5 march 2000

Time to review MUTANT X again. Do I have to, mum?

Hold on. No, I don't have to, do I? This is my column. I can review what the hell I want. So let me make this clear: until such time as Mutant X stops being boring, or at least starts to be boring in a way which is interesting to review, I'm not going to review it any more. Every month it's a variation on the same review because every month it's banal and bad in the same way.

This is your standard Mutant X review. Don't bother writing it down, I'm just going to cut-and-paste it in as a capsule review for every issue of this title until I regain interest. Yes, so predictable is this title that I can review it in advance.

"Once again, Howard Mackie has some potentially interesting ideas but fails to explore them properly. But the plot is riddled with holes and yet again the book fails to make proper use of its alternate universe concept by slavishly following established X-Men conventions where it could have taken a completely different slant on the mutant concept. Cary Nord's art is again the best thing about the issue/Guest artist Insert Name Here is wasted on this rubbish [delete as appropriate]. C"

This issue, specifically, we have a potentially interesting variation on the Horsemen of Apocalypse who will, given the book's track record, undoubtedly be killed off before any of the potential can be used. We have a plot that hinges on the heroes just happening to be in the area (and choosing an absurdly stupid place to be having their secret rendezvous to boot). And after reading issue after issue of bloody Apocalypse in the mainstream titles, we have an Apocalypse story. Just what I wanted! Another sodding Apocalypse story!

The hopeless lack of inspiration! The inane plot construction! The sheer grinding tedium of reviewing the bloody thing! No more of it. I will take no more of it. Until such time as the title becomes interesting to write about (which doesn't necessarily mean "good" - "interestingly bad" would do), this is going down in the capsule reviews where it belongs.

God, that's a weight off my shoulders. Right, on to real stories.

UNCANNY X-MEN ties up the High Evolutionary three-parter. When I commented on the last part that I wasn't 100% convinced that Claremont was writing it, somebody e-mailed me to point out that it had a typical Claremont plot construction: an interesting moral conundrum is raised, but then it turns out that something very nasty is going to happen, making one side automatically right while avoiding the need to actually address the issue raised. (See also X-Men/Alpha Flight for a particularly good example.)

Peculiarly Claremont? I'm not convinced about that. It is, nonetheless, an excellent analysis of what's not quite right with this story. It starts off with the Evolutionary deleting everyone's powers and giving a reasonably good argument for doing so. This raises lots of interesting possibilities about how the X-Men might deal with it, which to be fair we saw addressed in the previous issue. But the story dodges out on the possibility of admitting the Evolutionary has a point by then bringing in the thematically-unrelated stuff about Sinister hijacking the No Powers Ray and using it for a nasty experiment. The X-Men defeat Sinister, and the Evolutionary destroys his equipment, having somehow been convinced by this unrelated turn of events that it was a bad idea all along.

So if you're looking for a proper resolution of the storyline's themes, forget it. In fairness, the themes aren't totally glossed over - we have the X-Men admitting that they have an ulterior motive for going to stop the Evolutionary, and we do have the subplots in Genosha to remind us that the Evolutionary may have had a point. But this is basically a fight scene.

And judged as a fight scene... it's okay. We do get a decent explanation of how the X-Men can still be any kind of worthwhile offensive force in the circumstances, which is a plus. On the other hand, Sinister is back to being a cretin. The big plot twist is that now they're on the satellite, their powers come back. And Sinister hasn't thought of this. Well, why the hell not? He's conducting a worldwide experiment with this junk and he doesn't know whether he's standing in the line of fire? Bollocks, flagrant bollocks, and an annoying way to end the story.

Still, even allowing for all this, I did quite like the issue. There's an excellent subplot about Mystique feeling abandoned. It's got decent artwork from the regular fill-in artist Tom Raney (god, what has comics art come to when the concept of the "regular fill-in artist" has arrived?), and it's got some nice character moments. But it's also got real plot problems and it doesn't really address any of the things this storyline is meant to be about. Which is a shame.

X-FORCE is between creative teams this month, so we get an Adam Pollina cover (always a plus) and a fill-in story by Joe and Steven Harris tying into the High Evolutionary storyline. And actually bothering to address some of the themes of the story, which is nice.

This is the second time Joe Harris has written an X-books fill-in story about a team member helping out a bullied child who isn't very grateful about it. The first one was X-Factor #147 (July 1998), in which Shard met a child also by some strange quirk of fate called Kevin. This is a different young blond heroine and a different bullied child called Kevin, and it's a different story (the last one was the kid turning on Shard after discovering that she was a mutant), but there's a nagging familiarity to it.

Nonetheless, this is still far and away the best X-book of the week, if only by virtue of taking a completely different approach to the whole mutant concept. (See, Howard? It CAN be done!) Yes, we've got the old staple of the mutant kid being picked on because he's weird, but this time we've also got him trying to win over the crowd by performing for them with his powers. Nice simple powers - basic flight. And of course, since he's trying to demonstrate his power of flight without actually having it, Kevin's going to (a) humiliate and (b) kill himself.

Meltdown's contribution to this story is to try and talk some sense into the kid and generally to play the straight man in his story. It's a role that pretty much any of the team could have played, but Harris gets the character pretty well. Throw in some clean, straightforward artwork from Steven Harris and the net effect is pretty good. Sure, it's not particularly original, but it's an endearing downbeat story that actually takes the whole no-powers concept somewhere.

Chynna Clugston-Major loves her record collection very much. And she'd like to tell you about it.

According to the letters page, BLUE MONDAY is "a teenage dramedy." Not quite sure I'd agree with them on that. So far, this looks to me like a pure comedy. With lots of references to Chynna's beloved record collection.

It's a three-issue mini, and the first issue's plot is basically "group of girls and group of boys play teenage-type practical jokes on one another for 24 pages." Which is fine. The book has a quirky tone because the writer/artist has decided to indulge her Britpop fetish by setting the book a few years in the past and sticking in as many mod references as plot logic will bear. And just to confuse matters further, the British-tinged American high school comedy is drawn under a heavy manga influence.

So, uh, we've got a bunch of British indie girls locked in practical joke combat with half of Blur circa five years ago and looking like they were drawn in Tokyo. Weird. Downright weird.

Yet strangely charming. Although it's all desperately adolescent and inconsequential, and has a distinct quality of teenage years being romanticised in retrospect, there's something rather sweet about the characters' squabbling that makes the book an entertaining if lightweight read. And Chynna Clugston-Major (is that REALLY her name?) is a talented cartoonist with a nice line in silly exaggeration.

In a healthy market, Blue Monday would do quite nicely, thanks, playing to an audience of sitcom fans. We don't have a healthy market, of course, but hopefully the book will still manage to carve out its niche, since a few more titles like this certainly would be a good thing.