#antis should actually learn the basic logic of why fiction is different than reality and learned that harassing strangers online is what | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

whydidireadthis · 7 years ago

Text

X-Treme X-Men (volume 1, 2001)

When you hear “extreme”, what springs to mind? Naturally, there’s the dictionary-correct definition of “exceptional” or “to the utmost extent”, but most of us who lived through the 90s (or who learned about them after the fact, I assume) can’t hear the word without hearing it as “EXTREEEEME!!”

We can’t divorce it from Mountain Dew, snowboarding, and ludicrous color schemes, of extremity not in reality, but in artifice -- a commandeering of the term in a vernacular sense to suit marketing and lazy youthful pseudo-rebellion, curated and served up ready for consumption by half-assed youth.

Appropriate then that X-Treme X-Men reads like Chris Claremont’s midlife crisis, but expressed through a small, awkward collection of characters seemingly hand-picked to be the least-favorite mutant superheroes we used to read about.

Note that I’m referring to the first series to bear this title, which started in 2001, in the wake of the then-new X-Men movie series...and the less said about that donkey mess, the better. This series is not the same one that came around a decade later, which aside from the last couple of issues was very good, featuring Dazzler and dimension-hopping. Just to clear that up. I’ll deal with that one another day.

The Genocide Slide

X-Treme X-Men slides in on the supremely awkward period where Marvel was desperate to confuse people into reading the comics by having them bear vague, superficial similarities to the movies. So of course, Magneto had to be their archfoe and doing Bad Guy Things, never mind that the justification for those things -- and quite a lot of the issues the X-Men are supposed to be dealing with -- come from a literal attempted genocide with massive casualties, both mutant and non-mutant alike.

And that’s really the first and most glaring problem with X-Treme X-Men and, indeed, every X-Men story and series from this point in time: a scope problem. After Genosha gets attacked in what absolutely has to be an attempt at genocide, an abhorrent evil in the eyes of every single civilization on the planet and several others as well, anti-mutant hysteria is not going to be acceptable anymore, I don’t care how you try to justify it. An entire race of people being targeted and countless numbers dying means you shut the fuck up about how boo hoo, you’re scared the mean nasty muties will take the jobs from hard-working Americunts.

It really shows, in a lot of the writing, that none of the writers even remotely understand the struggle of a mistreated minority. Like...at all. But especially Chris Claremont who, well past his prime as scribe of the X-people, tries to make his version of fetch happen with the X-Treme team.

And yes, one of them does snowboard. I’m not making this up.

But the biggest problem I had with Claremont’s writing is that, again and again, people who should know better (like Tessa and Charles Xavier himself) are either awkwardly forced into the “straight pride” question or presented with it as if it’s an airtight counterpoint.

I realize some of you might not know what this is, so allow me to digress slightly in order to explain.

“Gay pride event, ugh. Why don’t we get a straight pride event?”

I’ll even allow for you to have a moment to think this may be a reasonable question, before you realize how absolutely fucking stupid it is when anyone asks the best question that logically answers it:

“What, you mean like every other thing ever?”

I’ve long campaigned for a reboot for the X-Men, because Genosha even existing in the first place...was really going too far, but Genosha existing as an anti-mutant hell, then turned into a sovereign mutant nation, then getting wiped out by Sentinels...was way past too far. But in a post-Genosha setting as where this takes place, it really is remarkably stupid to hear Tessa (now called Sage for some reason, probably because it’s extreme!) repeatedly bitch and whine about the mutants they encountered not wanting to join them and Xavier being more concerned about mutant rights and advancing the cause of mutants...after an entire nation of them was brutally murdered. And she repeatedly asks the question, what about the non-mutants, are they just making time until their species comes to an end? Who champions their cause?

Oh, you mean like the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, the Defenders, the Heroes for Hire, the Invaders, or any other superhero affiliation in the world?

This is yet another reason why the X-Men existing in the same universe as the rest of them makes anti-mutant insanity so nonsensical, but it makes it even worse when even one of the characters in a book centered around mutants -- and she is supposed to be a computerlike mind and one of the most intelligent people in existence -- cannot understand this very simple thing.

Could it be that Xavier is finally understanding that he really has to choose something to concentrate on, instead of trying to deal with every other problem on the planet and mutants too?

Well, that’s something that the other (terrible) titles at the time often ignored or failed to deal with but pretended they were addressing. We had Morrison’s absolutely embarrassing New X-Men, which I’m pained to remember. I can only imagine the pretentious college crowd who wanked to it constantly have either forgotten it by now or pretend they have. Of course, we also had Chuck Austen throwing in his mostly-terrible contributions there too, in both the other X-Men titles and, eventually, New X-Men as well.

Basically, the early 2000s were one of the worst times for the X-Men that have ever happened in the entire run of the whole franchise. And I mean that in both an in-character and a real-life sense; the X-Men series were utterly garbage, and the events happening in-world were wretched and miserable, and usually garbage too. It certainly didn’t help when you had people like Tessa actually lending credibility to blatantly asinine non-arguments.

It’s especially funny that when it’s hurled at Charles -- and by Ororo, no less -- he doesn’t even give it the dignity of a response, which I thought was nice. The school, he maintains, will give refuge to a mutant boy implicated in a murder investigation, rather than giving him over to a court that is obviously going to be biased against him because he’s a mutant. It raises a lot of questions which, of course, it never once addresses; it also points out, probably quite unintentionally, that mutants cannot any longer rely on human society to deliver any of the things that society is supposed to. They cannot rely on impartiality or justice. They cannot depend on fair treatment from government. They certainly cannot take for granted that anyone who isn’t a mutant and in much the same situation as they are would even understand or even could understand and fairly deal with such a problem.

I don’t think this is too complicated an issue to expect a writer of the most put-upon, targeted, and abused minority in an entire fictional universe to be able to understand and portray plausibly and in an engaging, accessible manner. But maybe I’m asking too much.

Regardless, I think it’s pretty easy to figure out why, even if it’s terrible writing, when Magneto decides he’s had it with humanity. After a near-genocide caused by an attack -- using giant robots whose development was sponsored by a government -- on a sovereign nation that made it their thing to be pro-mutant, it’s kind of the fault of every government that didn’t issue any sort of statement of support or protection for mutants, in the light of such a tragedy. It’s hard to feel like you can give over your agency and safety, much less the structure of your society, to people who apparently couldn’t care less whether you live or die. And the people who stayed quiet and didn’t voice their support, didn’t decry the horror of it, and didn’t insist on something being done...well, past a point, it’s kind of their faults too. But all this is way too complicated for superhero comics.

Which kind of makes you want to ask, why did they think it was a great idea to do this if they had no idea how to handle it and repeatedly refused to do so?

X-Cluded X-Men

X-Treme X-Men is, in some ways, better off for being separated from much of anything going on in the other titles, but it doesn’t make it a good series. It’s nice that they kept the same creative team for the entire forty-six-issue run, and Larroca and Liquid!’s art really is distinct and presents a unique vision of the world. Having Claremont write the whole run did at least give him the opportunity to introduce plots that he wanted to do and resolve them as he wanted to do. Consistency means a lot in comics, and in the superhero world, even the very specific X-circles, there is a large problem with that. See also Morrison’s abysmal New X-Men.

And before anyone says a thing about mentioning it twice, yes, I think Grant Morrison is horribly overrated, but the man is capable of decent writing and even good writing sometimes. He’s just never reined in and constantly celebrated as if he’s some sort of genius, whatever he shits out. New X-Men was different, and I won’t lie, the X-Men had needed something different because they were getting stale and uninteresting.

But you can’t just do something different and call it great because it’s different. Just because something has become so bad overall that people are losing interest does not mean that doing something different, whether or not it regains that interest, is an improvement. All it means is that you changed something and piqued people’s curiosity for a while. This is how Frank Miller built his career, on doing things that were different...but wholly inconsistent with anything that came before, and not very good to boot. You can’t just take a sharp left turn and expect IT’S DIFFERENT!! to handwave your lack of giving a fuck about what you were supposed to have learned before coming onto the creative team of a story that’s run decades before you came along.

Which brings me to some of the things that really failed X-Treme X-Men, and were indeed failed by Claremont. While turds like Fantomex and Doctor Douchebag or whoever his fucking name is, show up and never fuck off or die in New X-Men (and oh how I wish they of all people would), X-Treme X-Men is saddled with some newer-introduced mutants itself: a man from India named Neal Shaara who goes by Thunderbird for no reason at all, and Heather and Davis Cameron, Lifeguard and Slipstream, respectively. All three were created by Claremont, which makes it even more utterly bizarre that he just dropped them like hot potatoes during the run. They didn’t even get reasonable justifications for leaving or being utterly forgotten, they just fucked off and were gone, and nobody seemed to remember them afterwards.

The thing that really bothered me the most is that Davis actually started to develop some kind of relationship with Storm that she seemed to be very into, but in the space of a handful of issues, Davis just vanishes when his sister manifests a monstrous appearance. Which, considering everything Davis went through, including stimulating a potentially dangerous mutant power to save her and almost being killed in battle, seems like a whole lot of bullshit totally inconsistent with his character. So he left because he couldn’t deal with her having a weird appearance? There’s certainly no way that could’ve developed into an interesting, character-defining storyline examining the Camerons and propelling them into being well-rounded characters or anything.

At least we got some hilarious addressing of how poorly Nightcrawler had become written since his Excalibur days. Here was a character who had kept his faith in God, in good in the world, but it didn’t define him; he was no preacher or proselytizer, and the few times his faith was shown were dire times where he was in need of hope, like when the X-Men were sure they would die because of implanted Brood.

Not so, said the XTREEEEEME 90S!! This was a time when all of the X-Men were distilled down to cartoonish, shallow, barely two-dimensional caricatures of the more complex characters they once were! Kurt quickly became a bible-thumping jackass it was hard to sympathize with, which of course wasn’t helped by his embarrassing appearance in that cinematic cure for insomnia, X2. It wasn’t Alan Cumming’s fault, but that...was not Nightcrawler.

And neither was it Nightcrawler in the comics. So to have him come to Davis and give him the then-usual “God made me this way and I’m studying to be ordained" and Davis just deciding immediately after to leave and more or less never again showing up in any comic since 2002...is screamingly funny for me. It’s balm for my soul.

Compare and contrast with Kurt introducing himself to Kitty Pryde -- a young teenager -- some twenty years earlier, and her managing to deal with it and get past it, and see him as a person and not as a frightening demonic figure, because he’s charming and kind and shows through his actions that he’s worth knowing. The Kurt at the time of X-Treme X-Men is just an obnoxious loser who really gives any sort of spiritual path a bad name. What happened to the fun-loving swashbuckler who made Uncanny X-Men and the first issues of Excalibur so much fun? Oh well, it doesn’t matter since years of legal trouble with one of Kurt’s creators meant they couldn’t easily use the character. Not that they’ve particularly improved him since being able to use him again, but that’s a story for another day.

Honestly, the Camerons and Thunderneal weren’t bad ideas at heart, but it felt like Claremont just lost interest in trying to make them happen and dropped them. It’s sad to see, especially since Davis and Ororo made an interesting pair, and Heather had some intriguing powers. Thunderneal was basically a giant asshole (like many characters of the time, desperate to show how hard and extreme they were), but he had potential to become something and never did. It’s not like they were around for a long time and just stalled out, either; Thunderneal came from X-Men #100, which was just a year earlier, and the Camerons were introduced early on in X-Treme X-Men! And none of them really ever got to become characters.

There was also some guy called Red Lotus, but I kept forgetting he existed, as I just now forgot he existed while writing this. Apparently everyone else also forgot he existed, because even after the asinine debacle that was Scarlet Witch being a fucking menace to reality, nobody thought to check if he still had powers or not. Because that’s how genetics work.

You Can’t Go Homily Again

Really, characters made up a lot of the problems in X-Treme X-Men. Whether it’s the “straight people baby daddy problems” that pop up in place of actual character development, or whether it’s introducing too many new characters and just having people tell us how powerful and impressive we’re supposed to think they are, few of the cast actually get to do anything meaningful.

The ones that we know by this time also don’t really mesh up with how they’ve acted, ever, up to this point. We have weird Stepford Gambit, and I mean that as a reference to the film, not to the Cuckoos, and Rogue’s powers suddenly work completely differently than they ever have before, which is handled by pretending like that’s how they always worked. I could understand if it were lampshaded as a secondary mutation, like Emma’s, but it was only treated like that’s how we were supposed to believe they had always worked. But that was never how they worked, ever, at any point.

Of course, Gambit can’t have his powers most of the series, for some unknowable reason. He gets treated like absolute shit for his appearances in the whole run though, so you can probably understand why I was glad to see him and Rogue flit off in some hastily-excused jaunt, which seems to be the only idea Rogue ever has when things aren’t rainbows and sunshine in the X-Men. At least it means we get rid of Rogue for a while -- I find her utterly insufferable at this point, and her relationship with Gambit is incredibly toxic -- and as this isn’t the “main” X-title, we usually don’t have to deal with Wolverine either.

Thank god for that.

Storm is basically a bitch 24/7, with the occasional glimpse of the character we once loved. You’d think that, being Claremont, who wrote some of Ororo’s best moments and most characteristic stories that explored her strength as a person and as a human being and not as a goddess or a mutant warrior, he could write her strongly as a compelling leader for a team. Nope! She’s an asshole who is totally okay with people being put in mortal danger, sometimes by her, who has remarkably little in the way of authentic emotion.

The only thing that made her tolerable, for a very short time, was the blossoming thing she was developing with Davis. Good thing Nightcrawler took care of that little problem!

Bishop is boring at best and annoying at worst, and Tessa runs hot and cold at any given point in the series. One issue, she’s the only one that makes sense and nobody listens to her, for no reason. The next issue, she acts the same way but has inexplicably become an idiot and clearly isn’t thinking in any manner that a supposed computer mind should be. Cannonball shows up eventually and there’s something something X-Corps et cetera, which is presented with no context and never explained, but he’s another character who is very difficult to give two fucks about, especially with the dull way Claremont writes him...which is, yet again, nothing short of perplexing given that he had written the character much better before then.

Plodding Plotting

But the lack of context is something that struck me, reading through them; there’s no helpful editor’s note to refer readers to issues of the other series, as there had been. I don’t know if it’s unique to the format I was reading these in, but it seems like a stunt filled with the pretentious assurance that “comic books aren’t for kids anymore” and naturally, referring readers to other events in other series would somehow cheapen the whole experience. By giving them context they could seek out, or you know, any sense of what the hell is actually going on. There’s even a “God Loves, Man Kills 2″ that either needed a reference or the subtitle “Electric Boogaloo”.

The problem is that if you make the decision not to give readers any frame of reference, you have to make it abundantly clear in what you’re writing so that they don’t need that external context. As you might have guessed from what I’ve said up to now, this is another point that Claremont fails on, and almost nothing he writes gives readers that essential context. I had to sit and think back over years of comic knowledge I’d intended to forget, and even then I had to look on the internet to fill in the gaps!

Claremont’s plots are also needlessly protracted, beyond any reasonable measure. Things that could have, and really should have, taken an issue or two to resolve, instead are dragged out into issue after issue of nothing much happening. I could understand if anything happened we could care about, but so much nothing happens in X-Treme X-Men that you start to believe the extreme quality of it is that it dares to make a comic about wasting time. They’re superheroes, they have fabulous powers beyond human ability...and they busy themselves with things that have nothing to do with anything. At times, things happen expressly to stand in the way of the plot advancing, and at those times, it’s almost invariably when you as a reader will want the plot to advance most of all, if only just to get closer to the end of the story and move on to something else.

But most glaring and inexcusable of all is that, despite having the same creative team for the entire run, it feels like Claremont never really commits to any of the storylines he starts. He tosses something at the readers during a perfunctory conflict plot and then seemingly forgets about it, or handwaves a facile non-resolution that confirms he’s basically just wasted everyone’s time that gave a shit about seeing the story resolve in any meaningful way. This contributed to a feeling of being adrift in a sea without purpose, without destination or any means to get there. The X-Treme X-Men could ultimately be removed from the universe entirely and, aside from a very few limited circumstances during the run, not be missed.

Which would be fine, if all they were doing was very pinpoint-specific, niche work. But at times they do things like, say, single-handedly fighting off an alien invasion with about a half-dozen members, while groups like the Avengers are shown on-panel just sitting around doing nothing about it. And for the rest of the Xers to be to determined to help out their comrades in the last issue (with absolutely no real stakes and nothing on the line) they sure didn’t have a fuck to give when the tiny splinter group was all that stood between their home planet and a horrific genocidal alien force.

X-Treme X-Men is an oblique relic of a time when the X-Men very unfortunately hit a broader public eye and a wider range of consumers. And I’m not saying that because it’s always a bad thing when something in a niche goes for mainstream recognition (though it often is), but because Marvel could have maintained the comics as a consistent, if not spectacularly creative, home for the X-Men we knew and at least tolerated.

Unfortunately, Marvel went for the brass ring, knowing it was brass but thinking that because it was shiny, it would be just the thing. It wasn’t, of course, and they ended up with several very different writers’ very different concepts of a team that had enough problems before their publisher decided to mix things up a bit. There was a tremendous disconnection at the time, both between the teams and their titles, and between the readers and Marvel’s creative staff.

You could read X-Treme X-Men over and be bored and mildly frustrated by the uninteresting plots dredged up by a tired Chris Claremont, or you could read Grant Morrison’s New X-Men and witness a group of unrecognizable assholes having the opposite of adventures in a world you won’t give two shits about. Those are basically your major options to get a window on the time, not that I think it’s a particularly good idea either way.

At least with X-Treme X-Men, you aren’t reading the painfully horrible X-Men Forever, which would come about half a decade after the end of X-Treme X-Men and show, once and for all, that Chris Claremont was completely out of ideas and had forgotten, if he ever knew, how to write X-Men. X-Treme X-Men’s worst offense is that it’s boring and pointless, and while its writing isn’t great, it doesn’t quite reach the crushing lows that X-Men Forever would in 2009. Overall, you’re probably better off reading X-Treme X-Men than New X-Men, and at the very least, you’ll feel later like you just read the last tired issues of a failing series that went on too long and not the pretentious babbling of someone so far up his own ass that he’s somehow found Narnia.

But it’s still not a good read. It’s consistent, and that counts for something, but consistently boring is still boring.

#x-treme x-men #x-men #writing critique #comic review

1 note · View note