16 september 2001

The problem with CYCLOPS is that it has a villain with a Heath Robinson scheme.

A Heath Robinson scheme is where the villain has a basically lucid and simple objective which he wants to achieve - in this case, to teleport Cyclops to the Savage Land and fight him to the death - and yet somehow manages to come up with the most dementedly contrived manner imaginable of achieving it.

In this issue, for example, we learn that Odysseus has gone to the trouble of hiring Black Tom Cassidy and the Juggernaut to kill Cyclops, knowing that they would fail, knowing that he would then follow them back to their aircraft, knowing that he would get them to safety but remain aboard himself, and planning to then teleport the entire aircraft to the Savage Land with Cyclops aboard. It's one of those "Yes, I knew you would run down that precise alleyway and stumble over that brick" pieces of plot mechanics.

In the obligatory "Well, why the hell did you do all that?" routine, Odysseus explains that if he had simply kidnapped Cyclops, the X-Men would have come after him. To my mind, this rather overlooks the minor fact that he HAS kidnapped Cyclops, and has simply done so in the most roundabout way conceivable. Wouldn't it have been a lot simpler just to send the thugs after Cyclops with a teleporter, and save all the nonsense with the aircraft?

It's a shame that the book is dragged down by these contrivances, since Vaughan does have a pretty good handle on Cyclops' character, and he has some nicely thought out reactions to all of this lunacy. Odyssesus is also a potentially interesting character, although the "aggrieved leader avenging his men" routine is hardly original and for the moment it's little more than a device to justify the fight scenes.

Texeira and Palmiotti's art is annoyingly inconsistent. Texeria usually benefits from some grimier inking, which take the edge off his cartooning excesses. There are some excellent panels, but some hopelessly sketchy or inadvertantly comedic ones as well. Incidentally, the lettering spellchecker puts in an irritatingly amateurish appearance as well, as Cyclops talks about his advisor. That's the advisor he wears over his eyes.

There are a couple of interesting ideas in here, and the character work on Cyclops is strong, but the plot seems like a incredibly convouted method to generate some disconnected action spots, rather than an actual story.

Now here's an oddity. An issue of ULTIMATE X-MEN that I kind of liked.

Millar's idea of a young readers' book is still some way different from that of anyone else on the face of the planet, as he continues to pile on the torture and viciousness. Yes, admittedly there's no blood coming from any of the corpses, but that's a rather shallow justification if that's the sort of reasoning they're using.

Nonetheless, judging the book as what it actually is - namely, not a kiddie book in any way, shape or form - this issue isn't bad. Millar's depiction of the Weapon X Program is still ridiculously over the top, but at least he remembers to include some characterisation this time, and there's a degree of credibility to the character interaction. Having Tom Raney on art helps matters; this sort of material has never really been the strong point of either Kubert brother.

Millar introduces the Ultimate Nick Fury this issue, and in his typical manner seems entirely uninterested in the original character, so takes the name and welds it onto somebody entirely different. I'm still bemused as to what the point of the Ultimate line is meant to be if Millar isn't even going to make a pretence of writing versions of the original characters, but there you go.

But Millar's Fury, despite being a rather generic "cool under pressure" type, does at least get back to one of the key points of the SHIELD concept which the Marvel Universe lost long ago. He has cool toys. Even Millar's determination to undercut any sense of wonder by drivelling on about budgetary limitations can't quite undercut that. The Marvel Universe SHIELD have been stuck with sixties sci-fi for decades now, and long since stopped looking remotely advanced. Flying cars, for heaven's sake. Gerry Anderson's dead, you know. Millar has at least rethought this aspect properly and even if his Fury hasn't got much of a personality, at least he's got a gimmick that works. The original version hasn't had that for years.

Most of all, though, this issue seems a bit less pleased with itself than usual. So for once, I don't want to punch it. That's certainly a plus.

And X-TREME X-MEN is having a reasonably decent month as well.

We seem to be leaving Vargas aside for now and moving onto a different storyline, with Gambit being framed for the murder of a crimelord in Australia, and the splinter X-Men showing up to help him out. It's not a complicated plot, to put it mildly, but it's clear enough.

Claremont seems to be toning down some of his more aggravating quirks - there's only one page of really purple narration in this issue, gushing over Sydney's Chinatown at excessive length. Otherwise, the dialogue seems to be a bit more concise, and generally less couched in Claremontisms. (Or "less stilted", to put it another way.)

I can't honestly say I find it terribly interesting. It's a standard plot with the character development going in fairly expected directions. To be honest, there's not much here I feel particularly driven to comment on, other than that it doesn't get on my nerves as much as usual. Still, as far as I'm concerned that's still a plus.

It's okay, but for some reason it doesn't engage me.

ESTABLISHMENT is yet another in the seemingly endless line of Authority spin-offs that aren't anything like Authority. It's better than Monarchy, in that it actually makes sense.

I had low expectations of this one, largely because it's written by Ian Edginton who ploughed X-Force to a creative low at the tail-end of the Counter-X run (not to say a moral one). As it is, this isn't bad but feels incredibly artificial.

The gimmick is that the Establishment are a secret British superhero team, and the book is largely an excuse to play around with British pulp fiction archetypes. Or, to be slightly more accurate, other people's characters shamelessly ripped off, if the interviews are anything to go by. This issue isn't too blatant about it, and if anything the incessant references to old British TV shows just end up coming across as out-of-place throwaway jokes.

It's a bit like a cross between the WildStorm Universe and Granada Plus, the digital TV station where Man In A Suitcase will be broadcast for eternity. Nothing about this issue really convinces me that there's any point to the exercise. There are a lot of TV references in here which seem to have been included for absolutely no story purpose other than to maintain the supposed gimmick. I really fail to see how any sense of drama is helped by referencing Fawlty Towers, Grange Hill and - for heaven's sake - Time Gentlemen Please. If Edginton was trying to do some kind of postmodern commentary then this might make sense, but I'm damned if I can see anything of that sort lurking beneath the surface. This routine worked in Paul Grist's Jack Staff, but here it seems like irrelevant gimmickry bolted onto a completely unrelated story. And the editorial at the end of the issue strongly suggests that that's exactly what it is.

But fighting for space beneath all this junk (how many people have even SEEN Time Gentlemen Please?), there's a somewhat interesting if utterly unrelated story surrounding hasbeen gangster Charlie Arrows, tm and copyright Kray Brothers, Inc., trying to put his life in order before his imminent death. And there's some superhero stuff going on as well. Charlie Adlard seems a good choice of artist, as well, strong on character and conveying an effective sense of location and atmosphere.

There's something in here, but I'm damned if I can see what it's got to do with the gimmick. Maybe this will become evident over time. Otherwise, the formula needs tweaked.

Onto the Max line, and FURY sees Garth Ennis doing...

Doing...

What the hell does he think he's doing?

Well, I'll give him this - at least he's not doing his usual soldier routine, about the wonderful loyalty and comradeship of infantrymen under fire. Here, he seems to be purposely setting out to make us hate every single character in the book. Fury is presented as an annoyed relic from the Cold War era who is more or less a reactionary asshole. Again, this raises my question of what the point is of reviving a character if you're going to reinvent them beyond recognition - Fury was never even a Cold Warrior figure to begin with - but it's an out of continuity series, so let's take it no its own terms.

Ennis is presumably going for the "unreliable narrator" routine here, presenting the entire book from Fury's point of view and therefore portraying assorted other characters in the most pointlessly hateful way imaginable. We're presumably intended to reject the character's point of view, but that still doesn't explain to me what the point of the exercise is.

I've seen it argued elsewhere that the book is a satire, but of what? Essentially, Ennis is presenting us with an asshole, and asking us to reach the conclusion that he is an asshole. That's not satire. That's just stating the obvious. And if that's the point, then it comes across loud and clear in this issue. I have no clue why I'm meant to want to read the rest of this book. If I'm expected to reject Fury, then Ennis can take pride in knowing that I reject him so thoroughly I don't have any interest in reading the rest of the series.

Assholes are assholes. What kind of satirical point is that? What kind of point is that, period?

I'm confused. I'm confused because it's crap, and I don't expect Ennis to be crap. If it was any other writer, I'd just slam a D+ on it and be done with it. But it's Ennis, and I can't quite shake the feeling that I must be missing something obvious. I wondered if I just wasn't in the mood for it this week.

But after much careful consideration, I still think it's crap.

US WAR MACHINE is an interesting experiment in format, if nothing else. It's a (relatively) cheap black and white weekly title, which is being illustrated by Chuck Austen on his exciting hi-tech computer thingy, and is obviously influenced by the cheap, high-volume formats popular in Japan.

However.

It pains me to say this about two thirds of the Max line's launch titles, but this isn't much good either. I'm told it picks up considerably in future issues, but we'll see about that. For the moment, what we have here is two scenes - one of Tony Stark withdrawing the War Machine armour from the government, and one of War Machine fighting some terrorists. The overall plot is not immediately evident, and given that this is basically a "show off the armour's capabilities" fight, fifteen pages seems a tad excessive.

Now, I know that in Japan the storytelling style frequently takes that amount of space to handle these scenes. But in Japan, they have more pages so the story still advances. Here, we still have the usual page count, so the upshot is that the story spends fifteen pages inching forward at glacial speed. Even within this, there are odd plot glitches (if Iron Man's only just been announced to the public at a press conference across town, why are passers-by mistaking War Machine for him?).

War Machine is a natural choice for Austen's computer art, since the armour doesn't have the problems of facial expressions. Unfortunately, while Austen can touch up the faces himself, there's still a serious problem here with body language and other such subtleties. Many of the sequences here are very static, and while the computer is doing a nice job of getting the vanishing points right, it doesn't look to be doing any of the tricks like exaggerated perspective.

I wanted to like this, and on the basis of reports that it gets much better I'll give it another couple of issues, but this is not a good start.