332 – Gideon Falls

Scattered thoughts:-

-I will try to be a good person and say something nice about Loeb’s writing before I say less nice things.

First, his attempt to get at the media depicting mutants in sensationalized ways as a matter of *routine* and how that would dominate ordinary people’s attitudes — that did feel reasonably fresh compared to the standard X-take on this.

Second, ”Nice speech.” after Roberto’s overwrought verbiage is a good little self-aware bit. It’d be nice if the X-books sent up their own logorrheic tendencies more often.

– Which, alas, brings me to the first thing that I didn’t like. Both writing and art in these issues read as if somone noticed that X-Force has become just another unnecessary X-book and said to Loeb and Pollina, Make it more Liefeldy!.

Our hosts were thorough on the art, but I might add that there’s something peculiarly absurd about Pollina coming back twice to that terrible Domino pose, once combined awkwardly with an absurd Really Big Gun and another time seen rather awfully from the rear.

As for the language, in the early days, X-Force seemed to come by its macho posturing honestly and was at least reasonably concise about it. Here, Loeb combines the OTT nonsense with his faux-Claremont excessive wordiness, and the result is two terrible tastes that do not go any better together than they would separately.

– And my God, does the fact that Loeb writes in clichés stand out. “Wrote the book.” “The silence within the aircraft … is almost deafening.”

And then at one point, disastrously, Loeb tries to Claremont-up a normal expression: “The struggle for peace often comes at the expense of war.” This is one of those points at which I have to wonder about Harras’s editing — how did he miss that “at the cost of” means something different from “at the expense of”?

Then there is, “Sunspot has given his all, and it hasn’t been enough. For the Externals fight for something which is almost indefensible. The honor of having died in battle.” I am not at all sure what Loeb in context is trying to communicate by saying that “the honor of having died in battle” is “almost indefensible.” But I do think we may be, to revisit a recent Hawk Talk, in the territory of “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Finally, Mr. Loeb, “warrior skills” and “fortitude” != “rage,.”

But, to be charitable, perhaps we have Jeph Loeb opening up a bold new front in his ongoing struggle to defeat Scott Lobdell for the title of All-Time Laziest X-Writer. Because Lobdell’s use of “parameter” for “perimeter” had nothing on this. This is early Jurgens Thor territory. (But without the excuse of attempted archaism. Or the charm.)

But seriously, it is really surprising to me that this stuff was not flagged and fixed by an editor. Marvel was in crisis, obviously, but this was still part of their flagship line — you would think that Harras could bring himself to care just a little. People make fun of Stan Lee’s grandiloquence, and, God knows, there’s a lot to make fun of in Claremont’s recurrent verbal tics. But the sentences do in both cases make *sense.*