4 november 2001

THE BROTHERHOOD has, until now, been merely a bit mediocre. Fortunately, for me at least, it now seems to have abandoned this wishy-washy middle ground and committed itself to being outright bad. This may not make it any more entertaining to read, but it certainly makes it a damn sight easier to review. So many more targets.

Last issue, you may recall, a bunch of jumped up goths chased another jumped up goth through London and eventually caught her. This issue, the goth terrorists set about beating her up in generic fashion and then - I'm not making this up - locking her in a coffin. While doing this, they deliver top quality dialogue such as "I'll suck your body dry of every bit of its life-giving moisture." Dear god, no! Not it's life-giving moisture!

The story proceeds clumsily onwards in, at the very least, true Mackiavellian style. There's a basically nice Brotherhood member who treats his hostage well and takes her off to show her the nasty things her family have been doing. Again, the dialogue says it all - "All I wanted to do was open your eyes - help you to see that you have options, that you don't have to be bystander in life. [sic] But it's my eyes that have been opened. You who've helped me to see." Very poor indeed.

But this is as nothing compared to Marshal, the grim government agent hunting the Brotherhood, straight from the Realm of Cliche to the printed page. Having captured Bela, the Brotherhood member who is slightly more goth than the others, Marshal puts him on a giant treadmill with a squashing device on it and makes him run. This is presumably supposed to be a dark and sinister death trap. In fact, it looks like the sort of thing Adam West used to spend an awful lot of time on in cliffhanger endings. It's absolutely hilarious, all the more so for being so convinced that it's dark and moody.

Gleefully poor stuff, it's tempting to say that this is a waste of Leonardo Manco - but then, the goth obsession and the saminess of the characters is quite likely something that stems from him. It's not as jawdroppingly awful as Mutant X was - to pick a series completely at random - but there are some hilarious so-bad-its-good moments in this book.

Entertaining, but not for the intended reasons.

NEW X-MEN leaves Cassandra Nova aside for the moment to set off on the Germ Free Generation storyline. It looks like this one is going to introduce the new Angel, and focus on the U-Men from the 2001 annual.

The U-Men are an interesting idea that isn't quite clicking. The basic concept - that they're ordinary humans who aspire to being superhuman and are prepared to do rather questionable things to achieve that goal - is perfectly good. There's a lot of story potential in there because it's an intriguing motivation for them to have.

The difficulty is that all of that potential is being overshadowed by making them so unequivocally evil. The U-Men's plan is to kidnap and slice up mutants for body parts. The logic of this is a little questionable to start with - why slice up and dehumanise mutants if that's what they aspire to become - but explicable on the grounds of jealousy. The difficulty is in making them so utterly unrepentant about the whole thing. They're so totally unsympathetic that the underlying concept doesn't come through as clearly as it could have. They're still effective villains, but the potential in the concept is being smothered a bit.

Still, there's a lot of very good material in here. The opening scene, in which a typical geek U-Man explains why he has just murdered a fellow pupil, is a neat reversal of the convention that we're always meant to sympathise with the underdog nerds against the jocks. Emma's telepathic dismissal of the crowd at the gate is a lovely scene, and the idea of Magneto as a Che Guevara-like posthumous icon is a nice touch (even if his death was, in all honesty, a bit underwhelming).

Ethan van Sciver's artwork is generally impressive. The diamond effect on Emma Frost doesn't quite work, looking swirly rather than hard edged, but other than that it's a good looking issue. The new Angel's flight from the U-Men, blundering into some overhead power lines, comes across well.

The U-Men need a bit of tweaking to make them less one dimensional, but even so, it's another good issue.

Frank Tieri's last few issues of Deadpool haven't been bad, but he's still struggling to hit the mark with WOLVERINE. After two issues of pointless fight scenes with obscure microvillains, the Blood Sport storyline suddenly takes a 90 degree swerve and turns into an Ogun story. Quite what this is meant to have to do with the first two issues of the storyline is a bit of a mystery.

It's yet another iteration of Wolverine fighting his evil mentor, and Wolverine wins in rather predictable fashion. The story seems more like an excuse to get rid of some unwanted hangovers from previous writers, as Tieri resolves the Ogun storyline from the Larry Hama run of a few years ago, as if anyone much still cared. Moreover, in a very sensible move, Tieri disentangles Wolverine from the Viper by giving him the negotiating leverage to force her into agreeing a divorce. It's clunkily executed, but getting rid of that piece of continuity baggage is entirely welcome - it never added a thing to the book, and just gave Wolverine a confusing marital status which did nobody any favours.

The overall impression is that even Tieri didn't find these plot points particularly interesting, which is why he spent the first two thirds of his storyline dealing with something else altogether. I share this lack of interest in the story.

Dan Fraga's art is passable but unexceptional, marred largely by the very odd looking hairstyle his Wolverine sports. He also seems to have modelled his Viper on Lara Croft, which really doesn't work at all.

Mediocre, all told.

X-MEN UNLIMITED continues its crusade to persuade us that there is some point to its existence, with predictably patchy results.

This issue contains six short stories about X-Men villains, although that billing does involve a hefty emphasis on the "short." John Ostrander and Sean Phillips contribute three pages of a shipwrecked man blundering through the forest, finding Magneto, and running away. That's it. In its entirety. It doesn't even make Magneto look particularly intimidating, so it can't really be said to succeed on its own terms. Buddy Scalea and Mike Collins' one page Sabretooth joke "Lucky Day" is more successful, since it makes its point and winds up in nine panels - about what the joke will bear.

Three of the other stories are written by Will Pfeifer, who was partly responsible for last issue's overlong Dazzler joke. This issue's material is a definite improvement, but still not quite on the mark. "Special Attraction" is about two sideshow operators of the sort that I can't quite believe still exist putting a Sentinel on display without realising what it is or how dangerous it is. I have a little difficulty with the underlying premise that the Sentinels, who have publicly attacked New York on numerous occasions, whose invention was announced in a televised press conference, and which are rather distinctive looking thirty-foot-high robots, would not be instantly recognisable to the sideshow operators and their audience. The story seems to want to take place in a world where the Sentinels exist but the general public have never heard of them, the sort of pick-and-choose approach to continuity that simply doesn't work. You can't gloss over something that fundamental.

"The Sport of Queens" is a moderately amusing piece with Emma Frost and Selene, in their Hellfire Club days, competing for the attention of a Hellfire Club soldier just to prove they can get him. Somebody has decided it would be very clever to colour the thing in black and white aside from the lead characters' lips, which isn't half as effective as they probably hoped. Pfeifer does do a very good job at getting over the idea of the Hellfire Club as the secret power behind the throne who rule the world by influence, an idea which really hasn't come across in their stories in years. On the other hand, I just can't buy into the idea that Emma or Selene, as previously written by anyone, would waste their time on this kind of bet. And given that the entire premise of the story needs me to buy into that idea, we have another problem.

"The Grand Illusion" is a Mastermind story tying into the Dark Phoenix Saga and showing us the nasty illusions Mastermind had to put up with after Phoenix messed about with his mind. Once again, there's a glaring pick-and-choose attitude to the continuity here. Pfeifer wants to play off the scene of Phoenix trapping Mastermind in illusions, and yet disregard the fact that the original story spent half a page showing Mastermind being exposed to the cosmic glory of the universe, which isn't anything remotely like the hallucinations Pfeifer gives the character here.

There is no point in invoking past continuity unless you're going to do it properly. Take it as you find it, or just don't bother using it. Preferably, don't bother using it. This scene was much more effective first time round when the nature of Mastermind's hallucinations was left to the reader's imagination. Incidentally, this story is hopelessly lacking in any sort of context that might enable newer readers to work out what's going on. The story it's tying into is some twenty years old, for heaven's sake.

This is the second issue running that Pfeifer has warmed over somebody else's story in thoroughly underwhelming fashion. Am I really supposed to find this impressive?

Steven Grant and Sean Phillips do the lead story, featuring the Blob. The Blob is irritated by some people and does his usual routine on them. A rather old joke is used to tie up the sequence. It's actually not bad, but like everything else here, it's the sort of mildly amusing throwaway that works nicely as a back-up strip to something more substantial. Six of the bloody things with no lead story just feels hollow.

BLOODSTONE is written by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, the writers who brought you the X-Men: Magik miniseries and would probably prefer that I didn't remind you about that.

I don't watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and no, that is not an invitation for you to e-mail me and tell me that I should), but it's still readily obvious that Abnett and Lanning are aiming for that kind of concept. Sassy blonde teenage girl inherits hereditary role as monster-fighter in a story which is vaguely tongue in cheek without going too far in that direction. On the front cover, our heroine helpfully displays her arse and demonstrates in profile the sort of nipple that will a small child's eye out if she isn't careful. The actual story is much more restrained on that kind of thing, leaving the cover looking even more amazingly stupid in comparison.

This is desperately formulaic stuff, although it does have a certain undeniable charm to it, and at least it has the sense to mock its own cliches. But being somebody who could never be bothered with Buffy, seemingly the acknowledged leader of its genre, I'm not much impressed by this either. It's inoffensively amusing. Some people seem to have really liked it, so it's likely just my antipathy to the genre showing through.

Incidentally, this character is the retroactively inserted daughter of obscure monster hunter Ulysses Bloodstone, the sort of obscure character who turns up only in stories by Roger Stern. The character has not aged terribly well, and while the protagonist accurately mocks his appearance as the Bee Gees crossed with Fabio, the name is also hideously dated. If you were creating a monster- hunter character nowadays, you would probably name them Mr Bloodstone, because it's a really shit name. I'm not entirely convinced that playing off this obscure Marvel character is doing anything much to help this book, other than saddling the protagonist with a terrible, terrible name. Maybe some Bloodstone-specific plot point will come along later on, but still, it's hopelessly corny.

Reasonable enough but nothing out of the ordinary.

TROUT is a two-part miniseries from Troy Nixey, and by god it's bizarre.

The silent, withdrawn and inscrutably weird child Trout lives above his father's turnip factory. He's either mute or he talks in empty speech balloons to symbolise inaudibility; I'm not quite sure which it's meant to be. A strange and sinister sideshow comes to town and bewitches all the children. That night, they all stagger off in hypnotic response to the sideshow's music.

Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, hold on, this is a shameless rip-off of the Pied Piper of Hamlyn with some weirdness about mutes and turnip factories thrown in. And yes, granted, if you just look at the plot then I can see where you'd be coming from with that.

However, the issue has a wonderful quality of dark surrealism to it. The plot is really just a vehicle for Nixey to hang an off-kilter sense of menace on, and on that level it works fine. The weirdness comes across as unsettling rather than gratuitous, giving the story a dream-like quality where the insanity appears to have its own fully functioning internal logic. Even if it's impossible to fully fathom what that logic might be.

Impressive work, and another excellent choice from the ever reliable Oni Press.