8 april 2001

"Bob Weinberg is one of the greatest comic book writers of all time," says Dean Koontz on the cover of CABLE #91. Well, it makes a change from Alan Moore, I suppose.

Marvel evidently disagree with Mr Koontz, as they're kicking Weinberg off the title in a few months. That leaves Weinberg in the position of aborting his long-term plans and instead having to go for a relatively swift tie-up of the Dark Sisterhood storyline. "Relatively" is the operative word, mind you, since even Weinberg's sub-storylines run in fairly lengthy blocks, and this storyline is set to continue into the new regime.

What this seems to mean in the short term is a second consecutive issue which devotes a large chunk of time to Cable ploughing through the Dark Sisterhood in classic "horde of attacking ninjas, all of them shit" style. For a globally dominant organisation of mutants, these people sure are crap in a fight. More interesting are the cutaways to what the supporting cast are up to, with some decent material for both Clarity and George Bridge.

The main purpose of this issue seems to be for Cable to declare out of the blue that there needs to be a fifth force in the human/mutant relationship war (the first four being friendly humans, hostile humans, friendly mutants and hostile mutants). Cable's fifth force concept seems to be to follow the X-Men's dream but with more aggressive tactics. This doesn't really make as much of an impact as it's evidently meant to, since it just amounts to Cable reverting to his original character. Nor, for that matter, does this sudden interest in the human/mutant war have a great deal to do with the Dark Sisterhood (Cable tenuously claims that they fall within the Fourth Power, but while this may be true, it has very little to do with the story).

This runs the risk of falling flat for the same reason X-Force's recent relaunch did - with much fanfare, and assuring us that this is something new and radical, the characters proceed to hit the reset button and go back to what they were doing a decade ago. Not that it's actually a bad idea, since Cuddly Cable always seemed to be somewhat missing the point of the character, but trying to sell it as something dramatically new is a mistake.

GAMBIT & BISHOP comes to a conclusion this week. Thank god.

In this issue, Stryfe sacrifices himself to destroy Le Bete Noir, and then everyone goes home. That's pretty much it.

To be fair, this is actually one of the better issues of the series. Or less bad, if you prefer. After six issues of pissing about in New Orleans, confusing bollocks about transchronological supporting characters, some of the worst pseudo-science we've seen in ages, an impenetrable subplot about Bishop having a cosmic satanic symbiote under his skin, and roughly four issues worth of filler in a seven issue series, things finally come down to a relatively simple finale. Villain number one threatens world. Villain number two sacrifices self to save world. Villain number two thereby dies redeemed. And also in the plus column, Georges Jeanty's art isn't at all bad, though it's inconsistently inked.

Of course, the fact that the plot has finally decided to make some vague degree of sense does not fully redeem matters. For one thing, Stryfe is given absolutely no reason to reform. Back at the beginning of his series, he was planning to destroy the world. Now he decides to save it. Why? The story offers no explanation, making Stryfe's sacrifice meaningless. Every other character in the story ends up commenting that it makes no sense; when the characters are complaining about the plot, that's usually a bad sign.

There's more pointless convolutions with the Witness, who's added nothing to this series but whose own continuity has been reduced to ruin by the inexplicable desire to set him up as some kind of non-linear entity - which had nothing to do with the plot. Gambit and Bishop's reconciliation seems to have come out of nowhere, since the series gives them no reason to start liking one another. They've been fighting alongside one another for years, so that's not a good enough reason.

Then there's the usual selection of scenes that don't make any sense. Gambit thinks Cable's frozen, hurls him to the ground, and then gets berated by Cable, who says he was just relying on his force field to protect him. Well, why did Gambit overreact so badly? More to the point, if Gambit could wrestle him to the ground, doesn't that make the forcefield really shit? Then there's the rather fundamental plot point that tells us that "If Le Bete Noir consumes him [Stryfe] before it has a foothold here on Earth, it will be destroyed forever." How are the characters meant to know this? It's hardly something that's within their normal area of knowledge.

Most crucially of all, of course, this series had absolutely nothing to do with Gambit or Bishop. It had nothing to do with anything that happened in the first two issues, in fact. To some extent you can understand how it ended up like this, given that the series supposedly had to be rewritten on the fly as requirements for the upcoming X-books relaunch changed. But while that might be an explanation, it doesn't alter the fact that the series has been really quite atrocious.

Some moments of good art and a semi-viable finale raise the score of this final issue somewhat, but the series as a whole is an outright disaster zone.

What can one say about MUTANT X that has not already been said? Anything remotely complimentary, I suppose.

But wait! Here on the final letters page is editor Lysa Hawkins' farewell. "A word of praise needs to go out to all the incredible talented creators that worked on this title - you can walk away with pride for a job well done."

She's kidding, surely?

I mean, I know you're obliged to write something along those lines for the final issue, but... pride for a job well done? I'll be honest with you, I'd be much more comforted by the idea that Mutant X had been a hack job. The idea that somebody slung it together in a half-hearted way while watching television and balancing their chequebook at the same time is infinitely more reassuring than the idea that sane people lavished love and attention on this book, and genuinely believed it to be worth publishing. That whole concept opens up areas of anti-talent that are just too psychologically disturbing to contemplate without a stiff drink inside me.

Mutant X actually started off fairly promisingly, back in 1998. It had Tom Raney on art, which was a very good thing. It had a somewhat interesting cast of altered X-Men, and it had a world in which the mutants were accepted as heroes. This was a good starting point. It opened up all sorts of potential to explore the mutant concept from a totally different angle, free from the obligation to make everything into a story about prejudice.

That lasted about six months. The book then slumped into a pointless and generic alternate reality story. Virtually every character who appeared was an existing character with a pointless twist on them. The book had so many throwaways it should have been prosecuted for littering. Who could forget the Mutant X version of Sebastian Shaw - just like the real one, but in a box?

The first major storyline ended in a chaotic heap when the Goblin Queen was defeated by her son asking her nicely to stop. Quite why he hadn't done this in the previous six issues was never made entirely clear. The series then decided to go for the anti-mutant prejudice route (gosh, how imaginative) and give us exactly what all fans were demanding - a third-rate copy of Onslaught.

Mutant X has been in a plunging descent for months, every time answering the question "Surely it can't get any worse?" with the sort of resounding "Yes! By god, yes!" not normally heard outside hardcore pornography. Since the book was given notice of its cancellation, it has plummetted to unimagined depths. I try not to engage in hyperbole, and believe me, I am not doing so. Mutant X has become worse than I had ever feared it could get.

In this final storyline, Howard Mackie has already demonstrated all the qualities that make his work so unique and so very distressing. The Beyonder has been brought in from nowhere. An unexplained US/Canadian war has been set up, and then it's been completely forgotten about. Dracula is wandering around, in what could charitably be described as a slight clash of tone. Already, this is a strong contender for one of the worst stories ever written. It is a great shame that William McGonagall never tried his hand at writing fiction, as one suspects the comparison would have been fascinatingly close.

And yet... even at this stage, I had still thought, it can't get any worse, can it? Surely Mackie has screwed up as much as it is possible to screw. Surely from here it's just a matter of coasting to a third-rate fight, wrapping things up, and shoving Havok back to Earth? It won't be any good, but surely that's what any sane writer would do in this situation? Wouldn't they? Right?

I am a fool. I had reckoned without Mackie.

Mackie is not satisfied! He raises the bar again! He has not screwed enough! Mackie twists the screw further, grunting with effort, a grimace of satisfaction on his face as the wood begins to splinter and the tip of the screw comes out the other side. Mackie screws onwards! Mackie screws for the record! Mackie is Annabel Chong!

The Beyonder isn't the Beyonder at all! It's really Madelyne Pryor! What do you mean, "Then what the fuck was the point of bringing in the Beyonder in the first place?" You're not entering into the spirit of this! Everything you know is wrong! It's Madelyne Pryor, back from the dead! Of COURSE! The fans will love it!

Havok is now the Nexus of All Realities! What do you mean, we haven't mentioned the Nexus of All Realities since 1999? That's no obstacle to bringing it back from nowhere to be a key plot point in the final issue! Oh, and we're not going to tell you exactly HOW Havok is the Nexus of All Realities... or how he's apparently going to transfer it to Madelyne Pryor. Just take our word for it, this is great! Thrilling!

Remember how Dracula bit Havok at the end of last issue, presumably turning him into a vampire? Oh. We're not planning on addressing that. Just forget about it. Please?

Even with all this, surely Mackie can't go further? Surely this is the limit of badness? Surely all he has to do here is deliver a closing fight with the baddie and wrap up the plot? Right? How can you screw that up any further?

By god, Mackie manages it. I'm in awe. The closing fight takes place simultaneously on two planes of reality. Havok somehow manages to dump the Goblin Queen into the Nexus of All Realities while saving Madelyne Pryor, and then, for no adequately explained reason, is seen floating around in limbo, in a scene that leaves it completely unclear whether he's dead, whether he's alive, or indeed what dimension he's meant to be in. Quite how he's meant to have done any of this remains charmingly vague.

Unbelievable.

Over the last few years, for the benefit of you my readers, I have read every issue of Mutant X several times. I hope you're bloody grateful. This is time, money and brain cells I'll never have back.

This is a series that may well spend years to come in the cherished role of Marvel's most derided publication ever. Previous winners include Nightcat and the immortal NFL Superpro. But those were short-lived books. This has been going on for some three years. Mutant X will not fade quickly from our memories. It will be the benchmark of awfulness in the X-books, and quite possibly in the rest of the comics industry, for the forseeable future.

So. Who's printing the first batch of "I survived Mutant X" T-shirts?

ULTIMATE X-MEN continues the Tomorrow People storyline. My main concern about this book so far has been that (as is not uncommon for Mark Millar books) it's an exercise in style over substance. This time around, Millar looks to be finally taking his characters somewhere, although he can't quite shake his predilection for shock value.

Millar decides to give the team a bit of a crisis of faith in the aftermath of their disastrous first encounter with Magneto. While the X-Men have negotiated the end of the Sentinel programme (and a good thing too, since it was not a wise move to start with), the Beast's still in a coma, and Cyclops is generally pissed off at the world. The upshot of which is that Cyclops ups and leaves, and decides to give Magneto a go.

Now, on the one hand it's nice to see the characters actually showing some kind of emotion beyond "cockiness", though Millar still isn't really distinguishing very strongly between his interchangeable characters. On the other hand, by choosing the character who (in the parent book) would have been the least likely to go rogue, Millar's doing his shock routine again. Cyclops really doesn't have any kind of defined character in this book, but Millar is playing off the parent book to remind us that what we're reading is a sassy, modern and twisted version of the book, And Therefore Cool.

Maybe that's why I can't really connect with this book; I don't get the impression Millar really is, either. Brian Michael Bendis has claimed that he and Millar view the Ultimate continuity as the "real" one, at least for the purposes of their books, but somehow that's not how it really comes across in Millar's book. Sure, he's delivering a straightforward story for the complete newcomers (though why they didn't just play it as a simple movie sequel is beyond me), but at the end of the day there's a perpetual feeling that this is the X-Men at one remove. The focus isn't really on the X-Men, but on how Millar has changed them. To the extent the cast have defined personalities at all, they're defined in contrast to their counterparts in the parent books.

Or maybe that's just the way it reads to me, as a longtime reader of the parent book. Or maybe the book really doesn't have any content of its own, and that's why the comparison with the parent book stands out for me. Whatever the reason, I'm souring on this book, and I can't help feeling that what I'm missing right now is a good story beneath the gloss.

IMAGE TWO-IN-ONE is a one-shot from Erik Larsen and Chris Eliopoulos, who have both decided to have a go at Scott McCloud's 24-hour comic challenge. The deal here is that the creator is meant to single-handedly create a comic, from start to finish, in 24 hours. You can think about it in advance, but you can't actually do any written or drawn preparation. Stories have to be 24 hours in length.

It goes without saying that this sort of story can easily end up as an Actor's Workshop kind of product. All very interesting for those involved, but not all that exciting for those of us in the audience. Modern art is full of artworks which are meant to be about their own creative process, and it's a recursive loop which usually ends in the work disappearing up its own arsehole. Fortunately, Larsen and Eliopoulos have skirted around that one, both electing to deliver stories which would work as well whether you knew about the gimmick or not.

Larsen's is the better story. Although billed on the front cover as a superhero story, it's actually something rather different. Two brothers who've been out of touch for years meet in a diner and discuss their respective lovelives, while completely ignoring the superhero battle going on across the road. The superhero thing has nothing to do with the story, other than to provide some amusingly absurd counterpoint to the dialogue (and break up the visual monotony of a 24-page scene of two people talking around a table).

While his art style is grating horribly on Defenders, it actually works rather well here (even though, inevitably, he's drawing even more loosely than normal). Whereas his cartooning style often just serves to make supeheroes look ridiculous - which is fine here, since they're meant to - it clicks much better with more understated scenes. Superheroes are an absurd enough concept to begin with that they just won't take that much exaggeration before the suspension of disbelief breaks; conversation scenes offer a lot more scope for exaggeration within what the reader will accept.

It's a nicely dialogued scene, with a cute enough punchline (though you'll probably guess it before you reach it). Worth picking up the book for.

Eliopoulos goes for the kind of story normally only sighted in the kind of cartoons produced by government-subsidised animators in Poland, or on occasion the National Film Board of Canada. Aggrieved child Duncan (a first name which Eliopoulos has rather optimistically trademarked) gets a magic crayon with which he can draw things that come to life. This is great news for Eliopoulos, as he gets to draw lots of childlike drawings smashing up landscapes, which is very quick.

It's mildly amusing, but let's be honest, it's a one joke story (with a clever reversal for the punchline), and it's just not got the material to stretch to 24 pages. Would have made a moderately amusing five-minute cartoon from the former Soviet Union, though.