Astonishing X-Men #36-37, 39, 41

Writer: Daniel Way
Pencillers: Jason Pearson, Sara Pichelli and Nick Bradshaw
Inkers: Karl Story, Sara Pichelli, Nick Bradshaw, Norman Lee, Jay Leisten and Craig Yeung
Colourists: Sonia Oback and Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterers: Cory Petit, Joe Caramagna and Clayton Cowles
Editor: Nick Lowe

As regular readers will know, I find that most storylines are improved by reading them in one sitting.  Partly it’s because the structure comes across better.  Partly it’s because it’s a re-reading, and you always see things that you didn’t spot the first time around.  And yes, partly it’s because a lot of comics weren’t properly structured for the serial in the first place, even though it’s the format in which most readers will experience it.

But sometimes it’s the other way around – a story which was vaguely unsatisfactory in serial form just ends up falling apart in a more noticeable way.  And “Monstrous” is one such story.

You only have to look at that list of creators to realise that something’s gone badly wrong with this one.  This started off as a straightforward four-part story by Daniel Way and Jason Pearson.  Three months passed between the first two chapters, and the second chapter came out with several pages of fill-in art by Sara Pichelli.  Then they started splicing in an unrelated story by Christos Gage in every second issue.  Chapter three has a ton of credited inkers, always a good sign of a last-minute panic.  At least replacement artist Nick Bradshaw was able to draw the last two issues.

Visually, it’s all over the place.  Jason Pearson is all bold lines, heavy shadow, and comically exaggerated expressions.  Nick Bradshaw is a latter-day Art Adams.  Both are fine on their own terms – in fact, considering that it must have been something of a rush job, Bradshaw’s work on the final issue is very good.  Even so, their styles are so vastly different that they don’t belong on the same story, at least not without some device to justify it.

But that’s just the way it turned out.  These things happen.  The story, however, has problems of its own.

It starts quite promisingly.  Chapter 1 opens with a Roxxon ship heading to Monster Island (near Japan) intending to carry out some terribly dangerous oil drilling, accompanied by D-list villain Mentallo – who is presumably meant to use his psychic powers to keep the monsters at bay.  Of course, he betrays them and seizes control of the monsters for himself, because he’s a villain. Meanwhile, on Utopia, Armor learns that her mother and brother have been killed (which, in a nice touch, also supercharges her powers, which are supposedly linked to the spirits of her ancestors).  So she goes back to Japan for the funeral, accompanied by Scott, Emma and Logan.  Issue ends with one of Mentallo’s giant monsters attacking Tokyo, as is traditional.

So far, so good.  It’s a nice use of an obscure Marvel villain, who’s found a way of using his low-level powers to maximum advantage – though oddly the story never brings up the fact that he’s one of the few surviving mutants.  And it tries to find something for Armor to do – she is, after all, the closest thing this book has to a character of its own, so sure, let’s flesh her out a bit.

Chapter two: Armor goes to the funeral where there’s a degree of passive-aggressive tension based on the idea that if she’d been around then she might have saved her relatives.  The other X-Men fight the giant monster for a whole issue and, at the end, Armor decides to go and join them.  (That’s her big dramatic choice for this storyline; she rejects the guilt trip and helps her teammates.)  Mentallo tries to extort money from Roxxon to give them the island back, and Roxxon decide to help the X-Men out instead.  As the story makes sure to point out, this is vaguely ironic because Roxxon are the bad guys.

So at this point we’ve got a fairly standard storyline where one set of villains team up with the heroes to take down another bad guy, coupled with a rather more interesting subplot about Armor choosing where she “belongs” – and Way makes sure to present it as a choice between two different families, rather than a choice between family and duty.  Up to this point, all is basically well.

Chapter three: Armor defeats the big monster.  The X-Men head off to Monster Island to fight Mentallo, their plane crashes, and Armor is knocked out.  Scott and Logan talk inconclusively about her motivations, in a discussion which goes nowhere.  Everyone goes off to face Mentallo.

Chapter four: The X-Men (minus the unconscious Armor) fight and defeat Mentallo, who crumbles pretty easily, and is ultimately ironically crushed to death by one of his own monsters carrying the ransom he demanded from Roxxon.  At the end, Armor goes back to visit her father, who apologises for being mean to her, and this is apparently supposed to constitute a resolution.

The second half of this storyline is very strange.  After a strong build-up, Mentallo reverts to type as a D-list villain; that’s kind of okay.  Armor, who is supposed to be the emotional and dramatic focus of the storyline, vanishes from play for the entire climax, only to return in a tacked-on epilogue which arbitrarily declares her plot resolved.  And the Roxxon storyline gets shunted to the side as well.

In short, it’s a story that sets some interesting plots in motion, but doesn’t follow any of them through; the ending is simply that the X-Men fight their way to the bad guy and beat him, and despite the best efforts of the last two pages to pretend otherwise, that’s not a resolution to the Armor story which dominates the first half of the book.   If Way had been planning to write more stories, it might be possible to read the Armor material as a subplot playing into longer-term plans for her character, but since he’s not, that doesn’t appear to be an option.

The upshot is that “Monstrous” has the first half of a good story, stapled to a cursory resolution that doesn’t properly address the ideas that seemed central to the earlier chapters.  And when you read it in one go, that just becomes even more apparent.