212 – Drumbeats of Despair: X-Cutioner’s Song (Part 3 or 3)

Having listened to the podcast, (with bonus Bonnie Tyler *and* a reference to a Duran Duran album cover — I know we’re all missing the Claremont era, but isn’t it time to embrace the ‘90s?*)

OK, so I’m back to “quite liking” this again. I really feel that it’s the meandering middle section that lets it down. There’s a decentish opening with the other teams hunting down X-Force, there’s a decentish conclusion with what might be described as “the X-Men plus” confronting Stryfe — it’s the stuff in the middle that desperately needed someone to say, “Actually, is there some way to cut this?”

What do we call those people again? Oh yes, “editors.” I do think that a lot of the failures here are failures of editing. One feels the absence of a strong central perspective pulling this whole thing together and co-ordinating the contributions of the individual writers and artists.

This is especially so in how Stryfe is handled. He’s the central character of this whole story, so it’s a serious problem that his characterization is so random. Supposedly, he has this big revelation that Scott and Jean aren’t the monsters that he has always unquestioningly assumed, leaving him with “doubt” and nothing but his “hatred.” None of that is visible in his next interaction with them. It’s perfectly credible that he might double-down and proceed with his intention to destroy them rather than accept the collapse of his entire sense of self. But that’s not how it’s presented. Instead, Peter David writes Stryfe, pretty much, as if Scott Lobdell’s comic has not actually happened.

Another thing that I think an editor might have caught is that the character’s voices seem off sometimes. Would Warren really say “I loathe to admit” in place of the normal “I hate to admit”? That sort of slight artful variation sounds more like Hank. I definitely think that Logan would not express the thought of “Something I have been known to use successfully now and then” in those exact words.

In theory, I think this is also true of the new, calm, deadpan, snarky Cable that our hosts pointed out — it’s a sudden radical shift in a character’s established voice. But I like the new Cable rather a lot, especially when he says “If I do it myself, twenty, twenty-five minutes” for no intelligible reason except that he must want to trick Wolverine and Bishop up into offering their help, just so that he can be a [expletive deleted] to them.

In fact, I had the revelation while reading these that I am much, much more interested in both Cable and Bishop than I am in Wolverine. Isn’t he completely played out at this point? Time to kill him off, surely. There’s no way this character will still be around at the end of the ‘90s, right?

Other scattered thoughts:

– It feels odd to praise these issues for subtlety, but the whole revelation of Stryfe’s origin is handled in quite an interesting way. There’s no single “My God, Jean, you don’t mean?” “Yes, Scott – – Stryfe is YOUR SON!” moment. Instead it becomes more and more obvious until by the end of the comic not only the reader, but also the characters, are taking it as read that Stryfe is the grown-up baby.

Of course, I can’t be sure that the answer isn’t that each writer thought that one of the others was supposed to write that scene, and Harras simply didn’t catch that nobody did. Still, it reinforces the whole “fathers and sons” theme that Xavier announces nicely, in a way that suggests that yes, the opening arc really was supposed to be about Xavier and Cable as rival “fathers.”

– I sort of felt that Havok was maybe being pushed into the leader role at Storm’s expense a little too much.

– Bishop reminiscing about his childhood in the future and mutant-human relations there seems to be dialing down his Dredd-analogue-ness in favor of a different impression than he gave at first.

– “Star-crossed soldiers of fortune.”? OK, Cable actually was one and there’s room in Wolverine’s Mysterious Past for him to have been, whether or not that had been stated at some point before this. But Bishop wasn’t a soldier of fortune. Words mean things, Mr. Nicieza.

*Although, thinking about it, the fact that our hosts went straight for Total Eclipse of the Heart is solid evidence for my belief that stereotypically “‘90s” superhero comics like these are only *chronologically* ‘90s — they’re more in tune with the ‘80s than the rest of ‘90s pop culture.

Just thought I would mention that the sequence where Cable, Bishop, and Wolverine decide to go to the moon is a reference to the 1969 Western the Wild Bunch. In fact, the subplot of Cable being hunted by former “Wild Pack” member G.W. Bridge also parallels the plot of the film. Come to think of it Cabel’s character development in Blood and Metal is very similar to William Holden’s transformation as a character in the Wild Bunch.