5 May 2002

I am not in a good mood. It's all very well to say that ITV Digital boxes still allow you to watch free-to-air stations, but for god's sake, who actually watches BBC Parliament?

Mind you, at least I'm forcibly spared more Hulk Hogan matches, where the main point of interest is seeing whether he can make it to the ring without dropping dead from a heart attack, or just plain old age. So the timing could be worse, I suppose.

I also own a Tivo. If only I had a Betamax video recorder, I could form some kind of triptych.

In any event, it's time to take a break from stamping my foot in impotent rage, and turn to this week's relatively light selection of X-books. And we kick off with EXILES, in the second half of its Weapon X two-parter.

This is not one of the stronger issues. It's not bad, but as with the first half of this storyline, it suffers from having an underdeveloped plot. The tension is meant to be that the Tallus is telling both the Exiles and Weapon X to kill David Richards, the kiddie they rescued last issue. I realise David is just a plot device to generate tension, but at least on paper, he's central to the plot - so why is he a non-speaking bit part? Can't he even get a couple of lines of dialogue to give him some kind of personality beyond "child"?

Still, the plot does serve its function of allowing the Exiles and Weapon X to fight (which they do, at length), and of letting the Exiles challenge the premise of the series by questioning whether they actually have to carry out the missions they're given in the first place. The most interesting aspect of this is the interplay between Blink and Sabretooth, who is given a largely sympathetic role in the story.

The pay-off, however, is unsatisfactory. Sabretooth announces his intention to stay behind on this world and take care of the kid, build an army and save the world. As you do. The powers that be then cheerfully announce that this will do fine, despite the fact that it wasn't the mission and so it ends up as the old routine where you set up a moral conflict and then avoid answering it by introducing Option 3 out of nowhere. In this case, Option 3 doesn't even make all that much sense in the context of the story.

Nonetheless, it's still a nicely told story, with the usual decent characterisation and strong artwork. Just a shame about the plot.

ULTIMATE X-MEN #11 is part two of the "World Tour" arc, which in practice turns out to mean a cover version of the Proteus storyline from the late 1970s.

The Proteus storyline is a fairly straightforward plot - kid escapes, causes havoc, X-Men must stop him - and it plays nicely to Millar's love of action set pieces. As usual with this book, the emphasis is firmly on the action rather than the characters, and Proteus is certainly some way short of two dimensional, but it's a decent enough issue taken on its own terms.

The art, however, is looking a little on the rushed side. There's some loose and sketchy work in the early pages, and Kubert seems to be going for the lowest common denominator school of scene-setting. Aberdeen seems to consist of one cottage; St Petersburg has six-foot snowdrifts. There's a difference between visual shorthand and drawing cliches, and this issue is a little too close to the latter.

Once again Millar takes the opportunity to revise some of the core concepts fairly noticeably. This time, Proteus is the child of Xavier and Moira MacTaggart, who was formerly married to him for fifteen years. A fairly glaring revisal, but for once one that makes sense in terms of streamlining everything. It gives Xavier and Moira a more clearly defined relationship, and effectively conflates Moira and Proteus with Gabrielle Haller and Legion. It's not like the world needs both, after all.

After telling us last issue that Land's End was in Scotland, this month Millar refers to the "A90 motorway." I'm starting to wonder whether Millar's really from this country after all.

Personally, I think this book pales in comparison to what Millar's doing on Ultimates, but then again, I'm interested in what he's trying to do on that book, and I'm not desperately interesting in reading the X-Men as a plot-light action book. For those who are, though, this will be another perfectly okay issue.

Pop quiz: who is the regular penciller on UNCANNY X-MEN?

In theory, I believe it's meant to be Ron Garney, but thus far he's drawn issues #401 and #402 and then appears to have disappeared off the face of the earth for four months. Maybe he's waiting for the Chuck Austen run to start.

In the meantime, Joe Casey is here to wind up the X-Corps storyline for the handful of people who are interested. Whatever point Casey was trying to make in this whole mess has never come across clearly. To the extent that any theme was discernible, it seemed to be that we ought to view the X-Corps as a controversial threat to mutant public relations. Much of this issue is devoted to the renegade X-Corps members trashing Paris (which, for the moment, is still questionable iconography deployed in the service of a non-plot), the point again being to let the X-Men wail about the damage to human-mutant relations.

But so what? What will happen as a result of this story? People won't like mutants? What, just like for the last thirty years? Why should I care? Despite public reaction supposedly being central to his story, Casey hasn't even shown us any public reaction - the only characters outside the X-Men and the X-Corps to be allowed to open their mouths are a generic anti-mutant terrorist group, who hardly count as mainstream. How can you do a story about public relations with no public? I haven't a clue, but Casey seems to have had a go anyway.

Even some of the fairly elementary plot points, clearly relevant to the story themes, have never been properly explained - such as, for example, what exactly was the X-Corps legal status? They kept blabbering about jurisdiction, which suggested some kind of official status and would have an obvious bearing on their public image, but the point was never properly addressed.

Sean's scheme is brought down by Mystique and Lady Mastermind, both firmly in "cackling evil villain" mode. Does anyone seriously care? Casey makes a belated attempt to rationalise the confusion over Lady Mastermind's continuity by explaining that there's actually two of her, and they're feuding half- sisters. There might, with a bit of effort, be a story in there somewhere (although initially, do you really care which of two cookie-cutter characters is the better heir to a villain who's been dead for a decade?). But it isn't this story, and aside from that brief flicker of personality, all we're left with is two villains who are doing evil because they're villains. Not desperately exciting.

Art comes from Aaron Lopresti (for the second time in four months), and it's perfectly competent fill-in art. Nothing wrong with it, nothing very exciting either.

This is not an offensively bad issue, but it is a mediocre one. If there was any particular point to the whole X-Corps storyline, then it's never been conveyed very well. If there wasn't, then why have we been reading it for the last five months? My money is on a misfired idea rather than five months of pointlessness, but does it really make much difference at the end of the day?

I have a feeling ATHENA INC may have come out last week, but I only got my copy this week, so here it is anyway.

This is Brian Haberlin's second Athena Inc miniseries, although I didn't read the first one. It's a sort of sci-fi espionage thing, and the premise is intriguing. An unidentified black ops agency has created the ultimate undercover agent - an artificial woman with two personalities, one of whom believes herself to be a completely normal person, and one of whom is your super-spy type. Once activated, she changes appearance totally. So it's the secret identity concept taken to the nth degree, where even the secret identity persona itself has no idea of what's going on.

All of this is handily explained on the back cover, which is fortunate since you would probably struggle to extract that information from the actual story. Haberlin and artist Jay Anacleto are having fun experimenting with their storytelling techniques here, which means we have a comic that features several pages of pure text, no speech balloons, and captions featuring transcripts of the dialogue.

On the one hand, it's very distinctive, it plays up the tech aspect neatly, and it looks magnificent. Anacleto's art is impressive throughout, as long as you're looking at the individual panels. It's a little less impressive when you're trying to follow the plot. While all the necessary information is certainly in there, this is an example of a fairly simple story being told in a very unusual way which means you spend more time deciphering the plot than actually following it.

There are some great ideas in here, but not so great that they couldn't have been communicated more effectively in a more normal way. It's all very distancing rather than involving, and I can't for the life of me figure out why the creators want to distance me from a plot that seems like it would be so much more comfortable as an action piece.

I'm all in favour of interesting experiments, but unfortunately the nature of experiments is that they don't always work. This is such a book, I'm afraid. It does look wonderful, though.