WXM 042 Fantomex MAX

Around the Time Wolverine and the X-men, or WXM came out for Heroclix is when I really started to pick up the game a lot. I had played in a few events and was really getting into it. So it doesn't surprised me that My first batch of favorite pieces are from there. Fantomex was one of those pieces that was pretty heavy on power. He can make an E.V.A. token that can go anywhere on the board. Most of the people I played with didn't really know much about Fantomex either it seemed. Then a short while later a mini series started under the MAX label. So I bought them.

First off, who is Fantomex? Fantomex doesn't know who he really is. He is an expert thief and a Frenchmen. Well he claims to be French but really the virtual world he was raised in is based in Britain. He is a super sentinel created by Weapon Plus. Shout out to Google plus. He was born like a person but is totally full of nano machines and does shit like turn his hand into an acetylene torch. The most uncanny ability of his is his external nervous system called E.V.A. Eva is another personality of his which is directly connected to him. She exists outside of his body while possessing machines and has and empathetic connection to him. When he feels pain she feels it too. Basically the rest of his powers consist of being an expert agent and thief.

So what did they do in Fantomex MAX? The story covered Fantomex following a government agent that he is in love with down to the bottom of the Mariana trench. Down there is a secret building of untold purpose. Whilst down there he finds out it was a set up for them to get the master thief to help them activate a machine that operates from down there. I'll tell you in a minute what that machine does. He gets the keys of course, EVA learns some more about herself and the world is saved. Yet again without the rest of the world really knowing it was in any kind of danger.

So was this book MAX? Well while Fantomex and his crew of characters definitely seem like they fit a MAX setting. MAX line of books are for adult and explicit content if you are unaware. Unfortunately they only seemed to use it for crude jokes and dropping F-Bombs. I feel the art was a bit off at times too. Being my first experience with Fantomex I wasn't sure what to expect. Andrew Hope and Shawn Crystal aren't exactly going on my list of artists to follow.

So here is my gripe. If you read avengers 24.now then you know what the premise was. Someone hurled a planet at our planet. In the Fantomex MAX series they hurl a planet at Earth. Really. It is completely unrelated in any way and will never be mentioned by the Avengers. They still haven't revealed who threw a planet at earth but after reading last weeks comics I'm getting a feeling it had something to do with Loki. However I think it would have been just fine for it to have been the planet in Fantomex. It is just weird and unfortunate that the stories would work out like that without them being tied together. I was going to make a comment about bringing Fantomex to more of the spotlight but apparently he was on X-Force for years and I didn't know it.

Another cool part for me happened in book three. There is a scene where the guy with the mind powers is inside Fantomex's super sentinel mind. He plays scenes from Fantomex's childhood in The World I guess. The lines were in untranslated French and German. The French I could mostly make out with only being wrong a little bit but the German I had no idea. Thankfully I am a child of technology and whipped out my phone so that I could use Google Goggles to read the text for me and translate it into English. This process worked out better than I even expected. I had used Goggles to look up Magic: The Gathering cards before but this was a whole new level of usefulness.

So yeah. I'm glad to know where Fantomex is coming from now when I play his piece. Thank you guys and girls for reading. I'm honored to share some time with your eyeballs. Remember, no paper cuts.

P.S. There was no Heroclix event this week. Hence no post about it.