ROGUE #1

By: Tony Whitt
Review Date: Thursday, August 05, 2004

Rogue needs something to take her mind off her troubles: not only is she dealing with the usual problem (the whole power/memory absorbing thing), she has to cope with Remy's blindness and her accidental absorption of his feelings about it and hers. A mission to her old stomping grounds, however, gets her more than she bargained for in the form of a little girl whom she's sure she's "been" and a man who claims to know her family and who can resist her powers.

A few of the people who disagreed with my extended review of SPIDEY 2 felt I was too wrapped up in the comics version of the character to give the movie version a fair shake. While that might be a fair assessment comics is, after all, what I do, while movie reviews are a close second I'm more than a little annoyed by the fact that the comics are now mirroring the movies just a bit too closely, in such a way that the comics versions of the character are often getting crowded out. Such is my reaction to ROGUE, a new title that seems bent on convincing us that Rogue is more the teenager she is in the X-MEN movies and less the fully-grown adult she's been in the comics for the last twenty or so years.

Granted, Rob Rodi writes the character perfectly well we see touches of the adult rogue in her rescue of the little girl, and none of her actions seem terribly out of place. But she seems a bit emotionally stunted for someone we've seen developing over the years. That could be because of all the memories she's absorbed, all the personalities she's become or it could be a deliberate attempt to make Rogue more of an innocent, the way she is in the movies. It's hard to imagine Rodi's Rogue ever being part of Mystique's version of the so-called Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, for instance, even with the "personality pickpocketing" she engages in at the beginning of this issue.

Set all this aside and it's not as difficult to set aside as I make it out to be, by the way and there's an enjoyable book here. Not sure I'm lovin' the idea of a mysterious character who's stereotypically Cajun and who has a name like Campbell Sainte-Ange, but I guess living in Louisiana makes me a bit more sensitive to that kind of thing, and it does open up all sorts of narrative possibilities to have Rogue faced with someone who knows her and whom she can't drag the information from. Richards and Rapmund's artwork hasn't quite grown on me yet it's a tad overly ornate and yet imprecise at the same time. For an example of what I mean, check out our first view of what the little mutant girl the X-Men go to rescue in Mississippi has done to her town: it's hard to figure out exactly what you're looking at, despite the clarity of the lines. And, of course, while I dig Anna Paquin as Rogue on-screen, I don't dig her as Rogue in print.

Whether ROGUE will be a success or not especially given the profusion of X-related titles out there already, and the fact that EMMA FROST is already dropping out of sight is still an open question. Last year, I asked readers to write in telling me what female characters they'd like to see in their own books, and Rogue was one of them, though many expressed the opinion that they weren't sure she could carry a book on her own. Even now that she has one, I'm still not sure but it may be worth sticking around to find out.

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