17 december 2000

Over in the actual X-books, CABLE is doing a crisis of confidence routine following Dream's End. Which means, in the manner of these things, that this is a story about his mates trying to cheer him up.

I'm slightly unconvinced about the rationale for Cable taking this all so hard. He's supposed to be deeply upset about the death of Moira MacTaggert, but while that relationship had been alluded to before, it hardly counts as being well-established. Weinberg attempts to fill in the blanks at this stage with a rushed flashback to the aftermath of their first meeting (in the Flashback Month issue), but coming at this stage it all seems rather contrived. If they were going to use Cable for this purpose, wouldn't it have made more sense to give his book the Muir Island leg of the Dream's End crossover, and send Bishop off to protect Robert Kelly?

The X-Men try to cheer Cable up in time honoured fashion - a stunt sequence designed to illustrate their point while holding the reader's interest, followed by quotation of a relevant passage from literature. All fair enough, if rather conventional.

Irene's approach - showing Cable action movies to convince him that he really is a hero rather than just a soldier - doesn't work for me. Aside from the fact that the entire approach seems a bit dodgy in principle, her choice of films is rather bizarre. Soldier? I've not seen it, but unless I'm very much mistaken it went straight to video in the UK because it was deemed too bad to release. Giving us a scene of Cable applauding Kurt Russell's performance just makes me wonder what the point is meant to be. Are we to take it that Cable and Irene have abysmal taste in films? If not, why that film in particular?

Nor am I entirely clear what the point is meant to be for us readers. It hardly amounts to a dazzling character insight to tell us that Cable, a fictional action hero, is comparable to other fictional action heroes.

I appreciate the effort being made here to lend a bit of weight to the Dream's End crossover, which sorely needed it, but this is taking too obvious a route.

UNCANNY X-MEN #389 is one of Claremont's "how many plots can I advance in one issue" numbers. It's still one of his better recent stories, since at least the individual plots all make a fair degree of sense and there's a general sense of the story advancing. On the other hand, since we know Claremont's almost gone, it makes you wonder quite what he's setting up plot points for. Presumably some of this is going to feed into his new team book somewhere.

Our main plot is Xavier in mourning for Moira MacTaggert. Bring on the university flashbacks. Xavier meets Moira (and steals her from current boyfriend); Xavier gets dumped by Moira (but picks himself up again). Nothing wrong with either of these, and they serve as a better send-off for the character than the Dream's End crossover itself. The intercut flashbacks to the funerals of Moira and Robert Kelly are a nice touch as well. All perfectly acceptable stuff here.

Subplot number one is Cecilia Reyes still in withdrawal from that rather pointless drugs subplot a few issues back. She's really upset, but Xavier gives her a pep talk and then she feels better. This is all a bit Disease of the Week, and a decidedly trite way to round off the storyline. I'll give the benefit of the doubt here, though, and assume that this is Claremont tying up his story in a rush before leaving. In which case, it's passable.

Subplot number two goes back to the diaries of Destiny which were introduced during the Alan Davis run. Claremont is obviously rather fond of this idea and seems to be setting them up as a major plot point (presumably for the new title). It now seems that Mystique and Destiny have spent most of their lives trying to decode the cryptic diaries Destiny wrote when her powers first emerged. Mystique's fed up of it and has dumped them all on Xavier to get on with. So it looks like Destiny is going to be posthumously retconned in the X-books' Nostradamus, which actually isn't such a bad idea and could be an interesting driving plot for the new book. I question the attempt to suggest that Shadowcat knew from the diaries that she was always going to disappear, though; you'd have thought she'd have mentioned it somewhere in the story where she disappeared if it was all going to according to expectations.

There's an interesting sequence where Storm and Gambit's conversation with Mystique is rendered partly in faux naive artwork that's supposed to represent the rendition of the same scene in Destiny's diary. The idea of Destiny producing something like that in her automatic writings is a bit contrived, but it still works rather effectively, and the shifts in art style are a nice touch.

I could very much live without the drug withdrawal stuff, but other than that this is a pretty decent issue to round off Claremont's Uncanny run. Which is nice.

And you thought Flashback Month was contrived. This month at the BATMAN office, it's "This Issue: Batman Dies!!!" month. Yes, with the exclamation marks. Because, right, that's the sort of story you used to get all the time in the Imaginary Stories days, right? So wouldn't it be good to have an entire month of that sort of thing now, right?

Well, the creative team of Batgirl obviously thought it was a terrible idea, since they made a token nod to the silly high concept and then went back to the plot. Their commitment to the idea lasted a whopping two panels. I could pretty much see where they were coming from with that, but why not have a look at one of the core Batman books which can't get away with skipping out like that?

So here's Batman #586, which has drawn the unenviable job of trying to make me care about Batman being killed by the Penguin. The Penguin, being a short fat man called the Penguin with an interest in umbrellas, is not somebody I can take awfully seriously as a villain. Ed Brubaker's script does its best to focus on the character as a slightly disturbing psychopath, and skirt round the short fat guy with umbrellas thing. This is reasonably successful, but at the end of the day, it's still the Penguin.

Anyhow, the Penguin's big idea is to play off Batman's origin, re-enact the thing, get Batman to rescue a robot kid with a bomb in it, and blow him up. Sure, yeah, whatever. It's a fairly slight idea, jazzed up with some nicely written dialogue and the usual great artwork from Scott McDaniel, but still a slight idea. And it's not helped by the fact that the big idea is emblazoned on the cover.

Unfortunately, this just confirms my scepticism about the "This Issue: Batman Dies" concept. It just isn't that strong an idea. This is the sort of thing you bash out as a back up strip in an annual, not something you use as a high concept gimmick covering the entire line. It won't take the weight. The creators here are doing what they can, and at least raise it up into mildly entertaining, but the concept is weak.