{"id":4626,"date":"2019-07-07T22:06:26","date_gmt":"2019-07-07T21:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4626"},"modified":"2019-07-11T20:05:56","modified_gmt":"2019-07-11T19:05:56","slug":"major-x","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4626","title":{"rendered":"Major X"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a temptation to bring out special standards where Rob Liefeld is concerned. \u00a0After all, on any conventional basis, he makes awful, incoherent comics. \u00a0And yet, and yet… \u00a0Liefeld was a star in the nineties, and clearly he was doing something that connected. \u00a0His style was one of the dominant features of the period, grudgingly imitated by all manner of artists who wanted to keep getting work. \u00a0His stories were incoherent in a way that suggested not so much laziness as naive, stream-of-conscious enthusiasm. \u00a0Some of his actual concepts, like Youngblood<\/em>, turn out to be entirely viable when handled by more conventional talents.\u00a0 And in a couple of years \u00a0he had a hand in creating Cable, Domino, Shatterstar and Deadpool, which is a pretty good track record.<\/p>\n

Major X<\/em>, his latest six-issue mini, fits well into this tradition. \u00a0It bounces around with tremendous enthusiasm and no great coherence. \u00a0Plot threads are introduced and never paid off (in a way that you’d get away with if these were the first six issues of an ongoing). \u00a0Little about it makes sense. \u00a0But Liefeld comes across as genuinely enthusiastic about it. \u00a0It doesn’t feel phoned in. \u00a0It feels mad.<\/p>\n

In a good way? \u00a0No. \u00a0Not in a good way. \u00a0It’s awful. \u00a0But at least it’s idiosyncratically awful. \u00a0And some Liefeld concepts turned out to work when other people communicated them more effectively. \u00a0Might this be one?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

To find that out, we’re going to have to unpack the plot. \u00a0Let’s note, though, that not only does Liefeld plot this story and pencil the first and last issues, he also scripts the whole thing. \u00a0The dialogue ranges from tersely serviceable to did-anyone-edit-this. \u00a0(“Crushing your resistance is an honor for we who serve the royal family.” \u00a0“Is that what they’re paying you for? \u00a0To intimidate me with threats?” \u00a0“Shooting fish in a barrel requires more difficulty than picking the rest of you off.”) \u00a0Though I’ll admit to liking “The major said I could fire the guns! \u00a0ALL THE GUNS!!!”<\/p>\n

Major X, a gun-toting paramilitary, and his companion M’Koy, who may or may not be the Beast – it’s never explained – have travelled back in time looking for the X-Men, but arrive at the Mansion in time to stumble upon an early incarnation of X-Force instead. \u00a0We’re off to a good start here already, because this seems to place the story in the closing pages of\u00a0New Mutants<\/em> #100, at which point the Mansion is meant to have \u00a0been levelled by an explosion. \u00a0But never mind, because there’s a fight, after which Major X asks X-Force for help in saving his world. \u00a0So apparently Major X is the sort of asshole who attacks on sight even when he recognises people and wants their help.<\/p>\n

What Major X is trying to protect is a world he calls – brace yourself, now – the X-Istence. \u00a0And this is where we get a somewhat interesting idea: the X-Istence is an artificial world inhabited by a bunch of mutants who fled Earth in the future, led by a high-powered mutant called – again, brace yourself – the X-Ential. \u00a0The X-Ential seems to be some sort of Moses figure, who’s led the mutants, plus a bunch of Atlanteans, to safety in their new homeland. \u00a0But this world is created and sustained by the X-Ential, who is powerful, but not\u00a0that<\/em> powerful – so it’s a bit wonky, and the mutants are happy but the Atlanteans’ bit is below par. \u00a0As for Major X, he’s basically a driven patriot who wants to preserve his mutant refuge dimension.<\/p>\n

You might be thinking that this is more the X-Ential’s story than Major X… and you’d be right. \u00a0The high concept here is the X-Istence itself, and Major X is just a guy who runs around shooting things and getting agitated about it. \u00a0He also has a motorcycle. \u00a0It’s called the Motherbike.<\/p>\n

Anyhow, the big crisis is that the X-Ential is missing and the X-Istence is collapsing. \u00a0So Major X has come back in time to change history and save his world. \u00a0And then Wolverine shows up for no reason. \u00a0And then a guy called Dreadpool shows up – not a typo – who wears a Deadpool costume and seems to be a serious-and-gritty impostor. \u00a0Dreadpool is apparently working for the people who caused the collapse of the X-Istence, and has been sent to stop Major X from stopping it. \u00a0More fighting happens. \u00a0Deadpool shows up for no apparent reason. \u00a0And at the end of the issue Major X unmasks as Cable’s son.<\/p>\n

Yes, this is all just issue #1.<\/p>\n

Let’s see if we can pick up the pace. \u00a0Brent Peeples pencils issue #2, and doesn’t particularly try to emulate Liefeld’s style, making for a more conventionally readable issue, though also quite a bland one. \u00a0We get a lot of flashbacks to the wars that led to the X-Istence, and an introduction to Nomar and Lora, the aggrieved leaders of the X-Istence Atlanteans. \u00a0Back at the X-Force plotline (wrongly captioned as “the here and now”), Cable agrees to help Major X, and they go off to fight Surf, a trio of Atlantean mutants who Liefeld created for an Atlantis Attacks annual. \u00a0Major X doesn’t speak until page ten of this issue, and has something like eight lines of dialogue.<\/p>\n

Issue #3 is drawn by Whilce Portacio, whose scratchiness serves the material pretty well. \u00a0While the heroes regroup, Surf return to the Atlantean throne room where for some reason Nomar and Lora are in charge. \u00a0Apparently they’ve come back to the present day to stop Major X and avert… something? \u00a0Stopping Atlanteans from going to the X-Istence in the first place? \u00a0Stopping Major X from stopping what they did to destroy the X-Istence? \u00a0Why are they running present-day Atlantis anyway? \u00a0Meanwhile, Major X and M’Koy move on to fight the Watchtower, who you might conceivably remember from a Wolverine story that Liefeld did in 2000. \u00a0The recap page seems to assume this is the present-day version of the X-Ential, but the actual dialogue suggests it’s the one Major X knows – though how he ended up with the Watchtower in the first place, I have no idea.<\/p>\n

Peeples is back for issues #4 and #5, which open with a decent enough flashback to the Atlanteans complaining about their living conditions in the X-Istence, and Major X shouting them down for insufficient patriotism. \u00a0There’s a glimmer in there of an interesting if rather unsympathetic character. \u00a0Back at the regular plot, the future Atlanteans betray the Watchtower and try to wander off with the X-Ential, but Major X and M’Koy escape with him to Genosha, where the dying X-Ential merges with some girl called Aura who he apparently knows, making her the new X-Ential.<\/p>\n

Then Liefeld returns for issue #6, which opens with a painfully extended monologue by Deadpool before we get a big fight between (on the one hand) Major X, M’Koy, the new X-Ential, a future Cable and Deadpool against (on the other) the mad Atlanteans, their sea serpent, and Dreadpool. \u00a0Dreadpool gets unmasked but we don’t find out who he is. \u00a0And at the end, the new X-Ential announces that she’s taking the captured baddies “to a tribunal that will seek to determine whether your actions were influenced by the environment that you claim compromised you”, then leaves without restoring the X-Istence at all. \u00a0Um…<\/p>\n

So it’s a godawful mess, plainly. \u00a0There’s\u00a0something<\/em> of interest in the concept, even if the Major is largely marginalised in his own book: he’s over-committed to his newly-minted nation and dismisses every criticism as disrespectful, while the Atlanteans seem to interpret every failure of the X-Istence as a sign that they’ve been screwed. \u00a0But going forward we’re left with a character who’s apparently resigned to being unable to restore his home, and whose main motivation going forward is to change history so that it won’t be needed in the first place. \u00a0And that makes him a standard-issue change-the-past-to-save-the-future character. \u00a0It’s hard to see him taking off.<\/p>\n

Still, if you were in the market for a Rob Liefeld miniseries in the first place, I guess this is probably what you were looking for: ropey on levels of basic competence, but indisputably enthusiastic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a temptation to bring out special standards where Rob Liefeld is concerned. \u00a0After all, on any conventional basis, he makes awful, incoherent comics. \u00a0And yet, and yet… \u00a0Liefeld was a star in the nineties, and clearly he was doing something that connected. \u00a0His style was one of the dominant features of the period, grudgingly […]<\/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,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4626","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\/4626","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=4626"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4630,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4626\/revisions\/4630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}