GHOSTS DO NOTHING NEW: Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Boxes #2. Well, this was a polarizing comic. My vague impression is that the two Ghost Boxes issues were marketed as “steampunk” X-Men. And… I pretty much desperately don’t care about steampunk as a thing. I know people like both corsets and contemporary philosophical assumptions, but that doesn’t impress me, as a combination.

So I was okay with the fact that Ghost Boxes #2 isn’t that, at all. It’s a pricey (just about a fifth of the comic is script pages for what we’ve already seen) look at a post-apocalypse, all gray painting and melodramatic narration.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS SPOILEROUS.

Some more backhanded compliments: I liked some things about the art. The weepy-feathered, Goreyish birds in the second story are fantastic. The grays feel creepy and even nuanced (they’re harder in the first story, cloudier in the second), rather than merely oppressive. The suspense and reveals are handled very well–the pacing is great, so great that you don’t even notice until much later that these aren’t stories. These are two X-vignettes… at best.

That’s fine. I got nothing against a good vignette. But both of these vignettes were the same story. Things go horribly wrong; the X-Men respond with suicide or euthanasia, because how can you have a story without killing things?

On first reading, these two stories were both really, really powerful for me. I thought the Scott characterization was plausible (his own survivor’s guilt was the subtext of Joss Whedon’s Emma arc), and in general I’m okay with the other characters’ portrayals. But on re-reading, I wonder why these stories. Aren’t these the easiest ones? “I lost, so I killed myself/I lost, so I killed everyone who would suffer.” Those storylines provide obvious endings, but require–frankly–very little thought. It’s a lot harder to come up with storylines about rebuilding, acceptance, perseverance… or, even, letting people make their own decisions about what it means to die a good death.

I found myself comparing Ghost Boxes #2 to a particular fanfiction story. I won’t link to it because I’m unsure of the etiquette there, but email me if you want to know more; it’s not an X-Men story, but it’s about an apocalyptic disaster, and how the people caught within that disaster still try to have compassion and solidarity in the face of devastation. They don’t win. They don’t solve anything. They just figure out a better way to die.