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Finally, the miniseries, along
with one ongoing title - X-Men Unlimited - that got
axed at the start of the year. Deep breath...
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 CIVIL
WAR X-MEN was David Hine's second miniseries of the
year. Notionally, it's the X-Men's contribution to
the enormous Civil War crossover, but in fact
it's got virtually nothing to do with that book.
It's really a sequel to Hine's earlier book X-Men:
The 198. Surprisingly, there are some
important plot developments buried in this book, which
affects the status of the 198, Bishop and the X-Men's
relationship with the Sentinels outside the Mansion.
Really, I don't approve of major plot developments
taking place outside the regular titles, but that seems
to be the way things are going. The series itself
is okay but not great; it struggles to accommodate the
Civil War theme, and would have been better off not
bothering.
Reviews: #1 |
#2 |
#3 |
#4
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 CLAWS
is a dreadful three-part miniseries under the Marvel
Knights imprint, starring Wolverine and the Black Cat.
The wafer-thin plot barely merits a single issue, let
alone three, and the best that can be said for it is
that Joe Linsner's art is often quite cute. But as
a story, it's superfluous nonsense, and really should
never have made it past the pitch stage.
Reviews: #1 |
#2 |
#3 |
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 CYBERFORCE/X-MEN
came out last week. It's the latest product of a
working relationship between Marvel and Marc Silvestri's
Top Cow studios, which has resulted in Top Cow artists
turning up on Marvel titles in exchange for Silvestri
doing some cash-in books like this. The book
itself is diabolical - two X-Men and two members of
Cyberforce randomly fight some Sentinels and then go
home. Ron Marz wrote this drivel, and let me tell
you, either they called Marz up at two in the morning
and demanded that he dictate a plot off the top of his
head, or it's hackwork of the worst order. The
worst X-book of the year by a landslide. |
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 DARKNESS/WOLVERINE
is another product of the same working relationship.
It's not fantastic, but it's a far superior effort,
since at least Frank Tieri has made some effort to tell
a story. At the end of the day, it's still just a
plot device for an arbitrary team-up, admittedly, and
the book is of little interest unless you're a hardcore
fan of either character. But at least there's a
story of sorts here, and a sincere attempt to do
something more than just bang out twenty pages of
filler.
Reviews:
Darkness/Wolverine |
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 GENERATION
M, Paul Jenkins' miniseries about the aftermath of
Decimation, was already in progress at the start of the
year. It's a strange book, and not altogether
satisfying. Basically a series of vignettes in
which journalist Sally Floyd goes around meeting
ex-mutants and writing about their predicament, the book
features a tacked-on plot about a serial killer.
There's also a horribly schmaltzy finale in which Sally
writes an article about the loss of her baby, and
everyone spends pages congratulating her for being so
terribly, terribly brave, just in case we hadn't grasped
that it was supposed to be moving. A disappointing
book that feels like it could and should have been much
better, but ends up merely leaden.
Reviews: #3 |
#4 |
#5 |
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 GIANT-SIZE
WOLVERINE was a Hallowe'en one-shot in which David
Lapham and David Aja told a Hallowe'en story, and then
Marvel bizarrely rounded out the package with some
reprinted X-Men stories from 1991 that couldn't be more
different in tone if they tried. The lead story is
a perfectly decent moody horror story which could have
been done with a number of characters and isn't
especially concerned with Wolverine. The overall
package, however, means buying some old stories that
weren't all that great, and it's not very good value.
Reviews: #1 |
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 I
HEART MARVEL: MY MUTANT HEART was the X-books'
contribution to Marvel's Valentine comics back in
February. It's an anthology book with a very good
Doop story featuring Peter Milligan on all cylinders; an
okay Cannonball/Lila story for those who still remember
that largely forgotten relationship; and an utterly
dreary and pretentious Wolverine story by, you guessed
it, Daniel Way. Overall, it's average.
Reviews: #1 |
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 MYTHOS:
X-MEN was the first in a projected series by Paul
Jenkins which seems to have drifted off the radar.
The big idea was to retell the origins of various Marvel
characters in a way that sort of accommodated the comics
and the movies, and which could be sold to the general
public as, I suppose, some sort of branding exercise.
The X-Men were a bad place to start since issue #1
doesn't actually work very well as a starting point for
the series - hardly surprising, because at that stage,
Lee and Kirby hadn't properly worked out in their own
minds what the series was about or even who the
characters were. Jenkins trudges through it
dutifully but would have been better served just doing
something different altogether, as Joe Casey did with
Children of the Atom a few years ago.
Reviews: #1 |
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 SENTINEL's
comeback miniseries finished in the opening months of
2006, since when we've heard nothing more about it.
With hindsight, this mini was not a success. It
dragged the lead character away from the surroundings
that made him interesting, and it didn't play to the
book's strengths. When the Sentinel ongoing
series was cancelled, you heard people saying that they
wanted a sequel. This time, the book has just
politely faded from view. A shame, but at least
the story was allowed to reach some sort of ending
instead of just ending on a cliffhanger.
Reviews:
#4 |
#5 |
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 SENTINEL
SQUAD O*N*E are perhaps the X-office's biggest
failure of 2006. Introduced with tremendous
fanfare, the Sentinel Squad quickly came to look like an
editorial edict that no writer particularly wanted to
deal with. Chris Claremont had a good faith stab
at doing something with O*N*E, but everyone else just
ignored the Sentinels altogether and threw in scenes
where the X-Men easily evaded them while on the way to
more interesting events elsewhere. Since the
Sentinels' only function was to stop people getting in
and out of the Xavier Institute, and they were
repeatedly shown to be totally incapable of doing that,
they ended up looking like a giant robot version of the
Keystone Kops. It looks like a classic example of
editors foisting a concept on writers, and then failing
to make sure it was properly followed through, resulting
in the worst of all worlds - not only is the concept
inflicted onto other people's stories, but it fails
anyway. In this miniseries, John Layman and Aaron
Lopresti attempted to interest us in the group's origin
story, but the results are merely average, and the
characters were dead in the water by this time.
Reviews: #1 |
#2 |
#3 |
#4 |
#5 |
back |
continue |
