12 august 2001

This looks to be the final part of CABLE's Dark Sisterhood storyline, although I see that the new creative team don't actually start until issue #97. So god only knows what next month is going to be.

Anyhow, this issue deals with tying up the Dark Sisterhood's conspiracy and generally defeating them. The thing about genre stories is that there's never any actual tension about whether this is going to happen, particularly not in shared universe comics. It might be just about conceivable that a villain could succeed in bumping off a minor member of the Avengers, but he certainly isn't going to conquer the world, because Spider-Man needs the planet intact for his book next week.

The interest can never come from whether the villains are going to be defeated; it has to come from how they're going to be defeated. Unfortunately, this issue just gets it all out of the way in a fairly standard manner, and it's all a bit unsatisfying. Yes, the villains are defeated, but we already knew that was going to happen. The conspiracy is averted when George Bridge pops up to explain the plot to Henry Gyrich, which isn't desperately exciting. Cable and Rachel then do the time-honoured routine of storming the enemy base and fighting the chief baddie, which again isn't anything we haven't seen before.

There are some misfiring attempts to liven things up - a curious attempt to tell us that the Dark Mother is an ancestor of Jean Grey, which is promptly reversed two pages later and never seems to make much sense. Yes, okay, it would establish a tenuous family relationship between Cable, Rachel and the Dark Mother, but that's not a theme of this story, so what's the relevance? There's a somewhat cute piece of plot mechanics to get rid of the Dark Mother by having her go into a panic when her precognitive powers reveal that she's in a no-win situation, but it's only a minor point in a formulaic effort.

There's also some very shaky dialogue in here - characters yelling "I am justice!" and "For you, I am Finality!" is a bit embarrassing. Michael Ryan's artwork is still good, as he seems to be moving in a more stylized direction, and he does some good work with the visuals on Rachel. Still, this is all a bit disappointing. It might work better in the trade paperback, but as an issue in its own right it feels like Weinberg has already done all the important stuff in this story and is left with an issue of plot resolution to get out of the way. Shame.

CYCLOPS.

Dear god, I hoped we'd seen the last of solo miniseries. They were all over the place in the 1990s. Terrible crap, most of them. Not something I have any desire to see again.

Well, this is the first of a series of minis which being billed as the "Icons" line, in an attempt to convince us that this isn't just more of the same. We shall see.

Cyclops isn't the most obvious choice for a solo book because, bluntly, nobody much likes him. He's a very quiet, restrained character who generally comes across as dull compared to those around him. His defining character trait is being the boring one in the X-Men. For the most of the nineties, that was joined by a simperingly annoying romance with Jean Grey, which was at no point interesting. If he wasn't a superhero, he'd be a bank manager. Or maybe work in personnel.

The logic of giving him a solo title is presumably to try and bring out some interesting aspects of his character by taking him out of an environment where he tends to be overshadowed by his more colourful teammates. The risk is that it might just demonstrate that he's exactly as boring as many of us always thought.

Brian Vaughan's story plays up to these expectations by having Cyclops in particularly boring mode at the beginning, only to be packed off on a forced holiday by Xavier (ah, that old device). On his way back to Alaska, Cyclops is attacked by two henchmen working for previously unknown villain Ulysses, who wants revenge on Cyclops for reasons that will presumably be explained later in the series. This allows Cyclops to show off his skills a bit, while setting up the actual story for the remaining three issues.

It's an effective enough fight scene, which lets Cyclops display a bit of attitude and go some way towards shaking off his image as a tedious boy scout without actually requring him to do anything out of character. The choice of villains is a bit suspect - it feels like a waste of the Juggernaut, who seems to do nothing these days besides get beaten up in order to establish how impressive other characters are.

Mark Texeira's wildly exaggerated artwork is as entertaining as ever, although he doesn't seem an ideal casting choice for this book - Cyclops usually comes across best when he's allowed to seem calm and professional under pressure, whereas here he's as exaggerated and chaotic as everything else around him. (And this is nit-picking, I know, but I just don't believe Cyclops would be riding a motorbike in a blizzard without wearing a helmet.) The Quitely costume design doesn't feel right in Texeira's style, either.

This is an okay start, but we're only just getting to the actual story. A lot will turn on whether Vaughan has anything interesting to say about the character. The big question raised so far is why on earth anyone would have a personal grudge against Cyclops - unfortunately, it also raises the question of who would bother.

I'll quit the running joke while I'm ahead, I guess.

X-TREME X-MEN #4 is rated Marvel PG, oddly the only book out this week to carry the parental guidance caution. Punisher has a violent content warning, and everything else is apparently all ages. You can now begin wondering what the hell was thought to require a PG warning on this. About the most offensive thing in it is the shot of Sage's arse on the cover. All very odd; are Marvel ever going to get around to announcing exactly how they're defining these new standards?

Anyhow, what we have here is a whopping great retcon. Claremont has spotted a serious oversight in the X-Men canon. It is a clear rule that all black characters must be established as a potential ancestor of Bishop. There, after all, only a handful of these strange dark people. Clearly they must all be related.

Yet, so far, nobody had thought of trying this with Gateway. Many reasons suggest themselves for this. Fairly high up the list is the fact that Gateway IS A FUCKING ABORIGINE.

This is no barrier to Claremont, who evidently wants to bring his Dreamtime themes from the late-1980s Australia era back into the series. Nothing wrong with that - the Aborigine myths are quite interesting and there's a lot of material in them. But when a character who's been around for a decade suddenly announces out of nowhere that he's an aborigine just so that he can be shunted in as a descendent of Gateway... well, it does seem a bit forced, to say the least.

Claremont's basic idea is to write about an urban man from an aborigine family rediscovering his family's cultural traditions - and that's a perfectly good idea. But not for Bishop, who's been around way too long to suddenly dump all this stuff into his history now without it seeming utterly absurd. It's a shame Claremont wasn't planning a bit further ahead, actually, since this would have been a great plot for the rather anodyne Thunderbird if only he wasn't completely the wrong race. (Mind you, so was Bishop until last week, and he still looks nothing like any aborigine I've ever seen. Still, he's black, and that'll have to do.)

There's an extensive dreamtime sequence here which is obviously meant to be introducing all manner of central plot elements for the future, but suffers from some troublesome art. There's a big idea about Bishop looking out on a panorama of alternate worlds all dominated by the same space needle, and the art really doesn't manage to convey that at all. The sequence needs some more space to let the art show the scene properly, since it ought to be a great visual image, but what we get is nothing of the sort. Murky colouring (aside from some good fire effects) doesn't help matters - I still think this art style can work, but they've got to sort out some of these kinks.

Over on the other side, Gambit is back and doing much what he was doing in his early Claremont appearances - namely, robbing people and doing his charm routine. Ah, the long-forgotten "charm" superpower, which everyone else quietly abandoned a decade ago but which we're evidently going to pretend was there all along. Whatever. It does make for a pretty good scene with Gambit and Vargas, with some nice reactions from Vargas' mute sidekicks.

This issue isn't as glaringly drowning in prose as some of the previous ones, though it still has some horribly clunky moments. The bigger problem here is that everyone has more or less the same speech pattern, give or take a bad accent. There's an artificial quality to Claremont's dialogue that makes everyone sound the same, and still feels aggravating.

There are a few interesting ideas here, but the execution still leaves me cold. I just can't buy into Bishop suddenly declaring himself to be an aborigine after ten years of publication including two minis and a year-long solo series in which it never occurred to him to mention it. It's silly.

Ah, Garth Ennis. And his other type of war story.

ADVENTURES IN THE RIFLE BRIGADE shouldn't work. It has six lead characters. One of them never talks. Three of the others talk exclusively in catchphrases. Only two are actually able to speak. And they still talk crap.

It's ridiculous, pointless, and utterly puerile. It involves a search for Hitler's other testicle. It is shamelessly and relentlessly obvious. It even does the gag where they blow up the wrong building by mistake.

It really shouldn't work. But it does.

Ennis obviously loves war stories - he's doing a string of them for Vertigo later this year - but Rifle Brigade is a vehicle to take the piss out of them and string them together with a whole load of absurd jokes. This issue does the "gathering of the forces" routine that Ennis fast-forwarded past in the first series, which would normally be the space to flesh out their characters a bit. Of course, most of them don't actually have characters, so it's really just an excuse to do some more variations on the joke. But good ones.

Carlos Ezquerra's art hits the perfect balance between superficial normality and demented idiocy. He manages to let the joke characters react to what's going on around them without ever letting them lose their glazed-over insanity, fleshing out the gags instead of losing sight of them.

This sort of comedy is difficult to pull off - especially in a four-issue miniseries which conventionally calls for, well, characters - and Ennis and Ezquerra have hit the tone perfectly. It's very funny. What more are you looking for?