17 october 1999

CABLE #74, and no Rob Liefeld. Obviously psyching himself up for the double-sized issue #75. Bets are now being taken on how many pages he'll actually manage to draw.

Anyhow, in his place we have Bernard Chang, who's obviously a major improvement. While his style may be too cartoony for some tastes, it's a pleasure to see some real storytelling ability on this book. Okay, so the sequence where Caliban smashes his way out of X-Force's base just looks weird. And there's something very, very odd about Chang's rendition of San Francisco, which looks more like the Age of Apocalypse - I kind of suspect this was a communication problem. On the whole though, it's a good looking issue, and Chang manages to make the new Caliban design work.

As for the script, this is more build-up to the upcoming big millennial fight with Apocalypse. While X-Force flounder around adding colour, the real point is to establish Caliban and Deathbird as Apocalypse's Horsemen, and to advance the plot by getting Cable captured. It's a perfectly efficient job but nothing to get too excited about. Deathbird's sudden involvement in this plot is a bit surprising, and I'm vaguely interested to see where that's heading. Caliban, to be honest, I lost interest in years ago. Does this man do nothing other than stumble around and be manipulated?

Perfectly okay, but really an issue spent putting the pieces in place for decent stories to come rather than a good story in its own right.

GENERATION X has also got a guest artist, and this time it's Darick Robertson from Vertigo's Transmetropolitan. Robertson's an artist whose calling doesn't really lie with superheroes - he's never really at his best doing grandiose set pieces. The character scenes here look great, the fight scenes less so. And he never really gets a handle on Emma Frost. Still, it's a decently told story and although the Dodsons do this sort of thing better, it's nice to see an artist of Robertson's quality being used as a fill-in. Even if it's not a story that plays to his strengths.

Hmm. I don't usually devote much time to talking about art, mainly because I don't really have much of interest to say about it. Yet here I am opening a review with it twice in a row. Not a particularly gripping story, then?

Well, half and half. The main plot, in which the hunt for Penance in the woods is complicated by a lost sasquatch, is pretty much superficial action at its most superficial. It doesn't grab me. The subplot, with Monet's father coming to visit his children and trying to play the liberal father with Emplate, is far more interesting (and, of course, plays far more to Robertson's strengths). There's some great story potential in the idea of this poor, well-meaning man trying to achieve a meaningful relationship with his psychopathic son.

Still, most of the issue is the sasquatch/Penance stuff, and it just doesn't interest me at all, I'm afraid. I realise Jay Faerber is trying to do the "we were wrong not to trust you, Penance" plot, but surely there must be better candidates for a real villain than a sasquatch?

Oh, one other point that strikes me. If the team are going to be wandering around the woods close by the school where they all live, wouldn't this be a very good time for Sean and Emma - two pretty prominent people - to invest in costumes with masks? I mean, it's not as if the kids wouldn't recognise them instantly as it is.

So, it's a substandard story and a good artist dealing with the sort of script that doesn't show him to best effect. Still, it does have the Monet material.

Howard Mackie is up to his old tricks again. MUTANT X is showing distinct signs of being written with no plan in mind. This issue is a mess of promising plots being ignored, bizarre new plots being introduced, tedious retreads of themes already being done to death in the main books, and a couple of ideas that misfire so badly it makes your jaw drop.

Last issue, you will recall, was Alex being reunited with his brother Scott. They didn't get to talk much, so no doubt there'll be some deep character material this issue, right? Wrong. Will there bollocks. Scott's not even in this issue, and he's not even mentioned. We're forgetting that plot, apparently. You know, the one that was in mid-flow last issue. You don't mind, right?

So what do we have instead, exploiting the alternate reality concept to the hilt? Why, the US government is turning against mutants.

Dear god, how many times are Marvel going to try and rehash this same bloody concept? It's been beaten half to death already! Here we have a fresh new universe, which was originally set up as having good mutant/human relations, and where entirely new aspects of the whole mutant concept could have been explored. But no, sod that, we're going to do exactly the same thing as the other books. Pathetic.

Meanwhile, the X-Men are nuked for no other reason than to save Mackie the bother of explaining any of the plot threads he had hinted at with them, and three characters show up in new costume designs that defy belief. Cary Nord is a great artist, but dear god, what was he taking when he designed that Sunfire costume? It reminds me unshakable of the Steve Dillon artwork in How To Be A Superhero showing the down-at-heel superhero begging for money. I'm sure it's not meant to. The Captain America costume is a T-shirted mistake, and the less said about the dire take on Sebastian Shaw the better. (Hint: taking a villain and giving him vague civil rights platitudes to spout is not characterisation. It's cheap irony.)

Costume misfires aside, Nord's sketchy artwork is still by far the best thing about this series, although more and more that's not saying much. In any event, it's not enough to recommend this issue, which seems to me to completely miss all the potential of the series in favour of playing it as safe as humanly possible. And it doesn't even do that well.

My god, what are we coming to when the best X-book is John Byrne's X-MEN: THE HIDDEN YEARS? But it is, and in fact it would have put in a pretty good showing in any week.

If anything, it would be an understatement to say that John Byrne has fallen out of critical favour in recent years. Too many people forget that Byrne produced fifteen years of material that was generally pretty good before going off the rails in the last few years. As little as five years ago, people were raving over his series Next Men. Now, a new John Byrne title is greeted with about as much enthusiasm as a diagnosis of syphilis.

It's not as if this is without foundation, either. Too much of Byrne's recent work has spent too much time trying to reconstruct continuity into some kind of imagined platonic Silver Age perfection and too little time telling decent stories. His last twelve months have been pretty much a nadir. If Spider-Man: Chapter One was weak, then Spider-Woman was lame, and The Hulk had had both legs amputated after an unfortunate incident with a thresher.

So when word comes down of not just a Byrne series but, god help us, a Byrne series set in past continuity, it's understandable that people are going to be sceptical. But the preview story in last month's X-Men was a pleasant enough affair, and this issue keeps up the quality nicely. Perhaps this actually is going to be the series that reminds people why we used to like Byrne.

The series picks up just after the X-Men's cancellation in 1970, and understandably a fair part of this first issue is devoted to summarising what the X-Men had just been up to. However, it's a double sized issue, so that still leaves plenty of space to get on with the plot. This is mainly a spin-off from the Thomas/Adams Savage Land story, as Xavier points out (not unreasonably) that assuming supervillains have died is a very, very stupid thing to do, and packs the X-Men back off to the Savage Land to check.

Where, to be honest, not a great deal happens that doesn't normally happen. There's a curious subplot where Magneto crops up as a ghost, which is obviously making use of the fact that we all know he isn't dead. But mainly it's the usual affair of crashing in the Savage Land and stumbling upon some hostile savages. Nonetheless, Byrne keeps it readable with good interaction between his characters and consistently solid artwork.

This time round, Byrne seems to have his priorities right, taking the period as a springboard for new stories rather than bogging himself down in the details of the original stories of the period. It's a promising starting point, and it should go a long way to improving his reputation. Admittedly, the recent commercial track record of past-continuity titles has been dire, and you wonder how long it'll be before this series is down there with Webspinners at the bottom of the charts. But if Byrne manages to fulfil the promise of the first issue, he deserves better.