3 september 2000

No X-Men Declassified, for whatever reason. No Wolverine (what, a late Rob Liefeld book? Surely not). Next week's going to be hectic. Anyhow, X-FORCE has come out, on time for once, so let's talk about that.

The good news is, no Whilce Portacio. Actually, he does do the cover, giving Domino a rather nice goth gypsy look which would work perfectly for a different character altogether but seems wildly wrong for her. Other characters with squint faces stand in the background. By keeping Whilce's contribution down to this level, the Counter-X X-Force has actually published an issue on time. And that's using Ariel Olivetti, who's already drawing an entire other series on a monthly schedule.

Normally I find Olivetti's art a little awkward, but compared to what we've been seeing lately, it's positively fluid. In fact, Olivetti's come on a lot in the last couple of years, and he's looking pretty decent here by any standards, even with the hideous costumes he's got to work with. God, Portacio's been dragging this book down.

However, the art isn't the only thing that's been making this the weakest of the Counter-X titles. Ian Edginton can't be blamed for this; his execution of the story ideas is perfectly sound in terms of pacing, dialogue and the like. The problem is, unfortunately, that there's an awful lot of ideas floating around here that are nowhere near as good as they'd like to think they are.

The Counter-X story remains hinged on the idea that Pete Wisdom was taking X-Force off in some strange and radical new direction, but we're not shown anything to support that. The style is slightly different, but the substance is not significantly changed from what Cable was doing back when the book was launched. So we've got a big problem here, in that the story needs me to buy into a premise which simply doesn't work.

The flashback half of this story is devoted to Pete forcing James to learn to fly. This takes the form of one of those "I will push you to the limits in a rather sadistic training session" scenes which we've all seen a thousand times before. The explanation given for James' new powers are that it was a side-effect of the High Evolutionary cancelling all the mutant powers in a pre-Counter-X storyline. While I don't particularly have a problem with that as an explanation, I still can't for the life of me see what the point was in doing it at all. What does it add to the character? He was a strong guy. Now he's a flying strong guy. Doesn't make him any more distinctive, certainly doesn't make him any less generic. It looks like the old routine of cranking up power levels as a substitute for real character development, and to be honest I'd thought Ellis was above that sort of thing.

The present day half is better, at least when Domino isn't expressing surprise at the fact that X-Force are doing exactly the same as always. There's some decent character moments in there, and an amusing enough origin flashback for the villain, albeit using the now well-worn routine of "his origin is shrouded in mystery but here are some implausible-sounding rumours."

The real problem, though, is that while the other two Counter-X books have genuinely gone somewhere new, this is pretty much just a load of stock ideas and stock scenes welded onto a thin variation on what the book has been doing all along, which won't stop shouting "Look at me! I'm fresh and new!" You can get away with ploughing the same old furrow, but not when you insist on telling us that you aren't. It's a readable if average book, but it plainly likes to think it's something more.

Next week, Brian Michael Bendis gives us Ultimate Spider-Man. This week, though, it's the first issue of his Spawn spin-off title HELLSPAWN, which is basically like Spawn, only arthouse.

The artist for this one is Ashley Wood, who long-time X-books readers may recall drawing a Generation X annual a few years back (the one where Mondo turned up). Clear storytelling has never been one of Wood's strong points, although in fairness it's also clearly not one of his priorities. A Wood comic tends to end up as a selection of moody illustrations while the dialogue gets on with explaining what the hell is happening.

Right now, Wood is influenced by Bill Sienkiewicz and Dave McKean in the same sense that a falling object is influenced by gravity. He also appears to have developed a sepia fetish. What this means is that the book looks absolutely brilliant as a selection of individual illustrations, but actually working out what the hell is going on takes rather more effort than is normally the case. Since the plot is really quite simple (the Clown drives a couple of people to suicide, and then has a fight with Spawn), it's hard to see why the storytelling needed to be quite so obscure. Unless it's a deliberate attempt to lend cheap gravitas, I suppose.

Bendis' strengths are normally considered to be grounding his stories in some sense of reality, and so he's very much playing away from home here. He seems to be trying to interpret Spawn as some kind of iconic warrior figure rather than getting too far into the character's personality. In fact, Spawn remains more or less a cipher throughout this issue. He's not even the protagonist, he just shows up to fight the Clown. The Clown, for that matter, is Just Plain Malicious rather than having much in the way of a personality.

The strongest parts of the issue are the sequences with the Clown driving his victims to suicide, particularly his grim three-page commentary on a hardcore porn film (which is wisely never shown clearly, incidentally). Neither of the victims actually gets to say anything much, but they do lend some human interest to the story.

This isn't one of Bendis' best, largely because he's not playing to his strengths at all. It's still worth a look for some extremely strong individual scenes and the curiosity value of the bizarre art style, but ultimately it's a basic story needlessly obfuscated.