Web hosting Custom Email SiteBuilder

Treading the Well-Beaten Path

One might think that it involved little effort to find raw material for a column like this. After all, comics provides something to offend almost anyone's tastes. It becomes problematic only when one imposes certain minimal standards of awfulness and thereby sets oneself up as a follower of only the finer awful things.

Many a comics-trolling session came to nothing in attempts geared at least in part towards dredging up the occasional really bad piece of work. However, when I lay my bloodshot eyeballs on the cover of one particular gem - X-Mutants #1 Special Edition - I knew from the cover alone that I had a Truly Awful Comic.

Though never achieving a true horribleness of magnitude on the same proportion as, say, Bloodstrike #5, nonetheless the relentless campaign of the trite, the cheesy, the overdone, the silly, and the dated qualify this piece as at least an honorary member of the bad comics brotherhood; and, furthermore, this work shows some insight into the careers of comics pros in the first stage of their evolution from fanboys into celebrities in their own right.

The cover alone told me I'd find what I sought inside - prom queens with samurai swords, zombie/vampire/mutant/goon things, a bad story, and a cornucopia of cliches as one might expect from anything entitled "X-Mutants".

The High School Yearbook Phenomenon

A small industry - or, more accurately, a hobby - has developed on the Internet, involving locating old and embarrassing high school photographs of famous people and posting them for the world to admire in all their original glory. Here we see faces of the beautiful and pompous before hairdressers and cosmetic surgeons remade them; here we see archipelagoes of acne; here we see horrendous and dated haircuts; we see the most overt and obtrusive of orthodontic appliances; and we see the most unflattering of corrective eyewear.

Recalling our own portraits from some (hopefully) forgotten decade, we can enjoy the guilty pleasure of someone else's embarrassment, particularly in the collective, where swarms of similar and similarly bad haircuts can evoke memories of the collective folly of a fashion of bad taste.

I bring up this particular lurid pleasure mainly because this comic book makes me think a lot along the lines of the high school yearbook photo, for it bears all the marks of datedness, and probably represents something the original talents - at least the ones who managed to make it as pros - would prefer that no one circa 2001 unearth.

Dumpster-Diving Mutants

This comic begins with a cheesecake scene featuring a bikini-clad babe in a hot tub luring her workaholic scientist husband away from his toil. He has a name: Alex. She doesn't seem to have one until the end of the story, but it might not matter much because she has hair so big that it can compete with the largest afros recorded by photography. A linear measure from her chin to her scalp would also equal the measure from her scalp to the top of her coiffure, for those of you who seek meaning in numerical equivalancies.

After an introductory interlude in the present or near future, one that doesn't really foreshadow particularly well, nor offers a workable transition to the desolation of the setting of this piece, we nonetheless move ahead to the post-Apocalypse earth (think of it: a nice crunchy bowl of Post Apocalypse cereal in the morning) until someone realized that the transition didn't work and explained, via flashbacks, that someone they don't bother to name started a nuclear war and blew everything up.

Anything that survived the big blast, furthermore, mutated in fine comic book fashion to roughly humanoid forms, but with lots of aftermarket features like extra or missing or misplaced parts.

This brings us to Doctor Emmanuel Cugat. One can instantly recoil in the implied pun here connecting Marvel Comics' X-books to this peculiar inversion of the concept by thinking of bandleader Xavier Cugat, the intermediary link between Professor X and his analog here. Or, if memory mercifully fails, one can simply think of more pleasant things. Doctor Cugat looks at a picture of Alex from the opening scene a couple of times and calls him "Dad," so we can infer a parent-child relationship, although Cugat has an extra eyeball high up on his forehead and no particular nose to speak of.

Solar-Cell Parthenogenesis

The context doesn't make it especially clear whether the three-eyed guy manufactured his five "X-Mutants" or simply repaired the DNA and tissues of five stray wandering mutants from the scenes preceding, where many oddly-formed but almost humanoid creatures sorted through fallen masonry looking for something of value.

It may not matter.

Regardless of where the raw material came from - fully formed bodies in need of genetic repairs, or test-tube variety germ plasm - our three-eyed doctor found himself unable to complete his work until he found, in the debris, a small solar cell about the size of a pack of cigarettes. The technical aspects of keeping biological material viable in a big glass tube without a power supply to a) refrigerate it or b) circulate bubbles through the water to provide things like oxygen and nutrients must wait, perhaps forever, for explanation.

Once armed with this formidable solar battery, however, this daring scientist realizes that he can now complete his plans, whereupon he powers up his consoles and blinky-things and various electronic remnants from the sixties "Star Trek" soundstage, and, for no particular reason, falls asleep at the console, awakening to the five products of his experiment exiting their matching incubator tubes.

Here we might presume that these five began as run-of-the-mill mutants, as per the garbage-sorting sequence, but for the lack of previous exposure more than one of them in their mutated forms. Lorelei, who originally resembled a human skeleton fleshed out with stuff scraped from the inside of a sink trap and then adorned with Swiss-cheese like holes and some spaghetti for hair, reappears among the five young models who come out of the big glass tubes. The other four might have appeared in an earlier scene where Dr. Cugat rounds up a handful of generic comic-book fallout mutants. Whatever their origins - as matured germ plasm (we need not dwell on the technical points here) or rebuilt mutated humanoids - the five of them emerge from a common metaphorical chemical-electronic womb, all coiffured and dressed and shaved and made up. Until I read this comic book, I didn't realize that bad eighties haircuts enjoyed a genetic component.

At this stage, then, our triclopean scientist proceeds to instruct them in the ways of martial arts and the use of Japanese swords, since evidently these skills number among the last things we could expect the survivors of a nuclear war to forget after thirty years of surviving by sucking the goo out of mutated rats squashed into jelly with a handy rock.

Nimbos with Big Hair

At one time, the average Kid in the Street believed that karate or judo rendered its students invincible. Somewhat later, another generation of kids believed that ninja schtick rendered its practitioners similarly immune to harm and irresistible in a knock-down. Then, at the dawn of the eighties, comics came to the conclusion that adding spike heels, fishnets, and thongs to the equation made for a fascinating character, spawning - much to the detriment of some comics - a character sometimes described as "the nimbo."

I used to think that the nimbo had achieved something close to perfection in her ability to annoy. I thought, in my innocence, that no one could really improve the prototype to make it more annoying.

Ron Lim and Timothy Dzhon, however, still have much to teach the world, and with this mid-eighties piece, they showed me that you can make a nimbo more annoying. Just give her eighties big hair.

Indeed, with that, only one thing would take the nimbo over the ultimate plateau of Perfect Nuisance Value: Should she take up the affected speech patterns of the synthetic valley girl, I doubt that she could do more to annoy.

The Fanboy Fornication Festival

Belushi, the male X-mutant, managed to offend his four female companions by suggesting that the male-to-female ratio suggested an optimal breeding relationship. His remarks, to me, seemed as likely to invite the affections of passing females about as well as hanging out in front of a plasma bank wearing a vomit-stained sweatshirt and scratching oneself bloody.

Nonetheless, comics of the last fifteen years or so have increasingly recognized a civic duty to pander to the sexual daydreams of unwillingly-celibate fanboys. The true hero, after all, must not only defend the weak and uphold the good, he must also score at every opportunity, carving notches in his bedpost. Leave the unshared bed to the villain, since he deserves no better.

Therefore, we encounter the scanned page in the illustration up and to the right. In it, we can watch Belushi's romantic claims of stud-dom amid a swarm of heifers work their magic on his fellows. Initially, the term "breeding stock" left Belushi's female peers generally annoyed, but each of them, in returning to her tent, turns wistfully back, wondering - considering - before succumbing to an attack of better judgment.

Not so for Vikki, the one with the blond big hair. As an out-of-sequence sidenote, for some future historian of comics who intends to compile The Annotated X-Mutants, remember: Erin has the red big hair, Vikki has the blond big hair, Angela has the brown big hair with the braid in the back, and Lorelei has the curly big hair. These colors might not help much to identify the characters in a black-and-white book, but we can assume future anthologies will correct this oversight.

But, back to the point: Vikki, much to her discredit, behaves like one would expect a character named "Vikki" in a movie from around 1986 would. She enters Belushi's tent and drops her clothes, and then we infer from the context and a suggestive silhouette what actually follows.

My own objections begin with the notion that "We've got to repopulate the earth" could ever work as a pickup line or as a successful prelude to procreation. Secondly, I must wonder if a harem of no less than four nimbos with big hair and spike heels does not already operate under adequate handicaps - must they also become pregnant? Does this somehow enhance their ability to clobber piranha-like swarms of hostile mutants? Vikki, perhaps, knows something I don't. Perhaps a nimbo, great with child, enjoys some kind of maternal instinct that heightens her killing powers.

Perhaps, instead, a kind fate will spare me the discovery of whether or not Vikki indeed began to gestate at that point. The prospect of X-Mutants: The Second Generation depresses me.

Quest or Road Trip?

In the Alien movies, when the handy bioengineers attempt, through various means, to create or deliver their little payload of man-slaying alien DNA, they generally treat it with great care, overseeing its development and sparing nothing in the attempt to make sure they have something (and something dangerous) to deliver.

In such a context, we might, then, wonder about our three-eyed scientist and his own methods for restocking a barren and mutated world with humanity. Granted, he did dedicate at least part of a full charge of a handy solar cell found in the garbage to creating or completing his projects; he furthermore taught them the three arts - bare-hand fighting, fighting with Asian steel, and driving; and he did provide them with an improbably-functional automobile in which to travel.

At that point, he simply waved them adieux and hoped that they would repopulate the world. If any of you have teenaged offspring, you might consider the wisdom of flipping a cluster of hormonally hyperactive adolescents the car keys to any car, any time, any place. Yet old three-eyes sees nothing amiss in doing this for the only five supposedly normal surviving humans and not really worrying any more about them. Such minimal oversight generally does not result in the building of new nations or worlds.

The Plot Congeals

For no reason I can ascertain through speculation or divination, once the five young lingerie models-turned-fornicating-samurai hit the road, they pass some point where spies in the hills observe them through binoculars.

These spies suffered from some mutation that made them appear as Chico and Harpo Marx (I'll wait while you recover your breath after laughing yourself into a coma). This could represent some foreshadowing of something, perhaps at the end of the book or beyond. Or it could represent Lim and Dzhon's desire to put the Marx Brothers in a comic book.

After a while one loses the curiosity necessary to follow up on such triviata.

Back at the farm, meantime, Doctor Cugat drops a dud of a revelation on the reader; he has a conversation with a comatose female (in an eighties bathing suit) who floats in another handy tube of liquid. To float in a large tube of liquid seems to serve as the main vehicle of physical therapy, confinement, and storage for heroes, and, even more so, for the lost lovers over whom they might choose to pine, in a great many comic books.

The pseudoheroes whom Supreme fileted in Bloodstrike #5, for instance, end up in such tubes. Some female I couldn't identify hovered in such a tube in one of the Liefeld Wolverine issues from circa 2000. And I imagine that the real X-books feature some tube of liquid with a picking humanoid form in it every other issue or so. Perhaps comics chooses the big fluid-filled glass tube so often because it doesn't seem to interfere with the dynamics of big hair.

Back to the point, however: Dr. Cugat addresses this female as Norma Jean, and she might represent the nameless female from the first pages of this story. This becomes problematic, however, since that female played the role of spouse to Alex; and we recall Dr. Cugat holding the picture of Alex and calling him dad. Nonetheless, Cugat denies any incestuous intentions towards the nimbos he created - at least one of whom, Lorelei, must have had the same parents he did.

In general, characters in comics keep dead lovers, not dead mothers, floating in tubes of liquid. This is where the sequence, to me, suggests incest, unless some future revelation in this book established that Emmanuel Cugat once introduced himself as Alex, and somewhere along the line developed the habit of addressing pictures of himself as a younger and non-mutated man as "Dad."

Ending on a Cliffhanger

Belushi, the male X-mutant who, a few scenes ago, wisecracked his way into erotic excess, took the wheel of the miraculously-functioning twentieth century automobile which Dr. E. Cugat provided his patients / siblings / spawn / proteges / students / whatever. And, as we might expect of a character so inherently adolescent, he proceeds to drive the thing the same way we might expect a drunken fifteen-year-old to do.

Leave it to lesser talents to build up to a cliffhanger by carefully-sown clues throughout the entire length of a comic book. All that work merely implicates them in their inefficiency, impugns them for a decadence that might allow them to drag out - and never complete - a story in twenty years. David Lawrence, who selflessly served as our able scribe here, sets a cliffhanger up with a single page.

Belushi drives too fast and hits something and his cargo of supermodels go sprawling, unconscious, across the remnants of a once-great highway. Or, more accurately, they fly in all directions out of the automobile as it flips over the concrete barricade it struck; then they all land in a concise pile. Then, as they lie unconscious in a single heap, a swarm of mutants begins to emerge from the shadows.

Hope often crumbles beneath contrary fact, and in this case my own somewhat withered with the revelation that X-Mutants did not end with this single episode. However, since this X-Mutants #1 Special Edition contained a reprint of the original X-Mutants #1, with additional material (a director's cut, if you will), and since furthermore the cover hyped X-Mutants #5 and The New Humans - evidence that this comic not only continued, but had bred a spinoff, we can (sadly) assume that our heroes survived.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 233. Completed 02-MAR-2001.