Writer: Greg Pak
Artists: Tyler Kirkham (p), Sal Regla and Jay Leisten (i), John Starr (colors)
Publisher: Marvel Comics
I’m sorry to say that I have nothing but complaints to offer after reading this issue. Well, I’ve pretty much had nothing but complaints since I started reading issue #1 of this frustrating series, but the many shortcomings of this pitiful effort have finally coalesced in my mind. I think I shall write a review.
Remember when X4, or whatever it was called, came out? That startlingly incompetent miniseries that saw the X-Men and the Fantastic Four swap powers amid the grotesquery that is Pat Lee’s non-mechanoid art? Well, I punished myself for having bought the first four issues by refusing to buy the miniseries’ fifth and final one. And really, how stupid is that? To invest in the first 80 percent of a story and then quit when you get to the last chapter? That’s hardly even worthy of the term “protest.”
Well, I’m seriously considering saving my three bucks when the last chapter of this mini hits the racks, too.
As a fan of Grant Morrison’s epic X-Men treatment on which this miniseries is based, I ought to be more interested that a storyline is going back and trying to explain a few things about the Stepford Cuckoos, whose appearance in New X-Men, completely without preamble, was certainly conventional enough by Morrison’s standards. But the triplets (nee quintuplets) have stuck out as a collection of glaringly unsupported character devices by X-Men mythos standards. An attempt to explore their backstory while incorporating another quirky element of Morrison’s run – the World of Weapon Plus – certainly deserves the conceptual green light.
And, without giving away too much here at the series’ penultimate issue, there does finally seem to be a nugget of a worthy Big Concept here: that the Cuckoos are really part of a giant, collective, genetically engineered Phoenix capture device. But, as I said, it seems to be just a nugget, since I have zero faith that all the fascinating implications of such a revelation (if I’ve gotten it right) will be adequately explored by this creative team with just one issue to go.
But enough of this wistful preface. Probably my most nagging complaint of the series as it has actually been published is the trivial matter of the name, Weapon Plus. You see, someone on the creative team here must not have actually read the Morrison work on which this story was founded, since the dialogue persists in misnaming the outfit as “Weapons Plus,” with an “s,” as if it’s some discount outfitter for genocidal maniacs. Names are actually important. Getting them correct demonstrates credibility. If Steven Spielberg had promoted the forthcoming Transformers movie he’s producing by telling everyone how much he loved the character of Optimum Prime, leader of the Autorobots, you’d probably detect a whiff of cluelessness, wouldn’t you?
More central to the deflation I feel in reading this series has been the tepid art by Top Cow’s Tyler Kirkham. Look, the series is already on difficult artistic footing when it’s conceived as a story revolving around three identical looking characters whose only distinguishing visual features are the colors of their pajamas. Throw in their two resurrected identical sisters and a heavy helping of Emma Frost – who, it seems, bears a striking resemblance to the Stepford girls not by accident – and you have the potential for unbearable visual monotony panel after panel, page after page, issue after issue, as the art relies on six near-indistinguishable faces. Not even eye color can serve to differentiate the ladies, as they all have featureless glassy orbs instead of normal eyes.
Well, Kirkham certainly delivers in the monotony department, sad to say. Top Cow artists all must have a certain shtick, no doubt, to be counted among the “herd” as it were. They have to be able to “draw the ladies,” if you know what I mean. Now, the fact that the stars of this show are all teenagers suggests that a more bosom-oriented artist wouldn’t be the right choice, and Kirkham is certainly not one of those. Instead, his style seems to be focused on his ability to draw dark, alluring eyes and luscious lips. In fact, you can almost tell that many of the panels seem to be oriented around those features (though, lacking irises, this particular skill is mostly wasted), and the rest of the figure lines are practically an afterthought.
Layout in each panel is problematic, too. It’s often quite bland, with stiff, static poses and weak backgrounds. You can tell Greg Pak is aiming for widescreen, cinematic moments, but the page layout completely fails to capture that spirit.
Conveying action from one moment to the next is another difficulty. In one scene, a glorified extra – a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, it so happens – gets to take Wolverine’s place in a fastball special. He flies through the air, but never clearly comes down. The art forgets about him until a few panels later, where we see him dangling from some piece of debris somewhere, having apparently arrested his fall. Sense of space? Of height? Of dimensional context? Nada.
Storywise, the X-Men are mostly wasted here. Wolverine and Colossus stand around. Cyclops stands around shooting eye blasts up at things. Colossus had, I believe, exactly one line of dialogue, and it was delivered in a balloon floating in from off-panel, situated between the backs of two other people’s heads as they faced, well, nothing. Such use of art, space and character are not why the unique medium of comics was created.
And the Cuckoos … well, they work best as a collective, because they certainly have not been given any individuality here. If pressed, I could probably name all five from memory, but I could not tell you from one page to the next which of them is which over the course of this miniseries. Let’s see … Celeste. I had to double-check just now, but she’s the one in this issue who manifests the Phoenix force. Eighty percent of the way through this story about the Cuckoos, and I still can’t tell you anything about any one of the Cuckoos.
And really, what are the five of them doing? Two of them are dead, then they’re alive. Three of them are flying around, then two of them are swallowed up in pods. The fifth one is the Phoenix, then she’s not, then she is. The third and fourth get out of their pods, but now they look just like the two zombie sisters, since they’ve been given flesh again but are still dead. Then they’re back in pods again, or something. Sigh.
There really is a good concept here lost amid all the water treading, judging by the last page reveal (if I can call it that). It’s just that the fifth issue of a five issue series is not an adequate time to begin addressing your good concept.
When Phoenix: Endsong debuted two years ago, it certainly seemed that Marvel’s X-office was going back to the well one last time too many. As it turned out, Greg Pak struck gold and provided a Phoenix story that actually seemed to achieve closure. It had heart, passion and a real sense of drama.
Phoenix: Warsong? I think I’ve been waiting for it to end since issue #1. The well has run dry.
For more of Paul’s reviews, commentary and publishing statistics, visit The Comic Glutton.
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