In Marvel's weekly Q&A over at Newsarama, somebody asked why it was that the scheduling of the X-books, and the similar families, is so haphazard.  The official answer, given by David Gabriel, was to the effect that Marvel put hours of effort into planning the schedule for each month.

"Great consideration is put into shifting Spider-Man titles so they are not all in one week," he explained, "and the same goes for X-titles, Ultimate books, Marvel Adventure titles and now Ultimate books.  Keep in mind that this is all done 3-4 months prior to the on sale week.  Then life takes over, books shift around for one reason or another, even by a week or two within a month, and by the time the on sale date is up, the books have often shifted in the schedule beyond anyone's control."

Uh-huh.  Marvel solicited thirteen X-books for May, with six in one week, and none in another.  You're telling me that's because of last-minute rescheduling?  Before the solicitations came out?  To that extent?  I have some trouble with that explanation.

To be fair, June is a lot more balanced, so perhaps somebody's finally taking this in hand.  But the scheduling has been an utter mess for months now, and you can't blame it entirely on delays.

This, for example, is another very quiet week.  The only X-books are New Excalibur #18, and Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America - Wolverine, the first part of Jeph Loeb's five-part miniseries in which various characters react to the death of Captain America.

Jeph Loeb was one of DC's big name writers.  Understandably, his jump to Marvel was greeted with some fanfare.  I wasn't reading any of his DC work, but I do recall it getting a decent reaction.  His Marvel output, thus far, has been distinctly underwhelming.  Wolverine has not impressed.  Onslaught Reborn is outrageously horrible.

Fallen Son isn't great either, but to be fair to Loeb, the basic premise of this series is credited to J Michael Straczynski.  And the premise is a far bigger problem than anything to do with the execution.  The high concept is that each issue represents one of the so-called five stages of grief - so issue #1 is denial, issue #2 is anger, issue #3 is bargaining, issue #4 is depression and issue #5 is acceptance.  I've certainly heard worse ideas.

But the decision to base each story on a different character strikes me as a mistake.  For this structure to work, surely it needs to follow the psychological process.  In other words, there needs to be some sense of progression.  If you're going to have a different character representing each stage then you're not showing anyone's progression - you're just doing a gimmick based on some overfamiliar pop psychology.

In fact, it doesn't feel like a story at all.  The distinct impression given is that Marvel came up with this structure, thought it was incredibly clever, and only worried later on about the actual content.  To pull off something like this requires a writer with a sure touch for complex emotion.  I can just about imagine it working with Straczynski.  But Loeb is principally a writer of big, sweeping epics.  This sort of story isn't his strength.

The most fundamental problem, of course, is that nobody really believes that Captain America is dead.  Marvel can insist that he's dead until they're blue in the face, but nobody will believe them.  In 2012, if the Winter Soldier is firmly established as the new Captain America, and the Captain America movie has come and gone and Steve is still dead, then maybe people will start to say "Hey, he really isn't coming back."  I'm actually more open-minded about this than most.  I think there's, ooh, about a 5 to 10% chance of that happening.  I'd actually like to see that story.  But I certainly wouldn't put money on it.

In Captain America itself, this isn't a problem.  Even though we don't believe Cap is dead, his supporting cast do, and that's good enough for the story's purposes.  But when you start wheeling out characters like Wolverine, who have very little connection with Captain America, you're really just making a declaration that the death of Captain America is an event - an event so big that it deserves a five-issue tie-in miniseries to remind us of how big it is.

The more you present it as an event, the more it looks like a stunt, and the less it looks a story.  I don't believe Cap's dead and bluntly, I couldn't care less what Wolverine thinks about the subject.  And after reading the story, I still can't work out why I'm supposed to care what Wolverine thinks about it. 

If this story serves any purpose, it's to stick Wolverine in front of the corpse so that he can verify it as dead.    But he did that back in the mid-1990s when they killed of Nick Fury, in a similar spirit of "No, honestly, he's really dead - look, Wolverine's checked the body."  Having been fooled by a SHIELD substitute once before, you'd think Wolverine would be less easily persuaded this time round.  I don't blame Loeb for not mentioning that - even if he knows about it, there's no possible upside in undermining the story by drawing it to people's attention.  But really, you could publish an entire issue consisting entirely of trustworthy characters examining the body in detail and proclaiming it definitively dead, and still nobody would believe it.  That's just comics for you.

A story that asks us to believe, as a starting point, that Captain America is really dead and that it's a huge event deserving of commemoration, is a story that faces a huge uphill struggle.  That's essentially what Loeb confronts here, and while I can't really fault anything in particular about his approach to it, I'm not at all persuaded that it's an achievable task.  It's not a bad comic, just an unconvincing one - and it does have some beautiful artwork for Leinil Francis Yu to liven up the proceedings.  That's the main thing that raises the book out of the doldrums.  Sketchy as his art is, his layouts have a lot of power and grace to them.

Ultimately, though, it's a story about a character chosen for his star power rather than his relevance, reacting to an event that I simply don't believe in.  It doesn't work for me.

Rating: B-

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