13 august 2000

CABLE finally ties up the Undying plot after six months, and unlike most six month story arcs, it seems to have merited the space.

Weinberg takes the sci-fi route here, giving us an explantion for the Undying which might not entirely qualify for the term "rational" but certainly isn't going for the supernatural. In good old school style, Cable then gets to defeat them by coming up with a nice little twist on their concept - since he can't stop them being reincarnated every time they die, he just traps them as cockroaches in every incarnation. All very old school when you get past the dense plotting, but there's nothing particularly wrong with that.

Phoenix and the Beast guest star for no discernible reason, and I would take a wild guess that editorial edict factors in here somewhere. They serve no function in the plot and while Weinberg throws them some dialogue, he does seem to be keeping them on the sidelines while he gets on with his story. Fortunately, he's pretty much successful in sidelining them and they're not dragging the book down, but I still can't work out why they're here in the first place.

There's also a bizarre glitch in the first epilogue, tying up the storyline of the two stray timeships from the timelines that were wiped out last issue. Apparently, despite having been enemies for years and, presumably, being traumatised by the obliteration of everyone they know and love, they have nonetheless decided to hug, make up, and go off to "forge our own timeline." They're just absurdly too happy given what's recently happened to them, and this scene rings totally false.

But Weinberg ties up his main story effectively, so I'm not going to complain too much about these things. Cable remains an above average superhero book - distinctive due to Weinberg's dense plotting, but not really raising itself into being truly unique. Still, there's nothing wrong with being above average.

I said I'd review MUTANT X again when it did something worth writing about, and so here we go.

Not that this is a particularly great issue, but it does see the title moving back to the interesting aspects of the book's parallel universe premise, rather than just doing yet another "Look - a Marvel Universe character, only slightly different!" story. This one's basically a three-way conversation piece for Alex, Hank and Bobby (yes, characterisation, in Mutant X), as Hank tries to remember how he lost his intelligence in the first place. (He got it back at the end of last issue in a monumentally bad plot contrivance, but I'll let that pass.)

This is basically an excuse for the characters to chat about what their alternate reality counterparts are like, leading up to the explanation that Hank lost his intelligence in this universe after their verson of Alex sabotaged an experiment due to jealousy over Bobby's friendship with Madelyne Pryor. Hideously soapy stuff, but at least it gives Hank and Bobby an opportunity to react in a more or less interesting way to our Alex, even though they know he's not the same person.

It's not a great issue, but at least it's breaking with the series' god awful format and making an attempt, however clumsy, to deal with the issues of identity that these alternate reality storylines raise. The end product is still decidedly average, but credit for effort if nothing else.

UNCANNY X-MEN...

There are two things that make me sad about this issue. Three if you count the fact that I paid for it. Firstly, whatever impression I may sometimes give, I get no pleasure from giving Chris Claremont bad reviews. His New Mutants stories were the ones that got me into comics in the first place. I'm an enormous fan of his 1980s work. Wouldn't be here if it wasn't for him. So it makes me sad to see him sullying that run with this frankly dreadful nonsense we're getting now. He could have been remembered as the greatest X-Men writer ever. Now, that statement is going to have to be qualified. "Not his second run, you understand. Not that one. The GOOD one."

Secondly, Marvel have got a great opportunity to push the X-Men to a mainstream market here with the movie out there, and this is the best they can muster? I've seen numerous reviews this week from people who actually did get their non-comic-reading friends to try and understand the issue, and reported that it genuinely is incomprehensible to them. I haven't tried the experiment myself - frankly, I wouldn't admit to any of my friends that I paid money for the thing - but I find it eminently believable.

It's tempting to launch at this point into a rant taking all the rumours about in-office politics at face value and begging Marvel to for god's sake get a clue and find a new writer PDQ, before the cancer spreads... but no, let's NOT take that stuff at face value. It looks like there's some pretty horrible internal politics going on here, with Claremont not on the same page at all as the writers of Gambit and Cable, and now going so far as to announce Avengers storylines that haven't even been discussed with Kurt Busiek... but let's leave all that stuff aside. It might be totally untrue, after all.

Besides, the issue is still crap even without all this stuff.

Now, I can see what Claremont is trying to achieve here, and it doesn't work in the slightest. What he's trying to do here is have the two X-Men teams fight one another so that he can play up the tensions between Gambit and Rogue's leadership styles. Rogue just smashes things up; Gambit makes a morally dubious deal with the other side. Fair enough.

Here's why it doesn't work.

Problem number one. At no point in this issue does Claremont share with us what Gambit's plan actually is. We're just told he's got one. If we don't know what it is, it can't form a contrast with Rogue's leadership style. As near as it's possible to make out from the story, the idea seems to be that Gambit has agreed to help the slavers capture more slaves, but since the slavers promptly betray Gambit after that point, it's not at all clear what the deal was meant to be. Given that the rest of Gambit's team were willing to play along with it, it's completely implausible that he was simply going to capture some slaves and then go home. The others would never have agreed to that. So what was the plan? We need to know in order for the story to work. And we're not told.

Problem number two. In order for us to care about the contrast between Rogue and Gambit's leadership styles, we need to care about the objective that they're trying to achieve. Even if it's just subsidiary to the main theme of the issue, we need to care. That means that the villains need to be at least moderately interesting. And they're not. It's Tullamore Voge, it's the Crimson Pirates, it's the Goth. Throw them all together and they don't have enough charisma between them to power a lightbulb. Voge is one of the worst ideas for a villain I have seen in years - an obese smurf with a stupid cod-English accent - and Claremont clearly expects us to take him seriously as a threat. He's impossible to take seriously. The rest of the villains are just impossible to care about in the slightest - utterly generic figures who are a total waste of time and ink.

I mean, Claremont thinks he can get Voge over as a villain by having him say "Wot-wot?" repeatedly, and describing him in the narration as "a roly-poly nightmare"? Is he on crack?

Problem number three. This one isn't actually Claremont's fault, but it's a big problem so I'm going to mention it anyway. The issue has three different pencillers with very different styles, whose work hasn't even been divided up by scenes, so that art styles shift in the middle of fight scenes. Worse yet, all the pencillers have been given different costume references, so that several characters - Archangel, Psylocke and Colossus being the most obvious - actually change costume from page to page. That's just unprofessional.

Problem number four. The utterly generic nature of the plot. Heroes fight heroes. Heroes get captured. Heroes team up and beat up baddies. The end. That's it. That's all there is to it. How painfully dull. When even Rogue is commenting that she's heard it all before and that there is nothing whatsoever new going on in the story, alarm bells should be ringing. But apparently not.

Problem number five. That painful, painful dialogue. They're even defending it on the letters page now, which makes me wonder just what the postbag is actually saying. Apparently all this tedious exposition is needed so that new readers can understand it. But it doesn't work, according to those people who've tried the experiment, and besides, every other decent writer seems to get by without such clodhopping stuff. How can this be? Bluntly, Claremont seems to lack the ability to work his exposition into the story in an unobtrusive way.

On top of this, there's still more of Claremont's "I am Insert Name Here" nonsense. Subtlety is at a premium in these stories. Claremont wants to tell us that Bloody Bess is (a) a villain, and (b) a pirate-themed villain (even though she never does anything remotely pirate-like). So her opening line of dialogue, which sums up her entire personality is - and I'm not making this up - "Avast, you lubbers! Party's over! Any of you of a mind to play hero, you'll find out right quick why I'm named Bloody Bess!" For Christ's sake.

Later on, when he wants to tell us how enormously powerful he is, the Goth announces "I am the Goth!" as if this explained everything. He then goes on to tell us that "I am darkness absolute, the avatar of iniquity! As I drain the brilliance of your lives, I shall lay waste to the landscape of your souls! Until you are but hollow vessels aching to be filled with mine own corruption!" This is just embarrassing.

The art, at least, is okay on a page by page basis, though it falls apart due to the jarring style and costume shifts. But there's nothing here to work with. This is a hollow shell of a story.

Claremont has not been able to write consistently good stories in over a decade. When he was on miniseries, people said it would all be okay when he was on an ongoing title again. When he was on Sovereign Seven, people said it would all be okay once he was on the X-Men again. When he was wrecking Fantastic Four, people said the same thing. (And incidentally, how many of those terrible early plots from his arc did he get around to resolving? None.) And now he's on the X-Men. What's the excuse now? A dwindling number of fans are still trying to argue that we have to think in the long run. It's the only fig leaf they've got left.

After all, we have to give him a CHANCE. He's only been on the books for four frigging months, all of them crap. The equivalent of eight months of his original run. How much of a chance do you want me to give him? When am I allowed to say there's no hope in the long run either? 2005? 2010? How about right now? When do we admit that Claremont is writing stories that any other writer would be crucified for?

The Neo story - an absolute dud - strike one. The slaver arc - an absolute dud - strike two. I'll be generous and not count his shoddy Lady Deathstrike/Stryfe annual as strike three - though it certainly casts enormous doubt on the claims of some of his fans that all will be well once he gets to deal with established characters rather than having to create his own (something for which he no longer seems to have any aptitude).

The bottom line is that, on the basis of his work not just over the last few months but over the last decade, I have no faith in Claremont's ability to deliver good stories on this title. I see no hope of quality so long as he's around. He was one of the greats of his time, and now he's totally lost it. Whatever the stories about politics, about in-fighting, whatever you believe about that stuff, the quality of the finished product speaks for itself.

Claremont just doesn't have what it takes any more. The stories aren't there, the ideas aren't there, the characters aren't there. It's an abject mess. The emperor is naked, and half the crowd are shouting it to him. Please make him stop. Please.

Ahem.

X-MEN: CHILDREN OF THE ATOM wraps up this week, surprisingly only a month after the last issue. Since we're no longer expecting Steve Rude's art, or even an imitation, Essad Ribic's work seems a lot more natural this time round. And it's rather good. The sequence with Magneto tearing his way into an aircraft hangar is wonderful - Marvel should be hiring this guy more often.

Showing a surprising interest in maintaining continuity at this stage in the proceedings, Joe Casey doesn't go for the predictable X-Men versus Magneto fight at the end of the issue, leaving Magneto and Jean tied up in subplots so that the heroes can beat up the Friends of Humanity in a nice bonding moment that, admittedly, was noticeably missing from the previous version of the X-Men's formation. It's kind of a shame that Casey's story does so much violence to continuity that it can't possibly stand as part of continuity, since it's a much richer and better story than the original ever was.

This doesn't mean it's an artistic triumph - the message really isn't much deeper than hate is bad and tolerance is good - but Casey has at least given the X-Men an origin story that goes to the root of what the team are about. Even with the changes in creative team, it should make a decent trade paperback, and a nice primer for new readers. (Yes, it's not in continuity, but it gets to the themes, which is the real point.)

It's a shame the book has suffered so much disruption from creative team changes and the like, because even though some of the reaction to it has been perhaps over the top, it's a much better piece of storytelling than we usually get on the X-Men.

God, Leonardo Manco's brilliant. He was great on Hellstorm. He was great on Blaze of Glory. And admittedly, he was also on the vastly overrated Deathlok where he seemed to have something of a leather fetish, but he was still pretty good on that as well. Even that Avengers Annual he did was surprisingly good, considering that Manco's gritty style wouldn't seem very superhero-friendly. Even so, given that Marvel's line isn't actually all that gritty at the moment, they've struggled to find the perfect vehicle for him.

This time around, it's a DOOM miniseries written by Chuck Dixon. For the benefit of those who didn't read Claremont's Fantastic Four (and in fairness, this was his one storyline that really did work), the storyline was that after Doom and Mr Fantastic defeated the Dreaming Celestial, the Celestial trapped Reed in Doom's armour on Earth, and banished Doom to the former Heroes Reborn Earth, now located on the other side of the Sun. We know that Doom eventually comes back and defeats Reed after he goes mad. This series starts with Doom being dumped naked in the duplicate Serengeti. So essentially it's a story about Doom pulling himself together from absolute zero in the course of four issues.

Not a bad premise, and while the whole Counter-Earth thing is decidedly silly, Dixon doesn't play on it too hard. It's a parallel Earth, and that's pretty much all you need to know. Fortunately, this means we get to avoid the usual superhero visuals (which Manco can certainly do, but aren't his forte), and have him doing his stone-age-man-fighting-lions routine, which is much more exciting. Admittedly, he goes into bad character design mode near the end when a bunch of slavers show up (incidentally, to far more effect in three pages than Claremont manages in five issues), but for the most part it's material that plays well to Manco's strengths.

Oh yes, the writing. Well, it's Chuck Dixon, which means he shuts up and lets the art tell the story, but what dialogue there is does tend to be a touch overblown. Still, even though I feel I ought not to like the scene with Doom cutting up the dead lion ("Meat to feed Doom. Sinew for Doom's weapons." etc), somehow the rhythm of the dialogue carries it off. Maybe I'm just in a receptive mood this week to writers who shut the hell up. Perhaps that's it. But it's a good enough read, even if it's blindingly obvious where we're heading, since we know Doom gets back to Earth in the end.

Something of an oddity, in that it doesn't seem obviously aimed at the same audience as its parent book at all, but a surprisingly readable affair.