Shell Game
Credits: Chris Claremont (writer), German Garcia, Michael Ryan, and Randy Green (pencils), Panosian/Pepoy/Ketcham (inks), Richard Starkings & Comicraft (letters), Richard Isanove (colors)
Summary: Gambit’s team of X-Men raid an upscale party in Madripoor, aiding the Goth and Crimson Pirates in abducting several attendees. Rogue’s crew of X-Men arrive, stunned to see their teammates working with the villains. The two teams fight, with Rogue’s side apparently losing. Unbeknownst to their opponents, Gambit has touched skin with Rogue, imparting unto her the means of defeating the Goth’s leader. After everyone is teleported to their secret Chinese base, the united X-Men attack Tullamore Voge and his slavers. Rogue, having absorbed Gambit’s power, overloads the Goth’s leader with energy. The resulting explosion kills him, and enables the X-Men to defeat the slavers. Gambit, recognizing Rogue’s discomfort with killing their opponent, offers her his support.
Continuity Notes:- Cable’s bloodthirsty attitude when fighting his teammates “has nothing to do with Gambit’s caper.” This is a reference to Tullamore Voge corrupting him in the previous issue. No resolution here.
- Still no appearances from Alexei Vazhin or Deb Levin this issue.
- We also learn the bloated Chinese Goth identified as…The Goth in X-Men #104 is actually the team’s leader. He absorbs the life forces they bring him.
- An oddity for the X-Men—the issue ends with the team placing Voge, the Goth (the team, not the person), and Crimson Pirates in restraints and (presumably) handing them to the authorities.
Critics’ Corner: Another issue you could scarcely find anyone defending. The rushed art, confused storytelling, and recurring Claremont Clichés (Phoenix recycling the old line about “you can always tell” where X-Men have been, the continued use of “caper,” villains speaking in third-person…) were all fodder for ridicule.
We Get Letters: The letter column consists of a missive about page numbering and paper stock (nothing to do with story content), one reader confused over what the team line-ups are supposed to be (with no real commentary on the actual stories) and one gentle admonishment of Claremont’s scripting style. Followed by…fan art from a child, and a lengthy Next Issue blurb. Marvel rarely ran negative letters in this era—but were they so desperate they’d run anything they could find to avoid real criticism?
Commercial Break: The line of Ultimate comics is announced, with preview pages for Ultimate Spider-Man and character designs for Ultimate X-Men filling out the back of the book. (My memory is that UXM had last minute rewrites, due to the movie, so no preview pages were available.) Notice that Bob Harras is still the editor-in-chief, by the way. The first issues were released right as Joe Quesada took over the chair, but the development occurred during Bob Harras’ final days. New president Bill Jemas viewed the line as his pet project, his way to introduce a new generation of readers to these characters without all of that pesky, non-Jemas approved backstory.
John Byrne once speculated that Ultimate Spider-Man #1 was the most heavily promoted comic of all time, as I recall. If we’re speaking strictly within comics media, and not Entertainment Tonight-style coverage of random hero deaths, then he’s likely correct. We were told this comic was going to save the industry, that Marvel was going to move mountains to get it in the hands of young readers. I’ve yet to encounter anyone who first discovered comics through Ultimate Spider-Man #1. Vaguely, I recall maybe a person or two saying Ultimate trades brought them into comics, or back into comics, but the floppy version of USM #1 mainly found itself in the hands of speculators.
Personally, the Ultimate line always seemed pointless, if not entirely misguided. You can say you’ve scraped away all that awful continuity…but within a year or two, you’ve already developed a new continuity that may or may not intimidate these hypothetical new readers. Its legacy now seems to be the dilution of the Marvel brand, creating a far more “confusing” web of alternate versions of existing characters. Around a year after the Ultimate line’s debut, Claremont acknowledged the sales success of the books in an interview, but questioned just how it would be faring five, ten years later after the newness had worn off.
The talk at the time of the Ultimate books providing some kind of blueprint for future filmmakers also seems amusing in retrospect. Does anyone think Sam Raimi gave a second thought to Ultimate Spider-Man? I know some people still claim the MCU movies are influenced by the Ultimate universe…but that largely seems to be cosmetic. Yes, we have Sam Jackson as Nick Fury, but even he acknowledges he hasn’t had as much to do in the role as he hoped. (I imagine Joss Whedon hated the idea of the Avengers taking orders from Nick Fury as much as I do.)
By the way, the surest sign this project began during the Bob Harras days? The fact that Bill Jemas initially considered Howard Mackie for Ultimate X-Men. How much you want to bet Jemas asked Harras to name one of Marvel’s “good” writers for the book, and this was the suggestion he got? I’m picturing now Jemas’ reaction, learning one reality within the halls of Marvel, then going online and discovering how little of it reconciled with existing fan culture.
Review: It’s a last minute jam issue from three different fill-in artists. No, this probably isn’t going to be any good.
Just think, this is the big finale to the opening “Return of Claremont” arc…chapter ten of the storyline we were told would bring the franchise into the twenty-first century. This was the Revolution, folks. And it’s a rushed fill-in issue, featuring the same villains with the same lame personalities and lame motivations, often acting as background figures as the X-Men have a tepid squabble amongst themselves.
It would be easy to blame the art for not selling this. Every penciler is doing a rush job, and even German Garcia (the artist who once turned around a double-sized issue on an impossible deadline and still made it work) can’t rescue this. Compare this X-Men vs. X-Men fight to Jim Lee’s work in Claremont’s original swansong issue, X-Men #3. Sure, people complained about an overly busy story and contrived hero vs. hero setup in those days, too—but Lee still delivered a memorable fight scene. It’s possible to read that issue and forgive many of its flaws, just to admire the image of a Jim Lee X-Men vs. X-Men battle. Who’s ever going to want to go back to this one?
Even if Jim Lee in his prime did render this, we still have some fundamental plot issues. For one, the story works overtime to sell the concept of the X-Men really, truly fighting each other. That perhaps Rogue’s team has an instinct to hold back, but Gambit refuses. He’s risked everything to free his team, and if that means working with these slavers, then by gum he’ll go through with it. There’s even a sequence where his teammate Thunderbird (the neophyte mutant who’s contributed just shy of nothing in these stories so far) declares he can’t go through with this. “I won’t betray the X-Men -- aargh!” he shouts as a Sea Dog takes advantage of his hesitation and attacks from behind.
So, clearly, Claremont’s working overtime to sell this. It’s unlikely anyone’s going to fully buy in, given that Gambit’s been on the team for ten years at this point, and his crew of X-Men include purehearted characters like Colossus and Storm. But, still, Claremont’s in salesman mode. Only to reveal within a few pages that, of course, this was all a feint. That Gambit just knew all along he could pass his powers on to Rogue, and she’d do what’s necessary to destroy the Goth.
Why did Gambit assume he’d be able to locate Rogue? How did he deduce the Goth’s secret weakness? And why didn’t he call off the ruse as soon as Rogue’s team of X-Men appeared? Instead of fighting one another, they could’ve instantly joined forces against the Pirates and Goth, then used the slavers’ transportation portals to travel to China and finish the job.
It’s all cheap drama. We could’ve had a true resolution to the Neo storyline, the dangling Shadowcat and Reyes/Jones plot threads, or if Tullamore Voge had to be here, a resolution to the Hellfire Club/Shadow King arc in Excalibur that introduced the freak. Instead, it’s a pointless fight sequence, scant on geography, tension, or relatable motives.
Irritatingly, you can see hints of what could be a story in here. Claremont’s obviously given some thought to the Goth’s secret base (an abandoned ancient city in China)…even if he’s yet to reconcile how a team inspired by a Western 1980s fashion trend actually has Chinese origins. And having Rogue struggle with killing their opponent—fine, it’s been done, but it’s usually the kind of material Claremont excels at.
Then again, the last chapter teased the idea of Rogue, a reformed villain, might not have an issue with killing, only to see her in tears over doing it here. Perhaps this was intentional on Claremont’s part…actually putting Rogue in a position of doing what she’s threatened, only to reveal her tough act was merely a pose. Most likely, however, it’s another victim of the mangled storytelling of this era.
This entry exists thanks to those who posted Amazon reviews of my new novel, Black Hat Blues. I’ll continue posting installments in this series—one for every review the book receives. So if you want this series to continue, please, leave a review!
6 comments:
If anything the MCU draws the most on the main universe Marvel comics from the mid-2000s, after the bloom was off the rose for the Ultimate line and the 616 comics started taking the lead again. Brubaker's Captain America, Millar's Civil War event, Richard Morgan's revised take on Black Widow - you can tell that Feige is heavily influenced by the comics that were coming out around the time the MCU started up, and he's still not done mining that era. There are bits from the Ultimate line that made it into the MCU, but they're often quite peripheral things like Hawkeye having a wife and kids.
I'm fascinated by what things were like online when Jemas was shaking things up and seemingly deliberately trying to split the fandom into old-school and new-school fans (the few reviews I've read from that period often have a very contemptuous attitude to the former). I can't say I think he was wrong that Marvel needed some modernization, especially in the writing, which had remained more or less the same for a long time, right down to the fact that most of the comics up to 2000 were still produced Marvel-style. But my impression is that he couldn't stop "fixing" things even after the necessary fixes were made, or at least that's how I interpret such bizarre edicts as the sudden "every book must be upper/lowercase lettered like the Ultimate books" edict which was almost universally abandoned the second he was out the door.
Marvel going from barely acknowledging the internet to having a president actively creating online publicity stunts, AND encouraging a segment of fandom to hate him...that was nuts. Looking back, I think he was influenced by pro wrestling of that era, which was huge and filled with these stunts.
Jemas came from Marvel's trading card division and seemed to have little or no understanding of the characters, the typical "Marvel Zombie," or the history of the company. His research consisted of talking to his buddies at WIZARD and scanning online comics forums. I do recognize comics were in a sorry state, with no new blood coming in, but I associate Jemas with publicity stunts and ego strokes and nothing else.
Jemas may have been a dick, but I can't say I hated everything that came out during his era...
As for CC's return, the best thing you could say about it was Adam Kubert's issues were really nice looking.
There's a curious paradox in Jemas, in that, on one hand, he constantly presented himself as an outsider from comics, smarter than, and contemptuous toward, the unwashed losers who had historically bought and read them. Yet on the other hand, there is the distinct sense that he secretly believed himself to be a more talented and capable comic book writer than anyone on his own staff. So as his tenure wore on, he became more and more willing to insert himself into the creative process, whether it was through increasingly specific edicts for "correct" writing methods, bizarre story pitches for titles like Mark Waid's Fantastic Four, or the outright disaster of his self-penned Marville. In that sense (and though he would never admit it), he wasn't all that different from Jim Shooter, whose confidence in his own creative capabilities likewise proved to be an achilles heel.
Even in hindsight, it seems the best thing about CC's return and this storyline so far is Adam Kubert's art.
You can say you’ve scraped away all that awful continuity…but within a year or two, you’ve already developed a new continuity that may or may not intimidate these hypothetical new readers.
That's the thing that bewilders me about the "continuity turns off new readers!" argument - the minute you start telling a story, it has continuity. The Ultimate universe had less continuity than the main Marvel Universe, but it still had it, and I just don't think someone who is going to be scared by picking up issue #140 is that much more likely to NOT be scared by picking up #40. So then it just becomes a question of how continuity is too much - 100 issues worth? 50? 12 (which seems to be Marvel's current answer...)? Why not just make every issue a new-reader friendly #1 and we'll just never tell a serial story because someone might be too afraid to pick up #2? What's even the point then?
The solution to "impenetrable continuity turns away new readers" isn't "eliminate continuity", it's "make the continuity less impenetrable, and sell the idea that it's a feature, not a bug, of the genre". Draw on the rich history of the characters, make it easy (and obvious) for new readers to explore the continuity and references (footnotes, anyone?!?) and support that with a robust, easily-marked reprint & digital program. There's ways to do it without reverting outright to the "every issue is someone's first!" repetitiveness of the Silver Age, but that's harder to do than relaunching every series every 12-18 months, so we'll just keep doing that to diminishing returns.
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