246 – Foreshadow Puppets

Sometimes you can disgard the answer to a mystery because it’s too obvious to be correct.

Trivia: my grandfather had a boat named Windsong. Can’t remember what kind it was, though.

Scattered thoughts:-

-I realized while reading the first story that Fabian Nicieza is making a stylistic choice that I’m not sure is well-advised, but is at least interesting. He is using relatively few captions and shoving exposition that might otherwise be in captions into dialogue (seeing as we are well past the thought balloon era). Sometimes this does produce some bizarre “Let me expand on this for a while” speeches, where people dump an awful lot of information on other people in a very awkward way.

For instance, Moonstar shoots Hardaway, and he says, “What did that mutant witch do?” and then proceeds to tell everybody, at some length. This is exactly the sort of thing for which Claremont would have preferred purple-prosy third-person narration in captions. I am going to have to look out to see if this is something that Nicieza also does in X-Men, where I’ve been perceiving him as doing self-conscious Claremont pastiche. It would be interesting if it’s something that he’s doing that specifically differentiates X-Force from his “main” X-book as less Claremonty.

-Incidentally, “witch” for the b-word does not work in this context at all. The problem is that this feels horribly fake alongside far too much of the godawful macho posturing dialogue that still infests this book. (And in fact, Nicieza turns the posturing up a few notches in the first story, as if worried that readers have been missing it or won’t accept that these are the real MLF without it.)

– Except for Adam-X the X-Treme, strangely. In his first appearance, he had this balance between overly formal and archaic language and macho ‘80s action movie in his dialogue, switching at random between two separate registers.

Now Nicieza seems to have gone for the first: Mr. the X-Treme mostly talks as if he’s wandered in from a somewhat violent Merchant Ivory film. E.g. “Blood has been drawn. If you will recall my mutant abilities from our first encounter… …that means you are defeated!”

Until the very end, when he suddenly comes out with “I can’t afford to fill out paperwork and have my pictures in the papers, Shatty.” Which, OK, is not the kind of ridiculous Feel The Testosterone, Boys! stuff that came out of Adam-X’s mouth in his first appearance. But it’s much, much more normal than how he’s been talking up till now.

-“That’s fershoor.” Mr. Nicieza, stop it. Claremontian phonetic accents are a fine art.

-“Some of their choices will shock you!” Kind of didn’t. But I’m glad that Feral’s main choice was to leave the book.

– On the whole, I think I might like this book more as a Shatterstar solo title. He’s grown on me.

-“Next: Siryn and Warpath in Ireland! But so are Black Tom and Juggernaut!” First, the attempt to work up excitement for the mere fact of characters not being in America is amusing. But second, it would be funny if, yes, all four characters were in Ireland, but not in the same part of Ireland. Theresa and James have an adventure in Mayo, and every so often we cut away to a panel of Tom and Cain sitting quietly in a restaurant in, I don’t know, Kilkenny or wherever.

Also, I always loved Siryn as a character. She don’t get the exposure she desreves (ever since becoming that weird Celtic goddess – which was a bismol plot point btw). And I loved her ever since reading her in X-Force and her struggle with alcoholism. Maybe I just like the half-broken struggling people in my heroes répertoire. I feel them more. But since then she always stood up for me as someone special, like a more mature and authentic type of hero. And also she has red hair and has a castle and is Irish and can fly with the sound of her voice, so…
Anyway, I never made the connection between her alcoholism and her Irish origins. I can see why it’s problematic. Still, I’m kinda happy that it came to be this way because in the end we got a really awesome heroine with some powerful stories and moments (that X-Force issue which deals entirely with her past via flashbacks remains one of my most rememberable issues of the entire run).