The Goth
Credits: Chris Claremont (writer), Tom Raney (penciler), Scott Hanna (inker), Richard Starkings & Comicraft (letters), Liquid! (colors)
Summary: Tessa advises Psylocke on the use of her powers during a Danger Room session. Rogue questions Tessa’s position within the team, but quickly corrects herself. After walking out, Rogue’s abducted by a mystery foe. She awakes inside the remains of a city, without her powers. Rogue quickly discerns her abductor was Wolverine, and that she’s inside the Danger Room. After fighting him to a standstill, Wolverine declares she’s proven herself, declaring her the team’s new leader. After everyone makes their case, Rogue reluctantly agrees. Elsewhere, at Harry’s Hideaway, Colossus is attacked by the Goth, a trio of unknown villains. On their way to Harry’s, Thunderbird, Psylocke, and Archangel discover the Goth’s presence. They lose to the villains, but not before Thunderbird sends a distress flare. Rogue, Wolverine, and Nightcrawler arrive to investigate, only to discover all of Salem Center has disappeared. Rogue asserts Gambit and the rest of the X-Men must be called.
Continuity Notes:
- According to Rogue, Tessa has been working with the X-Men for weeks now. This is the first time her connection is depicted on-panel, however. Per Tessa, she’s known Xavier for years, another revelation that’s casually tossed out this issue.
- Forge is now at the mansion, discussing ways the team can locate Shadowcat, and rescue Reyes and Detective Jones from the Neo.
- Rogue says it’s been three days since the events of X-Men #100.
- According to a news report, the “major parties disavow” Senator Kelly. If mutant bigotry were so common, wouldn't the major parties be courting Kelly?
- Harry’s Hideaway seems to be portrayed as a backwoods biker hangout this issue. The exterior shot of the pub doesn’t match its previous portrayals.
- For some reason, Phoenix hasn’t yet searched for Shadowcat. Nightcrawler suggests it this issue.
Continuity Notes - Special Goth Edition:
The Goth consist of Sanguine (perhaps the leader), Beldame (the female), and Wanderer (the bald female.) They can apparently drain energy, enter minds, and create slaves of their opponents. With the exception of Wanderer, who can create teleportation portals, their powers don’t appear to be distinct.
“Huh?” Moments: How does Wolverine shut off Rogue’s powers? Of all the X-Men, isn’t she the member with the deepest association with her powers (and a long-established desire to be free of them)? And, during this Danger Room fight, how does Rogue acquire toy trucks, mannequins, rice cereal, and cayenne pepper to use against Wolverine?
Finally, there’s the question of just what’s going on with Psylocke’s powers. She creates a psychic katana that can “scramble the Goth’s neural net” and do “no physical damage” yet she solely possesses telekinesis now? What she describes are aspects of telepathy, which we’re told repeatedly she no longer possesses.
Critics’ Corner: Amongst other things, critics griped about yet another verbose explanation of the concept of mutants, this time coming through a TV broadcast. The text is so thick, it covers the row of motorcycles Tom Raney presumably spent a decent amount of time rendering on the exterior shot of Harry’s Hideaway.
Review: One aspect of the Revolution issues is the bizarre structure of the stories, which treat major moments as an afterthought…while devoting numerous pages to introducing villains with predictable gimmicks and vacant personalities.
Tessa, the Hellfire Club flunky, the perennial background figure, has a years-long association with Xavier? And she’s been living with the X-Men, and training them, for weeks now? This is the kind of “shocking revelation!” the Six Month Gap could’ve exploited to some dramatic effect. Exactly the kind of plot reveal you’d never expect, but given the rules of comics, not a totally unreasonable thing to walk into after a hypothetical break of six months.
But does the revelation have any impact, aside from making the reader question if they’ve missed an issue? Why is this tidbit just tossed out there like it’s nothing? And, from a dramatic standpoint, why do we have an important plot point connected to Xavier, during a period when the character’s been written off into outer space and not a part of the status quo? Unless the stories are peppered with flashbacks, there’s no way for the reader to confirm Tessa’s story without Xavier present. If she were portrayed as an ambiguous figure, that could work, but over the course of a page, the information is presented to the reader as something you should’ve already known. Tessa’s an X-Man now. Deal with it.
A larger issue—why is a major swerve like this thrown at the audience when 1. Numerous mysteries from the Six Month Gap remain unresolved and 2. Even fundamental aspects of the Neo storyline have yet to be resolved/clarified?
Instead of granting this plot development the space it deserved, the issue is far more concerned with selling the Goth, the latest group of mystery villains to appear and embarrass the X-Men. Would you be shocked to learn the Goth are S&M themed baddies with mind control powers, a penchant for slavery, and a sadistic attraction to violence? (Claremont seems to have two settings: instantly sympathetic foes, who are likely to become allies/members of the team, or sick monsters who seem sexually aroused at the thought of inflicting pain on others.) Also, any use of the word “Goth” was pretty tired within two weeks of The Craft’s release in 1996.
Presumably, there’s more behind-the-scene chaos going on here. Issue #101 indicated the X-Men were desperate to find Shadowcat, while last issue ended with the team dramatically proclaiming they will return to that church to save Reyes and Jones. To be fair, both of those plots are referenced here. For around a panel each.
Even a writer known for a short attention span like Claremont isn’t this bad. He wouldn’t have placed a favorite character like Shadowcat in such a position without immediate plans to follow up her story. Or gone out of his way to bring back two peripheral characters, only to leave them on a cliffhanger after two issues. The abrupt shift in direction is typical of the Mark Powers era of the title, where subplots are introduced, mysteries developed, character arcs instigated, and then…hey! Check out our new team of X-Men! We’ve got those Excalibur characters back!
Whatever decisions are being made, and regardless of who’s making them, this style does not suit Claremont’s writing. Claremont’s famous for being the mainstream writer to declare “fights are boring” (sometimes quoted as “the fights are bulls---.”) He understands that having readers connect with the characters, developing an ongoing relationship with the cast and playing fair is the key to long-running success. Fight scenes are an aspect of the genre, you try to make them interesting, but the hardcore fanbase is built on the character work.
Where’s the character work here? Allegedly, we’re getting it in the Wolverine/Rogue moments, where the team’s senior member gives his endorsement to Rogue, tells her to stare down her insecurities and have the bravery to recognize her true potential. And, hypothetically, this could be a meaningful exchange, and a deserved payoff for Rogue’s devoted fanbase. In the context of the story, it reads as one more jumbled moment, another scene with scant context and questionable plotting. (Seriously, she found cayenne pepper in the Danger Room?)
Overall, I’ll acknowledge this is more readable than the previous issue. Raney’s presence surely helps. His storytelling remains clear (it’s only the larger details that are confusing, not the panel-to-panel continuity), and he’s not skimping on detail lines to meet a deadline. I can’t picture either of the regular artists rendering all of Wolverine’s stubbly beard hairs on one page, then drawing an action sequence with several characters in elaborate outfits without a serious sacrifice in quality. It’s the big picture that’s the problem here, however. One that can’t be rectified by more consistent art.
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5 comments:
I found it a bit surprising that Powers was not fired when Marvel fired Harras and Claremont (as exec. editor) but actually oversaw the 2001 revamp, though after a year or so he was replaced by one of his junior editors. But my impression of Powers is an editor sort of hemmed in by trying to do his best Bob Harras impression without actually being Bob Harras.
Whatever one thinks of Harras, he kept the X-Men on top in the '90s through all the departures and changes in the zeitgeist, and "Age of Apocalypse" was an incredible feat of editing. (There's one story from the infamous Avengers "The Crossing" that was edited out of Harras's office instead of Mark Gruenwald's and it not only looks better than the rest of the series, the storytelling is just better despite being from the same writer/artist team.) The X-books start to go off the rails once Harras is promoted to Editor-in-Chief but still seems to be trying to run the X-line personally; I don't know exactly when Powers was allowed to be sole editor, but I don't think he got credit as such until 1998.
Anyway, it doesn't seem to me like Powers developed an approach that was his own instead of a sort of pale imitation of what worked in the early-to-mid '90s, but he may not have had a chance to do so. Around the same time Tom Brevoort was developing an approach to the Avengers and related books that really felt like his own and not a copy of, say, Gruenwald's.
I've heard some stories Powers wasn't fired until Marvel discovered the hidden "SEX" joke Ethan Van Sciver played on the editors in one of his fill-ins. Don't know if that's true, though.
I think the Powers era truly begins in Fall 1997, with Seagle/Kelly on the main books and Ellis on WOLVERINE. There's a brief period where the internet actually LOVED Powers. Until the storytelling became so disjointed, and those cool hip creators were gone.
Bob Harras didn't really have to contend with the internet as editor, but Powers had pros on his books openly describing the rewrites and arbitrary changes of direction. I agree he seemed inspired by the Bob Harras approach, but lacked whatever quality Harras had that enabled him to pull off the "family" feel of the books.
The only real stories I've heard about Powers, outside all of the rewriting allegations, is that he's honestly a hard worker. That Marvel editors were fighting over who'd get to hire him to be their assistant when his internship ended. And his profile in one of those WIZARD specials, the one that followed him for a day at the office, indicated he came in early and worked like 10-12 hour days. Reading the books, the Powers era just doesn't feel like someone like that's in charge, though.
I was a high school senior or so when Alan Davis took over his run and I completely hated it. I remember liking Kelly's run but that it was very short, I was around a junior in high school at that time but was losing interest in general with comics with so many other distractions. Those Davis comics I had because I collected all X books but could not get into them and would have gladly thrown them away or never bought them. He ruined over a year of X-Men stories for me and so I basically stopped reading to focus on finishing high school, working and then going to college.
My parents picked up my books from my hometown shop but I didn't read a comic for around two-three years. I was excited when I finally picked up the books and saw that there was this time jump, Chris was writing, no more Davis and then boom, it sucks just as bad. I had no interest in the Neo. He was pulling deep cuts from X-Men history and I didn't have easy access to figure out who these people were. (It was 10+ years before I found out who Warhawk was from those early X-Men backup issues with Maverick. To this day I hate Harras for not putting a reference note.)
I basically skipped through those books until the change with Morrison and I was probably around issue 133 when I picked all these books back up. I loved it, I was so glad something new and interesting was happening. I did not like the Jean/Emma thing with Scott though. My parents were just starting to fall apart after being married for 27 years so seeing this other woman come between them in the comics was hitting too close to home and really made me hate Emma.
One aspect of the Revolution issues is the bizarre structure of the stories, which treat major moments as an afterthought…while devoting numerous pages to introducing villains with predictable gimmicks and vacant personalities.
That sums up a lot of my issues with these issues really well. I've always struggled to put it succinctly, but that does the trick.
Was actually Mark's intern for two years just after this run, as the 2001 relaunch was kicking off. He's a great guy that loved the material and was just doing his best to make a good sandwich out of shit ingredients that were left on his doorstep every week. He'd consistently get conflicting direction from editorial above and was regularly working to serve many masters in the process.
It wasn't an easy gig & honestly editorial was mostly musical chairs at the time where bosses wanted to clear house and bring their industry friends in to take over books that they felt certain ways about. It only took a few mistakes to warrant booting the whole office for a "regime change".
Credit where it's due, he presided over a lot of nonsense in that X-Men run/office and then left to write some half decent GIJOE at Devil's Due for a few years.
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