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X Men Noir #1
Posted 22 Dec 2008
Writer: Fred Van Lente
Artist: Dennis Calero
Letters: Blambot's Nate Piekos
Ink: Dennis Calero
Colors: Dennis Calero
Publisher: Marvel
5.00 out of 5 Stars
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.”
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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.
—CCdC—
Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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