9 june 2002

It's a very heavy week for new series, and a fairly interesting set of X-books as well, so let's get straight to work.

EXILES #14 is the first part of "I Cover the Waterfront", but that isn't really the point of the issue. It's actually the Mimic's origin story.

This issue doesn't really work. The problem is that the framing plot is a rudimentary affair, and doesn't seem to have a great deal - well, anything - to do with the Mimic's origin story. Things start off passably enough as we're informed that the Exiles' mission on this world is to help Dr Doom stave off an Atlantean invasion. The team dutifully angst about whether allying themselves with a global supervillain makes them more like Weapon X from the previous storyline. Then they forget all about that and get on with the plot instead.

What we end up with is a list of objectives of the "Team A will go here and do this, Team B will go here and do this" variety, none of which is terribly dramatic. This was a problem with the last storyline as well, and it does seem as if this book is sliding into the pattern of just throwing a generic plot out there and trying to ignore it as much as possible. Way more effort needed to be put into the supposed main plot if it was going to be effective.

Even the Mimic doesn't seem desperately excited, since he breaks off halfway through to spend ten pages on a flashback to his own origin story, apropos of nothing in particular. There are some fairly interesting ideas in here, which suggests that Winick could have written a very nice four issue miniseries about the character's history. Unfortunately he's written it as a ten page flashback instead, and the effect is like reading a synopsis rather than a story - only one scene, with the Mimic and Professor X in jail, really gets time to breathe, while the rest of the plot rushes by at double speed. It's a list of good ideas for scenes, rather than actually good scenes, if you see what I mean.

The art is up to the usual high standards, and there are still some decent one-liners, but the plot doesn't manage to hold this issue together.

MUTIES is continuing to distance itself somewhat from its earlier TV movie tendencies. This is a drugs story, and drugs are bad, but the story takes a somewhat more oblique line, and gets away with it. The story does seem a little confused about exactly what drugs we're talking about here (and given that they're central to the plot, it might have been a nice idea to clarify), but judging from the opening page we're presumably talking heroin. (Or, to quote the only character who actually names it, "dope." Oh dear.)

This story is nominally set in Stockholm, but the Swedish setting plays no particular function. That's not necessarily a problem - not every story on the world tour has to be region specific. In practice, all that Sweden actually contributes to the story is two characters called Bjorn and Sven, and a poster of the Hives.

As usual, the story is relatively basic - basically nice mutant girl has been sucked into drug addiction, but is eventually found and taken away by, um, nice government men in suits. This being Scandinavia, maybe we're meant to take it that the local G-Men are a particularly friendly variety; certainly the ending comes across as somewhat ambiguous, albeit with an "anything has to be an improvement" tone.

The lead character has a third eye in her forehead which gives her her powers, although again the exact significance of the imagery is hazy - it's a symbol I associate with psychedelics, and none of the drugs in this issue actually fit that description. The suggestion seems to be that the symbolic third eye was kept closed by her drugs habit. I assume the intended reading here is meant to be ironic, with the supposed enlightenment associated with the third eye imagery being achieved by removing drugs, rather than taking them. Although this does kind of hinge on you accepting the "third eye" imagery as drug-related rather than specifically psychedelic - maybe it's really means as a backhanded tribute to LSD rather than heroin, though I imagine not.

Art comes from Charlie Adlard, who was last seen on the X-books when he drew the Hellfire Club miniseries two years ago. Since then, he's been working on Establishment, which none of you bought - not that I particularly recommended that you should, admittedly. Adlard is a good artist whose style isn't really suited for superhero books, and this is the sort of story that plays more to his strengths.

Definite points for effort with this one, although I have a feeling that the choice of imagery may not have been altogether appropriate for the point Bollers was trying to make. It's an anti-drug story, at the end of the day, but less clodhoppingly obvious than many of them are.

At the other end of the drug intake spectrum is Grant Morrison, which brings us to NEW X-MEN. Actually, Grant has been saving his drugs for the Filth, which we'll come too later. First, New X-Men #127, which finally gets around to fleshing out Xorn's character.

One glitch with the previous storyline was that Xorn was shoved into a fairly prominent role despite the fact that he'd never had the opportunity to come across as an interesting character. Morrison rectifies that this month (yes, arguably a couple of months late) with a Xorn solo story.

It looks like Xorn is going to be filling the role of early Colossus as the naive, well intentioned one. The plot itself is fairly standard stuff, as Xorn tries to help a mutant in New York City, but cocks it up largely due to not having much of a clue what he's doing. The story isn't anything out of the ordinary, but it does give Xorn a proper introduction at last. He seems like a very nice chap, which plays off the unfathomable weirdness of his powers.

Those powers still give me some difficulty. We're repeatedly told that he has a miniature sun for a head, but this really doesn't mean a great deal, nor does it have any apparent relationship to the powers he actually displays. Somewhere a few issues back he turned out to be a healer, and aside from that his power levels are all over the place. The man who was destroying entire buildings in New X-Men 2001 is now having trouble with an outsized teenager. I would guess that Morrison may be going for something similar to Havok's inability to use his plasma beams on anything less than "lethal", which would explain why Xorn seems so nice but ineffective in the middle of New York - if he tried using those sort of power levels in a built-up area, he'd kill everyone. But it's still not entirely clear.

This month's guest penciller is John Paul Leon, who manages the rare trick of being inked by Bill Sienkiewicz and having his style overpower Bill's. The art is suitably understated, and makes an appropriate change of pace from the previous arc.

All told, a step in the right direction for this character.

UNCANNY X-MEN #407 is an epilogue to the X-Corps storyline, in which Nightcrawler sits around in the mountains and has a crisis of confidence. Incidentally, as near as I can decipher, the title translates as "Believer, Healer, Faller." Quite what this gains from being in a language that 99% of the readership doesn't speak, I wouldn't like to speculate.

The book starts off with four pages of artwork scrolling across the pages, which is a very nice trick. Unfortunately the Church of Humanity are in there, but don't worry, because they don't come back. Instead, it turns out that when Kurt and Chamber teleported away from that bomb at the end of issue #405, Kurt made a blind teleport miles away and ended up in the house of a man he used to work with in the circus, even though he didn't actually know the guy lived there.

Ri-i-i-ight.

This isn't a plot point, by the way, it's just a ludicrously implausible set-up required in order to get Kurt into a shack with a circus freak so that he can yearn for a life as a hermit. Somewhere in here, there's a vaguely interesting point being made about Kurt losing interest in the whole thing. And hey, if you were appearing in Uncanny X-Men when all your mates were being written by Grant Morrison, you'd probably be thinking about chucking it all in as well. I certainly can't summon up much interest in the book after reading the last few story arcs.

On its merits, it's actually not a bad issue. But Casey lost me months ago, and he's unlikely to get me back now. Let's just move on.

CALL OF DUTY finally ships its first issue, although those of you who've been reading the preview stories will already be familiar with most of this material. The first three chapters of the preview story are included in this issue (in an expanded form), which takes us up to page 20 or so. The other two chapters appear again at the end of the issue as a preview of Call of Duty: The Precinct. That leaves 18 pages of original material, although two of those overlap with the Precinct preview. Having said that, the price tag is not so high as to make this approach unreasonable.

This book and its sister miniseries The Precinct and The Wagon are getting a huge push from Marvel, reflecting what's undoubtedly a very sincere interest in the subject. What we're getting, it seems, is three interlinking miniseries (effectively a fifteen-part miniseries) leading into an ongoing title in the autumn. My initial concerns going into this series were that a very strong premise was going to be required in order to justify a fifteen-part prologue, and also that Marvel's obvious desire to pay tribute to the emergency services would result in a worthy but tedious series in which a group of uniformed saints wandered New York saving lives and looking deep.

While the book doesn't plunge headlong into either of those traps, there are definite elements of both in this issue. In theory this is a Marvel Universe book, but in practice no Marvel Universe elements appear. Instead, we have a story about a little blonde ghost who wanders around appearing to the three protagonists (one for each miniseries) making cryptic comments about how there's a war coming. It's obviously meant to be a supernatural mystery, but in the course of a fairly lengthy lead story - 38 pages, if you count the reprinted elements - it doesn't really develop much beyond the sentence above. And we already got that bit by page 7. I have a nasty feeling that this storyline is going to be dragged out horrendously in order to make it to chapter 15.

So far as the characters are concerned, there's a fairly obvious desire to push the heroism of the fire department, and that's fine as far as it goes. There's an attempt to give the lead character some more depth by giving him the usual array of troubles ("marriage problems, drinking, divorce"), but this issue remains largely on the surface, bending over backwards to show us a flawless and admirable vision of the New York fire department. This may be a perfectly accurate description of them, but wonderful people being wonderful doesn't make for great drama.

And the point is more than clear enough already, without dialogue like "Mick, I am a superhero. I'm a New York City fireman!"

A bigger problem, though, is that this issue hurls supporting characters at the reader without properly introducing them. There's an inevitable difficulty in that one man in a smoke- filled room in a fireman's uniform looks very much like any other (and quite honestly, it was only halfway through this issue that I was able to work out what the lead character's name was). But Chuck Austen also gives us a scene of the guys in the firehouse (with stirring narrator voiceover, of course) which simply reels off the names of eleven new characters in the space of three panels. I'm not even sure which one is meant to be which - or whether any of them is the black guy who was talking to the lead for most of the preceding four pages.

With James, the lead, as the only really established character, the book takes a definite wrong turning towards the end. As James is still injured from the first part of the story, he has to remain behind while the rest of the crew go to put out a fire in a crack house. Nasty people try to stop them. All fair enough, but it's just not possible to care that much about the fate of a bunch of interchangeable characters who haven't been properly introduced. "Berelli's stuck in a damn hole." Okay - which one was Berelli? I'm serious. How am I meant to care about the cliffhanger if I don't even know which character's in peril?

The artist is David Finch, who used to work at Top Cow and still retains a large part of the Top Cow house style. It works a lot better than you might think, though - he does some very effective fire scenes, in particular, although the work does suffer from having three protagonists who all look like Hollywood leads (and two men who look very similar to one another).

While the book is clearly done with the best of intentions, it has some definite problems. Particularly, it needs a stronger central plot (or to get the existing plot moving), and it needs better defined characters.

Those of you who miss the days when Grant Morrison comics were indecipherable without the aid of a caballistic encyclopaedia, an anagram descrambling program and a kilo of LSD will be pleased to see the debut of THE FILTH, his new 13-issue series from Vertigo. Plus, it's really quite good.

Part of the reason Morrison gets away with writing this kind of thing is that, unlike some writers who just hurl all manner of nonsense at the reader and ask you to stick with it on the offchance that it'll make sense in six months time, he always gives you enough to hang onto for the time being, while offering the promise that everything will make much more sense if you stick with him.

So what we have here is, on the surface, actually quite a straightforward plot - and as others have already pointed out, it's basically the same premise as the opening of Men In Black 2. Retired police officer who's had his memory wiped and is living a nice normal life is dragged back by bizarre employers who bring back his original personality. Much of the issue is the usual bizarre and cryptic mixture of material which will be (semi) explained in later chapters, but at least Morrison gives us this to hang onto for the moment.

The title of the series is a pun, incidentally - it's a reference to the police, plus it plays off the running theme of cleansing, corruption and pornography. Doubtless we'll be coming to this in due course. Trying to make too much sense of this type of comic in issue one is a pointless exercise, not least when the story includes defensive toupees, an incredibly ridiculous cleansing truck, and a mind-control sequence with unpleasant sexual overtones. ("I'm proud to be Simon's bizarre human camera.") At this stage, it's really best to just go with the flow.

For the moment, you get absolutely wonderful art from Chris Weston and Gary Erskine, who manage to make sense of some exceptionally unlikely material, and some very funny comedy sequences to be getting on with. Well worth your time.