2 september 2001

Grant Morrison: almost universal good reviews, sparks lots of discussion, has got people interested. Mark Millar: more divided reviews, those who like the book seem to really like it, but at least it grabs attention. Chris Claremont: well, he's got a fiercely loyal fanbase and his writing sharply divides opinion.

Joe Casey also writes an X-Men title. You might not have noticed.

UNCANNY X-MEN isn't bad, as such. But it's very average, and in comparison with Morrison's book - a comparison that it can't avoid - it looks so conservative, so unadventurous. Where everybody else is experimenting with new themes or at least new storyline ideas, Casey is doing the same old same old. It's competently done, but it's old. That's the key problem.

This issue is part three of Poptopia, and gives the general impression that Casey had an issue to fill in order to stretch a three-issue storyline to four issues. The content is much the same that we've come to expect from this storyline. In plot A, Chamber hangs around with a Welsh teen pop sensation (and I still crack up every time I type that) and gets treated as a novelty act. In plot B - get this for originality - a bloke who hates mutants tries to kill some.

Chamber's storyline is far and away the more interesting, and Casey has some reasonable ideas about Chamber coming to terms with his status as a novelty item. Unfortunately, it's undermined by his insistence on writing every other character in the storyline as a one-dimensional caricature. The social circuit he depicts simply doesn't ring true. "The Fractured Uberclub"? Please. There's still something to this story idea, but it would have worked better if Chamber wasn't the only fully realised character in the room.

On the bright side, now that Ian Churchill has left us, the replacement art team have quickly got to work on sorting out Sugar Kane's costume design to at least bring her marginally into line with planet Earth. At least she now looks like a contemporary cliche, and not a refugee from 1985.

Given that this is a rush job - one layout penciller, one finishing penciller, and an inker - it doesn't look bad. It's far from the best work that any of those involved have produced, but that's hardly surprising in the circumstances. They seem more comfortable with the deformed characters, but everything holds together adequately. Personally, I'll take this style over Churchill's early-nineties scratching any day.

Back in the B plot, Mr Clean is still hunting down mutants as if this was somehow a new idea. About the only development this issue is to establish that he's linked to the Church of Humanity, a concept that Casey is going to be elaborating on in future issues. It would be premature to dismiss them before we even get to their story, but the idea does not sound promising. Nothing about Mr Clean suggests that he is anything more than the usual mutant-hating loony we've seen a thousand times before, and I have great scepticism about any characters with names like the Vicar General and the Supreme Pontiff. It all sounds exceptionally stupid. I reserve judgment until we see the story, but nothing about this story interests me in them.

It's no worse than most of the material the X-books published in the latter half of the nineties. But this is not the late 1990s. Standards have been raised, and this title is firmly in the shadow of its more interesting, or at least more controversial, sister books.

X-FORCE is in fairly conventional mood this month, although these things are relative. Still, this issue X-Force get to do some standard hero routines, establishing that at least four of them have some kind of moral standards in there somewhere.

X-Force succeed in "rescuing" Paco Perez from Cuba, only to find that their employers intend to dissect him for medical research purposes. In a rather unusual move for this book, four of them actually display some kind of moral standards and decide to do something about it. (Edie, bless her, is keeping up business as normal by checking into a rehab clinic at the time.)

It'll be interesting to see where Milligan is heading with this. It seems a bit early in the day to have X-Force's employers exposed as doing something unequivocally evil (as opposed to just utterly amoral), not to mention having the team themselves turn on their employers. Coach makes a rather half-hearted case for the medical benefits to be derived from killing Paco, but it's not one that many readers are likely to buy into.

Still, the hyperactive fast-forwarded plots are a feature of this title. Either Milligan is risking destroying his concept at a very early stage, or all this has just been the starting point before he moves on to something else. He does maintain the title's proud tradition of killing a lead character by bumping off Saint Anna, which has the least impact so far, largely because she was never very clearly drawn as a character to begin with.

Despite these slightly questionable decisions, the title maintains the gleeful cynicism that makes it so entertaining. There are few books in the line where the line "You're safe now, you're in America" would be so clearly dramatic irony. And despite endorsing most of his actions, Milligan obviously finds the Orphan's traditional bleeding-heart liberalism equally amsuing. ("It's okay, I'll stop crying in a minute.")

The book is taking a risky approach, but for the moment this is another strong issue.

PRIVATE BEACH is a creator-owned book by David Hahn, published through SLG. This is apparently the second series of this title, the first one being a miniseries from a few years back called (deep breath) Private Beach: Fun and Perils in the Trudyverse. That book apparently had aliens in it. This one is a slice-of-life title. Odd.

It's a mixture of light comedy and drama which seems content to follow its characters around and enjoy their company rather than force them into anything so artificial as a plot. There are plenty of events, and there may well be some kind of over- reaching storyline, but the narrative just drifts gently forward without any particularly strong central plot. Normally that sort of thing annoys me, but here it works. Hahn's strengths seem to lie in observational material, and taking things slowly enough to let the details come out seems to work for him.

In this issue, Trudy plays golf, visits a friend, goes to a job interview, and then goes for a drink with her mates. They're all good strong scenes, and that seems to be enough. Hahn shifts tone neatly between the relatively serious (Trudy visits a friend who recently had his leg amputated) and the bizarrely comic (a recruitment event for club hostesses, attended entirely by identical women).

Hahn has a nice clean art style, and a good handle on body language (he manages to keep his lead character distinct from all her clones in the recruitment scene, for one thing). The book does seem to have a weakness for cutesy character names - Sharona Cupkey? Trudy Honeyvan?! - that might be a hangover from the book's previous incarnation. And it's a bit suburban and middle class - but then, I am suburban and middle class, and dammit, sometimes I'm allowed to read about my people. Even if they will play golf.

A bit meandering, to be sure. But very pleasant.