set does with trigonometry) Volume 3 gets us into Year 2 of the book and plays around the edges with a few elements of the New Warriors story pool as the decks get cleared for the big storyline that will close the second year out.

 We begin with the three-part "Forever Yesterday" story, wherein a new version of old Nova villain the Sphinx rewrites reality, creating an alternate timeline four years before the other omnipotent Egyptian bad guy did it. It's an interesting little romp that uses Nova's backstory very well (I always thought it was strange the way the Sphinx caught the fancy of certain writers at Marvel after Nova's run finished and he became a Fantastic Four villain for some time after) has some cool re-designs by Mark Bagley, giving the Marvel heroes an Egyptian flair and the alternate universe stuff allows for suitably apocalyptic action without overstaying it's welcome or (like the Age of Apocalypse) becoming an undying reservoir of alternate character takes.

 Issue #14 is a done-in-one featuring Namorita getting the crap kicked out of her by Sea Urchin, a minor Namor villain (who also guest stars) Darkawk also guest stars, for reasons which seem barely justifiable, but make sense given the book's remit. While the issue struggles manfully to make all this stuff hang together, it doesn't really work, and Nicieza's Atlantean poetry is. . .uhm, let's just say he's done better elsewhere and move quickly on.

 #15, titled "The Sushi People," for some reason I hope to ask Fabian Nicieza about some day, starts another three-parter, this one featuring Psionex (the opposite numbers for the Warriors from issue #4) and features a rematch with Terrax, who, you will remember, was the bad guy from issue #1.Of course, being that Terrax is a herald of Galactus, this fight actually goes worse than the first issue fight and by the end of the three-parter, the Fantastic Four and Silver Surfer have been called in to deal with Terrax.

 As with "Kings of Pain, this doesn't really work so well, basically because it sidelines the Warriors in their own book. Had Nicieza just stuck with making it a re-match with Psionex, it might have been OK, and would have kept it more directly tied in with the main characters, but  it functions as a nice call-back to the book;s past while various subplots are moving along in the background which will ultimately culminate in issue #25 and the first major shake-up of the book.

 But that will come in Volume 4. Hopefully. Volume 3 culminates with two issues of the Avengers, featuring Rage being rather upset for a convenient marvel Universe allegory for the then-current L.A. riots. This being the Marvel Universe, of course, the riots are the work of the latest hate-Monger, and. . .well., while I laud Nicieza for trying to land this and trying to make Rage "work" as a character, it doesn't quite come off (possibly because Rage never really worked in Avengers anyway) but is included ere because the Warriors have a guest-starring role and very soon Rage will be folded into the Warriors, and this (though I'm not sure it was meant to at the time) lays the track for that.

 In all, it's a brisk read, and while all of it doesn't work as well as it might, it's no more objectionable than say, Chris Claremont's overly melodramatic team dynamics and heavy-handed social allegory that only made X-Men the most insanely popular superhero book on the stands. There are worse paradigms to try and imitate. For all the book's shortcomings, it has its own voice and a lot of energy, and that goes a long way towards spackling over the rough bits. It's well worth a read.

I Read This--AVENGERS: CELESTIAL QUEST

 There are two Steve Engleharts, obviously. One is the well-regarded comic writer who had a definitive run on Captain America and was one of the early architects of the Avengers, introducing concepts that would endure for decades (and, inadvertently, The Crossing) He is considered one of the greats of the early-to-mid 1970s Marvel writers.

 The other Steve Englehart has written comics so bewilderingly insane the mind fairly shrinks from contemplating it. Yes, whether it's putting an entire interstellar empire in the hands of a shitty comic relief character named Clumsy Foulup; Creating a superteam with a gay hero named "queer" who gets AIDS after being bitten by a racist South African vampire named the Hemogoblin, and, it must never be forgotten, created the man/myth/legend Snowflame; this Steve Englehart is considered a bit mad, but on the plus side, whatever he's writing is going to be memorable, in a "will cause post-traumatic stress syndrome" sort of way.

 All the way from ten years ago, Avengers: Celestial Quest is a story wherein Englehart returns to Marvel to continue writing about Mantis, considered his signature character. I'm going to let Wikipedia do the heavy lifting with regards to the character, because, for reasons which will become clear shortly, I kind of hate Mantis.

 Avengers: Celestial Quest is, nominally, an attempt by Englehart to tie up a whole bunch of rogue loose continuity ends he left when he left Marvel around 1988, and naturally, doing eight issues in 2002 when none of the original material had been kept in print for decades was the perfect time to tie up all the loose ends.

 It is, in a sense, precisely why this kind of backward-looking stuff can be a bad idea..

 So. Let me try to summarise this book as best I can without weeping and rocking back and forth on the floor: Mantis seeks the Avengers help because she got split into multiple copies and Thanos is going around killing these facets of her because he loves Death and she's the embodiment of life or some bullshit like this (Jim Starlin retconned all this as being a clone of Thanos, and for all people give him shit about using that decide as a way of Control & Z'ing plot developments he doesn't like, but stories like this are adequate justification for why having a way to run them out is a good idea) Mantis' rebellions son, Quoi, wanders around and has sex with a lizard-woman while his mom has sex with the Vision as a way of helping him get over breaking up with the Scarlet Witch, who fights Thor for god only knows what reason. The Avengers are then called to help Quoi defeat the Rot, which is a black spot in the universe created when Thanos and Death mated which happened when Thanos died the first time.

 Let me say that again: The universe is, essentially, under threat from Thanos' pecker tracks.

 (And with that, "Thanos pecker tracks" joins "best dinosaur comics" and "power girls tits" joins my ever-more unfortunate top search results list)

 This book barely makes a lick of sense, even to some fool like me who's steeped in this kind of thing. I think this is supposed to be some mediation on notions of love and family and anima and animus, love and loss, death and taxes, whiskey and rye, but what it actually is is a confusing mess featuring characters acting insanely out of character, plot developments pivoting on characters we just meet and are expected to care about and/or like, however, they're not likable and we're not really given a window into their motivation.

 And then, there's a subplot involving Haywire. Haywire is one of the Squadron Supreme, and had been knocking around the Marvel Universe with his storyline responsibilities more or less fulfilled. The main thing driving his plot in this book is hoping to bring his girlfriend, Inertia, back to life (who was killed in a rather perfunctory and baffling Crisis riff ten years and change before) and acts wildly out of character. He then ends up getting killed, and the Avengers are like, "Well, damn. We were on an adventure the whole time, and even though he was with us, HE wasn't!" Because what this book needed is the Avengers acting even more like selfish dickheads to button this journey of self-discovery.

 You were on an adventure? Man, fuck you guys--nothing in this book was an adventure. You're confusing it with "ordeal."

 I don't know that I hate this book exactly. My relationship with it is far more complicated than this. I think, reading this book and re-reading it for the purposes of this review has given me a kind of survivor guilt. I mean, after reading it, you've experienced this horrible, wrenching, tragedy which has shaken your faith in life being fair and people being generally happy. Depression sets in, and as the trauma becomes permanent, you actually stop being able to feel emotions (not in the lurid sociopath sort of way, but more in the "life has no meaning" way) and the only thing running through your mind is a desperate breathless question, repeated over and over: "why am I alive?"

 In short, I cannot recommend this comic, unless you really want to read eight issues of muddled overreach steeped in ridiculous characterisation, puzzling dramatic choices, overwrought melodrama, and unlikeable characters, culminating in an utterly bewildering resolution that, if it worked very hard and went through several rewrites, might well rise to the level of "making no sense at all." So for all you masochistic neurotics, your book has arrived at last.

I Read This--THE GREAT DARKNESS SAGA

 The odd thing about The Great Darkness Saga, long considered one of the most immortal Legion of Superheroes storylines, is how at odds with the style and flow of the book. It's a great story, it has a great epic sweep, insanely high stakes, and is pretty action-packed, and is tied in at an almost rabbinical level of Legion of Superheroes lore (of which there is a lot) but what comes out most plainly at me is how utterly odd it is, given that Legion of Superheroes is not a superhero book, really.

 Oh, it has superheroes in it, but it's pretty much a romance comic in superhero drag. I was quite stunned in re-reading it decades later that really all of the action bits are pretty well dashed off before the issue's halfway over and then it's straight up soap-opera stuff: job stresses, relationship troubles, marriages, romantic misunderstandings, and, as with all romance comics, bundles of panels featuring women with their hand to their faces, a single tear spilling from their eyes.

 I'm not saying this as though it's a bad thing--hell, the most popular books in the industry at this time had adopted the X-Men "keep the soap-opera going at all costs and make that the bits that people come back for month after month" storytelling model--but I can't think of a book that all but pushed the superhero stuff to the bare minimum of the equation like this one did.

 My enormous Great Darkness Saga HC covers Legion of Superheroes #284-296 and the first Annual, and it's a very interesting slice of the book. The actual Great Darkness Saga only runs about 4 issues, and has been released with just the 4 issues, but in doing so, you really take the story out of context, and that's kind of a shame, as it's an interesting snapshot of a book at the peak of its popularity only scant moments before DC, motivated by greed, ends up tanking the book and catering to a mere handful of anoraks exploring ever more obscure continuity backwaters, most infamously making Element Lad gay because only gay dudes have man-fros. (I. . .guess? There's some real hair-related gay panic in DC comics) and then having to walk it back and taking a concept that collapsed so utterly in upon itself and having to take this thing out and sell it again to someone new while having no idea how to do that.

 But at the time of this story, Legion is riding high, and from the bits and bobs of this story, apparently very busily trying to get out from under the very weird 70's days of the book (you know, the time that Cosmic Boy was wearing a bustier and shit) and making it a bit more of its time (inasmuch as a book written in the early 80's about the 30th century can really be of its time) and point itself in a new direction while still keeping the critical bits of the Legion lore in play.

 Which is why Great Darkness is such a weird story. It uses a lot of current-day DC Universe backstory (which Legion almost never did apart from you know, Superboy) which it can;t even be fussed to explain (there's a hilarious editor's note that says, essentially "You know what? We can't explain the New Gods stuff either") and . . .man, there's something about the notion that the book is not willing to explain all that much (and if they're not willing to tell you that much, you can for damn sure imagine you're on your own trying to figure out who the hell the Heroes of Lallor are supposed to be) which is a . . .well, it's an interesting choice, as the writer of the piece, Paul Levitz, is basically throwing a story that turns on every bit of Legion Lore and characters accrued to this point and the whole Fourth World stuff at you, not really pausing to explain any of it and yet . . .

 . . .and yet it kind of works on this base level in that you're presented with something built up as suitably apocalyptic and if you go in knowing none of it, it still plays as "epic," because it's treated as an epic thing, and that comes across on a base level, even if the rest is not really known. Crisis, actually works on that level for the uninitiated, in fact; the less you know about DC universe lore, the better it plays, but that's another write-up.

 It's interesting that the story works so well, with everything against it (not least because this kinda stuff doesn't really happen in soap operas, does it?) and given it's rather anomalous circumstances, it's no wonder it stands out so. Even if it didn't work, it would probably be an interesting failure (as the sequel story was, sadly enough) but that it does with so much against it, it's kind of even more intriguing.

I Read This--X-MEN: X-TINCTION AGENDA

 So can we safely say that the X-Tinction Agenda crossover was the flashpoint moment where the 90's became The Nineties and all the good and bad that entailed was unleashed upon an unsuspecting comics world? I suppose we can, as both in form and in content, X-Tinction (abbreviated in the name of preserving my typing fingers and my sanity) pretty much wraps up the 80's for the X-Books and signals a definite change in direction.

 I've talked before about The X-Books changing direction in the past, and how it can sometimes work very well (and save a book from its own worst tendencies) and how it can just screw up everything. X-Tinction . . .does neither of these. But before we get too deep into that, let's run the clock back a bit, something this X-Tinction Agenda hardcover I picked up during yet another liquidation of Marvel's trade/HC stock allows us to do.

 In 1988, during the bi-weekly summer run of Uncanny X-Men, Chris Claremont did a 4-part story in issues #235-238 that introduced the island nation of Genosha, which was, and still is, a pretty on-the-nose extrapolation of South Africa and it's then-current policy of apartheid. Genosha was an inhospitable island nation that had raised itself to the pinnacle of technological superiority by enslaving its mutant population, making them more or less mentally retarded, forbidding them to breed, isolating them, and manipulating them genetically to whatever the Genoshans required to keep their economy going (this isn't, I should add, actually what apartheid is, as that was minority oppression of the majority--Genosha, we are commonly told, has a small mutant population) The Genoshans keep their slave labour project a tightly-guarded secret and hunt down and retrieve any mutant who tries to escape, which, in a roundabout way, is how the X-Men come to the place.

 While all too often Claremont's stories can be a bit too on the nose and mawkish when it comes to trying to land the "mutants and metaphor for the Civil Rights struggle," revisiting these issues, I was really surprised by how good and strong they were for late-model Claremont. The issue of Genosha is handled with some nuance and complexity (the son of Genosha's head scientist, whose girlfriend has been enslaved, tries to rebel, and is told several times as his eyes are being opened to it, he is no less guilty for ignoring the truth of Genosha than the people who actively engaged in it) and very darkly puts the X-Men out of their depth, putting them in real jeopardy for what felt like the first time in a long time (after the Fall of the Mutants, wherein the X-Men were "dead" and gadding about the world as "legends," it was very hard to get them credible opposition, outside of the latest big crossover) and it's got some things to say and it doesn't shy away from the darker implications (hell, Rogue, after being depowered is nearly raped, which was. . .not quite as commonplace in comics as it is today and was handled with real conscience here, I thought) It also had, in a subplot left dangling too long (it is late-model Claremont we're talking about here) that the X-Men basically lay waste to the country and get all Authoirty on them, telling them if they don't get their shit together and behave, they'll be back.

 Naturally, we had to sit on that story for two years (give or take a few instances where the Genoshans showed up essentially to just shake their fist and say "ooh, I'll get you wascawwy X-Men!") because of the Siege Perilous, the Shadow King, and associated crap, but then it was 1990, long past time for another X-crossover, and time enough to tie up the whole Genoshan thing, hence: X-Tinction Agenda.

 I can't really say the X-Tinction Agenda is that great a crossover. Part of it might be that taken as a whole, the main takeaway from it is "this didn't need to be nine parts" and "reading alll nine parts, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense." But no fear, neither did Fall of the Mutants (and whatever version of that they'd picked, it never would have) But X-Tinction is very interesting because things are shifting. It's a writer-driven crossover being done with two artists who want everyone to stop talking and get to the fighting.

 Here is, so far as I know, as coherent a summation of X-Tinction as I can muster: manipulated by Cameron Hodge, long-running dangling X-Factor plot thread and also-ran in the Evil Human Bigot sweepstakes, gets in the ear of the Genoshan president and cons her into essentially declaring war on the X-Men who are in the process of getting everyone back together (finally) His motives change about five or six times in the course of the crossover and he doesn't seem like he's in all that much of a rush to turn into Warlock or kill all mutants or whatever he's supposed to be doing. Eventually, in the final issue of the crossover, the X-Men finally kill Hodge and a few people die and none of this is gonna matter in about ten issues, except that Genosha is never really "saved"--it just exists in a state of "permanently fucked" for most of the 90's until, in a rare good idea from the late 90's X-Office, they give the country to Genosha, but fail to do anything with it, and in the next decade, Grant Morrison blows it up.

 The main selling point of this is Jim Lee tearing up Uncanny X-Men, filling pages with tons of dynamic action, hyper-detailed battle mechs, and pacing everything at this relentless breakneck speed. Unfortunately, he's only doing a third of the art. Rob Liefeld, fresh from giving New Mutants a shot in the arm, lasts for about two issues that he could be charitably said to have drawn ("sketchy" hardly does it justice, but what can you expect from someone with this going on in his head all the damn time?) Art on X-Factor's third of the crossover is handled by Jon Bogdanove and Al Milgrom, and while Bogdanove is a good fit for certain characters, X-Factor (itself slouching through its publication life in search of a point) was not one of them, especially not by comparison. The X-Factor bits are a right slog to get through, not least because there is an almost Liefeldian inability to understand what the hell is supposed to be going on on the page. As the final chapter is an X-Factor issue, you can imagine how that messes with things.

 So, if it's so misbegotten, why look at it? Well, because it plainly sets the stage for what to come. In less than a year, Claremont will be out, Lee, Liefeld, and the Image guys will be the new vanguard for the next decade, and the tone of the X-Books will change dramatically. And this is the flashpoint. It's not great, it manages to show the reason why a change was needed and the worst excesses of the next generation that illustrate that while change is necessary, it's not guaranteed to be good, but without it, things get stale, and the audience starts wandering off in search of something more vital.

 How lucky we are that no one's tried to arrest change in superhero comics or anything like that, huh?