Your
shadow at morning striding behind you
Or
your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I
will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Was it Joe Casey’s fault that his Uncanny X-Men run unfurled the way it did? Paired from the onset with Ian Churchill, it never felt like a smooth pairing, one of two creatives meshing, which is a bit of a prerequisite for a comicbook to be successful on nearly any level. Unless one of the two primary members of the creative team is doing such stellar work as to compensate for the other, it’s almost impossible for a comic to really hit if there isn’t some level of harmony. While Casey would admit to his own failings when discussing Uncanny X-Men #394, I don’t think the mismatch with Churchill was as apparent in their first issue.
What’s readily apparent in Uncanny X-Men #394 is that Churchill’s strength is single images. He’s not a bad panel to panel storyteller, it’s that he really shines when he can try to hit a single, impactful visual that’s meant to arrest your attention. Flipping through the issue, almost every page has one or two panels that, taken on their own, at wonderful compositions. Usually, these images are built around a single focus. Churchill isn’t a George Perez kind of artist where you want to pack panels with tons of characters and objects. His more unsuccessful panels are where the focus is divided or there’s too much going on. The first page is practically perfect in the way each of the four panels have a single focus that he can make pop and draw your eye towards.
I think this is what Casey meant when he said that the inside of Warp Savant’s head wasn’t suited to Churchill’s skills and that he should have done a better job tailoring the script to his artist’s abilities. As written/requested, it seems like Casey wanted a chaotic realm full of random objects and subconscious tidbits, filling up every bit of every panel with details; except, Churchill’s best compositions are the ones where the background is minimal or absent. He’s so good at giving a character or two posed just right. From the cover to Cyclops’s turning to talk to Jean to Warp Savant charging into Cape Citadel or warping the general... It’s not about big panels or splashes necessarily, but really tight foci for Churchill to home in on and present in the best possible way.
For all its flaws, I think Casey gives Churchill a lot of opportunities to do that in this issue. As I said, nearly every page has a panel or two that absolutely sings. A big part of Churchill’s problem is that he appears to put too much emphasis into adding movement over the course of scenes, often by changing angles. That limits the effectiveness of panel to panel transitions, and winds up creating some awkward compositions. The page where Warp Savant does his little rant before Wolverine descends from on high is a great example with the middle panel opting for this odd angle from beneath the character before jumping to Wolverine’s perspective from above over the final two panels – both of which are quite good, particularly the transition from distant-above to closer-above perspectives. Another fantastic sequence of panels is on the second page, while in a club, Warp Savant looks at a bottle of alcohol in one panel, warps it in the next, and then keeps looking at us/the girls with an empty hand raised – all done from the same perspective with the same sized panels, it’s great, basic visual storytelling over successive images.
This issue provides a good indication of how to tailor scripts to Churchill’s strengths with a brisker-paced issue, lots of opportunities for single/dual character panels, and really simplifying the visuals requested. I don’t think Casey had enough lead time to really see that and alter his approach, nor did Churchill last on the book long enough.
