Detroit: a place where people do stuff. Maybe. It's hard to tell.

You'll have to pardon me for temporarily borrowing these scans from the Photobucket of one tw_basketcase until I can finish touching up my own, but now that X-Factor #33 is finally out? Yeah... no.

I don't think I hate Stroman's art in this issue because I'm ignorant of what art is or unable to stomach anything harder than Alan Davis--yeah, I was really into Mondrian, Magritte, Seurat, all sorts of Impressionist/Post-Impressionist and Hudson River School-type stuff when I was a kid, fairly tame as far as it goes, but I was raised on New York City art museums to be cool with everyone from Burne-Jones to Kandinsky to Pollock and beyond. And even after taking into account that art can take on just about any form, however abstract, and still possess positive, lasting qualities, I still consider Larry Stroman's work here to be hideously unsuccessful. He can draw, I must emphasize--from time to time there's a panel that actually looks perfectly decent and you wonder, well, why didn't he bother to keep doing that, then?--but for the most part, this issue looks like it was phoned in over two paper cups and a length of string.

Or maybe I just really hate this top panel. The sequences with Darwin and Longshot rapidly oscillate between "hey ho, here we are in the trackless waste" and "look, an urban street with people on it!" In the page just before this, Darwin and Longshot stepped off a Detroit street into what I guess is an abandoned lot, which here magically morphs into giant sand dunes filled with free-standing ruins and random floating animals. Two panels later on the same page, even though they haven't even moved, the background? Trees and intact houses.

(And about those animals, what the hell is that? Is that a hawk? Or just a really inept Skrull? Because it's the wrong body type to be a pigeon, starling, sparrow, chickadee, mockingbird, oh, I dunno, night warbler, whatever. It looks like a random... ground-skimming... hawk... in the middle of what is either allegedly Detroit or the protected shoreline nesting habitat of the killdeer.)

Turn this page and now they're back in the same trackless waste, except it's inexplicably filled with crowds of people. A page before, Jazinda appeared to be standing near a telephone pole on a city street. Now--is that her silhouette to the far right of the top panel? Just standing around in the desert? (Floaty Cat also reappears in silhouette in the bottom panel, for no reason.) The whole thing is like that--there's no real attempt to establish where anybody is in relation to anything else. It's just a bunch of panels that happen to be sharing a page, which is doubly unfortunate when there's no dialogue to disguise the weakness of the action sequence. Comics are a visual storytelling medium and, regardless of personal art style, if you can't convey the story in an effective, dramatic manner, it just doesn't work.

Anyway, we'll see. I do like X-Factor, for the most part. But I'm perfectly willing to jump ship and hook up with Invincible Iron Man instead of paying to watch Jamie "No Nose" Madrox and his other face-shifting buddies throw punches or randomly run back and forth through an indeterminate landscape populated by African-Americans depicted with the same bone structure as Deep Ones. (Marvel Detroit's new slogan might as well be "Dude, You'll Never Guess What We Put In The Water Here.")