How hard is it to tell a story without words?

That was the challenge posed to various writers and artists in Marvel Comics' working stable -- not only to craft an entirely wordless issue, but to fit it into the continuity of the various ongoing series. Several of the resulting stories are collected in 'Nuff Said, with varying degrees of success.

The first entry is from The Amazing Spider-Man, and it shares a day in the separate lives of Peter, Mary Jane and Aunt May. It's a moving story, and my favorite in the book, as it examines two people who care and worry about a man who puts his life in danger on a regular basis, and a hero who is parted from the people he loves. Still, I think writer J. Michael Straczynski, working with artist John Romita Jr., cheated just a bit by using newspaper headlines and computer screen text to further the story with forbidden words. Fie!

The second entry takes a lighter route. In Peter Parker: Spider-Man, writer Paul Jenkins and artists Mark Buckingham give us a comical episode involving Spider-Man, a runaway dog, a laundry line of women's underwear, sentient cheese and a mob of angry mimes. It's a hoot!

In The New X-Men written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quitely, two mutant telepaths -- Phoenix and the White Queen -- silently enter Professor X's unconscious mind to bring him out of a coma. While the Queen gets her clothes burned off by a pair of leering doors, Phoenix confronts the professor's big head in a mental watchtower and, somewhat disturbingly, ends up swimming with his father's sperm as the professor is conceived and gestates in his mother's womb. A ha! His mentally aware twin fetus tries to kill him, awakening his own mutant powers before he is born. How this knowledge helps, I don't know, but it all leads back to the X-mansion where Phoenix speaks two brief sentences -- jarring after so many wordless pages.

The X-Force entry in the collection is decidely the weirdest -- and not just because I'm completely unfamiliar with the characters involved. A lumpish green alien pops a hole in his head (only the script that follows allowed me to know it was a big ol' zit) that sucks all of his teammates into his mental landscape. He follows to rescue them, often by swallowing them. OK, I can't say this particular tale by writer Peter Milligan and artist Mike Allred did much for me except induce a slight queasiness.

Incredible Hulk features a fairly vague story by writer Bruce Jones and artist John Romita Jr. Bruce Banner is eating in a diner when three men in black arrive. He flees into a neighboring field, is caught and drugged, is tossed in a car, has a strange vision and wakes up as the Hulk. Hulk smashes, and Banner returns to the diner wearing one of the men's suits. All the while, an autistic girl looks on. Eh.

The sequence in Thor, written by Dan Jurgens and drawn by Stuart Immonen, shows a series of memories shared by Thor, Loki, Balder and Sif as they prepare for Odin's funeral pyre. The book ends with an issue of Punisher, written and drawn by Steve Dillon, which has gunfire and chase scenes as the protagonist pursues a gang boss. Neither of these books is all that special.

For an extra touch, several of the stories are accompanied by the writers' original scripts

Sadly, this collected edition fails to include one of my favorite 'Nuff Said specials, featuring Elektra and a younger would-be assassin. Bummer!

Granted, a few writers take liberties with the rules, Aunt May writes e-mail, Phoenix speaks, Banner sends and receives text messages, the Punisher displays newspaper headlines and handwritten notes. But, by and large, the creative teams stuck to the assignment, which had to be tough -- and they succeeded admirably overall. 'Nuff Said was a fun experiment if for no other reason than to see if it could be done; Marvel met the challenge.

by Tom Knapp
Rambles.NET
30 December 2006