4 April 1999

X-FORCE #90 ties up the Hellions storyline, and I suppose I may as well get the obvious point out the way first. This storyline was promoted as a big, direction-changing event that would cause major ructions in the roster. Siryn losing her voice does not, to my mind, constitute a major ruction in the roster. Oh, it's a major plot point, yes, but to be honest I'd been expecting a little more.

But still, it's not exactly fair to review a book according to the solicitations (which increasingly seem to be on a slightly different planet to the actual books anyway), so let's leave that aside for the moment. Judged as the climax to the story, it's very good. Plenty of action, strong characterisation, and the Hellions - a very good bunch of villains indeed - are left in a good useable state for the next plotline, albeit minus a couple of members.

The Armageddon Man, not surprisingly, turns out not really to be a character at all, so much as a plot device on legs. Perhaps this could have done with a bit of work, actually, since the scene at the end where the team reluctantly hand him back over to the government - recognising that they just don't have the resources to help him - would have been more powerful if the character had shown a few flickers of personality. It's a good scene as it is, but it's difficult to get too worked up about a character who doesn't really do anything but blunder around and look blank.

Back to Siryn, I suppose. The first thing that strikes me about this - and I'm be willing to bet it was pretty high up the list for most readers - is "hold on, didn't we have this with the Banshee fifteen years ago?" Power loss stories are a staple, of course, but father AND daughter? Siryn's a character who took years to emerge from the Banshee's shadow in the first place, and I'm not entirely happy to see her embarking on what looks like a retread of her father's plot.

Of course, there's an additional element here, since quite aside from losing her powers, it's also suggested that she's now going to be entirely mute. This is decidedly more interesting, although hopefully it won't lead to her being entirely sidelined, since there's plenty of good material to be had with this. Still, Moore is going to have to play this one carefully - it has the potential to topple over into a retread of the old Banshee story on the one hand, and disease of the week melodrama on the other. But it's got plenty of potential to be more than that.

The strength of this title is in the characterisation, and the way in which Moore has managed to retain each character's individuality in the last few months of big fight scenes - which can so easily degenerate into two groups of pretty indistinguishable people punching one another - has been impressive. The obvious trend here has been that Dani seems at long last to be re-emerging as the team leader. If we're lucky, we might even be about to go back to the co-leader days of Sam and Dani from New Mutants, a relationship that hasn't been explored very much lately. If Siryn gets sidelined - and some excuse can be found to get rid of Domino, who no longer really seems to belong in this book - then Sam and Dani could make ideal co-leaders for the team.

It goes without saying that after suffering through six tedious bloody months of Wolverine in space, I approached NOVA with a little trepidation. After all, it was by Erik Larsen. It also has another major problem, which is that Nova's in it.

Nova is rather optimistically billed on the front cover as "The ULTIMATE superhero!", which strikes me as pushing it just a bit. With his powers of flight, enhanced strength and such forth, Nova is pretty much the most generic superhero you can imagine. I've never been entirely keen on that costume either, which is going alright up until you reach a helmet that seems to have been constructed with a yellow bucket, a piece of red cardboard and a Prittstick.

But forget all that stuff. Nova is a very pleasant surprise. It's almost unfathomable how the writer responsible for Wolverine in space can have written this - a story with plenty of things happening, quality comic relief scenes and good characterisation. It's not flawless, but it's certainly way up into the area where I'm prepared to turn a blind eye to the flaws and recommend it.

Larsen's approach to the problem of Nova being, let's face it, a third rate loser is probably what makes this book. Rather than try to gloss over Nova's decided crapness, he meets it head on. Nova IS a third rate superhero, and he's rather annoyed about it. This isn't to say Larsen's taking the piss out of the character - he isn't. Nova's certainly got the power, he's not incompetent, he's just the superhero equivalent of a really, really minor celebrity.

So we get several very funny sequences of Nova desperately racing to fight top quality supervillains, only to be continually beaten to the punch by far more famous superheroes who just don't need the help. Finally reduced to trying to beat up a second-rate Daredevil villain, he gets there first only to find that it's the wrong man, and he's actually stumbled across a bank raid by the Grinder. (Who fought Spider-Woman during the Carter administration and hasn't been seen since.) It's all beautifully timed.

In contrast to this, though, Larsen also takes pains to establish that dammit, Nova DOES have some cool powers, and in comparison to his pretty much normal social life and friends, he starts to look far credible. That's the basic approach here - contrasted against his own supporting cast, Nova looks damned impressive and credible. The moment he stumbles out into the wider Marvel Universe and meets real superheroes, he's embarrassingly marginal. Which of course he is. I love it, I really do.

Nova's supporting cast also allow a chance to diverge from the usual formula of hero with dual identity struggling with personal problems and supervillains. That's because Nova's friends all know he's Nova. Because he told them. With this set-up, the book is able to get away from the rather tired cliches that tend to come with a secret identity and head off in its own direction. What we get instead is Nova as a student, sharing a student flat with two friends who know about his powers, and flipping burgers in the evenings to pay the rent.

Pretty obviously this is an attempt to position Nova as the Hero Who Could Be You. That used to be Spider-Man, of course, but Spider-Man's pretty much vacated that territory and buggered off to live in a penthouse of melodrama. This is Spider-Man's natural role, but if the Spider-Man books aren't interested, why not give Nova a try? He's far better suited to the job these days.

Joe Bennett's artwork is generally excellent, although the splash page introducing Jennifer Smith is too blatant in trying to establish that she's Very Beautiful - don't artists have any way of conveying that these days short of big tits and a short skirt? But in fairness, many of the other female characters actually do look human, and Bennett's artwork is generally good solid stuff, telling the story perfectly.

Criticisms... well, there's a subplot scene with Namorita where Nova's actions seem a little too forced. There's nothing wrong with the idea, but it seems to have been crushed into too small a space, leaving it seeming artificial. The plot with Nebula is really little more than a big fight followed by the villain running away, though it does serve its function of setting up Nebula for future stories. And I can live without Nova's dreadful old catchphrase "Blue blazes!", which may conceivably not have been crap 25 years ago, but certainly is today.

Hmm. I seem to have droned on about this book at far greater length than I planned. Oh, never mind. The important thing is, this is a thoroughly entertaining comic, with the good points far outweighing the bad. Everything that is wrong with Larsen's Wolverine is right here (which just raises the question, what the hell is going wrong with Wolverine - but that's for another review). It's a funny book with its own distinctive style, and you should all give it a try.