Books like Siege

I originally read this when I was in high school, though I never finished the trilogy of books. I re-read this now with the intent of going back and finishing it out. I read a bunch of these kinds of novels during my transitory timeframe from comic-reader to actual book reader. Revisiting it is a disappointing experience, with not enough meat on the bones.As a kid, I read Marvel comics pretty avidly, and also greatly enjoyed the X-Men cartoon from the early to mid-nineties. Though my memories of the details of the comic universe are beginning to dim, I was still very much familiar with most of the characters in the book. You'd pretty much need to be in order to keep up with the plot and action. However, Golden still has to at least offer a cursory telling of the back story of many of the characters, meaning readers will need to wade through a lot of prose explaining, for example, how Angel became Archangel, etc.You sense that Golden must not have really had the freedom to tell any story that differs substantially from Marvel canon. There's never any sense that characters we know are in any real danger. The book is split into two plots, one featuring a confrontation with Magneto at a federal facility in Colorado housing the Sentinel program. This is the better of the two halves of the book by far. It can at least draw on some of the traditional X-Men themes of minority persecution and the knotty politics of mutants. Magneto is of course one of the most compelling enemies of the X-Men. Though the book is occasionally preachy and the depiction of political decision-making is, uh, elementary, it still plays to the strength of this kind of storytelling.The other plot, occurring off-planet and featuring Kree and Shi'ar alien races, is a bust. These sections of the book are frankly boring and completely without suspense. The book also lacked the ability to create the kinds of internal lives for these characters I had hoped to see. The strength of the comic format is that we can easily see the powers of these characters demonstrated in ways that are much harder to cogently describe in print. The advantage of print, I would think, it the space to create more full and meaningful inner lives of the characters. Though Golden does some of that work, it isn't enough to justify the existence of this kind of novel outside of the usual comic format. The prose consists of pretty straightforward descriptions. It's readable but not pretty. It feels like the book was pushed through to meet a deadline. There's not much room for any of the writing to breathe. It serves the plot.In many ways, comics are now a much larger part of the popular culture than when I was an awkward young person reading them. My guess is that it will continue to be difficult, however, for books like this to be successful. Super-hero comics are well suited for graphic formats.