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Nearly there...
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 SENTINEL
scraped into 2004 with two issues before getting
cancelled. It's got an open ending, presumably in
the hope of strong sales in the digest market, but to all
intents and purposes the book appears to be dead. A
shame, because Sentinel was a charming and likeable
comic; but Marvel can't seem to reach that audience right
now.
Reviews: Sentinel
#11 |
#12 |
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 ULTIMATE
NIGHTMARE, the X-Men/Ultimates team-up miniseries,
should have been finished by now. It isn't, which
has caused Ultimate Secret to be delayed as well.
Nightmare has been a disappointing book - far too
slow even before the delays set in, and based around a
single idea which isn't anywhere near compelling enough to
sustain the book. Given the quality creative team,
it's far below the levels it should have achieved.
Reviews: Ultimate Nightmare
#1 |
#2 |
#3 |
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 Bet
you'd forgotten about WITCHBLADE/ WOLVERINE.
Well, you're not missing much - it was utter dross.
It's an incoherent mess, which starts from a strong first
page and then disappears into utter confusion.
Surprisingly bad, considering that it's by Chris Claremont
(who's normally much better than this when it comes to
one-shot stories).
Reviews:
Witchblade/Wolverine |
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 Of
course, that's not the only Wolverine spin-off for the
year. WOLVERINE/ CAPTAIN AMERICA shipped
every week in February and... well, it's utterly generic
superheroics. The best that can be said for it is
that when it came out, Marvel hadn't done something quite
so ordinary for a while. Bad only by virtue of being
so uninspired, but that's enough to be getting along with,
surely.
Reviews: Wolverine / Captain America
#1 |
#2 |
#3 |
#4 |
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 Peter
Milligan's WOLVERINE/ PUNISHER series was an oddity
- it seemed uncertain whether it wanted to go flying off
into dementia, or remain relatively grounded. The
result was a book of very inconsistent tone, which leaned
closer to weirdness and was better when it did, but never
really came together. It's precisely this sort of
thing that makes me worry about putting Milligan on
X-Men - on balance, I rather liked it, but I can't
deny that it's horribly flawed.
Reviews: Wolverine/Punisher #1 |
#2 |
#3 |
#4 |
#5 |
| |
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 WOLVERINE:
THE END is, remarkably, still going. It should
have been finished ages ago, but this six-issue miniseries
is now on target to be spread across three calendar years.
It's dreadful, of course - completely scattered and
confused, and failing to communicate any kind of point.
But worst of all, it's boring. Just one issue to go,
thank god.
Reviews: Wolverine: The End
#2 |
#3 |
#4 |
#5 |
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 X4 -
or, if you prefer the full title, X-Men/ Fantastic Four
- only launched in December. It's presumably a
device to get the two film star teams into the same trade
paperback. Issue #1 was dire, and I have zero
expectations for the rest of the mini. So I guess I
can only be pleasantly surprised. Worryingly, writer
Akira Yoshida is scheduled to write the whole Age of
Apocalypse miniseries, along with a Wolverine mini in
2005. If this junk is anything to go by, I'm not
looking forward to either.
Reviews: X4 #1 |
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 X-FORCE
returned with Rob Liefeld in place for a six-issue
miniseries. To be immediately followed by a
four-issue Shatterstar mini, but let's hope that that's
it. This fiasco has all of the worst qualities of
Liefeld's work and little or none of the energy that used
to salvage him. The story, such as it is, is all
over the place, and Liefeld's shameless reuse of old
rejected art is absurd. Scripter Fabian Nicieza has
done his best to wrestle the story into some degree of
sense. I am morbidly curious to see how his much
less experienced replacement fares with a Liefeld plot on
the Shatterstar mini. Nothing more than a cash grab,
this should never have seen the light of day.
Reviews: X-Force #1 | #2 | #3 |
#4 | #5 |
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|
 Appropriately,
we finish up with X-MEN: THE END - the first book
of a projected trilogy which will wind up running to
eighteen issues. The supposed plan is for every
X-character to appear in it somewhere along the line, and
result has been an utterly confused and garbled mess.
Only an utterly devoted, hardcore X-Men fan could possibly
understand this series; most of them will be so frustrated
by the effort that they won't enjoy it. This book
desperately needed a good editor to take a chainsaw to it,
and pare it down to a strong core idea. Instead we
have a monumental folly of no interest to anyone but the
most devoted of Claremont fans.
Reviews: X-Men: The End, Book 1 #1 |
#2 | #3
| #4 | #5
| #6 |
And that's that, for a somewhat underwhelming year in the
X-books. For those of you keeping track at home, once
you filter out the books which have already been cancelled,
we're going into 2005 with a line-up consisting of
Astonishing X-Men, Ultimate X-Men, Uncanny X-Men,
X-Men, X-Men Unlimited, New X-Men,
Cable & Deadpool, District X, Excalibur,
Exiles, Gambit, Nightcrawler, Rogue,
and Wolverine. That's fourteen books. We
could stand to lose a good few more, and if the sales figures
on some of the new titles are anything to go by, we probably
will.
If Marvel have any sense, they won't replace them, and they'll
allow the line to drop back to a more sensible size by natural
wastage. But sense seems to be at a premium these days.
And on that note, let's move on. Next week, Exiles
#57 rounds off the Kulan Gath arc. Gambit #5
continues the tarot deck storyline. Ultimate
Nightmare #4 finally turns up, almost two months late.
And the What If? one-shots hit the shelves including a
Professor X/Magneto story.
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