Here's a curious thing - there aren't nearly as many X-Men miniseries around as there used to be.  X-Men: First Class has turned into an ongoing title, Wisdom finishes this week, and X-23: Target X will ship its final issue in the next few days. 

And that leaves the X-books with no outstanding miniseries at all.  Well, unless you count Ultimate Wolverine vs Hulk, which has been on hiatus for ages, and is now a complete joke.  But that's a hangover from a previous age.  The only X-Men miniseries solicited for the next few months is World War Hulk: X-Men.

This is strange.  Marvel have been churning these things out for years, even though most of them don't sell especially well.  Have they finally figured out that the X-Men were long since overshadowed by the Avengers as their top heroes, and stopped trying to milk the franchise?  Or are they simply holding back for some reason?  Either way, it's all gone strangely quiet around here.

I like it.

Wisdom was a strange comic.  It's hard to imagine who Marvel saw as the potential audience, except perhaps for X-Men completists.  Writer Paul Cornell isn't especially well known to comics fans, and Pete Wisdom's monthly title, New Excalibur, was one of the lesser X-books to start with.  They had a high profile artist, Trevor Hairsine, but they got rid of him fairly early on - perhaps because of his invariable slowness.

The book did have one thing going for it, though.  It's rather good.  Cheerfully ignoring Wisdom's membership of Excalibur, the story involves him leading a ramshackle team of MI-13 agents in investigating assorted weirdness in the UK.  The running subtext was that Wisdom is too detached and cynical to care much about his national identity, but that his villains (and many of his followers) are all caught up, one way or another, with iconic British imagery.  On one level, it's a story about Wisdom coming to terms with a national identity that he regards as terribly trite and embarrassing.

Quite where Paul Cornell stands on this issue, it's hard to say.  Rather than spelling out a clear stance on how Britain should relate to its heritage, Cornell presents it as something that Wisdom can't escape, but otherwise leaves it ambiguous whether we're meant to regard that as a good thing.  It's simply a background feature to the whole series, in which Wisdom gets to run around and sarcastically destroy stuff.  The MI-13 team actually make for more entertaining reading than Excalibur do; it's a shame we're unlikely to see more of them, if the sales are anything to go by.

Perhaps the series would have benefitted from reaching a stronger conclusion; the actual ending doesn't link up with the main themes of the story in any readily apparent way.  And I'm frankly baffled at the decision to throw in a loose tie-in to, of all things, Killraven - Marvel's 1970s sequel to War of the Worlds where gladiators in chainmail jockstraps fought telepathic Martians.  I see why Cornell wanted to use the Martians, who are classic British sci-fi villains.  But Killraven feels like a dose of fanboy indulgence.

It's also a shame that the book had to change artists halfway through.  Manuel Garcia's pages aren't quite as polished as Trevor Hairsine's would have been.  But they're still more than up to the job of telling the story, and they have one unquestionable advantage over Hairsine's work - they exist.  If Hairsine was still drawing this book, we'd be lucky to have reached issue #4.

There's room for improvement here, then, but there's also an awful lot to like.  Wisdom is a book that's prepared to present the sheer absurdity of the Skrull Beatles, or the sight of our heroes beating the hell out of fairies, but which also added some intelligence.  It's a fun book that had interesting ideas as well, and hopefully we'll see a lot more along these lines from Paul Cornell

Rating: A-

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