9 december 2001

Yes, this week's reviews are a day early. I'm going to be out of town for a couple of days.

No, I am not reviewing that Batman book. I got fed up hearing about it months ago. I simply don't care. If you want to hear about the Batman book, I'm sure there are a ton of other reviewers who will be happy to oblige. For my part, my total apathy, my reaction against excessive hype, and the high price point outweight my normal "I'll buy anything" policy, so I'm steering clear.

No, I do not want to receive any e-mails telling me to reconsider.

Talking of things I have no enthusiasm for at all, this is the first week of Marvel's silent month. This is meant to be a wonderful celebration of the storytelling possibilities of the medium. Week one includes EXILES #7, Thor #44 and an issue of Spider-Girl which I haven't read. (Fantastic Four #50 and Uncanny X-Men #401, both also scheduled for this week, are late. Who'd have thought it, eh?)

Exiles adopts the device where a group of characters each have their own little dream scene designed to shed light on their character. Thor adopts the device where a group of characters each have their own little reminiscence designed to shed light on how they personally viewed Odin. So basically, in the first week alone, this exercise to display the storytelling possibilities of the medium has already produced two awfully similar stories.

As I will no dobut be explaining at tiresome length over the following three - or more likely, eight - weeks, Nuff Said month is an extremely poor idea. Far from displaying what the medium is capable of, it actually just imposes an artificial restriction which limits what the medium is capable of. You can't do plots of any real complexity; you can't identify the characters meaningfully for the benefit of new readers (and indeed both this week's issues must be all but impenetrable to anyone not already familiar with their respective casts); you can't really do a great deal, to be honest.

Now, these artificial limitations can be very effective when wheeled out once in a while in service of a story that demands them. In the GI Joe story that everyone always talks about, it worked because all the characters were in fact silent, and the protagonist of that issue was a mute. Other times, it can work because the distancing effect of denying the reader access to the dialogue is something the writer actually wants to bring about.

But in those cases, it works because it's a storytelling device deployed in service to the story. In Nuff Said month, we are presented with a bunch of stories in service to the device. At worst it's irritating and intrusive (and it'll result in some trade paperbacks that will read atrociously when the sound cuts out for twenty-two arbitrary pages halfway through). At best, it's a rather pointless writing-class exercise which I have no particular interest in paying to see.

Exiles tries to come up with a situation where the distancing effect works, by filling most of the issue with characters on their own sleeping and dreaming. This is a reasonable enough way to approach the gimmick, since it at least delivers a story which is vaguely in key with the available narrative options. Of course, it still means that we have a grating opening sequence to justify getting a bunch of nomadic wanderers into separate hotel rooms, where the lack of sound serves no artistic purpose whatsoever and is merely an intrusive nuisance.

If you're wondering how I've managed to get this far into the review without getting to the actual story content, that's partly because there really isn't very much - it's just a bunch of character vignettes, with some development of the internal relationships within the team. But it's largely because the novelty gimmick storytelling simply overpowers any artistic or creative point the story was trying to make. I think this is my fundamental problem with the whole concept - when we know that the silence is a gimmick rather than a voluntary artistic choice, it loses all the aesthetic power that it generally has. Rather than creating a distancing effect, the silence here just amounts to a neon sign saying "This is a gimmick issue. We are treading water."

Flashing. In your face. On every. Bloody. Page.

The actual content is passable, but takes an awfully long time to establish fairly basic elements of characterisation. (Silent storytelling takes ages to make its point, which is one good reason why people don't generally use it for an entire story.) Thunderbird would like to be human again - well yes, we knew that. Sunfire feels guilty about rebelling against the cultural values of her strict Japanese parents - fair enough, and at least it's new plot material, but it's not desperately original. Mimic wants to live in domestic bliss with Blink. Morph's an exhibitionist with inner insecurities. Nocturne's section appears to be an erotic dream sequence, but erratic colouring leaves it wholly unclear what's meant to be real and what isn't, and the upshot is a sequence which is next to incomprehensible. Blink worries about getting her team killed, and has nightmares about home.

It's passable, but it amounts to a writing exercise rather than a story, taking an age to establish relatively basic pieces of information. It works to an extent, but where it works, it works despite the silence, not because of it. The gimmick detracts rather than enhancing.

Which really shouldn't come as much of a surprise.

ULTIMATE X-MEN concludes the Return to Weapon X storyline, with the help of two pencillers and three inkers. Much the usual routine here - the heroes escape and beat up the villains, which is no doubt meant to be emotionally satisfying because the villains were such nasty people in the previous issues.

Of course, for me it doesn't really work, because I still don't buy into any of the villains as people at all. Since I couldn't get the story under my suspension of disbelief to begin with, I can't get particularly worked up about the villains being defeated. Millar has a couple of nice ideas here - Sabretooth having himself fitted with four claws on each hand actually works, since it comes over as an insecure piece of one-upmanship. His fight with Wolverine has some good moments as well, although Millar resorts to having the character defeated by a moment of sheer idiocy which only serves to undermine the idea that he's a genuine threat to anyone.

On the other hand, Millar's villains still seem to suffer from selective lobotomies, as even within the story's own logic they do some very odd things indeed. Having gone to all the trouble of establishing that Xavier will wake up and defeat everyone now that the power has been cut, Millar has given Wraith an eminently good reason to kill Xavier before he wakes. So what does Wraith do? Why, he shoots an immobile and unconscious Xavier three times in the chest at point blank range, which of course miraculously fails to kill him. Apparently it doesn't occur to Wraith to shoot at the head, because that would in fact have killed Xavier and screwed up the plot. But if Millar wants to write this sort of story, he's got to start coming up with plots that hold water on their own, rather than relying on the readers not noticing the glaringly obvious plot holes.

The climax also seems uncomfortably out of place in this book, as after spending most of his stories deliberately pissing on traditional comic book cliches (for somewhat understandable reasons), Millar's X-Men suddenly start parading around delivering platitudes about the moral importance of never killing the enemy. This feels totally incompatible with the all-pervading nastiness and cynicism of Millar's writing and doesn't convince as a plausible response to the situation. Millar obviously fancies himself as an iconoclast; to have his protagonists suddenly revert to cliche- babbling twerps at the end of a story is doubly unsuccessful as a result.

Some rather rushed art by Tom Derenick (one of those "quite good when he's got the time to do it properly" artists) doesn't help matters much either. The coda, cryptically teasing the return of Magneto, is more successful and does inspire some interest in the next storyline. But this issue doesn't hold together.

UNCANNY X-MEN #400 is a damned odd book. This being an anniversary issue, it's doublesized. But of course, the book has no regular artist at the moment, so instead we get the "What the fuck are they doing on the X-Men?" players, sharing the art chores.

Sean Phillips and Cully Hamner aren't too far off the beaten track, and Eddie Campbell's sequence feels surprisingly at home. Javier Pulido is given a scene largely composed of fictitious flashbacks, so his incongruous art feels more appropriate than it otherwise might.

And then we have Ashley Wood, last seen in these parts when he drew a Generation X annual a few years back. Wood is an odd bugger, who seems to remain convinced that there is no story which would not be enhanced by the visual depiction of murky, indeterminate figures in a monochrome or sepia landscape, wandering badly lit areas which are covered by a fogbank. Even indoors.

Yes, it's all very moody. Ashley Wood can set a mood. The problem is, it always seems to be the same mood. This is the key difference between Wood and somebody like, say, Bill Sienkiewicz, who would seem to be one of his main influences. Sinkiewicz has a range of art styles and changes to suit the story. Wood has one specific style, which is great if the story calls for heavy mood and no visual action (since you won't be able to discern what it is), but not so good if you wanted anything else at all. You'll take your sepia fogbank and you'll damn well like it. It's good for you, it's art.

An attempt is made here to incorporate Wood's style into the story by giving him all the scenes of people talking into the Church of Humanity's cathedral. This is only successful to a limited degree - Wood's artwork is so distinctive in comparison with everyone else's that there can't help but be a glaring gearshift. On the other hand, giving him all the Church's scenes does give them a vague air of menace and has the distinct bonus of largely concealing their hilariously awful costume designs.

I mean, priests with firearms, for christ's sake. These guys would be great villains for Howard the Duck, but you surely can't expect me to take them seriously?

Oh no, god, apparently you do. Shit. This issue does go some way to giving the Church a specifically Christian anti-mutant manifesto, by making them rabid anti-evolutionists who believe that they're made in the image of God (and therefore mutants aren't). Nonetheless, it still comes over as a really strained one-joke concept, and if Casey seriously wants these people to get over as a legitimate danger, they need revising urgently. The costumes are too stupid. Leaders called the Supreme Pontiff are inherently laughable. It's the sheer lack of subtlety with which the religious imagery is deployed that makes the Church of Humanity clowns rather than threats.

On the plus side, Stacy X gets some decent character work this issue, and Casey is starting to show some reasonable grip on most of his cast - though his Chamber still rings a bit false, and in any event they're mostly interchangeable in this story, with the arguable exception of Kurt.

Possibly the weirdest anniversary issue I've ever seen, if only because it's so incredibly uncharacteristic of the series as a whole. Unfortunately, in this case its weirdness never quite translates into being particularly interesting.