Gambit #4 (vol 1)

Once you're done, feel free to go back to Uncanny X-Men Annual #17 if you're reading these in chronological order.
 
Gambit #4

Writing: Howard Mackie

Art: Lee Weeks

What Went Down:  Gambit returns to New Orleans to the aptly named Church of Lost Thieves.  He finds Julien there, and steals the final elixir component from the villain.  Gambit explains that he intercepted Julien’s agent trying to steal the other elixirs, and then unmasks Julien, revealing a haggard and drained man.  Gambit takes Julien to his father to confront him about the elixir.  It turns out that in some people the Elixir of Life has horrible addictive side effects that cause pain unless the person regularly ingests it.  Jean-Luc explains that he’s seen it before, but it’s rare and a small risk for a long life. 

Just then the Tithe Collector bursts in with an army of Thieves and Assassins.  After saving his father from a hail of gunfire, Gambit blows up a statue and takes off.  Elsewhere, Bella Donna is convulsing, but Rogue isn’t responding to Tante Mattie’s pleas for help. 

Gambit fights off more soldiers, lamenting that some of them are his old friends.  Gambit makes it back to his house, but the Tithe Collector is already there with Belle and Rogue held hostage.  As the bad guy goes to kill the women, Gambit leaps forward and charges the Collector’s jacket.  After kicking the Collector out a window, Gambit gets to mixing the elixir.  Rogue tries to tell him what she’s done, but Gambit is too focused on making sure the elixir turns out right. 

Julien bursts in, stabbing Gambit in the hand and shattering the vial of Elixir.  Marius kills Julien by filling him full of arrows and thanks Gambit for trying to save his daughter.  Candra shows up to see the execution of Gambit, but Gambit gives a speech about how she has been using and manipulating the guilds for her own selfish means.  Both guilds refuse to kill Remy, with Marius blaming Candra for the deaths of both his children.  Candra disappears, and Jean-Luc tells Remy that he will always be seen as the death of the old ways and exiles him from the city and the guild. 

Gambit tears off a sheet with some of the elixir soaked in it and drips it into Belle’s mouth.  Belle wakes up, but has none of her memories.  Gambit leaves her to her father and tries to console himself by taking Rogue out.  However Rogue knows he still loves her, and disturbed by the memories she’s absorbed, flies off. 

How It Was:  Julien gets turned from an unstoppable force to a weakling for plot expediency, and that’s just the first three pages of this book.  And I feel like I keep saying the same things, but that’s because they’re true.  The art is great, especially the fights.  Seeing Remy fight the combined guilds is pretty exciting, even if all the thieves look like homeless people and all the assassins look like every other Image Comics villain.  The writing refers to all the blood spilled, so it’s vague if Remy actually kills them or not. 

The real problem with the story is that Gambit defeats Candra basically by explaining how awful and stupid her plot is to everyone else in the book and then the guilds realize how stupid it is.  She gives a life elixir by tricking you into killing each other.  And with the Tithe Man killed, this plot is settled forever; I can’t understand why Jean-Luc is unhappy for Gambit setting them free.  It just reads weird that he would exile Gambit just for pointing out how futile their whole existence has been. 

I do like that Belle wakes up with no memories, leaving the reader to wonder if it was Rogue or the elixir that did this to her.  But overall this series has been a series of unmemorable new characters peppered with some nice action scenes.  All the villains are weak, and at no time do we think any of them are going to beat Gambit.  There is some tension with the fate of Bella Donna, but if you didn’t read the Brood crossover, then all you know about her is she’s some unconscious girl waiting for Gambit to rescue her.  It’s a commendable attempt to create a mythology around Gambit and his origins as a thief, but in some respects it just would’ve been easier to say he was a thief who eventually turned good and leave it at that.  Worth a look for the art though.

Completists Only