7 may 2000

This is Marvels Comics week, which means that instead of our regular books we get a set of fifth-week gimmick titles. But hey, one of them's X-MEN, so I'll write about that.

The Marvels Comics gimmick is meant to be that Marvels publish comics within the Marvel Universe itself - either licensed or unlicensed, but basically reflecting how the Marvel public view the characters. It's a potentially interesting idea, and Tom Brevoort's essay in the spoof History Of Marvels Comics one- shot makes it sound promising, with plenty of skewed takes on established characters.

However, Brevoort has also commented that he didn't stick too closely to the letter of the law at the expense of telling a good story. This is fair enough, but in my view the Marvels Comics books have veered so far from the letter of their gimmick that they've gone sailing away from the spirit as well. Although the Captain America and Thor books look reasonably like something you might see published in the Marvel Universe, the FF title is an unconvincing attempt at a licensed book, and the other titles are so far removed from the original concept that they bear more resemblance to DC's Tangent gimmick (same names, different characters).

Mark Millar's reinvention of the X-Men is just this side of Tangent, since it does at least have some recognisable characters, but is so removed from the original series that nobody could seriously argue this was how the Marvel Universe public viewed the X-Men. The approach is to play the X-Men as a version of Suicide Squad, DC's team of captured supervillains pressganged into service as government-sponsored (but ill-treated) superheroes.

In theory this might have worked, since it's the sort of rationalisation the Marvel public might come up with for the X-Men's actions, and it actually does have some basis in the Sabretooth-era X-Factor. But Millar pushes the concept out to lunatic extremes, having the team under the control of a skewed and unpleasant Captain America figure calling himself Colonel America, who has an inverted star on his chest just to hammer home the fact that he's a villain.

There are logic problems with the entire issue (why on Earth would the Marvel public identify the barely-known Deathbird as an X-Man?), but it's the bad guys who push it way over the edge. Millar writes his villains as the sort of ludicrous caricatures that Golden Age creators used for Japanese and German characters. This leads to some good gags (a bunch of cannibal mutants opening up Iron Man with a tin-opener), but ultimately leaves you wondering what the point is. Modern comics aren't as blatantly offensive as this - I don't recall anything quite this stupid being done during the Gulf War, for example - and there's just no way the Marvel public would buy into a group of mutant villains led by a psychopathic Doctor Strange.

Art comes from Vertigo regulars Sean Phillips and Duncan Fegredo, who aren't people you'd normally associate with superhero work. They do a good job of making the story work on its surface level as a ridiculous brawl, but their work probably won't be to all tastes. Always pleasant to see them in these parts, though.

The book kind of works as a wind-up superhero story, but whatever point Millar thought he was making about casual racism gets totally lost by the sheer lunacy of his plot. The Marvel Universe's anti-mutant prejudice is already so absurdly extreme that it's almost impossible to imagine how Millar has managed to come up with something that goes so ludicrously far beyond it - but he has, and the book would probably have been more successful if it had underplayed things more. A lot more.

LEGEND OF THE HAWKMAN is a three issue series which will be starting in July, but DC had preview copies at the Comics 2000 convention, so why not review it now? Since this one isn't out yet, I'll take more care than normal to avoid major spoilers, but it goes without saying there are going to be some here, so you have been warned.

If you're not aware, this book is what Ben Raab's been working on lately - well, aside from Scandinavian Phantom stories. It was originally commissioned for Legends of the DC Universe (and in fact, all the pages here have that book's title scored out) but is now coming out as its own miniseries.

Raab has said that he has no idea how this story is meant to fit into Hawkman's continuity, and since I've never followed the character, nor do I. It doesn't matter, however, because this is not a continuity-heavy story, nor is it yet another attempt to redefine the poor bastard's history, already mangled beyond repair by Crisis. Are we in the present or the past? Damned if I know, but it doesn't really matter. No doubt anyone who knows the characters will have no problem placing the period if they want to.

The set-up here, for the benefit of those of you who know nothing about the characters, is that our heroes Katar and Shyera (Hawkman and Hawkwoman) are aliens from the planet Thanagar currently maintaining cover identities as antiquarians. Raab quickly sets up the main tension between the two characters - Katar is getting more and more into his cover identity and clearly just wants to stay here to live, while Shyera regards their mission as finished and wants to go home to see her friends again. It's a reasonable angle to take with the characters, and gives the readers something to identify with on both sides.

The plot involves the discovery of a Thanagarian artifact in Tibet (that handy all-purpose symbol of the remote and mysterious), which gives the characters an element of their home to argue over. Since the nature of said artifact is the central plot revelation of issue #1, I'm not going to go into detail here, save to note that it involves a coincidence which hovers on the verge of implausible. I can live with the use of a variant Bible story as part of Thanagarian legend, though - nothing wrong with a good old universal myth, and it's only really used as a source of inspiration.

I've only seen Michael Lark's artwork in black and white, of course, but it's good clean stuff with some suitably graceful aerial sequences. Lovely quiet scene on page 19, too.

There are some elements here that are a bit too generic for comfort (the old "mysterious artifact found in Tibet routine" is groan-inducing these days), but Raab gives the characters something worthwhile to work with, and it holds the attention without requiring much knowledge of the character. Of course, in the usual way of these things, when it eventually comes out it'll probably have been coloured in luminous pink or something...