As a nerd of a certain age, I have a lot of nostalgia for comics – especially X-Men comics – of the ’90s. It was when I started reading, it coincided with the (at the time) most prominent era for Marvel’s merry mutants, and it produced some of the genre’s most popular and memorable characters.
That all being said, the nostalgia really only holds for the early to mid-’90s. The late ’90s, however…
“Operation: Zero Tolerance” was a storyline designed to help revitalize the X-Men line that had largely been stagnating in the wake of the Onslaught crossover. As such, in the main line of the X-Books, we saw the X-Mansion dismantled, Iceman emerged as a serious player for the first time, and two exciting new characters in Dr Cecilia Reyes and Marrow took center stage. It was a fun, if largely inconsequential storyline that made little lasting impact. Unfortunately, that is only true of the main books. The X-tended line of books, however, were considerably less successful.
Take X-Force, for example. The one-time New Mutants had a few off years, and I’m sad to say that the Zero Tolerance era is one of them. This was an era when all of Marvel Comics had launched a new covers mandate that predated clickbait by including some story hook – often in text – and a figure on an unremarkable void of a background. It made every book look the same for a while, and often was the most interesting part of the books. Sadly, that holds true for this collection as well, as this represents one of the less interesting periods for Cable’s cadre of (former) child soldiers.
As is often the case with collections of this size, the titular event only touches a handful of issues within this trade — which is fine, because the storyline of the tie-ins are remarkably underwhelming, succeeding only in reintroducing Dani Moonstsar to the team. Of the arcs contained within the book, the most interesting tend to deal with James Proudstar/Warpath, but even those stories leave a lot to be desired. Am I happy to get a little more time with a young James hero-worshiping his older brother? Sure. Am I as interested in his torrid affair with Risque and complicated relationship with Siryn? Honestly, on paper I thought I would be. I love Jimmy, and really wanted to get more into his story than I was, but the melodrama from John Francis Moore is a little too Melrose Place to be taken seriously.
That is unfortunately true of most of this book, too. I enjoy that they made an effort to be more introspective and focus on the mental and emotional states of their characters (the trip to 616 Burning Man, in particular, is a fun idea) but the text is dense and wordy, the character beats a bit cliche, and the comedy never lands the way it is intended to.
Not helping matters is the artwork from in this collection which, barring the work of a nascent Jim Cheung, is uniformly hard to look at. I really don’t enjoy ragging on work that is clearly stylized and intentionally of a particular aesthetic, but this and 80 percent of this book is really hard to look at. There’s an odd emphasis on disjointed, elongated figures, odd proportions and honestly, just bad character design. You can’t blame any of the artists in this collection specifically for the terrible costumes that our main cast (and the MLF) are wearing at this time, but you can blame them for their casual looks and odd figures. I’m also not sure if it’s the printing of the copy that I reviewed, but the colors also feel a bit too muted for my tastes.
Ultimately, this collection is really for super fans and completists only. This was a pretty dismal era for the X-Force kids from an aesthetic standpoint, and any interesting story elements are buried beneath mounds of melodrama that would make Aaron Spelling wretch. I wanted to like this book, I really did – unfortunately, it’s just not one I can see myself going back to.
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