On to the miniseries.

X-23 has been selling surprisingly well, far outperforming its nominal parent title NYX.  Despite my scepticism about the character, it seems that there may well be a market out there for a Wolverine knock-off.  And to be fair, the character's been given a reasonable point of distinction from her "father."  Both have the "reluctant super-soldier" element in their origins, but X-23 is a damaged brainwash victim in a way that Wolverine never really was.

That provides something to work with in the present day, which makes X-23 more than just a duplicate Wolverine.  However, it doesn't take the writers of her miniseries very far.  Despite the title, the series has been built around X-23's mother Sarah Kinney as the de facto protagonist, simply because X-23 is nothing more than a brainwashed killer at this stage.  If characters are defined by their choices - and that's the conventional wisdom - then X-23 is an un-character.  She makes no choices.  The very point of the character is that she has no personality of her own.  We're not even really getting glimpses of anything beneath the facade.  The only thing she does on her own initiative is escape her captors and go home.  And that only serves to confirm her lack of personality.

On one level, it's an interestingly bold move to make the title character quite so blank.  On the other hand, it means that by this point, the book seems to have done the job in terms of setting up X-23's origin.  There's still the mechanical exercise of letting her escape to be dealt with, of course.  But so far as introducing X-23 is concerned, well, we've got the point now.

Which is why the book ends up being built around Sarah, who at least has a personality.  It's a redemption arc, of course, as Sarah's supposed to be atoning for getting involved with the whole dodgy project in the first place.  By this point in the story, the writers are hammering it a bit - Sarah takes X-23 out to help beat a paedophile, while Rice is becoming more of a moustache-twirling pantomime villain by the page.  For my money, the book was working better when the characters weren't so obviously polarised.

But it's not bad at all.  Artist Billy Tan does his best to give X-23 some charisma, even while keeping up her blankness.  Sarah is developing into a character we can properly root for, if only because she's not as bad as the rest of them, and somebody's got to look out for poor X-23, who shows no inclination to do it for herself. 

It's obvious where this is heading so far as X-23 is concerned, of course.  It's not exactly difficult to guess where Sarah's going to end up, for that matter.  But the creators have managed to construct a workable and reasonably interesting story around a complete non-character, by turning her very blankness into the focus of the story.  It's an interesting effort, if nothing else.

Rating: B

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