Civil War: X-Men Universe

Ok, another Civil War book, but this one has promise because Deadpool plays a major part in the book.  Of course I love Deadpool and I knew he would make an appearance which made this one of my earliest purchases of the supplementary Civil War books.  Now knowing that I’m a big Deadpool fan, if you’re not then take my review with a grain of salt.

Ok, so I bought it for Deadpool, but the action starts with Jamie Madrox (Multiple Man) and his X-Factor friends.  Am I still allowed to call them X-Factor?  See I haven’t follwed X-Factor pretty much since Joe Quesada pencilled it.  Ok, that’s a slight exaggeration, but not that far off so I’m way out of the loop.  I have no idea who Tryp is, why he’s important, who Layla is, what the purpose of Mutant Town, et al.  Needless to say, as a stand-alone book, at least as far as the first half is concerned it does a very poor job of standing on it’s own two legs.  That said I don’t really think that it was the intention of Marvel to make the supplementary Civil War books to be read as stand alones, but it was still a bit of a disappointment to me.

The used-to-be-called-X-factor saga is all about Quicksilver post House of M and what stand Jamie Madrox and his compatriots are going to take in regards to the whole Civil War thing.  I like Multiple Man, and I used to like Quicksilver, but I’m afraid being so out of touch with the whole X-Factor gang left me a bit confused as to the importance of this story because from an outsiders perspective I’d have to say that no one really cares about Mutant Town or its’ inhabitants.

Then we get to the Deadpool story, yay!  The merc with the mouth makes a decision that he wants to work for the government hunting down good guys that don’t want to register.  Deadpool decides that in order to get the government to take notice of his limitless skill he will clobber a group of unregistered heroes and deliver them to the proper authorities.  In typical Deadpool fashion however the super-hero group he chooses has already registered and he just manages to make an ass out of himself after getting beaten to a pulp by Squirrel Girl.  If that right there isn’t enough to make you want to read this book then there is definitely something wrong with you, or with me.

Somehow Deadpool still gets offered a chance to be a government sponsored bounty hunter of non-registered heroes and he even gets a shiney badge to boot.  So of course he heads out to mix it up with Daredevil and the rest of the core group of rebels including Captain America and Hercules.  After another humorous butt kicking Deadpool comes to realize that his good friend Nathan Winters-Dayspring Askani’son also known as Cable just happens to be on the other side of the fence of the Civil War as Cable fears a future with government controlled super-heroes.  Of course that leads to a bunch of Wade versus Nathan action that never gets old.

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My take, if you are a fan of the Cable / Deadpool series you should pick up this book because the second half of Civil War: X-Men Universe is a fun read.  If you’re not a fan of Deadpools, well the X-Factor story just isn’t enough on its’ own to make it a worthwhile purchase.

X-Men: Mutant Massacre

Wow, it’s taken a long time to set up MyTPB, but now that it’s finally done I think it was worth the effort.  So what better way to kick off my review site than to start with one of the most infamous and talked about crossover story arcs ever..  The X-Men’s Mutant Massacre!

I had always wanted to read this crossover given how many times I would find it referenced in modern story arcs, but finding all the books in this relatively old & popular crossover stories with some hard to find titles like Power Pack just seemed like more work than I was willing to go through.  Luckily, that’s exactly what trade paper backs are for.

Just to clarify, I had tons of preconceptions about this story.  What I — and probably most people who never read the story but followed the X-men comics — knew was that a group of assassins including Sabretooth called the Marauders were hired to cull the morlocks, and the popular X-man Gambit had led those assassins there.  Finally and probably the most significant change from the story was the transformation of Angel into Archangel.

I was envisioning all kinds of cool looking Weapon-X black-op type of soldiers creeping through the tunnels below New York and killing unsuspecting & ugly mutants with uncanny efficiency, what I got was something a whole lot different.

Ok, so time for a synopsis.  Contrary to future history, as confusing as that sounds, Gambit was never in the storyline.  There wasn’t even a dark figure stalking about the tunnels that we could pretend could have been Gambit, but that’s comics for you, re-writing history (retcon) whenever it makes for a shocking twist.  Ok, so no Gambit, but we still got these super-cool assassins called the Marauders.

Well, as it turns out the Marauders aren’t as cool as I was imagining them to be either.  I’m not going to go through all the Marauders, but a couple of key villains were Harpoon, an Inuit who throws electrically charged harpoons, Scalphunter who wears a ridiculous outfit with thousands of gun pieces all over his body so that he can make different guns on the fly I guess and Riptide, a killer who could spin really fast and then fling out an unlimited amount of shurikens at everyone within range.  Fantastic!

Ok, so the villains kinda left something to be desired, but what about the heroes.  Well between the X-Men and X-Factor (consisting of the original four X-men) you’ve got a lot of good superheroes in this mix, the problem was that neither team ever got near each other so both teams end up taking solid butt-kickings.  I have no problems with heroes getting whooped now and again though, so I was Ok with this.

I must admit reading a comic from the 1980’s does throw you a bit.  I mean Psylocke is not yet a hot ninja chick, Storm has a Mohawk and wears a leather vest and Rogue has a mullet with a skunk stripe right down the center.  But those were the times, so you’ve got to take those in good spirit and laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Another hero of note in the Mutant Massacre is Thor, who killed a guy which was pretty cool actually.  I had no real problem with the God of Thunder making an appearance in a mostly mutant storyline & kicking some ass, but the first eighteen pages of his appearance has him babysitting a group of children until a pair of frogs named Pudlegulp and Bugeye inform him of the Morlock massacre.  And no, I’m not kidding, though I wish I were.

The New Mutants make an appearance which really makes no difference to the storyline whatsoever.  You could scrub their entire appearance and be no worse for the wear.  Speaking of appearances that should have been scrubbed, we move to our last group of heroes, Power Pack!

Do I even need to make a list of the cons of having Power Pack make an appearance in what is supposed to be a landmark crossover.  I mean it’s Power Pack for Christ’s sakes. They have to sneak out so their mom and dad don’t see them because their powers are a secret.  If annoying not only the Marauders but also the readers was the point of putting them in the book, then I say job well done Power Pack!

Ok, so maybe my pre-conceived notions of how cool this book was going to be spoiled the read for me.  Kinda like when I saw clerks five years after everyone else in the world had.  It was still a fun read to fill in some of the X-Men history I had always wondered about.

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So what did I make of this all?  It’s not a perfect book by far, but it was pretty entertaining.  The cons were really Power Pack’s appearance, the whole X-Factor versus The Executioners ridiculousness which I didn’t even bother going over here and the lack of truly impressive villains.  The pros on the other hand were some fairly violent changes not contained merely within the book, but also as to how far you could take that kind of violence within fairly conservative super-hero comics at the time – but that’s just my opinion.

So between the historical significance of the book, the birth of brutality in X-titles and some pretty good scraps between Wolverine and Sabretooth, I deem this a pretty good read for fans of the X-Men line regardless of my sarcasm throughout this review.  Just don’t expect too much like I did or you’re bound to be disappointed.