4 march 2001

So far the Ultimate line has been doing rather well, but ULTIMATE MARVEL TEAM-UP seems a bizarre choice for the third book. For one thing, Marvel Team-Up has never struck me as a very good idea for a series in the first place, pretty much guaranteeing that every issue is going to hinge around an unlikely plot contrivance bringing two characters together. For another, in a line comprised of only three titles, do we really need two Spider-Man books? And given that the last attempt to relaunch Marvel Team-Up crashed and burned in less than a year, is there really that much interest in the concept?

The logic is presumably to do a tour of the Marvel Universe and thereby quickly fill out the Ultimate universe with versions of other major characters. Since most of these characters are going to be making their debuts here, that suggests that the book is going to spend at least its first couple of years as something closer to Ultimate Origin Stories with Spider-Man shoehorned in. Given the relatively creator-driven approach of the Ultimate line to date, I'm not sure it's such a good idea to have one book going around establishing ground rules for all the major characters before any other writers get near them, but time will tell on that one.

For the moment, Ultimate Marvel Team-Up doesn't have to address those problems, since it starts off by linking together the two existing Ultimate books and teaming Spider-Man with Wolverine. Of course, that gives rise to a whole raft of other problems. The X-Men have always sat rather uneasily in a shared universe, for a variety of reasons. The book doesn't really want to play with the Avengers or the Fantastic Four; it wants to go off and do world-changing stories about evolution, and it has a premise that would work much more smoothly if the only superhumans were mutants. It's a regularly asked question why the Marvel Universe public seem to like the Avengers but hate the mutants, when there's no apparent way for them to tell the difference. The answer is that it doesn't make any sense, but you have to gloss over that problem in order to get them into a shared universe.

That problem is vastly magnified in the Ultimate universe, where the ever-subtle Mark Millar has the US government sending giant robots out to attack US citizens in public with a blatant disregard for public safety, all the time being cheered on by mutant-hating crowds. By pitching itself at that kind of level, Ultimate X-Men has effectively set itself in a fascist USA, and it's simply impossible to credibly reconcile that book's setting with Ultimate Spider-Man's. This is a problem that can be lived with as long as the two books stay apart, but when you bring them together, a horrible grinding of gears can be heard a mile away.

The focal point of this issue is how Spider-Man reacts to Wolverine and how he deals with his own feelings about mutants. Brian Michael Bendis takes the rational approach and has the anti-mutant lynch mob react to Spider-Man as a mutant as well, but that just leaves me wondering quite why Spider-Man is bothered about whether he's a mutant or not. If he gets lynched either way, then what difference does it make? Wolverine's a character who can do other things than simply play the X-Men anti-mutant routine, and played in that way a crossover between the two could have worked; but Bendis has effectively written this story as Spider-Man meeting the X-Men's premise. I simply can't accept those two series co-existing; it strains the suspension of disbelief too far because it makes no sense.

Bendis does the routines you'd expect with the rookie hero and the experienced Wolverine, and given its shaky premise the story's well constructed, with solid artwork from Matt Wagner. But I just can't buy into the premise of this story, and so it all rings hollow to me.

Back in the mainstream continuity, WOLVERINE concludes its three- part Mr X storyline, which irritatingly turns out to be a trailer for future stories involving the villain.

The plot: Wolverine has been defeated by the unnamed serial killer, who tries to get him to sign a document renouncing any claim to the title "the best there is", and gives us a lengthy rendition of his origin story. Wolverine escapes and fights back. The villain escapes, making the usual noises about how he will return in future. Not if anyone other than Tieri's writing the book, I suspect.

The problem with serial killers is that they're not very interesting people. "Why do they kill people" sounds like it ought to be an interesting question, but in practice the answer is always "Because they're mentally ill." It's hardly a dazzling revelation that mentally ill people do irrational things, and when you get to that point there's little more to be said. Serial killers are a handy plot device for the heroes to react to, but when you shove them centre stage and try to do a character issue with them, most writers just don't have the ability to make them interesting.

Tieri attempts to liven the character up by giving him his irrational obsession with being the best in the world. Obviously this is an attempt to make the character a specifically Wolverine villain, but it's not enough to make him work. Playing off the character's catchphrase in that way is just too stilted. This wasn't all that great a gimmick when they did it in the seventies with Imus Champion, and welding it onto a serial killer character doesn't make it any better.

Compare Sabretooth, a serial killer who's interesting as a Wolverine villain because the characters actually have a history together. He's rather dull when fighting anyone else because he just does his normal routines of psychological sadism, but as a foil for Wolverine his history elevates him to better stories. The interest with Mr X is presumably meant to lie in whether he or Wolverine is actually "the best there is", which is to put it mildly a superficial understanding of what makes Wolverine a worthwhile protagonist.

Tieri has just spent three issues introducing this guy, and while there have been some nice black comedy moments in there, he's just not a strong enough character to merit an entire storyline (with no ending, at that) just to introduce him. The black comedy and ridiculous violence works as a tone for the book, but tone will only take you so far without a working plot underneath.

X-FORCE is onto the third part of the Rage War storyline (yes, they're running a month late). This is the most successful of the three Counter-X storylines, but unfortunately that success has come about mainly by going back to something rather more conventional.

This issue establishes Constantin Racal and his daughter Valentina as the morally lighter-grey Russians, and brings back Niles Ronan (the villain from the first Counter-X arc) as the real villain. This does, if nothing else, justify the obvious similarity between this storyline and the first one. Even so, the book seems to be playing safe; our heroes are signed up by SHIELD and packed off to defeat the nasty foreign government project in a deniable way. For the most part this is fairly conventional material. There's a couple of imaginative ideas (the exponential cloning of the sleeper agents, based on the fact that females are born with a lifetime's supply of eggs, is a nice touch), but overall we're in formula territory.

Substitute artist Jorge Lucas is looking rather inconsistent this issue, with the artwork getting increasingly sketchy as the story goes on. The briefing scene with SHIELD looks particularly rushed, although the closing two pages are more like it. It's somewhat surprising that on a book that's running a month behind schedule, Marvel have hired an artist who's inking his own pencils, and the deadlines don't seem to be doing him any favours.

It works, but it works as a normal 1990s superhero story. Which surely wasn't the idea.

X-MEN FOREVER #4 concludes the backwards trip in time, with two issues still to go. As we're heading further back, we've now got to the point where the two actual X-Men in this book are too young to make much of a difference one way or the other, leaving this book up to the villains.

Specifically, this is the Toad and the Juggernaut's opportunity to take an issue for themselves. The Juggernaut hasn't been doing a great deal in his jumps through time so far. That's the point, of course - to illustrate just how little this character has actually achieved with his supposedly enormous power.

The Toad is a somewhat more complicated matter, and the approach here has been to take the current version of the character back through his life so that he can wonder what the hell he was thinking of, putting up with the treatment he was getting for all these years. The Toad's treatment by Magneto has always seemed curious, even by the standards of the Silver Age character. As somebody supposedly interested in mutant rights, it seems decidedly strange for Magneto to dress the Toad as a jester, but that's what he did. Forcing the Toad to address this absurdity head on makes for some good material.

The main criticism this series has been received is that it's taking an awfully long time for the point to become apparent. Since the characters don't really know what they're trying to achieve, there's a danger of the various jumps being seen as disconnected sequences without much of a narrative flow. For the most part, the themes of mutants and their potential have remained prominent, but there do seem to be a couple of weird choices for jumps the significance of which is not really evident to me. I'm really not sure why Mystique's escape from HYDRA is in here, for example, since it neither seems to further the plot nor the themes.

However, the final explanation of what the hell was going on in Alamagordo (a storyline that Nicieza kicked off during his run on X-Men a decade ago) does further the plot, and the series raises the more or less unexplained question of why the Celestials bothered to create mutants in the first place. For years that storyline has basically been left to sit there on the justification that the Celestials are awfully enigmatic and don't need to be explained, but from the X-books' point of view, some rationale for the Celestials' actions would be a help.

I'm deliberately not rating this book (since I'm biased, having done some of the continuity checking), but I'm still enjoying it a lot. With the upcoming X-Men relaunch likely to see an end to reliance on past continuity, if nothing else it's good to see some of these points being properly visited before we bid them farewell.

GIRL GENIUS is a new book self-published by Phil Foglio. There was apparently a preview of some sort out last week, but I haven't read it. It's a fantasy book which looks at first sight as though it's aiming to appeal to kids. On a closer look, though, the sense of humour is a bit more warped than that.

The setting here is one of those worlds which looks more or less medieval but has all kinds of anomalous clockwork machinery lying around. Our heroine is a science student who's basically a lab assistant in this issue, but judging from the title will presumably be demonstrating some kind of genius in future issues. She's not really called upon to do so here; the emphasis is more on establishing her character as a likeable underdog.

This is generally a pretty upbeat book, but there's enough oddity around to make it more than it first seems. The city appears to be in the habit of punishing convicts by leaving them in giant glass belljars to starve in public - something thrown in here as a background detail, but lending a bit more edge to the society. There's also a very funny back-up feature solemnly detailing the scientists' hopelessly inept attempt to develop a means of transport to the Americas. ("Attempt 5: Catapult.")

There's also some excellent material with the scientists rebelling against the city's ruler dumping them with a completely pointless task as the sort of test that keeps cropping up in stories of this point. It's kind of a genre piece, but it's evidently not going to stick too closely to the rules, which is always a good thing.

I wasn't really expecting to like this book - I was assuming it was going to be a kids' book and to be honest, I only picked it up as part of my attempt to get a bit more diversity into the reivews. But it's great stuff, suitable for kids but definitely with wider appeal than that. Well worth a look.

Daredevil #15 and GREEN ARROW #1 in one week? Dear god. At this rate the 1963 Annual will be out next.

As somebody who got into superhero comics by the Marvel route, I've never had the faintest interest in Green Arrow. I'm only buying this book out of interest in the creators. What Kevin Smith has delivered is, for people like me, a rather curious read.

As we start off, Green Arrow is dead. Other than a single panel flashback to an explosion, Smith doesn't choose to share with us how or why he died, or how long ago this is supposed to have happened. We get reminiscences about the character from three supporting cast members - his former sidekick, his former girlfriend and his son. None of them are named. I recognise them from my vague knowledge of the DC universe (at least, I'm assuming the ex-girlfriend is Black Canary), but the story itself discloses nothing.

Now, this is such an elementary departure from basic storytelling principles that I'm assuming it must be a deliberate decision. Presumably the idea is to leave them identified only by their relationship to the title character and thereby put the emphasis on that rather than on the supporting cast members themselves. But since two of these characters give us chunks of their life history, it seems curious to withhold basic stuff like their names. And readers unfamiliar with the DC Universe may be understandably bemused by the opening sequence, a conversation between Batman and Superman evidently set during the Final Night crossover, which is not really explained.

It's not that you can't follow it. You can, quite easily, since the story does get over the important information about the title character that it's trying to convey. But missing out such basic information just has a distancing effect that I doubt was intended. Especially since the Canary has a completely different appearance in her flashback, making it a rather confusing sequence until you realise it's meant to be the same character.

Still, the story does achieve the purpose of establishing its lead character as somebody who would be interesting to read about. Phil Hester's art isn't entirely to my taste, but it tells the story well enough. It does enough to hold my interest for future episodes, and it's nice to see a first issue concentrating on something other than an origin flashback. Even so, given that this is a project that you'd have thought was likely to bring some new readers to the character, it seems odd that the book is so clearly targetted at readers who have some kind of familiarity with him.