7 january 2001

A new year, a new beginning. What fabulous piece of work do Marvel have to kick off the X-Axis for 2001...?

Oh god.

MUTANT X #29 continues the title's proud tradition of taking the line of least resistance (not to say least imagination). This is the continuation of a Wolverine storyline, in which the Mutant X universe's version of Wolverine regains his mind and... hell with it, I can't be bothered summarising the plot. It's the obvious one. He fights Sabretooth. You've read it before.

Now, let us step back here and ask: what is the point of an alternate reality storyline? Presumably, to show us the same characters but shaped by different circumstances. Impressively, Mackie misses this point by a margin of several miles, giving us a Wolverine with a different background, who nonetheless acts exactly the same as our one. Despite the differing history of the characters involved, Mackie still lacks the imagination to do anything other than the same old Wolverine versus Sabretooth fight, in which Sabretooth takes one of Wolverine's friends hostage but gets beaten up in the end.

Who cares? Who, in the name of god, cares? Who hasn't seen this done better a thousand times before? Who could muster the faintest enthusiasm for this junk? Apparently not artists Tom Lyle and Andrew Pepoy, who seem to be phoning it in with possibly the least convincing burns I've ever seen. Their Sabretooth looks more like he's been putting a lot of effort into his camouflage paint. I know there are limits to what you can do within the Comics Code, but you can do better than this, for god's sake. The rest of their work seems to be similarly unenthused. Who can blame them?

Even the basic plot mechanics are shaky. Mackie tells us out of nowhere that his Sabretooth has an adamantium skeleton so that Havok's stunt near the end of the book will work, but doesn't explain how Havok knows. And then, two panels later, Wolverine beheads Sabretooth, who evidently didn't have an adamantium skeleton after all.

Look, Marvel, this is me trying to kick the first review of the New Year off on a positive note. Unfortunately, I simply can't find anything positive to say about this book. It's dire. I try not to cheer cancelled books to the grave, but Mutant X is making it very difficult to resist, since about the only compliment I can issue in respect of this book is that at least somebody saw sense and cancelled it.

Ah, now this is a bit more like it.

SENTRY/X-MEN is one of the line of Sentry team-up one-shots leading into the conclusion of the series in Sentry Vs The Void. For those of you who haven't been following this series, the idea is that the Sentry is a long-lost Silver Age character who has inexplicably been wiped from everyone's memory. Now he's turned up again, with his archenemy in tow, and everyone's very worried about it. This is all interspersed with various suggestions that all is not what it appears to be.

The team-up books all consist of various heroes reminiscing about their past adventures with the Sentry (a kind of Superman figure) now that they can remember them again. The subtext here is to contrast the present day heroes with their innocent incarnations from the Silver Age.

When I say "subtext", this should not be taken to imply that the point is being made with any particular subtlety. The Angel has been chosen to represent the X-Men in this story for the fairly obvious reason that of all the X-Men, he's the one who's been most blatantly mutilated and twisted to make him into a darker character for a darker era. In case anyone hasn't got the point here, Jenkins has the narrator talk about "all of that potential you once had - before everything became so convoluted and difficult to comprehend. Before the blue skin and the attitude adjustment."

The flashback story here is the Angel being introduced to the Sentry when he was a neophyte superhero, and then the Sentry teaming up with the early sixties X-Men to fight one of his villains, the General, who has an army of miniature robot soldiers. Jenkins may actually be overstating the point here; while the X-Men undoubtedly had a much more innocent era in the sixties (the anti-mutant hatred not becoming a dominant theme until the 1980s), they were never quite this goofy. Aside from the downright ludicrous issue where the mansion is attacked by a circus, the early X-Men villains tended to be a bit saner than the General. He's straight out of the Silver Age alright, but it's Silver Age DC.

Still, even if Jenkins is hammering his point home far more blatantly than he needs to, it still comes across pretty effectively - basically, that somewhere along the line the superhero genre lost sight of the fantasy element that's needed to make it work. It's all become just too miserable and angst- ridden. Nobody in their right mind would want to be a modern day superhero, and since wish fulfilment is the basic foundation of the superhero genre, that's a bit of a problem.

Art comes from Mark Texeira, with painted colouring from Jose Villarrubia. Naturally, it looks wonderful. It's a slightly odd casting choice since Texeira's style is far more in tune with the grim'n'gritty era than with the Silver Age period Jenkins is trying to evoke, and thematically a cleaner art style might have been more appropriate. But it looks great.

All these team-up one-shots are spreading the point rather thin, and if you're not already following Sentry you probably won't get a great deal out of this. But it's a decent issue for those who've been reading the main series.

X-MEN: MAGIK ties up this month, after four issues that leave it decidedly unclear what the point was meant to be.

This shows all the classic signs of being a miniseries where somebody decided to publish a Magik book, the book was commissioned, and only then did they realise that nobody had any ideas for what to put in it. Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning have had an interesting approach to the depiction of Limbo and the other magical realms by playing up the surrealism, helped by Liam Sharp's computer artwork. But they haven't managed to marry that to an interesting plot, nor have they managed to make Amanda Sefton an interesting character.

I should add that, while I have some time for the surrealism, there is no excuse for having Magik summon her armed forces by blowing on a tuba. This is not surreal. This is just stupid. Nor is the surrealism helped any by the wild tone shifts between pages as Sharp goes from linework to computer art. Either would be acceptable in its own right, but these shifts within a scene simply don't work. It's like a film changing the whole lighting style between camera angles, with some of the cameras shooting the scene straight and some of them shooting the scene under ultraviolet strobes. There may conceivably be a story in which this would be an effective storytelling device, but this is not it.

The plotting is rudimentary. S'ym apparently betrayed the heroes, but it's never entirely clear in what manner he's supposed to have done so. The villain turns out to be the computerised repository of magical knowledge that Magik had built in issue #1, which is potentially a nice ironic twist, but the role of the computer in the story to date has been too marginal for this to be an effective revelation.

But the big problem with the book is, quite simply, that it doesn't make me care about the characters in the slightest. Amanda remains the same bland and generic figure she was at the beginning. That's a failure.

Mark this one down as another horribly misconceived X-books miniseries, I'm afraid.

X-MEN: THE HIDDEN YEARS packs the X-Men off to the Himalayas to find out what happened in the Lost Generation miniseries.

Now, you may well be wondering what the Lost Generation stuff has to do with this book, or indeed with the X-Men in general. The answer is "absolutely nothing", but that evidently isn't going to stop John Byrne from wasting an issue wheeling out his characters for a reprise.

If I gave a toss about Lost Generation, I would have read it. I do not give a toss about Lost Generation, and I did not buy it. If somebody wants to bring back a character from that series because they actually have a story to tell with them, fair enough, but here Byrne is just shoehorning the characters into a series that has nothing to do with them at all.

It's not even as if it makes for a particularly good story. The X-Men find a Lost Generation character, they wonder what happened to the First Line, and then Pixie turns up to tell them what happened in Lost Generation. The X-Men are duly impressed by what a powerful story that must have been, and more or less tell us so. Ultimately, this isn't a story, it's an excuse to say how good Lost Generation was.

You know when you go to a gig, and the audience isn't all that enthusiastic, and the band races back on stage for their encore almost immediately to make sure that they get back on before the applause dies out? This issue is like that. Painfully self- indulgent.

USER is the first creator-owned series from Devin Grayson. It's not a superhero book, but those who want to see comics being spread out to new and exciting audiences may be slightly disappointed to learn that it's about online role playing games. Role playing, as we all know, is almost as sad and marginal as comics.

The story is basically a character piece. Meg Chancellor is depressed about her admittedly gloomy life and takes refuge in online role-playing games. On the very obvious level, this is an "escape from reality" story, as Meg finds the online world more attractive than the real one. (Which, surely, is the point of the exercise.) Moreover, though, this is about questions of identity. The anonymity of the Internet and the ability of users to construct personalities and histories divorced from reality raises questions about the nature of identity and the validity of these self-created personalities. Are they simply acting, or are they equally valid expressions of the underlying person who is, after all, just playing a role in normal society as well?

This, at least, is the theory as to why role playing is an interesting subject for a story. Anyone interested in seeing the concept taken to extremes would be well advised to read Luke Rhinehart's 1971 novel The Dice Man, which has some very interesting things to say on the subject. It was recently reissued in the UK, and I suspect the Warren Ellis fans among you may like it. (Don't bother with the sequel, though.)

Grayson doesn't take the kamikaze approach of that novel. She keeps the online world resolutely artificial, with the mechanics of the whole thing kept firmly on the surface. It's entirely clear that this is not an equally real world, and that the fairy tale morality Meg is adopting in it has limited direct application in the real world. Equally, while wandering around babbling about chivalry on the internet, she's neglecting her responsibilities in the real world, making her online identity hypocritical as anything other than a role-playing exercise.

Grayson seems to see role-playing as something that gives people a different perspective on themselves, which is fair enough, but leaves her needing a character study for it to work. Since Meg's personality is defined largely by her actions online, I'm not convinced that any change in her is going to come across all that clearly, but we shall see.

The obvious technical difficulty with this story is how to make a story about people sitting at keyboards participating in glorified text messaging into a visually interesting story for a visual medium. What we get to represent the online world is stylised painted artwork from John Bolton, with a bit of text built into the background. Since Meg only meets other people in character, this works fairly well as a representation of that world, still kept at one remove from realism.

John Bolton and Sean Phillips' painted artwork (on the online and offline scenes respectively) is as excellent as you'd expect from them. Bolton's use of colour is interesting - he goes consistently for a faintly psychedelic selection of bright colours but somehow makes them work in the context of the artificial world. Phillips does his pages in black and white, which may perhaps be hammering the contrast a bit far, but they still look good within the rather narrower parameters he's got to work in.

There are some interesting ideas here, but the story veers too far in the direction of being a role-player's tribute to her hobby and too far from really getting into the themes. On the other hand, this is the set-up, so Grayson's got another two months to get into that stuff. The question is whether the book will manage to get beyond that homage level.