Well, How Did I Get Here?

It’s been a long and winding road for Gigi Gutierrez. She has gone from Los Angeles to London, Las Vegas, Reykjavik and back. Now she’s headed for China!

Whenever readers pick up a new issue of Pretty Vacant, they realize that Gigi is pushed further away from a normal, stable life. The momentum is ongoing and it doesn’t seem to end!

We stumble from one situation to the next in real life. It’s the same for Gigi, only magnified. She's competing in beach volleyball matches and reality shows on one end while she’s frozen and plastinated as a mannequin's body mold on the other.

There’s a literary term for it: serialized storytelling. Passed on from generation to another, it led to a new level of critical respectability when television used it in the 1950s, leading to it’s use being co-opted by Marvel Comics in the 1960s.

Yet comic book serialization did not see its golden era until Chris Claremont was offered the Marvel writing gig of The Uncanny X-Men in 1975. With great artists such as Dave Cockrum, John Byrne and Jim Lee, Claremont weaved an ongoing tale over the next 16 years, taking The X-Men from one barely-survivable fight to the next: overcoming being hypnotized puppets in a killer circus, defending a star empire in outer space or taking on their arch-nemesis Magneto under the Antarctic.

It’s strange that Claremont doesn’t seem to get the credit he deserves today. Revisionists Alan Moore and Frank Miller (both taking delight in deconstructing superheroes) have passed him in the pantheon of comic writers, yet Claremont’s influence is undeniable. Where this year’s Iron Man 3 and Man Of Steel movies were original stories for the screen, the upcoming 2014 film X-Men: Days Of Future Past is a direct homage to the classic 1981 Claremont storyline in X-Men 141 & 142.

Cover for X-Men 141 (Jan 1981).  Art by the amazing John Byrne! 

Claremont’s stories dealing with religious and racial bigotry with the multicultural superhero team did resonate with a certain sixteen-year-old high school student in Southern California. However, the main reason why The Uncanny X-Men became the top selling comic book for 15 years was that Claremont’s stories were just plain fun!

In a nod to Miller and Moore, the mechanics of the plastination process is explained somewhat. Still, Gigi's adventures are not supposed to be scientific essays (yawn); they’re supposed to be fun! Judging by the look on Gigi’s face in page two (see above) of the upcoming Pretty Vacant: Made In China, she’s having fun kicking butt and taking names. And if she gets platinated along the way, getting her back to normal is just part of the fun!

The future is certain. Give Gigi time to work it out!

Kudos if you remember the lyric in the song that is used for the title of this post. Same as it ever was!