3 october 1999

My thoughts on ASTONISHING X-MEN can be summed up in three words.

But first a digression, which may seem superficially irrelevant but which I can assure you will be coming full circle and tying in with the main theme of the review in just a few short paragraphs time.

A few weeks ago, I went to see a screening of Romance at the Edinburgh Film Festival. For those of you who are unaware of the film, it's probably best known for containing the most graphic sex scenes ever passed by the BBFC (the British film censors). As in, well, hardcore porn, really. The BBFC allowed them through on the basis that they were in fact not pornographic, heavens no, but an expressive work of serious art. They knew this because the film was slow, extremely well lit, and in a foreign language. And boring. The BBFC like boring.

Now, Romance is rather ambiguous in its sexual politics and such forth, and the screening was followed by a Q&A session with director Catherine Breillat. Did I mention it was directed by a woman? The BBFC like that too. Women make art, they don't make porn. Except the women who are in porn, but they don't count. So anyhow, the audience has got kind of mixed feelings about this whole film, having at least in my case spent the last half hour praying for the bloody thing to end, and at the very least, everyone's interested to hear what she has to say about this curious and undeniably extreme film.

Unfortunately, Breillat's views are a bit strange. It's pretty obvious from early on that the audience just isn't with her on a lot of this stuff. The main character's husband, she says, isn't an unsympathetic character and she disagrees strongly with the suggestion that he is. Since he's a loveless, sexless, affectionless bastard in the film, this was a view many people found rather hard to share. Then she started drifting off into the realms of paranoia feminism - you know, censorship is actually a device to make women ashamed of their bodies, all that stuff. And the audience quite clearly isn't going for this at all, but sit politely, asking polite questions and generally but very tentatively querying some of her suggestions, but firmly maintaining the established rule which is that she's on a stage and she's an artist and we're an audience, and besides, we're all liberals together and kind of in favour of this sort of thing.

Then she goes totally off the rails and proclaims that the use of "X" as a symbol denoting pornography is deeply offensive, because obviously it's an allusion to the X chromosome. No, honestly, she actually did say that. Obviously polite, liberal film festivalgoing audiences don't query this sort of stuff, because they're polite and liberal, although if you've never heard the sound of four hundred eyebrows being raised simultaneously, I can tell you that I did, and it's kind of interesting.

And the audience is just gearing up for another round of polite disagreement, except for one guy at the front who stands up, says in a loud voice, "OH, FUCK OFF" and walks out. And I realise that this is, let's face it, a pointless discussion with a paranoid, and however intelligent and polite the conversation is going to be, it's never going to add a great deal that hasn't just been said by "Oh fuck off."

(Sidenote: I should probably mention that my female friend who accompanied me to the screening thought Romance was a great film, so maybe it's a gender thing or perhaps I just don't get it, or maybe she doesn't have any taste. But she thought Breillat was talking shit in the Q&A as well.)

Which brings us back in the general direction of Astonishing X-Men #3. Now, I could go into detail about why this is a stupid and bad comic - the failure to make Wolverine's death scene work or convince on any sort of level, the moronic script that has Cyclops twice declare that nobody could survive a plane crash which he himself has just survived, the general total failure to bring any kind of wit, intelligence or angle to the story and the seeming willingness to settle for a (sub)competent trudge through the most basic plot elements, just the overall absence of anything to make it worth reading generally - but why bother? I know it's shit. You know it's shit. 99.9% of people who read the thing will instantly know and understand why it's shit. The creators probably know it's shit and are wishing they'd thought it through better before soliciting it.

So when Marvel serve up this sort of nonsense, which would have looked pretty damn weak in an issue of X-Men Unlimited let alone as a much-hyped "special event", there isn't any point acting like there's a real story of artistic merit sitting there to be reviewed. The only sensible response:-

OH, FUCK OFF.

Jesus, I've just read that stuff back and I'm obviously too stressed. It must be all those Fast Lane inserts. Maybe I should relax with a joint.

WOLVERINE.

Hold on, isn't he dead over in Astonishing X-Men? Well yeah, sure, like anybody gives a toss about that, and in fact it isn't even plugged in this issue. Ignore that, it's a sideline and it doesn't matter. This is what matters.

Although actually it isn't, since what this is is a classic example of that curious subgenre, the "killing time for an issue so that the big event can happen to coincide with a crossover/anniversary/multiple of 25" story. Doubling as a lead-in to Hulk #8 (which has been and gone, in fact, but no problem), this is mainly a flashback story to the lead-in to Wolverine's first encounter with the Hulk.

It's not a great story, but it is a distinct step forward from the last few issues. Larsen and Stephenson have been attempting to write all-action one-act stories, and have hit up against the problem that frankly, it's very, very difficult. That's changed here, as we get back to a more conventional writing style that works rather better.

But it's still not a great story. It starts off well enough with scenes of Wolverine getting his costume for the first time and some ironic banter with James Hudson about how some poor sap is going to end up dressed in a Canadian flag and paraded around as a national hero. The idea of Wolverine knowing that his first mission is secretly a test and sleepwalking through it is a nice one as well. Then the real plot shows up, and it could use a bit of help.

Basically, the Leader captures Wolverine, along with Hercules and obscure character Karkas, with a view to getting them to capture the Hulk for him as part of his big plan. Quite why he's chosen Wolverine is far from clear, and quite what Hercules and Karkas - particularly Karkas - are doing here is never at all clear. I'd hazard a guess they may tie in with contemporary subplots in Incredible Hulk, but god only knows. So the Leader has his plan, but the heroes escape and, uh, beat him. Right.

Quite some way off being a good story, in fact, since it's not noticeably about anything at all. But it flows quite nicely (up until you realise it's not really heading anywhere), and Mike Millar - presently completely wasted on the purgatory that men call X-Man - does some good looking artwork which is certainly the best thing about the issue.

It reads pretty well, but falls apart upon anything more than superficial thought.

X-FORCE, meanwhile, is off retroactively tying the Damocles Foundation into everything it can lay its grubby little hands on.

The bulk of this issue is a flashback story in which Cannonball's father and uncle encounter the Damocles Foundation about a decade ago. It's a perfectly decent little story let down somewhat by the fact that it's just plain contrived to have X-Force's current main enemies crop up quite coincidentally in something that happened to the team leader when he was ten. You've got to admire the way John Francis Moore is tying everything together, even bringing in neglected supporting character Sledge, but there's no denying you can see the strings.

Nonetheless, the plot is strong enough to get over this. As well as being just a decent story in its own right, the flashback sheds some interesting light on quite what the Damocles Foundation have been trying to achieve all this time, and the various subplot scenes advance everything nicely - although even in Brazil, Sunspot seems compulsively drawn to encounter Damocles Foundation plots. Nobody had heard of them two years ago, and now they're crawling all over the place.

Guest penciller Anthony Williams has improved a bit since we last saw him, but he's still in the competent division rather than standing out from the crowd. Still, he tells the story well enough and there's a few particularly good images - the young Sam's hypnotized expression when his memory is being wiped is a nice touch.

X-Force isn't really at the top of its game at the moment, but it's still a perfectly good read.

FAITH is Ted McKeever's new five issue miniseries for the Vertigo imprint, and as you might expect, it's a bit odd.

The setting is a Murr, a curious and neutral afterlife rendered almost exclusively in a palate of assorted greys and browns. Nobody's suffering, but nobody seems to be getting much in the way of reward either. It's just kind of there. It's a curious vision of the afterlife, and it'll be interesting to see where McKeever's going with it.

The main character is a newly arrived woman who, like everybody else, doesn't have any recollection of who she was when she was alive. Naming herself Faith, she spends most of the issue wandering around being baffled and generally serving as a viewpoint for the audience to share her culture shock and bemusement. Towards the end of the issue, McKeever invokes a stock plot and reveals that she's a Messiah figure to any well-informed inhabitant of Murr.

So that's a story we've kind of seen before - in fact, Bishop's doing it at the moment in a more conventional way - but the nature of the setting makes the Messiah device rather more interesting than usual. She's the saviour of Murr, apparently, but it's not entirely clear what saving an afterlife might involve. That, and just generally the nature of Murr, are the interesting points here, and certainly interesting enough to justify sticking with the book.

What's not quite so strong is the characterisation, as many of the cast are a bit indistinct at this point. Aside from just generally being confused, Faith isn't too strongly drawn at this point. Some of the others are simply rather generic, and Chicken Curry (yes, honestly) is a generic raving madman. But this issue is about establishing the setting and being, to an extent, deliberately baffling, so there's time enough for this to be addressed in issue #2.

It's got the potential to go either way at this stage, and it would probably have benefitted from setting its scene and cast a bit more clearly from the go, but worth a look anyway.