6 may 2001

"The book's about evolution. Aside from the actual storylines, the book itself should be the evolution of comics. It should be - from graphic design to costumes to things that we deal with in the stories themselves - it should all be the next step. This is what mainstream comics should be doing. When this stuff comes out... people are going to be imitating it for the next couple of years. It's our job to be completely ahead of the curve as much as we possibly can, to push in every direction just as far as we can."

That's how Joe Casey described UNCANNY X-MEN in a recent interview with Wizard, and he's said broadly similar things elsewhere. And judging from issue #394, he's kidding himself.

If this is the future of comics, get ready for a decade of stagnation.

Don't get me wrong, it's not bad. It's just there. Normally it would just rate as entirely average. After all the hype, it can only rate as thoroughly disappointing. It's not even as if I was expecting to like the book, since I've always felt Casey was overrated and I've never had much time for Churchill at all. But if nothing else, I was assuming that they had some new ideas for the book. And maybe they do - but not in this issue. If this is even remotely representative of what's to come, it's time to lower those expectations. Drastically.

It's not Casey's fault that this story grinds unpleasantly against what's come immediately before. The Lobdell run should have been written to lead nicely into this book and the Morrison run, but for whatever reason it doesn't lead nicely at all. Last week, the X-Men saw Wolverine murder Magneto on panel. This week, there's no fall-out from that whatsoever, nor is there even any mention of Magneto, even though the issue goes out of its way to pay homage to his first appearance. These aren't Casey's fault, although they're still an irritation for the majority of readers who aren't newcomers. The fact that Jean Grey has suddenly got telekinetic powers again - making two unexplained power changes in one year - might not be Casey's fault either, although if it's meant to be a deliberate change rather than a cock-up, Casey could have made that clearer.

Equally, after Lobdell spent several issues hammering home that Cyclops had had a personality change, Casey completely ignores that and goes back to the old personality. Not Casey's fault that Lobdell was going in completely the wrong direction for his run, but it still grates.

But leave that aside. Those are the continuity problems (though I'd say continuity - or "superconsistency", if you prefer - with what came out last week isn't really too much to ask for). What about the story?

Teenage mutant Warp Savant decides to celebrate his eighteenth birthday by attacking Cape Citadel for no apparent reason other than to stir things up a bit. The four available X-Men - Scott, Jean, Logan and Warren - head down there to stop him. Savant teleports Jean and Logan into his brain (using a very vaguely defined power, which I'll come back to in a moment). Bog standard "Oh my gosh, it's his subconscious" scenes ensue. Finally, it appears that Savant is dying, and Logan kisses Jean at the last moment, thereby reviving a romance subplot that goes back twenty-five years. (This, ladies and gentlemen, is your new, forward-looking X-Men storyline.) However, Savant is defeated when Warren and Scott whip out a plot device and zap him with it, so that's alright then.

Not a BAD story, but nothing to write home about. It's the sort of plot that would make for an acceptable annual, or an issue of X-Men Unlimited. But it's routine, it's banal, and it's the same old stuff we've seen a thousand times before.

Warp Savant doesn't work as a character. He's one dimensional and has no clear motivations at all. He's just a generic antagonist with a power that's convenient for the plot (since this entire issue exists simply to generate a peril that forces the romantic tension between Jean and Logan). His power is extremely vaguely defined and seems to have designs on being more original than it actually is. Much is made of the idea that Savant is teleporting these people into "his brain" rather than onto "the astral plane", but unless Casey is seriously telling us that Mr Savant has a miniature bedroom and an army of zombies physically located within his brain, the distinction seems meaningless. Nor is Savant's subconscious remotely interesting - this would have been a perfect opportunity to at least flesh his character out a bit, but all we get is some cliched nonsense about monsters under the bed. Nor, for that matter, is it at all clear why Logan and Jean make it back when everyone else he absorbed just disappeared.

Other than that, it's a bog standard "villain causes chaos, heroes come over and sort him out" story. Casey doesn't even have a particularly interesting way for them to beat him - whipping out a previously unheralded ray gun from nowhere and zapping the villain with it is not my idea of clever writing.

There's some potential interest in developing the romantic trilogy, though why Casey has spent his first issue on it when two of those three characters aren't even in his regular cast is confusing to say the least. But if Casey just wanted an issue with a straightforward story to force this subplot forward, he could have done better than this.

I've seen it argued in defence of this issue that Casey is reintroducing the core concepts for new readers. This is wrong. He is not. The core concepts of the X-Men are to establish what a mutant is, what their status is in society, and how the X-Men want to change that. This story does not address those themes. It's just the X-Men fighting a generic villain in a generic way. Nor is Casey introducing any discernible new themes.

As far as Ian Churchill's concerned, this issue does little to change my view that he's the poor man's Jim Lee. The artwork is competent, but unimpressive. The warp effect used for Savant's powers doesn't work for me (it looks more like the object's melting), and Churchill doesn't manage to draw a proper distinction between the real and mental worlds - pretty important given that both of them consist of a field full of soldiers at one point in the story.

This is not the future. This is barely the present.

Mere competence simply will not do after the level of build-up this was given. But mere competence is all this has to offer.

Back with the concluding miniseries, X-MEN FOREVER winds up this week, and it's got my name in it, so it must be great.

One of things I liked about this storyline when I first read the proposal was that it builds off the long-running theme of human evolution and ties it in with all the Phoenix stuff, which had always struck me as semi-detached from the rest of the Marvel Universe. Giving the mutant concept a bit of cosmic significance, even in the very long term, ties that material in a bit more neatly.

On the other hand, the series spent its first two thirds doing a notable continuity clean-up job, but often on material whose relevance to the instant story wasn't immediately obvious. I'm still not at all clear why it was thought necessary to resolve the assassination of Graydon Creed here, since it doesn't really seem to belong in this series at all. Some of Mystique's other material falls into the same category.

Changes in the plans for the other X-books have forced a few minor changes to this series along the way. Taking the opportunity to justify the changes in appearances of Mystique and the Toad is all very nice, but something of a distraction. Equally, the proposal that I originally read had Mystique going on to appear in a completely different storyline and one that I'd much rather have seen than "mad bitch kills senator." Since it's still a viable idea for some point in the future, I'm not going to reveal what that plan was, but suffice to say I think Mystique's character arc for this series made rather more sense in the original draft since she went on to do something constructive.

For all that, and acknowledging that it's basically a series for long-time readers who won't be lost by the fog of continuity references, I've still enjoyed the series. It's had some great artwork from Kevin Maguire, some solid character work for all involved (particularly the Toad). It's perhaps allowed itself to be a bit too clouded into continuity minutiae at the cost of putting over the central storyline, but hell, I liked it.

And my name's in it.

I turn to X-MEN: THE HIDDEN YEARS in the sure knowledge that I have nothing to say about it that I haven't said before.

Usual routine. You like it or you don't. You're either desperately aggrieved by its cancellation or you couldn't give a toss. I couldn't give a toss.

Finally this week, Warren Ellis' MINISTRY OF SPACE begins, which is the first of his Pop Comics stories.

This is an alternate history story, in which the British managed to get hold of the German rocket scientists at the end of World War II and used them as a springboard for a British space programme. Judging from what we get to see of 2001, we made a rather better job of it than the Americans did. This instantly endears the book to me.

It's a three-issue miniseries, which seems rather on the short side given that this first issue only takes us up to the Ministry of Space's first flight in 1950, and the story seems to be the history of the Ministry from 1945 to the present day. No doubt Ellis knows what he's doing, but it does seem a bit odd at this stage.

This being an alternate history story, much of the entertainment lies in reading into the details and trying to work out how on earth we got from 1945 to such a noticeably different 2001. I'm not immediately convinced that the space programme alone would leave the British flying around in jet packs, nor that it would result in quite such a fifties retro sci-fi feel, but we shall see. The retro feel is part of the point, of course.

Ellis plays off the real-world conflict between missile and aircraft designs for spacecraft by having the aircraft approach win in this world, which partly gives an opportunity to have everything look different, but also lets the whole program be infused with the wonderfully British attitude of the 1940s air force. Rather than play up the design arguments, this time the aircraft people win because "I'm an English airman and I want to wear my bloody jacket and sit in a decent leather chair." Wonderful stuff.

Weston's art and Laura DePuy's colouring give the book an idyllic "lost England" feel to it. You instinctively feel that all of these characters play a large amount of cricket and live in an England with a lower level of rainfall than ours. Even when they're crashing errant aircraft, they crash them into picturesque windmills. There are no cities in the flashback scenes. Despite the plot acknowledging a fair amount of behind the scenes backstabbing and general nastiness, the tone of the issue remains stubbornly and serenely Boys Own.

Really excellent stuff, this, and it's good to see Ellis doing something that steers clear of most of his usual routines. You should find a copy.

And whatever else you may think of Warren Ellis' predictions for the future of comics, this stands a damn sight better chance of being the book everyone's going to imitate than Uncanny does.