10 december 2000

EXCALIBUR... now there's a name we haven't had here in a while.

Although to be perfectly honest, I'm not quite sure why we're seeing it now. This is a Captain Britain & Friends miniseries, with a scratch team composed of Captain Britain, Captain Britain's wife, Captain Britain's sister, Captain Britain's counterpart from another dimension, and the Black Knight (who co-headlined a strip with Captain Britain in Marvel UK's Hulk Comic many years ago). The story involves the interdimensional Captain Britain Corps composed of counterparts of Captain Britain, and the villain is Captain Britain's mentor.

I tentatively venture to suggest that this might more accurately be described as a Captain Britain story. Widget pops up (curiously acting as a villain, which will presumably be explained), but that's about the extent of the connection to the rest of Excalibur. Still, somebody obviously thought the Excalibur name would sell a few more copies (they surely can't be coming up for trade mark renewal already), so there we go.

Ben Raab is writing, which is something of a relief to those of us who find American writers' attempts at British accents tortuous at best. Raab is one of the better ones, because he tends just to write the characters without accents at all. Just the one glaring lapse here (nobody over five says "crikey"), which is way ahead of the pack.

The story makes a reasonable stab at introducing Captain Britain to new readers, but looks to have gone the unusual route of giving out too much information. What you need to know about Captain Britain for this story is his involvement with Otherworld and the Captain Britain Corps, and the fact that he doesn't have his powers at the moment because he lost them in one of Raab's Excalibur stories. That doesn't need a four page flashback including stuff like the Jaspers Warp which just isn't relevant here, and threatens to lose the key points in the detail.

Aside from that, it's a reasonably sound Captain Britain story, which has presumably been charged with giving him his powers back in some way. Pablo Raimondi struggles a bit with the hordes of Captain Britain variants he's asked to draw, but he's clearly made an effort in lifting most of the designs from the Alan Davis stories. And his Psylocke is vastly preferable to the one in the main books. There's some highly contrived plotting with Captain UK, who starts the book off "nearly dead" and by the end, some twenty minutes later, is charging off into Otherworld to fight evil again. But as a whole, the book hangs together well enough.

It's still not entirely clear to me quite why anyone thought there was a pressing need for a Captain Britain story right now, but this is good enough.

MUTANT X is back to Howard Mackie's usual tricks, rewriting characters retroactively so as to fit the story he wants to tell even though it's wholly inconsistent with the last one he was doing with the same characters. This time, Mackie brings back Wolverine and Sabretooth. Apparently they're now enemies, Wolverine's not as mindless as he once was, and Sabretooth isn't mindless at all. Even though that was the entire concept of their last story - that they (and Wild Child) were a bunch of mindless animals wandering around the Canadian wilderness.

Oh well, at least they're still in Canada. That counts as a nod to continuity by this book's standards.

It's a bog standard Wolverine and Sabretooth story, in which Wolverine discovers that he has a family he'd forgotten, and Sabretooth sets about killing them. The family, incidentally, consists of the least recognisable Mariko Yashida I've ever seen, and some awful looking brats. So kill 'em all, see if I care.

This is the sort of story that has earned Mutant X its much deserved cancellation. What the hell is the point of doing an alternate reality Sabretooth and Wolverine story if they're just going to do exactly the same story and the Sabretooth/Wolverine/ Silver Fox routine, only with Mariko plugged into the Silver Fox role? There IS no point, and it's good to see Marvel treating the title accordingly.

Oh, and a brief mention for the cover. I realise this is a Code approved book, but if Wolverine's not wearing any clothes (and he isn't) and he's going to stand with his legs apart in silhouette (and he is), shouldn't we be able to see his... oh, never mind.

WOLVERINE #158 is, you will be pleased to hear, a fill-in story to give us a break from the Rob Liefeld run. Unfortunately, it is not a good one.

This is your standard fill-in story. Hero is captured by villain, villain puts him through gratuitous fight scene as a test, hero escapes. Story is made Wolverine-specific through the involvement of an ultra-minor supporting character as a hostage, the use of the healing factor in part of the plot mechanics, and the appearance at the end of a Japanese bloke talking about honour. Nothing says Wolverine like a Japanese bloke talking about honour, mainly because it's such a hoary old cliche.

Zaran (our main villain) is actually a pretty good choice of villain for Wolverine, since they're on more or less the same power level and you could get some good martial arts routines out of them with the right artist. But you've really got to come up with a better motivation for him than "I'm going to beat up Wolverine to prove how tough I am." This is a mediocre piece of writing. In fairness, fill-ins usually are, given the difficulty of filling 22 pages while changing nothing. But this is still mediocre.

Art comes from Sunny Lee, who I've never heard of and may be a newcomer. He/she's actually pretty decent - perhaps a bit cuddly for a Wolverine story, but the storytelling is sound, the camera angles show a bit of variation without becoming gratuitously flashy, and the basics are all there. His/her martial arts routines aren't great, but the story doesn't actually contain all that much of them (which you would have thought was the only point in using Zaran in the first place - but there you go).

Still, the issue as a whole is pretty bad, and gives more ammunition to those demanding to know what the hell Marvel were thinking, not cancelling this book. It IS possible to do good stories with Wolverine as a solo character that are different from the ones you can do with him in a team book, but it has been years now since this book was proving it on a regular basis, and it's fair to question whether there's any reason to think that's going to change now.

X-MEN: MAGIK is still going, for the benefit of the five of us still reading. More of the same here, so I'm not going to go for the full length review. The sorcerous realms all gang up together on their mysterious attacker, but one of them turns out to be a pre-established villain in disguise. (You know, this plot wasn't all that good in Hellcat, and that was just a few months ago.)

While it would be nice to say that this is a book which is doing something different with the X-Men franchise and therefore deserves your support, unfortunately I can't. It IS doing something different with the X-Men franchise, but it isn't doing so very successfully. Amanda and Kurt just aren't fleshed out at all as characters, with the series refusing even to go near the potentially interesting topic of how a Catholic priest feels about all these magical realms.

Liam Sharp's computer generated art is pretty effective, but looks artificial when forced to share space with his much more grungy linework. One style or the other would have worked, but in combination the continual style shifts from panel to panel serve the story badly.

Getting an Amanda Sefton miniseries to work was a tall order, but this falls some way short of achieving it by any standards.

X-MEN: THE HIDDEN YEARS is shortly to become an even more accurate replica of the early seventies X-Men, by not being published at all. In theory, I agree wholeheartedly that it's a book we simply don't need, providing yet another variant on the X-Men name that ought to be pared down as far as possible to a simple core concept. (Frankly, I question the wisdom of having seperate storylines in the two core titles as well.)

But it's probably the best of this week's X-books, and in those circumstances you can understand why its readers want to keep it around. For once, Byrne abandons his normal mess of intermingled and protracted plotlines in favour of getting most of the team together in one place and doing a storyline to kill off Warren's mother. (Since this is revealed on the cover, that's not much of a spoiler.)

It's not a great story - the villains should practically be wearing top hats and twirling their moustaches, and Warren's mother is a hopelessly watery character who never really does much to make us care about her. But if Byrne is doing nothing remotely new or ambitious here, at least he can do the same old routine effectively. Doing the same old routine is not something that really justifies being kept around (you want the old stuff, buy back issues), but when you see some of the rubbish it's up against, you can see the appeal.

And while I still don't want to see it saved from cancellation, it IS this week's best X-book. That's not something to be happy about.

Sam Kieth is back with ZERO GIRL, a new series from Homage that would look downright bizarre if it wasn't for the fact that Kieth's last major project, The Maxx, was on acid half the time. In comparison, Zero Girl is pretty sedate. Its lead character has surreal powers involving protective circles, and oozes defensive liquid from her feet. By Kieth's standards, this is normal.

I've always liked Kieth's art, which manages to remain more or less grounded in reality while lurching sporadically off in the direction of Dr Seuss. The idea this issue is pretty obviously to set up a fairly normal school environment, give the lead character a relationship of some sort with the school counsellor, and establish her as (a) an outcast and (b) weird. This means it's basically a fairly standard bullied teenager story with some weirdness about circles added, but Kieth makes the characters interesting enough to hold my attention.

Having said that, I'm hoping that Kieth was planning to head a little further off the beaten track now that the basic concept has been established. Yes, she's being bullied, we get the idea. Given how bizarre his last book became, presumably Zero Girl will be heading somewhere less obvious as well. If it stays at this level it'll get old quickly, but as an establishing issue it's a necessary evil.

It's good to see DC supporting this kind of stuff. A while back it would have sat more easily in the Vertigo imprint than under Homage, but now that Vertigo is mired in something of a house style, Homage feels like the better imprint for something as idiosyncratic as Zero Girl. Worth a look, anyway.