9 may 1999

Time once again for me to have a go at explaining why CABLE isn't anywhere near as good as everyone else seems to think.

To start with the good stuff, though, as always Joe Casey excels in the small character pieces. The subplot in this story finally brings Irene and Stacey together, and there's some excellent material with Stacey mistaking Irene for a love rival and then freaking out on seeing Blaquesmith for the first time. Casey is at his best dealing with relatively normal human characters, and this is some of the best material either Stacey or Irene have had from him. Yup, the subplot is good stuff. I'm all for the subplot.

Where I have problems is the main story. One of the biggest weaknesses of the previous three-parter was that Casey clearly expected us to accept at face value Ozymandias's prediction that if New York was destroyed, Apocalypse's domination of Earth would be avoided. Certainly his characters seem to have believed it. But it was a ridiculous prophecy, since there's no obvious connection between the two at all, and really it was just a contrived plot device to generate more artificial tension.

This issue is drowning in that sort of fudging, with a plot that crumbles almost completely if you think about it too hard, or indeed at all. Cable is brought to a limbo dimension between timelines where he meets a group of "chronologists" led by somebody called Jacob Sutton. Sound familiar? Well, aside from being a tired old idea (does the Marvel Universe really have any need for yet another group of characters monitoring the timeline for trouble?), it's not even a terribly original spin. Sutton's group are a bunch of ciphers, and overall the whole thing reads like it was originally written for the Linear Men. Who aren't even in the same universe, but that's no excuse.

Anyhow, Sutton wants Cable to realise that there's no point continuing to muck up the timelines by trying to eliminate his home time, as it can't be done. Fair enough. So in order to convince Cable of this, he decides to force Cable into a fight (erm...) by kidnapping Sanctity, claiming that she's a threat to time, but nonetheless offering to let her go if Cable wins the fight. You what? This is supposedly the safety of the universe at stake, and you're willing to let her go if Cable wins a glorified arm wrestling contest? No wonder he doesn't believe you - it's too silly even to work well as a double bluff.

Incidentally, apparently Sanctity isn't really a threat after all, just a menace. Well, that's cleared that up, then.

Not surprisingly, Cable sees through this ridiculous plan immediately. Bemusingly, he then goes on to recognise the pointlessness of trying to alter history, on the grounds that "it's obvious from the existence of this place... that future will always exist." Really? Why is it obvious from the existence of a limbo dimension that time can't be altered? (The same speech also contains a dreadful passage in which Casey appears to drag Hypertime into Marvel continuity - "time is an overlapping series of rivers flowing in all directions at once", apparently. The less said about that the better.)

On top of all this, Cable suddenly finds that now he's in limbo he can remember who the Twelve are. How dreadfully convenient.

So, with Cable having somehow learned the lesson he was supposed to learn, presumably we can all go home now? But no, we're going to have the fight over Sanctity anyway. Despite Ladronn's laudable attempts to jazz it up with a load of Kirbytech, the fight turns out to be Cable and a chronologist standing in a big machine thinking at one another. Contests of wills are not exactly visual feasts and it bemuses me why comics writers continue to insist on including them.

So what does this leave us with? A pointless and dull fight scene, arising out of a ridiculous and wafer thin plot that serves largely to introduce some new characters who are little more than ciphers. On the bright side, the subplot material is often very strong indeed and Ladronn is in his element drawing hi-tech complexes, but this isn't enough to distract from the serious flaws at the heart of the story.

UNCANNY X-MEN continues the Skrull plotline, and Davis and Kavanagh seem to have got a decent handle on the characters now. Well, except for Marrow - as she stretches into yet another issue of unconsciousness, it's still hard to say whether they have a clue what to do with her.

But this issue, while hardly in classic territory, does give most of the team something to do - Xavier gets to try and save the world, Gambit has a chance to do his redemption routine, and so forth. After a very shaky few months in which the X-Men filled a largely generic role (any roster would have done, really), we are now getting back to proper stories which make decent use of the characters provided.

The comedy value of the Skrull superhero impersonators having been pretty much played out last issue, this story concentrates more on the dramatic aspects. And there are some lovely ideas here, such as the Skrulls who agreed to be permanently shifted into a particular superhero's image to make it harder to be exposed, only for the hero in question to promptly drop dead, leaving them useless and disillusioned.

The artwork continues to be a problem, though, as Adam Kubert's pencils just don't seem to be at their best with Tim Townsend's inking. Sloppy colouring doesn't help matters either (for anyone wondering, the verbose Wolverine on page three is presumably meant to be the Beast), and while rather ambiguous art excuses some of these errors, some are just baffling. Worst of all are Kubert's ranting and cartoony Skrulls, who when in their own forms are impossible to take seriously. Obviously he's playing them for laughs, but it doesn't work. There are places where the quality we know Kubert is capable of shines through, but for the most part the art is frustratingly below his ability.

A better than average issue, for all that, but still nothing to write home about.

WOLVERINE/PUNISHER: REVELATION is a Marvel Knights title, which is normally a good thing. Having said that, though, it's a Punisher story from the writers of the last Punisher miniseries, which was easily the worst received of the first wave of Marvel Knights books. Actually, it wasn't that bad, but the reaction was quite understandable. Reinventing the Punisher as a supernatural angelic warrior was always going to seem forced and bizarre, and the art wasn't as great as people had expected.

This story represents a continuation of those themes, evidently. It doesn't take much in the way of reading skills to realise that when the story introduces a new character called Revelation, we can look forward to more material on religion. Quite where Wolverine is supposed to fit into this isn't entirely clear, although he certainly gets equal screen time here and his appearance doesn't seem too gratuitous.

So far as plot is concerned, this is really just a set-up issue, designed to manouevre Wolverine and the Punisher into the right area of New York as Revelation (who has a death aura that kills people around her) gets freed from her underground prison by museum workers. Wolverine comes across as reasonably in character, though it couldn't be said that the story has much to say about him so far. The Punisher doesn't seem quite as I remember him, though it works alright if you're willing to accept his new status quo. (He's alive again, he's still got mystical powers, and he wants to redeem himself so that when he dies he can join his family in heaven.)

I have a degree of sympathy with those who say the Punisher doesn't look right waving angelic weaponry around. He's just not that sort of character. The revamp has an excellent idea at its core, but they've overdone it. There's a wonderful story there to be told about the Punisher having a religious experience that leads him to change his whole approach to life. It doesn't have to involve him waving weaponry about. I'd be all in favour of removing these supernatural powers and continuing with the other aspects of the storyline, since they're the ones that actually make it interesting.

This series features the artwork of Pat and Alvin Lee, best known for their heavily manga-influenced Image series Darkminds. Readers who aren't too keen on the manga influence may wish to give this a look regardless, since the art here has an animation feel to it without the cartoony quality American readers often associate with manga. No enormous doe eyes here.

Which is not to say they're great artists, by the way. For the most part the art is solid and helped no end by atmospheric computer colouring. But some of the action sequences aren't very well choreographed, and somebody really should give them a picture of a dinner jacket so that they don't mess it up again as badly as they do on page two. (In which a page of narration about Wolverine going to a lot of effort to get dressed for a date is shot to hell when the art shows him in a dinner jacket hanging in all sorts of ways that it couldn't possibly hang if it had ever been anywhere near an iron. He looks like an overdressed tramp, almost certainly not the effect the writers wanted.)

A rather average beginning to the series, this. The new character, Revelation, doesn't do anything that particularly engages the attention, and nor does anything else really leap out at you from the story. On the other hand, it is just a set-up issue and it could yet pick up; and even if some of their work isn't very good, Pat and Alvin Lee have an interesting and atmospheric style, and there's certainly a few panels which are excellent. I love the cover, for example. Nothing terribly special, which is rather disappointing from the Marvel Knights imprint, but it's okay.

"A teenage girl always makes for an interesting character," writes John Byrne on the text page of SPIDER-WOMAN #1. This is a salutary reminder which many readers will be much in need of after reading the preceding story. A teenage girl can often make for an interesting character, as can pretty much any combination of age and gender, but anybody who seriously believes teenage girls are inherently interesting obviously hasn't seen enough comedies from the Saved By The Bell school of production.

This story really doesn't work because it doesn't do anything much to make the reader care about Mattie Franklin, the new Spider-Woman. In her previous appearances in the Spider-Man titles, she's been little more than a generic spunky teenager. And she still is.

The plot involves Mattie and the other two Spider-Women being brought together to fight the villainous Spider-Woman introduced in recent Spider-Man stories. The original Spider-Woman is by far the best drawn character in the story, and blows Mattie off screen - rather unfortunate, really. The second one does virtually nothing and might as well not be here. Byrne is presumably trying to construct some kind of Spider-Woman dynasty which he can present Mattie as the heir to. It doesn't work, and given the essentially B-list nature of all the Spider-Woman characters, it's not really the sort of legacy you want to emulate anyway.

Madame Web also features heavily, performing the role of the enigmatic person who knows lots and tells people vital plot-moving information. Again, her role here is rather generic, but it's possible Byrne is thinking of some kind of mentor relationship here - a potentially good idea.

As for the art, well, it's Bart Sears. It's alright, it's on the right side of average, but it's nothing particularly memorable. I can take it or leave it.

Anyhow, as you might have guessed, I don't regard this is a terribly auspicious start to the new title. It's not a very strong story, it doesn't have a particularly interesting villain, but most of all it doesn't make me care about the lead character. A look at the charts shows that Slingers and Webspinners are both drifting far astray of the other Spider-Man books. The line is not popular enough to make its spin-offs guaranteed hits, and Spider-Woman will have to do rather better than this if it wants to stand on its own.