211 – A Cornucopia of Mayhem: X-Cutioner’s Song (Part 2 of 3)

So for Stryfe at karaoke, if Scott is at the bar I can totally see him pulling out “Cat’s in the cradle”

Oooh. Scott gets a vid call from Cable, “Hey dad, can you meet me at the Empty Orchestra bar tonight. Want to talk about something.”

Then when Scott arrives and realizes it’s a karaoke bar, Stryfe gets up there “disguised” as Nate and blasts out a full powered Cat’s in the Cradle just to try and make Scott cry.

Excellent episode as always…

After hearing you guys riff on Stryfe, may I suggest a new fictional construct/character through which listeners can be thanked? I present to you Passive-Aggressive Stryfe. I imagine he would 1) come up with some plan to thwart the listener, but said plan would fail because it was spectacularly bad, 2) give a series of life pro-tips that don’t actually work the way Stryfe thinks they work (e.g. the weaning of children during the storyline), and 3) he would try to confuse his adversaries by making them think that he’s someone else under the helmet, and when he reveals himself, would get frustrated when the listener doesn’t care.

Anyway, keep up the good work!

I’m starting to see what people objected to about this crossover — although I’d still say that it doesn’t seem that much worse than the routine in the X-books during this period.

But I think our hosts are absolutely 100% right. This is taking too long, and, worse, the plot, such as it is, meanders here and there instead of progressing. Far too much of these issues is made up of what feel like obligatory extended fights: we’ve got these characters on the same page, so they have to fight, even if the fight isn’t actually material to the plot in any significant way.

A good example of this is the MLF fight, which sprawls over two issues. OK, one has to address the MLF. They’ve been consistently associated with Stryfe, so if you have a story about him, the reader is likely to ask where they are. But that’s all that this is — it’s just checking off that box. It doesn’t affect anything in this actual story. So get it over with!

There’s a semi-good idea in here, which is that the experienced X-teams can handle these guys without breaking a sweat. It’s only semi-good, because it reads as a swipe at Liefeld’s X-Force and its readers that’s little meanspirited. (Note that the story goes out of its way to make Cannonball look incompetent in contrast to the older X-Men.) This is especially so in David’s contribution: I find the scene where Kamikaze decapitates himself on Archangel’s wings really off-putting, and while Forearm may be a stupid name for a throwaway character, nothing makes me like the character more than having Warren talk about how dumb he is.

But it’s a semi-good idea. You know what would have sold the notion that the X-Men can handle these guys without a problem? Having it happen at a rapid pace in the comic.

Also, I have this pressing question. Why is Apocalypse in this comic? I’d say that he’s complicating the plot to no purpose, but he’s not actually complicating it. He’s just adding fight scenes. (This is, in part, because there isn’t much more to the plot than “Stryfe does stuff.”) Ditto Sinister. I get that they were tying Stryfe and Cable to Apocalypse, but serving the backstory is just not a good enough excuse for having Apocalypse wander randomly into this specific story.

You can still see glimpses of the better crossover that might have been, though. The conversations through the bars between former team-mates. Sam commenting about what he could do if he had government resources, or trying to get a pardon for the rest of X-Force. As with last week, what’s gold about the opening, with Cable apparently killing Xavier, is how elegantly it should serve to bring out a range of conflicts between all these characters. Given the extent to which these comics are in the shadow of Claremont, could they not, for God’s sake, have aped his fondness for making every single character incredibly verbose? If there was ever a time for those over-stuffed word balloons that spell out characters’ dueling thoughts about What It All Means, this is it.

Instead, we have Stryfe just doing stuff. I suspect that they were trying do something with Xavier and Cable as surrogate parents to be played off against Stryfe’s anger at his actual parents, and his other surrogate parent Apocalypse, but this needed to be articulated a lot more clearly.

Other thoughts:

– OK, Scott Lobdell. I forgave you Bishop using “parameter” when he meant “perimeter” last time, in the same way that I’ll forgive him using “reluctancy” this week when the more normal “reluctance” would have been fine. He’s from the future. Maybe this is how he talks.

But no way will I accept that Apocalypse would use the expression “the Great Unwashed” with so little attention to its strict class connotations.

– Were Americans really saying “feeb” all the time in the early ‘90s? Fabian Nicieza seems to think so. (Looking the expression up, I discover that it’s pretty awful, except when it refers to an FBI agent, which I doubt it does here.)

– Wow, Chris Eliopoulos really likes big lettering in color (usually red). He massively overdoes it. In particular, there’s a jarring moment when he uses it to emphasize the word “know” in a balloon in a context when more subtle and normal devices to show stress would be appropriate.

I so want an Apocalypse “New bod, who dis?” shirt or something. I laughed so hard at this.