7 november 1999

I went to see the Blair Witch Project this week. I really absolutely hated it. I left halfway through. I don't recall ever having done that before. I can't remember ever having seen a film I found more boring, and that includes The End Of Violence. I just don't get it. I mean, I see the point - genre plot, ultra-naturalistic film style that overcomes your normal resistance to the genre elements - but it doesn't work for me at all.

I mention this partly because you deserve to have a fair sense of just how much our tastes may or may not diverge, but mainly because I'm trying to fill up space that I would otherwise have to take up writing about BISHOP.

Maybe I'm just an impatient fool, but we're three issues in and I'm getting rather restless. I'm not turning against the book quite yet, but I'm not generally well disposed to stories set in post-apocalyptic feudal societies (surely the future timeline cliche of the 1990s) and I'm having difficulty seeing what new insight this title has to add to the well-worn theme.

In this issue we mainly have the reintroduction of that kid who Bishop rescued in issue #1, who's apparently been transported to the nasty future time along with him. His function here seems to be to raise Bishop's spirits when he's having a crisis of confidence, which frankly also doesn't strike me as the most original idea I've read lately.

I don't know. I want to like the book but I'm not finding much here to grab me. It's a subgenre I've never really liked and maybe that's the problem, but I also don't entirely see what this book's got to add to the genre elements. It's got quite pleasant art, it's decently scripted, but what's the point?

GENERATION X 1999 reads more like an extended issue of the regular series than an annual. Not that that's a bad thing, of course - while it advances the ongoing plot, the main story is more or less self-contained. The art also manages to hold to the tone of the Dodsons' work on the regular series, despite the plethora of artists contributing (seven in all).

I have a policy of not marking books down for continuity glitches with past stories in other titles altogether, so I'm simply going to note that this story deals with who killed Jubilee's parents and does so in apparent ignorance of the fact that Larry Hama resolved this plot thread in a contradictory way over five years ago.

This time around, Jubilee discovers that her parents were involved with Hunter Brawn, the villain whose son is now going out with Husk and who they had a fight with a few issues back. She investigates and finds out that he was involved with their deaths. Well, so far so good.

As always, Faerber has his characters nailed (with the possible exception of a curious sequence in which the Banshee just cheerily allows Jubilee to carry on with an attack on Brawn that everyone seems to think is tantamount to suicide). There's good material here with Synch's refusal to do the supposedly honourable thing and keep his mouth shut, and Jubilee's memories of her dead parents. The closing sequence with Tristan Brawn turning his back on his father is also well written.

But I'm going to have to be honest here. This thing has plot holes you could drive a truck through.

One, the climax hinges on Brawn's plans being foiled when the other half of the team stop his henchmen from killing Jubilee's informant. Since she never told them who the informant was, presumably they worked out his identity by looking under "Informants" in the Vermont Yellow Pages. Now, this is a pretty big plot mechanics problem.

Two, and perhaps I'm being overly lawyerish here, I simply do not follow the logic of what Brawn is supposed to have done to Jubilee's parents' bank. He was using it for money laundering - okay, so far I'm with you. Mr Lee finds out and gets killed to stop him revealing it - fine. But the circumstantial evidence Jubilee finds, that the next day "the bank was stripped of all its assets" - um, what exactly does that mean?

I mean, stripped by who? By Brawn? Why? What's the point of that? He's got a perfectly good money laundering institution here, and the possibility of shoving friendly management staff in Lee's place. Surely he'd want to keep the bank going. Making it go bust just means an investigation by the banking authorities and most likely a liquidator. That's a disaster for Brawn because it increases the likelihood of his getting caught. So what exactly is the idea here? This feels to me gratingly like the legal equivalent of pseudoscience.

The issue is strong on its themes, but unfortunately the story has serious plot difficulties. The character work is enough to raise it into a positive mark, but the plot problems keep it near the borderline.

I've made my views clear many times on giving WOLVERINE his adamantium back. I'm against. We've done that story. We did it for almost twenty years. Can we do something else, please?

Well no, apparently we can't, since this is 1999 and Marvel's entire policy for getting out the mess the industry is currently in is to rehash old ideas from previous decades rather than coming up with any new ones at all. So the adamantium's back. Which, to be honest, I think is a boring, unimaginative and cowardly thing to do. But there you go.

Leaving this aside, it's not a very good issue anyway.

The story cuts back and forth between the present, with Wolverine as a horseman of Apocalypse, and flashbacks explaining how he ended up there. The flashbacks are by far the more interesting bit. For one thing, the story does at least come up with a semi-credible reason for giving Wolverine the adamantium bit, which is a hell of a task in itself, so all credit for that. For another, it actually gets some character mileage out of Wolverine's decision to sign up as a Horseman in order to stop Sabretooth getting the job.

Unfortunately, the main plot is Wolverine being packed off to fight the Hulk for absolutely no clear reason, and then having a pointless and inconclusive fight. We're way off into "what was the point of that supposed to be" territory here. This story isn't about anything other than resolving the adamantium story and advancing the Twelve story. It has nothing to SAY about either of them. This is a story about resolving other stories, and nothing more.

Let's see, what else can I be negative about? (Keep reading, I'll be positive about something in a bit.) Ah yes, the art. Much as I like Leinil Francis Yu's artwork, Dexter Vines' inking is absolutely killing it for me. Since he started inking Yu, there's been no sense of atmosphere or texture at all. It's ugly, and frankly it reminds me a bit of Ariel Olivetti. This is not a good thing. If Yu is moving to one of the core titles, can we please take the opportunity to find him a better inker?

Maybe I'm just being negative because I hate the entire idea of giving Wolverine that bloody metal back. But no, this issue is no good for many other reasons as well. I don't like it.

Onto UNCANNY X-MEN, which thank god is actually a decent issue. Granted, it's lumbered with the difficulties of advancing the Twelve plotline (which means we're about to enter a three month crossover involving that most tedious of villains, Apocalypse), but there's some proper storytelling here and some good ideas.

I particularly like the repositioning of Scott and Jean as characters trying to get the hell out of the entire X-Men mess but tied into it because everybody sees them as the core of the team. This is a good storyline, which is finally finding something interesting to do with two characters who have often had nothing to do besides be blandly normal and act as a contrast to the interesting people like Wolverine and Gambit.

It's also pleasant to see Rogue finally dumping Gambit, although I freely admit I take pleasure in the very idea of this rather than anything in particular about the way its done. I'm sure they'll be back together within six months, but for the moment it's good to see.

Guest art come from Roger Cruz, who has obviously decided that this week he's going to copy Chris Bachalo. This astonishing artistic chameleon has been aping other artists without ever threatening to develop a style of his own for years now, and this issue is no exception. Actually, the issue doesn't look at all bad, helped by some decent colouring from Liquid.

On the other hand, there are some shaky action sequences with the size-changing Skrull (without proper backgrounds, his size-changing doesn't come across clearly), and a confusing flashback sequence altering the Living Monolith's origin in which it's far from clear whether the character we're seeing is Apocalypse or Sinister. Cruz seems to have drawn one of Apocalypse's stock disguises, but the actions of the character are far more consistent with Sinister. Very odd. Wrong references, perhaps?

Some complaints have been heard that the identity of the Twelve was thrown away in Xavier simply reading out a list on page twenty. There's some truth in that - it's certainly not played as the enormous plot revelation that some had expected. But this is probably for the best. The identity of the Twelve is not, in itself, going to make an interesting plot. What they're supposed to do and whether they achieve it - those are potentially interesting. This bit of the plot is, at heart, just a list, and it always will be. Much better just to chuck it out there as an aside in the middle of another plot and let the readers try and figure out how it's meant to work (the inclusion of Bishop is a particular surprise).

Given that I'm sceptical anyone can get a decent storyline out of Apocalypse at this stage (Age of Apocalypse was at its best whenever the big twat was off panel), this is a decent and promising beginning to the Twelve crossover.

X-FORCE, bereft of its original plans for issue #100, now seems to be lumbering gamely towards resolving the Damocles Foundation storyline for its anniversary. This is to be honest a bit disappointing, since the whole Damocles Foundation thing doesn't interest me a great deal.

As always, it's a perfectly decent affair, albeit rather rushed as the Foundation's plans get ruined in only a few panels to make way for a big fight with Selene. What I don't entirely get it what a big fight between Eternals and Deviants is doing in X-Force. I suppose there's the general interest of all mutant books in future of mankind plots, and Moore is doing a down-to-earth version of the Deviants which mirrors what he's doing with X-Force. But it still seems a rather curious book to be running a story like this.

I really don't have a great deal to say about this. It's the Damocles Foundation, and I'm not very interested in them. It's not that it's bad in any way, it just doesn't catch my attention.

After a promising first issue, X-MEN: THE HIDDEN YEARS #2 gets off to a rather bad start as Cyclops encounters a T-rex and proceeds to angst about whether he should kill it or not. After all, as he says, it's only defending its territory and acting as nature intended. Quote: "What sort of monument to Jean would it be to kill this innocent beast, even in self-defence?"

Oh, just shut up and kill it, you whining little prick. It's only a dinosaur, the Savage Land's got tons of them.

Ridiculous opening sequence over, however, the book gets quickly back on track. The explanation of why Jean isn't dead after all is a clever one. When the priest said she'd passed on to the land of the dead, he meant exactly that. She's in the land of the dead. It's just over there, next to the hill. I like that.

So Scott, Hank and Warren spend their time trying to get into this land of the dead place only to find that it's not a terribly nice afterlife after all. This is all pretty amusing stuff, perhaps a bit cute but definitely bringing out some good plot twists. It only falters when Byrne succumbs to melodrama and starts giving Scott more horrible dialogue like "Bit beyond that, I'm afraid, ol' buddy. Arrow must have nicked my heart..."

Meanwhile, Byrne also reintroduces some of the Silver Age supporting cast - not just Candy Southern but the other long-forgotten love interest characters, Zelda and Vera. We haven't seen either of these people in a while, and it's quite nice to see them showing up.

Although cursed with some irritating stylistic tics, the book is pretty solid on the fundamentals and definitely the best work we've seen from John Byrne in quite some time. It still needs a bit of tweaking, but I've got no hesitation in giving it a good review.