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X Men Noir #1 Posted 22 Dec 2008Writer: Fred Van Lente
Reviewed by Adam McGovern |
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It’s a common catchphrase of gumshoe-and-gangster literature, and a basic motif in any student melodrama: Class. And X Men Noir has got it, as fedora’d flatfoots might say, in spades. The kickoff to a strange and fertile restaging of some of Marvel’s leading franchises in crime-fiction trappings, this takes one of the company’s most oversaturated and predictable brands and does astonishingly sophisticated and deliriously original things with it.
“The iconic gloom and despair of gangland pulp and film noir collide with the universal blood-feud of the X-Men and Brotherhood.” |
If this book is any indication, the Marvel Noir line is going to bear in mind that superheroes arise from the fabric of particular times’ troubles and dreams, so the most fascinating what-if’s can come from changing the setting and seeing how these classic types would develop differently – it’s why the 2005 What If series by the same editorial team, placing Captain America in the Old West, Wolverine in Prohibition-era Chicago, etc. worked so well and opened so many new possibilities, and why so many other alt.storylines reshuffling the plot-points of recent crossover events fail to satisfy – WWII-era Sub-Mariner stories and Kennedy-era Sub-Mariner stories took completely different shapes that each stand as classics, in a way that wondering if the Hulk’s skin were purple just can’t.
But when the iconic gloom and despair of gangland pulp and film noir collide with the universal blood-feud of the X-Men and Brotherhood, a whole new classic canon can get refilled, and writer Fred Van Lente and artist Dennis Calero are going in with cannons blazing. It’s renegade psychiatrist Charles Xavier and his circle of social-misfit youth, ostensibly treated medically yet secretly trained in crime and terror, against a corrupt brotherhood run within the police department by Chief Magnus while, in a masterstroke of pop-history free association, Tom Halloway, the golden-age, non-powered “Angel” (no sign of the more familiar X-Men’s Warren Worthington) tries to sort things out as an undercover investigator.
Calero achieves a clearly defined yet richly claustrophobic atmosphere of textured shadows and intricate industrial monuments, the literally shady underpasses and dive-bars where the action roils out of polite society’s sight. Tense panel grids and deep darks chiseling the bleak settings and facial expressions like an ice-pick create both a feeling of immediate realism and an effect of the characters existing in some old photo-album, which swallows up the reader too. This is immersive, cinematic art right up there with the best of Jae Lee and Richard Isanove.
Van Lente weaves a fascinating storyline based on the long-discredited but once-gospel idea of eugenics – racial engineering or selective breeding to perfect human behavior – as a stand-in for the genetic mutation controversy that underpins contemporary X-Men stories. We have, as yet, seen no actual superpowers from these characters, but we do see a titanic conflict between Magnus’ racial ideas and Xavier’s scary conviction that sociopaths (not mutants) are a new form of humanity, unencumbered by primitive morality. These are just the kinds of crackpot substitute religions that were floating around in the 1930s-ish timeframe the book seems to be set in, and Van Lente is brilliant in working up a motif of miseducation – from Xavier’s loony teachings, to several flashbacks regarding the Angel’s instruction in criminal techniques by fellow cons in a wayward youth, to the wacky-yet-accepted psuedoscience of eugenics itself.
The book is full of little touches that show how surely on their toes the creators are – in keeping with the school-for-scandal theme, Calero sticks in “Fagan’s” as the name for a bar the cops frequent (one vowel away from Oliver Twist’s pickpocket mentor), and Van Lente is virtually alone with J. Michael Straczynski in getting the period speech patterns right almost every time in a sea of recent comics set in the past but littered with anachronisms.
The comic wraps up with a serialized prose pulp story about future mutants credited to “sociologist” Bolivar Trask (a well-known modern X-Men hater turned Marvel’s L. Ron Hubbard here), in which Van Lente expertly accesses the headlong dime-novel style which both makes visionary flights of expression possible and catastrophes of convoluted phrasing inevitable (while Calero captures the crude immediacy yet mythic impact of classic anonymous pulp illustration) – and they ring the comic in with an honest-to-god creator credit for Lee & Kirby on X-Men, and even Paul Gustavson on The Angel. Like I said, a class act, and I can’t wait for the next curtain.