17 september 2000

Only two days late - not too bad. I've spent the weekend moving out of my old flat into this delightful and far superior interim accommodation, where I shall remain for a month before decamping to Glasgow and moving into my cottage.

Anyhow, on with the reviews. CABLE #85 is the beginning of Robert Weinberg's second storyline, which is presumably going to be a two- parter given that there's a whopping great crossover lumbering towards us. Necessarily, this is a rather simpler affair than the previous storyline. Weinberg gets various subplot teasers for future storylines out of the way at the beginning, and then gets on with the business of Rachel Summers.

The idea, basically, is that Rachel has been washed up from the timestream at the end of time, where she has been taken in by Gaunt, the most evil man in history (tm), who was banished there himself after trying to conquer the universe. Although it's not made entirely clear from this issue, presumably the idea is that now that Cable's eliminated his home timeline, Rachel no longer got washed up there after Excalibur #75, but ended up here instead.

I'm not altogether sold on the whole idea of bringing Rachel back. What do you do with her? She's one of those ridiculously powerful characters who never sat very easily on any of the X-teams simply because of the chronic power mismatches that resulted. Excalibur used to have dreadful problems in finding villains who could provide opposition for both Rachel and Nightcrawler, and generally ended up copping out and finding some way or other to incapacitate Rachel from the outset so that the rest of the team could get on with a nice fight. I'm not convinced that a greatly improved future awaits the character if she gets written back into the mainstream storylines. Having said that, her relationship with Cable never really got looked at in any detail, so I suppose there's some mileage there.

Gaunt himself derives most of his interest from the House on the Borderline concept rather than anything he actually does. Much of his behaviour is pretty generic - he's set himself up as a token ruler, he's captured Rachel for no particular reason, he's challenging Cable to a fight for (when you get down to it) no particular reason. He'll do for a two-parter, and I suspect Weinberg is not the sort of writer who will be heavily reusing his characters, but more could probably have been done with him.

The subplot scenes are of more interest, with Cable being enlisted as a pupil by some kind of time travelling martial arts instructor, and mysterious characters turning up to point out plot holes in Blaquesmith's back story. As for the main story, it's clearly got a job in mind, and it gets it done well enough.

The thing about these four part Counter-X arcs is that by the time you get to part three, there's not much more to be said about them. GENERATION X is up to part three of its Shockwave arc, and it's still basically about the other schoolkids turning on the team while Adrienne hangs around ominously.

And I've pretty much said what there is to be said about this - that it's far more in touch with the basic mutant concept than the other X-books, that it works because it's on the small scale, and it's also an effective character piece for the team as well. So no point repeating any of that, really. It's not that the story's dragging, it's just maintaining the same thing for four months, which feels about right.

Guest art this month comes from Alan Evans, who I've never heard of before, but turns in some very good work. There are some great panels here - Everett and Angelo with their Playstation, and the birds gathering outside the school stand out. It's much better than Steve Pugh's work has been looking lately, and while that's widely reported to be due to chronically unsuitable inking (which will soon stop), Evans is still somebody Marvel clearly should be using more often.

Rob Liefeld's run on WOLVERINE isn't anywhere near as bad as I'd feared, although you will appreciate that that still leaves it with considerable scope for mediocrity.

As tends to be the case with Liefeld, the Watchtower is actually a perfectly adequate idea - he just doesn't get to grips with any of the interesting aspects. The gimmick is meant to be that they're a government-sponsored group up to all sorts of illegal and unethical experiments with a long term aim of using their findings to make the world a better place. While this isn't exactly groundbreaking stuff, it's a perfectly sound starting place to do a story about scientific ethics.

And in a vague sense, that's kind of where Liefeld's heading. We do get a story in which Siryn's voice is restored thanks to a healing factor obtained through illegal experiments carried out on Wolverine. Unfortunately, nobody really gets into any of the issues this raises; characters simply stand around proclaiming black and white opinions. The Watchtower's opponents, led by a character with the godawful name of Geronimo Crowe, simply assure us repeatedly that the Watchtower are very bad indeed, without actually backing their opinion up in any way.

Nonetheless, the germ of a decent story is in there. It's just a shame that Liefeld chose not to pursue it, but instead to concentrate on the all-important fighting. The Watchtower field a bunch of generic henchmen led by a generic smug villain. Their opponents are entirely generic aside from the unexplained presence of (no, really) a Sentinel with dreadlocks, which is certainly an odd one, but never translates into the character being anything very special. Nor does the story manage any particular conclusion - Siryn gets cured and everyone apparently just goes home.

In fairness, Liefeld's got a few more issues to go in his run, so it may well be that he's got plans to follow up on this in future and develop the ideas properly. But for the moment, this is pretty much what we've come to expect - an idea that had something going for it at the start, but veered off into a rather pointless fight somewhere along the line.

I'll take the three issues of X-MEN: BLACK SUN together, since they're pretty much indistinguishable.

This series seems decidedly unclear about what it's trying to achieve. Nominally, this is meant to be commemorating the 25th anniversary of the debut of the new X-Men in 1975, but it doesn't seem interested in doing anything of the sort. Instead, we've got a new Magik running around (who has nothing to do with any of this), the new X-Men appearing for the most part only as characters possessed by the N'Garai, and the original X-Men carrying the book. It is not altogether apparent to me how the new X-Men are meant to be commemorated by an N'Garai story that they're not even really in.

The idea is meant to be that the possessed 1975 X-Men are running around chasing the "originals", but this never really comes across particularly clearly. The disparity in numbers forces Claremont to treat Polaris as an original X-Men (which she wasn't), and to wave Wolverine aside on the basis that Belasco isn't mad enough to try to possess Wolverine (which seems a bit contrived, to put it mildly). Nor is there any explanation of how Belasco got the new X-Men together in the first place, or why he wants the founding X-Men (particularly on a definition loose enough to include Polaris). A degree of contrivance is only to be expected in anniversary stories, but this is pushing it.

As for the actual stories, the routine is the same for each one. A couple of N'Garai impersonating the X-Men go after some of the original X-Men. Pilgrimm shows up to complicate the fight. The N'Garai steal the founding X-Man's soul. Magik turns up belatedly and absorbs the X-Man's body into the Soulsword. That's the plot of all three issues, with a bit of conversation for the characters bolted on at the beginning to try and make them look different from one another. It gets a bit wearing after a while.

It doesn't help that I'm still not remotely interested in Belasco or the N'Garai. I've never been a particular fan of X-Men stories that veer off into mysticism, since it's not really what the characters are about. Belasco's choice of targeting the X-Men seems ridiculously arbitrary, despite an attempt to claim that he and the N'Garai view the X-Men as their greatest enemy. Nor, for that matter, am I particularly interested in Belasco or the N'Garai at all - it's just the usual generic conquer-the-world villainy which only works when it's providing something for the lead characters to play off. When it ends up as the focus of the story, things rapidly become dull.

The choice of artists is odd considering that this is supposed to be some kind of anniversary special. Issue #2 gets Thomas Derenick and Mark McKenna, who are perfectly competent if slightly dated. Issue #3 has Karl Waller, who gets a few good panels in there but does fairly average work for the most part. Issue #4 gets Alitha Martinez and John Stanisci, who do some rather meaty demons and are otherwise unexceptional. (That issue also has a bizarre sequence in which the dialogue stubbornly assures us that a cairn is made of skulls when the art clearly shows nothing of the sort.) For co-writers, we've got Len Wein, who wrote Giant-Size X-Men #1 and is therefore a reasonable choice; Roy Thomas, who wrote the X-Men in the late sixties and kind of makes sense; and Louise Simonson, who was the editor for a while in the 1980s and seems a rather bizarre presence. All three do a decent job with what they're given (Wein even remembers that Shadowcat should be surprised that Magik's alive), but the collaborators are a slightly surprising selection for a commemorative project like this.

Black Sun is marginally better than some of Claremont's work on the regular titles, but still pretty weak - it's got generic villains, a repetitive plot, and it really doesn't work at all as any kind of anniversary celebration.