Speaking of awful, X-Men #164 finally sends Chuck Austen on his way.  How we shall miss him.

In all fairness to Chuck, this is by no means the worst book of the week - after all, X-Force has that sewn up.  But for that matter, it's not the worst thing he's ever done either.  This is just incoherently pointless, while providing some opportunities for Salvador Larroca to salvage scenes with quality visuals.  Austen is much better when he's pointless.  When there's actually a point, the results are far uglier.

In this final issue, Austen clears the decks from all his outstanding plots.  A couple of characters leave, everyone else gets caught up in a big fight. And how does the big fight end?  Xorn II turns up and absorbs them all into his black hole.  He couldn't actually control it in the last storyline, but never mind!  He can now!  And so all things Austen-related fall into a black hole and are never seen again.  And the remaining characters write themselves out by leaving.

Yes, that's right - the Chuck Austen run ends by collapsing in on itself thanks to the sheer incredible degree of sucking.  Really.  It's such a gift to critics that I can only imagine it was included as a bet to see if anyone would take the bait.  Well, whatever.  It might be obvious, but it's true.

One last time, the characters get to complain about the plot.  New villain Mammomax protests that Exodus' plan is completely incompetent.  He's right.  But don't blame Exodus - blame Austen.  What's Exodus meant to do, if the writer can't be bothered actually writing a scheme for him?  Charge at the heroes and get annihilated, apparently.  I realise it's easy to lose sight of the little details when you're writing a comic like X-Men, but just for future reference, stories tend to work better when somebody remembers to give the villains a plan, an agenda... anything, really.

Anyhow - with this issue, we finally draw a line under Chuck Austen's two year run.  So with the benefit of hindsight, the question can now be asked: Is Chuck Austen in fact the worst X-Men writer ever?

Yes.  He is.

To be fair, the satellite X-books have probably seen worse.  The all-time record for jawdroppingly awful writing on an X-book is still held by the last few issues of Mutant X, which have to be read to be disbelieved, and weren't even enlivened by competent art.  Rob Liefeld's current run on X-Force is so startlingly inept that it probably rates below Austen as well - at least Austen was aiming higher and had some sense of pacing. 

But if we're talking about regular writers on the ongoing X-books, then it's Austen, hands down.  For all that the 1990s are often derided, there's some perfectly good reading in there, and nothing as outrageously stupid as "The Draco."  Before Austen, the record for the worst-received run on an X-Men title was held by Joe Casey, the writer who actually managed to plough Uncanny X-Men out of the top ten for the first time in over 15 years.  And Casey isn't even a bad writer, he just didn't get the X-Men and misfired horribly. 

Really, over the forty-year history of the X-Men, the standard has been pretty high.  It's Austen.  There's no contest.  Yes, the Juggernaut subplot was okay.  No, that doesn't come close to balancing out the rest of the garbage we've had to wade through over the last two years.  The disintegrator communion wafers?  The Draco?  A five-issue adaptation of Romeo and Juliet with armour plating?  Everything he's written involving Polaris?  There's just so much in this run which defies belief.  Usually with bad comics, you can at least understand why they seemed like a good idea at the time.  But it's incomprehensible that the Chuck Austen run seemed like a good idea to anyone.

This issue, which has perfectly nice art and at least sweeps all outstanding Austen storylines off the board, is not Austen at his most egregious.  It's bad, and fundamentally defective in key ways (such as, oh, failing to give the villains any agenda at all).  But at least it isn't actively horrible on top of that, which means it rates as one of his better efforts.

But at least it's all over now.  Thank god for that.

Two years.  God, it feels like longer.

Rating: C

back | continue