15 august 1999

Obviously a BISHOP series poses certain problems. For one thing, the character's done bugger all in the last few years, and much of what made him interesting in the first place had been obliterated as his culture shock faded. On top of that, you're lumbered with an arch- enemy in the form of Trevor Fitzroy, a man who from the look of him has travelled through time, all the way from the New Romantic era.

Nonetheless, no character is beyond help. For all that he's been pushed aside for years, Bishop remains an interesting concept. This series, which transplants Bishop to an alternate future timeline, in many ways takes us back to the original man-out-of-time idea. The first time around, that idea started out well and then decayed into endless scenes of Bishop looking grim and announcing "This thing you call fun... we did not have it in my time." And when that joke wore thin, they just forgot about him. With any luck, this time they'll get it right.

Of course, there's only so much you can do in a first issue, and the main job of this story is to get Bishop into the future timeline in the first place. Consequently what we see of the new setting is really more of a teaser than anything else - enough to establish the downright weirdness of the place, and interest me in finding out the wider picture, but pretty sketchy in itself.

Instead the story gets down to the important plot job of shoving Bishop into place and establishing Fitzroy as a credible adversary. In fact, dreadful character design aside, Fitzroy WAS a fairly credible villain when he first appeared - it's only years of trudging around in low quality stories that have left him in such low regard. Joe Harris takes the character back to basics, which means that in this story he's a fairly standard evil bastard. Of course, this is only the starting point, and that's what's required at this stage. Now the character can be taken forward in another direction and, like Bishop, be given another chance.

As for the art, Georges Jeanty does a solid job throughout, hovering between the quite acceptable and the pretty good. There's a few moments that are rather reminiscent of the Askani'Son miniseries, although that may simply be the decided similarity of the post-apocalyptic character designs.

In itself, of course, the story is pretty basic. But the point is really to serve as a declaration of intent and establish where we're going with these two characters. And it's clear that we're looking at something rather preferable to their recent treatment.

CABLE #72 is, of course, a fill-in issue forced by a last-minute vetoing of the previously intended plot. What we get instead is, well, a very talky issue which serves mainly to fill out the character and origin of third-rate villain Post. Not quite what might have been expected, in fact.

Let's start with the obvious observation, though. Chap Yaep has a very funny idea of what Cable looks like. His bizarre selective exaggeration of different bits of Cable's body ends up looking just plain silly in a lot of panels. He is, having said that, better than Rob Liefeld, and the inkers and colourists have done a pretty decent job in adding atmosphere to his often questionable layouts. It could have looked worse. It certainly did the last time Yaep drew an issue of this title.

As for the story, Shon Bury makes a brave but ultimately doomed effort to grant some kind of interesting personality onto the thoroughly dull Post. Faced with an all-purpose henchman whose previous appearances have had little in the way of consistency, Bury makes an interesting attempt to turn this to his advantage by writing Post as a bit of a hopeless twat, forever drifting from philosophy to philosophy and failing to commit to any of them.

It doesn't really come off, largely because the issue is hopelessly bogged down in melodramatic and cliched dialogue. The last two pages are, in fact, written entirely in cliches. Observe:-

- The past can never be changed, so I must strive only for a better tomorrow.

- I've been learning that myself, the hard way.

- Yes, I see. Goodbye, Nathan - and thank you. Perhaps, in some other time, we will meet again.

- But where will you go? I have friends, people who can help you...

- No, Cable. Though I know your offer is sincere, it is time I look within for the answers I seek.

Oh, yuck. As I say, the approach is a valid enough one, but even allowing for the unpromising starting point, Bury doesn't succeed in making Post a credible character when he's spouting nonsense like this. Nonetheless, the story does introduce a new idea to the character which may at least make him workable for future stories, surely no bad thing.

So, in the long term this story's probably done some good. In the short term, it's a bit poor and you might as well skip it.

GENERATION X concludes the two part Hellions story, and leaves me wondering whether it might not have been as well to do the thing at double speed in a single issue - or perhaps in an annual. With the "is this for real?" angle explained at the end of last issue, this story doesn't really have much to do other than get the characters out, which it does.

There's definitely some good character material in here for the main cast. M's acknowledgement that she does regard the rest of the team as her friends is fairly significant, and it's nice to see Emma put the Hellions' death behind her. Unfortunately, the issue makes a bit of a hash of Adrienne Frost.

Adrienne turns up at the end, proclaiming herself the new White Queen, wearing a costume presumably on loan from an amateur production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and announcing that she had been behind the last two issue's events, hoping to kill Generation X while Emma watched for seemingly no good reason other than to torment her.

This is deeply unsatisfying. Adrienne had seemed like an interesting character with a mysterious hidden agenda. Now the agenda seems to be nothing more than pissing off Emma. First of all, that's difficult to reconcile with the scenes where Adrienne decided to come to the school in the first place, where she seemed to have plans for the kids beyond just killing them; and secondly, it's just not too interesting. This doesn't seem a good move for the character at all.

The issue also has the curse of two art teams - both of whom produce excellent work, but who jar rather badly as we shift from Terry Dodson's smooth linework to Karl Kerschel's rather more angular approach. Still, whichever you're reading, the story still looks a thousand times better than it did when Whilce Portacio drew it.

On the whole, though, a disappointment, purely because of what looks like a real wasted opportunity in the form of Adrienne Frost.

Ben Raab guest writes MUTANT X with a story set in the early days of Bloodstorm's time as a vampire. It's not actually her origin as such, which would really just have involved retelling the X-Men Annual that the idea was lifted from, so that's probably for the best. It's more about what happens then.

The plot involves Kitty Pryde deciding to hunt down Storm and destroy her rather than allow her to live as a vampire. Unfortunately, when she finally finds Storm, she loses her nerve and just fails to bump Storm off before Storm turns her into a vampire too. Dramatic irony, you see.

And while, to be sure, there's nothing particularly original about the story, I still rather like this issue. There's a very odd, faintly surreal, quality to the story, arising from what seems to be the deliberate omission of the background material normally found in these stories. Anything that doesn't bear directly on the plot is just missing.

So, for example, why is Storm imprisoned? Who imprisoned her? Why is Forge, in particular, there? We can guess, but the story is simply silent. It doesn't matter why these characters are there or why they're in this situation. They just are. As long as you're willing to accept that there IS a reason, it doesn't matter what the reason is, and the story seems all the stronger for focusing absolutely on the key points and just ignoring anything that isn't needed. The plot itself is, after all, just an excuse for the characterisation - so why worry about the details of the plot if you don't have to?

Simple, direct and to the point. I like it.

Right, then. WARLOCK.

Louise Simonson is set a tricky task with the first issue of this story. Warlock is, after all, far from a simple character with a far from simple history. Simply introducing him to the readers is going to take up a fair chunk of time. Recognising that it's just not that interesting a story, Simonson does her best to power through the entire thing in two pages, which may be overly optimistic, but at least signals an intention to try and draw a line under the past and take the character forward from here.

As the series picks up, his experiences under the control of the Red Skull have restored Warlock's memories, so now he's the old Warlock again but without all those grating mannerisms that wore thin so quickly. It's a bit hard to connect this character with the one we've seen in recent stories, and the effect is jarring.

Warlock now seems to have three main concerns. One, he feels responsible for the Transmode Virus having reached Earth and wants to do something to make sure it doesn't spread. Perfectly reasonable, and a decent potential springboard for stories, although the memory of past bad Phalanx stories hovers overhead. (The first story does involve the Virus but doesn't involve the Phalanx, which is a good move.)

Two, he loves and cherishes Earth culture and wants to preserve it - not just because he's a generally nice guy who likes to the save the world, but because it seems to remind him of Doug. Oh, and three, he seems obsessed with Doug.

This last comes through in this story in an early scene where Warlock goes to visit Cypher's corpse, a scene which isn't too irrational from a plot point of view but might just be hurling a bit too much information at new readers at so early a stage in the game. This would probably have benefitted from being done at more length later on in the series, when the character's feelings for Doug are more clearly established.

The main plot, though, involves Warlock visiting a research facility which is experimenting on the Virus and trying to find out what the hell they're doing with it. This handily gives him the chance to rescue his two supporting cast members (a girl and a monkey) from the experiments. Floating around in the background are a group of uniformed Psi-Cops who seem to have some interest in the Virus as well. Naturally, the story raises far more questions than it answers, but gets away with it.

It also deals successfully with the other key problem with Warlock. He's immensely powerful. He's almost impossible to injure, he's almost impossible to imprison... how are villains supposed to give this character a fight? The story deals with this by bringing in antagonists who aren't on ridiculous power levels but have relatively modest powers keyed to giving Warlock a decent fight (without being too obvious about it).

Pascual Ferry produces some wonderful artwork, quickly showing that he's one of the few artists who really understands how to make techno-organic characters work. When Warlock was first introduced, he was a creation of Bill Sienkiewicz and fairly obviously influenced by the deranged cartoons of Ralph Steadman. Artists with a more conventional style have always struggled to make Warlock work, but Ferry does a thoroughly good job here, keeping the character's excesses under control without losing a sense of his weirdness when appropriate. The net effect is a far more human Warlock than we've seen before, but it works.

This is a decidedly promising start to the series, which seems to have some interesting ideas about what to do with this character. The first issue is perhaps a bit too clogged with introducing the cast and would probably have been much better in the double-size format Marvel used to use for first issues. On the whole, though, a good beginning.