11 june 2000

I am still firmly of the view that almost anything has to be more interesting than cranking out another Mutant X review, so this month's substitute book is BREAKFAST AFTER NOON, a slice of life drama set in the declining English ceramic industry.

This is the latest work from Andi Watson, who was also responsible for the excellent Geisha - and the not-so-excellent recent sequel one-shot, but I'll let that pass. It's a six issue miniseries, which for no enirely obvious reason has been packaged in the style that Penguin Books used to use about forty years ago. There may be some significance to that, but if so, it entirely eludes me.

Anyhow, our plot here is that our hero and his fiancee both work at this ceramics factory and they get laid off with their wedding imminent. So while she's being very practical about it, he sets out to get their jobs back. End of part one.

Now, on the surface this could well be heading towards the stock plot that's the curse of the British film industry, namely "working class dreamer overcomes institutional obstacles and cynicism of his peers to achieve heartwarming vindication." I know you use that plot a lot in the USA as well, but believe me, the British film industry's drowning in it. But that plot's normally played for light comedy, and Watson plays this issue entirely straight. So maybe he really is heading towards six issues of exploring what it's like to be unemployed - in which case, congratulations for doing unusual subject matter, but god only knows how many copies it'll sell.

I'll stick with this for a couple of months mainly on the basis that Geisha was a really good series, but in honesty I'd have to concede that the first issue doesn't really engage me with the characters beyond the pretty stock central relationship (the dreamer and the practical one). It's slightly odd to see such a consciously realistic story being drawn in Watson's distinctively stylised and skewed art style, although it's surprisingly effective, probably demonstrating again the theory that it's easier to empathise with more sketchy characters.

It's one of those books I'm kind of obliged to applaud because we need more of them, and really, it does look like a pretty sound story. But, maybe because it's going for such an understated style, it doesn't quite grab me so far.

On to UNCANNY X-MEN #383, and it's certainly an improvement. If nothing else, unlike the last few issues, it passes the test of basic coherence.

The Neo (who still don't work, incidentally) aren't quite gone altogether, but they're at least significantly downplayed, and instead we get a villain who at least has some coherent motivations. He's also got some Neo connections, but since they're not the focus of the story, it doesn't impede him yet.

The story here is that the X-Men are called in to help by the underfunded (ex-)KGB, calling in a favour owed by the New Orleans Thieves Guild. Apparently somebody's running a slave trade under the cover of a nightclub, and the KGB agent sent to investigate it has been captured. The X-Men go in to find her, but get captured themselves; Storm comes back with reinforcements, the heroes win, hooray. While it's some way off being in any way original, it's a perfectly okay action story, and yes, it does make a nice change to have the X-Men chalk up a clear victory for once.

Also one for the plus column: post-Soviet Russia is an interesting setting for stories, and the superhero genre has done a surprisingly small amount with it. Claremont's apparently planning to make more use of Russia later on, and that's something I'd be interested in. No doubt is depiction of Russia is about as far off as his UK, but the basic elements of a delapidated government and vaguely lawless society are something to work with, just as long as we steer away from making it nothing more than a toned down Madripoor.

Some decent art in this issue, as well, as Adam Kubert sets about the villains' henchmen with obvious glee, producing some amusingly absurd imagery. Tullaman Voge, who looks to have escaped from a Dr Seuss book, is probably a step too far, but for the most part Kubert hits the visuals excellently.

Now the downside...

There's a distinct "seen-it-before" quality to this plot. Heroes get captured by baddies, remaining free hero comes back with back-up, baddies beaten up, baddies captured, world is safe again. And there's not really much more to it than that - while slaver Ransome Sole is a perfectly workable villain, since he's at least got a sane scheme and comprehensible motivations, he's not a particularly distinctive character. Claremont has done this whole "slave trade concealed behind the nightlife of the decadent rich" routine before with the Shadow King/Karma stuff in New Mutants, and nothing about these characters seems particularly different.

There's more henchmen being chucked out there with nothing but a snappy codename to make us care about them. Sketch, of course, is a reluctant henchmen and a legitimate character, so she's got a good reason to be there. Sole could probably use somebody loyal to discuss the plot with, which would justify Big Casino. But on top of that there's also Revenant, Manacle, Bludgeon and Cudgel running around with nary a shred of personality between them. Revenant, worse yet, has yet another variation of the "torment you with your nightmares" superpower, which is not only an awful cliche allowing character development on the cheap, it's also the same awful cliche that the Lost Souls used last issue. All these characters are just cluttering up the plot, and some simple generic henchmen would have worked better.

There's more pointlessly confusing stuff about Jean's powers, particularly considering that the letters page goes out of its way to tell us that she DOESN'T have the Phoenix force back again. If that's not the plan, you have to wonder on what planet somebody thought that giving her its energy effect would be anything other than misleading and distracting.

The bottom line is... yes, this is an improvement. It's an improvement by virtue of not being actively bad. But neither is it particularly good; it's a stock plot, with some nice art, but characters I don't particularly care about. Its rating is hovering right on the cusp between B- and C+, but I'm going to have to go with instinct on this...

X-MEN: CHILDREN OF THE ATOM is still going, and is now, after many trials and tribulations, onto its fourth issue. Not that you'd know it from the front cover, as Marvel have impressively forgotten to include the issue number anywhere on the cover. Hadn't noticed that before.

Nitpicks aside, Steve Rude is gone and in his place we have Paul Smith. Briefly. And then we have Michael Ryan. Briefly. But he's busy on Cable, so presumably he's not drawing the rest of the series. Say, why didn't they just wait until the damn thing was drawn before soliciting it?

Smith draws his pages pretty much in the style that Steve Rude had adopted in the earlier issues, and gets the tone very well. Michael Ryan doesn't hit it quite as well, but then given that he's Marvel's favourite rush job penciller I'd imagine that it's not like he had an enormous amount of time. He's not all THAT far off, and Paul Mounts' colouring gives the book an adequate degree of continuity.

The story, for those of you who can still remember it, has now reached the "gathering of the team" issue. Completely - and wisely - ignoring the original episodic structure, having got Scott last issue, Xavier just wanders around and picks up Jean, Bobby and Warren. Meanwhile, Meltzger continues to play the nasty bigot, assisted by the fact that Smith doesn't draw him to look quite like such a cartoon Nazi.

It's pretty much what we've come to expect from this book - a perfectly sound revisiting of old material, structuring it into a better plot but not doing anything dazzlingly new with it. It's alright. I know the book has its devoted fans who see it as some kind of artistic highpoint of the line, but I don't really see it. It's a quality superhero book, and it'd certainly be a shame to see the final issues limp out months late with jarringly dissimilar art, but I have a feeling that's what we might be going to get.

X-MEN: THE HIDDEN YEARS seemed last month to be heading towards a gratuitous Phoenix retcon. It backs off this month, giving us six pages of Jean as Dark Phoenix beating everybody up, and then hitting the "It was all a dream" button. The plot then proceeds to deal with the decidedly less thrilling Z'nox.

I really don't see what the point of that was. Either Byrne's got plans to do something with Phoenix later in the run - which would be an unequivocally bad thing, since her continuity is screwed up beyond repair as it is - or Byrne's just going for the cheap shocks.

Anyhow, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four board an entire alien world which seems to have a population of one, and banish them from reality. I suppose it gives the Z'nox storyline a better ending and explains why we haven't seen them since, although "because they're shit" was an explanation that always worked well enough for me.

Once it gets past the opening burst of pointlessness, this is inoffensive but bland.

Let's play "Follow the Marvel logic!"

There's this film coming out. You might just have seen the adverts in this month's line, they seem to fill half the book. You want a tie-in book out there. Of course you do. Potential impulse buyers. Hook 'em while they're there. So you do film tie-ins. Something for people to buy on impulse, right?

So you make X-MEN THE MOVIE PREQUEL: MAGNETO. (Catchy title.)

How do you package it? Cheap, accessible, marketable? Nah, let's do it in the Prestige Format. In fact, let's give it a glossy cover to boot. Eight dollars forty Canadian! I know what sort of impulse that gives me, and it doesn't involve buying.

Who in the name of god does Marvel think is going to buy this thing? They're packaging it as if it was a collector's item when surely the natural audience for this is members of the public! It's not as though the movie Magneto has such a drastically different origin from the comics version. If you're an X-Men fan, or even somebody with a passing knowledge of the comics, you've seen this story before. So for god's sake, pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap.

Eight dollars forty. For fuck's sake.

At least the creators get it. Joe Pruett is best known to us for a run on Cable with Rob Liefeld that could charitably be described as undistinguished, but there were extenuating circumstances with that one. Here, Pruett sets about establishing the premise for the benefit of an audience totally unfamiliar with the entire idea, and gets it down pretty well. The point here is to establish (a) what mutants are; (b) the relationship between Xavier and Magneto and their respective philosophies; (c) Magneto's motivation as a concentration camp survivor; and (d) that Magneto's a villain, but a vaguely sympathetic one. So if you know all this stuff already, you might find this a bit of a chore; if you don't, Pruett hits it all neatly. Having Nazi war criminals hiding in Israel (and still instantly recognisable decades later!) is a bit of a stretch to put it mildly, but it gets the job done.

Mark Texeira confines himself to very conventional storytelling techniques - no weird panel layouts or flashy effects that might confuse newcomers. It's appropriate in any event, since we're dealing here with decidedly powered-down versions of the characters. This is aimed, rightly, at the sort of reader who hasn't seen it all before when Magneto lifts up a handgun with his powers. Texeira plays it all in a pretty much realist mode (as these things go), and while it's slightly jarring for us to see Magneto rendered as a caricature of Ian McKellen, it should work well with the cinema audience.

The creators get it. This is a book for kids in the cinema. And for that market, it's pretty well handled. This is certainly not a book for comics fans who don't need to be told for the two hundredth time that Magneto's a driven man who used to be in a concentration camp and bears a grudge. But that's no criticism, because this book shouldn't be aimed at us.

So whatever cretin decided to put it in this horrible, horrible overpriced format needs his head examined.

MARVEL BOY is, unless I'm forgetting something, the first work Grant Morrison's done for Marvel since Skrull Kill Krew. Of course, it's not like he's been totally unaffiliated with Marvel in the past - who could forget his classic work on Zoids and Action Force - but he's not somebody we see very often in the Marvel Universe.

Fortunately, this is nowhere near as over the top as Morrison's vastly successful and vastly overrated JLA relaunch. That book was packed to the brim with great ideas for stories, which distracted attention from the fact that none of them had really been developed into great actual stories. This still has some of the better aspects of JLA - the great and ludicrous throwaway ideas like the belief-powered engines ("Number one epiphany nacelle just lost faith and shut down!") - but there's more of a focus here on producing a coherent plot.

The story here is that our lead character, Noh-Varr, is the sole survivor (possibly, although I'm betting he isn't really) of a Kree ship from a parallel universe that's crashed on Earth while trying to make its way home. As Noh-Varr's first experience of Earth is being captured and tortured in the name of scientific knowledge, he doesn't form a very positive view of the place.

Morrison has described this book in interviews as "the ultimate adolescent power fantasy." Well, not on the strength of this issue it's not, although Noh-Varr's stated aim at the end of the issue to go out and "fix the planet" might be heading that way. Instead, it's a perfectly straight superhero book, providing a great vehicle for some excellent action sequences by artist JG Jones. It looks good, it reads well, it's a sound superhero book.

But is this really what Marvel Knights was meant to be about? With this and the eponymous Marvel Knights, they've just launched two books which are certainly good sound examples of their genre, but pretty much lacking in the more experimental virtues the line gave to Daredevil and Inhumans. Maybe Sentry will turn things around, but I'm starting to wonder whether the Marvel Knights line is losing its way. Isn't it meant to be a bit more idiosyncratic than this? There's no point in a line whose only distinguishing feature is quality; all books should have that.

Still, it's a sound enough book, and JG Jones gets some really good material out of it. Worth a look, but is it going anywhere?