10 october 1999

What's this? No Fast Lane inserts? What a terrible, terrible shame. Without them, I shall surely sink into an pit of opiated depravity and medically hazardous orgies with underage girls. Be it on your heads, Marvel!

Ah well. Comics. There should have been three X-books out this week, but Cable's running late (now there's a surprise), and X-Men: The Hidden Years hasn't shown up either. So that just leaves UNCANNY X-MEN #375. Which is pretty damn good.

We're obviously now in the middle of a pretty major Skrull storyline, as pretty much nobody had guessed before the preview issues were shipped last week. It's good to see that Marvel have finally got out of their habit of blowing all the storylines months in advance. This is the first time in ages we've had the books take a surprise turn which has clearly been worked out well in advance and which wasn't telegraphed half a year away.

The Skrulls, being your typical shape-changing alien invaders, are all about paranoia. Anybody could really be a Skrull, and all that B-movie stuff. So what we have here is pretty much an entire issue of paranoia, as Xavier and his fellow telepaths set about putting their teammates through the wringer in order to find out whether they're for real or not.

Now, if you haven't read the book, you'll probably realise anyway that this is one of those "oh, most of the story was just an illusion" stories. Which are usually supremely annoying because they're so inconsequential. This one isn't, partly because of the way in which the X-Men's various factions are divided up. A couple of very odd choices suggest that Davis may have some interesting ideas about some of these characters - Cyclops and Phoenix are on the faction that DOESN'T trust Xavier?

Needless to say, it all goes a bit apocalyptic, and Adam Kubert's artwork catches the necessary style wonderfully as it steadily topples over into chaos. Unfortunately, the issue is lumbered with some really muddy colouring, and you just wish Marvel would get around to hiring colour seperators of the quality DC have.

Still... revealing that they swapped Wolverine for a different character about five months ago is a heck of a broad stroke, and difficult to pull off well. This issue gets the trick to work, and makes sure that it's easily one of the best anniversary issues we've had in ages.

Well, there's nothing new this week that interests me in the slightest (the Superman relaunch didn't make it to Britain for some reason), so instead of picking some piece of drivel and pretending I'm interested, I'll have a look at the first three issues of MR MAJESTIC instead.

I'd been avoiding this series until its recent good reviews, and it's pleasant to report that it deserved them entirely. Writers Casey and Holguin have pretty obviously chosen to play Majestic mainly as a Superman counterpart and to revisit the kinds of deranged, over the top stories that kids liked about the Silver Age Superman. And they've hit the tone exactly, creating something wildly over the top but at no point degenerating into Silver Age tribute. They're aiming this at the kids, not at middle-aged men.

The first three issues are all self-contained single issue stories, with no running subplots at all. This is all about taking one idea and then developing it to absurd extremes over the course of 22 pages. In issue #1, Majestic saves the solar system from an alien invader by... disguising it. Issue #2 is a schoolgirl with temporal blip powers doing ridiculous damage to causality. And issue #3, setting its sights a bit lower, is Majestic going for a night on the town with his rather less uptight colleague Ladytron. Who had some highly unconventional religious beliefs she'd like to share with us.

Obviously all of these are pretty basic ideas in themselves, but the skill is in the execution. Issue #1 realises that if you're going to disguise the solar system, it damn well ought to look like a big and difficult thing. Too many writers these days would just have some cosmic entity or other wave his hand and do it in thirty seconds. Boring. Unimpressive. Dull. It's precisely because of the scale of effort that goes into Majestic's planning and the amount of time taken in showing us how damned difficult this all is that the feat looks impressive.

Issue #3 seems to be aiming at rather different territory than the first two - less of the big scale events, more of the bizarre ideas. The cyborg Ladytron's religious conviction that machines are alive and have rights is turned into a warped and hilarious parody of religious views on abortion, reincarnation and the like. Odd stuff to find in what seems in issue #1 to be intended as a book for kids, but very funny and well worth reading.

Artist Ed McGuinness was last seen in these parts working on Deadpool, before heading off for a frankly ill-advised phase drawing Fighting American and the like. He does a magnificent job here, giving Majestic the necessary sense of, well, majesty while never losing touch with the cartoon element that's needed to make insane stories like these work.

A genuinely excellent first three issues, and a great example of how to make characters like this work.