Marvel has belatedly seized on the "fifth week event" idea that DC used to be so keen on.  DC appear to have given up on it now - you could tell they'd run out of ideas when nonsense like Girlfrenzy appeared.  (Unifying theme: 50% of the planet.)  But Marvel haven't really gone in for it until now.  So at the end of the year we're getting a week of What If? books.  And this week, we have the bizarre Marvel Knights 2099.

It's difficult to disentangle what the point is meant to be.  The official line is that these books, and the other Marvel Knights titles which began in September, are celebrating the 5th anniversary of the Marvel Knights imprint.  And that's a baffling claim right there, because it isn't the fifth anniversary at all.  It's the sixth.

So, how do you celebrate a non-existent anniversary of an imprint which was meant to provide for more edgy and mature superhero comics?  Why, simple!  Take one writer who has no previous involvement with the imprint.  For added irrationality, make sure it's Robert Kirkman, who might best be describes as a new traditionalist - someone who's at his best breathing life into the old genre standards.  A good writer, but one whose strengths and style have little or nothing to do with Marvel Knights.

Get him to produce five one-shots set in 2099.  Use the Insert Name Here 2099 device from the ill-fated 2099 imprint.  For maximum confusion, while alluding heavily to the 2099 name, don't actually produce anything remotely connected to it.  Instead, take the names of some characters who are associated with the Marvel Knights imprint - Punisher, Daredevil, Inhumans - and do new 2099 versions of them.  But don't play off the Marvel Knights versions in preference to any other.

And then, finally, remember that you haven't included an X-book, and shove in Mutant 2099 to make up the default.

The basic set-up is that the remaining superheroes have been driven underground after the Sentinels have effectively imposed a utopia.  Thus far it's working, but since they're Sentinels, they're bound to go wrong in the end.  (And they certainly seem remarkably ineffective at actually fighting evil, which still seems to be the province of the remaining superheroes.  Makes you wonder how they managed to impose their will in the first place.)

So far, not a hopeless idea.  But then you throw in a lead character who seems to have been jury-rigged together from a bundle of stock plot devices and a roll of sellotape.  The hero uncertain of whether he'd rather have a normal life.  The older hero mentor.  The falling grades because he's busy fighting evil.  The remarkably patient girlfriend who keeps getting stood up.  There's nothing new here - Kirkman has just come up with a new backdrop and stuck the same old devices in front of it.

Remarkably bland and instantly forgettable.

Rating: C

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