Thoughts

Claremont returns to his equivalent of Paul McCartney’s “Granny Music” – an insanely twee and shamelessly populist return to a storytime fairy tale. It had worked when Kitty did it way back in Issue 153 so why not have another go at this format?

And yet… I’ll defend Claremont’s touches of twee quite a bit but this issue doesn’t quite work. In attempting to recapture the magic of Kitty’s Fairy Tale, it instead just makes that issue seem all the more precious. Because this issue has all the same elements – but it’s not enough. The whole thing just doesn’t quite come together.

It’s quite hard to put my finger on why it doesn’t work. I think part of it is that this is an Annual and so the tale has to fill a lot more pages. There isn’t enough to the central gag to really sustain that.

Also I think you’re fighting against the fact that the comic feels very different now. It has developed in depth and tone. Trying to re-tell recent story concepts in such a twee comedy form feels more jarring. Whereas previously the reworking of the main characters as infantile, fairy-tale tropes felt like a neat gag – here it only delivers less interesting variants of the characters we’re getting increasingly to care for.

There is a lot of fun in its space-sci-fi setting, but again, the X-men have adventured for real in this world. This feels like a more childish, two dimensional take on a type of adventure the X-men actually have. And finally there was something rather beautiful in the way Kitty’s Fairy Tale gave all the readers a likeable insight into the newest member of the team. And the context made a lot of sense – it was for a very small child.

Here Illyana’s storytelling doesn’t really tell us anything about Illyana – we’re not charmed by her naive youthful charm that glows out of Kitty’s story. Instead Illyana just feels like someone telling a tale round the campfire. And ultimately it never feels like a tale anyone would tell their contemporaries round a campfire. Its not funny enough to be a comic tale, and not narratively strong enough to hold such an audience’s attention. It just feels like an in-joke.

Claremont does use the extended page count to spend a bit more time with characters after the story. And we get a post-breakup reconciliation between Colossus and Shadowcat. It’s a nice understated moment that they both needed to share.

Overall a flawed experiment. It’s telling that after this Claremont doesn’t really go back to the Fairy Tale within a Tale format again. It was too well suited to just one time and place.

Fun Panel

Steve Leialoha’s art has its OTT excesses which do throw me out the book a couple of time – but elsewhere in the same comic it has some wonderfull beautiful, colourful moments that suit the issues tone.

It was a Product of its Time

In all the in-jokes and rehashes that thie story has, Shadowcat’s costume change gag gets an outing – with new – very eighties outfits designed by one “Trina Robbins”. I wonder whether this was maybe a competition winner but a quick google reveals it was Leialoha’s partner and a comic artist with a considerable underground comics movement background. Also someone so cool as to be referenced in a Joni Mitchell song. The things I am learning doing this blog!