10 february 2002

EXILES continues its three part storyline set on a world which the Skrulls conquered in the nineteenth century. I seemed to be in the minority last month in finding this idea all a bit dull.

So from my point of view it's somewhat fortunate that this issue does a wild change of direction by having the Skrulls flee the planet halfway through. Rather than the expected storyline where the Exiles lead the poor downtrodden locals to overthrow their oppressors, the Skrulls don't get overthrown at all - they just get the hell out of the way when Galactus turns up, and leave it up to the locals to fend for themselves.

This is more to my taste than last issue's plot, although to be honest it's still not the most exciting idea I've ever seen. When you get down to it, it's still bloody Galactus again, and I've always thought the mileage in that idea was exhausted long ago.

Still, as always there are plenty of nice moments scattered throughout the story - the Mimic having a deliberately anti- climactic fight with Captain America to annoy the crowds, or a Reed Richards who started off with no technology at all excitedly babbling to the Exiles about his recent invention of radio. And the art is typically impressive.

But I find it hard to get particularly worked up about reading yet another variation on "Act 2: We've Only Just Managed To Beat The Herald, How Will We Possibly Defeat Galactus Himself?"

Well, so much for the Joe Casey run on UNCANNY X-MEN. Mind you, he's going to be around until issue #409, so there's plenty of time yet to enjoy (or endure) his work.

Oddly enough, after last month's disastrous beginning to the X-Corps storyline, this issue really isn't bad. It's playing very safe, and almost feels like a hangover from the pre-relaunch days, but it more or less hangs together.

The basic storyline is straightforward - Sean Cassidy has formed the X-Corps, a rather dodgy-looking self-proclaimed mutant police force based in Germany which seems to specialise largely in beating people up. The X-Men find all this rather worrying, and the big questions are meant to be (a) what the hell does Sean think he's doing, and (b) how is he keeping all these supervillains in line anyway?

That's perfectly sound as a starting point, and Casey at least gets the basic idea across this time round. It's still somewhat emasculated by the fact that everyone talks about the X-Corps as if there was something clearly repellent about their public image, when in fact there's nothing terribly distressing about it at all. The X-Corps are supposed to look militaristic, but in practice they look no more military than the X-Men themselves.

Originally this would have been addressed by covering the X-Corps in Nazi regalia, but that idea has been junked. Wisely so, for numerous reasons - aside from being tasteless and tacky, it's completely implausible as a character decision for Sean, and the use of Nazi imagery is illegal in Germany, so the group would have been arrested within thirty seconds of opening for business. However, in order for this story to truly work, it needed to be replaced with something else.

Some of the plot logic is a little questionable - just what exactly is dropping the Blob from a great height supposed to do? Casey also largely passes over the opportunity to play off Chamber's previous relationship with Sean. It's alluded to, but nothing comes of it. Nonetheless, aside from a closing page where I'm presumably meant to recognise the woman in the tank but simply don't, it's a reasonable enough story. How well it works at the end of the day will depend on just what Sean's motives are meant to be here - Casey appears to be dropping hints of outside influence, in which case it makes a degree of sense. If Sean is simply meant to have woken up one day as a fascist because he's a bit upset at Moira's death, then the psychology leaves a lot to be desired.

There's a subplot with Archangel addressing the G8 Summit which, to be honest, irritates me a bit. It's not the idea of Warren speaking to world leaders, which is fair enough. It's more that the scene gives the strong impression that Casey and Garney have only the most superficial understanding of what the G8 actually is and who's in it. Casey has at least bothered to find out that the President of the European Commission is Romano Prodi, and dutifully namechecks him as the chairman of the meeting. But quite why Prodi hosting, when he has nothing to do with the G8 and doesn't even live or work in Germany, is a bit bizarre. And nobody seems to have made even the slightest effort to dig up any photo reference for Ron Garney, who has simply drawn a sinister looking ape. It took me thirty seconds to find a photo of Romano Prodi on BBC News Online, so I find it rather annoying that nobody involved in this comic could apparently make the effort. (He looks nothing like Garney's rendition, before you ask.)

Still, overall this is one of the better Casey issues. It's far from groundbreaking, and it doesn't entirely work, but it hangs in there.

If you've dismissed X-FORCE on the basis that it's all cynical and nasty, you might want to give issue #124 a try. This is a character piece for Edie and Guy which has practically no cynicism whatsoever, and is actually downright sweet. I love it.

While Milligan spent the early issues deliberately making his X-Force team as unlikeable as possible, it's precisely the most unpleasant characters that he's been steadily killing off in the course of the series. The current cast, while thoroughly flawed, are basically nice enough people when you get down to it. Edie is the obvious exception to that, and her origin story in this issue is her big rehabilitation, making a shameless - and successful - attempt to get the audience to root for her rather than just wanting to punch her.

Despite the title, most of this issue consists of Edie returning at long last to visit the family she turned her back on, and explaining why she left them in the first place. Of course, the book can't quite bring itself to go for the obvious cutesy ending - this is still X-Force, after all - but what we get here is a perfectly straight character piece with an epilogue scene that's openly romantic.

Guest art comes from Darwyn Cooke, who already collaborates with Allred on DC's Catwoman and makes for a fairly good fit. Cooke isn't trying to do an Allred pastiche here - the key difference in style, to my mind, is that Allred looks retro, whereas Cooke seems more similar to the animation style, with his minimal and heavy lines. It's good, though, and his flashback scenes demonstrate that he's got some range when it's needed.

It's perhaps not what you've come to expect from X-Force, but as the title has been stealthily increasing the level of conventional characterisation over the last few months, it won't come as a jarring change to regular readers. Those of you who found the early Milligan/Allred issues too sarcastic and cynical for your tastes should seriously consider picking this issue up after all. It's a great illustration of how this book really does have a soul in there somewhere.

S.C.I.SPY is one of those books which really shouldn't be coming out under the Vertigo imprint at all, if they want to protect the value of that brand name. There's nothing remotely Vertigo about this book at all, aside from the fact that near the end, a woman gets her tits out. Which wasn't really necessary.

Still, it wouldn't be fair to judge the book simply by whether it fits under the Vertigo imprint, so let's move on. This is a six issue miniseries by Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy, always an interesting combination given their widely acclaimed run on Master of Kung Fu. Unfortunately, it's... well, it's not very good.

The high concept is that this is a book about a space opera James Bond. And it plunges headfall into a common pitfall for books whose raison d'etre is to combine two pre-existing genres - namely, rather than creating a new genre, it just ends up being generic and obvious in two ways at once. And in this case, the two genres in question both passed their peak some years ago to start with.

Alarm bells were going off for me by page two, when the hero is already in an argument with his computer boss over whether he should have cyborg enhancements or not. He refuses on the grounds that "It's called staying human - being REAL." When it becomes apparent that the lead character is called Sebastian Starchild all I can do is groan inwardly. When the book ends with dialogue like "I am Assassin Chaxx... And you, Sebastian Starchild... you are skin-pure meat"... well, I find myself silently wondering how I stuck with it that far.

If you really, really like space opera then you may find this to your liking. For the rest of you, run like hell.

ULTIMATES #1 came out last week, but I only got a copy yesterday, so in the name of completism, I thought I'd review it anyway.

And in fact, despite my general antipathy to Mark Millar's writing, this is really quite good. The obvious fear with Millar on the Avengers - particularly Captain America - is that he would be unable to control his rampant cynicism and would end up just mocking the characters under a thin justification of satirical subversion.

This issue consists of Captain America in World War II, and how he ended up frozen. That might seem an odd place to start a team book, given that the team itself isn't even mentioned and most of its members don't appear. (Tony Stark puts in a cameo in an epilogue that feels tagged on and which doesn't really work.)

Captain America would seem a thoroughly un-Millar character, and typically enough, Millar gets round that problem by changing the guy's personality to eliminate the boy scout elements and bringing in a dash of the "maverick genius" archetype instead. But he seems to have left untouched the character's basic ideals - though admittedly, in the context of an evil Nazi plan to nuke Washington, it's hardly surprising that he disapproves.

Also interesting is the decision to play up Captain America's origins as a propaganda figure, by having the rank and file soldiers express scepticism about his value, and repositioning Bucky as a photographer paid simply to trail around after Cap taking photos for propaganda purposes. Partly because it takes the widescreen approach of filling page after page with epic battle scenes, not a great deal really happens in this issue, but the ideas that are here seem promising enough - and, fortunately, seem to show Millar taking a less gratuitously vicious approach to the source material. It displays some range on Millar's part which I had seriously doubted existed.

Bryan Hitch makes the most of his battle sequences, which in the modern way of things are designed to make war look pretty damn unpleasant. His 1940s Captain America costume is an interesting little number as well, completely dumping the spandex elements and instead incorporating the same design elements into something more like a conventional army uniform. Aside from the slightly dodgy mask, it's a vast improvement - he no longer stands out like a sore thumb in wartime.

A surprisingly good start, all told.