Les X-Men, Numero Un

Well, before I start my rant-post about how much reading this hurt me, I should let it be known that my previous experience with the X-men is limited to watching the cartoon when I was a kid (and from which I retained not much more than the names of the main characters) and the movies (which I’m assuming, though I don’t know for sure, were probably not all that close to the comics, because that’s what movies do). So, I’m taking the Dark Phoenix Saga as something that stands alone here. I don’t know any of the background, or any of what comes after. So it is a little bit difficult to see how it’s working in the greater plot. But, anyway. Here I go.

Okay, so maybe I’m being horribly snobbish here. But the writing in this was horrible! Now, taking into consideration that this was fairly early on in the development on modern comics as we know it today, I’m sure that for its time, it probably wasn’t so bad. Also, its general audience probably didn’t care so much about the methods by which the characters were developed or plot points were established, but I guess I just wasn’t expecting it to be so...bad. Claremont has absolutely no subtlety. The way he shifts scenes, the way he establishes the characters’ attributes – it’s all so blunt. For example, on page 81 when the scene changes, he writes “On that note, let’s shift our scene to an upstairs library...” Thanks, Chris Claremont, for ripping me completely and unceremoniously out of the story. Or, on page 102, when Beast thinks “That’s the spirit, McCoy. Hide your feelings behind a flip, devil-may-care façade.” Or, how just in general, the characters must give a blow-by-blow account of what they’re doing in every battle, along with a summation of what their powers are, just in case we forgot. (Storm, page 162: “The limited environment within this crater will make it hard for me to effectively use my powers. I won’t have sufficient atmospheric “tools” to work with” – couldn’t she have just said something like “the environment here is making it hard for me to use my powers”?).

Reading this was a far cry from the quiet, subtle methods we saw in LeMire’s work, where pictures and actions served to tell the bulk of the story – in Dark Phoenix, the writing was far too expository/cheesy/repetitive for my taste. But that’s just me. Some people in class will probably chew me out if they read this. What can I say, I’m a writing snob.