X-Men #12
As Cyclops and Synch deal with Doctor Stasis, the X-Ladies deal with Cordycep Jones in X-Men #12, by writer Gerry Duggan, artist Pepe Larraz, colorist Marte Gracia, and letterer Clayton Cowles. Another month, another abysmal issue of Duggan’s X-Men. The art is good, though.
Cyclops fights Stasis and learns he’s the original Nathaniel Essex. Synch shows up, and they work together, but Essex gets away. On Gameworld, Jean fools Cordycep Jones into thinking he has control of the X-Men, but it’s all a trick, and they imprison him, freeing the slaves of Gameworld. Cyclops and Synch tell Ben Urich about Synch mindwiping him and give him the story of the X-Men’s immortality. After the news drops, the X-Men fight Mole Man and discuss who stays with the team. Stasis goes back to Phobos, and Orchis prepares their next plan to destroy mutantkind.
The saddest thing about X-Men is that if anyone else was writing this book, this would be a good comic. That’s not to say that everything in the book would work, but Duggan is just so bad at writing the X-Men that he takes good ideas and makes them terrible. Now, this issue is pretty much all bad, so it would take a great writer to save it. For example, why does Nathaniel Essex, a man who has spent a lifetime studying genetics, want to kill mutants? What possible reason could he have for that? That’s the problem with a surprise reveal like this one: either do some kind of foreshadowing, or it doesn’t make any sense. The issue shows him talking to a picture from his home of a deformed child and saying he’ll fix what’s broken in him, which implies that he wants a mutant cure, but why wouldn’t he have that by now? He’s a genius who has been working on the problem for over a century. He had a literal mutant database even before Sinister took it and expanded it. Now he’s just a wannabe High Evolutionary, which is ironic considering that villain appeared in this book.
Beyond that, the scene with the X-Ladies taking down Jones is just. So. Boring. It’s a lot of explaining what they’re doing, and then they imprison Jones in a metal shell. It seems like a really inefficient place to keep a fungal lifeform, especially since it’s makeshift. Why wouldn’t Polaris just send him into the orbiting black hole in her shield that only light can escape from? It’s all kinds of asinine, which is a perfect description for Duggan’s writing. Cyclops and Synch giving Urich the story back is heroic and all that, but also kind of stupid. It’s the only good scene in the comic, despite the clunky dialogue that Duggan is so fond of. The team also finally appears all together for the first time since issue three at the end, but they just talk about who wants to stay with the team as they fight. As usual, there’s the requisite bad humor, badly written dialogue boxes, and atrocious dialogue, but that’s to be expected.
Larraz and Gracia are the MVPs of this book, but they don’t really have anything spectacular to work on in this issue. Usually, Duggan at least does that for them. As it is, it’s basically the same great art as usual, and there’s really not much else to say about it.
X-Men #12 closes out Duggan’s first year on the book, and it keeps up the bad work this book has become known for. Duggan and Tini Howard seem to be in a death spiral to see who can write the worst X-Men book, and the only reason Howard is winning is because Duggan has Larraz and Gracia making the book look good. Other than that, this is mostly drivel.
