I’d like to bring up one of my favorite comic works for all the wrong reasons, X-Men: The End.

For those of you unfamiliar, Marvel has put out a few The End stories, theorizing what it might look like if the stories of some of Marvel’s more popular characters reached their natural conclusion.  Garth Ennis and Richard Corben’s Punisher: The End was a particularly good example of this, not least of which because, at a single taut issue, it didn’t outstay its welcome.  This issue asked, what is the Punisher about?  What would prompt Frank Castle to finally bring to an end his one-man war against crime?  But at the far opposite end of the spectrum, we have the X-Men’s opus in the form of three interconnected miniseries at six issues each, written by longtime X-Men writer Chris Claremont.  You’d think that if anyone would understand what the X-Men are about, to boil them down into their essential elements and craft a conclusion accordingly, it’d be Chris Claremont.  But these days, I like to think of him as the X-Men’s George Lucas: he did great work in turning the X-Men into a successful franchise, but then he returned to his creation after a significant hiatus, only to leave me aghast and wondering, “Does… does he really not get the X-Men?  To this extent?”

The idea behind these series was to craft the final X-Men story as an epic trilogy in the tradition of The Lord of the Rings.  I did not pick up or read them as they came out, but I view the collected edition as the comic equivalent of one’s favorite terrible movie, in that I can dip into just about any page and find something hilarious.  It features all of Chris Claremont’s usual tropes, from a spunky improbable future-daughter in the form of Deathbird and Bishop’s daughter (ugh) Aliyah Bishop, to his ubiquitous bondage/possession/mind-control fetish (Aliyah being possessed by the Brood, Tullamore Voge turning Nocturne into a spike-riddled Hound), to having these characters pair off and have children, dozens and dozens of children just ripe for the kidnapping.  To be fair, I have yet to check out Claremont’s GeNeXt books featuring the continued adventures of X-offspring Becka Munroe, Pavel Rasputin, (ugh) Olivier Raven, and lest we forget “No-Name” (not even kidding).  (Remember back in, like, middle-school, when you thought it’d be cool to have characters like “No-Name” in your X-Men fan-fiction? How young we were!)

Of course, the whole thing is precipitated by the resurrection of Jean Grey as the Phoenix, so various factions across the Earth and the larger galaxy start quivering in planet-immolating fear.  Consequently, the X-Men spend… I’d say seventy-five percent of this eighteen-issue story fighting “War-Skrulls,” because that’s what the X-Men are about, right?  Clearly that is what the “final” X-Men epic should focus on: fighting shape-shifting space aliens.  From a strictly personal perspective, I’ve never been the biggest fan of the X-Men’s space adventures, because I don’t feel it’s what the X-Men are inherently about.  Removing them from Earth removes them from society and, to an extent, negates their status as outsiders.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for Marvel characters enjoying the occasional trip into the vaster Marvel universe, X-Men included… I just don’t think it makes for the X-Men’s best stories. The whole affair culminates in a giant, overblown battle at the far end of the universe when Xavier’s genocidal twin sister Cassandra Nova usurps the power of the Phoenix Force.

But throughout this madness, back on Earth, a token effort is made to hearken back to Xavier and the X-Men’s dream of mutant/human coexistence, in the form of the subplot in which mutant activist and Claremont’s darling Kitty Pryde is running for mayor of Chicago against Alice Tremaine, the most straw-man anti-mutant bigot you ever did see. All her dialogue can basically be summed up with “Mutants are monsters and abominations!!!” to which Kitty replies, “Let me calmly rebut those points in the form of the following well-reasoned and rational appeals for tolerance and acceptance.”

And it can’t be overstated that there are so… many… characters.  Sean Chen’s terrible redesign on Wither’s costume is hilariously on-the-nose.  Following the events of Claremont’s Storm-centric storyline “The Arena” (the topic of a future Can We Talk About unto itself), Callisto is still being rendered as an otherwise beautiful woman with tentacles in place of arms and an eye-patch.  A significant amount of pages are devoted to Dani Moonstar once again taking on the role of an Asgardian Valkyrie, always a particularly bizarre niche of X-Men continuity.  Vargas’s stupidly-named sibling henchmen Thais and Thaiis are now the X-Men’s @#$%ing babysitters.  Madelyne Pryor infiltrates the X-Men by killing Dust and wearing her niqab.  In the most blatant example of nepotistic continuity, we even see the return of Doctor Doom’s generals from the Heroes Reborn universe, sorceress Shakti, amorphous Divinity, and techno-organic Technarx.  (Have these characters had anything to do with the X-Men to date?  Nope!  But hey, there’s room in this boat for everybody, right?  Hop on board!)  And as if all that wasn’t enough to contend with, there’s the non-canonical revelation that Gambit is the third Summers brother (whose identity has since, regrettably, been otherwise confirmed) and that furthermore, he, Gambit, is actually a clone of Mr. Sinister!  Clearly, this entire series could only have benefited from being reduced, in length and cast, by at least thirty percent.

But my favorite moment of this whole over-complicated sprawl features the late, unlamented Puffball.

During the events of the fourth issue, the X-Force team is ambushed, and their jet is blown up by a missile and crashes to earth!  Oh no!  Who could have survived this catastrophe?!  But what’s this?  Warpath smashes out of the jet to reveal X-Force has been saved by being individually encased in some featureless, giant white spheres, which they just kinda shove their way out of like Styrofoam!  (I would like to take a moment to give Chris Claremont props for going with “Miracles are what the X-Men do best,” instead of opting for the old-timey Claremontism, “Miracles are the X-Men’s stock-in-trade.”)  Is this some bizarre crash-protection system?  No, they’ve all been saved by heretofore unknown longtime valued member of X-Force, Puffball!  But then Irene Merryweather solemnly delivers the bad news: “Puffball – Laraine – didn’t make it.” We behold another white sphere with a piece of wreckage jammed through it, blood tricking from the cracks.  And for all her sacrifice and her well-timed rescue, poor unappreciated Puffball is never seen, thought about, or mentioned again!  It’s not even made clear whether she had a human body, or if she was just another featureless white sphere!  But she nonetheless holds the all-time record for shortest X-Men career by being introduced and killed off in less than one page.

This, class, is what we call the laziest possible writing.  While I am sure that this whole series was just Marvel tossing Chris Claremont a bone and letting him do whatever he wanted… every single thing about this decision baffles me.  Could none of the several dozen other established X-Men characters present in this series have contributed to this rescue?  Can you imagine any other story in which our heroes survive the catastrophe thanks to the actions of an unknown, unseen character who saves everybody and then immediately dies?