{"id":8645,"date":"2023-01-03T21:33:51","date_gmt":"2023-01-03T21:33:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8645"},"modified":"2023-01-03T21:33:51","modified_gmt":"2023-01-03T21:33:51","slug":"gambit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8645","title":{"rendered":"Gambit"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>GAMBIT vol 6 #1-5<\/strong>
\nWriter: Chris Claremont<\/strong>
\nArtist: Sid Kotian<\/strong>
\nColourist: Espen Grundetjern<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Clayton Cowles<\/strong>
\nEditor: Mark Basso<\/strong><\/p>\n

What do you do with Chris Claremont, if you’re Marvel? On the one hand, he’s the defining writer of the X-Men, the man whose run made it the biggest comic around. On the other… well, that was over thirty years ago now, and there have been a couple of abortive comebacks since then, with decidedly mixed results. Plus, the Krakoa era is the least Claremont thing imaginable.<\/p>\n

So… the nostalgia circuit, then. We’ve got this\u00a0Gambit<\/em> miniseries, set at around the time of his debut, when he was hanging out in Cairo, Illinois with a pre-teen Storm. And there’s also an\u00a0X-Treme X-Men<\/em> revival mini to follow.\u00a0X-Men Legends<\/em> but on a larger scale.<\/p>\n

Fair enough, I guess. If there’s one thing you can say about Claremont’s run, there’s a lot of gaps and dangling plot threads that he can actually go in and clear up. The specifics of Gambit and Storm’s time together isn’t all\u00a0that<\/em> important… but it’s a gap, for all that, and they had the sort of relationship where other stories were always kind of implied. Come to think of it, why is this billed simply as a\u00a0Gambit<\/em> mini? Why not\u00a0Gambit and Storm<\/em>, except maybe that Storm fans might be a bit disappointed by getting a kid?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It’s a slightly oddly structured book. Issue #1 is based on a minor altercation with the Shadow King – who was the villain in the original storyline – but the book then heads off in a different direction. After a car crash, Remy and Ororo are taken in by ex-marine Marissa DeCastro and her doctor mother, who are embroiled in a feud with one of those aggressive property developers that are trying to intimidate people into selling up. Remy and Marissa fall in love, she gets dragged into his world, and it all goes horribly wrong as things escalate towards the finale. Which, I guess, is indeed primarily a Gambit story – although there’s a fairly major subplot of Ororo being trained in her dreams by one of her ancestors.<\/p>\n

What it does well is to recapture the sense of Gambit as a slightly smug, one-step-ahead Robin Hood figure, exasperating Ororo by running rings around her. The basic infuriating charm of the guy comes across well, which was a big part of his appeal in those days. It does have a lot of the feel of the late 80s period.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, Claremont seems keen to tie Gambit into a lot of other concepts from his back catalogue. I get the desire to revisit some other concepts while we’re here, but early Gambit had a whole mysterious thing. And tying him to a bunch of familiar or semi-familiar names, whom he apparently knows well, doesn’t really fit with that. It anchors him in stuff that’s familiar. Granted, Gambit’s back story is pretty well defined by this point, but I’m not wild about filling his address book with characters he doesn’t really have any connection with.<\/p>\n

So Lila Cheney gets an outing here. Which… well, she’s a thief, I suppose, so that makes a degree of sense. Bounty, on the other hand, is a character from Claremont’s late-90s\u00a0Fantastic Four<\/em> run who never really worked; there’s a big gap between how cool she’s obviously intended to be, and how generic she actually is. And the Bacchae, from a later Claremont return to the X-Men, get a walk-on too. Actually, they make more of an impression here, because the original story just had them as a random bunch of all-female mercenaries with connections to the Olympians. Here, they’re more of a sort of global urban Amazon street gang, which feels like it might actually work.<\/p>\n

For the most part, I like\u00a0Cotian’s art a lot. It’s nicely traditional, in a way that makes eminent sense for a late 80s throwback book; it feels about right for the period, but reminds me a bit of Lee Weeks. His characters have plenty of expression, his locations have a lot of character. The dreaming training sequences are lovely; the shaded monochrome and the lack of backgrounds really work. I’d like to see more of him. There are issues, though. There’s a horribly botched reveal of Marissa’s costume in issue #4, where the proportions are absolutely all over the place, and generally the last few pages of that issue feel a bit rushed. He struggles a bit with Bounty, too, until he seizes on using her bandana as the visual hook. And Gambit often looks like he could use a haircut. But the positives outweigh that.<\/p>\n

What this mini promises is Chris Claremont revisiting the early appearances of Gambit and doing something distinctively Claremont with it. And that’s what it delivers. These projects don’t always succeed in recapturing the feel of the original stories, and they can be decidedly patchy – but on that metric, this is one of the successful ones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

GAMBIT vol 6 #1-5 Writer: Chris Claremont Artist: Sid Kotian Colourist: Espen Grundetjern Letterer: Clayton Cowles Editor: Mark Basso What do you do with Chris Claremont, if you’re Marvel? On the one hand, he’s the defining writer of the X-Men, the man whose run made it the biggest comic around. On the other… well, that […]<\/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-8645","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\/8645","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=8645"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8647,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8645\/revisions\/8647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}