14 october 2001

Well, this is odd.

The CYCLOPS miniseries started off with what looked like an issue of filler, brought in its main villain in issue #2, and now seems to have veered off in the direction of a fill-in story. No Ulysses in this story at all; instead, Cyclops meets yet another hidden race in the Savage Land and helps them to defeat an evil monster.

I'm now at a total loss as to quite what Vaughan is trying to achieve with this series. The only consistent theme seems to be to show Cyclops coming up with imaginative aways to win in the fight scenes, which is nice but not really a story. I have a vague feeling that this issue may be trying to allude to some part of the Odyssey that I'm unfamiliar with, but if so it's going way over my head.

The issue is a strange mixture of seemingly irrelevant digressions (JFK's adrenal gland is all very fascinating, but what's it got to do with anything?) and the sort of plotting so shamelessly contrived that it really makes me wonder what I'm missing. The hidden race are blind, and Cyclops has lost one lens in his glasses, so he's the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. Okay, so we've recreated a proverb... and? So? The monster has the deeply implausible (but vaguely mythological-sounding) power that you can't look directly at it or you'll lose your sight, which is so shamelessly tailored to Cyclops' powers that it can't help but seem artificial.

Vaughan has a decent grasp of the character, and Texeira's artwork is on better form this issue, though the bimbos in bikinis are really a bit much. Still, I don't know what to make of this. Taken at face value, this is a really oddly structured and contrived story that doesn't make a great deal of sense, nor seem to be heading in any particular direction so much as wandering around from episode to unrelated episode. It all feels as though it's meant to be alluding to something, but I'm damned if I can work out what. If anything.

Well, it's taken six issues, but we have an issue of X-TREME X-MEN that I quite liked.

The basic mystery in this storyline is meant to be how Miles Warbeck managed to suffocate in a normal room. That point never came across last issue, leaving it as a whodunnit which I didn't really care much about (after all, we'd never seen Warbeck before, so who cares who killed him?). The "how did he die" one is much more interesting, and the opening autopsy scene actually manages to explain it without doing a contrived infodump.

Claremont seems to have his tendency to narrate the obvious under control this time round, and we're also spared the usual routine of characters reciting the same capsule descriptions of one another. You know, Thunderbird actually feels more like a character when he does something other than whine about being a rookie. I'm not really sold on the surfer sequences, but we'll see where it's heading.

The C-plot here is Rogue and Gambit being tortured by, er, an evil acupuncturist. Under normal circumstances I would be responding to that one with mocking laughter. Maybe I'm in an exceptionally charitable mood this week, but for some reason I rather liked it. It's different, if nothing else, and actually makes a certain degree of sense within its own rather strained logic.

The art is looking a bit more effective this month, and while I haven't gone to the trouble of checking with previous issues, it does look like they've done it by sharpening up the black lines (which previously were blurring into the colouring around them). In other words, they've made it a bit more mainstream. I still think the art worked fairly well and just had problems with its suitability for costumes in primary colours, but the approach here does seem to be helping matters.

FELON is the latest book from the Minotaur imprint, and Minotaur have really demonstrated their faith in the book by cutting it back from an ongoing series to a mini of indeterminate length before the first issue has even shipped. I believe this week it's an eight-issue miniseries. It doesn't really matter, because it'll probably have changed again by next week.

This sort of thing tends to overshadow the actual content, and at the very least I've always found it hard to get into stories where we know there's a fair chance that the book is going to disappear unexpectedly or end with a rush to resolve all its outstanding plots. Still, eight issues is probably enough to get a story out of the way - assuming that that fits with Greg Rucka's pacing plans when he wrote the first few issues.

Rucka has done some impressive work on books like Whiteout and Queen & Country, and he's shown an interest in crime books before. He also writes one of the Batman titles, if I remember rightly, but I can never face the prospect of trying to get into Batman continuity, so I never buy those. (Yes, I know that sounds absurd coming from an X-Men fan, but it's still true.)

Felon is the story of Cassiday, recently released from three years in jail for a crime that, somewhat unusually, she did commit. However, she committed it along with three men who put all the blame on her, and now she's planning to hunt them down and get her share of the money. A passing supporting character does point out to her that they've probably spent it all, but she's going to have a damn good try anyway.

Even though she's apparently been screwed by her colleagues, Cassiday is a thoroughly unsympathetic character. She supports her trip home through credit card fraud, insults the homeless (by telling them to earn a living), and generally wanders around bullying people. It's difficult to sympathise much with anyone in this story, given that they all come across as assholes in varying degrees. Perhaps as a result, I found it a bit unengaging. I assume I'm meant to identify with Cassiday and want her to win, but I don't, really.

Matthew Clark's artwork is solid enough - it's got a certain Top Cow house style influence to it without losing the plot and sliding into T&A. Yes, granted there's the obligatory shower scene, but it's only a couple of panels. The book's pleasant to look at, the characters are all fairly distinct and the story ticks along nicely.

No real complaints, but I can't seem to get into it.

FOUR WOMEN is a new miniseries from Sam Kieth under the Homage imprint. (It's a mature readers book, incidentally, so we can vaguely wonder why it's Homage and not Vertigo. If that matters.)

Unlike his last book, Zero Girl, there's no surrealism here. Instead, it's a story about four women driving to a wedding and something unrevealed but nasty happening to them along the way. This first issue consists largely of four characters talking in a car, which conventionally wouldn't make for very good comics material. After all, it's not terribly visual.

Kieth does keep it visually interesting, since he's got his wonderfully distinctive art style to draw on, and he goes for a wide range of camera angles to keep livening things up. The pacing (with the jump forward in time to avoid us seeing what actually happened to them) is pretty effective as well. The catch is that the characters don't feel quite as rounded as they should.

They come across as faintly stereotypical, which isn't helped by a cringe-inducing page of character introductions full of lines like "She's fiercely protective of us, and the realist of our group" and, god help us, "I'm less extreme than Bev, but more bold and adventurous than my best friend, Marion." (Do you strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree?) Donna, the point of view character, seems more fleshed out than the other three. There's four months to go on this, of course, so maybe this will sort itself out with time.

The issue also features a glaringly obvious piece of foreshadowing in which everyone chats about who they would save in the event of a nuclear war, which is really just a set-up for Bev to deliver the "Lord of the Flies" speech about how people turn on one another under stress. Not really subtle, is it?

It's nice to see Kieth having a go at a more realist story and not using his surrealism as a crutch (which was arguably the case with Zero Girl's odd story about squares and circles), but as a character driven book, this issue unfortunately doesn't quite match up in the character department. Looks good, though, and I'm prepared to give it a bit more time to sort that out.

Jay Faerber has very kindly sent me a preview copy of NOBLE CAUSES: FIRST IMPRESSIONS, which through the wonders of international mail arrived at my house two days before the issue went on sale anyway. Much appreciated.

Faerber is best known in these parts as the guy who was writing Generation X before the Counter-X relaunch. (Ah, Counter-X. It seems so long ago now...) His work on that book was strong on character but generally seemed to be a bit light on story direction. Generally, he's a writer who's always seemed more at home with the soap opera elements of the superhero genre than with the action side of the equation.

Noble Causes, then, is a book tailored to his strengths - a soap opera about superheroes. In this first issue, the "fighting crime" side of things is quietly shoved to the side in favour of focussing on inter-family squabbling. Of course, there's been a hefty soap opera element to the superhero genre for some 25 years now, and the idea of making it the focus of a series isn't entirely new - the much lamented, and appallingly named, Young Heroes In Love had a go a few years back - but maybe the time is right. The TV rights have already been optioned, and in principle it sounds like a perfectly workable idea. (Not to mention much cheaper than a conventional live-action superhero show would be.)

The story centres on the Noble Family, the leading superheroes of their world, and popular media celebrities. This being a bright and upbeat book, the Nobles are beloved by their public. Faerber has mentioned the Kennedys in interviews; you get the general idea. Again, other books have done "superhero as celebrity" before, but here it seems largely a backdrop to the soap opera.

The first issue naturally sets about establishing the cast and who hates who. Doc Noble, the patriarch, doesn't get much camera time but seems like an interesting character, cheerfully asking his son what his girlfriend's like in bed. An appropriate selection of possible antagonists within the family are set up (after all, you can't have soap opera if all the villains are external to the team), and as usual Faerber seems to have a strong sense of his characters.

On the minus side, the first story uses the rather cumbersome device where one character refuses to reveal fairly banal information to any of the others simply so that there can be a big revelation scene for the benefit of the readers. Race Noble doesn't tell any of his family that his girlfriend is a normal member of the public, even though he's apparently been seeing her for months and has invited her round for dinner. It's an artificial device I've never much liked, particularly so here where that part of the story is already revealed on the front cover.

The backup strip, establishing how Liz and Race met, does a good job with the characters but does have a rather gloopy monologue about how famous people have got feelings too. It's hard to believe that this comes as quite such a revelation to Liz as the plot makes out, particularly as she was just selling a book based on exactly that concept.

Art is strong throughout, although curiously the regular series artist is on the back-up strip here. The art is leaning marginally towards the cartoon side, which is probably the right approach. This is a light entertainment book, and it doesn't want to be too realistic.

A promising start, albeit with some plot flaws that could use a little work. It's not particularly deep, but it's enjoyable, upbeat stuff.