Boom-Boom, Dazzler, Jubilee and Laura Kinney (the best Wolverine) have escaped 1. Dazzler’s creepazoid ex-boyfriend Alex, who happens to be a vampire; 2. Alex’s ultra-creepy mutant fight club; 3. the Collector’s disturbingly creepy space station; and 4. space. Now they’re back on Krakoa. What will they do for an encore? Find out in X-Terminators #5, written by Leah Williams, drawn by Carlos Gómez, colored by Bryan Valenza and lettered by Travis Lanham.
Let’s Go Crazy
So this is the thing (No, not Ben, another thing) about any story that gets by almost entirely on character work and vibes: You have to install a plot, and it has to conclude. And this is the thing about the particular story that Leah Williams has chosen to tell in this five-issue mini-series, concluding here (issue title: “The Book Is Ending :C”): The plot arc pretty much ended in issue #4. Everybody escaped (including a passel of fae also trapped on the Collector’s ship), our mutant heroes came home to Krakoa, and they even debated their way out of potential retaliation from Dracula, using their knowledge of international vampire law (Model UN kids, eat your hearts out, unless Dracula’s eaten them first).
What to do when you’ve got one issue to go? For this fun-loving team, that’s easy: revenge! Alex the terrible boyfriend tried to manipulate his way into a Girls Gone Wild scene. Instead he’s in for 24 full-color pages of Girls Get Even, and at this point you’ll probably know if you loathe it or love it.
I love it. “Alison Blaire of Krakoa” — so declares the Transylvanian tyrant — “the Vampire Nation grants you this boon”: permission to get back at Alex. Dazzler pursues her get-back in Los Angeles, while Wolverine, Boom-Boom and Jubilee pursue their own get-back against the Collector in space (to keep him from helping Alex). And these schemes have actual consequences for some characters! Consequences that might last beyond this series!
Before I let you know what they are, I wish to remind you that Williams has become a superb writer-for-artists, and Carlos Gómez knows what to do with what he gets. Check out the panel-by-panel and page-by-page layouts: never the same one twice. One classic three-by-three grid. Lots of long, flat panels for the rising action, and then just one page with diagonal panels where Wolverine stomps somebody hard, after which that particular somebody rises to take over the rest of the page as he attains his true Final Boss form.
I Would Die 4 U
Who might that somebody be? Why, he’s the Collector, who responds to a Wolverine beatdown by ascending into a 30-foot, dark-red villain in metallic undershorts and a rune-inscribed belt, like someone auditioning for a job in the next X-comic about Hell or Limbo. Raise your hand if you knew he looked that way, or ever could.
Then raise your other hand if you remember this series’ hints about Jubilee’s powers: Sometimes mocked as the fireworks-sparkle X-man, she’s really among the most powerful mutants we’ve seen, when she chooses to let her fundamentally atomic abilities rip, with her teammates looking on. The big-devil form Collector says he’s a god. Boom-Boom, apparently never briefed on the true plan, pulls out a rocket launcher. A rocket launcher. Who does she think she is, Deadpool? “We’re trying to kill a god, so we need serious firepower,” she explains.
At which point Jubilee retorts, “We are the serious firepower!” And, in two pages of lit-up spark-showers, she literally goes nuclear on the Collector and his creepy, now empty, space harem-cage-station. It blows up. She blows up. She comes back bald — maybe the atomic blast blew her follicles off? Boom-Boom says “You look like my big toe.” I’ve seen sharper repartée — in this series! — but I’ll take it. Jubilation Lee has been established as a Very Powerful Mutant, maybe not for the first time, but for the it’s-about-time. She’s also got a sweatshirt that says, “Yes, I’m cold.”
Take Me With U
I’ll also take what turns out to be the B-plot, though it returns to the events that launched the whole ding-dang silly series: Dazzler’s terrestrial revenge on Alex, in which she dresses in booty shorts with PRAXIS across the cheeks, dons vintage roller skates, organizes a posse of what I take to be non-powered former victims/trafficked costumed ladies/exes, and lays waste to Alex’s bar. Lays waste legally: She bought the site and the building, and she’s doing a teardown and rebuild. The series ends, of course, in the half-wrecked bar, with our four heroes drinking: “It’s beer o’clock, sluts!” announces Wolverine (of all people), who follows up, “Felt gross as soon as I said that. You all are terrible influences.”
Maybe this whole series has been a terrible influence: It’s lowbrow and frivolous and self-indulgent and also it’s exactly what some of us need. And it kills off the Collector, who has been a recurring character in Marvel space nonsense for years. And it establishes that Jubilee can do immense damage with her sparkly powers, when she wants. And it puts Alison Blaire back on roller skates and sets her up for, well, something. (Someone put Leah Williams on a Dazzler ongoing, maybe?). The series also mocks — I think — the fan demand for earnest, all-ages girl-power books, even while it is, at last, a potty-mouthed girl-power book. And a booty shorts book. And a book that ends, among trashed furniture, with the lettered effect “HA HA HA HA!” exactly at beer o’clock.
You may be wondering how our girls got to the Collector’s satellite to take him out, since he still lives in space. The answer is Magik. You may also be wondering how our heroes persuaded Magik to help. The answer is … let’s just say that it’s very in character. And that Magik now has an Amazing Baby of her very own.
X-Terminonsense:
- Illyana’s new, no-longer-based-in-Limbo gold armor (first seen in New Mutants 29, last year) looks wonderfully shiny in the Gómez/ Valenza rendering.. I hope she keeps it.
- Jubilee was a vampire once. For years. She had an amulet like Alex’s. Which does not protect Alex from a kick in the head.
- Alex summons assistance from hundreds of space gremlins he apparently created. As they swarm in, they call him “Lord-Daddddddy!”
- Alison has a playlist called SONGS TO HURT ALEX TO. Alas, we have no way to know the songs.
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her podcast about superhero role playing games is Team-Up Moves, with Fiona Hopkins; her latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids. Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.
