17 june 2001

We're now into the second month of the X-Men relaunches, which gives Joe Casey a second chance to impress us. Last month, you may recall, UNCANNY X-MEN was thoroughly average in most respects, and below average in the rest. It was defended in some circles by arguing that it was just a transitional issue which didn't even feature Casey's regular cast, and we shouldn't read too much into it. That's an arguable point (whose decision was it to do that story in the first place, pray tell?), but no such considerations apply this month, as Casey packs Archangel, Iceman and Nightcrawler off to London for his Poptopia storyline.

Have things improved?

Well, no, they haven't. The basic point remains the same as last issue - it's not that this issue is actively bad, but it lacks the new ideas that Casey claimed he would deliver. We've seen it before. Allowing for slight differences in scripting style, I can see this story being done by Lobdell or Claremont at pretty much any time in the last twenty years. That doesn't make it bad, but it does make it unoriginal.

And let's be blunt, this is an extremely unoriginal story. There are two plots here. In our A plot, Archangel, Iceman and Nightcrawler find a colony of deformed mutants, outcasts from society, living beneath London. These mutants don't like them very much, and their first meeting leads to a misunderstanding and a fight. At the end of the issue, an anti-mutant lunatic turns up and slaughters them all.

And if you're thinking, "Hold on, isn't that exactly the same as the Morlocks, and a shameless rip-off of the Morlock Massacre, which must be about fifteen years old by now?", then yes, you're right. It is.

The script has the gall to try and tell us that "This crowd make the Morlocks look like supermodels." This is bollocks, and is totally unreflected in the artwork. If Casey seriously believes that he has created a concept here which is any different from the Morlocks then he is, quite simply, wrong.

In the B plot, Chamber stumbles upon teen pop sensation Sugar Kane in a nightclub. After he saves her from being mobbed by a crowd of fans, she takes a shine to him and invites him out for the night in what's fairly obviously a romantic subplot.

And if you're thinking, "Hold on, isn't this the old Cannonball/ Lila Cheney romantic subplot from New Mutants with the sci-fi stuff about Dyson Spheres stripped out?" then yes, you're right. It is. Although in fairness, that plot petered out without going anywhere, so there's a bit more scope for Casey to make an impact here if he's actually got an ending for it.

Nonetheless, this is underwhelming stuff. Virtually every idea in this book can be traced back to an earlier X-Men concept. At least he's reusing some of the better ideas, but that's not really the point, is it?

Casey and Churchill tell the story competently enough, although there are some obvious glitches. Churchill's design for Sugar Kane is utterly divorced from any kind of British pop star I can think of, and looks tacky rather than glamorous. Casey does not help matters much by describing her as "Llandudno's own teen pop sensation." American readers can take my word for it that this is immensely funny for all the wrong reasons. Suffice to say that this character does not register as glamorous so much as ludicrous, which is not the intended result.

Mr Clean, the Genetic Cleanser is a serious misfire. This book has been trading on villains who hate mutants and kill them for no other reason since the mid 1960s. They are not exactly a novelty. You can't just introduce a bloke with a flamethrower who hates mutants and expect me to do anything other than yawn. There's no need for another generic mutant-hater. If Casey expects me to care about this guy turning up, he needs to establish what makes him different from the herd. Giving him a crap name and a job description based on the Balkan Wars does not count as a fresh idea, and indeed is actually rather tasteless.

This is passable if you're looking for average X-Men stories of readable quality. Had this come along without much fanfare as just another in the string of X-Men writers, it would have fitted in nicely enough (by virtue of changing nothing). Unfortunately, Casey is right up against Morrison on the other book, who makes this stuff look awfully small and unimportant in comparison. Because it is.

The issue marks a minor landmark for the series in one respect - at least on the Barry Windsor-Smith cover (which looks like a bit of a rush job, let's be honest), there's no Code insignia. That would make this the first non-Code approved issue of Uncanny X-Men. Not that anyone really cares by this point.

Meanwhile, THAT CLAREMONT BOOK moves into its second issue (with Code intact, if you really care). And yes, I am going to carry on calling it that until Marvel get a f--king clue and change the name, because it's the worst name for a comic in history, bar none, and I refuse to have it appear in anything I write.

There's not much change here from the first issue, so I'll just repeat the key points again. Chris Claremont has an extremely distinctive writing style. If you like it, you will be blissfully happy. If, like me, you find it incredibly annoying these days, you will find the issue incredibly annoying. You already know whether you like Claremont.

The plot this issue has the captive X-Men still running around as prisoners of the Guardia Civil, although we're apparently going to retroactively call them the Action Force. (Which somebody else holds the trademark on - hell, Marvel UK used to publish the licenced book - but that's something for Marvel's lawyers to worry about.) They run around a maze. They beat up the nasty cops. But an even nastier villain turns up and engages in acts of generic nastiness, leading up to him either seriously wounding or killing Psylocke at the end of the issue. Damned if I could work out which it was meant to be.

Oh, and if you're wondering what the point was of the subplot last issue that separated Rogue from the team... so am I. She heads straight back to join them in this issue, and I have no clue what splitting her off was meant to achieve, except perhaps to give her a few pages in peace to have rather pointless flashbacks. (This issue has a sequence of her angsting horribly, only for the other X-Men to come up and give her an inspiring peptalk; it doesn't add much.)

The story is just about competent. Now that we've established that rival book hunter Vargas was responsible for tipping off the cops, it's at least apparent how the events of the first issue were meant to tie into the main storyline of the hunt for Destiny's diaries - though it would still have been nice to make that point clear in the first issue, and give it a bit more focus. The question, as always, is whether you can tolerate all the Claremontisms.

Be warned: in the course of two panels, this issue features the lines "I am Elisabeth Braddock. I'm called PSYLOCKE!" and "I am... VARGAS!" If you roll your eyes heavenward at Claremont yet again having his characters standing around proclaiming their own names, then you will never hack it through this issue with a straight face. I certainly didn't.

BAD WORLD is another of Warren Ellis' side projects through Avatar, which so far seem to have been mainly a vehicle for him to vent his more bilious body horror ideas. This one's a bit different.

What we have here is not a story. Purists may wish to engage in technical arguments as to whether it's strictly speaking even a comic, so much as a series of pin-ups with accompanying text, or some kind of illustrated essay. The idea here is that this is a series of visions of "the world as seen by conspiracy theorists, visionaries, the mentally ill and the sadly deluded." Bizarre worldviews, which Ellis appears to have dredged up from assorted corners of the Internet.

Ellis has addressed this subject before in an essay he wrote about the unfortunate David Icke. Icke doesn't crop up in this issue, though I suspect he may be in future instalments. Icke, who is either a charlatan or a delusional lunatic, has been touring the world for the last few years solemnly proclaiming that the world is being secretly ruled by twelve-foot Annunaki lizards from the lower fourth dimension. As Ellis' original essay pointed out, if Icke really believes this stuff, he must be living a very unpleasant life, scared of the lizards around every corner. (He claims that George Bush is an evil extradimensional lizard, incidentally, which would admittedly explain a few things.)

This issue contains a selection of illustrations accompanying brief passages of text about a variety of such people. I have no idea whether any of these is actually based on fact, and I certainly wouldn't take the existence of a web page as particularly compelling evidence either way. The issue does carry the standard copyright disclaimer that everything contained is fictional, which sits rather oddly with the content, but there you go.

Anyhow, it's an interesting selection of deranged worldviews, many of which would make pretty good springboards for stories in their own right, if only some poor bastard wasn't (allegedly) actually living in fear of them. Some of Ellis' choices seem out of place given the theme - it may well be very unpleasant for them to be selling aborted foetuses in China, but if it's actually happening, what exactly does it have to do with delusional worldviews? The story of Spanish political dissident Manuel Cortes, who allegedly spent thirty years hiding in a small cupboard, is also very interesting, but not really to point. After all, Cortes had every reason to fear unpleasant consequences from a fascist government. His reported response to that may have been highly eccentric, but there's nothing delusional about it.

But most of the issue is given over to concepts that fit the premise nicely. A women who claims to be an alien; bizarre consiracy theories about simulated armageddons; a man who thinks he can survive on sunlight alone. Weird stuff, with some highly effective illustrations that give Jacen Burrows the opportunity to show off his range. This guy's obviously wasted at Avatar, and hopefully books like this will get him some higher profile work. It's an intriguing and entertaining book, with enough focus on how these poor bastards must be viewing the world to raise it above being just a set of cheap laughs at the expense of the mentally ill.

A point on pacing - with no indication of the end of the "story", the pacing of this issue feels very odd. Rather than building to any particular natural conclusion, the issue just stops and moves on to advertising Avengelyne comics. This doesn't work. I realise that Warren's principal focus these days is on the blessed trade paperback format, but if you're going to bother publishing something in monthly format, there needs to be some thought put into the pacing of that series if it's to be anything more than a cashflow exercise. Abrupt halts due to page count expiry are not the way to go.

Well, this is... audacious.

CEREBUS #267 is the second of two issues bridging the gap into the final storyline, which will see us through to issue #300 and the death of Cerebus. As everyone probably knows by now, this series is meant to be chronicling the life of Cerebus right to its end. This is always going to read a bit oddly taken as a whole, given that the first few issues were a funny animal parody of Conan the Barbarian, but since very early days the book has been following the character's life in a fair amount of detail.

In recent years the story pace has slowed to glacial. The character spent several years sitting in a bar in a monumentally tedious storyline which seemed largely to be an excuse for Sim to pay tribute to some of his favourite cartoonists. More recently, he was packed off on an exceptionally protracted riverboat journey accompanied by a parody of F Scott Fitzgerald. The book has not exactly been advancing its plot at a rip-roaring pace.

This issue covers several decades in twenty pages.

Basically, Cerebus goes off to another part of the world and becomes a famous player of Five-Bar Gate (a game Sim introduced back during the bar stories, but suffice to say it's vaguely like tennis). Unfortunately, Cerebus is famous entirely for being the bloke who makes it to the final every year and then loses to the really good one.

Needless to say, this issue (and the previous issue, which covered several years of Cerebus' life as a shepherd) have involved a sudden swing back to economical storytelling, and it makes for rather more satisfying issues. It's questionable whether, even in trade paperback format, the previous storylines have really required the insanely protracted page counts they received. For all the weirdness that's been coming out of Sim in recent years, though, he remains an exceptionally accomplished storyteller, and it's great to see him changing the pace to do some comedy for a change.

Fortunately, there's none of Sim's obsession with feminism in this issue. On the minus side, Sim chooses to introduce the first prominent black character in the series (to the best of my recollection), and whether or not you agree with Sim's questionable anti-PC justification in the accompanying essay, surely jokes about black guys having huge dicks went out with the flood. It's a tired old routine that doesn't suit the tone of the story at all, and wouldn't work for me even if it didn't instantly set off all my white middle-class liberal sirens.

Nonetheless, Sim seems to be somewhat back on track of late, although his lengthy ramblings about Jeff Smith in the text pages still make you wonder what the hell he's smoking (hasn't he already given his alleged final word on the subject?). A couple of really grating flaws drag it down, but on the whole this is a rather good, and unusually accessible, issue.

Finally this week, we turn our attention to PUNISHER, which kicks off with Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon and Jimmy Palmiotti reprising their recent miniseries.

For those keeping count, this is the sixth Punisher series. If you add in Punisher War Journal and Punisher War Zone, it's the eighth, and his fifth ongoing series. Some might say that the character has been done to death by this point. The recent Ennis/ Dillon series addressed that point by taking the series in the direction of black comedy and away from being a straight guns-n-ammo title, but still didn't lay to rest the feeling that here was a character who worked rather better in small doses, and who would get awfully tired very soon in an ongoing title.

This first issue consists largely of Ennis hitting the rewind button and undoing large chunks of the final act of his miniseries which isn't altogether encouraging. Detective Soap has been kicked out of his job as police commissioner, and returned to hunting down the Punisher as a one-man task force. The Russian, who was fairly emphatically killed off towards the end of the last series, is back, albeit in such ludicrous form that it raises the comedy stakes even further.

It's basically more of the same, and while that means it's still entertaining for now, it does make you wonder how much more mileage there is for Ennis in this character when he's going so shamelessly back to concepts from before. If he's just undoing the ending so that he can go in a different direction then, well, it's clunky but fair enough. If he's just resetting to an ongoing status quo, then we have a problem. And while Ennis is trying to exaggerate what he's done before, he's skirting dangerously close here to making the Russian so absurd that he doesn't fit in the story at all. Sure, it's funny, but it does sit very oddly against the rest of the issue, in a way that it didn't before.

I'll have to be guardedly positive about this issue, but "guarded" is the operative word. This shows worrying signs of pushing a good idea too far.