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

Gambit #3 (vol 1)

Gambit #3

Writing: Howard Mackie

Art: Lee Weeks

What Went Down:  Gambit enters an exclusive Paris club without paying mind to the dress code.  After making a scene with a woman, the security guards escort him to a parking garage.  When the guards, who are working for Candra, go to kill him, Gambit subdues them all.  After changing into his uniform, Gambit is knocked out by the Tithe Collector.

Back in New Orleans, Rogue and Gambit’s Tante Mattie, a voodoo practitioner and healer, are watching over Bella Donna.  When Mattie leaves, Rogue debates using her powers to absorb Belle’s memories of Gambit.  In Paris, Gambit wakes up in a nicely furnished room.  He fights the Tithe Collector again and blows a hole in the room.  Candra breaks up the fight, announcing that she has need of Gambit and revealing their romantic past together.  Over in the Big Easy, Rogue stops herself from touching Belle, but Belle’s hand reaches out to grab the mutant anyway.  This forces Rogue to relive the entire Gambit/Belle romance.

Candra reveals her elixir and offers to give it to Gambit if he will kill his father.  She explains that she created the guilds centuries ago to keep each other in check and do her bidding.  Now she wants to create a new organization.  The Assassins and Julien burst into the room to steal the elixir for themselves.  Julien is powerful enough now to take Candra, one of the Externals, but Gambit distracts him.  In the middle of the fight, Jean-Luc Lebeau takes one of Julien’s claw swipes to save his son.  Enraged, Gambit subdues everyone while Candra knocks Julien out the window with a psionic bolt.  Gambit kisses Candra good-bye, but uses the opportunity to steal the elixir from her cleavage.  We end on Candra telling the Tithe Collector to order both guilds to hunt down Gambit, Rogue, and Belle.

How It Was:  Now this is more like it.  Gambit with a leather jacket, torn jeans, and a cigarette, tearing into a high society club, flirting with ladies and beating the crap out of jerks.  This is the stuff I want to see, even if it slumps a little once we get to…sigh, Candra. 

So the entire plot still centers on this elixir, the plot device that the guilds exist to compete for.  We learn that Candra created them for some vague purposes—something about reaping benefits.  But it’s hard to see what she needs them for because we don’t really know anything about Candra, other than she sleeps with Gideon and had a fling with Gambit.  I have no idea why a super powerful mutant would need an army of thieves and assassins, and how giving them powers to rival her own or having them kill each other is remotely a good idea.  It’s story logic that makes no sense whatsoever.  And the problem is, all these issues are what drive the primary sources of Gambit’s origin.

The tension and mystique of the Tithe Man have been completely shattered now that he has been beaten twice.  And there is this plot convenience of Julien being able to almost kill these uber-powerful beings, but Gambit can smack him in the head and hold his ground against him.  Gambit might be a little too powerful in this series, which harms the story when we don’t think there’s any chance Gambit could fail. 

Well we’ve got Gambit back in character, but now Rogue is acting out of sorts.  I don’t know why Rogue would want to absorb Belle’s memories since they could only hurt her emotionally.

Still, it’s Lee Weeks’ art that continues to carry this book.  His layouts here are especially memorable.  There’s a nice sequence where Gambit drops a card at the top of the page and it lands by a panel of Belle grabbing Rogue.  Or the composition of Belle’s memory montage which looks great.  Even the explosion panel where Julien and his men enter the hotel is fantastic. 

So we’ve got some great scenes for Gambit mixed with some dreadful Candra gibberish.  While I feel this issue does some harm to Gambit’s back story, the stuff in the present is rather fun.  I just wish Gambit had something better to do than assemble a magic elixir from some fantasy novel that somehow got stuck here.

X-Fans Only

Gambit #2 (vol 1)

Gambit #2

Writing: Howard Mackie

Art: Lee Weeks

What Went Down:  Down in New Orleans, Gambit breaks into an Assassin’s Guild base and finds his wife Bella Donna unconscious, but alive.  He then attacks the assassins as they try to sneak up on him.  During the fight, Belle’s father Marius shows up, blaming Gambit for the loss of both his children.  They duel with swords, and Gambit spares Marius’ life after defeating him.  As the rest of the assassins move in to kill Remy, Rogue shows up to help him out.  They beat all the assassins and plan to take Belle with them.  Marius tells Gambit to use the Thieves’ Guild’s Elixir of Life to cure Belle. 

After the two X-Men leave, Julien shows up and kills the remaining assassins.  He confronts his father, blaming Marius for letting Gambit take his sister.  Marius denounces his son, and Julien attacks the old man, leaving his fate unresolved. 

Gambit takes Belle and Rogue to the Thieves’ headquarters and interrupts the tithing ceremony.  The Tithe Man disappears, saying he will return when they are not busy.  Gambit implores his father to use the elixir on Belle, and fights off one of the angrier thieves named Pierre.  Gambit and Rogue leave after Jean-Luc refuses to use the elixir on an outsider, and after they leave Pierre tells Jean-Luc that they need three vials for the elixir to be complete. 

Julien, Pierre, and an army of assassins attack the Tithe Man, trying to get the vials for the elixir.  Julien tells Pierre that he has to steal the vial that the thieves have to complete their deal.  In a house that Gambit owns, he thanks Rogue for staying with Bella Donna while he goes to Paris to retrieve part of the elixir.  Gambit mentions that the house is for when he settles down, knowing that he probably never will.  Gambit visits Marius for information to save Belle, while Gideon apologizes to Candra for having to leave.

How It Was: The opening with the super-melodramatic panel of Gambit screaming his wife’s name is not a good sign for the series.  Side note: why is Bella Donna naked…shouldn’t the Assassins caring for her put clothes on her since she is a patient.  Again, the fighting is very cool, but Gambit is challenged to his second duel by an assassin in a matter of pages.  So this is getting a bit repetitive, and the fight doesn’t actually progress the story.  In fact, the fight just stops and Gambit calmly takes Belle away. Marius as a character is pretty generic.  He does get a bit of an arc this series, but he doesn’t do anything particularly defining or memorable.  Also we get the first inference that Julien wants to be a little closer with his sister than is normal, which is a might bit over the top and uncomfortable, at least for this reader. 

The problem is I miss the fun, wise cracking Gambit.  There is yet another melodramatic ham fest when Gambit announces to his father “We will have words!” And Jean-Luc doesn’t turn out to be any more memorable than Marius, other than that Remy’s dad is calm and Belle’s dad is angry; Mr. Lebeau hardly even reacts upon learning that his real son Henri is dead.  None of these new characters, from the fathers to the Tithe Man, are really that interesting or compelling.  There’s also a serious problem with Candra’s scheme if her plot is to reward the guilds with enough power that they can eventually beat up her and Tithe Man and steal more power for themselves.  On top of that, Gideon gets one panel to reveal he’s not actually in this story, so what was the point in having him in the first two issues at all?

There are some nice bits toward the end as Gambit tells some of his origin to Rogue.  And learning that he has a piece of land set aside is a nice little character point for Gambit.  Although it is rather sexist that Rogue is being sidelined as a nurse; I like to think it’s more to do with being Gambit’s series than her being a girl, but we all know it’s a little bit of both. 

Hmm…what else?  The scenes of Julien carving up the assassins are well sequenced and have the right mood I guess.  Sorry, not much is coming to me.  None of these characters being introduced are that interesting and Rogue doesn’t have anything to do except ask Gambit questions that let him give exposition about his history; she helps fight, but it doesn’t feel needed or necessary.  Plus the fact that Gambit has to retrieve three elixirs is frustrating; it’s like a generic video game fetch quest delivered to our hero.  It’s just not very original.

Completists Only

Gambit #1 (vol 1)

The first Gambit mini-series takes place (by my estimate) between X-Men #23 and Uncanny X-Men Annual #17, since Wolverine hasn't left the team after Fatal Attractions yet.
 
Gambit #1

Writing: Howard Mackie

Art: Lee Weeks

What Went Down:  An enigmatic figure known as the Tithe Collector scares some hoods away from a woman they are robbing.  As the thieves run away, they are killed by the monster from Ghost Rider #26.  In Salem, Storm and Wolverine observe Gambit flirting with Rogue in the Danger Room.  Outside the mansion, a man in black slips through the security.

Rogue saves Gambit from an explosion, and Gambit suddenly announces that they have an intruder (somehow?).  The intruder is Gambit’s adopted brother Henri, and he has come to recruit Gambit for the tithing.  Henri is shot with an arrow and dies, but not before revealing that Bella Donna and her brother Julien are still alive.  Gambit pursues the men who shot his brother by himself.  In New Orleans, Remy’s adopted father Jean-Luc Lebeau requests permission to give his son an elixir.  In Paris we see the Externals Gideon and Candra talking cryptically about exciting plans.

Gambit pursues his brother’s killers, members of the Assassins Guild, to an abandoned warehouse and fights them.  At the same time, Rogue reveals to Wolverine that she loves Gambit, and Logan suggests that Rogue not wait to tell him.  Gambit then encounters the killer from the X-Men/Ghost Rider crossover, who turns out to be Julien, his ex-brother-in-law that he accidentally killed years ago.  The two sword fight, and Julien impales himself on Gambit’s sword.  Not dying, Julien and the assassins teleport through a portal.  Gambit returns to the mansion, tells the X-Men that he has to follow up on this alone, and Rogue announces that she is going with him. 

How It Was:  So it’s the 90’s and anti-heroes are super in.  Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor are getting demolished in the sales charts by the likes of Ghost Rider, Punisher, and Wolverine.  Due to the success of the new X-Men title as well as the Saturday morning cartoon show, Gambit was quite the popular character.  A mini-series seemed like a sure bet (and it was), but of course the problem is taking Gambit from member of the team (one piece in a greater story) and making him the focus—giving him supporting characters and motivations outside of the X-Men. 

To Howard Mackie’s credit, he does start out with some serious stakes.  We’re introduced to Gambit’s brother, who is almost instantly killed.  A little cheap?  Maybe, but it is enough so you buy that Gambit is willing to up and leave the X-Men for a little bit; this part would be more effective if Gambit’s brother was mentioned at all during the rest of the series.  Gambit doesn’t even do anything with his brother’s body…he just leaves. 

The fight with the Assassins members is laid out rather nicely.  Weeks changes it up enough when depicting Gambit’s powers that it never gets old to see him pitching cards.  In fact Lee Weeks does a nice job with all the characters and poses.  The only weak spot is the Danger Room sequence—it’s a room that can literally create anything, so I don’t know why so many artists decide to fill it with empty white space.  We see some arms, pistons, and rockets coming at Gambit and Rogue, but most of it is off panel and just barely in view.  There are some robots, but they’re drawn too close up to get any sense of how they are attacking or what they might do as a threat.  I get that the scene is supposed to be easy for Gambit and Rogue so they can banter, but it would be more impressive if we could see the full threat in a couple of panels, not just have it creeping in off panel. 

And of course the real problem is the plot points that Mackie is stuck with.  We’re exploring the two guilds, which makes one think of ancient orders dedicated to a craft.  Mackie knows he needs a conflict for them to fight over, and the best he can come up with is this generic macguffin of the elixir of life.  Plus we meet Jean-Luc Lebeau, Gambit’s father, who is pretty much a generic swashbuckler/Robin Hood type.  Things get even more disappointing when we learn just how Candra is tied into all this.

The rest of the issue is serviceable, although there is one inconsistency that always bothered me.  I understand that all this is embroiled in Gambit’s past and family, and he wants to solve his own problems, but surely the same was true in the X-Men/Ghost Rider crossover that sets this series up.  If the X-Men didn’t let Gambit go off alone then, why now? 

It’s an intriguing start, and to its credit, Gambit #1 delivers everything a Gambit comic needs: Gambit + Rogue, an arch enemy for Gambit to fight, and the unraveling of Gambit’s history.  We get one really good and one okay/decent action sequence, and some scenes of Wolverine telling Rogue common sense.  Tonally it’s struggling a bit; Gambit is a light hearted rogue, but he’s confronted with a lot of serious tragedy that force him to be a little too serious.  Still, it catches your attention well enough.

For X-Men Fans