16 december 2001

Welcome to week two of Extremely Bad Idea Month, as Marvel continue to demonstrate the amazingly limited scope of purely visual storytelling.

A word on the ratings may be in order. I rate comics according to whether the product was any good. I do not, as a rule, give marks for effort. I do not care whether the story was awfully hard to write. I do not make allowances for the fact that the silent month gimmick is an editorial imposition which did not originate with the creators. If it damages the book, if it results in a ludicrously inappropriate storytelling technique for the story in question, if it, in short, looks contrived, ridiculous and absurd, then the mark is going to reflect that. Clear?

Before that, though, CABLE #100, which is an anniversary issue and therefore is allowed to do a real story as well. Thank god for that, because this is the final part of the Peru storyline, and this means we get to see it done properly. After all, what idiot would suddenly shift to silent storytelling for no artistic reason halfway through a storyline? But more on X-Treme X-Men later.

The story reads a little curiously. Tischman seems to have hit a spot of difficulty here. He wants to present Cable as entirely victorious in this story, which means that the Shining Path get wiped out as an organisation. But he also wants to make sure that we know that the Peruvian government isn't very nice either, meaning that Cable has simply acted to preserve an unpleasant status quo.

According to Tischman's interviews, and the extract from his original pitch which is reprinted at the back of the issue, Cable believes that a Shining Path government would be bad for the people of Peru. But this theme hasn't come across very strongly in the storyline itself. There hasn't been enough on the merits of a Shining Path government for the story to position Cable as somebody who has chosen the right side, or even the more persuasive side. The end result is that he looks undermotivated, and his victory isn't as satisfying as it could have been. In fact, given that the Peruvian government are so unpleasant and that the Shining Path are shown as having genuine popular support, if anything the story gives the impression that he's chosen the wrong side.

We do get a reasonable enough explanation for Cable and Inza's incongruous embrace at the end of last issue (at least from his perspective - her actions are still tricky to justify). There are some interesting uses of Cable's powers, and yes, there's the obligatory sex scene. The idea of the Shining Path children setting up their own little camp as a splinter group of Askani is quite appealing as well.

Unfortunately, the plot mechanics are a little shaky here. The Shining Path's economic control of the Peruvian national debt was always a little vague as a plan, but it's far from clear how anything Cable does in this issue acts to remove that threat. He gives out a videotape, purportedly in the name of Ernesto Sanz, but what was on it that stops him using his economic leverage, even from jail? For that matter, if Cable is using his telepathy to mimic Sanz's appearance, how would he have been able to do that on the video? Did he force Sanz to record a message? Would that really make any difference in the long run?

There's some equally rickety plotting in the scenes where Cable wipes up some stray Shining Path members who are in the course of a bank robbery. This scene appears to have been included for the primary purpose of fulfilling the genre quotas for action scenes, but it's also meant to be making a general point about the Path's lack of direction without Sanz. Tischman's justification for Cable knowing where the robbery was going to take place is almost impenetrable, and appears to boil down to "He understands the way they think so he knows which bank they're going to rob, and at what time they're going to do it." Not convincing, I'm afraid.

A bit of a jumble, then. There are some interesting ideas here, and the art is consistently strong, but it doesn't entirely click. Still, it's better than American Century.

The back-up strip for Silent Month is Cable meditating on a beach and having techno-organic spasms for sixteen pages. The point appears to be to obliquely advance the subplot about Cable being able to get rid of the techno-organic virus, and while the exact point that's being made is wholly unclear to me, it does at least provide Igor Kordey with an opportunity to do some interesting layouts. Ultimately a bit of a throwaway, but what do you expect? As a back-up strip, it works rather more effectively than it would have done presented as an issue in its own right.

X-FORCE #122 is not the Silent Month issue, since it's running late. Instead, this is the second half of "Lacuna", which bucks expectations by not actually having her join the team at all.

This is another excellent issue, as Milligan both resolves Lacuna's story arc and uses the new characters as an opportunity to do some character development. Despite the seemingly random uses of her power in the previous issue, Lacuna's powers turn out to be nice and straightforward after all. It's basically the gimmick that they used to do on appalling daytime sitcom Out Of This World, except we've been viewing the effects from everyone else's point of view.

The twist ending for Lacuna's story arc is less than subtle - she finally realises that she doesn't really want to rebel against the system at all, she just wants to annoy her anti-establishment parents, and so she acts accordingly. It's still funny, though, and it works as a resolution to the two-parter.

For the main cast, the Spike is rather oddly added to the team despite not having done a great deal besides wander around as a deliberate stereotype in the previous issue. His main function seems to be to give the Anarchist something to worry about. With an eye on genre rules, the Anarchist fears that he will be killed off because there can't be two token blacks on one superhero team. Of course, all the X-Force characters are caricatures when they first appear, so we'll see where Milligan's going with the Spike - assuming he actually makes it past next issue, which is never a given.

The running theme continues of the X-Force members attempting to come up with some kind of public image that will increase their profile. The Orphan has now decided to tell more jokes, which is unfortunate since he has absolutely no sense of humour. I'm not quite sure where Milligan's heading with that one, except perhaps to illustrate that the character isn't quite as understanding of those around him as he first appears.

Interestingly, after a few months of continual exposure to Allred's work, it's now starting to feel more natural for the book and less retro. It helps that Allred opens with a few pages that, while stylised, are emphatically not Silver Age layouts by any stretch of the imagination. The colouring has also been taking a more unusual approach, with the characters still stubbornly coloured in uniform shades, while proper cloud patterns, reflective surfaces and such forth are inserted into the background.

Great stuff - and in its roundabout way, the book has managed to make its characters seem more real than I would have expected.

X-TREME X-MEN #8, on the other hand, is a Silent Month issue, and as Claremont tacitly acknowledges in his script, this one was at least interesting for the train wreck potential. If there's anyone out there who you can't imagine writing a silent issue, it's Chris Claremont. Whether or not you think the amount of text in his books is excessive, it's undeniable that his stories tend to be very dialogue-driven.

So in doing a silent story, Claremont is writing against his usual style. There are two ways that this sort of thing can pan out. One is that by forcing himself to explore different storytelling techniques, he discovers some that he likes, and helps broaden his range. (This happened to whichever Kubert brother was drawing the Hulk during Flashback Month, by the way - he spent the next couple of years drawing in grid layouts anyway, because he decided that he liked them.) The other possibility, naturally, is that Claremont writes an entire issue playing to his weaknesses and the result is a mess.

In any event, this issue suffers right from the start by virtue of the fact that there is no apparent creative justification whatsoever for doing this story silently. This is the fourth part of the Australian storyline, which means that we have a very jarring style shift between this story and the previous issues (not to say the final chapter next month). It will, of course, look ludicrous in the trade paperback.

Nothing about this story - which largely consists of a lot of running around and fighting - suggests that the silent storytelling approach was a sensible choice. It doesn't take place in a setting where there is no sound, and in fact Claremont cheats wildly on the entire concept by including sound effects throughout the issue. The absence of any dialogue, in this context, is a hopelessly artificial device. Devices like that need to be used sparingly in circumstances where the distancing effect is one that the creators actually want. I cannot for the life of me think of a single reason why this story benefits from having no dialogue. All it does is alienate the reader from the story by being a constant reminder that this particular issue has been the subject of a very silly gimmick. It's impossible to get into the story at all when the single overwhelming impression is silence - a silence which has zero connection with the story and is therefore inappropriate.

There are those of you who argue that silent storytelling is a wonderful device, that great things can be done with it, and that therefore Silent Month is a fascinating and interesting idea. You are all wrong, and this issue is a marvellous illustration of why. It is a technique that is only appropriate for a limited range of stories, and for most other stories, it damages them rather than complementing them. Worse, it absurdly interjects itself into the middle of a storyline. It is, quite literally, the equivalent of the writers of ER deciding to write ten minutes in the middle of a show in iambic pentameter, for no plot or creative reason, but simply in order to win a bet. It is an aesthetically wrongheaded decision on every level.

Undeniably most of Claremont's trademark problems are absent here, because the gimmick drags him so far away from his usual writing techniques. To an extent, I have to admire Claremont's nerve in even attempting this issue as a silent story (rather than taking the easier, and probably wiser, option of doing an entire story of Sage's hallucinations and flashbacks - cheap, obvious, but at least vaguely suited to the narrative device). This is a particularly difficult story to make work in silent form because large chunks of the plot hinge on visual illusions, and the audience being able to recognise what is a hallucination and what is not. Deciphering the plot takes a hell of a lot of effort as a result, and while to their credit Claremont and Larroca do manage to get it across, the action-sequence romp that Claremont is trying to do would have worked a lot better and more effortlessly if it wasn't such a slog trying to decode what the hell is going on. The information's all there, to be sure, but that would also have been true if the entire issue were published in French.

Comparing the story with the script at the back, there are a few points where Larroca has failed to get across the point that Claremont has in mind. One of these, in particular, suggests that Larroca is working from an inadequate translation of the script - in a hallucination sequence, the script called for Rogue to wear a nightgown. What Larroca has drawn is an evening gown, which needlessly confuses the scene (the point was meant to be that she and the half-dressed Gambit next to her had just got out of bed, presumably setting up a sex-equals-death guilt trip based on her finding the rest of her teammates dead in the next panel). I have to wonder why this wasn't sent back to be re-drawn, since it's so obviously an error when you see it in comparison with the script.

Less glaringly, there are numerous other panels where the key elements just don't come through as obviously as they should have. The next two panels, for example, are meant to show Vargas standing over the bodies of her dead teammates, but only one body and a head are actually visible. And to be honest, on the first read through, I assumed it was a some kind of reference back to the Rogue/Ms Marvel thing again, because from the angle Storm's body has been drawn, that's who she looks like. Then there's scenes such as Bishop and Teri Baltimore surrounded by gunmen in a lobby, which the script expressly describes as a pull-back-and-reveal moment of visual comedy. Larroca has drawn it perfectly straight, when he should have gone over the top, and as a result it isn't funny. It doesn't even look like it's meant to be a joke, for that matter.

This issue is a mess, not because of any of the usual complaints I have about X-Treme X-Men, but because the silent month device is so ridiculously and absurdly out of place, making the story infinitely harder to follow, for absolutely no creative benefit. Full marks to Claremont for effort, but I don't rate effort.

Gail Simone and Lea Hernandez's KILLER PRINCESSES is a miniseries from the ever-reliable Oni Press, and it's of some interest to us here anyway, since Simone is going to be the next writer on Deadpool. This is her first totally original story (her other published work has been for Simpsons Comics), so much interest there.

Simone's reputation largely stems from her humour column, You'll All Be Sorry, and she's playing to her strengths with this book. Which is fine by me - I've been saying for years that comedy is incredibly under-represented as a genre in comics, particularly given that it's about the only type of comic that normal adults will voluntarily read. You'd have thought that alone would be a good argument for publishing some more, but apparently not.

Killer Princesses is a weird concept. It's about three ditzy prom queen types who simultaneously attend university and carry out assassinations on behalf of their mysterious Sorority. Normally, prom queens (and jocks, for that matter) get a very rough ride in fiction, since writers can almost always be relied on to side with the underdogs. What we have here is cheerleader as anti-heroine. It hasn't been done before, I've got to admit.

While it's an interesting idea, I have trouble with the internal consistency of the set-up. The girls are presented as being downright stupid when they're at their university, but they come across as fairly effective in action. I can't quite buy the idea that characters that ditzy could get past the door without being killed - I know the whole point is to play the bimbo and assassin schtick off against one another, but I can't really reconcile how the characters can be that dumb for some purposes, and yet perfectly competent for others. It makes it very difficult for me to think of them as people rather than as a vehicle for gags.

Now, admittedly, they primarily are a vehicle for gags, and quite funny ones too. Given that this is largely a set-up issue, you'd expect it to be too busy with the plot. But the book kicks off with the Princesses on a typical mission, and that gives plenty of time to establish the idea and work in lots of good material to begin with. Hernandez' art is strong on the characters and comedy, though there are moments where it seems to struggle with the more complex choreography. It's a funny book, and works on that level. To the extent it seems to be trying to do more serious undertones, I'm not quite sure - although the anecdote told on the opening page is great material, and comes very close to making the concept make sense.

The Sorority, and its motivations, look like they're going to be a focal point of the plot. Next issue focuses on a new pledge arriving. We don't actually have sororities or fraternities in British universities, and it's one of those American institutions that I've never really felt I understand no matter how often they crop up in films. (Although I get the clear impression that I would hate them.) Unfortunately for me, I have a suspicion that this series is going to be spending a bit of time doing jokes about a subject I know precisely zero about, and which I consequently won't get at all. That's not a problem with the comic - it's aimed at an American market, after all - but it may pose problems for me in future issues.

Oh, and by the way, this is the book which Oni inadvertantly printed with page five twice, instead of the more boring and conventional option of including page six. Page six is available on their website, and while it's funny, it doesn't include any key plot points. The story does read a little oddly without establishing that the girls were in the elevator shaft, but that's nothing catastrophic.

Promising and funny, but possibly stretching credibility a little too far with the girls' inexplicably fluctuating IQs.