For this post, I thought I'd take a step back from lauding things that I love and talk about something that I don't love except in one very specific circumstance: Sugar Man.
Sugar Man is...weird. He's hard to explain. But he's a perfect illustration of why context matters in comics and a cautionary tale about what happens when you try to make all-encompassing fictional universes REALLY all-encompassing.
Let's start from when I first met Sugar Man. Sugar Man was a boss villain in the mostly very fun game X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse. This game, for those who aren't familiar with it, mostly ruled. You could put together a four-person RPG team from a huge roster of X-Men characters. However, if you were a relative X-Men novice, which I was at the time, you might be fairly baffled by the boss villains: mostly 90s characters from various Age of Apocalypse storylines, none of whom were as cool as Magneto or Juggernaut. (That said, the game made up for it by letting you play as Magneto and Juggernaut).
All this to say is, when Sugar Man first shows up in Rise of Apocalypse, if you are not familiar with the era in which he was introduced, he seems like the dumbest character ever created. He's a big head with four arms and a weird New Yahwk accent and a long tongue that's kind of a spear (?). There's almost something charming about the brilliantly designed creme de la creme of X-Men designs -- characters like Rogue, Magneto, Wolverine, and Storm -- going up against a character who looks like something I scribbled during quiet time when I was six. Charming, but also deeply silly in a way that even an X-Men fan has trouble taking seriously, and X-Men fans take Professor X's bird-like alien girlfriend seriously.
Enjoying the X-Men requires a holistic approach. You generally can't look at the characters and storylines and weird space elements in a vacuum. You have to consider the context of an issue of X-Men from a number of different angles: when the comic was written, what else was going on in comics at the time, the history of the characters, who is writing it, and--especially in the case of Sugar Man--who is drawing it (more on that further down). For example, considered in a vacuum, Gambit is a stupid character. He's a thief who wears a long coat and talks with a ridiculous accent and throws exploding cards. However, if you are reading X-Men at the time he's introduced, there's a bit more context that makes things that seem stupid in a vacuum make a bit more sense in context: 1) He's drawn by Jim Lee, who makes that stupid coat look really cool, 2) He's written by Chris Claremont (who hated the costume), and we're just used to Chris writing characters with exaggerated accents, 3) He's introduced not as a superhero, but as a thief who helps out a young version of Storm, 4) The playing cards come up later; he threw coins at first, but if I had to guess I would say it was easier to draw him throwing a card and it was easier to make a toy of him throwing a card. I'm not going to re-litigate Gambit. He is a dumb character on his face. But, like Sugar Man, you can't just take him at face value; you have to go back to the original context to consider him as a whole.
And getting back to Sugar Man, Sugar Man in context absolutely works.
Sugar Man is introduced in a story called Generation Next, which (deep breath) is a side story in the Age of Apocalypse alternate timeline, a timeline in which Xavier was assassinated before he could form the X-Men and Apocalypse took over the world. Sugar Man is a mysterious monster who runs the "Seattle Core," a slave camp for humans that also happens to hold Colossus' little sister, Illyanna. The story is told in a way that makes Sugar Man less of a supervillain and more of a boogeyman, a terrifying demon who the prisoners see mostly in shadows. Early on, we mostly see him through the perspective of Illyanna, a little kid. And to a little kid, Sugar Man is the scariest thing you've ever seen.
Generation Next, which the wonderful Battle of the Atom podcast ranks as the 9th best X-Men story of all time as of this writing, is a dark, dark story. It's less of a superhero story and more of a dystopian sci-fi thriller with tinges of horror. Sugar Man isn't supposed to draw comparisons to Magneto or Juggernaut, which is what happens when you encounter him in a modern day comic. He's supposed to draw comparisons to Freddy Krueger.
He is drawn by Chris Bachalo, a particularly brilliant 90s artist with a very exaggerated, cartoony style, almost a punk rock style, something closer to what you would see in 2000 AD than what we're used to seeing from mainstream US-based comics.
Sugar Man, in context, is fantastic. He's a nightmare inspired by a pop-punk album cover. He's a confusing mass of limbs, muscles, and shadows who makes no sense but who is scary because he makes no sense. He's your schoolyard bully and your best friend's angry father mashed together by a drug trip.
I can't recommend Generation Next enough. It's fairly standalone as long as you know the basic gist of the Age of Apocalypse.(Alternate timeline, bad stuff happened. You're all caught up.) It has all the elements of a great X-Men story: a team of young mutants working together, parallels to real-world problems, crazy stylish character designs, and Kitty Pryde. It also has a real ending, even though the events end up tying in to the larger Age of Apocalypse storyline.
This should have been all we ever saw of Sugar Man, but alas, the Marvel universe needs to find ways to bring back literally every single character, event, and throwaway moment and turn it into something. It's what makes the Marvel universe wonderful, and it's also what makes it really, really hard to justify loving at times. And so, Sugar Man weirdly escapes the Age of Apocalypse universe and makes it into the standard 616 Marvel universe, and, well, if he's not a mysterious demon who runs a human slave camp, and if he isn't drawn by Chris Bachalo and he's not in a dystopian universe run by evil mutants...
It turns out he's just a guy who looks like this:
It's kind of like saying, "Okay, Spider-Man's a great character, but what if we opened up a time warp and put him in the Melrose Place universe? Fans of Melrose Place will love it!"
All that being said, please, please read Generation Next. And then never read anything with Sugar Man in it ever again.
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