It’s the week of another X-Men relaunch, so naturally the question on everyone’s lips is: what did I think of the middle chapter of a Typhoid Mary miniseries that nobody is paying any attention to?<\/p>\n
Because yes, this is another of those weird minis with different guest stars in every issue so that you can bill all three chapters as an issue #1. \u00a0That way, people like me will buy the middle chapter and then go off and buy the others! \u00a0Or that’s the theory. \u00a0Obviously, from the fact that I’m reviewing this as a one-shot, it didn’t work.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Part 1 of the story was\u00a0Typhoid Fever: Spider-Man<\/em> #1, which came out in October. \u00a0Part 3 will be\u00a0Typhoid Fever: Iron Fist<\/em> #1, and it comes out in December. \u00a0For maximum aggravation, nothing in the comic actually explains this. \u00a0There’s a recap page, but it doesn’t tell you where the first chapter can be found. \u00a0There’s a “To Be Continued…” caption at the end, but no indication of where to go for that. \u00a0I had to Google it.<\/p>\n This is a subsidiary of Disney, for heaven’s sake. \u00a0How hard is it to remember to tell people what comics the rest of the story appeared in?<\/p>\n So. \u00a0It’s a comic that I’m already seriously annoyed by before I’ve even started thinking about the story. \u00a0It’s written by Clay McLeod Chapman, who I think is principally a horror prose writer, but he’s done some comics work before. \u00a0The artists change on every issue, but this one has Will Robson and Danilo S Beyruth. \u00a0They’re clear enough, but the change between the two artists, a few pages from the end, is glaringly obvious. \u00a0Robson is a cartoonist by inclination, and struggles with things like flashbacks to little Mary playing with a dead pigeon; Beyruth’s sketchier style feels like it would have fitted better with that sort of material.<\/p>\n Typhoid is a Daredevil villain, who makes occasional detours into Deadpool. \u00a0So what she’s doing in a story with Spider-Man, the X-Men and Iron Fist is less than clear. \u00a0But regardless, the idea is that a mysterious Dr Charles has tried to cure Typhoid’s insanity by getting Amp (the kid from\u00a0Iceman<\/em>) to amplify her normal personality and drown out the insane Typhoid persona. \u00a0Predictably, because there wouldn’t be a story otherwise, it didn’t work, and now there’s a powered up Typhoid on the loose, whose insanity is becoming a bit contagious.<\/p>\n The X-Men kind of have a reason to be in this story – they’re looking for Amp. \u00a0But it still feels like a random pairing. \u00a0The result is a more or less random fight in which Typhoid tries using telepathic illusions to distract and confuse them, because we’ve not seen that before. \u00a0There’s at least a mildly inventive twist on the idea – Typhoid convinces them all that they’re in a daytime soap opera, so for a few pages everyone’s yelling melodramatic relationship nonsense instead of fighting properly.<\/p>\n Some sort of point starts to emerge in the closing pages, where Jean goes into Typhoid’s mind and establishes that the Typhoid persona is trying to erase Mary’s traumatic memories (and the Mary persona along with it), but it’s still all trite stuff. \u00a0Frankly, to the extent that there’s a story in here, it’s a Typhoid story, and the X-Men are a massive distraction preventing it from developing properly. \u00a0There’s probably a reasonable Typhoid story in here trying to get out, but it’s buried beneath the guest stars.<\/p>\n I don’t imagine many of you needed to be told that the middle chapter of a\u00a0Typhoid<\/em> mini was safely skippable. \u00a0But just for the record, it very much is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s the week of another X-Men relaunch, so naturally the question on everyone’s lips is: what did I think of the middle chapter of a Typhoid Mary miniseries that nobody is paying any attention to? 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