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ROGUE #1
"In Your Hands..."
Neutral (4/10)
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Marvel Comics
Writer: Fiona Avery
Pencils: Aaron Lopresti
Inks: Randy Emberlin
Colors: Colorgraphix
Letters: Mike Heisler
Editor: Mark Powers
Price: $2.50 US/$3.75 CAN |
Well, these new solo X-Men
mini-series so far aren't looking much more impressive than the last wave. Rogue
is a tough character to tackle at this point, shackled with bad continuity,
numerous personality and power changes and an ill-advised romance with Gambit
that pretty much robbed her of all independent personality. So Avery chose to go
back to her early days in the X-Men and tackle the unsculpted clay of the
character... only she's using versions of the characters that exist in the
modern day or in the movie, mixing whatever elements she likes and ignoring what
she doesn't, and while I'm all for that if you can pull it off (as Millar,
Bendis and Morrison have), it doesn't work here. There's no way to really
empathize with the characters because we get no grounding... Avery is at once
assuming familiarity with the characters and writing them in a way that makes
them unfamiliar. It doesn't help that the plot, seeing how Rogue began to cope
with her powers, doesn't really make much sense, since the defining aspect of
the character throughout all of her incarnations has been that she doesn't cope
well with her powers, something that continues to this day.
While I try not to concern myself overmuch
with the continuity these days, if you're going to play in the sandbox, I think
you ought to at least have enough familiarity with the characters to write them
with some kind of consistency. Particularly in a solo series where you're
presumably defining the character further as job one. Avery ignores any number
of minor and major continuity points here, from the minor use of Storm as a
worldly and wise character back when she was still something of an out-of-place
goddess to the more major problem of ignoring that Rogue had (and has) strong
involuntary mental blocks which would have prevented much of what Xavier does
this issue.
More to the point, what Avery does
introduce isn't all that interesting. Xavier has a newfound fondness for wounded
animals, a nice thematic reinforcement of what he's trying to do with Rogue, but
one about as subtle as a ton of bricks. Storm takes Rogue shopping for clothes,
something she shouldn't be any more skilled at than Rogue herself, but it lets
Avery write some heavy-handed female bonding scenes and introduce her notion
that Rogue's problems stem from her past as an orphan and a runaway.
Having seen his past work, I was hoping
that even if I didn't enjoy the story, Aaron Lopresti's work would be the saving
grace. However, the work here is not even remotely his best, featuring sketchy
renditions of the characters and fairly bland layouts. The whole thing is kept
rather grounded, and while that would have worked had Avery's story of
psychological counseling and fitting in been believable or entertaining, when
I'm bored by the pseudo-psychology, the last thing I need is to be bored by the
visuals as well.
There are some very interesting questions
left unaddressed in Rogue's history and in her character, and if nothing else, I
have to give Avery points for trying to show that Xavier helped Rogue somewhat.
After all, she came to the X-Men for help years ago and has gotten nothing in
return, and if Avery can establish that they helped somehow, it makes Rogue's
presence on the modern team more believable. But so far, this seems like telling
a story with a whole bunch of characters who are wholly unsuited to it.
Email Randy Lander comments about this review. |
