Superhero comics are by and large gussied-up soap operas and the X-Men are probably the most soap-tastic of the lot. Someone’s sleeping with someone else, their relationship is on the outs, those guys are having kids, and so on and so on. That’s basically what’s put me off its many titles - I just don’t care anymore about whether whatshername is back together with whatsisface or who’s dead but is predictably coming back to life and here’s the fucking Phoenix Force again.
That said, Mr & Mrs X was amazingly not completely boring! So Gambit and Rogue have tied the knot and wouldn’t you Adam and Eve it - they’ve only gone and gotten roped into some shenanigans on their space honeymoon oh I couldn’t have oh that’s right of course that sort of thing always happens to the bleedin X-Men and here’s Deadpool for no reason too!
The story won’t be blowing anyone’s mind: the happy couple have to protect a MacGuffin from arbitrary antagonists for plot reasons (Shi’Ar politics - zzz). It works well though because our title characters are such good company. Kelly Thompson writes them really well with convincing chemistry and I enjoyed spending time with this cute couple romancing their way across the stars.
Even Deadpool, the Marvel Bugs Bunny who gets shoved into everything these days, partly because he’s a character who you can do literally anything with and it’ll make sense, but obviously also because his movies and comics are such a hit with audiences, wasn’t too annoying and played an amusing third wheel in the first half of the story.
It definitely helps that the number of X-characters is scaled back from unwieldy to just two, allowing more room to develop Rogue and Gambit’s relationship. The opening and closing issues where a bunch of X-Men rock up and blather pointlessly about nothing (“What’s SHE doing at the wedding??” - Eastenders drum beat) were definitely the low points for me. The art was… eh. It was there!
Rogue and Gambit also encounter an array of Z-list characters to remind us that the Marvel Universe is filled with forgettable non-entities that never became popular like Flashfire, Scatterbrain and Bodybag. Maybe that was why they were included - a joke on how lame they are? I mean, are there any fans of Waxworks or Ch’od waiting for their next appearance?
The story was generic and there’s nothing here that’s remotely new but the two charismatic leads are a charming, likeable pair who made reading this one not a total waste of time. As a lapsed X-Men reader, Mr & Mrs X, Volume 1: Love and Marriage was a pleasant surprise and I’m sure fans of the characters will enjoy de heck out of this one, cheres!
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