9 september 2001

BROTHERHOOD kicks off its second storyline this week, and they could really do with something to shake off the underachiever tag.

Unfortunately, they've given us a load of drivel about a badly written heiress running away from some goths. Time to start construction work on the Tomb of the Unknown Writer, I think.

This week's version of the rumour is that Howard Mackie is writing the book, in collaboration with various others who are at least imposing some kind of vague structure and sanity upon the thing. The first storyline had a certain general sense of reason to it that didn't read like Mackie to me, but with junk like this, I'm starting to wonder. Missing the point on so many levels it's hard to know where to start, this is woefully misconceived.

Where to begin? The story here is meant to be straightforward. A group of four British Brotherhood members go after heiress Malon Reeves, who is a mutant in denial, and kidnap her on behalf of the Brotherhood. That's the story. So what we want to do here, presumably, is use these new characters to flesh out what the Brotherhood is like, and establish Malon's character?

Right?

No, of course we don't. What we want to do is throw around a few upper class cliches, wheel out the goth trappings and stand around as if this was all terribly impressive.

Goths, for crying out loud. Monochrome onanists at the best of times. But what in the name of christ are they doing here, in a story which has absolutely nothing to do with them? The Brotherhood members are indistinguishable from one another, both in personality and (aside from the girl) appearance. Given that one of them was expressly meant to be a "psionic vampire", and the others are meant to find him unnerving, it's ludicrous that they all look like they've spent far too long listening to the Sisters of Mercy.

Worse, Malon herself is indistinguishable from the Brotherhood members pursuing her, even though the whole point of the frigging story is meant to be that she's a spoilt brat heiress who is arrogant but intimidated by the nasty Brotherhood, who come from a different world from her. I would have thought this would be best shown by having her conventional, or at least realistic, upper class costume in order to emphasise the contrast, and not by dressing her and her friends in clothing which is more or less exactly the same style that the Brotherhood themselves are wearing. If the idea is to contrast her as a pretender with the Brotherhood as the real thing, then that certainly doesn't come over in the finished product.

This could be the result of a serious error of judgment on the part of artist Leonardo Manco, who has admittedly always had a weakness for this kind of thing. Even so, the lack of proper characterisation in any of the main characters is fatal. Malon, in particular, is a joke, utterly failing to evoke the heiress figure they're supposed to aiming for.

The writer(s) attempt to establish Malon as an heiress by the use of a spectacularly clubfooted opening monologue. There are more subtle ways of establishing her as an upper class prick than having her talk about "the great unwashed" or deliver dialogue as hamfisted as "All I need to do is shop and party!" This is not a character, this is a dimwitted cliche. There is dialogue here which is laugh-out-loud bad. I know, because I did.

Quite, quite terrible. This book has so much potential, and their wasting it on goths chasing one another around London. Where's the credible portrayal of an underground terrorist movement? Where's the characterisation? Where are the themes? What is this superficial crap? What are they thinking?

Robert Weinberg winds up his run on CABLE with a one-off story (or a filler, if you prefer) in which Cable meets a neanderthal who had his lifespan extended by the Deviants.

And if you're wondering where Cable fits into this, the answer is that he doesn't, really. Presumably the idea is to contrast Cable as the man from the future with Cole as the man from the past, but it just comes over as Cole's story with Cable standing around as the other half of the conversation.

What we end up with is a pleasant enough tale of a neanderthal who has blended into society over the years (despite looking like a neanderthal, a point the story glosses awkwardly over), but who still loves his wife and kid. Quite sweet, but not earth-shattering. It does make for a nice low-key end to the Weinberg run, even if it seems totally unrelated to anything that's come before.

Weinberg and Ryan have had a solid run which will go down as one of the higher points in this notoriously inconsistent book. Next month, Cable meets American Century. This could be painful.

EXILES finishes off its Dark Phoenix two-parter, and how much this appeals to you will probably depend on how familiar you are with the original story. Winick plays extensively off the Claremont/Byrne material, even down to minor plot mechanics such as who was in what scene.

This has a certain nostalgic charm if you miss the days of Nightcrawler using multiple teleports as his standard attack. But it doesn't really take the story much beyond what we established last issue - that they've got to kill Jean Grey and they really aren't very happy about it. Despite some snappy dialogue with the Imperial Guard, at the end of the day it's a glorified fight scene throughout which the cast reiterate the same point they explained to us last month.

It also strains credibility a bit for Dark Phoenix to be defeated by the Exiles (look, is she an invincible cosmic being or isn't she?), and there's a questionable tacit assumption that alternate realities will mimic the original story even down to the minor plot mechanics.

It's a pleasant enough read, but underwhelming. Unfortunately, I'm getting the sinking feeling that this book is going to fall prey to all the obvious pitfalls in the alternate reality concept. Do I buy into the death of a duplicate Jean Grey as something I should care about? Simply, no.

Marvel have certainly laboured over ORIGIN.

After all, if they don't do the origin of Wolverine, Hollywood will. So here we have the first part of the much-hyped six issue miniseries, jointly plotted by Paul Jenkins, the editor-in- chief and the president of the company. Seems like overkill, to be honest, but there you go.

Marvel are desperate to convince us, however, that this is not just a sales stunt. No, this is a Quality Product. Note the cardstock cover. Note the reassuring pseudo-embossed logo. Admire the beautiful digitally painted artwork. This issue is bending over backwards to look like Art.

This means that we end up with the origin of Wolverine, in the style of Merchant Ivory. Which sounds like something out of Whose Line Is It Anyway? and feels about as awkward. Certainly it seems a commercially questionable choice. There is an undoubted market for the origin of Wolverine, but it is more questionable whether they wanted it to come across like one of those worthy children's novels you were forced to read at school. It's flying off the shelves, of course, but we'll see where we stand in five months time. Perhaps it's just a slow start, of course.

This issue, we're in what I take to be the late nineteenth century, at a mansion which may or may not be in Canada. Wolverine's father is the groundskeeper (and while they've gone for the drunken violent father angle, they don't seem to be playing the rumoured sexual abuse card). Wolverine is a cute lower-class kid who hangs around with the rich kids in the mansion. Mansion owner is Very Nice Man, whose father is mildly disapproving of his niceness. You get the idea.

I'm at something of a loss as to why I'm meant to care. About the only real dramatic tension here is Logan being beaten by his father, but with the greatest of respect to this very real social problem, I long since stopped finding it remotely interesting in fiction. It's been vastly overused for years as a way of lending cheap gravitas to a character's history and unfortunately, nothing here suggests that matters are any different here.

This is not a bad issue, but it is an utterly generic cutesy historical piece. The fact that it is a different genre from Wolverine's normal one can't eclipse that. I just don't see what the creators are trying to do here, other than reassure us that they have manufactured a quality product of artistic value. The impression I end up with, sadly, is more of an advert for a porcelain Li'l Wolvie. ("This little scamp's been out playing in the river all day, and boy is he going to get a thrashing when he gets home! Sculpted by the Worcester Pottery's finest porcelain craftsmen, and yours for only thirty-five monthly instalments, every collector will want this kitsch masterpiece on their sideboard.")

Perhaps a point will emerge over the next five months, but for the moment this seems to be a book whose primary purpose is to justify its own existence.

Back in the monthly series, Frank Tieri is putting WOLVERINE through the usual routine of excessive violence and, er, well, more excessive violence.

Tieri is at least having fun here, and in fairness to him this issue does begin to tie together several of his outstanding plotlines in a way that strongly suggests he's had a coherent plan in there somewhere. Wolverine is summoned to Madripoor by the mysterious "friend" who'd been writing to him in the last few issues, and is asked to participate in the Bloodsport fighting tournament. There, it turns out that the reigning champion is the anonymous "Mr X" character from Tieri's first storyline, who has been the letter writer.

Well, yes, it ties together. The catch is that, as with the Cage before, Tieri seems to have fallen in love with the idea of his Bloodsport tournament even though it isn't actually all THAT good an idea. As a backdrop, played as a semi-serious martial arts tournament, it would work quite well. Unfortunately, Tieri again pushes the idea further than it'll bear, giving us a tournament full of supervillains killing one another to advance.

This is deeply silly - it introduces a cumbersome spandex element which doesn't fit with the idea at all and seems to have baffled the poor artist, who evidently started off wanting to draw it as an underground fighting tournament. It also means that in order to use disposable characters who he can safely kill off, Tieri has to pack the field with unwanted minor supervillains like the Gamecock, which destroys the idea of the tournament being something that it's in any way impressive to win. Who on earth would take the winner seriously as the "greatest fighter in the world" when the Eel made it to the finals?

Instead of leaving the tournament safely in the background where it belongs, Tieri insists on giving us every bloody match, making it read like Contest of Champions. He also absurdly includes several gimmick matches obviously borrowed from the WWF, some of which are completely ludicrous. Given that the tournament is a spectator sport, what exactly would be the point of booking two competitors to fight behind a curtain where the audience can't see them, other than to allow Tieri to unveil Mr X on the last page?

Once again, Tieri has started off here with a perfectly solid idea but has totally lost the focus while following up every blind alley and throwaway idea that came to mind along the way. I really wish he'd develop some discipline, because his ear for dialogue isn't bad and the core idea here would work if only Tieri hadn't embellished it until it collapses under the weight of all the trimmings.

Dan Fraga is your guest penciller this month, and although he's come on a bit since I last saw him, he's still struggling badly with all the fight scenes he's called upon to draw here. Swiftly abandoning backgrounds altogther, the fights are all lacking in atmosphere. Admittedly he's got a lot to cram in here (due to Tieri's refusal to simply fast-forward through the irrelevant fights), but he's clearly having trouble and the end result still looks like something from the tail end of Image's embarassing period.

Somewhere in here, there's a decent idea. But the execution is a mess.

Oh, and a throwaway point. Despite featuring numerous on-panel deaths and being set in a martial-arts death tournament (of sorts), this remains an all-ages title. Origin, which features some nice dresses and some off-panel belting, is rated PG. Do Marvel really have a clue how this rating system is meant to work?

Welcome to a brave new era of adult writing, mature issues, and anal sex.

ALIAS kicks off Marvel's new Max imprint, and inevitably bears the burden of being the first mature readers title Marvel have issued since... god, probably Havok & Wolverine: Meltdown. In these circumstances, the question of whether the book is actually any good inevitably gets overshadowed by the question of how it uses its sex scenes and the word "fuck."

But first, the story. Alias is about Jessica Jones, a retired and disillusioned superhero now working as a private detective and hanging around the fringes of the superhero circuit being generally miserable and depressed. This being the first issue, it spends most of the time establishing the character and set-up before going on to have her stumble upon Captain America in the course of a surveillance job.

It's not an instant classic, but it's a perfectly good downbeat character piece. Comparisons between this book and Powers seem to miss the point that Powers is not a comic that takes itself too seriously. The incongruousness of combining the superhero and police procedural genres is part of the joke. Alias is trying to integrate the superhero and detective genres rather than play them off against one another. There's certainly a similarity there in terms of the lead character's history, but the books as a whole are very noticeably different.

Given that Jessica is a fairly depressed character at this point, much will turn on how much you're prepared to empathise with her all-purpose self-loathing. It works for me. Art comes from Michael Gaydos, whose name means nothing to me, but hits the right style balance for the mundane and superhero elements to co-exist without jarring shifts.

Yes, yes, okay. What about the fucking?

Well, if it's explicit graphic sex scenes you're looking for then you're going to be disappointed. The notorious page consists entirely of close-ups of Jessica's face with an accompanying monologue. It's not graphic. It's borderline on whether you'd be more accurate calling it implicit. It's there, it serves its role in establishing Jessica's self-loathing and relationship to the various things Luke Cage signifies to her, but it certainly isn't pornography.

The wider question, of course, is whether a mature readers line is really needed for the purpose of books like this. The Marvel Universe line has already proved itself perfectly capable of publishing material with this kind of tone and while the added ability to publish sex scenes is all very well, it's somewhat questionable as the raison d'etre for an entire publishing line.

The entire concept of "mature readers" lines is somewhat suspect to begin with. Thanks to Vertigo, there is a segment of fandom which seems determined to identify "mature readers" with "populist arthouse." In reality, Vertigo's audience base is a rather weird subset of comics readers. Potentially, "mature readers" should encompass everyone over the age of eighteen and is therefore an ethos defined by exclusion (of children and teenagers) rather than by any positive qualities. The existence of an adults-only classification as part of the ratings system is perfectly sensible; the use of it as the centrepiece for a publishing imprint seems rather less so. Vertigo offers a rather narrower, but more positive, agenda of its own. It remains to be seen whether the Max imprint really does have any agenda beyond being the Marvel Universe with more screwing, and on its own, that won't be enough to give it a worthwhile identity. After all, this book isn't going to have a pressing need for an implied anal sex scene every issue.

Still, forget the line for the moment. It's another good story from Brian Bendis, albeit much more downbeat than most of his publicised work. For this title, at least, the signs are good.