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X-FORCE #123
"Tick Tock"
Mildly Recommended (6/10)
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Marvel Comics
Writer: Peter Milligan
Artist: Mike Allred
Colors: Laura Allred
Letters: Mike Allred & Blambot
Editor: Axel Alonso
Price: $2.25 US/$3.50 CAN |
A couple weeks ago, New X-Men #117 showed how a "'Nuff Said" issue could be done, using weird dreamlike imagery to tell a story without words. In X-Force #123, we see how such a story might have gone wrong. Reading through the script excerpt, it seems pretty clear that Milligan knew what he wanted, and Allred delivered pretty much exactly what was asked for, but the story is really hard to understand, and nowhere near as entertaining, visually or otherwise, as the New X-Men #117 story it resembles. A lot of the strength of this book lies in
the dialogue, and despite the talent of the creative team, it seems that taking
that dialogue away from them considerably weakened the book for a month.
Allred does succeed in
conveying the weirdness that Milligan is looking for. Doop's twisting inside
himself is definitely odd, and the various settings that the X-Forcers find
themselves in are creepy and strange. I was particularly impressed with the
sequences featuring Phat and Edie, both of whom get into some horrific places.
Unfortunately, I only got a sense of weirdness from what was going on. I didn't
get a sense of what the nightmares were representing until I read the script,
which seems like a failure of story.
To be fair, Allred is asked
to do a lot here, and he delivers in almost every regard. We're supposed to see
Doop shrugging, while he's eating, despite the fact that he has no visible
shoulders. We're supposed to get a variety of emotions from Doop, including
worry, anger, fear and a number of others, despite his design as a very
inscrutable character. Allred struggles with some very difficult storytelling
obstacles here and never fails to make the expressions unclear. However, I found
that it wasn't until I read the script that I could put together what those
expressions were supposed to mean in the context of the story.
In a silent issue, if the story fails, the blame is generally placed on the artist. In Uncanny X-Men, easily the biggest failure of "'Nuff Said" month, I placed the blame equally on the artist and writer. With X-Force, the failure really doesn't lie with any of the
creative team. It lies higher up with editorial, who suggested a storytelling
gimmick like this on a book where it really has no place. Taking the dialogue
out of the book robbed it of its strength, and even with a talented set of
creators doing exactly what they set out to do, the book didn't really work as
well as it usually does.
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