Thad wrote:(And I keep talking about how great X-Statix was; I should probably take a post to explain just what exactly it was at some point.)
Thad wrote:So eventually I'll get around to talking about X-Statix and how it's the best X-book ever.
So let's talk about X-Statix.
But first, to set the stage, let's talk about X-Force.
X-Force wasn't just the most '90s of all the '90s X-books, it was quite possibly the most '90s anything ever. It's the book that made Rob Liefeld a superstar artist, and it looked like this.
But the thing about the '90s is, it ended. Liefeld was long gone, and X-Force wasn't selling anymore. They tried to retool it with Warren Ellis at the helm and Liefeld's fellow Image founder Whilce Portacio on art, but that didn't take either.
So they retooled it again, or rather, put something completely different and entirely unrelated out under the same title.
X-Force #116 (cover date June 2001) looked like this.
That '60s-retro art style, by husband-and-wife team Mike (pencils and inks) and Laura (colors) Allred, is pretty much the polar opposite of Rob Liefeld. As you may guess, this made X-Force fans very angry (and one of my favorite things about the new X-Force is that it had a letter column and they routinely printed the hate mail they got for ruining X-Force).
And in case it's not clear by looking at that cover, it wasn't just radically different from the previous iterations of X-Force, it was radically different from
anything else the Big Two were publishing at the time.
A lot of people hated it. For me, it was love at first sight. Marvel promoted it heavily in the Bullpen Bulletins, with a few panels of preview art, and I thought it looked fresh and exciting. And I love Mike's work but the thing that
really drew my eye was those bright, bold colors. I believe Laura Allred is the greatest living comic book colorist.
As it turns out, I
had seen Mike's art before in a couple places
but I didn't realize that until later. A big part of what makes Mike Allred's art so instantly recognizable is Laura Allred's colors; his earlier work, with other colorists, just doesn't shout "Mike Allred" quite as loudly.
One of the big surprises (at least, for those of us who hadn't already read Allred's other work like Madman), though, was that the retro art style masked a very modern sensibility. To wit, this book was
shockingly violent. Like, see all those characters on that cover? All but two of them die in that first issue. And it's graphic. Here are a couple links with gory scans.
ZeitgeistGin GenieAnd it turns out that graphic violence actually represents an important turning point in the history of American comics.
See in the upper-left of the corner, where it says "Hey kids! Look, no code!"?
Okay so let's talk about the Comics Code.
The Code was instituted in the '50s, following an era of moral panic around comics and how they were corrupting the youth of America. It was, hypothetically, voluntary, but if your comics weren't approved by the Code, nobody would sell them. It was, in part, a way to placate the angry busybodies who'd been scapegoating comics as a source of society's ills, but it was also designed to put companies like EC Comics out of business.
By 2001, the Code had relaxed a great deal, and, since the rise of the direct market in the '70s, it had been a lot easier to publish comics without Code approval. (DC had an entire line for mature-readers comics, called Vertigo, best known as the label Sandman was published under.) But every Marvel book at the time was still published under the restrictions of the Code.
Until X-Force #116.
Here's how Sean Howe tells it in
Marvel Comics: The Untold Story:
[Marvel VP] Bill Jemas was the kind of guy who cared more about the New York Knicks than about Nick Fury. He was proud to slay the sacred cows of the geeky world he'd entered[...] Marvel suddenly pushed for commonsense changes that might seem blindingly obvious to anyone who wasn't entrenched in industry[.]
[...]
At the end of an all-night bender, editor Axel Alonso recruited British writer Peter Milligan for a drastically reimagined version of X-Force, the X-Men spinoff that had once been Rob Liefeld's playground. The brand-new, college-aged characters resembled nothing more than spoiled members of a professional sports team, juggling talk shows, limousine rides, and endorsement deals; the group was funded by a venture capitalist. X-Force's dim view of youth culture--there were characters based on Allen Iverson and Eminem, and a grisly execution scene involving a teenage boy band--made it the most gleefully acerbic title Marvel had published. In the first scene of Milligan's tenure, a character named Zeitgeist pauses from a menage-a-trois with two supermodels to watch the "game tape" of the graphically violent super-battle he'd fought the night before; by issue's end, all but two of the team's original members are dead. The Kirbyish primitiveness of Mike Allred's art, and the primary-color palette, only accentuated the ironic corruption of old-fashioned Marvel innocence. When the issue came back from the Comics Code with a slew of objections, Jemas shrugged. Not only did Marvel publish X-Force without the Comics Code seal, it boasted about it: "Hey Kids!" shouted one corner of the cover. "Look! No code!"
[...]
Jemas had no patience for moral watchdogs. He withdrew Marvel's membership from the Comics Code Authority, just like that, after nearly fifty years. The other dues-paying companies protested, but the feeling within Marvel was electric. Seemingly no one had questioned before why a publisher would continue to underwrite an outdated third-party entity that limited the content of its product.
[...]
"Bill was absolutely fearless in the way a man who does not understand the consequences of his actions can be," said Tom Brevoort, "and he bulldozed through obstacles that could not be moved beforehand, because he was heedless--courageous, insightful, and oblivious to the fact that things couldn't be done. That was very valuable to knocking out some of the calcification that had been built up."
(Also: bad form to mention the colors and not credit Laura Allred there, Howe.)
At any rate, that was the beginning of the end of the Code. Marvel published the issue, didn't face any major backlash for it, and just stopped submitting its books to the Code entirely. Other publishers eventually followed suit, including Bongo in 2010 and DC and Archie in 2011.
In 2012, Mike Allred said in an
interview, "killing the comics code is what sticks with me the most as far as making our mark." I got to meet the Allreds at a con some years back; I handed them my copy of that issue to sign, and that was the first thing Laura had to say about it too: "Ooh, this is the one where we killed the Code."
So, all that background out of the way, what was the book actually
like?
It was cynical and subversive and shocking, but it was also a hell of a lot of fun and never self-serious. Its leads were a bunch of twentysomething narcissists parodying celebrity culture -- Howe mentions the connections to sports, hip-hop, and boy bands in the passage I quoted, but omits another very-2001 influence, the rise of reality TV. The new X-Force weren't just celebrities, they were reality TV stars; everything they did was recorded. As much as anything, their lives were a performance for the cameras. They were selfish, they mostly hated each other, and they had the "live fast, die young" drive of self-destructive young adults.
As for dying young? They did. Every single one of them.
That twist ending in the first issue, where almost every character they'd just introduced ended up dying? It wasn't a one-off; it was a mission statement. New characters would join to replace old ones, and then
they'd die a few issues later. It introduced, and then immediately killed off, a
slew of new characters over its run. And the deaths stuck. No superhero death cheats; when somebody died, they'd stay dead. (A few of them have come back from the dead in subsequent series, but not until years after that original run ended.)
No one was safe. And when it finally started to seem like, okay, there were four characters who
were safe, they went ahead and upset the apple cart and promised to kill one of them off, too.
(And, in a sly bit of metacommentary on tokenism, a new woman and a new Black character joined the team in that same issue -- oh, we can't kill of U-Go Girl because she's the only woman on the team and we can't kill off the Anarchist because he's the only Black character? Well guess what.)
After that, the book was retitled "X-Statix" and relaunched with a new #1. It continued to push boundaries, to test the limits of how far was
too far.
It turned out it was this.
"Let's have the new leader of X-Statix be the reanimated corpse of Princess Di" was the point where Joe Quesada finally drew the line and said "No, you can't do that."
And so, a couple of hasty last-minute changes later...
I wasn't aware of the Lady Di flap at the time. But I could feel that something was off, something had changed. The book just wasn't quite the same anymore after that. And it didn't last much longer. The Back from the Dead storyline ran from issue #13 through #18. After that was a two-part story called The Cure, then the five-part X-Statix vs. the Avengers in issues #21-#25. It feels like nothing so much as a victory lap, a "let's bring in all the big guns before it's all over." And then #26 was the final issue, and it ended the only way it could: everybody dies.
And that was it, sort of. Milligan, the Allreds, and Alonso re-teamed a couple years later for a Dead Girl miniseries that followed the cast into the afterlife (and had them encounter other dead Marvel characters like Harry Osborn and Gwen Stacy). Milligan brought Doop back during his X-Men run and he's appeared in various X-books since then, including his own All-New Doop miniseries. And there's another followup coming. In 2019, there was a one-shot called Giant-Size X-Statix that introduced a new team made up of some of the original cast resurrected (largely without explanation) and some new cast members (mostly the illegitimate children of characters from the old team -- best not to try to make sense of how that's supposed to work in Marvel Time). That one-shot announced a forthcoming series called The X-Cellent, which has been delayed quite a bit but is finally supposed to come out in February 2022.
So that's what X-Statix was, in a nutshell. It was one of those books that was a cult hit but not a bestseller, but was critically acclaimed and hugely influential. The "team of bickering, dysfunctional superheroes who kind of hate each other" approach became the norm in the years that followed, and the two biggest influences on that trend were The Authority and X-Statix. The Ultimates, The Boys, Jupiter's Legacy, the movie version of the Justice League -- even the DCAU version of the Justice League. Timm cited both the Authority and X-Statix as a couple of his favorite books at the time and a major influence, and the JL fights thinly-veiled versions of those two teams (the Justice Lords and the Ultimen). It's one of those things like Watchmen that's become something of a tired cliche through decades of imitation, but that was fresh and exciting when it was new.
It was a hell of a ride, one of the best comics of the past 20 years, and it changed comics.
And, if Giant-Size X-Statix is any indication, it looks like Milligan and the Allreds still have the power to recapture some of that magic. I'm really looking forward to The X-Cellent.
