Role playing and collecting comics since age 10, I'd like to share my experiences and insight of RPG's. I hope that my reader's will also feel free to contribute their thoughts and feelings alongside my own. I'd like to keep the pen-and-paper in roleplaying games. [Formerly known as RPG4EVR] A non-biased place where you can read reviews of graphic novels and trade paperbacks. I also give my opinions and reviews of pop culture and events. [Formerly known as Zanziber's Point of View]
Sunday, June 29, 2014
Ghost World
Title: Ghost World
ISBN: 1560974273
Price: $11.95
Publisher/Year: Fantagraphics, 2013
Artist: Daniel Clowes
Writer: Daniel Clowes
Rating: 2.5/5
The relationship between comics and Hollywood has always been a difficult one. Comic adaptations of movies are often slapdash and careless. While movie-makers are prone to taking liberties with characters, bending them to their own needs and alienating fans in favor of the mass market. Which is one reason why it was so refreshing that, while adapting Ghost World for the silver screen, director Terry Zwigoff involved creator Daniel Clowes in making of the movie. Having said that, we maintain that it’s always best to consume the original version before the copy, so catch the graphic novel first if you haven’t already seen the film.
Ghost World is the story of two teenage girls, struggling to leave the childish things of their past behind but finding the alien landscape of adulthood to be strange and unforgiving. The girls are superbly realised, surrounded as they are by a host of caricatures – the extremist teenager who rebels against liberalism, the shy young boy who finds himself at the wrong end of the girls’ sexual frustrations, the parents who can’t do the right thing and a supporting cast of assorted weirdoes.
Clowes’ artwork is black and white, but adds green as the go-between. At first this seems a bit strange, as the black on white would be more than sufficient, though the extra colour adds a subtlety of depth that shades the world with a ghostly and atmospheric hue, brining the teenagers’ world alive.
This book is a fascinating insight into the mind of the disenfranchised youngster, and anyone who can remember being there will probably understand the journey the girls are going on. Insecurity, anxiety, frustration and inevitability are mixed with friendship, love, independence and fun. It’s a heady mix that Clowes captures wonderfully with poignant dialogue and drawing that’s very easy on the eye.
Sunday, June 22, 2014
Harbor Moon
Title: Harbor Moon
ISBN: 9781897548950
Price: $19.95
Publisher/Year: Arcana, 2010
Artist: Pawel Sambor
Writer: Ryan Colucci, Dikran Ornekian
Rating: 2/5
When Ryan Colucci tweeted that he'd send signed copies of Harbor Moon for only $10, I couldn't resist answering the call. I don't regret adding this graphic novel to my collection at all. It takes an old story (werewolves versus hunters), and gives it a modern flair and flavor.
Yes, this is a werewolf story, and I’m really not that interested in traditional monster stories – that’s just the way I am, man! However, this is an interesting comic for a few different reasons – Colucci spins it just enough to make it entertaining, if not a completely unique take on werewolves, and the art is quite cool. In the story, a man named Timothy Vance ends up in the town of Harbor Moon, Maine, looking for his father, who invited him to the town but was then killed under mysterious circumstances. Vance finds that the townspeople, like any good townspeople in weird towns in horror stories, aren’t particularly friendly to outsiders and not interested in helping him out – the sheriff simply lies to him about the presence in town of any O’Callaghans (his father’s name). We know this has something to do with werewolves, but we’re not sure what it is. Colucci does a nice job at hinting around at what’s going on and dropping enough hints before revealing the true reasons things are happening – unlike long-running serials where one sometimes wonders if the writers have worked everything out before they start dropping clues, Colucci has to wrap everything up in one book, and he does a nice job balancing the need to explain things to us with the need to tantalize us with a mystery.
I don’t want to give too much away about the story, but the writers manage to take very familiar werewolf tropes and twist them just enough – the werewolves are just people, for instance, both good and bad, even in monster form – that it’s not too annoying. What Colucci and Ornekian do well is give us characters who work pretty well even if they’re not monsters – Timothy is searching for his family roots; Sheriff Sullivan and his son, Patrick, are trying to protect their secrets, even if they might go about it in an extreme way; Kristen, the love interest in the story, wants to trust Timothy but knows she might not be able to. The villains in the story are cardboard characters, which hurts the book just a little, as the book isn’t really too much about the villains, so it’s not too big a deal. Stories are more interesting when the villains are compelling, but for this book, Patrick is kind of the villain, and Colucci and Ornekian do a decent job with him. The book moves along well as Colucci and Ornekian drive the plot nicely, and while it doesn’t rise too far above a standard werewolf tale, the writers make a good try and change things up enough to make it at least interesting.
Sambor is an interesting artist, and he seems heavily influenced by Ben Templesmith; but his figure work isn’t as strong. He definitely does better with “set pieces,” I suppose – posed drawings of single people where he can take his time a bit. When he gets into characters interacting with each other, he struggles a bit more, but it’s not like the art is awful or anything. As I read through this, I was expecting the inevitable showdown between the werewolves and the villains to not come off well, but it’s better than I thought it would be … although there are some issues. Sambor draws the wolves very well, which helps the big showdown, but because he uses a lot of “special effects” (blurring, electrical effects, blood splatter), because the coloring on the book is naturally a bit darker, and because Sambor’s male characters look very similar, it’s often hard to tell what’s going on. On the one hand, that’s kind of neat, because it’s a messy, quick battle, but on the other hand, it’s hard to tell what’s going on!
Harbor Moon isn’t a great comic, but it’s a very entertaining book, especially if you’re inclined to like horror.
Sunday, June 15, 2014
X-Men: Fall of the Mutants Omnibus
Title: X-Men: Fall of the Mutants Omnibus
ISBN: 9780785153122
Price: $99.99
Publisher/Year: Marvel, 2011
Artist:Walter Simonson, June Brigman, Todd McFarlane, Sal Buscema, Jon Bogdanove, John Romita Jr., Kieron Dwyer, Keith Pollard, Marc Silverstri, Kerry Gammill, Bret Blevins
Writer: Louise Simonson, Peter David, Ann Nocenti, Mark Gruenwald, Steve Englehart, Chris Claremont
Collects: New Mutants #55-61, Uncanny X-Men #220-227, X-Factor #18-26, Captain America #339, Daredevil #252, Fantastic Four #312, Incredible Hulk #336-337 & #340, Power Pack #35.
Rating: 3/5
This hardcover collection of X-Men: Fall of the Mutants is an omnibus in all but name, collecting the contents of 2001’s “Fall of the Mutants” trade with an additional 552 pages of content. There are three stories being told in this collection, with each one focusing on one of the X-teams that were active in 1988.
The Uncanny X-Men face off against The Adversary, a mystical threat with ties to Forge and Storm, resulting in a major change in their status quo.
X-Factor battles Apocalypse, as their former teammate Angel is turned into Death, one of the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse.
The New Mutants go up against the militant pro-human group “The Right", which leads to the shocking death of one of their members resulting in their striking out on their own, away from Magneto’s tutelage and the X-mansion.
The additional issues add context for the crossover, giving the reader a better snapshot of the status quo prior to the event.This crossover isn’t like most X-related crossovers, as it’s only linked by the banner Fall of the Mutants, with no interlinking in the stories. There are three separate storylines here to enjoy, as opposed to a complicated and complex multi-title crossover storyline so common today.
The X-Factor storyline is a major highlight here, as Angel is transformed into Death, a transformation which still reverberates in today’s comics. The quality of the reprints is top-notch, and is a great improvement over prior collections of this material, plus it includes a number of tie-ins, which help flesh out the stories that are presented here. Unfortunately, while reading my copy, a section of pages in the back came loose from the binding. I was able to reattach them, but I would want you to be aware of this defect when you add this wonderful trade to your collection.
Sunday, June 8, 2014
X-Men: X-Cutioner's Song
Title:
X-Men: X-Cutioner's Song
ISBN: 0785100253
Price: $24.95
Publisher/Year: Marvel, 1994
Artist: Brandon Peterson, Jae Lee, Andy Kubert, Greg Capullo
Writer: Scott Lobdell, Peter David, Fabian Niceza
Collects: X-Factor #84-86, X-Force #16-18, X-Men #14-16, Uncanny X-Men #294-296
Rating: 3/5
In a way X-Cutioner’s Song marks a fairly significant turning point in the history of the X-Men franchise. The X-Men books were in a state of turmoil. They had lost their long-term writer Chris Claremont only recently, and Jim Lee had departed to work on other projects. The central theme of the books – exploring prejudice and racism – looked to be losing steam slightly as South Africa’s apartheid regime collapsed and the country developed into a truly democratic state. It seemed like the books were struggling to cope with all these changes occurring so rapidly, and X-Cutioner’s Song reads like an attempt to assert control on the franchise – as if to assure readers that everything was okay and it was business as usual.
“I’m still a little bit wary when I look back on these issues and I’m asked to write an intro for them,” Fabian Niceza’s introduction (reprinted from an earlier collection) suggests, “because for as much as I fondly recall the enthusiasm, the uncertainty, the fear and the gung-ho cockiness we mixed together in working on these stories, I also feel that it was a bit unfair, in retrospect, to expect us to hit a home run in our first time at bat.” It’s a fair point, to be honest, and it’s a brave confession. X-Cutioner’s Song isn’t a perfect crossover. It isn’t even a very good one. However, it is a deeply fascinating one in many ways, because you can detect the seismic shifts occurring in the background.
X-Cutioner’s Song truly ushers in the nineties, as far as X-Men crossovers go. Arguably the biggest crossover was still ahead, with Age of Apocalypse still a bit away, but X-Cutioner’s Song seemed like an attempt to pull the books kicking and screaming towards a new age. The event is, after all, built around the characters of Cable and Stryfe – two Liefeld creations who have come to represent the nineties for many readers. Lots of pouches, lots of guns, lots of scars, badass attitudes and a willingness to kill – without too much remorse or angst about it. For better or worse, the nineties were arriving – the biggest and boldest and loudest decade for Marvel’s merry mutants – and X-Cutioner’s Song feels like an attempt to welcome them.
However, you can sense the ties to the past, the sense that the book shouldn’t stray too far from “what worked” before. In particular, writers Fabian Niceza, Scott Lobdell and Peter David return to Chris Claremont’s ridiculously tangled Summers family tree. Much of the artwork in the collection – with the notable exception of Jae Lee’s superbly atmospheric and stylistic work on X-Factor – seems designed to recall the sort of sharp work Jim Lee used to turn out. That’s not to suggest that there weren’t new ideas (in fact, Niceza shrewdly points out that Stryfe’s Strike File sets up years worth of stories), but just to observe that the story is located at something of a crossroads between the past and the future.
I think it’s hard to make sense of the nineties, in hindsight. It was a post-Cold War, pre-9/11 world. The Berlin Wall had fallen, capitalism had won. There were conflicts, as there always are, but they were relatively contained and far away – places like Bosnia and Iraq. Chris Claremont had found a nice hook for Uncanny X-Men by tying it into the social issues of the day, crafting a racism allegory for a Civil Rights era comic book. What happens when there is nothing to respond to? What happens when the real-life situation driving your central metaphor expires?
X-Tinction Agenda, the last major X-Men crossover, had seen Claremont cling desperately to his “mutants-as-oppressed-minority” metaphor by presenting readers with a fictionalized counterpart to South Africa’s racist apartheid system, with the fascist state of Genosha. It was a last-ditch attempt to anchor the books to the issue of race, something that was becoming increasingly difficult in an increasingly PC world. That’s not to say there wasn’t mileage left in the metaphor (Grant Morrison would shrewdly play it out in New X-Men, as would Peter Milligan in X-Statix), but that it couldn’t continue to be used in the same way.
Even though Mandela was not yet President of South Africa, it was clear that the apartheid system in the country was being dismantled. The last bastion of such direct state-sanctioned racism was crumbling, and would soon be consigned to the history books. The issues of racial identity and equality were no longer problems that would require violent revolution or confrontation to resolve. The barriers had become more subtle, more nuanced. In Western Europe and America, the issue of equal rights for minorities became a problem requiring more thorough consideration and exploration, rather than the type of stuff that Claremont’s Uncanny X-Menhad been dealing with.
As such, it should be no surprise that X-Cutioner’s Song opens with the attempted assassination of Charles Xavier. After all, the dream is over, so to speak. Magneto had been removed from the book a little while ago, so placing Charles at death’s door seems like a fair way of acknowledging the ideological conflict between the two was a relic best left in the past. Of course, Magneto would inevitably return (in fact, Niceza concedes that he considered bringing Magneto back in the middle of this storyline) and Charles doesn’t die, but that opening issue makes a bold philosophical statement. The times, they are a-changin’.
However, the crossover suffers from a massive lack of consistency, as well as some difficulties with the general direction. As Niceza notes in his introduction, the writers handling the crossover were still relatively new to their individual assignments. To expect them to handle a massive crossover would be even more difficult, as they were still finding the voices for their own books. As such, the quality, tone and themes of the crossover seem to shift as we move from one chapter to the next – the crossover feels like the disjointed effort of three different authors with three different styles.
Niceza is perhaps the writer who does the best with the big superhero melodrama, and who seems to grasp the core of the crossover. He has a solid understanding of the core X-Men dynamics. In particular, I like his exploration of the idea of family with X-Men comics. After all, the X-Men are one giant surrogate family, covering for the fact that each of the members seems to have difficulty with their own biological relatives. Scott seems to get on better with his team mates than his brother and is, as the crossover notes, an absolute failure as a father. Peter uses the team to cope with his brother’s suicide, unsure how to tell the rest of his family.
X-Cutioner’s Song is the story of the tangled Summers family, juxtaposed against that of the X-Men family. By all accounts, Scott’s family is a broken unit, a group of people related by blood and cursed by a bond that none of them ever sought. Scott and Jean spend most of the story dealing with their failure as biological parents in isolation, on their own terms. In contrast, Professor Xavier spends the whole story surrounded by his surrogate family. Even unconscious, he’s never alone – despite the fact that he is not related to any of the team by blood. Apocalypse remarks that Xavier’s X-Men “play the part of the family” remarkably well, and Niceza’s Uncanny X-Men and X-Force issues tend to emphasis this point.
Indeed, Niceza’s issues seem to hit on the vague sense of existential ennui that was gripping the books, as they entered a completely new era – one where the central metaphor that had made them so successful in the past few decades was increasingly irrelevant. “Maybe it’s just the way o’ the world that did it,” Wolverine suggests. “Maybe the dream is dead. Maybe we should all stop pretendin’ it ain’t– an’ accept the fact we’re livin’ in a nightmare.”
Indeed, more than any other X-Men event, X-Cutioner’s Song is fascinating because so much of what is important to it is happening unseen in the past or in the future, though the story itself unfolds in a somewhat listless present. Stryfe is a rebel from the future, seeking to pay Scott and Jean back for “a legacy of hatred! a legacy of decay!” And yet we never see him develop as a character. We never really see what twisted him so much, or what it is that he’s responding to. The same is arguably true of Cable, who is stuck in a present fighting against a terrible future that is yet to materialize. And yet, X-Cutioner’s Song is never really about time travel. It’s just a crossover where all these sins – past and future – have come back to face the team in an almost contextless present. “How can they defeat me, when I am their tomorrow?” Stryfe asks.
In fairness, Niceza’s writing isn’t particular strong, but it isn’t particularly weak. It’s just straight-forward superhero stuff, for better or worse. I do like the way that he’ll acknowledge the old tried and tested cliches that he uses as he writes, rather than simply falling back on them as simple crutches. The problem is that each of the three writers have markedly different styles and approaches, and so it feels almost like the story is shifting genre as the reader moves from one chapter to the next.
Peter David, for example, proves a much more interesting character writer. His plotting seems to go through the motions, but his characters seem much more vibrant in his chapters than in any of the others. Indeed, one might imagine that a team-up between Cable and Wolverine and Bishop would be a pain to read as nineties machismo oozes off the page, but David makes their dialogue sparkle. Consider this brief interaction between Cable and Wolverine as the former tries to rework his transporter system:
The other side of the coin is that David’s characters feel somewhat wrong when handled by other writers. Members of his X-Force, in particular Madrox or Strong Guy, seem slightly “off”in the hands of the other two writers on the crossover – it’s clear that Lobdell and Niceza are trying to channel David’s witty self-aware dialogue, but it doesn’t work quite as well.
Don’t get me wrong. I know that various writers have different ways of writing various characters, and I know that’s one of the necessary facets of a shared universe. Truth be told, I generally don’t mind if two writers have slightly different voices for the same character – after all, they are different books and these are fictional characters. However, it’s quite jarring when structured as part of one crossover, as you change between writers for the same group of characters, and they end up sounding subtly different from chapter to chapter.
Reading David’s chapters made me wish that Marvel would consider releasing his X-Factor runs (both the one here and the current one) in a nice oversized hardcover. It’s one of the X-Men books that very clearly has its own particular voice, and its own place in the shared universe. Of course, I’d also love to see his Incredible Hulk run collected in a similar format, or even in the omnibus line, but I imagine that’s a long way off.
However, the weakest of the trinity of writers working on the book is Scott Lobdell. It’s somewhat ironic that Lobdell would be the writer tapped by DC to script several of their “new 52″ titles, because his issues here seem to demonstrate a lot of what is wrong with nineties comics. There’s a perception that nineties comics were a wasteland, and I’d argue that’s hardly fair. There were any number of important and iconic and clever comics being written inside and outside the mainstream, it’s just that particular art styles and writing styles became dominant.
There are several problems with Lobdell’s writing. The most obvious is his awkward reliance on cliches. Okay, I know that this is the X-Men we’re talking about, but it’s no need for such lazy writing. At least when Fabian Niceza falls back on those familiar storytelling devices, he’s honest enough to have the characters point it out. Instead, Lobdell just used these sorts of outdated plot devices without a hint of self-awareness or irony. “I should take this opportunity to slay them — to cull the chaff from the wheat,” the villain Apocalypse suggests as he stands of a bunch of subdued X-Men, “but to slaughter an unconscious foe is so — unseemly.”That’s just bad writing.
There’s also a surreal scene where Jean Gray is held at the mercy of mechanical tentacles, “servo-arms that push and shove and paw and grope.” There’s actually no plot reason for this scene at all, and the villain seems to have no reason for subjecting her to it. It just reads like the sort of gratuitous objectification that Lobdell got into trouble for last year when writing Red Hood and the Outlaws. It feels slightly disgusting and disturbing, particularly because there’s no need for it. Artist Brandon Peterson even draws a metal phallus near her mouth (when most seem to end in claws) in case we didn’t get the “naughty tentacle” associations.
In fairness to Lobdell, although he is easily the weakest writer of the three, he does a nice job scripting the event’s epilogue, including a nice little subplot that sees Charles granted the ability to walk, if only for a short while. The interactions between Charles and Jubilee make the bond between Charles and his extended family somewhat explicit, with the bald telepath now a grandfather to a diverse range of mutants and individuals. It doesn’t counteract the criticisms of Lobdell’s writing (in fact, it’s just as on-the-nose as the other issues collected here), but it is a nice issue.
There are a few nice moments scattered throughout. I particularly like the way the book allowed Wolverine to continue smoking, even though the writers knew the risks of lung cancer. “Uhm,” Cable remarks, “where I come from — smoking isn’t considered very smart.” Editor Joe Quesada would ban Wolverine from smoking, on the basis that it might encourage youngsters to do the same, although I never understood such censorship. Here, it’s clear that smoking is bad, and everybody is aware of it, but Wolverine just smokes anyway… because some people will smoke anyway. Besides, surely his healing factor negates any risk of cancer? And surely the fact that he has been known to kill in cold blood makes him less of a role model than his smoking habit? What about his drinking?
Still, the biggest problem with X-Cutioner’s Song is the lack of a strong thematic continuity between books. There’s never really a sense of what the event is “about”, apart from an attempt to reveal the identities of Stryfe and Cable. In fairness to Niceza, he tries to make that lack of a theme a theme unto itself – the assassination of Charles Xavier representing the fading of the potency of the “mutants as minority”allegory – but it’s never strong or clear enough to truly work.
I don’t have the same dislike of X-Cutioner’s Song that most commentators seem to have. In fact, I think it was a solid first attempt at something like this from three writers finding their feet. That said, I’m not sure that it should have been attempted in the first place. It has a handful of clever ideas and nice moments, which is enough to avoid it becoming an empty waste of time, but it’s never essential and never truly magnificent. Still, there’s potential to be found in these creative teams, even if you can only really see the seeds of it in this crossover.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkdlGEVmApNOo5WnniJGb-sJsxR4jxSd4ver1wPk1c8275WP7bMdDceBX70Sv5VUiUNNk76_2nWFxQk-Oa7q5jn9oIGcSU0L3ZeEl3KK_SOFuPDjVjgV8SlIq4HOSc0uO8qFNCQY3jpgMe/s1600/571725.jpg)
ISBN: 0785100253
Price: $24.95
Publisher/Year: Marvel, 1994
Artist: Brandon Peterson, Jae Lee, Andy Kubert, Greg Capullo
Writer: Scott Lobdell, Peter David, Fabian Niceza
Collects: X-Factor #84-86, X-Force #16-18, X-Men #14-16, Uncanny X-Men #294-296
Rating: 3/5
In a way X-Cutioner’s Song marks a fairly significant turning point in the history of the X-Men franchise. The X-Men books were in a state of turmoil. They had lost their long-term writer Chris Claremont only recently, and Jim Lee had departed to work on other projects. The central theme of the books – exploring prejudice and racism – looked to be losing steam slightly as South Africa’s apartheid regime collapsed and the country developed into a truly democratic state. It seemed like the books were struggling to cope with all these changes occurring so rapidly, and X-Cutioner’s Song reads like an attempt to assert control on the franchise – as if to assure readers that everything was okay and it was business as usual.
“I’m still a little bit wary when I look back on these issues and I’m asked to write an intro for them,” Fabian Niceza’s introduction (reprinted from an earlier collection) suggests, “because for as much as I fondly recall the enthusiasm, the uncertainty, the fear and the gung-ho cockiness we mixed together in working on these stories, I also feel that it was a bit unfair, in retrospect, to expect us to hit a home run in our first time at bat.” It’s a fair point, to be honest, and it’s a brave confession. X-Cutioner’s Song isn’t a perfect crossover. It isn’t even a very good one. However, it is a deeply fascinating one in many ways, because you can detect the seismic shifts occurring in the background.
X-Cutioner’s Song truly ushers in the nineties, as far as X-Men crossovers go. Arguably the biggest crossover was still ahead, with Age of Apocalypse still a bit away, but X-Cutioner’s Song seemed like an attempt to pull the books kicking and screaming towards a new age. The event is, after all, built around the characters of Cable and Stryfe – two Liefeld creations who have come to represent the nineties for many readers. Lots of pouches, lots of guns, lots of scars, badass attitudes and a willingness to kill – without too much remorse or angst about it. For better or worse, the nineties were arriving – the biggest and boldest and loudest decade for Marvel’s merry mutants – and X-Cutioner’s Song feels like an attempt to welcome them.
However, you can sense the ties to the past, the sense that the book shouldn’t stray too far from “what worked” before. In particular, writers Fabian Niceza, Scott Lobdell and Peter David return to Chris Claremont’s ridiculously tangled Summers family tree. Much of the artwork in the collection – with the notable exception of Jae Lee’s superbly atmospheric and stylistic work on X-Factor – seems designed to recall the sort of sharp work Jim Lee used to turn out. That’s not to suggest that there weren’t new ideas (in fact, Niceza shrewdly points out that Stryfe’s Strike File sets up years worth of stories), but just to observe that the story is located at something of a crossroads between the past and the future.
I think it’s hard to make sense of the nineties, in hindsight. It was a post-Cold War, pre-9/11 world. The Berlin Wall had fallen, capitalism had won. There were conflicts, as there always are, but they were relatively contained and far away – places like Bosnia and Iraq. Chris Claremont had found a nice hook for Uncanny X-Men by tying it into the social issues of the day, crafting a racism allegory for a Civil Rights era comic book. What happens when there is nothing to respond to? What happens when the real-life situation driving your central metaphor expires?
X-Tinction Agenda, the last major X-Men crossover, had seen Claremont cling desperately to his “mutants-as-oppressed-minority” metaphor by presenting readers with a fictionalized counterpart to South Africa’s racist apartheid system, with the fascist state of Genosha. It was a last-ditch attempt to anchor the books to the issue of race, something that was becoming increasingly difficult in an increasingly PC world. That’s not to say there wasn’t mileage left in the metaphor (Grant Morrison would shrewdly play it out in New X-Men, as would Peter Milligan in X-Statix), but that it couldn’t continue to be used in the same way.
Even though Mandela was not yet President of South Africa, it was clear that the apartheid system in the country was being dismantled. The last bastion of such direct state-sanctioned racism was crumbling, and would soon be consigned to the history books. The issues of racial identity and equality were no longer problems that would require violent revolution or confrontation to resolve. The barriers had become more subtle, more nuanced. In Western Europe and America, the issue of equal rights for minorities became a problem requiring more thorough consideration and exploration, rather than the type of stuff that Claremont’s Uncanny X-Menhad been dealing with.
As such, it should be no surprise that X-Cutioner’s Song opens with the attempted assassination of Charles Xavier. After all, the dream is over, so to speak. Magneto had been removed from the book a little while ago, so placing Charles at death’s door seems like a fair way of acknowledging the ideological conflict between the two was a relic best left in the past. Of course, Magneto would inevitably return (in fact, Niceza concedes that he considered bringing Magneto back in the middle of this storyline) and Charles doesn’t die, but that opening issue makes a bold philosophical statement. The times, they are a-changin’.
However, the crossover suffers from a massive lack of consistency, as well as some difficulties with the general direction. As Niceza notes in his introduction, the writers handling the crossover were still relatively new to their individual assignments. To expect them to handle a massive crossover would be even more difficult, as they were still finding the voices for their own books. As such, the quality, tone and themes of the crossover seem to shift as we move from one chapter to the next – the crossover feels like the disjointed effort of three different authors with three different styles.
Niceza is perhaps the writer who does the best with the big superhero melodrama, and who seems to grasp the core of the crossover. He has a solid understanding of the core X-Men dynamics. In particular, I like his exploration of the idea of family with X-Men comics. After all, the X-Men are one giant surrogate family, covering for the fact that each of the members seems to have difficulty with their own biological relatives. Scott seems to get on better with his team mates than his brother and is, as the crossover notes, an absolute failure as a father. Peter uses the team to cope with his brother’s suicide, unsure how to tell the rest of his family.
X-Cutioner’s Song is the story of the tangled Summers family, juxtaposed against that of the X-Men family. By all accounts, Scott’s family is a broken unit, a group of people related by blood and cursed by a bond that none of them ever sought. Scott and Jean spend most of the story dealing with their failure as biological parents in isolation, on their own terms. In contrast, Professor Xavier spends the whole story surrounded by his surrogate family. Even unconscious, he’s never alone – despite the fact that he is not related to any of the team by blood. Apocalypse remarks that Xavier’s X-Men “play the part of the family” remarkably well, and Niceza’s Uncanny X-Men and X-Force issues tend to emphasis this point.
Indeed, Niceza’s issues seem to hit on the vague sense of existential ennui that was gripping the books, as they entered a completely new era – one where the central metaphor that had made them so successful in the past few decades was increasingly irrelevant. “Maybe it’s just the way o’ the world that did it,” Wolverine suggests. “Maybe the dream is dead. Maybe we should all stop pretendin’ it ain’t– an’ accept the fact we’re livin’ in a nightmare.”
Indeed, more than any other X-Men event, X-Cutioner’s Song is fascinating because so much of what is important to it is happening unseen in the past or in the future, though the story itself unfolds in a somewhat listless present. Stryfe is a rebel from the future, seeking to pay Scott and Jean back for “a legacy of hatred! a legacy of decay!” And yet we never see him develop as a character. We never really see what twisted him so much, or what it is that he’s responding to. The same is arguably true of Cable, who is stuck in a present fighting against a terrible future that is yet to materialize. And yet, X-Cutioner’s Song is never really about time travel. It’s just a crossover where all these sins – past and future – have come back to face the team in an almost contextless present. “How can they defeat me, when I am their tomorrow?” Stryfe asks.
In fairness, Niceza’s writing isn’t particular strong, but it isn’t particularly weak. It’s just straight-forward superhero stuff, for better or worse. I do like the way that he’ll acknowledge the old tried and tested cliches that he uses as he writes, rather than simply falling back on them as simple crutches. The problem is that each of the three writers have markedly different styles and approaches, and so it feels almost like the story is shifting genre as the reader moves from one chapter to the next.
Peter David, for example, proves a much more interesting character writer. His plotting seems to go through the motions, but his characters seem much more vibrant in his chapters than in any of the others. Indeed, one might imagine that a team-up between Cable and Wolverine and Bishop would be a pain to read as nineties machismo oozes off the page, but David makes their dialogue sparkle. Consider this brief interaction between Cable and Wolverine as the former tries to rework his transporter system:
How long will it take?
If I do it myself, about twenty, twenty-five minutes.
And if we help?
An hour and a half.
The other side of the coin is that David’s characters feel somewhat wrong when handled by other writers. Members of his X-Force, in particular Madrox or Strong Guy, seem slightly “off”in the hands of the other two writers on the crossover – it’s clear that Lobdell and Niceza are trying to channel David’s witty self-aware dialogue, but it doesn’t work quite as well.
Don’t get me wrong. I know that various writers have different ways of writing various characters, and I know that’s one of the necessary facets of a shared universe. Truth be told, I generally don’t mind if two writers have slightly different voices for the same character – after all, they are different books and these are fictional characters. However, it’s quite jarring when structured as part of one crossover, as you change between writers for the same group of characters, and they end up sounding subtly different from chapter to chapter.
Reading David’s chapters made me wish that Marvel would consider releasing his X-Factor runs (both the one here and the current one) in a nice oversized hardcover. It’s one of the X-Men books that very clearly has its own particular voice, and its own place in the shared universe. Of course, I’d also love to see his Incredible Hulk run collected in a similar format, or even in the omnibus line, but I imagine that’s a long way off.
However, the weakest of the trinity of writers working on the book is Scott Lobdell. It’s somewhat ironic that Lobdell would be the writer tapped by DC to script several of their “new 52″ titles, because his issues here seem to demonstrate a lot of what is wrong with nineties comics. There’s a perception that nineties comics were a wasteland, and I’d argue that’s hardly fair. There were any number of important and iconic and clever comics being written inside and outside the mainstream, it’s just that particular art styles and writing styles became dominant.
There are several problems with Lobdell’s writing. The most obvious is his awkward reliance on cliches. Okay, I know that this is the X-Men we’re talking about, but it’s no need for such lazy writing. At least when Fabian Niceza falls back on those familiar storytelling devices, he’s honest enough to have the characters point it out. Instead, Lobdell just used these sorts of outdated plot devices without a hint of self-awareness or irony. “I should take this opportunity to slay them — to cull the chaff from the wheat,” the villain Apocalypse suggests as he stands of a bunch of subdued X-Men, “but to slaughter an unconscious foe is so — unseemly.”That’s just bad writing.
There’s also a surreal scene where Jean Gray is held at the mercy of mechanical tentacles, “servo-arms that push and shove and paw and grope.” There’s actually no plot reason for this scene at all, and the villain seems to have no reason for subjecting her to it. It just reads like the sort of gratuitous objectification that Lobdell got into trouble for last year when writing Red Hood and the Outlaws. It feels slightly disgusting and disturbing, particularly because there’s no need for it. Artist Brandon Peterson even draws a metal phallus near her mouth (when most seem to end in claws) in case we didn’t get the “naughty tentacle” associations.
In fairness to Lobdell, although he is easily the weakest writer of the three, he does a nice job scripting the event’s epilogue, including a nice little subplot that sees Charles granted the ability to walk, if only for a short while. The interactions between Charles and Jubilee make the bond between Charles and his extended family somewhat explicit, with the bald telepath now a grandfather to a diverse range of mutants and individuals. It doesn’t counteract the criticisms of Lobdell’s writing (in fact, it’s just as on-the-nose as the other issues collected here), but it is a nice issue.
There are a few nice moments scattered throughout. I particularly like the way the book allowed Wolverine to continue smoking, even though the writers knew the risks of lung cancer. “Uhm,” Cable remarks, “where I come from — smoking isn’t considered very smart.” Editor Joe Quesada would ban Wolverine from smoking, on the basis that it might encourage youngsters to do the same, although I never understood such censorship. Here, it’s clear that smoking is bad, and everybody is aware of it, but Wolverine just smokes anyway… because some people will smoke anyway. Besides, surely his healing factor negates any risk of cancer? And surely the fact that he has been known to kill in cold blood makes him less of a role model than his smoking habit? What about his drinking?
Still, the biggest problem with X-Cutioner’s Song is the lack of a strong thematic continuity between books. There’s never really a sense of what the event is “about”, apart from an attempt to reveal the identities of Stryfe and Cable. In fairness to Niceza, he tries to make that lack of a theme a theme unto itself – the assassination of Charles Xavier representing the fading of the potency of the “mutants as minority”allegory – but it’s never strong or clear enough to truly work.
I don’t have the same dislike of X-Cutioner’s Song that most commentators seem to have. In fact, I think it was a solid first attempt at something like this from three writers finding their feet. That said, I’m not sure that it should have been attempted in the first place. It has a handful of clever ideas and nice moments, which is enough to avoid it becoming an empty waste of time, but it’s never essential and never truly magnificent. Still, there’s potential to be found in these creative teams, even if you can only really see the seeds of it in this crossover.
Wednesday, June 4, 2014
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D)
System: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D)
Type: Tabletop
Publisher: Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. (TSR)
Overall rating (1-10): 7
Before Wizards of the Coast (WotC) bought the rights and created Dungeons & Dragons 3.0, there was TSR's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D). A simplified D20 system well before D20 was solidified and made opened source, and before the inclusion of skills.
The biggest flaw with AD&D is THAC0 (To Hit Armor Class 0). Armor Class was a whole different monster than it is in the current incarnation of D&D. A lower AC indicated that a creature was more difficult to hit. An unarmored human had an AC of 10, and armor lowered a character's armor class. Powerful creatures would usually have an armor class lower than 0.
In Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, a character or monster's ability to strike successfully was indicated by its THAC0, the minimum roll needed on a 20-sided die "To Hit Armor Class 0". The die roll needed to hit other armor classes could be computed by subtracting the armor class from the THAC0. The lower one's THAC0, the more likely a hit would be successful.
The term "advanced" does not imply a higher level of skill required to play, nor exactly a higher level of or better gameplay; only the rules themselves are a new and advanced game. In a sense this version name split off to be viewed separately from the basic version. The three core rulebooks are the Monster Manual, the Player's Handbook, and the Dungeon Master's Guide; later supplements included Deities & Demigods, Fiend Folio, Monster Manual II, Oriental Adventures and Unearthed Arcana. This was followed by a fairly constant addition of more specific setting works and optional rule supplements.
The great thing is that you could actually run a game with just the 3 core books. There were a number of published adventures ranging a huge range of level's for player's. You also have the option of other campaign settings such as Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance; each of which add a new level of creativeness for dungeon masters and players alike.
FINAL ANALYSIS:
As this system as a precursor to the modern D20 system, I feel that most modern gamers would be able to learn AD&D fairly easily. The only real hang-up for modern gamers would be THAC0, but that's easily remedied.
As much as you can run a game with the 3 core books, I highly recommend that addition of the supplemental books mentioned above as well as possibly the campaign setting books. These books add more flavor and possibilities for your campaigns.
Unlike the D20 system, AD&D wasn't really setup to allow players to use monsters as races.. but with the right tooling from you Dungeon Master, I'm sure you can make it work.
Sunday, June 1, 2014
The Witching Hour
Title: The Witching Hour
ISBN: 1563899450
Price: $19.95
Publisher/Year: Vertigo, 2000
Artist: Chris Bachalo, Art Thibert
Writer: Jeph Loeb
Collects: The Witching Hour #1-3
Rating: 4/5
The original title the Witching Hour was a quirky, highly readable anthology comic from DC’s 1970s horror/mystery stable, with the early issues particularly memorable due to some extremely tasty contributions from arch-stylist Alex Toth. The pithy, spooky, mordantly ironic yarns were recounted by three iconic hosts representing the Wiccan concept of maiden, mother and crone and nominally based on the Weird sisters from Macbeth: namely Cynthia, Mildred and Mordred. The series ran from 1969 to 1978.
In 1999, with the company’s Vertigo imprint successfully reinventing the horror comic month by month, a number of old properties were given the proverbial fresh spin and Jeph Loeb and Chris Bachalo produced a delightfully dark, character-driven mystery yarn as a three issue prestige-format miniseries, promptly collected in a volume that unjustly vanished with nary a ripple of comment. Hopefully this time out it will garner some better press and attention…
In Manhattan, vivacious, exotic Amanda Collins visits a disparate, desperate selection of characters, daring them to trade-in their pasts and seize new futures. Dispensing blank business-cards and new realities to the lost, lonely and dangerous with but a wish, she seems the epitome of wild chance and missed opportunities, but Amanda too is a prisoner of the past, with a sorcerous heritage reaching back to 1660 and a romantic clash between Christian propriety and pagan license.
As other mysterious mystics also enfold fate-touched mortals in some enigmatic grand scheme – are they Amanda’s coven comrades or opponents in some grand game? – a centuries old debt is assessed… and perhaps repaid…
Vague as that sounds, it is all you need for this complex, intriguing, savage, seductive, sexy and additively arcane experiment in sequential story-telling. The connections linking Amanda to her own past, her witchy companions and all the apparent innocents who accept her highly suspicious offer are deliberately obscure; thus the tale unfolds on a multitude of levels and the reader actually has to engage the brain to divine the hidden secrets of the Witching Hour.
Bachalo’s art is magic of the purely pictorial kind: as light and airy as clouds and deeply, densely, information-packed like a favorite grimoire. The section collecting his design sketches are sleek and pretty, everything an art-lover could want to see.
This is a book that washes over you like a wave, all mood and moment, and will offer a rare challenge for adult readers tired of being spoon-fed their fiction-fix.
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