13 february 2000

If you're wondering, X-Men Unlimited didn't ship to Scotland. Maybe next week, by which time it will be three weeks late.

This is the interim issue of CABLE, bridging the one month gap between the end of the Twelve storyline and the arrival of the new creative team. Surprisingly, there are actually new plot threads being introduced here, so presumably Joe Pruett is doing a set-up job for his successor.

The story seems to be trying to provide some kind of closure to Cable's mission to defeat Apocalypse, which we're apparently now meant to take it is over. Now, I could have sworn we saw Apocalypse escape at the end of the Twelve story, which you'd have thought meant the whole mission thing was still going, but apparently not. He's been beaten in a minor fight that led to nothing, therefore the future is free. Well, that was a marvellous pay-off to years of plot, wasn't it?

The Cable creative teams aren't really to be blamed for this fizzling out of the book's raison d'etre, but it still leaves the book looking a bit pointless. The new writer is going to have to impose some direction on this thing, and quickly. What we get in this issue as an indication of things to come is Cable dumping Stacey (well, fair enough, she was never that interesting a character in the first place); Blaquesmith talking about a possible cure for the technovirus (okay, that's potentially interesting); and a subplot which seems to involve people from two different future timelines coming back to fight about which version of the future they're going to ensure happens. Not sure I follow the logic - I mean, if they both exist now, doesn't that undermine the idea that there's anything to fight about - but I suppose that could work as an extension of Cable's character.

Oh, and then the book ends with a tie-in to the High Evolutionary erasing everybody's powers in the X-Men books. I wish they hadn't bothered. It's got nothing to do with the rest of the story, and presumably it's not going to be picked up in the next issue, so why use it as a cliffhanger?

Fill-in art this month comes from the ever-reliable Michael Ryan on the subplot, and somebody called Juan Santacruz on the main plot. Santacruz seems to be influenced heavily by Bernard Chang's issues, which is fair enough. He does a decent Stacey, at least.

It's nothing great, but it does at least set up some possibilities that could be used to get this book back on track.

X-MEN: THE HELLFIRE CLUB concludes with a reasonably successful character study on Sebastian Shaw, but doesn't manage to tie the various flashbacks together into a decent story arc.

The flashback this month has Sebastian Shaw as a Pennsylvania steel worker, making his way up to the Hellfire Club (including a very good scene of Shaw talking to his recently dead father), and then meeting up with Lourdes Chantel, who was his partner in the Classic X-Men story that established how he ended up in charge. Unfortunately, the story kind of fast forwards past that bit. Understandably, it doesn't want to retread previous stories, but Shaw's becoming Black King really ought to be the climax of this story, and it gets glossed over. Still, on the whole it works fairly well.

The problem lies with the series as a whole, as the various issues don't hang together into much of a story arc, and the framing sequence doesn't really come off. So far as the story arc is concerned, this has basically been a series about the doings of the Shaw family down the generations. But Sebastian Shaw works his way up from nothing in this story, not really capitalising at all on his history. So what was the point? Admittedly, his family background might be getting him into the Club in the first place, but it doesn't come across as a theme.

For the framing sequence, it does make a degree of sense to have Shaw try and bribe Irene Merryweather into joining the Hellfire Club rather than exposing it. But what doesn't make any sense is Irene's decision to run off and try and publish her story. What story? She hasn't got any evidence. No newspaper in its right mind would publish this story, even if Shaw didn't lift a finger to stop them. So where's the threat?

All of which is unfortunate, as this has been a nice experiment in doing something rather different in the X-books' miniseries. But viewed as a whole, the series doesn't really hang together, and falls short of its potential.

THE PUNISHER is back, for his seventh solo series. After the dreadful mess that Marvel Knights made of him last year, this time they're trying the more traditional approach, with Preacher's Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon going back to what made the character a success in the first place.

The good news is that, as you'd expect from Ennis and Dillon, it's full of wonderfully brutal, brilliantly timed and very funny scenes of all sorts of thoroughly unsympathetic characters being nastily killed. It doesn't allow itself to get bogged down in the continuity issues of getting the Punisher back to basics, which are admirably dealt with in two pages of captions while the story gets on with business. It's totally ridiculous, but in a good way.

The bad news... is that it's possibly a bit too back to basics. Really, what we've got here is the generic Punisher story in which he goes out and kills some criminals in a satisfying way. It's done extremely well, but it's still basically the same old story, and there's only so much mileage in the Punisher shooting people for 22 pages.

Of course, given where the character has just been, he needs to be re-established for what he is. Hopefully that's what's going on here; the status quo being set up in preparation for something a bit more imaginative next issue. Because let's face it, the Punisher written straight is a pretty limited character. He has basically three stories: the Punisher kills villains in a cool way, the Punisher encounters difficulty in killing a villain but ultimately prevails, and the Punisher expresses his tender side when an innocent is caught in the crossfire. It gets a bit repetitive after a while.

Now, if anyone can take this character and find new variations to make him interesting past issue #3 (but without the drastic measures that were tried last year), it's Garth Ennis. And hopefully that's what he's going to do, but to be honest there's no sign of it here. This is an extremely good example of one of the stock Punisher stories, but it's not going to carry a series. Still, looking at it as an individual issue, it is very, very good at what it does. So if you feel like reading a stock Punisher story, you'll love it.