10 september 2000

Still no X-Men Declassified, and Rob Liefeld's already running two weeks late on Wolverine (do they NEVER learn?), so I've got a sane number of books to review after all, thank god.

MUTANT X hits issue #25 and, in the manner of anniversary issues, spends a bit of time contemplating its own premise by giving Havok an opportunity to return to his own Earth. The main focus of the story, however, is the Beast's attempt to come up with the necessary technology before his intelligence fades again.

Now, I like the basic premise of Hank knowing that he's going to lose his mind again in a few days and racing to complete as much as possible before then. It's not an original idea, but it's still a very strong basis for a story, since it's essentially the "reaction to diagnosis of Alzheimers" plot. Universal human fears - always good material, and actually quite well handled here.

Unfortunately, while Mackie comes up with a nice little ending whereby Alex decides not to leave, meaning that Hank has wasted his last few days of intelligence after all, he loses his nerve. So Hank gets a minor subplot in which he cures Ice-Man; and Alex is given a last minute, heat-of-the-moment "I must stay to save my friends" crisis to spur him to stay behind. The story would have been much more powerful if Alex had just shown up and announced that he'd decided to stay, leaving Hank with nothing to show for his work at all. Granted, you'd have lost the token fight scene, but the issue as a whole would be stronger for it. Perhaps a bit too dark for Mutant X, admittedly.

The other difficulty with this plot is that it rests on the idea that Alex might credibly want to remain behind in the first place. For all Mackie tries to present this as a difficult decision, it clearly isn't. Alex's emotional connection to the Mutant X world can't be all THAT strong compared to his home world. The plot doesn't really give Alex a compelling motivation to stay behind, which is a problem.

Enough good material from Hank's plot makes it through to make this one of the better recent Mutant X issues, but it would have been much stronger if it had held its nerve and done the really grim story that the story idea suggests.

UNCANNY X-MEN breaks Claremont's run of atrocious villains by the simple technique of not having any. It's a natural disaster story, with the X-Men trying to rescue Lee Forrester and some extras from a hurricane.

And hey, it's not bad. I'm not a big fan of natural disaster stories, since there's basically only two stories you can do. One, the heroes are great blokes who get together and save people. Two, the heroes are sadly unable to save people from the mighty storm, proving once again that we are nothing compared to the majesty of Mother Nature. Claremont goes unashamedly for option one, which means that the question is how entertaining he can make the routine.

The answer is, moderately entertaining. There's some decent superpower stunts, and some opportunities for good visuals. There's a few bits of okay character development in subplots. Ultimately, you've seen it all before, but it's a perfectly reasonable rendition of the stock plot. The only real writing problems here are the contrived coincidence of a minor X-Men supporting character just happening to be in the storm; the occasional lapse into overwriting (but not as bad as he often is); and the fact that the plot is functional at best ("The X-Men save some people from a hurricane" pretty much sums it up in its entirety). Given that we're basically killing time here until next month's crossover comes along, it could be a lot worse.

Adam Kubert has departed to start work on Ultimate X-Men, so this month's fill-in work comes from Thomas Derenick. He reminds me of Andy Kubert's early X-Men work, which isn't a compliment, but fortunately his sense of storytelling is stronger, and his characters are less prone to weird deformity-causing angles. He draws the least convincing dancefloor I've seen since a Hanna Barbera cartoon (you can almost imagine the limbs jerking back and forward on a cheaply animated loop), but when he gets into the action scenes, he's not at all bad.

Nothing much to say about this one compared to some of the other Claremont issues, since there's really not that much to it. But for what it is, it's okay.

And then, on the other hand, we have X-MEN: BLACK SUN. Oh dear.

This one is meant to be a twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the relaunch of the X-Men in Giant-Size X-Men #1, which is as good an excuse for a miniseries as any. This buys the book a certain degree of latitude as far as I'm concerned, since this has actually got a reason to play the nostalgia card, and an acceptable reason to put a contrived team line-up together so as to reunite the 1975 team.

Unfortunately, even with lower standards being applied, the book still fails them. Where shall we start?

Shadowcat is back, without any explanation. This is good insofar as it means we're not going to have to sit through the Neo plot that her absence had presumably been building towards. However, given that she's been away for five months and that her absence was mentioned as an ongoing subplot, it really deserves some kind of token resolution, even if just a throwaway comment.

For villains, we've got Belasco and the N'Garai. Belasco's here for a reason, which is to set up the return of Magik. The N'Garai are here presumably because they're fairly early X-Men villains, and Claremont naturally didn't want to commemorate Krakoa the Living Island. Unfortunately, neither of them are particularly interesting. The N'Garai just go around killing stuff, which really isn't anything to write home about; and Belasco is Just Plain Evil.

Their involvement is basically an excuse to have the N'Garai swap minds with some of the 1975 X-Men and go off on a rampage for the next few issues, which is fair enough as far as it goes, but it still doesn't make me want to read about them. Can't we have ANY villains in the Claremont run with personalities?

And then, of course, there's the return of Magik.

Now, as anybody who reads Usenet regularly will know, I think bringing Magik back is an incredibly dumb idea. But hell, if the books are going to be crap, they may as well be fan-pleasing crap. So I'm not marking the book down for bringing her back; I'm marking it down for doing it in such a banal way. Shadowcat's having a fight with Belasco, and Magik turns up and attacks him. Now, you might think that the return from the dead of her best friend would provoke some kind of reaction from Shadowcat, but no. She doesn't even seem surprised.

Nor is there any explanation of who Magik is. Now, of course, it's pretty obvious that Claremont is trying to leave some leeway here to allow Magik to be revealed as somebody else next issue - she refuses to be called Illyana, her face is kept mostly in shadow under her costume, and so forth. But there can be no misdirection if the readers aren't familiar with original Magik character, which is explained nowhere. Don't forget that Magik hasn't been in regular use of any sort since Inferno back in 1989. That's eleven years worth of new readers to whom the character doesn't mean a great deal; I refuse to believe that more than a fraction of readers who started during that period went off hunting down New Mutants back issues. You can't bring back a character who hasn't been in print for eleven years without any explanation of who they were in the first place, and then expect it to mean anything. Especially if the characters themselves don't seem that worked up.

An obvious question that arises here is why a series that's nominally meant to be commemorating Giant-Size X-Men #1 has been co-opted to do a Shadowcat and Magik story. I forsee some rather nasty welding together of completely different themes over the rest of this miniseries. The book doesn't find space to explain its unlikely roster of X-Men because it's too busy focusing on Shadowcat. It doesn't find space to set up Magik's return properly because it needs to drag in all these other X-Men.

As for the art, Thomas Derenick is looking much worse here than on the regular title. A large part of that is probably the different inker. Shiny paper and bright colouring do little for any sense of atmosphere, as well. It's okay, but only okay.

There's three issues of this miniseries due out next week. Please let it be painless.

I'm thinking of relegating X-MEN: THE HIDDEN YEARS down to the capsule reviews, as I was doing with Mutant X until recently. It's not that it's a bad book, but it's just the same every month. Cosy. Inoffensive. Unimportant. Okay.

This is a double-sized issue commemorating the one year anniversary (which is a pet hate of mine, by the way - it's eleven damn months since issue #1 came out, for god's sake). Magneto and Sauron have a fight, which is much as you'd expect. Some other subplots meander merrily onwards, much as you'd expect. All much as you'd expect.

Hell with it, it's going down to the capsules next month. There's nothing to say about the damn book. It's a competent John Byrne book. That's all there is to say.

Well, I've got to do ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN, haven't I?

This is Marvel's much heralded attempt to get some new readers into comics by giving them an easy-access version of Spider-Man and promoting it to the hilt. We won't know how well that works until it hits the newsstands, which apparently won't be for a few weeks. But at least we can see whether it's a decent product.

And yes, it's a decent product. It's got a good distinctive design which should make it stand out, so that's a plus. Putting it out with a cardstock cover seems a bit perverse, since it raises the price, and I doubt that it delivers all that many extra readers. But the thing looks good, which is a start.

What we get in terms of story is, naturally, the first part of Spider-Man's origin. The decision has been taken to serialise the story, which seems a little odd in some respects. The normal approach would be to at least get the character into costume in the first issue. The story does work as a self-contained issue (it takes you up as far as Peter getting his powers, which is Act 1 of the story, and a natural break point), but there's still some risk in going with the natural pace of the story rather than sticking Spider-Man out there in the early going.

Some people have criticised the book for running so much slower than Amazing Fantasy #15, pointing out that the original story took only a handful of pages to get this far. That's true, but the original story is done at a breakneck pace by modern standards, practically lapsing into montage at times. In the original, May and Ben are pretty much all-purpose kindly relatives; this version is trying to give them an opportunity to become real characters.

It's also tying in Spider-Man's origin with the Green Goblin's, which takes up more space. John Byrne tried something similar in Chapter One when he conflated the origins of Spider-Man and Dr Octopus. That didn't work, because Byrne seemed more interested in cutting down the number of explosions in 1960s continuity than in actually making something out of putting the characters together. There IS something to be said for involving the arch-enemy at the origin story stage, and Bendis strikes the right balance between tying the characters together without eliminating the "twist of fate" element of Spider-Man's origin. While Osborn's experiments are responsible for the spider, the bite remains a pure accident.

Bendis has also wisely tweaked another part of the original story by establishing the webshooters as being Peter finishing off an invention of his father's. The idea of a high school kid inventing that stuff was a weakness in the original story, which detracted from the idea that he was meant to be basically ordinary. Having him simply complete the process works much better, playing off his science nerd persona without making him into a child genius. It's also a far better use of Peter's parents than the Marvel Universe managed (the MU turned them into agents of SHIELD, an awful idea which again just undermined the concept that Peter was a normal kid until the spider came along).

Peter is pretty much unrecognisable as the modern day character, which is hardly surprising since he's a fifteen year old kid here. This is the same starting point, with the cultural references updated a bit - he's still got virtually no friends (though Mary Jane is there already), he's still basically a nerd, and he's perhaps a bit more sullen and introverted than before.

Mark Bagley is doing some excellent artwork, superior to his recent Thunderbolts work, and taking full advantage of all the opportunities he's given to tell the story visually. Bendis is a writer who knows when to shut up, and the story is all the more effective for it. Bagley doesn't get to do all that much spider-power stuff in this issue, but what he does is excellent, and works effectively as a teaser.

Whether it works to get in the new readers or not, this is a great relaunch for the character. If Marvel can keep this up in the other Ultimate books, at least they'll have the right product out there.