“Between the Cracks” Credits: Scott Lobdell (writer), Chris Bachalo (penciler), Mark Buckingham (inker), Buccellato & Electric Crayon (colors), Starkings & Comicraft (lettering)
Summary
While on a field trip, Generation X encounters a SWAT team surrounding a school. The townspeople believe that a young mutant has taken a classroom hostage. By talking to the crowd, Jubilee discerns that a teacher tried to enroll the boy, Eliot, into the school but the community fought against it. The town now thinks that he’s turned against the teacher who wanted to help him. Synch tries to concentrate on Eliot’s mutant signature, but only senses one in a nearby ice cream truck. While Jubilee sneaks into the school, the Orphan Maker emerges from the truck. The team tries to keep him away from the boy’s parents as Jubilee confronts the suspected mutant inside. As the student hostages escape, she discovers that the teacher died of a heart attack. He helped Eliot out because he knew what it was like to be different due to his weak heart. The Orphan Maker leaves the battle, deciding that Eliot’s parents have already orphaned him. Jubilee breaks the news that the teacher is dead, and Synch’s power reveals that Eliot was never a mutant, he was only born disfigured. Meanwhile, Husk spies on Chamber and Penance in the Biosphere, as Emma Frost comments that Husk reminds her of herself at a younger age.
Continuity Note
The Orphan Maker is a villain from the early issues of X-Factor. He kills the parents of young mutants so that his concierge Nanny can look after them. The gimmick is that the Orphan Maker is a young boy in a hi-tech suit, which is redesigned in this issue. When Banshee stops his bullets, he discovers that they’re bone fragments, something I've never understood (is this supposed to be his mutant power?)
Commercial Break
There’s an ad for the infamous Street Fighter movie, which remains a popular target for online ridicule to this day. It’s funny that comic book movies have gotten so much better over the past 10 years or so, but video games movies are still pretty awful.
Review
With one issue to go before the massive “Age of Apocalypse” event, Lobdell does a self-contained story that doesn’t make much of an effort to advance any ongoing storylines. There’s a very brief moment where Husk considers the possibility that she’s following Emma’s footsteps, but that’s essentially it. The cover claims that Emma is now her mentor, which is only overstating things by a thousand percent (and why is Emma still being called the White Queen at this point?). Cutting this series off at issue four in order to make room for the next event doesn’t do the title any favors. The cast is still being introduced, and due to the leisurely plotting so far, you get the feeling that the series hasn’t even gone anywhere yet. By the time the AoA storyline is over, half of this series’ run will have taken place in an alternate reality with warped versions of the main characters. The fact that this series was still so new was the biggest clue to me at the time that the X-books were not being cancelled. I just knew that Marvel wouldn’t have gone through such a huge effort to push this book and then kill it after four issues.
This issue’s story is passable, with a decent twist at the end, but it does feel like Lobdell’s marking time until the crossover starts. Bachalo’s layouts are fairly quirky, with little cartoon elves hanging out on the margins of most of the pages. They don’t really contribute to the actual story (which has nothing to do with Christmas), and I get the impression that they’re added to distract from the pedestrian plot. They do add some charm to the comic, though, and it’s nice to see some of Bachalo’s cartooning. Bachalo’s unique style doesn’t do any favors to the new Orphan Maker design, though. Not only is not an improvement on the original design, which had a straightforward look that any artist should’ve been able to work with, but it looks too much like Emplate without the giant nose. The Orphan Maker’s treatment in this issue isn’t that great, either, as he gets beaten on for a few pages and then just decides to leave. I suspect that Orphan Maker was being set up as a recurring villain for this series, which would tie into his gimmick very well, but I don’t think the idea ever went anywhere.
Nanny and Orphan Maker were two of the more boring villains in X-lore for me, and they were especially pointless here.
ReplyDeleteBut I still think the issue has a lot of charm and I think it's an important step to have these new mutants see the realities of human hatred of mutants, through the sad story of Eliot. Bachalo brings a quirky and depressing feel to it, while in a more traditional artist's hands it may have veered into afterschool-special material.
These four initial issues are a weird beast because things could barely get started before a crossover completely disrupts the title. Although I love them for introducing the characters and group dynamics (and for the brilliant art), I will concede, while rereading your posts, that the overall plot and character arcs are barely incrementaly moved forward. I can see how this would have been frustrating at the time, but in the bigger picture, they are still strong building blocks for the series.
I find it interesting that at their starts, the overall mood of both New Mutants and Generation X, books that dealt with the young'ins, they both had such a maudlin and somber tone. Not completely dead mind you, but the slower plotting, the feeling of confusion and dread, and the teen angst.
ReplyDeleteI love bachalo's art so much, but in a similar way as I love Sienkiewicz' art; it's far too mature for the characters in its story.
That being said, I'd rather we not get into Bird Brain (was that his name) and Gosamyr.
I always really enjoyed the X-Men and X-Factor stories that revolved around Nanny and the Orphan-Maker (yes, even the one that made Storm into a 12-year-old, lol), and I agree that Bachalo's redesign of the Orphan-Maker is a big step backwards.
ReplyDeleteAnd while I can certainly see your points about Generation X so far, I still think the first 25 issues hold up as really solid stuff considering the mire that the mid-90's X-books would become post AoA. In fact, Generation X and Ellis' Excalibur are the only runs from this time period I've gone back and re-read in recent years.
Oh man, that Street Fighter movie is so awesomely bad, I love it. My buddy and I still chuckle over Raul Julia's line towards the end about being a god: dude, you can (sorta) fly and shoot lightening bolts. A god this does not make.
ReplyDeleteI always wondered about Orphan Maker too, if he and Nanny were going to be recurring villains for the team. It was just odd to see him dusted off, redesigned (poorly) for this issue, then forgotten.
Actually it really saddens me that Street Fighter is still mocked to this day since it was Raul Julia's final movie before he died.
ReplyDeleteShould serve as a warning to great actors that they should not be in such crap at any point because you never know if it'll be your last.