While most of the X-books are quite literally off in their own little world (and boy, that’s going to be a lot of storylines all finishing at once in a couple of months…), we still have secondary titles continuing as usual. \u00a0So here are four issues of Rogue and Gambit in the Mojoverse.<\/p>\n
Mojo’s not an obvious choice of villain for these two. \u00a0Yes, he’s an X-Men bad guy, but he doesn’t have any more specific link to these two, and like Arcade, he’s the sort of wacky novelty villain who can wear thin rather quickly. \u00a0So it’s probably for the best that writer Kelly Thompson only devotes an issue and a half to traditional Mojo hijinks before moving on to something with a bit more substance.<\/p>\n
Still, he’s an overbearing presence, and this continues the book’s approach of dragging Rogue and Gambit into alien environments. \u00a0It does keep them apart from the other X-Men, but it also makes their role in their own book rather reactive. \u00a0This one also keeps them apart from each other for half the story, and while they’re certainly given equal prominence in terms of page count, it’s more a Rogue story, since it follows through on the question of why she’s struggling to control her powers. \u00a0Gambit gets to display his commitment plenty, but the bottom line is that his role is largely to chase a macguffin and provide some action while Rogue is looking inward.<\/p>\n
Mojo is back in the Mojoverse again, but\u00a0X-Men: Black – Mojo<\/em> hasn’t been forgotten: his brief attempted dalliance with a human girl has left him convinced that his audience wants love stories. \u00a0He settles on Rogue and Gambit, since not only are they familiar to him, but they rank highly on social media. \u00a0(Also, Spiral puts the idea into his head.) \u00a0So in the usual way, Mojo sets about trying to do Rogue and Gambit in assorted genres, all of which fall apart rather rapidly, since not only does the plot keep getting derailed by macguffin-chasing, but Rogue’s powers always end up going out of control in the end. \u00a0I’m not quite clear how all that’s meant to work, given that it seems to all be taking place in their minds, but okay, we can hand wave that one through.<\/p>\n Even allowing for the built-in Mojo-ness of it all, this part of the story feels unfocussed. \u00a0Partly, it’s hard to get that worked up about a mission which we all know isn’t “real”. \u00a0But the genre pastiches are limp. \u00a0At best they’re generic; the longest one, which is ostensibly a parody of\u00a0Moonlighting<\/em> but doesn’t bear much resemblance to it (or to noir, which Mojo claims he’s going for), feels more like a regular X-Men story after the first page or so. \u00a0I have my doubts about how well the art sells the genre shifts, too; Oscar Bazaldua is a pretty good costume designer, and not at all bad as an action artist, but spartan on background and atmosphere, and colourist Frank D’Armata seems to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting in making the scenes visually distinctive.<\/p>\n While Gambit is chasing the plot along, part 3 tries to establish why Rogue has always had trouble with controlling her powers, in a series of flashbacks to key moments and relationships from her life. \u00a0Most of these are the standards, though we also get her brief body-sharing with Simon Williams from\u00a0Uncanny Avengers<\/em>. \u00a0And then we get a scene about the time she was assaulted by prison guards in Genosha when her powers weren’t working, which isn’t quite such a standard reference point. \u00a0I’m not entirely sure about the way that reference plays out. \u00a0The basic idea here of the issue seems to be that Rogue has always been, in various ways, afraid of other people getting close to her, and so she subconsciously won’t control her powers to provide an excuse for keeping other people away. \u00a0As a take on Rogue, that works fairly well; it’s an inversion of the traditional tragic angle for her powers, and it plays nicely with Gambit’s role in the series as her husband. \u00a0How well the flashbacks actually illustrate that point is more debatable.<\/p>\n The Genosha scene comes from\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #236, which came out in 1988 \u00a0and doesn’t exactly get mentioned very often. \u00a0The original story, broadly speaking, indicates that the guards groped Rogue and that she found the experience so traumatising that she wound up having to let the Carol Danvers persona take over. \u00a0It’s played mainly as a convenient plot device to let “Carol Danvers” appear for a few issues, and it’s the sort of thing you might well see as worth revisiting from a modern perspective. \u00a0But it wasn’t any sort of turning point in terms of Rogue and her powers – what actually happened was that Carol stayed in control for the rest of the story, and then the next arc was the Inferno crossover – and I’m not convinced that it works in the “key to her psyche” role that the story tries to give it.<\/p>\n It’s a weird one, this. \u00a0The threads don’t seem to come together – once the story moves past Mojo’s gimmickry, it kind of forgets he’s there until it needs him as someone to beat in the finale. \u00a0And Spiral’s arc likewise feels disconnected from anything the leads are up to, except on the plot mechanic level. \u00a0There are interesting ideas scattered here and there, but it’s like a bunch of mostly-formed stories going on in parallel. \u00a0Good in parts, but unsatisfying as a whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While most of the X-books are quite literally off in their own little world (and boy, that’s going to be a lot of storylines all finishing at once in a couple of months…), we still have secondary titles continuing as usual. \u00a0So here are four issues of Rogue and Gambit in the Mojoverse. 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