15 july 2001

This is what they call a heavy week. I dunno, you wait weeks for Marvel to publish an X-Men book and then three come along at once.

Naturally, NEW X-MEN holds its place as the flagship title. And again, it's all about the tone. In plot terms, there's nothing here particularly out of the ordinary. A madman wants to wipe out mutants and sends the Sentinels to do it. The X-Men must stop them. And that's pretty much your lot as far as the plot is concerned.

But that's fine for now, since the plot is just a structure on which Morrison can hang the really entertaining stuff. Most of this issue is Wolverine and Cyclops, and Morrison seems finally to have found the key to making Cyclops hold his own in the duo without getting overshadowed from the word go. Scott has generally tended to come across as a rather dull character, given that his main character trait is being the sensible one on the team. The cheap and dull way out of this is to give him an attitude.

Morrison takes the far more interesting approach, which is to make him so insanely calm and collected that he ends up as a slightly intimidating Zen presence in the midst of all the lunacy around him. None of this changes his character in the slightest; it's just about portraying him such a light that his central character elements become virtues again, and not merely the signs of the dull team player who gets wound up by the interesting characters. Quitely's depiction of him as a completely normal man with none of the usual superhero proportions fits the picture perfectly.

The book hits an excellent balance between the over the top action sequences and the right level of ideas in the dialogue. Trask's concern that they should be committing genocide in a humane way is a great touch, as is Cyclops' putting a fatally injured character out of his misery ("Look into my eyes..."). The efficiency of the whole thing is amazing - barely a wasted line of dialogue in the book.

The X-Men haven't been this good in years. Which is unfortunate for the other two X-Men books that came out this week...

UNCANNY X-MEN is into the second part of Poptopia, and it's still not really working, is it?

There are two plotlines here, one of which is moderately interesting, and one of which certainly isn't. The one that certainly isn't is Mr Clean, who is billed as a genetic cleanser, although "generic" would be nearer the mark. I remain at a loss as to why Casey thinks I would possibly be interested in, or impressed by, a bloke with a flamethrower and no personality whose agenda is exactly the same as hundreds of other X-Men villains down the years. There's nothing whatsoever new or original about this character.

The moderately interesting plot is Chamber's relationship with pop star Sugar Kane, a character who still struggles to overcome the credibility gap of being billed as a "Welsh teen pop sensation." In theory, there should be some interesting material in putting Chamber into this situation.

But on the strength of this issue, Casey seems to be approaching the concept from the assumption that all manufactured entertainment is Wrong and Evil, and no further explanation is required. Sugar Kane is given an utterly moronic speech about how the kids will buy any old crap that's marketed to them. Does Casey have any idea how many failed pop acts are launched each year? The idea that this stuff is so bad that nobody could REALLY like it is just a woefully condescending way for people to feel better about their own taste in music.

Now granted, it's a speech by Sugar Kane and not an editorial, but I have little confidence in Casey and Churchill's ability to deliver something that builds intelligently on the premise here. Nothing about Sugar Kane as a character, in behaviour or design, suggests any real understanding of her beyond a general sneering disdain for the industry she represents. Nightcrawler and Iceman turn up to give Chamber a woolly and ill-conceived lecture about how he should turn his back on all this stuff, which seems to have no proper logical basis. If Nightcrawler seriously thinks that Chamber won't be helping the image of mutants by being seen in a public relationship with a celebrity, he's out of his mind. Unfortunately, he really does just seem to be reflecting the views of his writer.

Churchill's artwork is perfectly okay here, but the storyline remains deeply unsatisfying. Compared to the broadly similar themes of fame and celebrity being addressed in X-Force, this is shown up as decidedly mediocre.

In contrast, THAT CLAREMONT BOOK looks decidedly inoffensive. I wouldn't quite go as far as to say that it's better, but at least it's coming closer to succeeding in what it's trying to do. The question with this book is whether you were interested in what it was trying to do in the first place.

This is probably the strongest issue so far, as Claremont confirms that Psylocke is dead (for the life of me, I don't know why that wasn't put beyond doubt last issue - they must know how sceptical we are about these things) and sets about the tribute issue. The secondary plot here is to do with getting the Beast out of the storyline so that he can go off and appear in the Morrison book.

So in other words, it's a breather between Acts 1 and 2 of the Vargas storyline, which is taking the opportunity to reshuffle the cast members. And it takes the usual structure for your farewell issue to a dead character - everyone mourns appropriately, and we get some flashbacks to remind us of what a great person the late hero was.

It's all the usual Claremont material, but he seems to have knocked the edge off his more grating dialogue this time round, making it all read a lot better. We do get one "I'm BISHOP! We're the X-MEN." in a context which makes you wonder why he's shouting so much, but that's about it for the cliches. A definite step in the right direction there.

There's still a general sense that Claremont is using far more narration than required, and that he would be better off letting the art speak for itself. The first page comes across perfectly clearly without needing seven captions of narrative to tell us that the Beast is upset that Psylocke's dead. Page 4 opens with four panels of the weather darkening to a storm which certainly do not need any dialogue to explain it to us. Let alone dialogue like "Where'd those clouds come from? We'd better get under cover, man! This looks like a pretty wicked storm!" We know! We're not blind!

There are several more instances like that, where the book continues to violate the basic rule of "Show, don't tell." This is a visual medium, and the story would read so much better if Claremont would just let the art get on with it and allow the readers to work out the X-Men's reactions themselves. Do we really need to be told that a page of the X-Men smashing up a criminal gang's headquarters depicts them venting their grief over Psylocke's death? Isn't that obvious? Wouldn't the point come across so much more effectively if the readers were allowed to work it out for themselves?

Admittedly, there are a few points where the art DOES fall down on the storytelling and the narrative captioning is justified. Part of the problem seems to be that the colouring is not helping to direct attention to the right parts of the page. There are several very murky pages here, and the fact that the X-Men have been given costumes with large chunks of bright red is resulting in their pages looking very cluttered, with whole chunks of random colours fighting for space on the page and making a mess of the layout. The book seems to look a lot better when the characters are out of costume and the colourists get to introduce some consistent themes to the colouring. Might be worth taking a look at those costumes and giving the colour scheme a rethink, because bright primary colours don't seem to work with this un-inked art.

Sage finally gets some kind of characterisation, as we're now being told that she was working undercover for Xavier the whole time she was in the Hellfire Club. This leads her to question why she was used as a spy rather than a member of the X-Men, which is actually a fairly interesting direction. Unfortunately, it does feel like a forced retcon. If this was the idea behind her joining the team, why wasn't it explained months ago? Why were the X-Men reacting to her arrival like she was a recent defector from the other side? It's difficult to believe that this isn't a change of plan being shoehorned into the plot. Still, it's got some potential.

It's still ultimately a book that stands or falls on whether you like Claremont's style, but this is heading somewhat in the right direction.

Let's address the obvious question to begin with: no, THE AGENCY is not another Authority spin-off. It's about the only generic government department noun that WildStorm haven't trademarked, but nonetheless it's not one of theirs. This is Paul Jenkins and Kyle Hotz doing a sci-fi book through Top Cow.

The bad news: we are in a dark and grim dystopian future, which is usually a recipe for guaranteed tedium. Fortunately, Jenkins and Hotz seem to be playing it for dark comedy. The concept is that in a world where conventional policing has pretty much collapsed, the Agency are a private sector organisation who have moved in to fill the gap in the market.

Obviously, on one level this is a rather blatant anti-privatisation satire, and come to think of it, I wouldn't be too surprised if it had originated as a pitch to 2000AD. Fortunately, Jenkins knows better than to beat the political drum too heavily, and instead focusses on introducing his main characters and getting the series to work as a proper team book.

At this stage, the characters are still in fairly archetypal mode (the manipulative boss, the comparatively sympathetic protagonist, the unreliable psycho team-mate), but there's some obvious potential there to build on. The cartoon quality to Hotz's artwork helps to take the edge off the potential grimness of the situation and play up the comedic side of the book. Hotz seems to be turning into Kelly Jones without the obvious drawbacks of Jones' recent work (excessive distortion, weird breasts and a throat fixation).

There's enough promise here to overcome my usual scepticism about the whole genre, as Jenkins and Hotz are keeping the usual cliches in the background and playing up the characters instead. A lot of potential here, which is a pleasant surprise.

Black marks, incidentally, for a shamelessly ass-kissing advert paying tribute to ten years of Wizard. "They're the best thing to happen to comics since Superman!" Christ.

HUNTER: THE AGE OF MAGIC is the relaunch of the Books of Magic series, one of the many Vertigo books to have originated as a Neil Gaiman idea and to have been kept alive long after he ceased to have anything to do with it.

I haven't been following this title at all since the very early days of its publication, and consequently have no clue how it got to this point. I see that Tim Hunter has been aged by a few years, which I take to be an attempt to distance him from the Harry Potter comparisons. Why, they've even given him the beginning of a beard. The idea here seems to be to position him as a contemporary character in his late teens, placed in a fantasy universe where he's apparently been learning about magic.

The whole fantasy and magic genre has never done a great deal for me, and this is not the sort of book that's going to change my mind. If you like the idea of Tim doing generically heroic stuff while hanging around in Gemworld (ah, obscure DC continuity, just the sort of thing that sets my pulse racing...), then no doubt you will be very happy. It's pretty much a straight hero story, with nice, clean and dynamic art from Richard Case.

Judging from reviews elsewhere, those who stuck with the original Books of Magic series to this point seem very happy with this issue. Good for them. I had no real interest in the original book, and this doesn't do a great deal for me. Nothing wrong with it, but it's not something that seems likely to expand the character's audience significantly.