{"id":4347,"date":"2018-10-17T21:33:54","date_gmt":"2018-10-17T20:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4347"},"modified":"2018-10-17T21:33:54","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T20:33:54","slug":"x-men-black-mojo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4347","title":{"rendered":"X-Men: Black – Mojo"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are certainly some interesting creator choices for\u00a0the\u00a0X-Men: Black<\/em> one-shots. \u00a0Mojo<\/em> gets artist Nick Bradshaw (always welcome, and his detailed cartooning is a good fit for the character), and comedian Scott Aukerman. \u00a0I’m… vaguely familiar with Aukerman’s name? \u00a0I see there’s three seasons of\u00a0Comedy Bang Bang<\/em> on UK Netflix, but yeah, never watched them.<\/p>\n

But Mojo’s a comic relief villain, so a comedy writer makes sense. \u00a0And this is indeed… well, wacky. \u00a0Much depends here on how much tolerance you have for wacky, and how relaxed you are about people being wildly out of character for wackiness’ sake.<\/p>\n

Mojo is stuck on Earth after\u00a0X-Men Blue<\/em> (presumably this is before they went back and captured him in the final issue), which feels like it could be a neat new angle on him. \u00a0Mojo can wear thin after a while, but updating his TV gimmick to the internet age, and putting him in the real world, seems like it could work.<\/p>\n

And the story kicks off with Mojo planning some scheme or other to beam some X-Men story back to the Mojoverse. \u00a0In some way or other, Mojo is planning to kill off the newer X-Men and get back to the classic team: “the group of mutants I grew up with have been overshadowed by new, characters designed to appeal to changing demographics, at the expense of true fans like myself”. \u00a0That’s a slightly off note – Mojo isn’t a stand-in for fandom (reactionary or otherwise), he’s a stand-in for Marvel. \u00a0Or at least for publishers and TV networks in general. \u00a0In modern terms, he’s a living clickbait factory. \u00a0He doesn’t care what the content actually is, as long as somebody’s watching it.<\/p>\n

But never mind – the story here is that Mojo is distracted from his plans because he’s fallen in love with a regular at his favourite coffee shop. \u00a0Being Mojo, he’s attempting to blend in by wearing a big hat and coat, and he’s gloriously oblivious to the fact that he’s fooling nobody. \u00a0But it’s Manhattan, so everyone’s just indulging him anyway. \u00a0Bradshaw does this stuff really well; Mojo trying to act normal, with his usual misplaced glee, is a lovely idea.<\/p>\n

Glob Herman turns out to be a regular as well and, um, strikes up a conversation with Mojo to encourage him to ask out the object of his affections. \u00a0Since this is the sort of neighbourhood where everyone turns a blind eye to Mojo, it’s also the sort of place where Glob can be relatively comfortable. \u00a0Glob’s a tough character to draw with emotion, and Bradshaw’s always had the hang of him.<\/p>\n

So where all this is heading is that Mojo kind of loses track entirely of his big plan, and a deeply unimpressed Major Domo winds up putting the plan into operation anyway. \u00a0There’s an artist change for the final act (in a one-off story?!) with Andr\u00e9 Lima Ara\u00fajo taking over; it’s inevitably a step down, though the style change isn’t as jarring as you might expect. \u00a0The colouring helps smooth it over, I think. \u00a0But you can probably guess where this is heading; Mojo is more interested in his girl than in actually beating the X-Men.<\/p>\n

The actual Mojo stuff is pretty good; the idea of sticking in him the real world and letting him flounder as he tries to sit in is funny, and it’s not really been done with him before. \u00a0The trouble is that pretty much everyone else is either a cypher or acting a bit out of character. \u00a0The girl is a bit of a blank; what personality she has comes almost entirely from Nick Bradshaw’s costume design. \u00a0Glob Herman as the relaxed guy at peace with his weird appearance makes sense as a take on the gimmick, but it’s pretty much 180 degrees from the way he’s been written as a supporting character in\u00a0Old Man Logan<\/em>, and on top of that, it doesn’t seem to occur to him that Mojo might be worth capturing or something.<\/p>\n

And Major Domo… I mean, Major Domo’s whole routine has been that he’s the loyal but long suffering organiser, doing his best to indulge the whims of the crazy guy and keep the show on the road. \u00a0I could buy him losing his mind if Mojo was messing up some critical detail, but I don’t get him dragging Mojo back towards a villainous plan that he’s lost interest in – if anything, you’d think Major Domo would jump at the chance to shelve some of Mojo’s nonsense and have an early night.<\/p>\n

So the centrepiece is pretty good, but a lot of the stuff around it doesn’t work. \u00a0Still, when the focus is on Mojo himself, it’s decent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are certainly some interesting creator choices for\u00a0the\u00a0X-Men: Black one-shots. \u00a0Mojo gets artist Nick Bradshaw (always welcome, and his detailed cartooning is a good fit for the character), and comedian Scott Aukerman. \u00a0I’m… vaguely familiar with Aukerman’s name? \u00a0I see there’s three seasons of\u00a0Comedy Bang Bang on UK Netflix, but yeah, never watched them. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4347"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4348,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4347\/revisions\/4348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}