In 1985, Ann Nocenti and Art Adams brought Longshot into the Marvel Universe. A young man with a power that makes things work in his favor, hunted by strange monster-men. Longshot doesn't know anything about Earth. Doesn't know where he came from, how he got these powers, why he's being hunted.
Longshot lacking any idea who he is or what he's supposed to be doing allows Nocenti to have him drift into a variety of situations. He falls into a job as a stuntman for a reckless director, alongside a stuntwoman called Ricochet Rita. When that nearly kills him, Longshot tries to help a man frustrated with his life by stealing a lot of diamonds. Except actually having the wealth doesn't make the man happy, so he goes back to his family.
He runs afoul of both She-Hulk and Spider-Man, meets the kids that Nocenti used in her Daredevil run, has a mysterious "friend" he met early on, a talking, furry creature that keeps growing larger and more monstrous, turn against him. He meets someone with a power the opposite of his, creating bad luck for its wielder rather than good.
Then Mojo and Spiral show up.
Two things Nocenti introduces, that it feels like most writers subsequently ignored or forgot, is that one, his power only works when his motives are "pure". Trying to jiggle the odds to make himself some bank, or just to show off a little, won't work. The other is, if Longshot's getting unnaturally, unfeasibly lucky, isn't someone else getting equally unlucky? This, more than lack of knowledge of his past, or really even Mojo, is Longshot's challenge. How can he be sure that when he acts, it's for the "right" reasons? Is he fighting Fang to protect others, or because he's mad his friend turned on him? And if his luck being good, so that he's someplace else when Mojo arrives, ends with Rita being tortured and driven nearly comatose, then does he can have business using his power at all?
Mojo's later appearances typically present him as some parody of a TV or movie producer. Chasing whatever cheap concepts will provide quick ratings, as that conveys power in his world. Hence things like "X-babies." Nocenti's original version of Mojo is just as egotistical, and suffers from just as much if not more of an attention span deficit, but he's more delusional, and always cruel, whether unwittingly or not.
Mojo may order everyone to wear masks of his face, then panic two pages later that everyone is stealing his face. He claims the sun, then assumes Longshot is trying to steal it when he arrives on a hang-glider. His very presence brings death, draining the life away from anything around him, making him poison from the moment he arrives on Earth. Adams draws a lot of panels that are close-ups of Mojo's face and head, letting him dominate the field of view, while also showing the wild swings in emotion.
In contrast, Spiral, who hates Longshot and regards Mojo with equal parts contempt and dependence, is usually kept at a distance. Even when she's in the foreground on panels, her face and expressions are usually obscured. The focus is on her actions, the "dance" that allows them to bridge dimensions, or the flashing of her swords as she tries to kill Longshot for reasons he doesn't understand. On a rare occasion we do get a close-up of her face, Scheele colors the entire eye yellow, with just shading to define the retina and pupil, the same as Mojo and Quark, the modified ram with bad luck ability. Longshot's the exception, marking his origin as something separate and outside Mojo's control.
The mini-series ends with Longshot determined to fight Mojo in their home dimension and free all the slaves there. A battle he's seemingly repeated through endless cycles of success, failure, mind-wiping repeat for the last 40 years. Except Claremont almost immediately hauled Spiral and Longshot both into the main X-Books, with Longshot seemingly still none the wiser for what Spiral's beef was with him. Also, any progress he'd made in his naivete over the course of this mini-series seemed undone. Those mind wipes come fast I guess.
Fabian Nicieza's the one who decided Spiral was actually Rita from some point the future, captured and modified by Mojo, then sent back in time to serve his earlier self. Meaning her hatred towards Longshot is that he didn't save her. Doesn't really jibe with Longshot having no sense of his connection to Spiral here, even once he regains his memories, not to mention that seems like too much of a long-term plan for Mojo to undertake. He'd be too jealous of his past self benefiting from all his hard work.
3 comments:
When I was getting back into comics around 1998ish, I remember there being a lot of buzz about how cool Longshot was, so I tracked it down and read it and... didn't get it.
It was fine, nothing wrong with it, but I didn't see why the fans of 1998ish were so fond of it. Nostalgia, I suppose.
Was Art Adams a big thing at that moment for some reason? I feel like this mini-series if fairly early in his career in comics, so maybe that's it.
I think he was over at Dark Horse doing Monkeyman and O'Brien at the time, and I doubt that was creating a lot of buzz, but who knows?
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