{"id":4633,"date":"2019-07-18T21:25:50","date_gmt":"2019-07-18T20:25:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4633"},"modified":"2019-07-18T21:25:50","modified_gmt":"2019-07-18T20:25:50","slug":"mr-mrs-x-11-12-the-lady-the-tiger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4633","title":{"rendered":"Mr & Mrs X #11-12 – “The Lady & The Tiger”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gosh, the backlog is starting to look a bit terrifying. \u00a0That’ll happen when everything ends at once, I guess – including a bunch of prologue one-shots sneaking in under the wire. \u00a0But we’ll come to those. \u00a0First up, the closing two issues of\u00a0Mr & Mrs X<\/em>, a book which has in fact achieved something (hopefully) lasting and solid. \u00a0Before Kelly Thompson got hold of Rogue and Gambit, their on-again-off-again relationship had drifted into that grey territory somewhere between “nineties nostalgia” and “not this again.” \u00a0Despite the initial wrench it took to get them there,\u00a0Mr & Mrs X\u00a0<\/em>ends with them as a solid couple who seem, once again, like they belong together.<\/p>\n

Publishers can be understandably nervous about marrying off characters, because of the fear that it marks the end of their story. \u00a0It depends on the story, of course. \u00a0Moonlighting<\/em> was notoriously considered to have lost its way after it paired up the lead characters, but the core of their appeal was the will-they-won’t-they schtick. \u00a0With Rogue and Gambit, any mileage in that routine was exhausted years ago, and besides, their appeal has long been more in the way they play off each other when they’re together. \u00a0They work as a double act; marrying them makes it stronger.<\/p>\n

But we have two issues left here, and some loose ends to fill. \u00a0There’s a gentle nod to the fact that the current\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> story is carrying on in parallel, but Rogue and Gambit have other priorities in mind than trying to track down Scott’s team. \u00a0Instead, Remy is going back to New Orleans to tie up that storyline about – shudder – the Guilds. \u00a0The Guilds have never felt like a good fit for Gambit – they take themselves far too seriously, and they’re quite a silly idea to boot – but they’re so ingrained into his back story that you have to deal with them sooner or later.<\/p>\n

Since Gambit is an absentee leader for the Guild, he figures there’s going to be a power vacuum in New Orleans that he’d better sort out. \u00a0There is, but Candra has already filled it. \u00a0Candra’s never exactly been a classic character, but there’s an angle here. \u00a0She was supposedly killed off in\u00a0Cable<\/em>, but being an immortal, she always comes back. \u00a0It’s just taking a little time, and it hasn’t entirely worked, so right now, she looks about twelve. \u00a0Gambit describes the resulting effect as “highly disturbing”, and I’m not convinced that Oscar Bazaldua’s art in the first issue sells it terribly well. \u00a0He does good action, and good infiltration scenes with Gambit, but his women are generally quite baby-faced – there’s a scene between Gambit and Bella Donna where her face looks too small for her head – and so an ostensibly 12-year-old Candra dressed in her typical costume seems more like Candra drawn in his style, only shorter. \u00a0It does look vaguely creepy, but more because it reminds me that his women look a bit wrong in general. \u00a0Javier Pina, doing the final issue, gets it a bit closer, or rather has more of a contrast with his female characters generally – but it still doesn’t entirely land.<\/p>\n

So Candra is in league with the Assassins Guild, and Gambit gets captured, and of course Rogue comes after him to rescue him. \u00a0Fortunately, Candra’s role here doesn’t depend on her being an especially interesting character outside her new gimmick; she’s there to give Gambit one final chance to be heroic before the book is cancelled. \u00a0Candra needs to sacrifice somebody in order to get her full power back, and because she is generous to plots in need, she gives Gambit the choice between Rogue and Bella Donna. \u00a0This is kind of false tension, because we all know Gambit’s not actually going to choose either of them.<\/p>\n

As with earlier issues, though, Kelly Thompson seems to have in mind that this set-up allows her to echo a point from the nineties that she evidently regards as unresolved: the flashback story in\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #33 when Sabretooth did the same routine with Gambit’s brother and his girlfriend. \u00a0The moral of that story was that Gambit got close to her because he was trying to steal something from her, and was too busy playing the thief to realise that he could just have asked her. \u00a0So it’s a story about the young Gambit treating a woman as entertainment and getting her killed as a result, basically. \u00a0And in theory, if you do something similar and he gets it right this time, you’re saying that he’s matured.<\/p>\n

Mr & Mrs X<\/em> expressly cites the earlier story, but doesn’t actually recap enough of it to provide the context. \u00a0It doesn’t even make clear that Genevieve was his girlfriend, perhaps because from a 2019 standpoint, it’s a rather unfashionable trope. \u00a0But if you’re going to invoke the story at all…<\/p>\n

This set-up is apparently designed to allow Gambit to redeem himself by making the heroic choice and saving the day. \u00a0You suspect that if this series were continuing then this would just be Gambit’s story, but the final scenes bolt on some stuff for Rogue, given that it’s her book too. \u00a0The big idea, though, is simply that Gambit now embraces all the aspects of his character and refuses to be made to choose between them. \u00a0And… yes, fine, though it’s a heavy handed way of making the point. \u00a0Of course, even though this is the last issue of the series, nobody\u00a0really<\/em> wants to do more stories with the bloody Guilds, so Gambit doesn’t stick around to actually run the Guilds. \u00a0Which kind of undermines his point.<\/p>\n

It’s not the strongest of stories for the book to go out on, even allowing for it only having two issues to work with. \u00a0But at least it ends strongly, with a few pages of domesticity. \u00a0I’m not sure\u00a0Mr & Mrs X\u00a0<\/em>ever quite matched the strength of its lead-in mini, but as a restatement of Rogue and Gambit, it’s done its job well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gosh, the backlog is starting to look a bit terrifying. \u00a0That’ll happen when everything ends at once, I guess – including a bunch of prologue one-shots sneaking in under the wire. \u00a0But we’ll come to those. \u00a0First up, the closing two issues of\u00a0Mr & Mrs X, a book which has in fact achieved something (hopefully) […]<\/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-4633","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\/4633","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=4633"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4634,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4633\/revisions\/4634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}