14 january 2001

In my year in review, I cheerily predicted that in the midst of all the chaos going on around them, Weinberg and Ryan would be carrying on their work in CABLE, thanks to the clamour from their fanbase.

Well, so much for my predictive skills. Although with that in mind, I take this opportunity to predict that the inauguration of President Bush will go smoothly, and that at no point in the next few months will he contract syphilis. Further, the success of the Backstreet Boys will continue in 2001.

This week's announcement that Weinberg was being relieved of his responsibilities in favour of Howard Chaykin (of all people) naturally came as a surprise. It was only a few weeks ago that Cable was generally assumed to have been saved from cancellation thanks to the vocal support of its readers.

Marvel's logic here is difficult to see. Surely they cannot be stupid enough to have misread the book's support as indicative of a fanbase who wanted to see Cable stories, whoever they were by? These days there is pretty much no such thing as a Cable fan in that sense. The character's original fans, who liked the guns and ammo approach of Liefeld, drifted away under later, more mellow regimes. The book's current readers tend to be vaguely disdainful of the underlying character and frequently compliment the creators for doing so well with such a hopeless character. There tends to be a veiled implication that they think they are slumming it by reading Cable at all, but are willing to put up with it out of admiration for the current creators.

Cable sells - and for some years has sold - to an audience comprised of X-books completists and however much passing trade the current creators have been able to drum up through the quality of their material. The days when the character actually had a significant number of fans of his own have long gone.

In the meantime, this issue Robert Weinberg and guest penciller Thomas Derenick plough on with the Dark Sisterhood storyline, now robbed of much of its meaning by the knowledge that it's part of a wider story arc which is going to grind to a halt one third of the way through. It's much what people have come to expect from the Weinberg run - the usual dense but carefully constructed plotting, solid characterisation and steady movement towards explaining what the hell is going on.

It's steady, it's reliable, and if you were looking for some reasoning behind Marvel's attitude, you might conclude that it's perhaps a bit safe. God knows a Chaykin run on Cable is unlikely to be safe, and probably sits more comfortably with Marvel's newfound desire to be seen as artistic pioneers. But not everything has to push back the boundaries, and I'm starting to wonder if Marvel are in danger of throwing too many of these relaunches at the market at once. If nothing else, it's a shame for Weinberg, who may not have the same street cred as Chaykin or Morrison among comics' self-appointed cognoscenti, but has been producing solid work on the book over the last year.

Also in the "we don't care now that we know all the plans have been changed" file is GAMBIT AND BISHOP. When this series was commissioned, the plan was for both solo titles to resume afterwards. Now, the plan appears to be to bang out the miniseries since it's been solicited, and then go home for a nice bath.

As the series was presumably intended to advance the plots of Gambit and Bishop's solo titles (and if it wasn't, god knows what the point was), this leaves the impression that the series now has no particular purposes to serve. Still, the prologue issue had started off fairly promising. There was some reasonably interesting paranoia material, and some genuine mystery as to what was going on.

This issue maintains that for about half the issue and then throws it all away by telling us that Stryfe is responsible. Just what we need, another Stryfe story. The character's been around for a decade and I can still count all the classic Stryfe stories on the fingers of one hand. Hell, there are thalidomide victims who can count all the classic Stryfe stories on the fingers of one hand. Forgive my cynicism if I do not expect this series to change matters. If you're going to reveal the surprise explanation this early in the series, it really needs to be something better than "Stryfe is back" in order to hold my attention.

Decent art from Georges Jeanty, though, and I suppose in fairness this has to rate as one of the better Stryfe stories by virtue of giving him a plan that makes some kind of sense coming from a telepath. It's not bad, but the mere mention of Stryfe removes any degree of anticipation I had. They'll have to work hard to win me back.

GENERATION X is still meandering towards cancellation with the Four Days storyline (or rather, collection of character pieces), this time focussing on Sean Cassidy and Skin.

Surprisingly, continuity rears its head here (in a Counter-X book?), as the story has Sean reacting to Moira's death over in the X-Men books. Perhaps because this story doesn't have to deal with the plot mechanics of how she died, her death is actually more effective here than it was in the core books. It's as shamelessly sentimental as Claremont was, but personally I find Sean talking with Angelo over a pint carried more impact than the lone piper routine in X-Men (all a bit kailyard for my tastes).

So far as Skin's concerned, this is an issue about how he relates to Sean, who he's obviously adopting as a respected father figure. The fact that Sean already addresses the male team members as "son" allows Wood to emphasise that at the end of the story without it seeming contrived. It's a good issue for Skin, who comes across as more mature here than he usually does.

Bowing to genre requirements, Wood works in the obligatory action sequence, but as it gives Skin the opportunity to rescue Sean and carry out some role reversal, it doesn't stick out too badly. Steve Pugh's missing this month for some reason, but Ron Lim fills in on art quite acceptably.

A quiet series, but very good. Shame they're axing it.

UNCANNY X-MEN 2000 finally makes it out - wrong year, but never mind. From the solicitations this sounded decidedly like that all-purpose filler story, "the X-Men help a teenage mutant we'll never seen again to adjust to his/her powers." And that's basically what it is, but it's actually a rather good one.

Amy Stringer, a latent telepath, gets gunned down in a school shooting, leaving her blind and with a damaged spine. After she starts subconsciously inflicting her blindness on other people telepathically (a bit of a problem when they're driving), Xavier takes an interest and encourages her to look on the bright side and learn to walk again. The story goes up to the trial of the gunman, which is played as a "do not use your powers to take revenge" scene.

There's nothing particularly new here, but it's well written and works as a character piece. Scott Lobdell is plotting here, and obviously playing to his strengths in doing an action-free character piece. Scripter Fiona Avery is a newcomer to Marvel, though I seem to remember that she's doing the Rogue miniseries later this year. A protege of J Michael Straczynski, if I remember rightly. She's obviously a good scripter, steering the right side of mawkishness. Melodramatic, perhaps, but not mawkish.

Essad Ribic - the one who finished off Children of the Atom - produces some excellent artwork here. Since he's not trying to mimic Steve Rude this time round, we get to see him with a wider range of storytelling techniques. It's a vast improvement, and hopefully he'll find some more prominent work.

I'm tempted to point out that this Lobdell story is far better than any of the last year's Claremont ones, but that would just be stirring. In any event, it's surprisingly good.

Ah, X-FORCE. The other big controversy. Just take it as a de facto cancellation and relax, is my advice.

Most of the Counter-X run so far has been a strong advert for cancellation, but Rage War is a bit more like it. For one thing, it's got Jorge Lucas on art, whose European style is a vast improvement on Whilce Portacio's ungodly scratchings. It also helps that this storyline actually seems to have enough plot to justify the four issues, rather than stretching out one rather basic idea further than the content will merit.

Where the first part of this story had looked dangerously close to rehashing the "members of the public transformed into monsters" routine from the first Counter-X story, this issue shifts away from that to establish that what we're actually dealing with is Soviet sleeper agents who've been stuck here all this time waiting for the post-hypnotic command to reactivate them.

It is at this point that I finally realise why the Counter-X X-Force has failed until now. For all the talk about fighting mysterious people in the shadows and investigating weird government secrets, the content of the stories didn't match. Ellis had made the misguided attempt to cross that genre with the Authority. The result was a mess. Conspiracy stories have to be smaller scale and more character driven. If that was what X-Force was meant to be doing, the last thing it needed was two issues of Kirby-style monsters running amok in San Francisco. Equally, the plotting needed to be far denser - both storylines were just far too straightforward to work on the level they were presumably aiming for.

Here, on the other hand, Edginton keeps his story relatively small scale, grounds it closer to reality (by having his genetically modified weirdos deliberately contrasted with the nice suburban environment around them), and focuses on the characters. And for the first time it clicks. Now I see what they were getting at. And it could potentially have worked.

For the first time, I'm actually interested in the Counter-X X-Force. With two issues to go. Oh well. At least we're getting a decent looking storyline to round it off.

THE DEFENDERS are back. Hmm.

Bearing in mind that the Defenders were cancelled in 1986, before I was even reading comics, they're not a team I have any particular attachment to. Nor has it ever really sounded like a book I was unfortunate to miss out on. Aside from the occasional wistful reminiscence about Steve Gerber and his elf, it's not as though people keep talking about all those classic Defenders stories I should get around to reading. And as a relaunch of a tired old brand name, it does seem to fit more in the ethos of the Harras regime than the Quesada.

But it's got Kurt Busiek and Erik Larsen on it, who if nothing else are unlikely to produce a book designed purely to let the aging fans of the original title wallow in nostalgia. So there's always the possibility of something interesting here.

According to the editorials on the letter page, the idea with the Defenders is that they're "a volatile, unlikely team of natural loners." The strength of this is that it makes for lots of character conflict. The weakness is that it makes for so much character conflict that it's just not plausible for them to turn up every month in the first place.

Busiek's solution to this problem is to turn it to his advantage. If there's going to need to be a shameless plot contrivance to keep the characters coming together, best to make it a really shameless plot contrivance and shove it right at the heart of the book. So this issue sees an impromptu Defenders reunion fighting some bloke called Yandroth (who apparently had some part in forming the team in the first place), who responds to his inevitable defeat by cursing them to remain together. This seems a reasonable solution to the problem, although please take notice now that I will not be amused to see some future story in which the curse is lifted because the four Defenders have learned to love one another.

However, while that's at the centre of the plot, what's at the centre of the book is the relationship between the four central characters. And this issue doesn't really sell me on it. Now, I've never been all that interested in any of the four characters being used here, which means I'm probably not the target market, but the dynamic here doesn't go greatly beyond squabbling. I'm really not convinced there's all that much mileage in watching four characters yell abuse at one another in different speech patterns. Hopefully the other regular characters - more "team player" characters like Hellcat and Nighthawk - will take the edge off this somewhat. Of course, you could argue that if the book's going to work, the last thing it needs is to have the edge taken off it, and that my problem is that I'm just not remotely interested in the central idea.

The tone of the issue is a bit puzzling. Although it's mercifully light on past continuity (though I could have done with some better explanation of who the hell Nighthawk is), the tone is unrelentingly retro. Busiek and Larsen are both talented scripters and I therefore assume that when they write dialogue like "Toad Men! Those are Toad Men! But... WHY have they returned? WHY?!", they're playing the scene for laughs. I'm just not clear why. As for Larsen's art, I quite like most of his work, but there are points where he pushes it too far for my tastes. There's a line between exaggerated perspective and horribly wrong perspective, and when my reaction to splash pages is to question why the proportions are so ugly, it kind of takes away from the drama.

I'm not sold. And I suspect the reason I'm not sold is that I don't greatly care about the characters and I'm not very interested in seeing them fight with one another. Worse, in fact, I don't even like them. Bunch of arrogant wankers. I can see what they're aiming at here, but it's not working for me.

STRANGER KISSES is the sequel to Warren Ellis' earlier horror series Strange Kiss. Personally, I thought Strange Kiss fell short by relying too much on gross-out material and too little on really unsettling the audience. This one looks closer to the mark, although still so graphic that you can well understand what it's doing at Avatar instead of a major publisher.

To give Avatar their due, while the majority of their output still seems to consist of the sort of fourth rate wank mags I'd be embarrassed to be seen burning let alone reading, they do package the book better than the mainstream publishers normally manage. Still overreliant on variant covers (signed leather variant edition of issue #1, anyone?), but the basic package is nicely put together.

William Gravel, the SAS officer from the first series, is the returning character for this one. Pretty much everyone else was eaten by lizards. This time he's enlisted as a bodyguard by somebody wanting to investigate the snuff movie industry, with a view to exposing it for political capital. A nice, relatively sane start to the proceedings.

Things in fact remain fairly normal apart from a gratuitously nasty eye-gouging scene, until we get around to actually seeing the videos. Rather than snuff movies - which would have been boringly conventional - we're back to the body horror from the first series, with performers featuring orificies in places you wouldn't normally expect, all depicted in loving detail by Mike Wolfer's artwork. Roughly as erotic as performing taxidermy on a salvaged foetus, this is genuinely squirm-inducing, unlike the exploding lizard stuff from the previous series.

Wolfer's artwork carries the story well. He's a decent storyteller, and his quiet, unshowy work makes the repulsive stuff even more repellent. Which, in this sort of series, is a plus.

Not one for a mainstream audience (the video scenes are almost nauseatingly graphic), but for those who thought Strange Kiss wasn't nearly unsettling enough, this should hit the mark.