2 december 2001

Well, I'll give them this, Marvel are making some significant strides forward this week in terms of finally clearing the backlog. Which is to say, they've realised that it was time to hire a fill-in artist for New X-Men who can draw more than one book a month.

Unfortunately they've also released a decidedly mixed bag of second-tier X-Men books on the market, perhaps in some kind of attempt to bludgeon me into submission. My concessions to reality here are quite simple: I don't review poster books, so no coverage of X-Men: Millennial Visions. And having read Devin Grayson's startlingly misguided Ghost Rider miniseries, I have precisely zero interest in seeing her adaptation of X-Men Evolution. In any event, to steal a line from Blackadder, a comic book adaptation of a cartoon adaptation of a comic book is the most pointless idea in publishing since How to Speak French was translated into French.

But don't worry, I continue to subject myself to all manner of crap so that you don't have to - and hell, none of you used to complain when I wasn't covering X-Men: The Animated Series, probably because none of you were reading it either. In that spirit of tooth-gritting masochism, I turn to BROTHERHOOD #6.

We have a different artist this month, presumably because Leonardo Manco has served his penance and been allowed to go off and draw Doom: The Emperor Returns. The goth imagery seems to have taken a back seat as well, confirming my suspicions that Manco was to blame for that. Our new artist is Joe Bennett, one of those sound but unexceptional types who would actually be quite good if it wasn't for his tendency to draw all female characters as eye candy. God only knows what the script described Malon's Brotherhood clothes as being, but Bennett has drawn something that appears to be the result of a tragic genetic accident involving Che Guevara and All Saints. She also carries an unwieldy great big gun, which makes perfect sense for a character who fires energy beams from her hands.

Anyhow, Malon has now joined the Brotherhood, which means that she delivers hilariously stodgy speeches about the importance of overthrowing the world, which in her case seems to mean specifically overthrowing daddy. This would be a nice little piece of irony if only I had any confidence that the writer of this book was capable of delivering such a thing deliberately. In any event, in practice it means that Malon parades around being righteously angry, while some of the cast from the first storyline stand around wondering quite when the plot is going to get around to giving them something to do again.

Daddy naturally turns out to be a mutant, which is not unexpected. The story winds up with a badly staged sequence where Malon's lover sacrifices his life to save Malon from a vaguely specified threat which is not immediately apparent, maing him look incredibly stupid rather than brave. There's a near total lack of credibility to any of the characterisation in this story, unfortunately, as a group of characters stumble their way through the outline of a story which obviously wants to be emotionally powerful but fails to properly convey any convincing emotions at all.

Mediocre rather than glaringly bad, but that's hardly a compliment.

Two Frank Tieri books this week - oh, how I am blessed by Jesus. As always, DEADPOOL is the better one, since Tieri's bad jokes and shock value fit much more easily with the tone of this book.

Unfortunately, what Tieri still can't get past is his tendency to write entire storylines which aren't stories at all, but simply set-ups for other stories. Most of his run on Wolverine has fallen into that category, and here we see the same thing as the Agent of Weapon X storyline ends with the hero failing utterly to achieve anything and the villains going on as before. In fact, precisely nothing has changed as a result of this story other than Deadpool's own status quo.

Deadpool, in a rather unusual move, is killed off by degenerating into liquid when Weapon X remove their enhanced healing factor. This has the merits of making a certain kind of plot sense, being genuinely unexpected, and allowing Georges Jeanty to do a decent enough visual sequence to sell the idea. On the other hand, it's so drastic that it's obviously going to be reversed almost immediately. Still, it may just about achieve its aim of distracting attention from the fact that Tieri has taken four issues to do a story which bumped off Copycat, set up the Weapon X project for future use, and singularly failed to resolve anything.

Tieri has another four months to go on this book, so in fairness it's always possible that he's planning to come back to this stuff in the course of his run. But I have this rather old fashioned idea that four-month storylines labelled as self-contained stories should be self-contained stories. Call me crazy.

Crashingly unsubtle and irritatingly unresolved. Still, the art's quite good, and Tieri does have a reasonable handle on the character, which is something.

The miniseries are not going to be participating in silent month (I refuse to call it "Nuff Said", which for some reason makes my skin crawl, possibly in an anti-nostalgia allergic reaction of some sort), but when I actually read them I can't help wishing it was the other way around.

ICEMAN isn't bad, but like the rest of the Icons line it has so far singularly failed to convince that it has an artistic reason to exist. They've announced a Chamber miniseries for 2002, so evidently the reasoning isn't getting through yet.

Anyhow, much like the Cyclops and Rogue minis before it, this second issue seems to go off on a bit of a tangent. Having had his powers sent out of control at the end of the last issue (giving Karl Kerschl the opportunity to do some very effective landscape shots of Hong Kong harbour covered in ice), Iceman bumps into an aging local superhero who hooks up with him to fight the villains from issue #1. And, er, that's pretty much it as far as advancing the plot is concerned - this is basically an entire issue devoted to introducing the oldtimer and letting Kerschl show off his ice effects.

Kerschl's character design for him is pretty good, although for some reason Abnett and Lanning have chosen to lumber him with the ungodly name of Foe-Dog. Perhaps it's meant to sound like it's suffered in translation from the Chinese. It certainly sounds terrible in English.

The idea of a geriatric with long-dormant superpowers who suddenly finds he can still turn into a youthful superhero after all is quite an appealing one. But it's also one that Abnett and Lanning have done before with Albion in the first series of Knights of Pendragon. Admittedly, that was a little-read book published in the UK, so they can't be criticised too heavily for recycling the concept for American consumption. Still, I can't help feeling that I liked it better the first time around, when he was more of a character you could empathise with, and less of a collection of far-eastern stereotypes.

Not a bad issue, though. Its main drawback, as with most of the Icons books, is that it leaves you none the wiser as to why Marvel thought there was a pressing need to do an Iceman series in the first place.

Well, Marvel have finally conceded defeat on NEW X-MEN, and hired an artist who moves at faster-than-glacial speeds in order to get the damn book back on schedule. Enter Cable's Igor Kordey, who is doing two books a month, pencils and inks, and looking pretty good at it. Of course, we're now into another of those stories which is going to look fairly odd in the trade paperback, with the art shifting from Ethan van Sciver to Kordey halfway through. Even with Kordey adopting a fairly neutral art style for the sake of consistency (this is much tighter than his Cable artwork), there's going to be a visible glitch.

So far as the writing is concerned, to be honest this is a bit of a mixed bag. Wolverine has some fairly good scenes with the new Angel, who has some plausible reactions to her unwanted powers, and includes an otherwise stereotypical redneck cafe owner giving a nice little speech about the death of his wife to give him a little more depth. The main drawback with this sequence is that (depending on how much faith you think Wolverine has in the U-Men's armour), he does seem to be killing them in cold blood, which is very out of character for him these days.

The U-Men still don't quite click, unfortunately. The idea is great, the execution a bit unconvincing, since I can't quite buy into them as anything more than lunatic villains, and consequently I don't really care about them. Their grand plan to attack the X-Men's mansion by, er, driving up to the front door also lacks the sort of grandeur that's needed to sell me on them as a genuine threat. Sure, Jean's the only one at home, but it's not like the U-Men have been enough of a threat so far that I have any particular doubts about her beating them singlehandedly.

Still quite a good issue on balance, but the U-Men aren't characters who work at the level of story that Morrison's capable of.

NIGHTCRAWLER is the fourth of the Icons series, and guess what? This one doesn't leave me any the wiser about why they bothered, either. It's the usual story - by no means is this a bad comic, but it doesn't exactly show the signs of having a searing creative vision behind it that desperately called to see the light of day. And that leaves it as just another X-book clogging up the shelves, rather than a hidden gem.

Writer Chris Kipiniak is apparently a playwright, but his comic book storytelling is fine. A rather wordy introduction on page two seems unpromising (not only does it go off on a digression about gravity, it feels the need to remind us that objects accelerate towards the earth at 9.8 metres per second per second), but otherwise the balance is about right and Kipiniak leaves the art to do most of the storytelling.

More curious is Kipiniak's choice of subject matter. Looking for character traits specific to Nightcrawler, Kipiniak understandably homes in on his religion, and gives us a series of scenes where Kurt's desire to put his faith into action is contrasted with his rather fatalist mentor. All well and good, but Kipiniak then drops this into the middle of a plot about the modern day slave trade, which has no apparent connection to Nightcrawler's character at all. Of course he gets to wonder about man's inhumanity to man, but he gets to do that all the time.

The slave trade, while a very interesting subject for a story in principle, is something that leaves Nightcrawler as a rather generic protagonist. If you wanted to do a story about the slave trade set in the Marvel Universe, there are a ton of more obvious characters to use. You could be crushingly obvious and use any black hero who was available. You could be rather less obvious and use a rich white character with the same social status as the owners (such as Iron Man). Come to think of it, you could do both at once and use Cloak and Dagger. In any event, I'd have thought a lot of names would have to be crossed off the list before you'd start seriously thinking about doing this story with Nightcrawler.

Kipiniak seems to think that the slave trade plot plays in some way off Nightcrawler's religion, but I can't work out why. Maybe it'll become apparent over the course of the series, but for the moment we have an odd disconnection between a protagonist with a religious subplot, and a completely unrelated main plot about slavery.

Art comes from Matthew Smith, who isn't familiar to me, and who seems to be taking the approach of using as few lines as possible to get a nice open feel. The narrative is fine, his characters are fairly expressive, and while it seems an odd style to use on a slavery story, arguably it prevents the book from becoming too dark. It's worth noting, though, that Smith is another artist who seems to struggle a bit to get the Quitely and Churchill-designed uniforms to work in his own style. Perhaps it's that the uniforms look more sensible when there are other characters wearing variations on the theme, whereas with one lead character on his own they look rather weird and out of place.

An okay issue, but time will tell whether this really is a Nightcrawler story or just a story that they happen to be doing with Nightcrawler.

WOLVERINE is... well, you know the deal by now. It's Frank Tieri, which means that it's got a barely coherent plot and a whole load of shock value material that doesn't work in this book. This is the first part of the Stay Alive three-parter in which - oh, the hilarity - Tieri plays off Survivor.

Survivor bombed in the UK, incidentally. So I start off here from the perspective that it's vaguely parodying a series I never saw in the first place and have no interest in watching.

Anyhow, this particular season of Stay Alive - Tieri's ersatz Survivor programme - is being filmed in the Arctic, which is a handy plot contrivance. Just to up the contrivance factor a little more, it's being shown live on remote-controlled cameras. I may not have actually seen Survivor, but even I know that the show would be impossible to make without pre-recording it because it wouldn't be anywhere near glossy and meaningless enough.

Into this utterly unpromising premise comes Tieri's own creation Mauvais, the cannibal sorceror who now seems to be playing up a French Canadian patriot angle. I can only think of one other story that involved a French Canadian superpatriot, and that involved a grown man dressed as a beaver. Tragically, the Beaver had more psychological credibility than Mauvais, whose name means "Evil" and helpfully sums up his entire personality for the benefit of the hard of thinking. Mauvais' plan, as near as can be deciphered, is to magically shut the local gods out of Canada and then reclaim the place in the name of the French. Since he obviously isn't going to achieve this, I don't care, and nothing about Mauvais is interesting enough to hold my attention on any other level.

Tieri takes the brave step over the line into Completely F--king Stupid by bringing in his Iron Man villain Tyler Stone as the owner of the TV show. When Mauvais starts turning up and killing people on national television, Stone decides this is a ratings winner and is delighted. This, of course, is nonsense - even the most callous of TV executives would pull the plug if only out of fear of a public backlash, and so Stone ends up with zero credibility as a character. With instincts like that, it's not even easy to believe that he could have ended up running a successful TV station in the first place.

Next issue, for silent month, Wolverine will fight the Wendigo in a snowstorm. I have a horrible feeling I know where this is heading, but if Tieri and Chen actually have the nerve to do a full-scale John Byrne homage and publish twenty-three blank pages, representing Wolverine fighting the Wendigo in silence in a heavy snowstorm, I will feel obliged to applaud such a move on the grounds of sheer nerve. Sadly, it will probably just be a shit fight scene.

X-TREME X-MEN: SAVAGE LAND remains thoroughly underwhelming, and judging from the reaction that seems to be a view which is shared by many of the people who like the monthly title as well.

The problem, I think, is the total lack of anything interesting in terms of the plot, the villains or the supporting cast. The X-Men themselves are getting some reasonably decent material in this issue, but they're in a void with nothing very gripping to play off.

I find it hard to get worked up about any stories set in the Savage Land at the best of times, let alone the fate of a bunch of overgrown lizards who seem to have no personality beyond the bare minimum required to allow them to provide a clodhopping parallel for Xavier's dream. Nor do the villains have much to add to the proceedings - three issues in, Brainchild has yet to say anything interesting, which is a shame given that he's driving the plot. I neither know nor care why he is interested in this small village, and I am disappointed to see him indulging a Claremontism I thought we had stamped out, as he wheels on a sidekick who has no personality, but does have a superpower which is extremely convenient to the plot.

There is an attempt made to give Lupa a bit of personality, but it comes across as a rather jarring shift back and forth between typical Claremont dialogue ("Thanks to the blood lotus and my own enhanced pheromones, that Beast is mine to command") and very shaky Californian ("That will SO not be a problem") on the same page.

This really isn't working. It's not so much the presence of anything bad as the absence of anything to make us care. The characters are weakly established, the motivations of everyone involved are blurry and uninteresting, and the series lacks any strong central ideas. Not good.