Rogue Is Interesting Again

May 25th, 2007

Between the unflattering picture of Anna Paquin I ran across earlier today and the latest issue of X-Men (#199), I’ve had Rogue on the mind today.

Now, I have probably done a lot more reading about comics in the last couple of years than I have actually reading comics, mostly via the highly entertaining dave’s long box and, recently this obsessively long multi-part Hobgoblin essay. But in that time, I’ve mostly kept current on X-Men and Uncanny, which have generally been good, but not, perhaps, interesting.

Rogue, in particular, started out as this very interesting, mysterious character. A thief and a villain who robbed people of their powers, if they had any– an evil Peter Petrelli, if you will– and who came over to help the X-Men. This only added to the misfit element of the X-Men, and that was all well and good, but then Gambit happened, and Rogue turned into a boring character good for the occassional ongoing angst and hitting people with telephone poles, but really nothing more.

Now, however, Gambit is gone for whatever convenient reason, Rogue is defying the government watchdog groups monitoring the X-Men, and she’s leading a proper team of misfits, with a robot, some criminals, Iceman, Cable, Cannonball, and her mom. That’s what I call a good start!

One of the things that I really like seeing in comics is people exploring their powers and using them in novel ways. So when, in this latest issue, Rogue gets psychically urged back from the brink of death, her absorption power amplified, and the absorbs the minds of billions of people and turns into a mind-sucking mutant vampire, a modern-day illithid, well, that is very interesting to me. A really good issue, and of course I totally dig Chris Bachalo’s artwork, even when his art feels a bit rushed it always looks amazing.

Entry Filed under: Comics