3 december 2000

I've been away for a couple of days, so it's very handy of Marvel to only get one X-book out this week. Makes it a lot easier to bang a column out on a Sunday evening that way.

GENERATION X is the lucky book, and this week it starts on its third and final Counter-X storyline. With cancellation now pencilled in for issue #75, this is going to be the last storyline in the book period. "Four Days" wasn't intended to serve that role, which means that the book now finds itself headed for cancellation not with a rousing climax, but instead with a four issue block of character focus issues which would have made rather more sense as a break from the action.

Character issues are what this book is best at, though. Attempts to hammer the characters into action scenes usually end up coming off contrived, given that they're not meant to be out there looking for trouble and there's only so many times they can be attacked at the school. It's also something that plays to the strengths of Brian Wood (who is now effectively the sole writer - Ellis' credit has dropped off altogether). So while it may seem like a less than ideal way to round off an ongoing series, at least there's a good chance that they'll be decent issues.

The idea is presumably that each chapter is going to focus on a different character (or characters, given that there are five team members to fit into four issues). This issue kicks us off with Chamber. Chamber meets a deaf girl in a record store, actually manages to pull despite the normally overwhelming obstacle of having half a head, but ultimately decides not to pursue it because it wouldn't be fair to drag her into his world.

This is a fairly stock plot reason for getting rid of unwanted love interests once they've outlived their usefulness to a particular story, but it's less commonly seen where the relationship is actually the focal point of the story. Chamber and Rana are given enough space here to make the potential romance more three dimensional than normal, and give the pay-off more power than it normally has. Chamber's probably right to get shot of her, of course, given the high death, kidnap and mutilation rate among friends of the X-Men, but Wood also leaves open the idea that Chamber is simply using this hoary old device as an excuse to avoid the hassle of pursuing a girl he's genuinely interested in. It's a very simple story, but an effective one.

Given the emphasis that's put on Chamber's interest in music here, the choice of records is a bit questionable. If we're trying to push the idea that Chamber's a goth (which would fit with his character), then have him buy some damn goth records. I don't really see the point of establishing him as a punk vinyl trainspotter other than to allow the creators to name some of their favourite bands who are now podgy, middle-aged and generally everything that Generation X isn't meant to be about. If he's going to be a trainspotter, at least make him a trainspotter about music that came out after he was born. Equally, if Chamber's going to make a comment about Rana holding a Britney Spears album when they first meet, it would have been nice for the art to show anything of the sort.

The team get new costumes this issue, which are a decided improvement on what came before. Pugh's original costume designs weren't really bad, but at the very least they were overly complex. This time round, it's nice straightforward sweatshirts which actually look credibly like a school sports uniform and make only a token nod towards superheroism. This is the "less is more" school of costume design, and it's a success here.

Pugh's art has always been stronger on the character sequences than the action scenes, so this is an issue that shows him off to good advantage. He finally gets to ink some of his own pencils as well, and while I wouldn't want to guess which pages he did, this issue certainly contains some of the best-looking published work we've seen during his run on the title.

A nice quiet little story which isn't really going anywhere terribly new, but makes its point very effectively. It's a shame this book is getting the axe; this is the Counter-X book which is most clearly doing something distinct from the other X-books simply because of the school format.

Somebody's been watching the Prisoner again, I'll bet.

Even if they haven't, the new BLACK WIDOW series falls neatly into that show's format of enigmatic mind games carried out by weird spying organisations and generally involving surreally bizarre gimmickry. In a follow up to the 1999 miniseries that introduced Yelena Belova, the "new" Black Widow, Devin Grayson and Greg Rucka have written something far odder than that miniseries would suggest.

The story plays off Yelena's conviction in the original series that she is the rightful heir to the name "Black Widow" following Natasha's defection. Last time round, this idea took the fairly straightforward form of Yelena trying to bump Natasha off to eliminate the competition for the name. This time, Natasha takes the lead in one of the strangest plots of the year.

Natasha's scheme, with the full assistance of SHIELD and Daredevil, is to capture Yelena, carry out an operation to swap their minds (or possibly reshape their bodies so that they look like one another; the story's unclear), dump Yelena into Natasha's life, give her a mission to kill "Yelena" (ie, the real Natasha) and generally watch her suffer and drown. The Prisoner did this sort of routine a couple of times as well, and it's a story idea I've always had a soft spot for.

It is, of course, eminently ludicrous in every respect. To enjoy these sorts of stories, you just have to accept the sheer oddity of the starting point and run with it from there. The classic way to achieve suspension of disbelief in your readers is to make sure you're only asking them to suspend their disbelief in a couple of crucial events, so to pull this off you really need to ground the rest of the story in reality. Fortunately, Grayson and Rucka manage that. It's a bit of a stretch to accept that Yelena would buy into the idea that she was under deep cover and suffering from amnesia, but once you get past the opening hurdle, things move along nicely. Yelena finds herself surrounded by other characters who insist on acting as if they're in a conventional spy story, which is exactly as it needs to be.

At some point, of course, the series is going to have to get around to explaining what the hell the characters are playing at with an idea like this. Hopefully there's a very good explanation in place, since stories of this sort generally get away with it by leaving things ambiguous. When regularly used heroes like Daredevil are implicated in the scheme, there's a real pressure to come up with a reason - although I suppose there's always the possibility that they'll leave it to our imagination, which could conceivably work.

The less glaring oddity about this story is that it's a first issue in which the heroes kidnap and psychologically torment a villain, which is to put it mildly a reversal of the normal set-up. Naturally, the effect is to buy our sympathy for Yelena while alienating us from the regular heroes in their scheming bastard roles.

Art this time round comes from Scott Hampton, who does a combination of line work and painting. His Daredevil's a little shaky, but other than that it looks great. The painted art gives the series the sort of grounding in reality that could never have been achieved with the T&A leather style of the previous miniseries.

I'm probably marking this up because it plays to some of my pet story ideas, but I really like this. It's nice to see some more offbeat material coming out of the Marvel Knights imprint.