9 april 2000

This is the final week of the X-Men Revolution month, which has seen most of the attention being drawn to the changed creative teams on the regular books. That means that MAGNETO: DARK SEDUCTION has been rather overlooked.

Which is a shame, as this is a far better example of how to kick off a plotline than any of the ongoing titles gave us. In the course of 22 pages, Nicieza establishes the status quo in Genosha after the six month gap, introduces his ten principal characters, gives them all some proper character material, and sets up and advances his plot. This calls for amazingly dense plotting, and really the only two Marvel writers who can do it at the moment are Nicieza and Busiek.

During the six month gap, Magneto has pretty much cemented his control over Genosha, with only the town of Carrion Cove holding out. Carrion Cove is getting outside assistance from somewhere, and since Genoshan currency is worthless, the big mystery is what they've got to offer. It's a good plot on which to hang an intriguing story about quite where Magneto now stands as ruler of Genosha. It looks like we're heading for a return to Magneto as a morally ambiguous character, which is entirely welcome.

This is really a Genosha series rather than a Magneto series, with Quicksilver acting as our point of view in this issue. Nonetheless, the status quo in Genosha is an ideal setting for Magneto that really is opening up new areas for the character. After years of him wanting to run his own country, now he's got one.

Art comes from Roger Cruz, who for once isn't blatantly copying anyone (although there's an extremely strong Adam Pollina influence in some scenes). In fact, his work is pretty strong here, though some garish colouring doesn't help.

A pleasant surprise, given that nobody was really paying much attention to this book. Don't be put off by the frankly atrocious cover; this is well worth a look.

Mutant X remains far too dull for me to contemplate reviewing, so instead here's THRESHOLD.

You might be surprised to learn that Threshold has been plugging away now for twenty-five issues with nobody really paying it the slightest attention. It's an anthology title put out by Avatar Press, who are publishing some of Warren Ellis's horror material at the moment. Threshold is getting to serialise "Dark Blue", which should no doubt result in a big sales boost and enormous publicity for their own efforts in the remainder of the book.

"Dark Blue" is basically more Ellis nastiness, although done rather better than the utterly pointless Strange Kiss. It's a police station where all the staff are going slightly mad and all sorts of unpleasant stuff is happening. And that's basically what we establish in the ten pages here. It's perfectly alright, a reasonably decent start, and well illustrated by Jacen Burrows. On its own, it would get a B.

However, it's ten pages of a five dollar anthology, and the remainder of the book is abject shit. Because despite their excellent packaging (this issue and Strange Kiss both look, from the outside, a damn sight better than most Marvel or DC titles), what Avatar actually specialise in is porn. Very bad porn.

And when I say bad, I mean bad. There are thirteen year old boys whose masturbatory fantasies have better plotting, not to mention more plausible breasts. I'm not going on a puritan kick here - this is just really grim, dead stuff. Of the two stories here, "Fauna The Jungle Girl" is marginally superior since at least artist Philip Xavier does a half decent landscape. Shame he can't do breasts, since they fill most of the story. "Pandora: Cult of Isis" is inept and ugly on every level, and how the hell anybody makes a profit publishing this stuff is beyond me. Given that it has absolutely zero artistic merit, it's hard to see the appeal of buying this crap when you could get real porn for the same price.

If Dark Blue ever comes out in a collected edition, I might take a look at it, but there's no way in hell I'm buying any more copies of this thing just to get it in ten page instalments. Given that I'm rating the book as a whole, there really isn't much choice here.

UNCANNY X-MEN wraps up the Revolution, with the second part of Claremont's Neo storyline. Unfortunately, while X-Men #100 was at least a decent action story, this is really a bit of a mess. A load of middling to average plot ideas are thrown about, and don't really amount to anything much as a whole.

Your team in this issue are Gambit, Phoenix, Cable, Storm and the Beast. Apparently they're being gathered together in Venice by Gambit, for reasons that the story doesn't even get close to establishing. Nor is it at all clear whether these characters are actually on the team at this point, or whether we're doing some kind of gathering-of-characters plot.

Jean takes Cable to her "secret place" which she "discovered" before the X-Men were formed. For some unfathomable reason, her "secret place" is in Venice and is full of treasure. And not all that secret, given that it seems to have a doorway opening directly into Venice city centre. Quite what point Claremont is trying to get at with this bit is entirely lost on me.

Most of the issue, though, is the X-Men fighting off an attack from a group of Neo called the Shockwave Riders, who seem to be after Jean for reasons not really explained. Presumably it's because she's meant to be awfully powerful. Meanwhile, Jean's power levels seem to have risen dramatically, although handily, they haven't risen dramatically enough to do anything useful for most of the issue. There's a distinct retread of Claremont's later Psylocke stories here, with Jean deciding that she's going to go around punching people even though her powers ought to let her take them out from the other site of the city.

On the minor but also aggravating front, Gambit is back to dropping bits of schoolboy French into his dialogue, and there's a rather cringeworthy sequence towards the end where Cable considers wiping his and Jean's powers as if this was an exact science of some kind.

If X-Men #100 was a reasonably promising indication of what we could get from Claremont on the X-Men then this, to be honest, is rather closer to what I was afraid we'd see. It's not terrible, but it's really not particularly good, even put next to Claremont's other book this week (Fantastic Four).

X-MEN: THE HIDDEN YEARS still has subplots droning about in the Savage Land (seven bloody months! Get out of there, Byrne!), but devotes most of the issue to a rather pointless "Storm met the X-Men before Giant-Size X-Men #1" affair.

The villain, Deluge, gets an origin story this issue, which is actually potentially interesting, but never really goes anywhere in the plot. The idea is that he's an outcast mutant from an isolated tribe who gets thrown out and is found by the anthropologist who was monitoring them. He's deeply offended by the fact that his people are treated as a museum piece rather than as people who should be helped to advance. This is a nice reversal of the usual way these stories go, and could make for a good motivation for a villain, but it's got nothing to do with the plot.

The plot is that Deluge is a mad bastard and wants to be more powerful. That's pretty much it, really. The net effect is that you end up with an issue that mucks about with continuity for no particular purpose and to no real effect. It's okay, but never really goes anywhere.

After last year's INHUMANS miniseries managed to revive interest in the characters, Marvel are taking a more conventional approach with the new four-issue mini.

It's almost inane to say it, but Carlos Pacheco and Jose Ladronn give the book a very European feel. The style is very different from Ladronn's usual work, closer to Moebius than Kirby, and with much denser storytelling - something like eleven panels a page as standard. It certainly has an impressive and epic feel to it, although the preponderance of pipes and gloomy colouring make the setting feel more like a gigantic oil refinery than Attilan.

Pacheco's plot plays off the Inhumans' origin as a race genetically engineered by the Kree as warriors. Tying this in with the Kree's current status in the Marvel Universe, Pacheco has Ronan the Accuser invade Attilan to forcibly enlist the Inhumans as the backbone of his new Kree army. This is a perfectly sound idea for an Inhumans story, and for the most part it comes across fairly well. Pacheco does perhaps overdo the Kree steamrollering the Inhumans in their invasion - after all, if the Kree are that powerful, what the hell do they need the Inhumans for? A bit more balance would have got the idea across better.

The big flaw is that the Inhumans just don't come across as a real culture in the way they did in the last series. Where Paul Jenkins gave them an entire class structure, values and so forth, Pacheco resorts to giving them a different word for mother (and any sense of genuine inhumanity is entirely dissipated by subtitling it as "mom"). Swapping a few words around just isn't enough to make the Inhumans work.

It's still a pretty decent issue, and a refreshing change of style if nothing else, but it doesn't entirely work.