Tuesday, May 04, 2004
We Lose
 Uncanny X-Men #444 will be on store shelves this Wednesday, and all I can say in regards to it is: we lose. "We" being those of us who enjoyed Grant Morrison's run. What we've lost is even the pretense of forward movement on the X-titles. For all practical purposes, Marvel may as well have called this stunt "Rewind" rather than "Reload." For example, let's take the cover. I'm not usually one to complain about the pin-up/poster style covers which are currently in vogue, but what exactly does this cover tell us about the content of the book? Is Nightcrawler's tail somehow integral to the plot?
And we can already see which character is going to be done the greatest disservice by the new creative teams. Emma Frost, while Morrison was writing the character, was compelling and multi-layered. We're only a few pages in and already she's been reduced to a flat stereotype of the home-wrecking bitch.
And as for the conflicts dealt with by the book, it looks as if we can expect a return to the "people in spandex hitting each other" model. Why, look, it's a gratuitously Arabic villain. I'm sure we won't be seeing any over-simplified metaphors for real-world political issues popping up in this run.
But what really gets me, is that both Bishop and Phoeni-er, Marvel Girl are appearing in this book. Two characters from two different and contradictory alternate futures. That doesn't require being intimately familiar with all the nuances of the last twenty years of X-Men continuity to understand at all. I guess even the pretense of making the books accessible to new readers has been abandoned.
And, as usual, you can tell Claremont wrote this book, as his usual over-reliance on captions and expository dialogue is on full display. At least the Alan Davis art is gorgeous, which is to be expected. And man, does he draw a sexy Wolverine!
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