17 march 2002

Happy St Patrick's Day to all those Americans out there still bafflingly determined to claim Irish ethnicity. Why not make your day extra-authentic, by making fun shapes with semtex, arbitrarily hating people with marginally different religious beliefs, and banning abortion? All while listening to the soulful sounds of Westlife.

CABLE is still in the Yugoslavian clones story, and this issue is a bit of a mixed bag. As Tischman and Kordey set about moving the story towards its climax, they throw in some plot developments that range from awkward through to just plain silly.

Goldberg, previously seen only in a brief subplot scene in issue #101, is brought into the foreground in this story and positioned as a bit of a stirrer who's deliberately setting out to cause conflict between the ethnicities. To put it mildly, he's not a very well fleshed out character, and seems to be largely a vehicle for a weird globalisation conspiracy subplot. The gist is that Goldberg causes assorted chaos in eastern European countries so that once the dust settles, the west can move in and build some more Macdonalds. Buying into this line of argument, in the absence of any real characterisation, requires you to accept some seriously simplistic anti-globalisation politics in lieu of actual logic or common sense.

Another serious problem is the simmering subplot with Gani (the assistant cloning scientist) and the clone he's made of his sister Ana (who, of course, he shot in issue #101 for the capital offence of having been raped). It now transpires that a key part of their mutual story arc hinges on Ana having memories of her previous life up to the point of death. This is so scientifically illiterate that it just doesn't work in the absence of an extraordinarily good explanation. Tischman seems to want us to just accept that clones will remember the lives of their "parent", and that calls for a degree of scientific ignorance which few readers will be able to supply. It's a shame as, in theory, the character arcs are quite interesting. But when they're reliant on plot points as flimsy as that, there are problems.

These subplot elements aside, the storyline glides onward in much the manner we've come to expect. The general themes are fairly interesting; Kordey's artwork is consistently strong; and the story is packed with a ton of vaguely sketched supporting characters who really aren't adding a great deal to the story besides clutter. The overall package is still decent enough, but this issue stumbles.

I had hoped we had seen the end of incoherent, incomprehensible, poorly thought out crap when Mutant X was cancelled. However, those nostalgic for those halcyon days may wish to check out DEADPOOL #64, which is really spectacularly bad.

First, the good. The art's quite good. And this is Frank Tieri's last issue before Gail Simone comes on, which is very good news.

And now the bad news. Call me old fashioned, but I like to think that one of the core elements of basic competence is that the story should actually make some degree of rational sense. This issue fails that test of basic competence. It fails on a huge, glaring and embarrassing scale.

The basic plot of this arc, as regular readers will know, is that Frank Tieri has shamelessly ripped off the "Reign of the Supermen" storyline, as the dialogue expressly acknowledges in this issue. Of course, there is no actual point to the rip-off - if you're being very charitable, you could call it a homage, but it's essentially just the reuse of somebody else's plot in lieu of actually having an original idea. Being open about it doesn't make it funny, doesn't make it clever, and certainly doesn't make it worth reading.

Now, here's how the plot departs completely from the realm of sanity. T-Ray, dredged up from the Joe Kelly run of several years ago with no adequate explanation for new readers, reveals that he is behind the recent events. Fair enough. T-Ray says that he has used a magic thingie provided by his boss to extract elements of Deadpool's personality, forming the copy Deadpools, the idea being to leave Deadpool as an empty shell. (As the epilogue makes clear, the employer is Thanos, trying to keep Deadpool away from his beloved Death.) So far, so good - assuming, of course, that you're familiar with the previous storylines referenced, since god knows there's no serious attempt to explain them here.

Now... Deadpool somehow breaks the cosmic thingy. Multiple readings of this scene have failed to disclose to me how or when he supposedly did so. Bad storytelling, to put it mildly. As a result, all the Deadpools disappear. But not into Deadpool (even though we were shown on panel that they'd come from him in the first place). They disappear into T-Ray. Why do they disappear into T-Ray? Christ only knows.

Deadpool then interprets this unfathomable sequence by delivering the following immortal line of dialogue, which is, of course, completely unsupported by any actual evidence in the story itself:-

"If T-Ray absorbed all the components of my personality, that mans he was never me in the first place. I was always the real Wade Wilson. I knew it."

A prize to anyone who can explain to me on what planet that makes even the slightest degree of logical sense. It sure as hell isn't this one. Needless to say, this clunky and incoherent attempt to retcon away Joe Kelly's T-Ray story achieves nothing in the context of the story, and is unaccompanied by any explanation of the original plot. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the original, the idea was that "Wade Wilson" wasn't Deadpool's real name at all, but rather an identity he stole from the man who went on to become T-Ray. This was always a rather questionable idea insofar as it complicated Deadpool's origin without really adding very much to his character. But it did at least provide T-Ray with a clear motivation for hating Deadpool.

So what we have here is an incoherent resolution, which makes no logical sense on any terms, certainly not its own, which attempts to retcon away a storyline that has no relevance to the current plot, which fails to do so in a way which makes sense, which fails to explain to its readers what it's trying to accomplish, and which leaves the storyline's primary antagonist without any motivation.

This is drivel. I'll allow most of the adolescent excesses of Tieri's Deadpool run as matters of taste, but this issue is simply inept.

Avoid at all costs.

Ah, ORIGIN.

Nothing in this issue is likely to change the opinion that you've already formed of this series. Logan's character gently develops into something more like the character we know today, but there's still no real sense that any of this has the faintest relevance beyond its own boundaries. What I'm looking for in an origin story is something which informs the character's subsequent actions and sheds light on his motivation. What we have here is the functional equivalent of a six issue prestige miniseries about Peter Parker: The Kindergarten Years.

The glacial pace and minimal amount of conflict don't do much to build excitement. Logan gets into a bit of a fight with a jealous cook, who really needs a more rounded character if he's to be an interesting antagonist in such a leisurely series. Logan hangs out with the wolves a bit. Logan feels a little bit jealous that his redhead companion is interested in another man.

It's all a bit bland, reading like it was nailed together to a Merchant Ivory blueprint of Oscars-style quality. And there's something about Andy Kubert's art which makes the digital painting effect look like a very artificial gloss on work which really wants to be starker and more aggressive.

On the final page of the penultimate issue, the series finally gets around to introducing Sabretooth. Or, strictly speaking, it brings back one of the kids from the first two issues - but you get my meaning. It's a little bit late to be reintroducing the character's arch-enemy into the main plot at this stage, though.

It's inoffensive enough, as far as these things go, but nowhere close to the back cover's attempt to convince us that this is "the most amazing journey ever."

X-FORCE #125 is the best of this week's X-books, although it isn't one of the book's strongest issues. The problem with this issue is that it seems to be trying to cram too much plot in one issue, which results in a choppy read, as the story races from scene to scene.

Having said that, the book's still packed with great character material, and some great comedy moments. Even when it isn't running quite as smoothly as usual, this is still a wonderful book which is miles ahead of the competition. The storyline also seems to be setting up for the name change - which, cheekily, is attributed in plot terms to the need to avoid paying royalties. And as we all know, that's one of the real world reasons for the change as well.

The story sees X-Force being blackmailed into a ludicrously dangerous mission largely designed to make the CIA look good. The solicitations for this issue teased a death scene by asking which team member the hand of death was pointing at. In fact, that blurb turns out to have been literally accurate - while recruiting new team member Dead Girl, Guy, Tike and Edie are literally confronted by a spectre of death which points at them. Not sure whether that was intended as a piece of misdirection, but it's cute nonetheless.

In one of those unfortunate plot devices which I've never liked, we're invited to accept this as a guarantee that one or other character will die in the upcoming storyline. Hopefully Milligan is heading for some misdirection here, since there's no apparent reason for the characters to reach that conclusion. There's also a glaring plot hole in the fact that nobody seems minded to ask Dead Girl what the hell was going on in that scene, even though it's taking place in her home.

Nonetheless, the character arcs are strong enough to barrel through those problems. Edie's mixture of loyalty to Guy and shameless self-interest is nicely balanced, and the relationship between Myles and Phat is developing amusingly in the background.

A bit rushed, and with some ropey plotting, but still solidly entertaining.

X-TREME X-MEN has a fairly tiresome issue this week. The story's clear enough, but it's nothing particularly new or interesting - aliens have invaded Madripoor, and the X-Men have inadvertantly captured their leader, who for reasons best known to himself was leading the advance party. (Which, now I write it down, I suddenly realises is unbelievably silly.)

Anyhow, Khan hangs arund with the X-Men for a while until he's rescued by his pet thug Shaitan, by which time he's decided that he wants to (yawn) cart Storm off to be his queen. So as she happens to be conveniently unconscious, he takes her with him. Isn't it time to pension off the old "I will take you to be my queen" storyline yet?

Aside from a subplot about Viper's rules of engagement, that's pretty much it for the story, and there's nothing particularly interesting about it. The villains are at best thinly sketched characters, and certainly some way short of being interesting.

Throw in the usual selection of dramatically pronounced names, the sudden appearance in the plot of Red Lotus (who wasn't there at all last issue), and Davis Cameron suddenly developing a codename between issues (just like Lifeguard did), and you have a bland story irritatingly delivered. The hardcore Claremont fanbase will find it more to their taste, of course, but there's little here to impress.

BLADE is back, in an acknowledged attempt to cash in on the popularity of the films. And why not?

The last two times Marvel tried a Blade series, the results could best be described as mortifying. The miniseries released to tie in with the first movie sold so poorly that it was cancelled halfway through its run. The subsequent miniseries by Bart Sears remains one of the most jawdroppingly awful comics of the last decade, and believe me, I don't say things like that lightly.

With a track record like that, Marvel would have been hard pressed not to achieve a substantial improvement. And certainly, as far as the commercial objectives are concerned, this is much more like it. This book is not in the Max imprint because it's trying to be arty. It's in the Max imprint because it's unbelievably violent.

This is not really a horror comic. Horror is about subtlety, whereas this book is much happier chucking around buckets of blood and killing vampires with drills. In fact, the gushing blood is so far over the top that it verges at times on unintentional comedy. If your tastes run to something a little subtler (as mine do), then this is probably not the book for you.

There are some more interesting ideas lurking in the subplots - Blade's network of senior citizen informants make for a nice contrast, or the corporate vampire hunters (albeit that they seem to be an attempt to play Men In Black straight). And when he isn't vastly overdoing the blood, Steve Pugh's art is pretty solid.

Overall, though... it's a hack-n-slay book, you know? I was hoping for something more.