X-Men Forever, v. 3: Come to Mother ... Russia! and v. 4: Devil in a White Dress

Collects: X-Men Forever #11-5 (v. 3) and 16-20 and X-Men Forever Annual #1 (v. 4) (2010)

Released: May 2010 (v. 3) and August 2010 (v. 4) (Marvel)

Format: 120 and 152 pages respectively / color / $16.99 each / ISBN: 9780785136811 and 9780785144359

What is this?: Chris Claremont continues to play with his X-Men action figures in his own private sandbox, thank you very much.

The culprits: Writer Chris Claremont and artists Tom Grummett, Graham Nolan, Sana Takeda, and Peter Vale

I thought about writing separate reviews for
X-Men Forever, v. 3: Come to Mother...Russia! and X-Men Forever, v. 4: Devil in a White Dress, but I just couldn’t do it. The two books resolved into an undifferentiated mush into my mind, and I didn’t have the patience to repeat my criticisms. The books are largely the same in quality, so instead, I’ll tell you what I liked about Russia and Devil:

• Colossus and Black Widow have joined the Winter Guard, the Russian national superhero force, in Russia. Since the Soviet Union is not the Evil Empire any more, it makes sense that Russian heroes would return to the Motherland occasionally, and an out-of-continuity series like X-Men Forever is a perfect place to explore that.
  
• …
  
• … hmm …
  
• It amuses me that the Amazon listing says Nightcrawler and Rogue head to New Orleans, not Jackson. One Southern city is pretty much like another, right? To be fair, Graham Nolan’s Jackson and Mississippi resembles New Orleans and Louisiana. Also, Amazon listings also have George Lucas’s credits in Chris Claremont’s author biography.
  
• Grudgingly, I will admit I liked the idea of the Summerses acting like a real family. I found the execution off, but the idea is good.

And what I disliked about Russia and Devil:

• Claremont dialogue. Good grief. It’s the same phrases and rhythms Claremont has been using for decades. Don’t the X-Men ever use an original turn of phrase? I would speak far less often if I sounded like a Claremont character. I’d be too embarrassed to say much.
  
• That cover for Come to Mother … Russia. Who is the Black Widow trying to sex with that pose? Is she trying to seduce me? Am I an enemy agent, whom she will mate with and kill? Oh my god … I am, aren’t I? I knew it! This is the greatest / worst day of my life!
  
• Reuse of tired plots. Claremont sends Magik to Limbo again, but this time her journey to the Dark Side is completed — so of course that means “teenaged female in scanty costume.” (Thank Odin it’s not bondage gear.) Rogue and Nightcrawler switch powers, just like Psylocke and Jean Grey did at the beginning of Claremont’s return in X-Men #100. SHIELD once again has to deal with a group of traitors in their ranks.
  
• On-the-nose codenames: Black Magik? Firecat? Perfect Storm? Ye gods.
  
• Dredging up past “romances.” Kitty and Colossus were done a long time ago — they broke up in Uncanny #183, almost 100 issues before the end of Claremont’s run — and bringing it up again to shoot it down again is pointless. (Besides, their romance was never especially convincing; Kitty was extreme jail bait during their relationship, and the thought that an older, wiser Kitty would want to resume that relationship is a little disturbing.) Black Panther and Storm rekindling their romance is no more believable in X-Men Forever than it was in the X-books’ regular continuity, but thankfully it is over quite a bit more quickly.
  
• Stupidity. A relationship between Jean and Beast begins with little warning; after all those years together on the X-Men and X-Factor, it seems like the platonic coating on their relationship should be too thick to penetrate. (Perhaps her attraction to him is based on his body hair: he’s the only one who can compare in that department to the dead Wolverine.) Nightcrawler and Rogue run into a trap in Jackson, not questioning why jetsetting stewardess Amanda Sefton would be in the capital of Mississippi long enough to investigate before blundering in.

So, in short, unless you’re looking for Claremont nostalgia accompanied by art that ranges from *ugh* to uh-cceptable, then don’t waste your time with these books. Discounts on the TPBs drew me into X-Men Forever, but I don’t think I’d read the rest of the series even if the books were free.

Rating: Russia: (1.5 of 5 )

Devil: (1 of 5)

X-Men: Messiah CompleX

Collects: X-Men: Messiah CompleX, Uncanny X-Men #492-4, X-Men # 205-7, New X-Men v. 2 #44-6, and X-Factor #25-7 (2007-8)

Released: October 2008 (Marvel)

Format: 352 pages / color / $29.99 / ISBN: 9780785123200

What is this?: A massive X-Men crossover in which the X-Men, Marauders, Cable, Bishop, and the Purifiers all fight over the first mutant baby born since M-Day.

The culprits: An accomplished crossover crew, including writers Ed Brubaker, Mike Carey, Peter David, Chris Yost, and Craig Kyle and pencilers Billy Tan, Chris Bachalo, Humberto Ramos, and Scot Eaton

I haven’t read much of the X-Men titles since the “House of M” event — haven’t read anything other than X-Factor and Astonishing X-Men, really, since Grant Morrison left New X-Men. (Also: X-Men: Deadly Genesis, which left me less than eager to read anything else with Ed Brubaker’s fingerprints on it.) But my local library’s getting in all sorts of titles, and this gives me a chance to read X-Men: Messiah CompleX and feel like a Usenet dino.

X-Men was better in the old days! Well, I’ve got that out of my system now.

For those of us who have been away, Messiah CompleX (man, do I hate that terminal capital “X”) is not a jumping on point. It sets up plots for the foreseeable future, yes, but it’s an exercise in clearing out the old. If you’re coming in with no knowledge of the X-Men — or if your knowledge is out of date — you’re going to be a little confused. Who are these New X-Men, and what can they do? Why are they so angry? Why do they die so easily? And why was Cable thought dead? Why does Bishop have a superplane? What happened to Cyclops’s father? There really aren’t any footnotes, although some of the information is given in context (eventually) and some of it doesn’t matter. Still, the New X-Men seem bolted onto the crossover awkwardly, and they aren’t very well explained, despite playing an important part in the crossover.

If you’re looking for action, Messiah CompleX has it. A new mutant baby is born —the first since the Scarlet Witch decreed “No more mutants” — and all the groups concerned with mutants want the baby: the X-Men to protect it, Mr. Sinister’s Marauders to control it, the Purifiers to kill it, the intensely stupid “Predator X” to eat it, and Cable to take it to the future. This gives rise to an intense level of action: the fighting is nearly non-stop, with numerous casualties. By the end, there’s a very real possibility the reader will be numb to the carnage; the number of mutants who are dead, dying, or deactivated is astonishing, given the restricted number of mutants at today’s Marvel.

The coordination of the crossover is a cut above what I’m used to; perhaps Marvel learned something about how to make the edges more seamless during the past decade. Writers Ed Brubaker, Peter David, and Mike Carey and New X-Men co-writers Craig Kyle and Chris Yost do an admirable job writing a story in which the chapters and characterizations don’t contradict each other. This is partly because the big revelations from the ancillary titles, X-Factor and New X-Men, largely happen in those titles. Still, everyone seems to do at least a passable job with the other writers’ characters, and that’s a real accomplishment.

I never thought I’d see the day when Chris Bachalo and Humberto Ramos would be penciling half a major X-Men crossover. Both are good artists but decidedly non-standard; I don’t think either is particularly “hot,” the kind of sought-after artist who makes the lists on Wizard. I’m not sure whether this represents a changing aesthetic on the X-titles or if it’s attributable to the X-titles’ loss of prestige over the years.²⁷ As I said, both are decent artists, with Bachalo keeping his more eccentric tics under control this time around. I can’t tell whether Xavier disappearing at the end is an art mistake by Bachalo or a plot point, though. Ramos … Ramos is an artist who divides fans, and with good reason. I think his exaggerated figures are better suited for a more lighthearted title — I think he was a good fit for Paul Jenkins’s Spider-Man work a few years ago — but Messiah CompleX is not lighthearted at all. I believe Ramos can do serious stuff, but there are times his characters look more comically panicked than stressed, and his tough guys (and gals) will never look as tough as a more realistic artist’s.

The other half of the art is from Scot Eaton, who draws Forge as Robert Downey, Jr., and Billy Tan. The contrast between the two halves is extreme. Tan and Eaton draw a shiny, glossy world where everyone is pretty and even the dirt is attractive, and Bachalo and Ramos create a misshapen setting where even the bondage models are strangely offputting. All of them do a good job — well, except perhaps Marc Silvestri, who’s even more pretty and streamlined than Tan or Eaton in the Messiah CompleX one shot and manages to draw Wolverine with a hint of androgyny — but the differences are startling. Personally, for this crossover, I think I prefer Bachalo and Ramos’s side of the divide, since this is a gritty, not pretty, story. This flies in the face of my usual preference for attractive, clean art, but I realize that’s not appropriate for every comic book.

The blurb on the back cover quotes IGN as saying Messiah CompleX is “easily the best X-Men crossover in a decade.” Assuming the quote is in context — and Marvel has a bit of history of using out-of-context quotes — they’re not exactly setting the bar very high, are they? They’re competing against “Endangered Species,” which ran as backups in the books in 2007; “Eve of Destruction,” which led to the Morrison / Casey reign on the X-Titles; “Dream’s End,” the swan song to Chris Claremont redux; the Apocalypse crossovers of 1999; and various late ‘90s forgettables such as “Hunt for Xavier” and “Magneto War” and various two-parters. “Operation: Zero Tolerance” sneaks in as well; “O:ZT” is one of the few major crossovers during that span, and it’s one of the prime reasons the X-titles shied away from the megacrossovers. None of them will ever be held up against “Mutant Massacre” or “Fall of the Mutants” as a high point of the X-Men. Hell, I wouldn’t say any of them were any better than “X-Cutioner’s Song” of ’92-3, although I admit I haven’t read “Endangered Species.”

As a volume, Messiah CompleX is mediocre — it misses the sweet spot between ultraviolence and story development by a decent margin. It does, however, deliver violent action until you can’t stand it no more. As a statement, a manifesto, it’s much better. It puts a violent, definite end to the past and says the future will be different, something at odds with the directionless wandering of the last few years or the warmed-over Claremont that marked the ‘90s. Whether that future will be better (or even readable) remains to be seen.

Rating: (3 of 5)