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MUTIES #1
"The Changeling"
Neutral (4/10)
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Marvel Comics
Writer: Karl Bollers
Layouts: Salgood Sam
Painted Art: Peter Ferguson
Letters: Paul Tutrone
Editor: Mark Powers
Price: $2.50 US/$4.00 CAN |
I'll say this for Muties: It's got nice artwork. For that matter,
it's a good idea, taking a look at mutants in society, filling in some of the
details of the "anti-mutant hysteria" that has been the backdrop for the X-Men
titles for so long. Unfortunately, it requires more of an understanding of
teenagers and the kind of subtle violence that caused Columbine than Karl
Bollers seems up to, and so this book winds up being clumsy and borderline
insulting. I applaud Marvel for trying something different, for looking at
mutants in a way that emphasizes characterization and their place in society
instead of spandex-clad squads beating one another up, but the way this is
carried off is about as realistic and believable as the melodramatics of the
super-hero set, and against a more realistic backdrop, it just looks ridiculous.
It's a shame that the story
is so lacking, because the artwork is fantastic. Sam and Ferguson deliver a
realistic and effective look at normal high school life, with a dark tone to the
colors that gives everything a sort of dark reality. I particularly enjoyed the
use of browns on "notebook paper" for flashback sequences, a nice storytelling
trick to establish what was going on in the narrator's head.
It's fairly easy to see where Bollers meant to go with this story, showing a troubled young boy beset by bullies and suffering from an unbelievably bad home life. Unfortunately, the torment the boy suffers at school seems remarkably mild and the trouble with his home life cartoonishly abusive, and so I didn't really buy into either. Anyone who has seen Boston Public has gotten a more
realistic view of the various circumstances and abuse that cause kids to
consider violence, and the torment that is inflicted on Jared in this issue
reads more like the kind of thing Stan Lee would have inflicted on Peter Parker
back in the 1960s.
We're meant to believe that
the pressures on Jared cause him to snap, and I expect that we're meant to have
some sort of sympathy for him as well. Unfortunately, Jared goes off the rails
on remarkably little, and while I'm certainly not one to call for any sort of
forgiveness for the unbalanced individuals who would perform a school shooting,
Boller's unwillingness to delve a little deeper into Jared's motives and make
his actions understandable, maybe even borderline justifiable, results in a
neutered story.
Perhaps the biggest shame of
the story is that it doesn't really get into the ideas promised by the title
until the very end, and it does it on a very surface level. The revelation of
the mutant is meant to be a twist, but given how poorly the character was
developed, that revelation comes off as cheap shock value, and the whispered
anti-mutant sentiments that echo through the last few pages, the most
interesting aspect of the story, are left as mere "color" to the overall story
of Jared, which turns out to not really be about him at all.
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