4 february 2001

The first issue of Tieri and Chen's WOLVERINE run looked rather promising, at least on the assumption that they were going for the Tarantino approach. It was a bit vacant, it was gratuitously violent, but there were some nicely paced jokes and it was quite funny as a change of pace.

Unfortunately, issue #160 doesn't capitalise on that. Beneath the cynical veneer, the actual story is decidedly lacking. Most of the issue is devoted to an extended fight scene between Wolverine and the henchmen, Blok and T&A. Yes, T&A are girls. Yes, Tieri did that joke last month. He has nothing to add to it this month, and while they're quite a nice character design (Sean Chen actually makes them looks semi-normal), there's nothing to them beyond a throwaway joke that was done in its entirety the moment somebody mentioned their name. Much the same applies to Blok; these guys are passable henchmen but they're not characters and they can't carry an issue on their own.

Equally, while their boss is a nice enough idea (absurdly calm serial killer who's even better than Wolverine is), Tieri never manages to give the character any depth beyond what you've just read. The visualisation is fine, but Tieri needs to make these characters feel like people if we're going to care about them. As it stands, they're basically just a mildly amusing one-off joke, and Tieri's attempts to put the unnamed boss over as a threatening serial killer fall short because he's still predominantly a comedy figure. Comedy and menace is a very difficult balancing act to pull off, and Tieri hasn't managed it here.

The book looks pretty good - though not as good as the excellent cover by JH Williams III and Mick Gray - but when you get beneath the surface, the story turns out to be hollow.

Over in X-MEN #110, Scott Lobdell continues his drive to clear decks before Morrison and Casey arrive. This issue doubles as a farewell story for Colossus and an explanation of Shadowcat's status quo.

On the first count, it succeeds. Yes, it's a bit sappy, but stories about characters mourning their recently dead friends have an understandable tendency to be. The issue is basically Shadowcat taking Colossus' ashes back to Siberia to scatter them, and writing a letter to the X-Men explaining why she isn't coming back. Quiet character issues have always been Lobdell's strength and he gives us both a strong character piece for Kitty and a nice reflection on Colossus.

On the second count... Well, the issue completely skirts around the question of what Kitty has been up to since we last saw her, nine months ago. Since the X-Men were standing around wondering where she was, and fairly recent Claremont issues had been suggesting that she was up to something in particular, the storyline really needs a better resolution than for her to turn up out of nowhere and announce that she's retiring so as to go to university. As an ending for Shadowcat's career, it's a perfectly decent idea (frankly, I find Lobdell's Shadowcat a lot more in tune with the character I remember than Claremont's recent stories). But it's such a blatant jump cut from what the character was last seen doing that it undermines the story.

Leinil Francis Yu does some of his best recent work on this issue; while he's never looked comfortable on action sequences, he seems entirely at ease with this material. Perhaps Yu is simply miscast in the superhero genre altogether, although somehow the issue feels like he's got a bit more enthusiasm for this than he had for the Neo.

Oh, and talking of the Neo, they turn up at the end in a coda where some of them get obliterated by Magneto in a couple of panels. I'm slightly surprised anybody's bothering to use these people again at all, and I really don't see what the benefit is in to any of the characters involved in sticking them with Magneto. If the intention is to throw a few failed characters Magneto's way in order to build him up as a villain in advance of the next storyline, then fair enough; if they're really going to stick them together, then I hope there's a good idea underneath it all.

This is a successful issue in its own right, dragged down mainly by its refusal to engage in the question of where the hell Shadowcat's been for the last nine months. If you can look past that, though, it's a good story.

Vertigo brings us another Brian Azzarello project, with the EL DIABLO miniseries. Apparently this is based on an old character who appeared in something called Weird Western Tales, so you probably know the routine by now. Take one superannuated character nobody gives a toss about, sprinkle with cynicism and superficial cleverness, and wonder whatever happened to the good old days of Shade the Changing Man.

This isn't a particularly bad series, but it's hardly breaking new ground. El Diablo was apparently a vaguely mystical western hero of some description. So here's a Vertigo western in which some all-purpose villains are killed by the nasty El Diablo, leading the more-or-less retired Sheriff to go after him in the hope of picking up a reward. Fairly basic stuff, and effectively it's a dolled-up genre piece.

This being a Vertigo book (not to say a Brian Azzarello book), there's the usual routines to try and convince us we're reading something edgy and different. A moderately unusual art style - quite nice, actually, but sufficiently different to make us feel we're reading something Different. Some gratuitous bodily mutilation at the end. Cynical protagonists. A sex scene that serves no real purpose that couldn't have been achieved by way of a straightforward conversation, but makes it all look a bit more edgy.

Nothing inherently wrong with any of the above, but I'm just bored of the formula. It's just a genre story with the usual Vertigo trappings, nothing more.

With the Grant Morrison X-Men run looming on the horizon, it makes sense to have a look at the final issue of his MARVEL BOY series for Marvel Knights.

I've found a lot of Morrison's recent mainstream work rather unsatisfying. Beneath the barrage of clever and offbeat ideas, there's been a certain hollowness in the actual story. I never really saw the appeal of his JLA run, which (quite consciously) more or less abandoned characterisation in favour of hurling its iconic characters at stories in which a wide variety of bizarre and surreal ideas were bolted onto rudimentary plots. It all seemed like an interesting starting point for a proposal rather than a satisfying final product. Of course, it didn't help that Howard Porter was drawing it.

Marvel Boy hasn't suffered to quite the same extent from that, but nonetheless it doesn't really work. JG Jones' artwork has been excellent throughout, and the book has looked fantastic, but once again it's been a parade of hit and miss ideas which never gels into a working story. The root premise is fine - superhuman alien from a better world (at least in his view) crashes on Earth, has all his crewmates murdered, and understandably sets out to improve our world by making it a bit more like his. It's sort of an inverted Superman - instead of being an alien who comes to Earth as a child and picks up middle America's cultural values, Noh-Varr comes to Earth as a young adult and brings his values to Earth.

Great. Fine. Good starting point. But the series never does anything with it. Noh-Varr fights a villain who wants to exploit him - okay, but nothing to do with the premise. Noh-Varr fights Hexus the Living Corporation - nice story, good idea for a villain, but it places Noh-Varr in a generic superhero role and it's still nothing to do with the premise. Noh-Varr smashes up New York in a fit of petulance - okay, he's a wanker, now what about this world-changing thing that's meant to be the character's primary motivation? He keeps talking about, he keeps whining about it, but he never actually does a damn thing to achieve it.

In fact, other than vague comments from Noh-Varr that his world was a better place we're never even told very clearly what kind of a world he wants to create. Presumably Morrison is deliberately trying to keep this vague, since this issue has SHIELD telling us that Noh-Varr's society can't be translated into human concepts as anything more precise than "zen fascism", but it leaves Noh-Varr with nothing much to do than wander around making unsupported claims about how his world's better, make all-purpose condemnations of bits of western culture that Morrison doesn't like, and generally look like a petulant little prick.

In some of his interviews, Morrison said that the idea of this book was to make Noh-Varr the ultimate power fantasy. The book fails on that level. It fails because for Noh-Varr to work as a power fantasy, we have to identify with him, and we don't. His personality is thinly established, and he's an almost totally unsympathetic character. We can empathise when he's mourning the loss of his crew, to be sure, but in all his reactions to these situations he just comes across as the sort of ranting idiot you make efforts to avoid at parties. Oubliette, the villain's psychologically abused daughter, has some kind of sympathy going for her on that level, but pretty much blows it by buying wholeheartedly into Noh-Varr's supposed campaign to remake civilisation for no apparent reason whatsoever.

Morrison seems at least semi-aware of this - even he wouldn't describe Noh-Varr's culture as "zen fascism" if he was trying to get us to embrace it without reservations - but that leaves the question of what on earth he's trying to do here. A load of thinly sketched and rather unlikeable characters run around talking about vaguely described aims that they never seem to take any steps to achieve. What's the point? Who am I meant to be rooting for here? If I'm not meant to like any of the characters, what exactly am I meant to be taking from this?

The ideas are fine, but they really need to be anchored to a stronger storyline in order to work as a piece of fiction. For all the flash, this is really just a series of events, and it doesn't work as a story.

Obviously, my main worry about Morrison on the X-Men is that we might get the same problems emerging there. I'm hoping that Casey will balance that out, since he's a bit more disciplined about these things. And of course, if he wants to, Morrison can do it himself; he's done so in the past. Morrison's ideas are always interesting and different, but that's not enough. The ideas would come across all the more strongly if they were attached to a story that worked.

Also coming to an end this week is SENTRY VS THE VOID, a one-shot which is essentially Sentry #6 (and I can't for the life of me work out why it hasn't just been solicited as such).

If you haven't been reading this series, the trade paperback will be well worth hunting down. This final issue will work fine if you're reading the series in one go, but taken on its own, it's a bit of an anticlimax.

The problem, I think, is that the book has pretty much shot its bolt by this point. Mysterious atmospherics? Done that. Explanation of whether the Sentry's a real character or not? Yup, all completed. Character analysis of how the Sentry feels about nobody remembering him? Filled a couple of issues already. Exploration of how he fitted into the Marvel Universe, to the general effect of establishing him as an iconic Silver Age hero and linking the Void with the growth of darkness and angst in later years of the superhero genre? Four one-shots devoted to it, mate.

That leaves this issue with the job of resolving the plot. Nominally, the story reveals that the Sentry and the Void are one and the same, but frankly, that was obvious to most people from the word go. And the plot is resolved by disposing of the Sentry in exactly the same way as before (ie, removing him from memory), which boils down to hitting the cosmic reset button and standing well back.

All of which is fine in the context of the series as a whole, since it's not really about plot, it's about the atmosphere and about the Sentry and the Void as symbols of elements of the superhero genre. But since this issue in isolation is charged mainly with resolving the plot, the weakness of the ending stands out as more of a problem. It's a shame the book didn't hold more of its revelations back till this point (or, if you prefer, avoid telegraphing the Sentry/Void relationship so glaringly), since the book would have been all the stronger for it.

But when you're reading the trade paperback as a whole, that won't be a problem. The presence of four one-shots treading much the same ground and taking up almost half the book's running length might be, but that's a different matter. It's still a strong miniseries, which the usual excellent art by Jae Lee and colourist Jose Villarrubia. The series as a whole is the sort of thing I'd like to see more of; just a shame the ending doesn't quite live up to the promise.