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Review: X-Statix Omnibus

By | December 9th, 2011
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

Written by Peter Milligan
Illustrated by Michael Allred, Darwyn Cooke, Nick Dragotta, Paul Pope, Philip Bond, et al.

Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s subversive, media-loving mutants – the world-famous X-Statix – star in a series of bizarre, hilarious and deadly adventures with the most shocking ending ever! See all your favorites – including the Orphan, the Anarchist, Dead Girl, Doop, Venus Dee Milo and U-Go Girl – in action against and alongside Wolverine, the Avengers, Dr. Strange and others! Plus: the awful threats of Bad Guy, Pink Mink, Surrender Monkey and more! Collecting X-FORCE (1991) #116-129; BROTHERHOOD #9; X-STATIX #1-26; WOLVERINE/DOOP #1-2; X-STATIX PRESENTS DEAD GIRL #1-5; and material from X-MEN UNLIMITED (1993) #41, I [HEART] MARVEL: MY MUTANT HEART and NATION X #4.

You had your chance the first time. Don’t blow it now that you’ve got another. A hundred and twenty-five bucks seems almost fair for the best series Marvel’s done in the past decade — maybe more.

Find out why after the jump.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there existed a musical group who were eventually known as the KLF. A pair of punk survivors who’d grown into semi-sophisticated pranksterism, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty did things like shower the audience with pound notes at live gigs, turn “Doctor Who-ooo in the TAR-DIS” into a football chant, burn all the recalled copies of their first album in a field when ABBA sued them for unlicensed sampling, write a book on how to scam your way into a number-one pop single, and invent trance music. They satirized pop-star antics and loaded music videos with references to secret cults and arbitrary icons. They defaced billboards and invented mythology about the lost continent of Mu and studio spots like “Trancentral” (actually a grungy, barely-heated squat). In the process of rupturing their cheek with their tongue, they became genuine pop stars. “3 A.M. Eternal (Live at the S.S.L.)” was the biggest-selling single worldwide in 1991; Lord only knows how many people knew that the S.S.L. wasn’t some trendy nightclub, but a Solid State Logic mixing console.

In 1992, at the BRIT Awards, the KLF were slated to perform “3 A.M. Eternal,” which is a low-key, pleasantly bleeping club groove with haunting female vocals and a synthesized choral echo. When the KLF took the stage at the Awards, they did so with the grindcore band Extreme Noise Terror, who menaced the audience with a thrash-metal take on the song that only barely resembled the dance hit of the year prior. Drummond, propped up on crutches, alternated between chomping on a huge cigar and screaming the lyrics into a megaphone at warp speed, his Scottish accent rendering them all but indecipherable. To conclude the performance, he produced a machine gun and fired blanks at the audience. The band’s manager calmly pronounced over the P.A. as they exited: “The KLF have left the music industry.

So, you see: There is precedent for a thing like X-Statix.

Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s thoroughly insane mutant opus couldn’t happen now. It’s still sort of amazing to consider that it happened then, but then was a decade ago, when everything seemed stacked in its favor. Do you remember 2001? When X-Force #116 was released, there wasn’t even a single Harry Potter movie out. Boy bands were the pop-cultural beast of burden, not reality-TV stars. Nonetheless, reality TV was already babbling its own language and presenting the USA with the novelty of people who were famous just because they were on TV, being themselves. On the comic book front, Marvel was pulling itself out of the abyss by its fingernails, kept afloat by lucrative movie deals. (This was, of course, only a year after X-Men ignited the decade’s passionate affair with superhero blockbusters.) Desperate to attract new readers, they tried anything and everything. After turning X-Force into a grim-and-gritty black-ops spy-thriller under the aegis of Warren Ellis, Marvel (then more eager to experiment than a college freshman) decided that a newer, bolder, less tested take on mutantcy was needed.

Mutants are the Survivor contestants of comic books. Sure, there are pitfalls to being a mutant — killer robots want to destroy you, and occasionally you look awful or hurt everyone you love. Like reality TV stars, though, mutants have a power that is wholly unearned. They’re fantastic flukes, gifted with amazing capacities beyond mortal ken just because that’s what their DNA said their bodies should do. (Popular legend has it that Stan Lee, who was then writing all of Marvel’s output, came up with mutants as a way to avoid coming up with six or seven separate origins for each of X-Men #1’s new characters. Later writers forged tenuous ties to human evolution itself.) Forty years of X-Men comics had presented a world where wealthy institutions tracked down mutants around the globe, offering them the proverbial golden ticket as their birthright. In eras where there was no capacity to understand the idea of unskilled TV-stardom for its own sake, mutants were hated and feared, to give their secret societies and superheroic adventures a strange, if mildly plausible, justification. Richard Hatch kicked that door clear off its hinges.

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This brings us back to X-Force #116. Its cover was a cavalcade of brand-new characters surging toward the reader — despite this being the 116th issue of the title, none of them had ever been seen prior. They looked strange, even silly: Battering Ram the giant goat-man, Gin Genie with her prominent unibrow, Zeitgeist caught at the most awkward point of a leapfrog. Drawn in Mike Allred’s inimitable style, the linework itself was a significant shift away from anything X-Force had previously used — cleaner and friendlier, on a book that was usually full of tight scowls and open-mouthed shouting. The single most important detail was almost hidden, in the little space next to the issue number where the parent-pacifying brand of the Comics Code Authority would normally go: “HEY, KIDS! LOOK! NO CODE!” And we’re off.

The first issue of Milligan and Allred’s X-Force introduced us to an unpleasant group of mutant megastars, their superheroic glory joined in media res. They make millions of dollars and have millions of fans. They buy land in Scotland and license their likenesses for beanie dolls. They eat in posh restaurants despite their blue skin and bizarre mouthpieces; the X-Men of yore would have been chased out by the kitchen staff, cutlery in hand. We don’t know why the public responds to them, and we’re never shown how it is they’re sold — we just know that they’re famous because their adventures are on TV, and we accept it. Then all but three of them are annihilated by a machine gun during a botched mission and the issue ends.

Before X-Force began, the focus was on how these new characters would be usurping the X-Force that came before, and how dare they, and so on. After #116 came out, the focus was on the fact that a Marvel comic book had not only rejected the Comics Code, but done so in order to show things like Zeitgeist, his pelvis removed with the grace of a wild boar attack, whimpering his last word as U-Go Girl holds up the parts of his torso that aren’t soft red mush. Even after this opening grand guignol, X-Force was never keen to keep its characters terribly alive — like good b-list pop stars, once they’d had their hit single, it was time for them to go away. Perhaps the smartest character in the entire run was Lacuna, a mutant girl who could “move between moments,” who turned down a membership offer and instead began hosting a TV show where she used her powers to spy on celebrities’ private lives. It’s worth noting that she lived happily ever after.

The X-Statix Omnibus is a giant book that you should keep on a low shelf, for fear of it falling from a high one and absolutely vaporizing your skull upon impact. Its heft holds all fourteen issues of Milligan and Allred’s X-Force, plus all twenty-six of X-Statix, plus other odds and ends, like the five-issue X-Statix Presents: Dead Girl miniseries. A decade ago, taking the stories month to month, in twenty-two page slivers, meant that the big picture was sometimes hard to see — besides, it’s not like Peter Milligan is the sort of person who spells those things out for his readers. With every bit collected into one giant wad, to be portioned at the reader’s discretion, the necessary context of the series becomes apparent. Which is to say: there is no satisfactory context for X-Statix but the one it invents itself.

Consider Milligan as the master of dry understatement, when he so chooses. The typical comic-book way of handling the pressures and payoffs of fame is to accentuate their forbidden sensuality and glam consumerism. The apex — or nadir — of this is probably Mark Millar’s Wanted, where anti-hero Wesley becomes initiated into a super-villain illuminati and proceeds to brag to the readers about all the ass he’s getting, consensual or no. In comic-book worlds, fame is alternately something to poke ribald fun at or get semi-guilty hard-ons from. Perhaps that’s why, at time of publication, X-Statix felt so “off.” One thing the repetition of such a massive Omnibus highlights is the banality of X-Statix‘s fame. When they’re not on missions, they sit around their headquarters or they go out to eat. What are they supposed to do, live like normal people? In the world of X-Statix, superfame is banal and boring, like the white backdrop Terry Richardson uses in all of his studio photos. What Milligan and Richardson are onto, though, is that these 2-D backgrounds focus us even more on the characters.

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Mister Sensitive, alias the Orphan, a reluctant leader whose freakish body is cursed with the ability to feel every sensation magnified a millionfold. U-Go Girl, a selfish narcoleptic teleporter with a heart of gold. Tike Alicar, the Anarchist, a media-savvy Angry Young Man who compares being a black mutant in America to “being black with a little black added.” Phat and Vivisector, a selectively bulbous trailer-trash Eminem clone and a lycanthropic Oxford poet, who are gay lovers until they aren’t anymore. Dead Girl, a caustic walking corpse whose pieces can fly apart and come back together. Venus Dee Milo, the series’ most brilliant character, whose design and concept are as senseless and arbitrary as her personality is grounded and human. Doop, always Doop, inscrutable, inexplicable, and insanely charming. And all the others, and all the dead bodies. And so on.

The cast list of X-Statix is amorphous and self-consciously strange; as made clear, characters die all the time, from two-panel wonders to ones we’ve spent years investing in. For a comic book, this is bizarre and halfway to heresy. Then again, think about how many TV shows you know who’ve managed to retain their entire core cast for their entire run (or even their entire first season), let alone all of their supporting players. To bathe readers in blood isn’t the lurid intention here — it’s just another symptom of Milligan and Allred’s smirking matter-of-factness. People are there, and then they’re not. That’s life, and that’s entertainment.

Milligan, of course, could not have done it without Allred. The ambivalence and occasional arch mean spirits of Milligan’s narrative were given a disingenuous face that they needed to complete their task. Allred draws strapping men and shapely women in the tradition of John Romita Sr., who strike hard, dynamic poses and vault through the air. They look every bit what one would expect from a gang of superheroes, where even the ugly ones are still pretty handsome, but Allred imbues them with an atypical level of sensitivity. Like Steve Dillon, Allred’s facial pallette seems limited on first blush, but his skill and craft are such that he’s capable of bringing out the entire range of emotions in his chracters without ever making them seem inconsistent with themselves. His clean, unfussy style gives even the most macabre elements an accessible shine — you know, like prime-time TV.

The tension between Allred’s groovy style and Milligan’s irrepressible strangeness is the engine that makes X-Statix move. Still, over the course of the book’s run, other artists pitched in, and the people who did fill-in jobs for this book are some of the best and brightest around. Philip Bond, Darwyn Cooke, Nick Dragotta, and Paul fucking motherfucking Pope are all represented here, adding their own sparks to the book. What’s most amazing, though, is the consistency of tone throughout. Some guys, like Dragotta, are inked by Allred, so that’s no shock, but even the untameable Pope — whose art never looked like anyone’s but his own, even back then — doesn’t feel like the sort of sharp left turn that, say, The X-Tinction Agenda would deliver every 22 pages. That’s the success of the book’s world and tone, whose richness brings out the best in a certain caliber of artist. Luckily, they never had to settle for anyone less.

With these authorial concerns in mind, it might seem like an afterthought to discuss the content of the work itself — and there’s a lot of it, being that the book runs for about infinity pages. A lot of superhero comics offer themselves up for easy, softball interpretations — this is a story about that. “What is X-Statix about, really?” is the question that’s hardest to answer here, and while it’s tempting to say that it’s about ‘fame’ or ‘influence’ or ‘silly powers’ or whatever else, the truth is that all of that stuff is just part of the scenery. If anything, the book’s about four people: Mister Sensitive, the Anarchist, Venus Dee Milo, and U-Go Girl. Other characters come and go and come again and have crises and fall in love and feel feelings and fuck and die. Those four do all of that stuff, too, but the narrative stays tethered to them, in a way that it doesn’t to, say, Phat, or the Spike, or Sluk.

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These primary characters are the anchor struggling against the riptide. The narrative of X-Statix carries them — and us — through strange waters, and seemingly lets the current decide its course. The absurdity of X-Statix is one of its perfect features, a sort of overarching “why not?” that bends and breaks superheroic conventions at will. X-Force becomes X-Statix, a name which is never actually explained and which is exactly as meaningless as it sounds. Doop, currently co-starring in Wolverine and the X-Men, is a floating thing most aptly described as ‘some kind of a potato booger’ who speaks in unpronounceable symbols and whose origins are never clarified or resolved, because they don’t have to be. The Mysterious Fan Boy, a deformed mutant who lives with his mother and has quasi-omnipotent powers to bring his entire town to its knees lest they risk his temper tantrums, is as close as the series ever gets to a clearly defined and easily interpreted allegory, and even then it’s willing to fall face-first into a puddle of its own bile. Characters welcoming a metaphor for their loyal real-world readers into their ranks, and then conspiring to kill them in order to stop the abuse of their power — your move, Grant Morrison.

Of course, everything eventually goes too far or does too much. X-Statix‘s tipping point came when it was announced that Milligan and Allred would do a story in which Princess Diana would come back from the grave as a mutant superhero and join the team. Cue public outcry, especially from rags like the Daily Mail, and with Marvel’s financial position still precarious, cue censorship. Princess Di became fictional pop star Henrietta Hunter, and the story arc as printed was defanged and a bit pudgy, as if the spirit had been sucked out of it. The title never quite recovered, and it became clear that it was time to go. Not without one last swipe of perversity, mind: as part of an “04/04/04” promotion that April, Marvel pushed four of its ongoing titles into the Marvel Knights imprint, X-Statix included. X-Statix celebrated its rise to Marvel’s mature-readers, not-just-spandex imprint by running a daft yet straight-faced parody of The Avengers/Defenders War, a superhero punch-up from the 1970s. Then, an issue after it ended, they died.

The cover copy for X-Statix #26: “Downbeat yet strangely moving FINAL ISSUE!” Let it never be said that this was a dishonest comic book series.

Final Verdict: 9.9 – For the X-books, one last twelve-hundred-page gasp of adventurousness before just giving up


Patrick Tobin

Patrick Tobin (American) is likely shaming his journalism professors from the University of Glasgow by writing about comic books. Luckily, he's also written about film for The Drouth and The Directory of World Cinema: Great Britain. He can be reached via e-mail right here.

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