12 december 1999

In case anyone's wondering - yes, I did flick through the Year In Review one-shot. It's a load of synopses of stories I've already got, so I didn't buy it. But it looks like it does the job perfectly well, so if you think you'd get some use out of it then go ahead and buy a copy.

CABLE #76 continues the Twelve crossover, although in the light of this and the last issue it seems pretty clear that the creative team are being instructed in no uncertain terms to stall. The main storyline remains firmly in the X-Men titles. That seems dreadfully unfair - after all, the big fight with Apocalypse is what Cable's supposed to be all about. Surely the Apocalypse thing should be a Cable plot. He's hardly ever even met the X-Men. But fate has decreed that Apocalypse is a major plot, and the X-Men are the flagship titles, so that's just the way it's going to be.

Joe Pruett (who I'm going to assume is actually writing this issue, notwithstanding that relying on the credits is often a risky business) makes a fairly good stab of salvaging something from the situation, giving us a story of Cable and Cyclops chatting on the astral plane for twenty odd pages. Cable gets some time to lament his total failure to achieve the expected pay-off and defeat Apocalypse, and then he and Cyclops settle down to chat about their relationship for a while.

Although the script contains some good ideas, this strange little interlude does sit very oddly in the ongoing Twelve storyline, and it's really best viewed as a tie-in rather than part of the actual story. Even on that level, there's no getting around the fact that it's being held back by its inability to advance the plot in any way. There's a variety of tricks being deployed to break the monotony of talking heads, and fairly successfully at that, but this is still the second issue in a row which is just circular and leaves us back where we started.

None of which is the creators' fault, as there's only so much you can do with a remit to stall. Still, you can't help wishing something was actually happening.

There's nothing like spoiling the plot on the cover, is there? GENERATION X #60 seems determined to make the identity of the villain a surprise, so naturally the cover has a picture of Mondo with the caption "Mondo's Back!" Thanks, guys. Good to have you looking out for us, I might have suffered a dangerous case of dramatic tension if it wasn't for you.

Anyhow, even though his run will be coming to an end fairly soon, Faerber still seems to be piling on the subplots. There's some good material developing the question of quite whose mind is inside Penance at the moment (a clever way of turning one of Larry Hama's silliest ideas into a useful plot device). There's something about Emma finding out about the new Hellions, which sets up perfectly good plot material.

There's also a rather questionable subplot scene with Monet at her new boarding school, involving one of her new classmates apparently being abducted by a vampire after playing with a ouija board. This shows all the signs of being downright silly.

Back at the main plot, Terry Dodson is called upon to draw a fight scene with Mondo. Mondo is one of those characters who seems to be designed specifically for the style of his original artist, and since Dodson's art is radically different from Chris Bachalo's, this presents a few problems. Rather than try and mimic Bachalo's style, Dodson adopts a rather different approach and has Mondo simply appearing as a humanoid lump of scenery. At moments, it's quite effective. At other moments, it looks like a pile of bricks. Still, the wood version is good.

I can't help thinking there's too much going on here for it all to be satisfactorily resolved before Faerber leaves and the Counter-X storyline begins. But still, I'd rather have Faerber ploughing on like this than simply sitting back and marking time.

The HELLFIRE CLUB miniseries continues into its second historical era with the American War of Independence. This time it's the story of a Hellfire Club protege who's supposed to be seducing a prominent US general in order to get secrets away from him, but instead falls in love with him for real, and in short order falls out of favour with the Club.

The bit which interests me most about this is why the Hellfire Club would want to side with the British in the War of Independence. Unfortunately, the story doesn't really get into much detail about that. I suppose the idea is that the Club are generally against all this republican stuff and much keener on good old monarchy, but it doesn't come across very clearly. If anything, I'd have thought it would be more interesting to see the Club transferring its loyalties to the revolution in order to ingrain itself into the new powers that be. Surely that's the story to be telling about the Club at this point in history?

Well, it's not the story that Raab wants to tell, and while this is a perfectly decent story on its own merits, I can't help feeling it's a missed opportunity. The story also seems a little too keen to make use of ancestors of existing characters. The presence of Archangel's ancestor as a general is something that works perfectly, but I've never been convinced by one of Steve Rogers' ancestors as a revolutionary Captain America. Yes, I know it's a Kirby idea, but it's a bad, contrived Kirby idea. And when you've got all these ancestors wandering around to start with, throwing in butlers called Jarvis and ancestors of Bill Clinton seems excessive.

It's a solid story, well told by Charlie Adlard's art, but I can't help feeling there was more that could have been done with this period.

STRANGE KISS is the first in Warren Ellis's miniseries for tiny little Avatar Press. If you've never heard of Avatar before, there's a delightful catalogue of their other offerings at the back. Any fans of Razor/Ravening #1 will be thrilled to learn that the new collector set features extra pages with "insanely hot lesbian action." Do I have to give these people my money?

Oh well, if I must. This is obviously a pretty class project by Avatar's standards, although that's not saying much. It's a horror book, and it seems mainly to be an excuse for Warren to indulge in some of the stuff that DC and (especially) Marvel wouldn't publish in a million years.

To be more specific, this is body horror. You couldn't really describe it as plot heavy; the first issue is basically a selection of thoroughly nasty things happening to characters, mainly involving lizards and rotting genitalia. We are invited to feel disturbed.

Do I feel disturbed? Hmm. Well not entirely, no. On the one hand, I've always been pretty squeamish about this sort of thing, and yes, some of this stuff is pretty squirm-inducing. On the other hand, what we've got in this first issue is a load of pretty much unexplained surreal nastiness, and quite honestly, I find it rather hard to empathise with somebody giving rectal birth to a lizard. Presumably there's some kind of point to this coming further down the line, but at the moment this is a set of slightly disturbing scenes, rather than a disturbing story, as such.

Art comes from somebody called Mike Wolfer, who I've never heard of. I see from that glorious catalogue that he normally works on a book called Widow X, which seems to mainly feature some masturbating spider-women. (Avatar have thoughtfully blacked out bits of the promotional art in the hope of persuading us that this is in some way interesting to look at.) Despite this dodgy pedigree, though, his art's pretty good. The opening sequence with the car chase and the woman killing herself are particularly good. Some of his body language is a bit stiff, but overall it's decent stuff.

This is going to have to develop its plot in the next issue to convince me that it's actually going to try and tell a disturbing story, because when you get down to it, this issue is basically a set of gross-out scenes. Still, I assume Warren must have somewhere he's going with this, so I'll stick around to see where.