Meximum Garbage: Fantomex MAX is Literally Unreadable

Holy mother of piss. This comic.

Fantomex MAX by Andrew Hope and Shawn Crystal is not an easy thing to find a lot of info about. I picked it up from the library having never heard of it before; a quick Google search reveals a 2.2 star rating for the trade paperback on Goodreads (yikes! and those guys like everything)and next to no information on writer Andrew Hope. In fact, the most conclusive summary to be found about Hope is in this article from The Beat assessing his very brief comics career and showing us some tweets where he more or less brags about getting the job only because he knows Mark Millar (fun!). So even before we look at the front cover, things are off to a bizarre, unpromising start.

What’s even weirder is that the back cover doesn’t actually tell you what the comic is about. “Investigating vicious villains, a kidnapping and the end of the world, Fantomex finds himself at the bottom of the Antarctic ocean, fighting for his life against a deadly Kraken!” is the closest we get to an elevator pitch before the blurb moves on to telling us “E.V.A. [?] gets a new look” and wondering if Fantomex can “overcome the lethal government agents of Grover Lane,” a character not mentioned previously on the book jacket. Even Marvel’s own marketing team doesn’t seem to be able to concisely explain the story’s premise.

So we have a book that won’t tell you what the book is about and a writer who requires a lightweight special ops mission to find the first detail about, working on an obscure mutant character for Marvel’s mature readers line. Could at least be interesting, right?

Oh my God it is the furthest thing from interesting.

What sucks is that the aesthetics are actually on point for the most part; Shawn Crystal’s body language is kinetic and fluid and Lee Loughridge’s colors really pop. Crystal’s facial work is frequently some of the only comic relief to be found in an otherwise desperately unfunny story, and his monsters, while uniformly residing under the Faux Lovecraft aesthetic that has become so tiresome in this Nerd Century, are pretty fun to look at for the most part. Francesco Francavilla also draws some beautiful Steranko-esque covers for these issues, promising a fun time that never emerges.

The comic, you may have surmised, is bad.

Fantomex’s storytelling is a gruesome hybrid beast of hoary genre cliches, lifeless banter, and some of the most tedious exposition I’ve ever read in a modern comic book. Every page is slathered with sub-Whedonesque quips and jibes; it’s extraordinary that not a single joke lands or even coaxes a smile in a comic with this much fucking talking.If someone isn’t telling a terrible joke, they’re explaining what’s supposed to be happening in the plot, terribly, using what feels like hundreds more words than should be necessary to motivate a Gun Man to Do a Thing.

Sometimes characters try to banter and spout exposition at the same time, to disastrous results. The following panel occurs during a point early in the story where [deep breath] a government agent is kidnapped by other government agents who are actually mercenaries, who are bringing her to a subterranean military base in the Arctic Ocean for reasons that are not clear and introducing her to the scientist who will allow them to do…something, also for reasons that are not clear. This is how they introduce the scientist. Look at this bullshit:

Notes:

1. Why is this person telling a kidnapped secret agent about how much his coworkers like The Thing
2. Even knowing that there’s a black person who rollerskates in The Thing I still cannot figure out what in the Sam fuck “I’m the only black dude here on the base, so I got to be the rollerskating dude” could possibly mean. Did he take up rollerskating out of his fondness for the black dude in The Thing? Did his peers stick a gun between his teeth and force him to rollerskate because they’re such fans of The Thing that the sight of an unskating black person drives them into a murderous frenzy? I don’t understand what he is even trying to get across here.
3. The fucking lunatic who wrote this comic derailed an already incomprehensible plot even further just so he could talk about rollerskates and The Thing. There isn’t even a word for storytelling choices that miserably stupid. If you replaced that entire one man show about movie references and rollerblading with “My father lives in the popsicle truck. Star Wars is my favorite basketball team” it would make as much sense to the narrative as anything this character just said.

And the whole comic is like this! Stupid, Crazy and Boring is the worst combination of things any piece of fiction can possibly be, and Fantomex MAX checks every box on nearly every page. Hope adds plot twist after plot twist and subplot upon subplot to a narrative that isn’t coherent to begin with: character motivations range from nonsensical to nonexistant and they change allegiances constantly even though, despite every diarrehic page of plot exposition, you’re never sure who the teams even are or what they want in the first place.

Reading Fantomex MAX is like trying to solve the Voynich manuscript while eating an apple pie filled with bees. Whenever you hear a publisher lament that they can’t hire women or POC because there just aren’t enough of them out there, remind them that Marvel Comics once let some middle aged white guy who seems mentally unfit to operate a cereal box write a mini about one of their most interesting characters, with a fine illustrator and designer assigned to the project to boot, just because he happened to know the fellow who wrote Kingsmen. If you can give that fucking guy a job, surely the briefest of searches through Tumblr or Twitter would be sufficient to staff your offices with marginalized talents for decades to come.

Or whatever. Just don’t let this happen again.