{"id":4670,"date":"2019-08-11T21:18:06","date_gmt":"2019-08-11T20:18:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4670"},"modified":"2019-08-11T21:18:06","modified_gmt":"2019-08-11T20:18:06","slug":"giant-size-x-statix-hereditary-x","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4670","title":{"rendered":"Giant-Size X-Statix – “Hereditary-X”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, look who’s back. \u00a0This looked like a random one-shot when it appeared on the schedules, but it turns out to be the prologue issue for The X-Cellent<\/em>, a 2020 series reuniting Peter Milligan, Michael and Laura Allred, and (some of) X-Statix. \u00a0The X-books are going in some odd directions again. \u00a0X-Statix<\/em> wasn’t a perfect series by any means – the Princess Diana thing probably wouldn’t have worked even without the editorial problems – but its little corner of the line was always refreshingly bizarre.<\/p>\n

It was also very much an irk-the-purists book, and that spirit seems alive. \u00a0Since\u00a0X-Statix<\/em> killed off most of its characters, this book opts for a next-generation approach. \u00a0So our main character here is U-Go Girl’s daughter Katie, who was introduced back in\u00a0X-Force\u00a0<\/em>#119, and believed she was actually Edie’s younger sister. \u00a0She’s now grown up and ready to be the next version of the character. \u00a0But on top of that we’ve got Anarchist’s previously unmentioned teen son “The A” and Phat’s clone “Phatty”, along with a returning Orphan, Vivisector and Dead Girl. \u00a0Do not ask about how the timeline works. \u00a0Really, don’t.<\/p>\n

If this had to be judged as a freestanding comic, it would be a bit unsatisfactory; it sets up more than it delivers. But of course it’s not a freestanding comic; it’s gathering the team for the upcoming book. \u00a0Which makes it rather hard to judge.<\/p>\n

Katie, still believing herself to be Edie’s sister, is obsessed with X-Statix, now known to a new generation from their Netflix documentary. \u00a0Dead Girl shows up to arrange a visitation from Edie, who reveals the truth before vanishing back to the afterlife. \u00a0Meanwhile, the X-Cellent are also hunting Edie, and Dead Girl is trying to put the team back together in order to take them on – describing them as “a perversion of everything X-Statix stood for”, much to Orphan’s understandable bemusement. \u00a0Orphan is grudgingly prepared to come back, as is Vivisector, even though he’s worried about damaging his literary reputation. \u00a0Doop is hanging around too. \u00a0Beyond that, it’s the second generation taking the place of the dead leads.<\/p>\n

The X-Cellent turn out to be the new team of Zeitgeist, the leader of the short-lived X-Force line-up that got killed in their first issue. \u00a0His new team is, he insists, “a team of evil dada shock troops for the culture war that lies ahead” – we’re firmly in the\u00a0Doom Patrol<\/em> tradition of weirdness here. \u00a0In many ways it’s a typically flippant and cynical X-Statix story, designed to reestablish the tone of the book and its undercutting of superhero tropes. \u00a0(“My mirror does not lie. \u00a0Well, it does occasionally, but in this instance it’s very honest.”) \u00a0The retro classic feel of the Allreds’ art is still a perfect fit for this, giving the book the sort of grounding in the superhero genre that the gimmick needs. \u00a0They’re not proper superheroes, they’re still concerned about their image as much as anything… but at the same time they kind of\u00a0are<\/em> proper superheroes, because they really are putting themselves at risk to fight the bad guys, for all their fame-chasing. \u00a0X-Statix<\/em> was always to some extent about characters who weren’t really cut out for this having to fill the role anyway.<\/p>\n

The new characters get remarkably little screen time here – presumably they’re going to get a lot more to do in\u00a0the upcoming mini, since to all intents and purposes they’re largely copies here. \u00a0That’s clearly a conscious decision but a curious one, though it helps to play up the usual artificiality of\u00a0X-Statix<\/em> stories, and I guess in the long run it fits with the theme of characters trying to live up to the roles they’ve taken on.<\/p>\n

In the wider picture, a mini involving the cynics of X-Statix taking on a maniac who thinks he’s fighting a culture war is… odd? \u00a0Zeitgeist is apparently meant to represent the spirit of the times in some way – hence the name – but I’m not sure I’d describe this is a particularly dadaist epoch. \u00a0That said, there’s something of interest in the idea of these characters from 15-20 years ago – not exactly the most edifying heroes of their era – being the ones who get to play one side in that culture war precisely because they are so trivial and compromised. \u00a0X-Statix’s ironic mild surrealism isn’t exactly the spirit of the times in 2019, but maybe that’s the point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, look who’s back. \u00a0This looked like a random one-shot when it appeared on the schedules, but it turns out to be the prologue issue for The X-Cellent, a 2020 series reuniting Peter Milligan, Michael and Laura Allred, and (some of) X-Statix. \u00a0The X-books are going in some odd directions again. \u00a0X-Statix wasn’t a perfect […]<\/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-4670","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\/4670","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=4670"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4683,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4670\/revisions\/4683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}