17 february 2002

Well, that little rant really put me in a good mood for everything else. But don't worry - today is my 27th birthday, so I am in a good mood after all. Aside from the feelings of creeping mortality and age, of course.

Anyhow... a ton of stuff to cover this week, so on with CABLE #102 and the cloned Albanians.

Given that this is a storyline about attempted genocide, Tischman and Kordey continue to take a somewhat tongue-in-cheek approach to the plot, fully accepting that a ton of cloned Albanians is inherently a bit silly. The point, presumably, is that the racial purity obsession is indeed silly, and the clones are only absurd because they take an already dumb idea to its logical conclusion.

Tischman's stories generally seem keen on maintaining a bit of moral ambiguity, so it's interesting to see him give Cable a speech which effectively rejects the entire concept of moral ambiguity. Tischman's Cable takes a purist approach denying that morality is anything other than totally objective. While this goes some way to justifying him in his willingness to interfere in convoluted national disputes, the position the story gives him is so hardline that it makes him read like an unsympathetic zealot. That's not really consistent with the character, and while we're undoubtedly meant to reject his position, it does seem to lead the story in the direction where it isn't really ambiguous, it just condemns everyone.

It's eminently readable, but as with the Peru story, there's a shortage of characters that it's possible to care about. Neither ethnic faction is particularly sympathetic (though the Albanians are marginally more likeable), and by turning Cable into a self-righteous moralist, Tischman leaves me cheering for the guy who shoots him on the last page.

ICEMAN limps to a conclusion, a mere six weeks after the issue was meant to come out.

The good news is that Karl Kerschl is back on the art. Despite a couple of areas of unclear storytelling (what exactly happens to Weiss at the end? Is that ice? Is he exploding?), Kerschl's art is very easy on the eye, and hopefully we'll be seeing more of him.

The bad news is that this is one of those stories which already used most of its ideas in the first couple of issues, leaving the finale to wrap up the plot and little else. The plot is duly resolved in relatively commonplace manner - villains are defeated, boss enters fight personally, boss is defeated too. An epilogue reveals that the baby wasn't Iceman's after all, which isn't exactly a surprise, since we all know perfectly well that nothing of importance will ever, ever happen in a solo miniseries.

Taken as a whole this has been one of the better Icons miniseries, since at least it reads as a nice enough story in its own right, even if the plot seems to have been designed to use a whole load of ideas (such as Foe-Dog) which have little or nothing to do with the lead character. The trade paperback will be inevitably marred by the ridiculously incongruous art on issue #3, which wasn't bad in its own right but will never work in collected form.

It's not bad. But it's another Icons storyline which seems to exist for no other reason than that somebody decided to do an Iceman miniseries, and then needed a plot to fill the pages.

The MUTIES miniseries is going to be a string of unconnected stories about mutants in "real life" settings. The writer on this issue is Karl Bollers, who has been responsible for some truly diabolical Marvel comics in the late nineties (Machine Man/ Bastion, anyone?). Fortunately, this is noticeably better.

Judging from the reviews, this seems to have divided opinion between those who thought it was a nice little character piece, and those who thought it was a load of cliches which needed to be a damn sight subtler to get away with its obvious Columbine riff.

Quite honestly, I'd completely forgotten about Columbine until reading those reviews. Probably comes from being British, but when I read stories about school shootings in the USA, I don't associate this with Columbine. I associate it with the fact that the USA is swimming in guns. While guns in schools seems to be a trigger issue for many American readers, all it does for me is confirm my existing impression of the USA.

Anyhow... it IS true that this issue is swimming in stereotypes, with the poor downtrodden nerd, the girl he's besotted with, and the nasty malicious jock. That's clearly a deliberate choice, because the point of the story is to do a twist ending (basically the same one that was used in Origin #2), and you can't do a twist ending without leading the audience by the hand in the wrong direction. Having said that, there's a difference between sterotypes and archetypes, and there's not really enough character depth here to make the twist as effective as it obviously wants to be.

The art, painted by Peter Ferguson over layouts by Salgood Sam, is certainly distinctive. Aside from a bizarre page near the end which lapses into linework (and simply doesn't work, whatever it was trying to achieve), it's pretty effective, avoiding the usual attempts in painted art to be photorealistic. At times it's a bit rubbery, but the incorporation into the art of ruled paper and other such motifs is a nice touch.

The biggest problem with this issue is that up until the twist it is indeed a pile of cliches; and as a result the characters aren't sufficiently alive to give the payoff the dramatic weight it clearly wants to have. Nice idea, though.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about NEW X-MEN is Grant Morrison's shameless use of some stock plot elements. Of course, his plots have always been frameworks to hang the ideas on, but even so this plot is an old standard.

Cassandra, disguised as Xavier, has destroyed Lilandra's flagship and is doing nasty things in the Shi'ar empire. Lilandra despatches a messenger to Earth to warn the X-Men, but he's too badly beat up to deliver the message. Meanwhile, Xavier's going to die unless the bodies are swapped back...

All very standard stuff, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the story go for the most obvious resolution (namely, "Jean uses the power of the Phoenix to outpower Cassandra and swaps their minds back so that Cassandra is trapped in the dying body and is defeated"). It's not a major problem given that Morrison's focus is more on the ideas and the characters, but the plotting is verging on overfamiliar territory.

But Morrison does the classic routines very well, and leaves plenty of space for the characters. Emma's speech at the school assembly hits the right tone, Hank's annoyance at his mutations is nicely handled, and Scott and Jean have finally found a way to interact which doesn't turn them into a simpering mulch. I'm a little less convinced about the pseudo-science explanations for Cassandra - the knack of good pseudo-science is that it should get the point over without being bogged down into the kind of specifics that expose it as gibberish. The bizarre speech about Cassandra being born without a body and then "improvising using Charles' cells" is bad pseudo-science, because the more you think about it, the more obviously meaningless it becomes.

Frank Quitely is back on the artwork this issue, and despite a couple of spots where Scott in particular looks awkward, it's generally a beautiful issue. He's at his best on the large scale set pieces such as the exploding ship, and Smasher's crashlanding on Earth.

Not the strongest Morrison/Quitely issue - it tilts a little too heavily towards the genre conventions - but it barrels along well enough to stay entertaining.

ULTIMATE X-MEN appears not to have any credits on it whatsoever (nor does this week's Elektra, for that matter), but I'm going to assume this is Chuck Austen and Essad Ribic tying up their Gambit two-parter.

You probably won't be surprised that everything turns out nicely in the end, as Remy rescues the innocent little girl and beats up the baddies. Oddly, after spending most of last issue positioning Remy as a much more straightforward character than his Marvel Universe counterpart, this issue throws in an allusion to him having a history involving Mr Sinister. (Fortunately, it looks like this time round he's just going to be called Nathaniel Essex, which is a much less silly name.)

The X-Men put in a token appearance to invite Remy to join, in a cute scene where Remy apparently assumes they're from a religious charity and tells them to get lost. Probably wise to have them turn up somewhere in this storyline, just to keep the fanbase happy.

This being Ultimate X-Men, much of the issue is devoted to a nice big fight between Gambit and the villain, albeit on a much smaller scale than we're used to. It's a great action sequence, with some real energy in Essad Ribic's artwork. After that, we get a rather cutesy, but just about acceptable, finale with the little girl staying marginally on the right side of punchable.

Given that this is a fill-in two-parter, it's been surprisingly good.

X-TREME X-MEN moves onto another storyline, and it's rather silly.

What we have here is a plot which hinges on the questionable coincidence that the gem on Storm's costume happens to be part of a really important set of magical gems which Gambit has also always been obsessed with. This really pushes suspension of disbelief, way past any reasonable limit.

Those of you who found Lifeguard intolerably naff will no doubt be appalled to see that her brother Davis has now developed surfing-themed powers. Isn't the surfing craze over? Wasn't that a few years back? I'm having horrible flashbacks to Razorback, the CB Radio-themed hero of the 1970s. (Although admittedly, neither Lifeguard nor Davis has yet seen fit to dress up as a giant humanoid pig.)

Not only do Davis' powers turn out to be almost ridiculously convenient for the plot, they're also used as the basis of a bizarre argument as to whether it's morally justifiable to activate them. (Er, why wouldn't it be?) Then there's a big fight with a generic villain with no personality, and the dreaded re-emergence of scenes where Rogue yells "I'm Rogue!" in the middle of a fight.

Not at all good.

Marvel seem very keen on the Udon studio at the moment, and the latest phase in their push is the TASKMASTER miniseries.

Orders haven't exactly been spectacular on this issue, which shouldn't surprise anyone. After all, it's a miniseries about a third-tier supervillain who's never been that much of a threat, has never been in any particularly memorable stories, and hasn't got much of an established personality. What he's got going for him is an intriguing power - the ability to copy anything he's seen done once - and that's about it.

Not surprisingly, then, Udon embark on a heavy revision of the character, although they take care to acknowledge that he's changed. The motivation, to do something a little more challenging than training henchmen, is reasonable enough, and so they're now positioning him as a mercenary. Amoral rather than immoral, that kind of thing.

The story makes some imaginative uses of the Taskmaster's gimmick, most of which are very sensible extensions of the idea. His power has usually been portrayed as the ability to copy fighting moves, but as defined, there's no reason why he shouldn't be able to do things like copy body language to improve his acting skills, or copy sleight of hand techniques. I draw the line, though, at him using his powers to copy voices - that isn't visual, and that's just extending the concept too far. It's a nice simple power, don't blur it by shoving in things like this which don't make sense within the premise.

Overall, though, the development of his powers is a clever move which makes them meaningful again, rather than just reducing his powers to a complicated way of saying he's very good at fighting.

Since it's his book, the Taskmaster seems to have had a vast overnight upgrade in his ability levels, and is now able to singlehandedly fight Iron Man to a standstill. They're really pushing their luck with that one, but they just about get away with it. Just. Given that all he's trying to do is get past Iron Man and escape, it skates within the bounds of credibility.

Art is in Udon's usual clean style with an obvious animation influence. The new Taskmaster costume is a definite improvement, although the mask is decidedly inexpressive. Still, at least he doesn't look like an idiot any more. Their Iron Man is a bit shaky, though - they obviously want to draw it as an actual suit of armour rather than a glorified costume, and the result is to make it look very clunky. Incongruously, his faceplate seems to have developed facial expressions, and that doesn't work - certainly not when the lead character's faceplate doesn't do them at all.

Entertaining, although a bit on the superficial side.