Full disclosure – outside of some Punisher and Fury: My War Gone By, I haven’t kept track of the Marvel MAX universe of adult-themed books – or if they even share a universe. I attempted Deadpool MAX but the artwork tended to make my eyes bleed. Also, my first real exposure to Fantomex was Rick Remender somehow making this incomprehensibly-powered character into my favorite thing about his Uncanny X-Force run. So it’s possible Fantomex showed up in previous MAX books, but all I’ve got to go on is Fantomex MAX #1, which hits the ground running and kind of assumes you know what’ what.
The 616 version of Fantomex is hard to describe. He’s a high-class assassin/thief who was artificially raised in a shrinking lab complex called The World, he has three brains, a crazy healing factor, a smarmy libido and an external nervous system which doubles as a size-changing space ship named E.V.A. In current issues of Uncanny X-Force, each one of his three brains has its own body now, and one of them is a lady, and things are weird and I’ve stopped paying attention. I don’t know how much of that stuff carries over into the MAX world, but there’s at least a strongly different vibe to Eva in this issue.
It opens with Fantomex in mid-caper, stealing a weird David Cronenberg-style organic-fleshy gun thing and fighting a jackhole in a robot suit dead set on killing him, but he’s more concerned about arguing with Eva, who seems to be a spaceship that can communicate with him telepathically and project herself as holographic images of various fantasy women – and who is cartoonishly jealous of Special Agent Rhona Flemyng, the woman who tries to arrest him, and for whom Fantomex seems to have a thing. However, he throws her out of the ship with a parachute, forcing her superior to recruit a special ops team called Grover Lane, which initially has kind of a Steed & Mrs. Peel sort of vibe, although Mrs. Peel (aka Alexandra Macready) in this case looks a lot like a Black Widow by way of Christine Baranski riff as well. Agent Stuart Stirling and Richard Gaunt make up the team with her, and they soon turn out to be evil assholes with their own agenda once Fantomex risks capture by leaving Flemyng a mash note with a one-time phone number. Then, they try to lure Fantomex into a trap.
Writer Andrew Hope has managed to keep Fantomex himself as a neat, slick and erudite sort of character, but everything around him seems like a swirling mess. There are neat moments – like Fantomex’s nightmare in French and his initial fight with Project Omega Zealot – but the sticking point here is Eva. She’s not explained in any way, which leads me to believe that I’ve missed some previous adventures, but it seems that she’s either a ridiculous caricature of a woman, a robo-assistant of some sort or an expression of Fantomex’s sleazy subconscious, given that she always appears as a huge-boob lady in dominatrix, nurse, cavewoman or French maid uniforms, what-have-you. She constantly expresses petty, foul-mouthed vindictiveness to everyone else (anytime a skinny lady fight includes one of them mocking the other one’s weight fills me with doubt about the male writer depicting it) and constant sexy and overprotective devotion to him. It brings to mind Lyla from Spider-Man 2099, although she was expressly defined as an A.I. holo-agent who generally looked like Marilyn Monroe, and she wasn’t this obnoxiously porny. Then again, I’d hate to think what Spider-Man 2099 MAX would look like.
Shawn Crystal’s art is decent. There’s a lot of use of background dots as a means of stylization, and there are moments where Eva looks a lot like a Joe Madureira drawing. The wardrobe of Flemyng in repose is also somewhat strikingly designed as well, even if it’s an excuse to get her in her underwear for no good reason. He’s going for a sexy superspy adventure kind of thing, and it works well enough, but it’s not super exciting.
Fantomex MAX #1 is okay, but somewhat suspect from the get go. It’s certainly weird, it could wind up being fun, but it could also become something gross.
