7 april 2002

Yes, yes, I know. Sit down and shut up, we'll be done sooner.

EXILES returns to its ongoing storyline this month, with the first half of a two-parter bringing back Weapon X - the other Exiles team which we saw a few months back. As that story suggested, Weapon X are basically a darker version of the Exiles who get sent on all the thoroughly nasty missions, presumably because they have the required moral flexibility.

Winick is understandably very interested in the idea of bringing together both teams of Exiles and fleshing out all of his new characters. And he does a pretty good job of it, with a particularly nice scene showing Weapon X's bemusement at learning that the Exiles' version of Sasquatch is in fact a black version of Heather Hudson. The Exiles also get some good material out of their reactions to seeing Sabretooth as a (sort of) hero.

Unfortunately, Winick hasn't managed to attach these very entertaining elements to a decent plot. The structure of this two-parter is pretty straightforward - they're in yet another version of the Days of Futures Past timeline, and they're sent to rescue the obligatory Summers-related messiah figure. Cue scenes of happy collaboration. But once they've saved him, they're told that they must kill him. Cue, presumably, an issue of conflict between the teams because the Exiles have inflexible morals and Weapon X don't.

Even granted that the plot is only meant to be a vehicle for Winick to do his character material, this is shamelessly simplistic. It amounts to a retread of the old "Would you kill Hitler as a child" dilemma, but without any real effort being made to make the kid a real character so that we might care whether he lived or died.

Looks nice, though, and the character moments are good. Shame about the plot.

Straight from the "why, dear god, why" file, it's a MORLOCKS miniseries.

The Morlocks? Who cares? Really, let's be honest, who cares? It was a neat idea for a couple of storylines, but this idea was burned out by the end of the 1980s. Getting rid of them in the Morlock Massacre was a pretty good move, and it's a shame it didn't stick.

Right now, they're like sodding rats. You can gas them, you can burn them, you can shred them, it doesn't matter. They always come back, blander and more inconsequential than ever before.

And now they get a miniseries. Oh lord.

The premise of this thing is that copycat Morlock communities have sprung up around the USA, although calling the Chicago group a "community" would be overstating it a bit, considering that there's only seven of them. As we've come to expect from Marvel miniseries, this thing has a semi-detached attitude to continuity, placing it somewhere in the hinterland between "ridiculous huge continuity error" and "alternate reality." Of course, Marvel choose not to clarify this point these days because they know that nobody would buy the thing if it was marketed as an alternate reality series.

But since we're told that 90% of American mutants are killed by government Sentinels before the age of twenty - an official policy of genocide entirely out of line with anything being shown in any other comic, I'm going to assume that this is just yet another highly questionable mini masquerading as canon when it's actually somewhere off in, quite literally, a world of its own.

Purists reading this will doubtless protest that whether the book is in continuity doesn't make a difference to its quality. True enough, but if quality was the concern, perhaps Marvel would like to clarify these points from the outset so that readers spend their first read of the story paying attention to the plot rather than wondering "What the hell is this shit?" As it is, we have another book guaranteed to pile up on retailers' shelves, which slides under the barrier of misleading advertising on the technicality that it never expressly said it WAS in continuity. (See also: Rogue. And wasn't that one a triumph?)

Spending a couple of paragraphs on that mercifully minimises the time I have to spend writing about the story itself, which even judged purely on its own terms, is some way short of being remotely interesting. Basically, all of the Morlocks have made a vow to help each other fulfil their last wish, and then disappear into the tunnels forever. And yes, this IS about as dull as that makes it sound. It's the usual selection of embittered but somewhat sensitive characters hiding in sewers, with a marginally lower deformity count than usual. It's competent enough, but this whole concept was stripmined bare over a decade ago, and it's way, way too late to try and squeeze a miniseries out of it now.

Perhaps Marvel could increase the concept's appeal to me by releasing a Whack-a-Morlock game on their website. Deformed but sensitive homeless people would pop their heads out of manholes, and players would race to cave their brains in with lead golf clubs before the Morlocks started delivering monologues about their feelings of alienation from mainstream society. I'd play it.

Previously in MUTIES, we have learned that shooting people is bad, and that beating up your wife is also bad. Keeping up this searing level of social commentary, issue #3 turns to the question of child soldiers in Africa, and concludes that it is bad.

This is actually somewhat better than the previous two issues, in that Karl Bollers is rather more successful in fleshing out the personality of his lead character. Unfortunately, the same level of success is not achieved in respect of any other characters, so what we end up with is a story about an ordinary kid being tortured by pantomime villains. I realise that Bollers is opposed to child slavery, for all manner of very good reasons, but if he wants to make this succeed as the serious work it so obviously aspires to be, he needs proper characters and not just cookie-cutter stereotypes representing the social evils of the world.

Dean Haspiel's artwork is perfectly sound, considering what he's got to work with in dramatic terms. There's also a suitably muted colouring job from Matt Madden. But like the previous two issues, this story simply lacks the depth to work on the artistic level it's aiming for. This is not an action film, nor does it want to be. And that means it can't get away with moustache-twirling melodrama villains.

UNCANNY X-MEN continues the X-Corps storyline, and quite honestly there's nothing here which inspires me to waste much time writing about it when I could move on to comics which are actually interesting instead.

More of the same. Villains are nasty. Banshee is a bit mad. X-Men are liberal and outraged. Mystique makes a surprise appearance on the last page, which is such a surprise that the letters page blew it three pages earlier. Nice layout design there, lads.

Pretty much on a par with the rest of the X-Corps storyline, but I'm really not in the mood to be sympathetic with this drawn-out tedium this week.

The other decent X-book this week is X-FORCE, which is in a relatively normal mood this month. The issue is given over to X-Force on their mission to liberate a hijacked space station from the Bush Rangers - which, as we saw last month, they're under orders to lose deliberately so that the government can rescue them and boost their PR.

What that means in practice is a largely character-driven story, as the team begins collapsing under pressure, the Spike turns out to be every bit as utterly useless in a crisis as you'd guess, and Phat and Vivisector out themselves as the first gay couple on a Marvel superhero team.

Dead Girl gets a fairly standard issue origin, although even she's not certain whether it's accurate or not. But the character is appealing enough, as she ultimately admits that her entire "in touch with the other side" routine is just a load of goth posing, and in fact her only power is that she can't be permanently killed. (The power's been done before, with John Byrne's character Mr Immortal, but the goth look is a nice touch.)

The issue suffers a little from some odd pacing towards the end. It reads as though this was intended as the first half of a double-sized story, since the issue hits a dead stop rather than any kind of natural stopping point. The plot also completely loses sight of half the team once they get aboard the station. We end on a nice enough throwaway gag, but it isn't the end of an act.

But the quality of the rest of the issue is enough to get it a recommendation notwithstanding that point. God, I love this series.

I reviewed the last issue of X-MEN UNLIMITED on 4 November 2001, so on its supposed quarterly schedule, this issue should have been out at the beginning of February. It isn't actually late - this is the week it was solicited for - but it says an awful lot that five months have passed since the last issue of this series, and not one person to my knowledge has asked, even in passing, when the next issue was coming out.

And do you know why that is? Yes, of course you do. I don't need to tell you. It's because nobody cares.

And is this the issue to change all that overpowering apathy? No, of course it isn't.

We're still in the anthology format here, which means three stories of twelve pages or thereabouts, one of which is quite entertaining, and two of which aren't. The quite good one is a Jubilee story by Udon studios, which (for those of you who care) fits into continuity after she leaves Generation X and before she joined the X-Corps. Anyhow, Jubilee and Angelo Espinosa have headed to Los Angeles, where she's making a living as an actress.

The story theme here is that Jubilee comes to realise that she's being exploited and is selling out her Asian heritage. It's not such a bad story idea, but it doesn't entirely come off. The attempt to suggest that she's being manipulated by her manager isn't altogether convincing, and the "last straw" moment where she's asked to play a prostitute doesn't entirely make sense - the story seems to suggest that there's something inherently wrong with her playing a prostitute, irrespective of what the script contains, which seems more than a little puritan.

But the art is impressive, the relationship between Jubilee and Angelo is neatly handled, and the montage sequence of Jubilee's bit parts is funny. ("I'm playing a kung fu chick fighting over a box of tampons...") Perfectly entertaining stuff, all told.

Unfortunately, it comes in a package with two rather boring misfires. Karl Kesel and James Fry provide an Emma Frost story, apparently intended to bridge the gap between Generation X and New X-Men. Emma is tormented by visions of her sister Adrienne, and memories of the death of Synch. Ultimately she confronts her issues (oh god), after realising that she is actually feeling guilty about letting Adrienne near Generation X again, after she killed the Hellions.

And if you're doing a double-take after reading that line, then congratulations - you have spotted the glaring continuity error at the heart of the story, which the writer and editor apparently missed, and which has the effect of neutering the entire thing. Because, of course, Adrienne DIDN'T kill the Hellions. She's never even appeared in a story with the Hellions. Which is not unconnected with the fact that she wasn't created until 1999, eight years after the Hellions were killed by a different and totally unrelated character.

Look, I know this is 2002. I know that an interest in historical continuity is out of fashion, for perfectly good reasons. But when the entire story hinges on one particular piece of history, would it kill somebody to make the effort to check it? This is about as glaring as continuity errors get. How hard long would it have taken to find out that the entire story is premised on something that half the readers would immediately realise was completely nonsense?

If you're prepared to look past that, the story still isn't much cop. Emma angsts in a very conventional manner, and artist James Fry gets bored by the second page and starts focusing his attention on huge, bulbous tits instead. Which is just what we need when the writer is trying to be sensitive.

Story number three is a Sunfire story with some rough-looking art from Trevor von Eeden, and a Steven Grant script hinging on our old favourite plot device, "Japanese people are obsessed with honour, and will do any old nonsense as long as it can be tenuously justified on that basis." I've read worse, and the last page is quite good, but it's nothing to write home about.

Another eminently missable issue of X-Men Unlimited, then. The Jubilee story is worth a look, but given that you can't buy it separately, it isn't worth the money.

On to the new series. The last time I saw Bill Rosemann's name in the writing credits, he was doing a pilot story for his Elite Agents of SHIELD team as a back-up strip for Captain America 2000. I recall that story being thoroughly average, and it didn't exactly inspire much enthusiasm when it came to his new series, DEADLINE.

However, this is a significant improvement. The concept is one of those nice simple ones which you can sum up in a sentence but still leaves plenty of room for manoeuvre. Low- ranking Daily Bugle journalist Kat Farrell has been assigned to cover superheroes - but she hates them. Simple, huh? And the plot is driven by equally straightforward elements - with the possibility of a promotion in the offing, Kat needs to prove herself with a quality story, leading her to investigate some mysterious deaths.

It's nice and simple, it allows from some amusing details to be included, and Kat is a fairly well-rounded character. Guy Davis' artwork largely goes for the street-level approach but shifts easily to accommodate the weirder material. It's a perfectly entertaining read.

There are a few glitches, admittedly. When Kat is given her big tip in a conversation over lunch with Jimmy Lee, she signals the importance of this key plot development by getting up and racing out to begin her investigation. The problem is that this makes no sense in plot terms - clearly, since Lee is her only lead, the only sane thing to do is to keep talking to him, and so the scene makes Kat look a total idiot.

Overall, though, not at all bad.

HIGH ROADS is a new miniseries under the Cliffhanger imprint. No, I didn't know Cliffhanger was still going either.

Anyhow, their latest recruit is Leinil Francis Yu, who we used to see a lot of on the X-books. He made an impressive debut on Wolverine, and then deteriorated alarmingly in his subsequent work on both that book and X-Men, with sketchy and awkward artwork that showed little sign of his initial promise. My hope was that this was simply a reflection of his lack of enthusiasm for the stories he was given to illustrate, some of which were certainly awful.

Yu isn't writing this series - Scott Lobdell is - but it's his original idea, and this is the Leinil Francis Yu I remember from the early days. It's a damned odd book, which seems to be aiming for a mixture of "high adventure" and comedy. Our hero is US army sergeant Nic Highroad, an impossibly innocent ingenue who arrives in recently-liberated Paris and finds himself doing the sort of things that such characters tend to find themselves doing in stories like this.

Lobdell is obviously having fun with the weird selection of characters - a midget Hitler lookalike and a prostitute who won't shut up about how much Adolf loved her, for example - and the second half of the book, with Nic arriving in Paris, is pretty good.

The first half is a flash forward action sequence to kick off the series, and it's a little more inconsistent. On the one hand, it's got some great artwork. On the other hand, it's a few pages too long for its own good, and it's got niggling little things like Nic's bomb somehow teleporting from his belt to being held in his teeth under its own power. (Where he proceeds to deliver dialogue while still clenching it in his teeth. I think not.)

Still, all told this is better than I'd expected. It's silly, but in a good way, and Yu's artwork hasn't looked this good in ages.

MARVEL KNIGHTS DOUBLE-SHOT was originally meant to be out months ago, but got put back for some unexplained reason. Hey, at least this time they went to the trouble of cancelling and resoliciting it.

Two stories here, both clocking in at around the 11-page mark. The first is a Punisher story by Garth Ennis, with a rare art job from Joe Quesada. Ennis recognises the strengths and limitations of an 11-page format, and goes for the classic approach - one good, strong idea, running for its natural length.

The good, strong idea is that the Punisher straps a criminal to a dentist's chair and then tortures him with dental equipment for 11 pages while the camera watches from within his mouth. It's thoroughly nauseating, which is precisely the intended effect. I really feel for Joe Quesada, who must have spent a lengthy amount of time staring at this stuff. I'm squeamish. Personally, I hope never to lay eyes on it again.

Now, in context, that's a compliment. But it should be equally obvious to you that this is not going to be to all tastes. We're talking truly sick here. It's up to you whether you take that as a recommendation or not.

The back-up strip is a Rob Haynes Daredevil story, which also has one joke, but it's not a strong enough joke to carry a story. The Kingpin has great big underpants. Oh, the hilarity.

If you like the Punisher story, it's worth it for that alone, though. You're certainly not likely to forget it in a hurry.

POUNDED is a three-issue miniseries from Oni, and if you want an X-books connection, it's written by Brian Wood, who was the last writer on Generation X.

This is a little bit more representative of his work, though. We're in Vancouver, and our lead character is Heavy Parker, lead singer of a local punk band. (And no, I don't get the reference, which according to the narration, excludes me pretty firmly from the target audience. Oh well, I shan't lose sleep.)

Anyway, once you get past the celebration of the punk underground (which doesn't do a great deal for me, possibly for the same reasons that I'm not in the target audience), it's a romantic triangle story. Heavy is a bit of an asshole, who finds himself torn between a nice cheerleader type who he'd really like to get rid of, and a cipher who sings in a Riot Grrl band. For perhaps understandable reasons, he'd rather have the singer, but is too much of a twat to actually dump the other girl properly.

Hmm. I want to like this, because Wood tells a good story, and Ralston does an excellent job on the art. Problem is, there's only one character here I sympathise with, and I have a sinking feeling it's precisely the one I'm not mean to identify with at all. Such are the trials of being chronically middle class.

It's a celebration of a music scene which I'm not remotely interested in. Technically, it's excellent, but thematically, it leaves me cold. Your mileage may vary, depending largely (I suspect) on your tastes in music.

Ah, TRANSFORMERS. It's been a while.

Some people don't get the Transformers. It's simple. They're big robots. And they change into things. And they fight. This is beautiful and mad. If you do not get this, there is something missing in your soul.

Marvel UK's Transformers series was the book that got me into comics in the first place. I emphasise, the UK version. It was really good. It had far better stories than the concept might suggest, and some really rather good artists. Now, granted, it probably helped that I was about ten years old. But it's a book that had some early work by Bryan Hitch in it, which has to give it at least SOME elitist credibility, surely? Hell, Alan Davis did a cover for it.

The UK comic also ran American reprints. They were on a weekly schedule and therefore got through material twice as quickly as the Americans were producing it. The American reprints suffered badly in comparison. For one thing, they were split into two parts, which messed up the pacing. For another, they were enlarged to UK page sizes, which cruelly exposed the limitations of contemporary Marvel US colouring techniques. (Marvel UK, in contrast, were way ahead of their time.) But largely, the problem was that the US stories were often crap. Even now, I can't quite believe somebody actually published a story entitled "Buster Witwicky And The Car Wash Of Doom." One story was so bad that Marvel UK reprinted it with a framing sequence mocking the poor quality of the plot.

This might explain why, in terms of both story and artwork, the Americans at Dreamwave seem far more influenced by the cartoon (which, for those of us with access to the British comics, was always a bit of an afterthought). That's more of a stylistic influence than anything else, though - while this story pitches itself clearly as a sequel, with the Transformers returning after years in the wilderness, it doesn't tie itself too closely to any particular continuity.

Perhaps surprisingly, writer Chris Sarracini resists the temptation to throw big fighting robots at us from the outset. Instead, this is a tension-building issue, focusing on the human cast members, setting up a conspiracy, and giving glimpses of the robots in order to set up for the big reveal at the end. This is the right way to go - they didn't open with the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, either - but it's pleasantly unexpected to see that the series is making a genuine effort to set up a real story rather than just hurling any old rubbish out there for the nostaglia rush.

To be honest, you'll have seen more of the actual Transformers in the promotional art than you will here. And let's not kid ourselves that this is going to be anything more than fun. But so far, it IS fun. Of course it's a nostalgia thing, we all know that. But so far, it's also married to a reasonably decent story. Fun, though it's not going to win over anyone who for some reason doesn't have fond memories of the things from the mid-1980s.