2 july 2000

Deep breath... BEFORE THE FANTASTIC FOUR: BEN GRIMM AND LOGAN. Is this a three or four issue mini? Please let it be three.

This isn't quite as terrible as issue #1, since at least this issue doesn't have a nonsensical gathering-the-cast sequence. But it's still pretty bad, with ranting comedy Soviets and faintly silly combat sequences that it's very hard to take at all seriously. Logic also seems to be at a premium here - given that he thought their mission was aerial spying, wouldn't Wolverine have been (at best) a touch surprised at being given a secret secondary mission to steal something from the ground? How did he think he was going to do it? It's taken him this long to realise something's not right?

Hama seems to be having fun here, but the story is just too formulaic to hold the attention. You could plug practically any three heroes into the roles of Ben, Logan and Carol Danvers in this story, and that's always a serious problem. Nice agents sent on dodgy mission by nasty superiors... anyone out there who hasn't seen this a thousand times before? Quite. Still, unlike last issue which was monumentally ridiculous, this is just very seen-it-before, which I suppose has to rate as an improvement. Of sorts.

Kaare Andrews' art has improved a bit this issue, with fewer weird camera angles and some clearer storytelling. But it's not like he's got much to work with here.

This is a classic example of a high-concept miniseries, where somebody thinks it would be a great idea to do stories about the Fantastic Four before they were superheroes and then commissions any old crap because it happens to fit the concept. Was anybody out there demanding this?

GAMBIT ties up the Assassination Game storyline this week, with an interesting new status quo for the book, but a rather contrived way of getting there.

After the last two issues of running around New York being shot at, Gambit gets to spend this issue buried under a building with his ex-wife Bella Donna, leading to a reconciliation of sorts and the merger of the Thieves and Assassins Guilds. The Guild merger is an idea with some potential, although Nicieza seems to be rushing into it. It's only been a few issues since both Guilds got trimmed down to a handful of characters during the six month gap, and there hasn't really been time to establish those characters yet. To hit us with another status change for the Guilds so quickly seems a bit much, but it could still lead to good stories.

Bringing back Bella Donna as a love interest (despite Gambit's claim that he doesn't feel that way about her at the moment) is also an idea with some potential. Since Rogue's a lead character in another book, she was never an ideal foil for him in this title, simply for practical reasons if nothing else. That horrible on-again off-again relationship has been allowed to define Gambit's character far too much, and giving him somebody else to show an interest in (making a grand total of two romantic interests in over a decade of publication, by the way) should show the character in a different light. And while she's been a pretty dodgy character in the past, Nicieza manages to cast her history in a more or less interesting light through some judicious flashbacks.

On the other hand, the plot that's being used to get there strains credibility a bit. Bella Donna wants an excuse to spend more time with Gambit so that she can understand her feelings for him... and so she's invented a contract to kill him? Uh? Does this make any sense at all? Is she that confident her Guild won't succeed? I really don't buy that at all - and I'm far from clear on why this is happening at the same time as the genuine assassinations arranged by the New Son. If it's just coincidence, it's a hell of a coincidence. If she knew about the other contracts, it's not clear how.

The New Son, meanwhile, turns out to have been doing the old "I will imperil your life and thereby make you use your powers at a higher level" routine. I've got to say I'm underwhelmed by that.

Yannick Paquette gets to draw Bella Donna an awful lot in this issue, and quite honestly, I think he's using the Jim Balent photo-reference collection. He's normally pretty good with his female characters, so this was a bit jarring. Is he doing it for a bet or something? Other than that, the usual perfectly good work, but it doesn't help the quiet conversational scenes for Bella Donna to be going quite so blatantly cheesecake.

The Assassination Game conclusion has to rate as a bit disappointing, but there's enough good ideas in terms of future stories to hold my attention.

Steve Skroce ends his WOLVERINE storyline next month, abandoning the book to the tender mercies of Rob Liefeld. The cover ought to carry a road sign: "Last decent Wolverine story before 2001."

In fact, though, this is a pretty weak resolution to Skroce's storyline, falling back on a lot of generic plot devices. The heroes go to the castle. Amiko is told to stay behind, so naturally she slips her minder and goes in anyway, and gets to save somebody before being captured and used as a hostage for a few pages... What is this, the Children's Film Foundation?

Skroce does immensely well choreographed fight scenes but seems to be having trouble drawing out any kind of point to the whole Clan Kaishek storyline. The family tradition is that they all kill one another; Kia kills all the others and then gets killed herself. There's vague allusions to fate and karma and all that stuff, but it's not exactly Greek tragedy, is it? When you're reduced to ending the issue with the "let's all go home" moment, you know there's a climax missing somewhere.

There are other nitpicking points as well. Wolverine tracks Kia by her scent... through a brick wall? How? And Yukio attacking Kia and kicking her to the floor in a nice two panel sequence is blown by lumbering Yukio with seven paragraphs of dialogue to deliver in what can't be more than two seconds.

Of course, there's a lot to enjoy in Skroce's stunning artwork, but at the end of the day, this doesn't deliver on the potential that earlier chapters had suggested.

WOLVERINE/SHI: DARK NIGHT OF JUDGMENT.

Uh, yeah...

A few years back in his series Punx, Keith Giffen did a brilliant parody of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. It was a missing chapter entitled "The Fight Scene: Exploring the Interpersonal Dynamic Through Violence." There was a bit about the theory that fight scenes are supposed to be a glorious balletic combat, illustrated by a picture of two boxers in tutus and a recommendation that anybody espousing this viewpoint should be institutionalised.

Well, that's what this issue is like.

There's a plot. It's not actually included in the story, but Bill Tucci has obligingly summarised it on the inside front cover. It's something to do with Wolverine and Shi being representatives of two different clans and fighting every 25 years in a ritual combat to determine which clan's warriors get to enter heaven. As far as I'm aware there's no earlier issues in this story that I've missed, but in any event all of this is purely an excuse for Wolverine and Shi to fight for the entire issue while declaiming platitudes about the honour of warriors.

Just to remind us that we're reading an artistic effort here, Wolverine inexplicably starts wearing samurai armour halfway through the fight. This makes no sense, but we're presumably supposed to take it as being artistically symbolic. It isn't.

I've tried, but there's no way of reviewing this book without using the word "pretentious." It's a frigging twenty page fight scene, for god's sake. It doesn't even advance the plot - they're still fighting at the end, where we get a handy trailer for more Shi/Wolverine books in this storyline that Crusade will be publishing (but I certainly won't be buying). And it is absolutely dripping with self-importance.

This book is way, way into the category of "What the hell were they thinking of?" Borderline impenetrable, absolutely pointless, it may if nothing else provide something for Rob Liefeld's Wolverine to be better than. Only some half-decent artwork drags this above a D-.