16 april 2000

Followers of my sig file will be delighted to learn that, as I write this, Luke Haines has just entered the UK charts at number 20, giving him his first hit. Well done, Luke, it's only taken you eight albums.

Anyhow.

After the excitement of all the Revolution issues last month, this month is the creators' opportunity for consolidation. Having set out what sort of direction they'll be going in, they now have to get down to the business of telling an interesting story while they're at it. Once again, first off the blocks is CABLE.

Robert Weinberg's routine here is to start off with a whole load of seemingly unrelated plotlines and then work on drawing them together. The main theme here is the war between the two alternate future timelines of Harmony and the Ranshi Empire. The divergent event that decides which one of them will turn out to be real is coming shortly, and they're fighting to make sure which way it goes.

Harmony gets most of the screen time this issue, as Cable visits their timeline and finds that it's a rather utopian place aside from its questionable use of genetic engineering. We still don't know very much about the Ranshi Empire, who are still being played as rather militaristic villains. If I were a betting man, though, I'd say we were heading here for the "nice culture turns out to be nasty, nasty culture turns out to be nice after all" routine. Hopefully it's going to be a bit more subtle than that.

Mind you, subtlety seems to be at something of a premium in Harmony. Trying to establish that it's a technological futuristic utopia, Weinberg lays it on with a trowel, wheeling out a string of sci-fi devices to hammer home just how darned advanced these people are meant to be. Unfortunately, they're of the "I have a computer in my bloodstream" sort, and the whole routine falls flat for me. It pains me to use this sort of analogy, since this is, after all, Robert Weinberg - acclaimed novelist, and the most celebrated real writer in the X-books today - but it's the sort of thing primary school kids do when they're trying to write sci-fi. ("Why, we have pills instead of meals in our time," said Qrztyl.)

On the other hand, the new character Clarity works rather better. His gimmick is basically that he's capable of monitoring all the world's media simultaneously and comprehending it all, thus making him the only person in the world who actually understands all the information in the public domain. It's the information overload theme, naturally, but there's nothing necessarily wrong with that, and Weinberg spins off it into a rather nice montage sequence jumping between plotlines arbitrarily and effectively challenging the reader to try and work out what the hell he's getting at.

I have my doubts about quite where Weinberg's heading with this plot - I still have a feeling that despite his complex plotting, we may still be heading for a very old routine indeed - but there's enough good in with the bad to keep me interested.

GENERATION X was the most successful of the first month's Counter-X books, in large part because it actually seemed to be working with the characters it already had rather than doing a slash-and-burn exercise. In other words, it feels like it's doing Generation X stories, rather than shoehorning its characters into something else altogether.

This issue alternates between what's actually a more down-to-earth take on the title characters, and the flagrant lunacy of the House of Correction itself. There's some good use of the cut-down cast, with a particularly good scene establishing that none of the kids actually know how to relate to other teenagers any more. Paige's sudden development of computer skills does seem more than a little convenient, but it does help give the plot some kind of grounding in reality.

The House of Correction scenes, of course, aren't aiming at a grounding in reality at all. The bizarre robot guard with half a decaying girl nailed to the front is a truly odd image, and Warden Coffin's office, full of the mounted heads of killed animals together with the top half of a CIA assassin, is quite consciously absurd. The story manages to blend these nonsensical images with sufficient darkness to keep the tension up, though.

The pacing seems a bit off, though. Much as we saw with X-Man last month, this issue obviously thinks it's building to a climax, but it isn't. Coffin gets a little speech, the end. Doesn't work.

Steve Pugh is better on his characterisation than his action scenes, but fortunately, he hasn't been called on to do many of the latter so far. Given the limitations of Marvel's usual colour separators, it's not a bad looking book.

There's certainly room for improvement here, but this works as a slightly warped yet still recognisable take on the characters.

X-MEN: CHILDREN OF THE ATOM. God, I'd forgotten about this thing.

This is presumably the last of the Steve Rude issues before we resume the story with Paul Smith. Rude is the more striking artist, to be sure, but the horrific delays that this series has experienced have not done it any favours, and Smith's a more than adequate artist who should be able to actually get the damn book completed on a sensible schedule. On balance, it's probably for the best.

The main focus of this issue is Scott's recruitment by Xavier, heavily rewritten to get rid of the admittedly rather silly stuff about Jack Winters turning into a man made of diamond. In fact, Casey and Rude haven't changed the story all that radically - they've simply stripped it of its Silver Age trappings and done a fairly straight rendition of the core concept (Xavier rescues hapless brat from nasty criminal). Nothing particularly deep about it, but it's all good solid storytelling.

Meanwhile, the anti-mutant paranoia theme is developed further. This is where the title has been less successful, as it's an area that the X-books have milked dry. While it seems worthwhile to introduce a more conventional militia-like organisation to represent human paranoia (the Friends of Humanity done right, in other words), Casey just hasn't managed to interest me in his Anti-Mutant Militia. Their leader William Metzger is a total cypher with no real personality beyond general scheming nastiness, and despite the superficial differences, there's not much here that we haven't seen before.

Despite the drastic overhaul given to the continuity details, this is the general way of things with this title - it's nothing you haven't seen before, but it's undeniably done with a lot more style than we're used to seeing on the regular titles. And it's not as if a retelling of an old story is really the place to be exploring wildly new ideas. It's exactly what it says on the tin - a classy revision of an old story. I'm not entirely convinced this is enough to deserve all the plaudits that the series has received so far, but I can certainly see what its admirers are getting at.

SHOCKROCKETS is the first product from the Gorilla Comics imprint, coming out through Image, for those of you interested in such things. It's a creator-owned imprint for some of the major mainstream writers and artists.

Kurt Busiek and Stuart Immonen kick things off, and while this isn't a superhero book, it's certainly very mainstream. It's definite space opera territory, almost crying out for its own Saturday morning cartoon series and line of action figures. (To be played with, mind. By children.)

The setting is Earth in the aftermath of a war with the alien Fermeki. The planet is in the process of rebuilding, but given the tone of the series, not in an excessively grim or dark way. Where we're used to see this sort of thing ridiculously overdone with refugee camps and the like, the inhabitants of this Earth don't seem to suffer from anything much more crippling than limited job prospects. This is not a criticism, by the way; grim future timelines are a complete cliche, and it's good to see Busiek trying to bring a bit of shine back to the genre.

Your point of view character is Alejandro, who's bored with his lot but will no doubt be delivered to a new life of excitement and danger after he stumbles into a fight and helps the heroic Shockrockets, whom he will surely be joining in issue #2. Fairly standard opening issue plot, in other words, but as you'd imagine, Busiek uses it as a good vehicle to introduce his protagonist, and piles on his storytelling skills to distract us, more or less successfully, from the formulaic plot.

Stuart Immonen is a vastly underrated artist and it's good to see him - and inker Wade von Grawbadger - on a regular title at last. Even on fill-in work, he's tended to look good. Sci-fi evidently agrees with him, though, as this is a very nice looking book. Of course, the usual high Image production values don't hurt - when you see it applied to artwork like this, it makes Marvel's output look downright shoddy in comparison.

For all the skill that's gone into it, it's really too formulaic to be unreservedly positive about. But it's a great piece of storytelling that deserves to find an audience.