Okay, I think it's time to lay down some ground rules here.

Alpha Flight stopped being listed as an X-book in the solicitations starting with issue #5, although nobody seems to have told the Marvel website or the letters pages yet.  Starjammers, meanwhile, debuts this week with the optimistic claim to be an X-book.  This seems an appropriate time to take a view on whether the X-Axis is going to cover them, and the answer is No in both cases.

Alpha Flight is not an X-book.  It's a relaunch of Alpha Flight, which isn't an X-book and never was.  Its only connection with the X-books is that the cast includes Sasquatch, who debuted as a guest star in the X-Men.  But you could say that about Ka-Zar.  Alpha Flight's claim to X-book status rests principally on a fairly minor involvement in Wolverine's back story.  Not good enough.  If the book wasn't being labelled as an X-book, would anyone seriously argue that it was one?  Of course not.

Starjammers, meanwhile, is just a mess.  Judging from interviews with the writer and the solicitations, Marvel can't even make up their mind whether it's a miniseries or an ongoing title.  Despite the story title, there's no Corsair, who provided the only real link to the X-books in the first place.  He's been removed by editorial fiat in order make the book more accessible.  Nor are there any other recognisable aspects of the Marvel Universe cosmos.  Instead, we have some generic space opera stuff about a human empire in space.  (And yes, we're specifically told that they're human.) 

Basically, we're either off in an alternate future here, or it's out of continuity altogether.  Marvel have declined to make the point clear, although they've tried to suggest that the story takes place in the Starjammers' past.  Since I don't recall a human empire in space forming any part of Marvel history, that suggestion doesn't even stand up to the most casual reading of the story, and doesn't merit any further consideration.

What we have here is a completely generic piece of space opera, reusing a third-tier X-books concept in a way that has explicitly and deliberately removed anything X-related, and appears not even to be part of the same universe.  To classify that as an X-book strikes me as stretching the definition to the point of utter meaninglessness.

However, there's more to this than just the irritant factor of Marvel's faintly ridiculous definitions.  It points up the dimwitted, fuzzy thinking at the heart of titles like this.  Seriously, who on earth do they think is going to be interested in a Starjammers book other than hardcore X-fans?  And yet in a ridiculous attempt at "accessibility" they then strip the concept of everything that those fans might expect to see.  Besides, the audience for space opera are hardly likely to be impressed by something as utterly generic as this.   Who on earth do Marvel think is going to buy this junk?

The Starjammers are, conceptually, particularly unsuited to this kind of overhaul.  With the arguable exception of Corsair (who isn't in the book), the rest of them are just a generic bunch of space opera rogues.  There is no real original core idea.  All that makes them distinctive is their original context (as a hybrid with superheroes) and Claremont's personal spin on the space opera genre.  Strip that away, and there's nothing left.

All of which might be forgivable if the comic was any good, but it isn't.  It's an almost completely generic piece of space opera, with a bland lead character, a princess love interest, and a nasty scheming villain easily recognisable as such because he's ugly.  All the characters seem two-dimensional at best, and the entire issue is swimming in embarrassingly obvious exposition.  Does the princess, guest of honour at a dinner where everyone's fawning over her, really need to tell people that her father the king was assassinated four years earlier?  Might this not be common knowledge?  There isn't even much attempt to work this stuff into the conversation - characters just stand around reciting back story to one another.  I mean, listen to this crap:-

"We have taken care of the problem of nonhuman malcontents like your father's assassin, princess.  [This at a dinner party, by the way.  It can hardly be news to her.]  At the moment, our main concern is the random and increasingly violent incidents of piracy in the space lanes."

"Piracy!  Are they the ones that call themselves the Starjammers?"

"Yes.  Usually led by a monstrous race of deadly plant creatures called the Thorns, though they've attracted a variety of other alien misfits as well."

And it goes on and on and on and on like that.  These are the sort of characters who would corner you at the bus stop and start telling you who the Prime Minister is, where petrol comes from, and how many hours there are in the day.  It's a really dreadful piece of dialoguing from start to finish.

It is truly difficult to imagine anyone but the most hardcore completist buying this comic - if you want some space opera, buy a book.

Rating: D+

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