CBR: When Words Collide - Jan 10, 2011

[CBR News]

This week, Timothy continues his look back at Robert Kirkman's run on Ultimate X-Men, explaining how everything isn't always what it seems, and shows how everything can be undone by a little magic.


Full article here.

[jmac]

I found both BKV's and Kirkman's runs frustrating for their apparent need to retell the same stories we've already seen, with often pretty superficial twists. It's a new universe; let's tell new stories. Cable's appearance just about broke me, but Kirkman's take on the character was compelling -- much more satisfying, in fact, than 616-Cable's origin. I can't say the arc ended quite as I would have liked; Apocalypse is such an impossible villain to write well. But there was really something original there.

Never thought of Kirkman as blowing through 616 continuity so as to force new stories; an interesting take. I hope those new stories come!

Great to get a broader analysis like this. Well done!

[RedRonin]

Keep in mind, when Kirkman came on the book Marvel had already announced and was still planning on having Bryan Singer and his X2 co-writers takes over the book for a year.

I always thought the reason Kirkman's run had such a slow start was that Marvel still believed the Singer run would happen and wanted to be able to yank Kirkman off the book at a moment's notice. And that he probably didn't have any security on the book until he got to the Cable and Bishop stuff.

[bongoes]

I've only read Millar's run on Ultimate X-men, but I'm really interested in Kirkman's now. Most of my X-men related nostalgia is for the 90's Cable and Apocalypse stuff (even if I do hate the art in retrospect).

[Radical_dreamer]

I'm really digging these X-run retrospectives.

One thing that baffles me about considerations of Ult. X runs is the praise BKV's get. Was I really the only one who found it extremely tedious and boring? Gambit and Rogue in one of their most boring interpretations (which is saying a lot), street thug Sinister, and Longshot's reality show take. Some interesting ideas here and there but a huge yawn as a whole. Between that and Kirkman's opening Magician storyline, I dropped Ult. X until the Cable/Wolverine/Bishop/Onslaught/Apocalypse/Phoenix storyline (the singular here highlighting the biggest issue of this clusterf*ck).

[DarkBeast]

There's a lot I agree with in this column, and also a lot I disagree with.

I agree with any and all of the criticisms Tim gave of Kirkman's run. Also, I had a dark fascination with the run even when most online critics were hating it. Tim seems to be going for an angle in which he redeems the bad stuff, saying that it wasn't so bad, that it was fun in that it thwarted reader expectations or whatever. I see what he's saying, and I too was interested in the run for similar reasons--but I have to call a spade a spade and just call it bad. I liked it because I enjoy watching trainwrecks--but I'm not going to turn around and say how "artistic" a trainwreck was because it thwarted the expectations of the passengers or the people waiting at the stations to see the train come in pretty much as they expected. Thwarting reader expectations isn't an inherently good thing. If all of a sudden in the last chapter of a novel, an author starts typing in babytalk and has all of his characters reveal themselves to be aliens, then it doesn't make the novel better. More to the point, I didn't see any self-awareness or conscious orchestration in what Kirkman did in this series. I know authorial intent isn't anything, but I really think Tim's giving Kirkman entirely too much credit.

Kirkman's a good writer overall, but he was horrible on Ultimate X-Men. There's no need to make apologies for him. I feel the same way about Bendis: often online critics will bend over backwards to make excuses for some out-of-character moment or continuity slip-up perpetrated by Bendis, when really the answer's usually way more simple: These writers don't always plan these things out or think things through well enough. Especially when they're hired to work on a property like Ultimate X-Men.

I agree that Kirkman may intentionally "erode the reliability of his own narrative" in the first several issues, but I didn't pick up on any hints that he was consciously reusing this technique, on some meta level, throughout the bulk of the run. It's very kind to read the series this way, but a reader might as well walk away with the opposite conclusion: that all this proves is that Kirkman couldn't EVER get the characters right, or EVER come up with a satisfying (non-deus ex machina) ending, or EVER create any storypoints worthy of keeping around afterwards; we saw these failures in the micro during the first few storyarcs, and in the macro during the rest of his run.

The fact that the Magician didn't reappear only emphasizes the lack of self-consciousness on Kirkman's part.

Tim says that the Phoenix force has "always" been a deus ex machina, but I don't think that's really the case. It's not the Infinity Gems. It does rewrite matter in a sense (in its function as an extreme form of telekinesis), but the way I remember Kirkman using it, he had it rewrite reality and time. Nothing wrong with that, but don't excuse his reliance on a bonafide deus ex machina by saying that the Phoenix force was always used that way. Claremont gets a lot of undeserved crap; he never had to use the Phoenix force to undo thirty issues of his own continuity.

I do think Tim's right in focusing on how quickly Kirkman seemed to run through many '90s X-Men concepts (Cable! Stryfe! Onslaught!) so quickly, but he seems to take it for granted that such specific recasting of characters is what the Ultimate line should be all about. I don't think the biggest point here is how wacky Kirkman was being by reiterating so many things so quickly. (I certainly enjoyed the rapid-fire Worst-Of-The '90s revival he conducted, but I didn't feel any artful intentionality on Kirkman's part. His retellings and recastings were worse than the original '90s comics.)

Basically, this speaks to the failure of the Ultimate line (Ultimate X-Men in particular) that this happened. The line was supposed to bring in new readers and revitalize core concepts. Things like Stryfe and Onslaught are hardly core concepts of the X-Men. Why retell them at all if they can only play before an older audience? Kirkman's X-Men, especially the last 2/3s of it, caters to people who would actually know about 90's crap and be amused by how Ultimate Cable was *gasp* Wolverine! Personally, I certainly was amused by that revelation... but I was more amused by the sheer DESPERATION of Kirkman (and/or Ultimate editorial) for having to stoop to something like that. I felt the same way about Ultimate Stryfe, Ultimate Onslaught, etc.

Tim seems to see this all as intentional madcap wackiness. I see unintentionally amusing desperation.

So, while I do think it's a fun run, to give Kirkman credit for this is, in my opinion, almost laughable. The run was a total failure. I'm glad it amuses some of us old timey readers (Tim and myself both, for different reasons) to examine the tossed-off carnival of crap concepts that Kirkman paraded in Ultimate X-Men. Kirkman paraded them in a totally uncreative, nearly senseless, one-TWIST-pony way ("Get a load of Ultimate Onslaught! What do you think the twist with him will be?!?!"). And meanwhile the Ultimate line TOTALLY, TOTALLY, TOTALLY failed to interest a new generation of comics readers. That is, it failed its raison d'etre and failed in its actual INTENT (as opposed to the projected intentions of Kirkman). But I guess that sacrifice was worth it in exchange for more bemused nostalgic feelings from readers like us who have (re)read stories like this for decades now and will keep doing so no matter what.

But I did really dig the artists Kirkman worked with.

[DarkBeast]

P.S. I don't want to seem to hard on Tim. You're a great critic. Your examination of a lot of this stuff in spot-on. The stuff about how Kirman "erode[d] the reliability of his own narrative" was wonderful. There's more intellectual value in that one phrase than in Kirkman's whole run.

Kirkman's Ultimate X-Men run doesn't deserve a critic as good as you. You're being too kind.

[Order of Zeon]

"issue #75-93 is one of the highlights of the entire Ultimate universe."

Really? I would say its the worst of the UXM run, but the pre-ultimatum issues would take care of that honor.

Date Night was Kirkman's best stuff on the run and a great start, but it just went downhill fast after that. Maybe things might have went better if they had really handed him the reins and not kept holding out for the phantom Synger run, but that is not an excuse for the wild characterization problems and meaningless plots.

[Basterdshark]

Have been an avid reader of the column for a while but this edition aroused enough passion in me to make me bite the bullet and send in a comment. Only to find DarkBeast has pretty much hit the nail on the head for me, of course, and answered in a more comprehensive fashion than I'm capable of to boot.

I only read this run recently - I'm a sucker for the X-Men and enjoy discursive retellings of classic stories to my own detriment - in a marathon reading of the entire Ultimate X-Men title. Not to be too hard on a single arc, but Kirkman's inauguration really stood out to me for all the wrong reasons. And it began with "Date Night." The pace, of course, played a big part in me noticing the change, but that was almost welcome. Nah, it was the jilted, flat dialogue that almost killed it off for me, with every SOB on campus having seemingly undergone a lobotomy (not too improbable you're an X-man, sure).

Of course, I like the idea of these health-spa issues (they're perhaps necessary in the modern superhero comic) but there's almost too much that can go wrong with them, specifically with turning a disenfranchised group of social and political outcasts into preening, posturing consumers of American mall culture. They aren't supposed to be vacuous fruitcakes like the Avengers; they're hunted and rejected, even on the sunny days. It's issues like this which make me admire Ellis' last arc in Astonishing X-Men even more -- him for that sick genius, and the editorial for allowing Astonishing to exist.

Mostly Kirkman's run seemed to stumble along, igniting a few brainwaves along the way, pulling and teasing threads without yanking any which one. But I really began to question the contribution to the progress of humankind my Ultimate X-men marathon reading would have with the introduction of Elliot Boggs. The manner in which Boggs got drawn in led me to expect something a lot grander and sophisticated was being tucked away for later.

Frankly, if so much space is devoted to introducing a character that, I don't know, suggests the impermanence of these X-Men stories, how ephemeral they are (unfortunately neglecting how much continuity the entire Ultimate canon cannibalized) then I demand something a little more innovative. I tell you, I almost wanted to take Boggs up on his offer of too-good-to-be-true-he-must-be-Magneto-on-crack-and-with-a-mask and see Cyclops atomatize him (Atomatize? I'm inventing words; I must the fabled Third Boggs Brother.)

It wasn't all bad, and I generally like to be more esoteric about things than reactionary, and naturall from this I'm led to wonder whether my own and others wishes to see classic stories retold conflicts far too much with any said creators attempts to branch off from continuity, or the editorials inteference between those poles. Boggs was not a good character, let's be straight about it (a one-note no-charmer with no flaws and no wit and no relationship to the Summers bloodline). But perhaps it's unfair to say that without considering that we reject any character thrown in out of nowhere with no ties to continuity, no relationship to its continuity and no stake in its success or failure (no to mention such convenient circumstance). Maybe Kirkman is attempting to illuminate this conflict. Fair enough if that's true but it doesn't change the fact that Boggs was a glib buffoon. A meta-gesture like that demands more innovation.

I didn't grow up with 90s Marvel comics. In fact, I didn't really grow up with comics at all -they were on the fringes of my youth, which would have been the 00s, anyway - but panini UK seemed to be printing, sporadically, a load of 90s-heavy X-titles about the time I had pocket money and subsequently, I've always loved Cable, pockets-an-all. My slight unwillingness to accept Wolverine as Cable grows from 100% accurate memories of my imagined and almost totally fictional childhood reading every Cable comic I could.

But what also stops me from accepting Wolverine as Cable as an example of an unwillingness to see continuity cannibalized is that I'm determined to believe this change occurred because of Wolverines popularity and not because of a truly creative reason. There are other things, too, that annoy me slightly with the Kirkman run. But there are also things which tantalize me, intrigue me. The portrayal of the phoenix benefited from the Ultimate lines willingness to entertain the utter self destruction of its universe, rather than the unwieldy, ill-defined portrayal of the mainstream universe phoenix, which must be all-powerful and god-like but also inefficient enough to not do its job properly.

The introduction of the Shi'ar as a cult managed to skirt around the bonkers depiction of them in mainstream continuity, whose silliness has solidified more through decades of complacency than perhaps Claremont's initial introduction suggested. Even so, I expected Xavier to be teleported aboard the mothership in any panel he shared with that horny space witch, so if Kirkman intended his run as some sustained critique of our continuity-flooded sphincters rather than a sequence of mis-steps, he would have a point. Still, I suspect its the latter and even if it was the former, it still could have been a whole lot more enjoyable.

[Starro]

Keep in mind, when Kirkman came on the book Marvel had already announced and was still planning on having Bryan Singer and his X2 co-writers takes over the book for a year.

I always thought the reason Kirkman's run had such a slow start was that Marvel still believed the Singer run would happen and wanted to be able to yank Kirkman off the book at a moment's notice. And that he probably didn't have any security on the book until he got to the Cable and Bishop stuff.

That's what I was going to mention. Both BKV and Kirkman were brought in as "placeholder" writers, keeping UXM in something of a holding pattern while Marvel patiently waited for Singer and the X2 screenwriters to finally begin their run. That's why their runs, in spite of their length, seem so inconsequential compared to Millar's or even Bendis's (who at least got away with killing the Beast, even though Kirkman eventually brought him back so Loeb could kill him all over again in Ultimatum).

Kirkman's run was initially supposed to last 9 issues and an annual, which is why they tell a complete story with no dangling threads. However, once it became clear that the Singer run would never happen, he ended up becoming the book's regular writer. Even after he wrapped his big Apocalypse/Phoenix storyline, he was still asked to write another arc before Ultimatum, which would have made his run longer than Millar's, but he declined the offer.

[pmpknface]

I really enjoyed the #75-93 run! It was a lot of fun to see that take on those characters and how they intereacted. The only part that I hated was in #94 (after Kirkman had left) they ignored that Jean was going to leave Earth for good, or at least for a while. They just ignored the status that was left for them in the previous issue, which was a great place. :(

[TimothyCallahan]

Wow, I had COMPLETELY forgotten the Bryan Singer thing. That makes perfect sense. He did the self-contained 9 issues (plus the weak sauce Annual) and then got the long-term gig and said, "I will tell the same story again, but bigger, and with all my favorite toys from the 1990s!"

I really think you're selling Kirkman's Cable/Bishop uber-plot short, though. I mean, yeah, as I'll write about next week, it is not particularly sophisticated character work, but he does a solid-to-quite-good job with the whole concept of Bishop gathering his tiny army of mutants to save the future, while Scott Summers inadequately tries to run the school without the X-Men.

Seems like most of the complaints here boil down to: (a) you don't like the 1990s characters anyway, (b) the Ultimate concept lost its way, (c) you want more layered characters and less plot machinations.

But complaints like that don't address Kirkman's run as it actually appeared -- it just reacts to what you wish it could have been.

Still, keep the debate going. Some very smart comments here, and I love it! (As I mentioned to a CBR editor -- who said he liked these Kirkman X-Men columns -- I honestly had no idea if anyone would be interested in this series about a run that no one seemed to every talk about. Glad to have you all aboard, even if some of you think it's a weird way for me to waste my time for a few weeks!)

[diablo7]

Hey timothy this is off topic but do you have plans for a follow up to your grant morrison: the early years book?