14 october 2001

There must be a war on - Kate Adie is back on the BBC, and boy does she look rough. I could have sworn she was a decade younger than that. Mind you, the Gulf War WAS a while back.

I note with amusement that the UK government has chosen today to put Railtrack into administration. What a handy coincidence that this humiliating defeat for the policy of railway privatisation should come to pass on a day when it could not possibly gain prominence in any news bulletin.

Anyhow... from one subject of absolutely zero relevance to the Marvel Universe, to another. EXILES, the other X-book nobody remembers about unless prompted, takes us this time to an alternate Canada where Alpha Flight are about to fight the Hulk. Our intrepid heroes must prevent the Hulk from killing them all.

Once again, the book's biggest shortcoming is the shamelessly obvious "plug and play" structure of the plots. The Exiles turn up, they are assigned an arbitrary mission, and they set about achieving it. But whereas in the first two stories there was at least some kind of broad reason for the characters to take an emotional interest in events, it's really not altogether clear what they've got to do with this. Wolverine's hanging around, and they all know him, but basically this is the Hulk doing his usual routine against the usual assortment of Canadian D-listers, and the team end up seeming like generic heroes.

In fairness, Winick is doing better when it comes to the characterisation side of things, giving T-Bird a counterpart in this world's Shaman so they can have a nice chat about his personality, and advancing a romantic subplot between Blink and the Mimic. (Oh, and five issues into the series, the Mimic finally gets around to explaining what his powers are.) It's the usual routine for this book - the characterisation is appealing, the dialogue is snappy, but the plot seems a bit token.

Guest art comes from Jim Calafiore, who's done some impressive work on Black Panther, and fits in rather neatly here. He's got a good sense of comedy, and does a lovely Hulk. His Mimic is also excellent, taking proper advantage of the visual possibilities.

Still... it's Exiles. It's pleasant, it's entertaining, but it feels a bit lightweight.

ICEMAN is the third Icons miniseries, although surely it's stretching the definition of "icon" to include a character whose career high was being one of the Amazing Friends.

It's written by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, a somewhat erratic pairing whose track records ranges from the genuinely pretty good (such as the first volume of Knights of Pendragon) to the really quite diabolical (such as last year's X-Men: Magik miniseries). This is another rather underwhelming Icons story, but at least it's the right side of readable.

Iceman is summoned to Hong Kong, where now-obscure late-eighties supporting character Opal Tanaka is now working in some kind of impressive role in high-tech business. Gosh, the wonders of dramatic licence - I seem to remember her being a shop assistant. This is an "all is not what it seems" story, but even so, shouldn't Bobby be at least mildly surprised by this astonishing turnaround in Opal's career fortunes?

Anyhow... Opal, it turns out, was pregnant with Bobby's child when she left America in the early nineties (or so she claims). Through the miracle of Marvel time, the child is still an infant ten years down the line, and has some kind of genetic disorder which they need Iceman's help to cure. More or less credible, I guess. Meanwhile, Iceman keeps getting attacked by weird thingies. All of this is some kind of plan to keep him in Hong Kong.

Well, there are some moderately interesting plot questions being raised - is it really his child, what's Opal playing at, why do they want him to stay in Hong Kong - albeit that this story still has that wholly inconsequential feel that we've all come to associate with X-Men miniseries. And that pretty much guarantees that the answers to those three questions will be No, Doesn't Matter and Doesn't Matter. Still, we might get a readable four- parter out of it if you're prepared to overlook Iceman's apparently inability to notice glaringly implausible plot points.

Art comes from Karl Kerschl, who I last remember seeing on the abortive New Warriors series from 1999-2000. In case you were wondering, no, that's not his art on the cover, nor does the interior look much like it at all. Kerschl still shows promise, with a generally appealing style, some strong character designs and a refreshing willingness to put some effort into designing his architecture and interior decor. He's let down here by the occasional moment of shaky storytelling, with two separate action sequences leaving me rather unclear whether I was watching one character morphing into another, or whether there had been some kind of cut to another part of the room. Still, at least he doesn't use that godawful costume that they're using in the core books, which has the major disadvantage of reflecting Ian Churchill's dress sense, not the character's.

This is readable enough, but it's still not making a convincing case for the continued existence of these miniseries. While the overall quality level may be higher than the drek we saw in the 1990s, there's still no immediately obvious reason why any of this stuff is being published.

ORIGIN still seems to be focussing as much on looking like a quality product as on actually being one. That isn't to say that it's bad - it's perfectly okay - but every page still screams "Look at me, I'm a work of art, not a shameless grab for money." It's trying way too hard to convince us that it's very serious and grown-up, and while it all looks very pretty, it gives the impression of being a bit too prettified for its own good. Costume drama is just a genre too, you know. It doesn't automatically qualify as high art, and bluntly, this book seems to be under the impression that it does.

In any event, the plot has tensions continuing to grow at the big gothic house on the hill, leading up to much squabbling, the obligatory attempted rape sequence, and the ultimate revelation of Wolverine using his claws for the first time. The big bait and switch here is that Logan turns out to be James, not Dog. Which I'll admit I didn't see coming, and works rather nicely - although in the long run, I'm not at all convinced that making Wolverine into an aristocrat is going to do the character any favours.

The art is settling into a slightly uneasy balance between Kubert's histrionic fight scenes and Isanove trying to turn them into pseudo-watercolours. It works in the quieter moments; it just feels a bit weird in the action routines. The mansion interiors are also way too sketchy for my tastes; I need more detail to get a sense of this as anything more than a vacant pile of bricks.

It's okay as a story in its own right, but let's not get carried away with ourselves - it's really nothing particularly special. The melodrama is really a bit much.

Well, after a relatively decent issue last month, it's back to business as usual for ULTIMATE X-MEN, the X-book for people who think there isn't nearly enough cynicism in the world.

And it's another issue which is way too busy being pleased with itself to bother making any sense or having any interesting characters in it. Once again, all the protagonists are completely interchangeable, meaning that it doesn't matter what Millar throws at them, I simply don't care, because I don't feel any connection to them as people.

Also, once again, Millar is throwing plot logic out of the window in order to emphasise how wonderfully nasty his Weapon X project is. If Millar put as much effort into making them make sense as he does into making them look evil, maybe this story would be interesting. But no, we've got characters parading around with numbers tattooed on their arms (a cheap holocaust reference which has no place in trivial crap like this), and nonsense like the Weapon X project refusing to teach their field agents to speak the same language because "we couldn't be bothered." Well in that case, they're fucking idiots. You expect me to take them seriously when they're that stupid? Forget it. I can just about buy them being pointlessly abusive to the mutants, but when they start acting in irrational ways just to hammer home the point with even less subtlety, we're entering the realm of the retarded.

Another dumb, nasty and cynical issue, with seemingly no purpose other than to be dumb, nasty and cynical. Still, if you like seeing characters with no personality fighting morons with even less personality while making cheap holocaust references, I'm sure you'll love it.

Really gets on my nerves, this book. So bloody pleased with itself.

Ah well. On to UNCANNY X-MEN, where Poptopia winds up and confirms our suspicions that no, it wasn't really heading anywhere terribly interesting.

We have another change of art style this month. Having started off with Ian Churchill doing his best "I Love 1993" routine, last month shifted to Sean Phillips drawing in a fairly neutral style. This month, in a selection that betrays either insanity or desperation, Phillips is still on layouts, but is joined by finisher Ashley Wood. By Wood's standards, this is perfectly mainstream stuff, but then Wood's normal style involves the reader peering through a sepia fog to try and work out who the hell the guy talking is meant to be. You can follow this issue just fine, but it has a scratchy and distorted quality which is almost a 180 degree turn from Churchill's art at the beginning of the run.

The trade paperback is going to look ridiculous.

I'm assuming this must be a selection driven by desperation to find a competent available artist at very short notice, since surely Marvel would otherwise have gone for something a little more in tune with the first three parts of the storyline. Personally, I quite like it, and I certainly prefer it to Churchill, but as a mid-story stylistic shift, it goes beyond jarring into just plain bizarre.

The writing, meanwhile, remains deeply unimpressive. The X-Men fight and defeat Mr Clean, and the New Morlocks trot off happily to start a new life, having decided to name their baby "Hope" in a moment that had me reaching for the sick bag. Incidentally, in this fourth part of the story, Casey finally gets around to telling us that Mr Clean is meant to be superhuman. If he had bothered mentioning this in earlier parts, maybe that previous fight scene between him and the X-Men wouldn't have looked so absurd.

In the other storyline, Sugar Kane fakes a public kidnapping to somehow persuade the public that she isn't pregnant by a mutant. The less said about this the better. Suffice to say I don't really buy it as a solution to her PR troubles.

You may be wondering what exactly these two plots were doing in the same storyline, considering that they never actually overlapped in any way, shape or form. The usual answer to that sort of question is "thematic link", but I'm struggling to work out what theme I'm supposed to be taking from this. The nice freaks in the sewers are sincere and decent people, while the pretty people are all shallow and basically ugly? Is that it? Not much of a point for four issues of stereotypes, really, is it?

All a bit dreary, I'm afraid.

Well, there's always X-FORCE.

Wolverine turns up for a guest appearance, which is almost as gratuitous as the cover suggests. In fact, there's a genuine reason why he's here (to legitimise Doop as a basically decent character by endorsing him as a friend), but the issue also seems to be playing with the conventions, retroactively inserting yet another "old friend" into the character's past.

The main purpose of this issue is to restabilise X-Force by getting rid of the Coach, and giving the other characters an opportunity to come across as the good guys for a change. Yes, even U-Go Girl gets to be sympathetic.

This isn't a standout issue - it's a bit too focussed on dealing with the plot - but it's still another entertaining issue. Unlike Ultimate X-Men, this book's got a bit of discrimination to its cynicism, and its jokes are actually funny. Overall, I'm quite pleased to see the book more or less returning to its original set-up and not dumping it at such an early stage, since there's so much potential there that they haven't been through yet.

ABSENCE OF INK THEATER is a quarterly anthology featuring the work of various new creators, which of course makes it the sort of thing we should all be in favour of as a matter of principle. And they sent me a review copy, which is why I'm reviewing it now even though it came out several weeks ago.

As is the way with anthologies, this is a bit of a mixed bag. In fact, this one is even more mixed than most, given that there doesn't seem to be any common theme between the material at all. It's a common vehicle for a group of creators to do whatever they want, and the end product is an oddly wide-ranging affair.

"The Castaways" is the strongest thing here, getting 18 pages to do a character-driven piece about a depression-era teenager who has run away to try and earn money for himself rather than take up space at home. Writer Rob Vollmar and artist Pablo Callejo have a great atmosphere here, and balance the lead character's monologue nicely against the art. This could easily have been a rather dull talking heads piece, but they've neatly sidestepped that trap. Impressive stuff, particularly considering that we're talking about fairly inxperienced creators here.

And then, on the other hand, we have a jarring style shift for "Bune's World." Fantasy is a genre that does nothing for me to begin with, and I'm afraid this one isn't about to change that. The basic premise - dinosaurs never died out, and several other races evolved alongside humans - has got some promise, but we're deep into genre territory here with the hero displaying his prowess in a swordfight, a melodramatic villainess making expository speeches which could stand to be a touch better paced, and a sex scene near the end which feels rather out of place in this book. The art's not bad, but this is really one for the hardcore fantasy audience only.

"Raven's End", by Kevin Gunstone and Alessandro Scacchia, gets six pages to set out its premise and really doesn't get much further than that. It's medieval Japan, and a chap called Muroto is following an apparently mystical raven in the hope of finding his missing son. It's explained in a bit more detail than that, but basically we're in mystical/historical territory here. The premise is sound enough, and there's plenty of potential. I could live without dialogue like "Perhaps amongst these mountains I will discover the Kin Hwa, and I would find the Grotto of Koshoei", mind you. This stuff doesn't mean a damn thing to me, and I just find it off-putting rather than atmospheric.

Scacchia's art isn't quite to my taste. I assume that the near-total absence of light and shadow effects is an intentional decision, but it really doesn't work for me. The art isn't abstract enough to get away with dumping the lighting altogether, and it's a bit too flat to work as naturalism. Scacchia does some nice character designs, and the visual storytelling is pretty sound, but there's something about the tone of the artwork that doesn't click.

There are also a selection of one-page strips here, with some reasonable humour material and the bemusing inclusion of what seems to be a serialised strip. This is a quarterly title, for heaven's sake. You can't serialise a story at four pages a year. If you want to go for that length, I'd say anything longer than fortnightly intervals is pushing it.

Rating anthologies is always a nightmare because the rating doesn't really reflect any particular story. I'll be buying the second issue, though that's largely for "Castaways." Mind you, it's $2.99 for 40 pages, no ads, and "Castaways" fills almost half the book. With that in mind...