X-Cards the Spot

Subject: Technet
Roster: Gatecrasher (Team Leader), Yap, Scatterbrain, Ringtoss, Waxworks, China Doll, Ferro, Joyboy, Bodybag, Thug, Numbers
First American Appearance: Excalibur Special Edition #1, 1988

Holy crap we’re really 4/5ths of the way through this series? And to commemorate the occasion we had to go with TECHNET?!

As an insult to the previous card, the Upstarts, Technet, an Excalibur villain team that wasn’t very relevant at all in the 90′s (basically as Excalibur became more integrated with the other X-Books), actually has one of their team get their own individual card (Gatecrasher, the team leader).

Cartoony art and characters were never Lee’s strong suit, which bodes terribly for Technet-related art. What was fun, refreshing, and vivid under the pencils of cocreator Alan Davis flounders against Lee, since the mass, volume, and heirarchy of his renderings are usually derived from powerful cross-hatching and detail, neither of which works much for Davis’ characters.

As a result, while I appreciate the zaniness of the composition of the card’s art, you can hardly tell where one character ends and one begins. It looks like an omelette of primary colors. Heck, I don’t even think I can actually see Gatecrasher in that card. Maybe he just forgot?

Once again the back of the card forgoes a team base drawing, even though the team bio refers to their new home on an abandoned pier in England. Yes, a rendering of a pier warehouse probably isn’t the most exciting thing to draw, but when it’s a choice between that and a half-filled-out card, I’d say go with the drawing.

Subject: Upstarts
Roster: Trevor Fitzroy (Team Leader), Shinobi Shaw, Fabian Cortez, Graydon Creed, Siena Blaze
First Appearance: Uncanny X-Men #281, October 1991

And finally, we get to a team none of whose members deserved their own card. Not entirely surprising, Siena Blaze hadn’t even debuted anywhere near the time these cards came out (in Uncanny X-Men Annual #17 , though I remember her most from the otherwise well-written X-Men Unlimited #1, both in 1993).

The Upstarts were actually nicely symptomatic of the direction of 90′s comics in that they were a team of supervillains who had risen to prominence while playing a game of who could kill the most a-level mutants, specifically, other evil mutants: Shinobi Shaw had “killed” his father Sebastian Shaw (there is no mention of Sebastian’s status in the Hellfire Club card, and I can’t remember if they had revealed Shinobi’s failure by this point), Trevor Fitzroy killed Emma Frost’s Hellions as well as Hellfire Club member Donald Pierce, and Fabian Cortez had “killed” Magneto at the end of X-Men #3. Again, the cards make no mention of these killings* despite apparently being essential to one’s induction into the club, so it’s hard to imagine that even Lee and the editors were taking these deaths (and the team) seriously at all.

I actually liked Fabian Cortez’ character as a kid, though probably more as a consequence of his cool costume and duplicitous nature. I never did figure out why he shared the same first name as then-X-Men writer Fabian Nicieza, but the theory has certainly been thrown around that creator Chris Claremont named Cortez after Nicieza as a nod to Nicieza eventually replacing him on writing duties for X-Men (Magneto being one of Claremont’s favorite characters).

Anyway, the card’s art looks like crap, like a fake-gangsta 90′s rap album cover, from the spotlight against the brick wall to the frosted tips to Fitzroy’s shoulder pads. No wonder the concept of the Upstarts was essentially dropped soon after Lee and company left.

*The killing game was moderated by Gamesmaster, an omnipath whose power was the ability to hear the thoughts of every being on the planet. Odd, then, that he would grant victories to Upstart members for killing their adversaries despite the fact that many of them hadn’t died at all.

Subject: Brotherhood of Evil Mutants
Roster: Toad (Team Leader), Sauron, Phantazia, Thornn, Masque, Blob, Pyro
First Appearance: X-Force #5, December 1991

I’m back from a whirlwind weekend at my very first San Diego Comic-Con, and since this week is a living hell of catching up with work, my recaps will have to wait til next week. Of course, little guarantee that next week will be any better as far as my free time goes, but now I’ve made a verbal contract with you.

This is without a doubt the worst incarnation of any villain team in the history of comic books. When your team leader is Toad, you’ve both hit bottom and not hopping your way out. I don’t even much have of a memory of when this lineup debuted in X-Force #5, but man it can’t possibly have lasted long.

Of course, the traditional lineup with Magneto at the helm hadn’t really existed since the 70′s, having been replaced by Mystique’s incarnation during the fantastic Days of Future Past storyline, and the movies’ lineup featuring allstars like Magneto, Mystique, and Sabretooth never existed at all (Sabretooth only became a member in the mid-90′s). Maybe even by the 90′s the concept of a group calling themselves “Evil Mutants” had become passe (I will admit there is something enticing about a group called the Mutant Liberation Front).

The art here suffers from the same lack of detail and compositional clarity that plagued many of Jim Lee’s less iconic cards in this series. The card is far too bright (seemingly from Pyro’s flames) that it’s just kind of hard to really make features out. It doesn’t help that many of these characters were those most susceptible to gross visual anatomical exaggerations. Also, team member Thornn (the sister of Feral) not only doesn’t get her own individual card, she doesn’t appear on the team card either.