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Six X-books this week, which I might
venture to suggest is excessive.
Then again, if you think this is bad, just
wait until October, when Marvel will be shipping ten X-books
in one week. (Before you ask: Cable/Deadpool #8,
Gambit #3, Madrox #2, New X-Men #6,
Official Handbook: Wolverine 2004, Rogue #4,
Sabretooth #2, Uncanny X-Men #451, Wolverine
#21 and Wolverine: The End #6.) When you start
seeing shipping lists like that, you have to wonder at what
point Marvel adopted an express policy of bludgeoning their
franchises into the ground.
Anyhow, first up this week is
Cable/Deadpool, which is now up to issue #5 and mercifully
free of Rob Liefeld covers. Mind you, the great one will
be back in a couple of weeks for X-Force #1, so don't
put the clubs down just yet.
This is an odd little issue. After
taking a fairly leisurely pace to get to this point in the
plot, the first half of the issue almost turns into a parody
of decompression, as Deadpool spends a large chunk of the book
slowly crawling across the floor in what seem suspiciously
like repeated panels. It's a ridiculously silly set-up,
but the gag works.
Then the plot goes into breakneck speed as
everyone decamps to Singapore for a second stab at launching
the all-important Facade virus. At this point, one of
Nicieza's recurrent writing flaws rears its head again - his
inexplicable love of overly complicated macguffins which seem
like the result of a bastard collaboration between Jack Kirby
and Heath Robinson. It sometimes seems like a Fabian
Nicieza character will never simply pop down to the shops to
buy some milk when he could use a subcutaneal nanoimplant to
send arcanopsychic signals to a hidden icon in a supermarket
fridge which will open a bacterial portal through which milk
will be telekinetically relocated in hard-light form to a
pocket holding dimension located in an occipital
interstitiality whence it may be drawn down with the use of an
experimental computer program held on three separate computer
discs located in Bangkok, St Petersberg and the Sea of
Tranquility.
The macguffin in this story is basically
straightforward. It's the Facade virus. It will
make everyone look alike. The One World Church think
this is a good thing because it'll an important step towards
world harmony. The problem is that it's also very
dangerous because it doesn't work properly. Nice and
simple. Basically, all you need to know up to this
point. Pseudoscientific nonsense, of course, but you can
get away with that as long as you don't ask readers to look
too closely at the mechanics.
This time round, however, the second Facade
Virus test requires readers to accept (and thus, on some
level, to comprehend) that the Church plans to convert the
virus into lightwaves (?!) which will, in some vaguely defined
manner, be distributed around the world by harnessing the
powers of Lightmaster. Quite how that's going to happen
is thoroughly unclear, and the idea of transforming a
shape-changing virus into an infectious lightwave is
borderline incomprehensible to start with. The "hold on,
is that REALLY meant to be the plot" factor somewhat
undermines the big reveal in the next panel that Cable had
worked it out all along.
And if Lightmaster is going to play a major
part in the plot, he should really have been established
properly before now - it's not like there hasn't been plenty
of space in which to do it. He's hardly the sort of
character you can expect readers to be familiar with.
He's a thoroughly obscure Spider-Man villain who hasn't
appeared in twelve years (and that was in a back-up strip in
Web of Spider-Man Annual #8).
There's an interesting story in here
somewhere. I like the idea of Cable trying to hijack the
scheme for his own social engineering purposes, rather than
just stopping it outright. Kruch is an interesting
villain, a cult leader who's manipulating his followers but
still has some core of belief in what he's doing. And
Zircher's Udon-style art works well for him. But the arc
could really use some streamlining.
Rating: B-
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