Reviewer: Jesse Baker
Story Title: Back From the Dead Part 6: The Disc
Written by: Peter Milligan
Penciled by: Mike Allred
Inked by: J. Boone
Colored by: Laura Allred
Lettered by: Corey Petit
Editor: Axel Alonso
Publisher: Marvel Comics
“Back From the Dead” comes to a shocking end in an issue that parodies the famous Japanese horror film “The Ring”. The book also features the deaths of two main members of the X-Statix team, sadly neither one of them being The Orphan (who needs to die a horribly violent death and soon).
The plot opens with the first casualty, as Phat sacrifices himself to protect the rest of the team from the now exploding Mr. Code. As they take stock of their latest casualty, The Orphan refuses to answer his teammate’s questions about whether or not he recognized Mr. Code when he unmasked the villain. Given that the last time Orphan learned something massively important (that deceased X-Statix member Zeitgeist and the team’s now deceased owner were planning on killing U-Go Girl and the rest of the team) that nothing came of it, I seriously doubt we will ever learn Mr. Code’s secret identity.
We cut back to the record company where Hennrietta Hunter records, as they announce their plans for a new CD featuring outtakes and interview clips that are spliced together to create a new album. The album though has one small hitch to it, as anyone who sings the first single “Back From the Dead” outloud dies a horribly violent death ala the victims in the film “The Ring”. This segues us into a series of scenes where people sing the cursed song out loud and die within seconds.
The members of X-Statix confront the record company executives about the deaths but arrive just as the head record company executive (the one who arranged for the creation of the new cd) mockingly sings “Back From the Dead” to prove to his fellow record executives that there is no curse. As the team questions the executives, the head guy falls over and dies right in front of them. Furthermore, El Guapo (who was crippled several issues back) then starts singing the song and gets killed, as the team attempts to find ways to appease the dead pop star’s vengeful wrath. Running out of options, they have Living Dead Girl sing the cursed song and bring the dead Hennrietta (who now looks exactly like “The Ring” villain Sadako) out to kill her. And since you can’t kill Living Dead Girl, she’s able to survive the curse and talks Hennrietta into revealing how they can lift the curse. Can The X-Statix’s capture the man who originally murdered the dead pop star-turned-hero? And will it end her evil curse?
Despite being uneven and going into a completely left-field direction in it’s final issue, “Back From The Dead” has been a great story arc and it’s ending is a very creative. use of the film “The Ring” was a totally out of left field way to resolve this arc and surprisingly it works rather well. As for the deaths, El Guapo was a total throw-away character and Phat was yet another character that never got the spotlight to shine thanks to Milligan and Allred’s masturbatory fetish for Guy Smith (who needs to die god-dammit in order to prove once and for all that no one is safe in the book, since U-Go Girl’s death was more of the case of Milligan and Allred killing off the book’s main lead simply because they wanted their Mary-Sue character “Mr. Sensitive” to be the centerpiece of the book instead of the fan favorite character).
