6 june 1999

CABLE #70 is the slightly premature end of Joe Casey and Jose Ladronn's run on the book. It's Liefeld next month. Well, next issue. Being Liefeld, next month may be a tad optimistic.

I've never been as impressed by Casey as some people on Usenet have been. Although I've been all for the general direction he's taken the book in, most of his big storylines have been let down by rather unsatisfying climaxes and characters such as the one-dimensional Agent 18 who were never anywhere near as interesting on the page as they obviously were in Casey's mind. (And more of Agent 18 later.)

Nonetheless, his stories have developed the regular cast well, and there have been some good ideas in there, albeit that their potential wasn't always realised. It's good to see Casey going out on a relative high, tying up some subplots and playing to his strengths.

This story focuses on Caesar (the disgruntled monk from a year or so back) going after Cable for revenge for destroying his lifestyle. This is an interesting enough idea, although I'm not sure it was necessary to declare that he had singlehandedly wiped out all the Believers. That bit has the feel of a deck-clearing exercise.

Caesar shows up and attempts to bump off Stacey for no real reason other than to really annoy Cable. From this rather basic premise, Casey gets a fairly good story, particularly helped by a rather surreal but likeable subplot about a madman in the basement who's trying to build a time machine out of car parts. It's not flawless (really, it's hard to imagine Caesar giving Cable much of a fight at all), but it leads up satisfyingly to Cable snogging Stacey on the last page, which is as good a place as any to wind up Casey's run.

Liefeld and Pruett are inheriting a title where the lead character is entrenched firmly in a version of New York which is at least semi-realistic. This doesn't immediately seem the sort of scenario that plays to Liefeld's strengths, but what harm can it do to give him a couple of issues? For all that the incoming creative team may genuinely like Casey and Ladronn's work, a jarring change of style seems inevitable. Should be interesting.

UNCANNY X-MEN #371 is the beginning of the Rage Against The Machine crossover (or rather, storyline - it's just X-Men titles) which is to launch as a springboard for the M-Tech line. Trying to link these three disparate characters into a single coherent story seems at first a rather tricky task, but to be honest, this story all fits together reasonably well. It certainly reads like something that's been worked out properly in advance, which is reassuring for a start.

Also, it's good to see that the ongoing storylines haven't been shoved aside to make way for advert material. This issue is still definitely an X-Men story, with Marrow finally getting to chat about her change of appearance to Colossus and a suitably embarrassed Gambit, and Professor X's attitude deteriorating further. For all that Wolverine may be not quite there himself these days, he's absolutely right - Xavier is plainly not acting sensibly, and the characters are reacting accordingly.

But what about the M-tech stuff? Well, Machine Man just gets ambushed and beaten up by SHIELD. Annoyingly, it's not at all clear whether this story is supposed to take place before or after the X-51 preview issue that Wizard published a few weeks ago, which is important because he had recently received a power-up in that story. Is this the powered up Machine Man, or am I to assume that he's going to get powered up in the course of this story? I'd have liked to know.

Douglock's appearance is pretty uncontroversial - he's not feeling to well, he's attacking things, it's all set-up for next issue when no doubt all will be explained.

The Deathlok sequence... yes, the Deathlok sequence. The suggestion is that SHIELD are going to build the new Deathlok. Joe Casey has said that it's an existing Marvel character; evidently at this stage it's supposed to be a mystery. This story has a character who is plainly Agent 18 from Casey's Cable stories being turned into a cyborg. I really do hope he's not the new Deathlok, partly because I don't find him at all interesting, but mainly because it's not much of a mystery if I can guess the answer two months before the series launch.

A cyborg does show up halfway through the story (and doesn't resemble promo art for Deathlok in the slightest), but I'm not clear whether it's supposed to be Agent 18 post-operation or not. The timescale of the story feels far too short for that to have been carried out. I get the feeling I'm supposed to be sure on this point one way or the other; I'm not.

Guest art comes from the X-Force art team of Jim Cheung and Mark Morales, looking surprisingly at home on this title. No complaints there; Cheung does his technology rather well, and his Douglock looks great.

As for the script, well, Kavanagh's dialogue gets the job done but has a few niggling glitches. The atmospheric art of page one feels like it needs a less wordy script. There are also bits where the script tries, quite unnecessarily, to jazz up perfectly ordinary words and makes itself look stupid. When the art has clearly drawn a common or garden desktop computer, why can't Shadowcat just say "The computer is still on"? Why does she have to get a ridiculous line like "The comp-system's still open"?

Still, not a bad story considering the inevitable limitations of springboarding three titles simultaneously. It feels like it's heading somewhere vaguely interesting, at any rate.

X-FORCE #92 is a Domino story, mainly designed to let John Francis Moore introduce X-Men 2099 villain Hallowe'en Jack (who he created) into mainstream continuity. It's noticeable that reaction to this story on Usenet seems to have split largely between those who read X-Men 2099 and are pleased to see Jack back, and those who haven't a clue who he is and aren't too pleased to see him taking up an issue of X-Force.

Certainly the story has a feeling of self-indulgence to it; Moore obviously thinks Jack's a great character and is having a wonderful time writing him again. As a slightly pathetic and deluded comedy villain, he sits rather uneasily in X-Force, though, and it's hard to avoid feeling that he's appearing in this title more because it's the only one available than because there's any desperately important reason why X-Force should meet him. Admittedly, Moore does drop in some foreshadowing in the form of Jack's account of how things went badly wrong for X-Force in his timeline.

The idea is that in travelling back from 2099 (to avoid the rather nasty way things turned out there), and researching the time he's coming to, he's discovered Domino and decided he's in love with her. He's also discovered that she's shortly going to get herself killed along with the rest of X-Force. So, in true stalker style, he abducts her and takes her to his citadel. Naturally, she escapes.

Jack's stalker persona is fun, although Domino's total refusal to play along (quite understandable though it is) doesn't really help the story. It's alright, but the strong central idea tails off into a fairly typical story about a heroine captured by a maniac and escaping.

With the regular art team off covering on Uncanny X-Men, Mike Miller and a plethora of inkers cover. Their work is reasonably good, but the surreal atmosphere the story is aiming for might have been better served by fewer panels of figures floating in front of white backgrounds.

Despite all the above, this is a solid enough and frequently amusing story; it just doesn't fit very well as an X-Force story. Taken as what it is - not a Domino story, a Hallowe'en Jack story - it's good for a laugh.

PROMETHEA is the third of Alan Moore's ABC titles, and it's far and away my favourite of the bunch. It goes without saying that these things are subjective, of course. They've all been technically excellent series which ought to find a loyal and devoted audience. But League is really just mucking about with a genre I have no interest in, and Tom Strong (let's be honest now) is a supremely well told but so far very generic superhero book.

Of course, there's a lot about Promethea which is pretty generic as well - only to be expected from a line which is all about going back to old ideas and trying to take them off in a new direction. This one, though, does immediately leap out at being not quite like anything else. At least, nothing else that immediately springs to mind.

The premise (and be warned, the explanation of the premise is the entire plot of issue #1, so if you have any intention at all of reading the book, just take my word for it that it's awfully good and stop reading now), the premise is that many centuries ago a little girl was saved from death by being brought into the Dreaming... sorry, the Immateria, where she became a story. She returns to the real world (kind of) by manifesting and taking over people who identify with her strongly enough.

Now, really there's no ideas here that we haven't seen in comics before, but still the sum total seems interesting. The normal person turning into mythological figure routine has been done to death (Captain Marvel and Thor being two glaringly obvious examples), and that's not the interesting bit. What's interesting is the fictional nature of Promethea. Plenty of writers have explored the relationship between fiction and reality before (Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison, to give another two glaringly obvious examples), but there remains a lot more unknown territory in this area.

This first issue has as its plot a generic, probably deliberately so, story in which the new Promethea, inheriting the mantle from the last one, is attacked by an old enemy of the character and beats them. The plot is irrelevant. This book is about the concept, and the concept has so many great angles to it that it's hard to see how Moore could possibly fail with this one.

An interesting quirk is the bizarre contemporary New York in which Moore has set the series. Despite ostensibly being 1999, New York has flying cars, a group of "science heroes" (this world doesn't have superheroes) called the Five Swell Guys, and a cult comic book called Weeping Gorilla which seemingly consists entirely of the romance-related complaints of a lachrymose simian. With all this, and the sketchy details of the previous Prometheas, it feels like Moore has, here more than in either of the previous two titles, managed to build something new and genuinely different from the cliches he's taking as his building blocks.

Art comes from JH Williams III and Mick Gray, who were the art team on the lauded and commercially catastrophic Chase. 95% of their work on this title is wonderful; the only bits I take any issue with at all are some of the splash pages of Promethea in battle which don't feel quite as dynamic or majestic as one imagines they were meant to. When you're dealing with mythical figures such as Promethea, there's no such thing as too much.

Personally, I find this much more impressive than either League or Tom Strong. Those two titles took a lot of old ideas, stirred them around, and came up with some old ideas in a different (albeit very entertaining) order. This book makes something rather more original out of them. Mind you, no doubt there's somebody out there who feels exactly the same way about one of the other two ABC titles.