X-Statix: The Complete Collection, Vol. 2

X-Statix (Collected Editions) #4-5

by Peter Milligan

The mutants in X-Statix know fame is the ultimate currency in today’s society — and they’re cashing in on their special abilities, big time! But as egos clash, the team may be torn apart by interior squabbles. When push comes to shove, will their careers end at their own hands? When European pop sensation Henrietta Hunter returns from the dead for the ultimate comeback tour, it’s up to the celebrity super-squad to keep her alive…again! But can X-Statix live in the shadow cast by her white-hot celebrity…especially when she becomes team leader?! Plus, meet Latino heartthrob El Guapo! Spider-Man swings by! And — together at last — Doop and Wolverine hunt the Pink Mink! It’s a super hero satire of modern culture from the brilliant minds of Milligan and Allred! 

COLLECTING: X-Statix (2002) 6-20, Wolverine/Doop (2003) 1-2, material from X-Men Unlimited (1993) 41
 

Genres: Comics, X Men, Graphic Novels, Marvel

416 pages, Paperback

Published December 28, 2021

About the author

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

Peter Milligan is a British writer, best known for his work on X-Force / X-Statix, the X-Men, & the Vertigo series Human Target. He is also a scriptwriter.

He has been writing comics for some time and he has somewhat of a reputation for writing material that is highly outlandish, bizarre and/or absurd.

His highest profile projects to date include a run on X-Men, and his X-Force revamp that relaunched as X-Statix.

Many of Milligan's best works have been from DC Vertigo. These include: The Extremist (4 issues with artist Ted McKeever) The Minx (8 issues with artist Sean Phillips) Face (Prestige one-shot with artist Duncan Fegredo) The Eaters (Prestige one-shot with artist Dean Ormston) Vertigo Pop London (4 issues with artist Philip Bond) Enigma (8 issues with artist Duncan Fegredo) and Girl (3 issues with artist Duncan Fegredo).

Series:
* Human Target
* Greek Street
* X-Force / X-Statix

Reviews

[cardulelia carduelis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collects X-statix 6-20, a Wolverine-Doop 2-issue crossover, and a little snippet of X-men unlimited.

The team is headed by The Orphan no longer - Tike Alicar is in charge now which leaves Mr Sensitive to pursue the newest addition to the team: Venus Dee Milo. Edie is dead but not forgotten and makes several appearances, once in the form of a diary entry for a young Edie trying to find her way in Hollywood. There's also a new hero, El Guapo (The Handsome), who has a controlling magical skateboard.
The big arc in this collection is a weird back-from-the-dead pop sensation called Henrietta who plays the publicity game so well they make her team leader. Dead girl comes through a lot more in these issues which is welcome too.

The Doop-Wolverine issues are a super-camp mystery about a mysterious woman with a Pink Mink who needs rescuing. It works well in this volume as a whole as her notoriety precedes her - just liek X-statix. The art in these issues is really too, a lot more flowy than the pop-art panels of Allred, and perfectly suits the subject matter.

The X-men snippet was barely worth including, it's a short story in which dead girl and VdM are off shopping so the boys go to an expo on the train (with Tike's grandfather for some reason) and meet fans. It's fine.

A great overall book. It does look like there were 6 more issues of X-statix after this so I'm off to read those.


==========
Why X-Men, why now?
I was really into X-Men during my teens.
It's such a classic story about acceptance and finding your place in the world that it feels catered to teens. Plus there's enough diversity in the cast's backgrounds and personalities to keep it interesting.
And look at the epic storylines back then: the dark Phoenix saga, Age of Apocalypse, House of M, Civil War - so much great stuff!
I grew tired of them at some point and moved on to other pastures (Runaways, then mostly Image) mostly because the big Marvel collections were huge, a long time coming, and they were so expensive! I didn't have a way to get single issues (this was pre-digital comics) so I ordered them from the USA.

But recently.. someone talked about how great the Hickman run is... And I wanted to get back in. Because let's face it: when Marvel is done well it's like being a kid again.

So with the help of comicbook herald I put together a little reading list. Books so far:
New X-Men, Volume 1 by Grant Morrison
New X-Men by Grant Morrison: Ultimate Collection, Book 2
New X-Men by Grant Morrison: Ultimate Collection, Book 3
X-Statix: The Complete Collection Vol. 1

[Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a lot going on in this volume. It's all over the place. There's a Beatles parody. Spider-Man shows up for a couple pages. There's an issue told from Edie's diary. It was kind of nice to revisit her. There are a bunch of different storylines and new characters added so at points it's hard to tell where it's going. But I enjoyed most of it. And if you liked previous X-Statix, you'll probably like this too. I could have done without the Wolverine/Doop side story. There's still plenty of inter-team drama, but less moping. So that's cool. I really like the Allred artwork too.

[Chris Lemmerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The strangest superhero team you've ever heard of! First as X-Force, then as X-Statix, a ragtag group of mutants that are mostly out for media attention as well as fame and fortune manage to be superheroes along the way.

X-Statix is a weird book, and that's entirely the point. A book like this wouldn't work nowadays - there's no way you could launch a team with entirely new characters, with hardly any link to the main Marvel Universe aside from a few cameo appearances, without it falling flat on its face. But X-Statix is all of that and more - the superheroics are almost just a sidebar at times, with the team's interpersonal relationships and their reactions to the world around them even more important than whether or not they manage to do what they set out to do.

It's also a satirical look at the nature of showbusiness, which somehow is still as applicable now as it was in 2002ish when this first came out. Every issue builds on the last, feeling like one serialised story rather than individual bits and pieces. Even when the book relaunches as X-Statix and has more delineated story arcs, it's easy for them to just flow one into the next.

Some of the characters can be a tad on the nose - the handling of POC and queer characters is a bit haphazard, but there's effort being made, and I appreciate what Peter Milligan was trying to do even if it doesn't always land the way we'd want it to. All of the characters feel real, even if some of their dialogue is a bit unnatural at times.

And of course, the fact that no artist can come close to copying Michael Allred's style makes X-Statix stand out even further. He pencils all but about 3 or 4 of the 25 issues contained here, and his pop art style just ensures that this series looks like nothing else as well as reading like nothing else.

So yeah, X-Statix is weird. But it's the kind of weird that I love. It has a big heart, even if it's hidden behind some dodgy dialogue and some grumpy characters. Odd little books like this are the reason I love comics.

[Michael Emond · Rating 3 out of 5]

So was this better or worse than the first volume? It definitely is different. I would say it improves in some areas and loses ground in other areas. The art by Mike Allred is still great. He has his own style which I love but it may be a bit too cartoony for some. And there are less fill in artists this time around and Darwyn Cooke being one of them for the Doop and Wolverine mini-series (how was that green-lit?) is always welcome.

Peter Milligan is a very weird writer. And this is a very weird series. It is hard to put in words. There are plots and stories, which is to say it isn't like a Grant Morrison un-story he sometimes writes. There are characters and they have defined personalities but they act so odd at times (most times). They murder the guy funding their group and no one bats an eye. One of their members gets both legs blown off and they accept it with a shrug. A dead singer comes back from the dead and they resent her being on the team and plot to kill her. Then they don't.
The first volume also had this but I felt the characters were more grounded in reality but in this volume it went from a 6 absurdity to a 9.

The stories are fun and and do have some points to make. I actually feel it works best when the absurdity is dialed back a bit and the story can be told. The last two parter about Vivisector and his troubled relationship with his powers and father actually worked the best for me. But again you have to take it with a grain of salt because this is the first time Vivisector has complained he has powers. There is no build up or character development.

Overall - I can't strongly recommend these stories but I think for a certain sector of comic readers they will be a breath of fresh air. They are silly, well drawn, entertaining and very different than your usual super hero comic. But if you go in expecting "X-Men" you will be confused and disappointed.

[Adam Stone · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not a big Peter Milligan fan, so I was surprised by how much I enjoyed his run on X-Force: Famous, Mutant and Mortal. Part of it is that I'm an enormous fan of both Mike Allred and Darwyn Cooke but I also enjoyed the oddness and daring turnover of characters from that run.

Unfortunately, this volume is a lot tamer and weighed down by tropes and terrible dialogue. The "Good Guy"/"Bad Guy" storyline was on par with a middle schooler's homework assignment. No creativity, flat characters, a bad understanding of characters borrowed from other books (seriously, the whole "Who is Bad Guy?" storyline is really dumb when one of the main characters in the story is Professor X, the world's foremost telepath. The storyline should have been two panels long instead of several tedious issues.), and mainly the complete loss of satire from the X-Force run. Instead of an interesting take on mutant culture using characters that you barely have time to invest in, the book is now a paint-bu-numbers superhero book using characters you're not given a reason to care about. It's a big letdown.

The art is great, as always, but with no interesting story behind it, I would just rather read just about anything else with Allred or Cooke's art.

I don't recommend this, even if you really enjoyed Milligan's X-Force.

[Raul Reyes · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
This volume definitely had some fun storylines but it was just very all over the place. At the beginning, we very heavily focus on Mr Sensitive and Dee Milo which I found very boring but, after that, we just kind of jump around characters without a clear goal. I liked the short issue which details U-Go girl’s rise to fame and I thought El Guapo had the potential to be interesting but his only storyline is about cheating on his girlfriend. I was very curious to see what they would do with him after the reveal during the last panel that his skateboard was sentient but we never got more. In comparison, I felt much less compelled by Henrietta and her storyline. I felt that the scene where music execs say that they’ll release a new record when she died so they didn’t have to pay her family royalties and was way too on the nose. In general, I felt like the commentary on this volume wasn’t very well executed in the way that 2000s media always act very weird towards the Middle East. There was also much less of it. I liked that we finally focused on Myles for once but the story only got interesting until the second issue and I feel like his mutation could’ve said more about being queer. It would’ve been interesting if the only reason that he doesn’t his mutation is because it’s so overt that people instantly know he’s a mutant, and tying that back to him being very insistent on not wanting to act very traditionally femme and be straight passing because of his daddy issues. I really don’t have to say about the Dead Girl and Doop stories. Although, the Doop one should’ve been shorter.

[Shane Perry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe more 3.5 stars. Milligan and Allred continue their satire of celebrities and pop culture with X-Statix. This volume features some mostly decent stories, with two one-shots, one about U-Go-Girl and one about Dead Girl, being the highlights of the collection. This collection felt like a bit of a step down in terms of story, with the way mass shootings were treated feeling especially too-shallow even for a satirical comic.

Allred’s art is the main reason this book remains enjoyable. Darwyn Cooke comes back for a two-issue series about Wolverine and Doop that looked way better than it was written. The biggest shame is that Allred didn’t get to finish the series, with Nick Dragotta doing art on the final issue. X-Statix as a whole is pretty good, but I’d say the first half of the complete collection was more pointed in its satire and better with its characters (though the idea of a mutant professional skateboarder who needs his board to live was pretty funny).

Also: Apparently there’s a whole story arc that came after issue 20. It feels strange to cut out the last 6 issues of the series and still call this the “Complete Collection.” Pretty poor work on Marvel’s end, especially with the trade of those final issues being out of print.

[Emil Z · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as good as the previous one but still great comic book. Drawings are still excellent but story was a little bit chaotic from time to time.

[Gabriel Rojo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This may not be as brilliant as volume 1, but still, the "Henrietta Hunter" storyline is the most punk rock thing done in mainstream comics since the 80s.