11 february 2001

It's a dismally uninspiring week for the X-books, which is why I'm devoting most of this week's column to assorted indie books that all happen to have their first issues out. But first, let's go through the motions.

GAMBIT & BISHOP continues along its way, still not convincing anyone that it has any pressing need to exist. Scott Lobdell's stories on the main X-Men books have played to his strengths so far, but this series is playing very much to his weaknesses. Actually constructing a plot has never been his strong point.

This series looks to be casting around desperately for ways to fill up the time while it progresses its very slight storyline. We've now had two issues of Gambit and Bishop fighting the X-Men and escaping (roughly four times as much space as the scene needed), and Lobdell now gives us an entire issue in which Gambit & Bishop travel to New Orleans, meet the Witness, and find out that he's got Stryfe in his basement. That's it. They travel to New Orleans and have a conversation. If this series was being paced sensibly in relation to the plot, we'd still be in the first issue. At least it's on a fortnightly schedule, which means we're getting through it at a reasonable pace, but this is still getting far more pages than it needs.

(If indeed the series merits any pages at all, which has yet to be established. If there is any point to this series, it has not become apparent so far. Does anyone really care that much about Gambit and Bishop fighting Stryfe?)

Astonishingly, Lobdell once again uses the plot device that marred some of his worst X-Men stories. Despite repeated requests from Bishop, Gambit refuses to tell him why they're going to New Orleans and who they're going to meet. Gambit has no sensible motive or plot reason for withholding that information. Lobdell simply doesn't want the readers to find out until around page 18, so he has Gambit act totally irrationally in order to build false tension. This is one of the (many) things that Lobdell was rightly crucified for in X-Men Unlimited #4, and frankly, you'd think he'd have got the point by now.

For pity's sake, Scott. Just because you don't want the readers to find out about this until late on in the course of the book doesn't mean that you have to withhold the information from Bishop! You could write the book so that the characters know, and the tension is built by the readers wondering what it is that the characters know but they don't. That would be okay.

Or, alternatively, you could just skip to them arriving in New Orleans and trim the story to a sensible length. That'd work even better.

As for revealing the Witness to be somebody entirely separate from Gambit... Well, I can see the logic in using the character, since he's about the only thing that's common to Bishop and Gambit's characters but not to the X-Men as a whole. But I fail to see how it benefits anyone to turn him into a cut-price version of the Watcher. It just seems to generate confusion to no real purpose.

Cary Nord's artwork is the usual decent stuff - he seems to be finding a bit more to interest him in this stuff than he did in Mutant X, although that's hardly surprising. But he can't carry a story like this.

X-MEN: THE HIDDEN YEARS devotes an issue to Kraven the Hunter fighting the Beast, in a scenario contrived even by John Byrne's standards. The gimmick is that Kraven has arbitrarily decided to have a go at hunting the Beast purely for the purpose of sharpening his skills. So he poisons minor supporting character Avia and says that if the Beast plays along, he'll hand over the antidote afterwards, whatever happens.

Can you see the obvious logic problem in this plot?

Of course you can. All the Beast is trying to achieve is to save Avia, which he can do by bringing the fight to an end as quickly as possible. So logically, he ought to throw the fight. But he doesn't. Because if that occurred to him - or anyone else - then it'd expose how silly the plot is.

So we get the usual pointless chase sequence, faintly silly babbling about honour, and a ridiculous ending in which the Beast is suddenly able to defeat Kraven almost instantly, just because he's very angry. (Jesus, if it's that easy to beat Kraven, why didn't he do it on page two?)

A woefully misconceived effort using a third-rate villain who has nothing to do with the X-Men.

With the X-books on autopilot this week, my comic shop seems to have discovered a sudden and unexpected interest in indie publishers, so let's have a look at four number one issues that I bought completely blind, simply because they were on the shelves.

BONEYARD is by Richard Moore, and the publishers describe it as a comedy horror book. Frankly, this is only a horror book at all if you're defining that term widely enough to encompass Scooby Doo. Which isn't to say it's bad, but it's not horror.

Our main character, Michael Paris, has inherited the graveyard in the small town of Raven's Hollow, following the death of his grandfather. He's gone to the town to finalise the sale of the property to the town council, only to discover that the reason the council are trying to get rid of it is that it's inhabited by an assortment of eccentric monsters and undead thingies. They're very nice, but they're bringing down the property values, so the locals would like to burn them all with torches.

Well, I think we all know where this one's heading - our sympathetic hero will side with the loveable outsiders, possibly leading up to a heartwarming reconciliation with mainstream society brokered by the protagonist, and the romance between him and the cute vampire love interest will successfully blossom. It's a pretty predictable set-up.

But it's still rather good. The visual storytelling is well paced, and (despite the presence of lynch mobs with torches) the whole thing is nicely underplayed, with the monsters all getting relatively normal dialogue instead of going for the melodrama. The best word would probably be "endearing."

HAMMER OF THE GODS is being published through Insight Studios Group, who I've never even heard of before. It's a more or less solo project by Michael Avon Oeming, the artist from the rightly acclaimed Powers. This is a drastic change of subject matter for him - a four issue miniseries about a mystically cursed Viking who swears revenge on the gods for forsaking his family and letting them all die while he was off doing his heroic journey routine.

Being a story about a hero who turns his back on those bastard gods, I'm assuming this doesn't have its roots in genuine Norse folklore. However, Oeming and his co-writer Mark Wheatley have constructed something that certainly feels like authentic mythology. It's got that feeling of being a story that's been around for centuries and which you'd just never heard before, much like some of the single-issue Sandman stories did.

Oeming's stylised artwork fits the material well. While he tends to go for grid layouts on Powers, this book takes a more flexible approach, with some excellent montage sequences. The minimal linework is perfect for this kind of story, which really wouldn't work as well if it was being drawn in a naturalistic style.

This is a great book (and it deals with its themes far more effectively than this week's Thor annual, incidentally, which takes a rather more tentative swipe in similar territory). Go and buy a copy.

HIGHWAY 13 is a new series from somebody called Les McClaine (no, me neither), coming out through Slave Labor Graphics. Or SLG, as they're calling themselves these days.

This is an odd one. The idea appears to be that our protagonists, Rick and Garth, are on a road trip around America encountering the weird and paranormal. Garth, for reasons not explained, seems to be some kind of humanoid dog. And the paranormal stuff is, quite consciously, of the eccentric or B-movie type, rather than serious mysticism. All of this is so well established in their reality that there's even a guide book for it all, and the public regard ghosts as a minor irritation more than anything else.

It's a premise with some potential, particularly the joke of the public being totally unfazed by what's going on around them. The art's also perfectly decent, if a bit simple at times. But the characters aren't established all that well, and the first issue goes for a rather weak idea for its central premise. When you're told the town is haunted by the ghost of a 1950s teenager who challenges people to car races, it's pretty obvious what the plot is going to be, and indeed our heroes do release him from his torment by finally beating him.

Quite why McClaine gave this rather limp idea the first issue is a mystery to me, especially when one of his throwaway ideas - free fuel stations left over from a failed 1960s interdimensional experiment and with deranged addicted staff fanatically protecting their posts - is infinitely more interesting. There's some possibilities here, but the series really needs to run with the weirder ideas rather than utterly conventional stuff about 1950s car races that we've seen a thousand times before.