Tuesday 7 January 2014

Uncanny X-Men #265: Lost in the Storm

Uncanny X-Men #265 is just weird.  By this stage Uncanny is madly experimental book.  It's not even trying to tell a story about the X-Men going through a difficult period, it seems to have abandoned the concept of an ongoing narrative entirely.  Exemplifying this, #265 promises Storm on the cover, but then opens with a four-page sequence about a new subject species of the Shi'ar.   Which is not followed up within the issue.

Cut to: Storm (she has been de-aged, thanks to the Siege Perilous, and has reappeared in Cairo, in Illinois with no memory and is doing a bit of commissioned thievery; comics, man).   Rather than have these two plot threads interact like a normal weird comic would do, we instead bring in one of Claremont's odder villains, Nanny, who is still mad at Storm escaping for reasons that, in turn, escape me.

And then even that's all of it.  Indeed, there's another cutaway, to Val Cooper being controlled by the Shadow King, who is mad at Storm for historic reasons related in #117 or something.  We end up with this set of interlocking vendettas against a Storm who isn't even really "our" Storm, which I fail to give a damn about at all.

The thing is, I like experimental things, as a rule.  I'm a bit pretentious, like that.  But sometimes experiments fail.  And this tail end of the Claremont era is one of those times.  Part of the usual story about his departure is that editorial wanted him to bring to the X-Men back together at the mansion, and he didn't want to do that, he wanted to do interesting new things instead rather than get stuck in the past.

But this is not interesting new things.  As we found out in Gillen's run, X-Men doesn't need the school, but it does benefit from some baseline.  It is fundamentally a story about mutants who are being oppressed, rather than about any specific characters.  And I don't get the sense that this is to fill the gap until the X-Men reunite properly on Muir Island or something (like, say the Death of Superman was), it just feels like it's wildly spinning out of control.

3 comments:

  1. "(she has been de-aged, thanks to the Siege Perilous, and has reappeared in Cairo, in Illinois with no memory and is doing a bit of commissioned thievery; comics, man)."

    Actually, Storm has been de-aged thanks to Nanny. This will be explained in Uncanny X-Men #267.

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    1. I'm not sure whether that makes more or less sense.

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  2. But sometimes experiments fail. And this tail end of the Claremont era is one of those times.

    Yeah, I'm with Claremont for the start of the "Dissolution and Rebirth" arc, and the general idea of breaking up the X-Men, following them solo for awhile, then putting it all back together, but he takes way too long putting it all back together. The 260s (or, specifically, issue #259-267) are probably by least favorite Claremont issues, simply because they're so meandering and lose whatever momentum there was in the initial "Dissolution" story.

    Also, it doesn't help that the art in those issues (particularly this and #266) suck. Shoddy and inconsistent.

    Part of the usual story about his departure is that editorial wanted him to bring to the X-Men back together at the mansion, and he didn't want to do that, he wanted to do interesting new things instead rather than get stuck in the past.

    There is definitely some truth to that, but by the time he left the books, the team was back in a (relatively) conventional place, wearing matching uniforms, working out of the mansion, generally functioning as a team again. And while most of that was at the urging of Jim Lee and Bob Harras, who wanted to bring more conventional storytelling (for different reasons), it seems like Claremont was fine with it in principal (it seems like the final straw that led to his departure was more the control Harras was giving to Lee, and the ensuing feeling that Claremont was being marginalized - once it became clear that Lee was going to plot and Claremont just script, he walked).

    One of the "new and interesting things" Claremont wanted to do was kill Wolverine, resurrect him as a Hand assassin, and do a long-running story featuring him as an X-Men villain before returning him to the fold. Harras squashed it for commercial reasons (can't have an evil Wolverine featured in a half dozen comics a month).

    While I'm on board with Harras and Lee wrangling Claremont to put an end to all this loosey-goosey non-team stuff, putting the kibosh on that story rankles me a little more, because it is so blatantly commercially-motivated, and because the basic idea was eventually done anyway, years later, proving that Harras' concerns were moot.

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