6 August 2000

Uncanny X-Men and Mutant X were both due out this week as well, but neither actually shipped, leaving us with just the one X-book to talk about. And not one that merits an enormous amount of time under normal circumstances, but hell, we're quiet.

X-MEN: THE HIDDEN YEARS has pretty much dropped off the screen as far as fandom discussion is concerned. The main point of attention before the series launched had been whether Byrne was going to wreak his usual havoc on continuity. Once it became apparent that he was actually just going to piddle about in the Savage Land and waste time with stuff like why Jean was wearing the wrong costume in some guest appearance published in 1972, people really lost interest. The book has picked up some moderately positive reviews, albeit that the main angle has been "hey, a Byrne title published after 1995 which doesn't totally suck!" It sells alright. But it's just kind of there.

Byrne gets off to a rather dated start by summarising a story from the Thomas/Adams run for us. Some explanation of this story is obviously needed, since it's the set-up for the issue, and it came out over thirty years ago. Giving it this level of detail may have been a mistake, since it shows up rather dated aspects that are difficult to gloss over. In 1969, Larry Trask no doubt looked rather dashing in his polo-neck and medallion. In 2000, he looks like a complete twat.

It's not Byrne's fault that the medallion's a key plot point of the original story which can't easily be avoided, but why draw attention to it? A kid in the nineties is going to obey his father's instructions to never, ever remove that repulsive medallion? Give me a break. It can't have been entirely plausible in the sixties either, come to think of it, but it's really rather silly these days. Oh, and giving Larry a 180 degree viewpoint turn between panels doesn't really work either.

But never mind - the history is established, and we establish that the Sentinel in Dunfee, Illinois, which we met last issue, is the result of the surviving Sentinels' self-repair program. (So why not just tell us that they had a fight with some Sentinels recently, and some of them got blown up? It's all we need to know.) The mutant girl, Ashley, gets to do the cute-little-girl routine by treating the Sentinel like a puppy, and I can't make up my mind whether Byrne's deliberately giving her stilted dialogue. What girl refers to her home as "my mom's house"? Wouldn't she say it was her house?

Anyhow, where this is heading is a downright contrived sequence in which the generic mother comes back and uses the words "destroy all mutants" in a completely different context, causing the Sentinel to go nuts again so that Ashley can destroy it and show us all how powerful she is. At least we're rid of the rather pointless Sentinel, but I'm not convinced about where Byrne's heading with this. Ashley and her mother are both rather watery characters, and I'm not all that interested in their story.

Subplot one this month has Cyclops, Marvel Girl (in the wrong costume, continuity for the fixing of) and Candy Southern (in Marvel Girl's current costume - still with me?) on a boat looking for Warren. The person with wings nailed to the wall in last month's cliffhanger turns out to be throwaway character Avia rather than Warren, which is rather cheap, but that's cliffhangers for you.

Anyhow, the baddies' leader is here to talk to our heroes, and walks straight through Cyclops's optic beam in a rather effective scene. Krueger's team are basically a bunch of circus freaks, and he tells us that he rejects the term mutant. Okay, now this is potentially interesting stuff. Anything which gives us another viewpoint on the mutant-human relations thing beyond Xavier and Magnus's ideas is something that can work. It also serves as a lead-in to bring in the Blob, Mastermind and Unus as villains - well, Factor Three were pretty big around this time, so I suppose it makes sense to use them at some point. The Blob long since stopped being a credible threat in the mainstream continuity, though, so Byrne's going to have to go some to sell us on him as a credible threat this time. Still, looks like a story with some potential.

Over at subplot two, oh god it's the bloody Savage Land. Is Byrne ever going to get out of the Savage Land? We don't care, you know. The Savage Land is one of those half-arsed concepts that comics fans of a certain age keep banging on about as if it was essential that we keep it in print, but nobody else cares. Two storylines intersecting down here (you need a scorecard to follow this book) - an amnesiac Iceman has been taken in by Sauron in a makeshift hut, while nearby Amphibius takes care of Magneto. Magneto's superpowers have been conveniently restored. Well, okay - he needed to get up to full power at some point and I didn't really want another story about him trying to get his powers back hot on the heels of the Dark Seduction miniseries. A rather contrived reason - if that radiation from a few issues back can heal his powers, why didn't it do it a few issues back? But it spares us a boring story, so I'll let it slide.

Unfortunately, it ends by setting us up for a Sauron versus Magneto confrontation, which is not what I'd call promising. Again, Sauron is one of those characters who has been used so ineffectively in recent years that he no longer has the status as a credible villain that this storyline seems to be assuming. Anybody who's been reduced to hanging around taking orders from the Toad is pretty much done for as a major villain, and Byrne's not done the work here to change that. Admittedly, I've never liked Sauron, so maybe it's just me.

The book is at the better end of what we might have expected from it - no wreckage of continuity, and some of Byrne's better artwork - but is still falling to the big problem with inserted stories. They're seen as totally inconsequential, because they ARE totally inconsequential. It's highly unlikely that anything of much import happened to the X-Men while their book was on hiatus, as otherwise they'd probably have mentioned it at some point in the last 25 years. So the book has to work incredibly hard to convince us that we're reading anything of significance, and it's not really doing that work, choosing instead to coast on period villains like Sauron who don't have much credibility to today's readers at the best of times.

It's an alright superhero book, but it needs to be more than that if it's really going to catch the imagination.

Whatever you have may heard elsewhere, MARVEL BOY #3 is about as radical as milk.

In fact, it's arguable the most pro-capitalism story I've read in ages, but it's still racking up the reviews describing it as anti-corporate. Deary me, no. I'm not sure quite what Morrison thinks he's aiming for, but that's certainly not what he's hit.

This is another of Morrison's high concept affairs. The villain this month is Hexus, the Living Corporation. Ah, see how Morrison skilfully blends Silver Age formulae with incongruous concepts, just like he's been doing in all his superhero books since, oh, at least Doom Patrol. Radical!

Not that it's a bad idea, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here. The "living corporation" idea isn't actually as ludicrous as it first seems. A corporation is simply an association of persons which is treated as a seperate person as a legal fiction. So what Hexus actually is, is the Borg collective with corporate trappings. It's a hive mind. Fair enough.

Hexus sets about growing, as companies do, and does so at ludicrous speed, because the plot demands it. And how does our hero defeat it? By revealing its trade secrets and confidential information to other companies so that they can compete with it and drive it out of business. So the world is saved by - to name only the two that we see - Macdonalds and Sony. Anti-corporate. Sure.

If there's an economics message here, it's that monopolies are a really bad thing (which they are), and that if you take away the monopoly's unfair advantage, then market forces will take care of the problem. What Noh-Varr does here isn't anti-capitalist in the slightest. All he's doing is restoring the normal market balance. This is not exactly a radical or innovative viewpoint. Adam Smith was opposed to monopolies, for heaven's sake.

Not that I disagree with any of this - on the contrary, I agree with it wholeheartedly - but come on. Morrison has written a paean to anti-trust law, and has essentially positioned his hero as the Monopolies and Mergers Commission with a gun. I'm supposed to view this as system-smashing stuff? I think not. This is kindergarten market economy philosophy. Market forces are good; monopolies impede market forces; therefore monopolies are bad and must be destroyed. Duh. Morrison's point is that we should be a bit more proactive in our anti-monopoly laws? Fair enough, but nothing new.

Hexus is actually a branding concept more than anything else. It's basically selling people exactly the same stuff as everyone else, only with a nice logo on it. The "Brand Hex" logo is a nice way of showing up the generic nature of the business, and could even credibly work as a fashion label. It's also got some nice fascist undertones, ideal for the story.

Morrison does make a reasonable case for his analogy of Hexus as a parasite which consumes one planet's ecosystem before moving onto the next. Of course, the model's based on the idea that Hexus has no purpose other than to maximise its profits and spread its market penetration, and there's something to be said for the view that particularly large corporations have become so detached from any controlling individual as to function on that level. Morrison's solution seems to be that the corporations hold one another in check with the help of effective intervention when things get out of kilter, which may not be quite what the J18 movement wants to hear, but isn't unreasonable. Hexus is a strong idea, alright. It's just not quite the idea some people seem to think.

JG Jones gets some great artwork out of what you'd think would be a rather non-visual concept, and is putting up a more impressive showing here than in last year's Black Widow mini. He's a perfect match, giving Morrison's flights of lunacy some kind of grounding in normalcy.

The book's biggest weakness remains its lead character, who still hasn't got much in the way of personality, and seems all too easily convinced to save the planet when last issue he was trying to destroy it. Morrison got away with his sketchy (to put it mildly) characterisation on JLA because the characters there were already established elsewhere, but Noh-Varr is desperately lacking in anything that the reader can get a handle on - neither particularly alien, nor particularly committed to anything. He shouts a lot, but he varies wildly in what he shouts about. Something's going to have to be done about this, but maybe next issue.

Even so, this issue the concept is strong enough to carry the weak lead. If only Morrison's high concept stuff clicked this effectively every time. Hell, he's managed to make mainstream economics look sexy, and how many people can say that?