18 february 2001

Another week in which the X-books are completely overshadowed by new releases going on elsewhere in the industry. Although in fairness, the X-books ought to be keeping their heads down at the moment so as to save themselves for the big push in May. Me, I'm trying to work myself into the Grant Morrison mindset by listening to arthouse music that pretends it's pop. Today, Chicks on Speed. (And they're pretty good, in fact.)

Anyhow. BLINK.

There's meant to be a rash of X-Men miniseries coming up this year. That announcement was met with groans from people who remember Marvel's last wave of X-Men miniseries, when they were churning out any old nonsense in the name of filling up the schedule. Cynics would suggest that the same may happen with this new wave, and god knows books like Blink - not to mention Gambit & Bishop - are doing nothing to disabuse us of that notion.

This isn't a bad book as such, but it's certainly one that shows no signs of being desirable or necessary. The adventures of Blink in the Negative Zone? Why? The overall impression is of the creators going through the motions with a view to padding out the four issues. You'd have thought the obvious thing to do with this miniseries was to set up the upcoming Exiles title that Blink's supposedly going to be starring in. There's no apparent sign of that happening, and if this IS setting up Exiles, then my expectations for that book are going to have to be revised downwards.

We kick off with Blink meeting a man in the Negative Zone and having a pointless fight with him until they are interrupted and he decides to be a nice character after all, delivering the "Hah - I am impressed by your warrior skills, little one!" speech. This tired old cliche devours thirteen pages, which is just absurd.

Blink and Bloke then go off to meet an oppressed people so that Blink can observe the similarities to her homeland. So one oppressed people is very like another; what a dazzling insight that is. Thanks for sharing.

Trevor Kavanagh's artwork is improved somewhat from the first issue - he's no longer so obsessed with playing games about Blink's underwear, and he does at least draw some dynamic action scenes, even if he's hopelessly in debt to Adam Pollina in terms of style. The book actually looks quite good, considering that it's got a 13-page opening fight scene to trudge through.

But there's little here to hold your attention. It's a filler story in which a character goes off to have an unimportant adventure, and it's an unwelcome throwback to the bad old miniseries of yore.

CABLE is continuing the Dark Sisterhood plot, which presumably may have undergone a bit of rewriting as Robert Weinberg wonders how to bring his run to some kind of truncated resolution.

The routine this issue is that Cable and friends are abandoning his safehouse, and Cable's trying to destroy the building before the Dark Sisterhood can take control of it. That, as you would expect, involves a lot of skulking around corners trying to activate all of the explosives. It's a rather contrived set-up, but at least we're given a semi-reasonable explanation in that somebody (presumably the Sisterhood) has managed to shut down the automatic triggers.

Unfortunately, the Sisterhood come out of this rather badly. So far they've been put across as a highly impressive mystical organisation of anonymous types in robes. This time, they're put in costume and sent out to have a fight, and they get trounced despite the twenty to one odds in their favour. It doesn't do much for their credibility as opponents.

The explanation of their origins doesn't help much either. They're described as, essentially, an organisation formed by super-powered women as a mutual defence against witch-burning and persecution. That's an interesting starting point, but Weinberg more or less throws it away by explaining that they've been corrupted into an organisation that wants to take over the world. This is comics - everyone wants to take over the world, and the Dark Sisterhood need more than that if they want to stand out. By taking away their air of mystery and revealing them as a bunch of mutants who want to take over the world for no clearly explained reason, Weinberg effectively leaves them looking rather generic.

If the Sisterhood had some kind of clear agenda for what they were going to do on taking over the world, and that agenda tied in somehow to their supposed origins as a self-defence union, then this might be interesting. But none of that comes across. The Sisterhood's portrayal as a religious cult is also undermined by the depiction of Sister Bonita, the exiled member who tries to obtain sanctuary from Cable. While she's got a decent reason to want sanctuary from the hero, she just doesn't act like she ever had any kind of religious investment in the Sisterhood's activities. The effect is to make their costumes look like a rather silly affectation.

There's some interesting material here with Irene and Blaquesmith, continuing the subplot about Blaquesmith not being trusted by the others. It's a shame a footnote in this issue blows part of the ending of Search of Cyclops, but that's hardly Weinberg's fault. Nonetheless, the main Sisterhood storyline really doesn't work here. The issue effectively robs the Sisterhood of their existing gimmick and doesn't give them anything much in return.

MUTANT X lumbers towards its much-deserved cancellation by introducing its version of the Avengers. Eagle-eyed readers may raise the little niggling point that the Mutant X Avengers were already introduced, and killed, in the 1999 Annual. In fact, come to think of it, I think they've been killed off twice already in this series.

But never mind, this is Howard Mackie, and he takes a broad brush approach to storytelling. In the same way that a car wash might take a broad brush approach to cleaning your teeth. As always, subtlety is at a premium here. Mackie wants this group of Avengers to be the villains, so he gives us a team including the Black Widow, Deathlok and Typhoid Mary. He then has everyone reacting as if these are the most impressive heroes on the planet, which is silly. The combined Iron Man and Giant-Man raises a smile, admittedly, but the team as a whole isn't very interesting.

Where Mackie is heading with all of this is to try and build up a world war sparked by tensions between the US and Canada. The groundwork for that was laid fairly early on when it was established that there had already been a third world war between the US and Canada. That was fair enough for purposes of getting establishing that it was risky for American heroes to be going into Canada, but now that Mackie is trying to put it over as a serious threat, a bit more explanation needs to be done of what the hell is meant to be going on here. Naturally, no such explanation is forthcoming. Entitling the story "Blame Canada" hardly helps to put the war across as a serious threat.

The usual routine here - Mackie has a couple of decent ideas, a lot of bad ones, and can't build a decent story out of any of them.

On to this week's new books, and BLUE MONDAY is back for a second miniseries. The implausibly named Chynna Clugston-Major delivered an amusing if lightweight story in the first series, so it's nice to see this one back for another go.

The official description of Blue Monday has always been that it's a "teen dramedy", a genre description that I assume means "like Dawson's Creek with jokes." The first miniseries wasn't like that; it was an outright teen comedy, mainly focused on Bleu's attempts to get tickets for an Adam Ant gig. According to the letters page, this series is meant to be moving more in the drama direction, but it still feels much more like a teen comedy. (Teenage boys filming girls in the bath from a hidden vantage point? Spiking the punch?) Yes, there's more of an emphasis on character interaction this time around, but the overall impression is definitely comedy.

Not that that's a bad thing; Chynna is playing to her strengths here, and she has some great comic timing. Some of the routines are perhaps a bit obvious - the two I mentioned above, for starters - but she does them awfully well.

The book still has its bizarre obsession with bygone Britpop. Few people in Britain would even admit to having seen Absolute Beginners these days, let alone name a miniseries after it. Chynna's music obsessions are endearingly anal, if nothing else, with footnotes reprimanding her for failing to remember which third-division indie band recorded "Save it for Later." Mind you, her classical music's a bit shaky - a "whole pit full of oboes and trombones and saxophones" is apparently playing Bach, which is rather more fundamentally wrong than confusing the Beat with General Public.

But never mind. The incongruous mixture of American story content, dated British soundtrack and vaguely Japanese art style is part of the book's style, and you can let it away with a few oddities when it strays from its home territory. It falls a little too easily into using the old standard teenage prank routines, but it's still an entertaining read.

When I was a kid, British publishers had a standard method for pushing new titles. You made the first issue really cheap. Or you threw in issue #2 for free. Something like that. The idea being that the promotion is a loss leader. Get the audience in the door, and then hopefully they'll come back and pay the full price.

THE CRUSADES is one of Vertigo's new ongoing series, and they've adopted a rather bizarre version of that approach. Their first issue is the Urban Decree one-shot, which has been published in the vastly expensive Prestige Format. But DC have knocked a dollar off the price. Meaning that it's now just in the expensive Prestige Format. Six dollars fifty Canadian sounds like an awful lot for a cheap introductory issue.

It's only 48 pages; why not just publish the thing in the normal pamphlet format and slash the price back a bit? Isn't the aim of the exercise to make it as cheap as possible? I mean, if the book's a success then Vertigo will bang out a trade paperback anyway, so it's not like it matters how durable the first issue is.

Anyhow, leaving aside Vertigo's bizarre marketing ideas, what about the content? This book has been pretty much savaged from the reactions I've seen so far, which surprises me. It's not the new Sandman or anything, but it's not that bad.

The story concept here is that a medieval knight has mysteriously turned up in modern San Francisco and is going around killing criminals. The Punisher with a sword, if you like. Nobody is entirely clear what he's doing here, whether he's just an urban legend, and whether he's just a lunatic. Of course, since the night is a silent type who just repeats the same French maxim whenever he does speak, he's not really the main character here at all. He's just a catalyst for the other characters to react to.

So presumably Seagle thinks there's some kind of mileage in juxtaposing the Crusades with modern San Francisco. He may well be right in that. There's been a dramatic change in the way society views the Crusades. When I was at school, the Crusades still tended to be portrayed as a heroic adventure whenever they turned up in popular culture. There would be mutterings about chivalry. These days, of course, the Crusades are recognised as a rather brutal and pointless series of religious wars driven by the sort of intolerance for insufficiently white people that we can't really endorse in this day and age. Everything that's wrong with religion, in other words.

Seagle presumably has thoughts along similar lines, since he opens with two characters giving us different accounts of the knight's actions, one showing him as a hero and the other showing him as a brutal killer. The implication seems to be that Seagle is going for a truth lying somewhere in between.

On the other hand, the cast that Seagle has set up to react to the knight don't seem an entirely promising bunch. We've got a fairly standard "shock-jock" radio presenter who's obviously intended to be annoying and, indeed, is very annoying. There's a sometime girlfriend who works as a fact-checker and seems to have repeated hallucinations about, er, facts. The relevance of which is not entirely apparent from this issue.

Then there's the gang war backdrop. Aside from the fact that it seems implausible that anyone would be cheerily naming the gang leaders on city-wide radio and going home with their kneecaps intact, Seagle seems to be setting this up as some kind of metaphor for the crusading armies. If so, he's being a bit obvious about it. By all means make one of the gang leaders a religious character who is equally driven by a desire for money, but it's hammering the point to name him "the Pope."

Kelley Jones' artwork has come in for a lot of criticism here. I don't really mind it, but I can see the point that beneath his rather good use of shadow, he's not a particularly good storyteller and he draws the characters rather inconsistently. And there's more than a few panels where he goes wildly over the top in drawing characters ranting, which he can't really pull off. It's not great artwork, but I can live with it.

Promoting the issue as a one-shot is really a mistake, since it's not a self-contained story; it's set-up for the ongoing series. I'm interested in where Seagle's heading with this, but it's only fair to note that, judging from the reactions I've seen across the Internet so far, I'm in the minority.

DOUBLE IMAGE is a flip book, with one side carrying Codeflesh by Joe Casey and Charlie Adlard, and the other carrying The Bod by Larry Young and John Heebink. That means twelve pages each, and so some economy of storytelling is called for if you're going to get anywhere on a monthly schedule.

Which is really where Codeflesh doesn't work. The concept is entirely straightforward - the hero is a bail bondsman who hunts down superhuman bail-jumpers in his dual identity. Nice and simple, huh? Well, yes, which makes me wonder why Casey thought it needed his entire first issue to set up the rather straightforward idea. Our hero fights a generic villain to illustrate what he does, and turns up late for his girlfriend as a result, in a truly superannuated dual identity routine.

The bail bondsman concept is interesting, but this issue does nothing with it. It's a generic dual identity hero routine which happens to spend a page explaining how a bail bondsman works. For this to work at twelve pages a month, it needed to get into its story, keep the storytelling efficient, and for god's sake not spend the entire first issue setting up a concept that can be adequately explained in one speech balloon. Adlard's a strong artist, so it looks good, but just too slow in going anywhere. And in this format, you cannot afford to be slow.

Young and Heebink's The Bod is a bit more like it. It's an origin story, admittedly, but at least that means something actually happens. Our heroine is a highly attractive female (in a deliberately cliched way) who moves to LA to try to get into movies, and ends up becoming invisible after a highly implausible accident. It doesn't really get very far into the subject, but at least there's something here about the perception of beautiful women by other people. Not a particularly original observation, but at least it's there.

This is becoming one of my repeated themes, but I'm going to repeat it until people get the point. In a serial medium, you can't just pace by page count, you also have to pace the story according to the frequency with which it's actually going to be published. Whether your story length is twenty-two pages or twelve pages, you've still got to produce something which works as a monthly instalment. The Bod gives us an origin story and a cliffhanger, and works as a monthly instalment. Codeflesh gives us an extended depiction of the character's modus operandi which would be fine as the first twelve pages in a 48-page opening story, but just doesn't work as an instalment in its own right.

There are some interesting ideas here that might pay off down the line, but for the moment this is skippable stuff.

THE MONARCHY is a spin-off from The Authority, and if anything has been given an even more hostile reception than The Crusades.

A fairly obvious reason is that this book is almost nothing like The Authority. The Authority's whole schtick is that it's a book which focusses entirely on widescreen explosions and big set piece action sequences, to the virtual exclusion of complex plotting. One nice big idea per storyline, and that's the deal.

The Monarchy is nothing like that. Nor, for that matter, is it anything like StormWatch, the book that spawned The Authority in the first place. If you're going to do an Authority spin-off it would seem to make sense that it should be something likely to appeal to the parent book's audience, but the book isn't even attempting anything of the sort. So a whole load of Authority fans will have bought this book and found that it's not really what they were looking for.

Demographic problems aside, however, the book has its difficulties. In his column at the end, writer Doselle Young says that this "isn't the kind of book that's gonna spell it all out for you from page one." He's not bloody kidding. The problem is that this issue is so busy introducing bizarre concepts and laying the groundwork for the future and it doesn't deliver a coherent story in its own right. It would be pushing matters to say it even delivered a comprehensible story.

At best it delivers a series of events which readers are invited to assume will be explained at some point down the line. But there needs to be something for the readers to hold onto at this stage, to give at least some kind of context to the barrage of oddity, and The Monarchy doesn't have that.

We start off in a relatively coherent way with an opening sequence establishing Jon Farmer as a refugee superhero from another reality where all the heroes were killed by a villain called Abraham Dusk. The idea is presumably that Farmer is meant to be stopping the same fate from befalling our reality, which is a stock plot. However, Young writes this plot in such a way as to obfuscate it for no apparent purpose. Dusk is described as "the quantum bacterium that walks like a man", which is just pseudo-scientific gibberish. Farmer's mission is apparently to stop "Dusk's infection." What infection? What the hell is this meant to mean?

Look, there's nothing wrong with pseudo-scientific gibberish in its place. The Authority uses it rather effectively in the bizarre narrative captions that always introduce scenes on the Carrier, describing the location in conceptual and surreal terms. This is fine, since all you really need to understand is that the Carrier is outside conventional reality. It doesn't matter where it actually is, so it doesn't matter if the caption makes no sense. Here, on the other hand, we're given a character who's apparently meant to be stopping an infection by quantum bacteria. Unless we know what a quantum bacteria infection is meant to be and what threat it's meant to pose, it's pretty much impossible to give a toss about this. This is psuedoscientific gibberish being used in a context where it needs to be understood in order to really follow the plot, and that's why it doesn't work.

Young then goes on to confuse matters further by not properly introducing his main characters, and failing to explain what their purpose is in founding a new team in the first place. Since the trailer issue of The Authority established clearly that one of Jackson's main motivations is bitterness at his exclusion from the Authority, you'd have thought that at least that could be included in this issue to give some kind of context to their efforts, but it isn't.

A bit of mystery is fine, but in this book everything is left as a mystery, and consequently it's impossible to understand the plot. You can't empathise with the characters, you can't get any sense of tension, because you haven't got a frigging clue what's going on. This can be fixed, by at least establishing some of the central concepts - either make it clear what the hell the Monarchy are trying to achieve, or firm up some of the other story elements and build some real tension around the question of what the Monarchy are trying to do.

Imagine trying to read an issue of Grant Morrison's JLA if you actually had to understand all the throwaway concepts just to follow the plot. The Monarchy is like that. Incomprehensible, in other words. Normally I can at least comment on whether there's a strong concept underlying the series, but after multiple readings, I still haven't got a clue what the premise of the series is meant to be. There's a couple of scenes which make a certain degree of sense, but the story as a whole means pretty much nothing to me.

This book desperately needs to get at least one of its feet on the ground and give the readers something to hold onto, or else it's dead.

WEIRD WESTERN TALES is another of Vertigo's genre anthologies, in which they dust off an old DC anthology title and do genre stories in the trademarked Vertigo style.

The need for a skewed Western anthology is questionable. The genre itself is pretty much dead, at least in comics. And indeed, the creators seem to be struggling to find anything much to do with it.

Paul Pope's story takes as its starting point the idea that the western heroes who actually had some factual basis acquired their legendary status by way of tales of their exploits being magnified through a process of Chinese whispers as the stories passed back east. In his story, a lunatic heads west to confront Wild Bill Hickok, only to find that the story is a load of nonsense. Cue twist in tale. Fairly standard stuff here, reasonably amusing but not really doing much with the starting point in favour of going for a twist ending.

Dave Gibbons gives us "Serial Hero", a short story with illustrations. This is rather well trodden territory - broken down actor who used to play a hero takes on the persona for real. It's the sort of thing you expect to see in Disney TV movies rather than Vertigo anthologies. Gibbons does the routine well enough, but it's nothing you haven't seen before.

Greg Rucka and Rick Burchett's story is the best of the three, even though it's based on a ridiculously silly play on the words "gun for hire." It's really just deadpan, but while it's only got the one joke, it's the sort of joke that works in an eight page strip.

The Vertigo anthologies always tend to be a mixed bag, and this is no exception. One hit, one miss, and the Paul Pope story somewhere in the middle.