Bang For My Buck: 30 Days Of Marvel Unlimited, Day 4 – I Can’t Believe What I Just Saw

To take full advantage of the fact that Marvel Unlimited is only 99 cents for the first month if you sign up by March 14 — which happens to be today — Nick is trying to see how much use of the service he can get. Every day, he’ll share what he read. See the previous day here.

Before anyone says anything, yes, I missed out on an obvious thematic hook for the Day 4 entry. I definitely should have read some Fantastic Four today. I’m not sure what I was thinking.

I went a completely different route, as you’ll see in a second. First I wanted to put it out there that I noticed another technical snafu while doing my reading. Today was the first time I tried downloading some issues for offline reading. For the final part of my reading, I was somewhere with notoriously finicky wi-fi and didn’t want to chance being unable to grab more comics as I’m going through them pretty quickly for this experiment.

After getting one or two into my library and marked for offline reading, I kept getting a pop-up message saying I had reached my limit of 12. Obviously I wasn’t anywhere close to that, but I couldn’t get the app to realize this, and eventually I just gave up.

There also isn’t a way to quickly remove issues from your library, or if there is, I couldn’t quickly figure it out. This is something that would be quite helpful for power users. I also encountered the error I had yesterday with the app failing to recognize my subscription status, which was again cured by simply relaunching the app — didn’t even have to log back in.

Could these simply be symptoms of that unreliable internet connection I mentioned? Absolutely, and I intend to check it against a steadier signal tomorrow. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the warts of the Marvel Unlimited service as well as the high points.

Anyway, on to a very intriguing run of comics that I’ve always wanted to read but never had a chance to prior to this …

X-Force (vol. 1) #116-129

Why I read it: If you’re not familiar with this one, Marvel made it appear that the mutants starring in X-Force all died off in #115. The very next issue saw writer Peter Milligan and artist Michael Allred pull off one of the biggest changes in direction of all time, reimagining the team as a group of young mutants cynically marketed for mass media and more obsessed with fame and its perks than being heroes. Add in graphic violence (made all the more surreal by Allred’s depictions of it), sex (though that wasn’t graphic) and a ridiculous body count and it’s hard to imagine Marvel having the guts to publish it, even with a “Mature Content” warning on some of the covers.

What I thought: The first few issues of this run come at you with so many concepts foreign to what you expect from a Marvel team book that they take your figurative breath away. They work on several levels; there’s shock value, obviously, but it’s not giving Milligan enough credit to see them only in that light. There’s an obvious skewering of some comic book conventions, but I think there are some throwback elements to the very earliest Marvel comics in the ways that all of the team members are flawed.

Milligan also pulls off a neat trick by establishing very early on that no one is safe, right before switching gears and making us care about the three “main” characters (Orphan, U-Go Girl and Anarchist) enough to be worried that one of them is going to end up dead. But it’s like a constant yo-yo job with your emotions: as soon as anyone seems likable, they inevitably do something that makes them look like a jerk. Kind of like real people often are, by the way.

With Wolverine and Professor X showing up, there’s little doubt that this series is in continuity even though it tests the limits of even comic book logic for it to be that way. Could X-Force really have burst into the public consciousness so quickly that they’d have their own restaurant chain? And would Xavier knowingly let his symbol be used for a team who fought battles staged specifically for the TV cameras? It seems unlikely, but that’s just another facet to the parody.

Having Allred on the book feels like one of those perfect choices, though seeing people dismembered in his art style messes with your head. The only problem is that the few times a guest artist is needed, it’s a jarring change, except for the single issue illustrated by Darwyn Cooke.

Even the name change the series undergoes is slyly worked into the plot. As long as you don’t take your super hero comics too seriously, this is a run you should really seek out at some point.

X-Statix #1-13

Why I read it: The X-Force run got me hooked, and I wanted to see where the story was headed. Milligan couldn’t possibly keep up the frenetic pace for too much longer, right? Incidentally, time constraints forced me to quit at #13, which is the beginning of an arc that was supposed to star a resurrected Princess Diana until Marvel backed off and changed the character. That would have been completely insane.

What I thought: It doesn’t quite grab you the same way as what came before it, possibly because you are in on some of the jokes by now. It’s still full of surprises, and the new characters introduced after the name change fit right in on this team of misfits. There are interesting treatments of issues concerning sexual identity and race, the latter somewhat surprising because there’s already the mutant-human relations aspect hanging over the team too.

There were several issues where I wasn’t sure right away if Allred was on art duties, and I mean that in a complimentary way because it appears he was experimenting a bit more. The problem with fill-in artists is still there though, as they turn a distinctive-looking book into something ordinary, taking some of the punch out of the whole thing.

X-Statix was cancelled after 26 issues, but even without getting to the end (and missing Thor versus Doop!), that doesn’t strike me as a bad thing. The creators got tons of mileage out of a crazy concept, probably more than I would have figured had I been reading these issues when they came out. I wonder what the pitch meeting was like …

Day 4 issues read: 27

Total issues read to date: 75