18 june 2000

CABLE #82 is more of what we've come to expect from Weinberg and Ryan's run, which is no bad thing. Weinberg is finally bringing together all of his various plot threads, and it's all clicking pretty well.

There's still a certain reliance on stock plot elements, such as the sequence with Irene being possessed by Aentaros, giving Cable the "how can I defeat the baddie and still save my possessed friend" dilemma that's been seen many times before. But this is a pretty good rendition of it, and while Weinberg perhaps overdoes the elaborateness of Cable's plan, the basic idea of getting rid of Aentaros by stopping her heart and restarting it is a nice little twist on the format. I'm sure it's been done before, but it's not one that's become overly familiar, and that's the important thing.

We also get a proper explanation of how the two future timelines are meant to tie in with the Randall Shire subplot, and it's a pretty sound one. Basically, Shire's possessed by a baddy. In one timeline, he gets assassinated and the world proceeds as if influenced by the opinions he's been professing. (Presumably under the influence of his mind control, since it's not entirely clear WHY an entire culture would suddenly decide to model itself after a dead inspirational speaker.) In the other, he survives the assassination attempt and the bad guy wins. Works for me.

What doesn't quite work for me is the logic of how Cable's meant to be the focal point of all this. Both groups are acting as if Cable makes some kind of decision - yet in both their histories, Cable tried to save Shire. The divergence depends on whether he succeeded or not, not on any decision he took. I don't really see how this bit's supposed to work - the only decision Cable could make is to try and save Shire (consistent with both timelines), or not bother (in which case he invalidates them both). In practice, I still think we're heading towards the ending where Cable deliberately invalidates both timelines, but the plot reasoning seems a bit flawed.

I can't fault the use of Domino as the potential assassin, though. This is a good example of how to use established characters - bringing in a new character as the assassin at this point in the story would seem contrived, and having them around in the earlier issues would have cluttered up some already busy plots. This way, you get to bring the character in when she's needed, and she comes with an established personality already attached.

The series remains in the "solid and readable" category rather than crossing over into the genuinely inspired, but there's nothing wrong with being solidly entertaining. Weinberg constructs a good story, even if his building blocks are on occasion over-familiar.

GENERATION X comes to the end of its first Counter-X story and, uh, well... What the hell was that?

This has been a decidedly mixed affair. It seems to have the right ideas about where to take the series - there's been some good character work for the kids throughout this storyline, but particularly in the last couple of issues. Giving them better defined personalities and getting them out there to actually do something are obviously definite plus points, and if Brian Wood continues to follow the direction that's been laid out here, he'll have plenty of potential to play with.

But the actual House of Correction storyline is another matter. Pretty much everything I said about how it could go wrong has come true. Specifically, back when the first chapter came out, I wrote:-

"We're going to get four issues of this plot, involving Johnston and his House of Correction. Whether it works or not will depend heavily on what tone is taken. There's an obvious risk of writing Coffin as such a sadistic bastard that it eclipses any kind of point and ends up being just another "evil villain tortures kiddies" story with a topical hook. There's also an obvious risk that any story involving something called the House of Correction is going to end up unintentionally camp. Is the story going to find something to say about this subject that will go beyond "We're right and you're wrong"? We shall see."

We have seen, and the answer was no. Coffin WAS just a sadistic bastard. There WAS no point. The topical references are a mere token facade - does anybody really think that the post- Columbine reaction of the US authorities, however nonsensical, has anything to do with quasi-Nazi sadists holding children in torture camps? The House of Correction WAS too camp to be a credible threat. And there was nothing to it beyond "heroic teenagers beat up nasty authority figures, hooray."

What the hell was Warren thinking of?

Let's be honest, this has the hallmarks of the sort of thing you'd scrawl on the back of a beer mat by way of illustrating the sort of story that the new Generation X direction might entail - but which you wouldn't actually do. I mean, it's barely got enough meat to fill a paragraph, let alone four issues. Warren surely can't be dumb enough to think this is any kind of meaningful social comment, and I pray to god he's not patronising enough to think that a teenage audience will feel any differently.

It's not even a particularly well constructed story, and I know Warren can do better on that ground. Like a lot of the Counter-X books, the ending seems bizarrely abrupt, and what's obviously meant to come off as an emotional crescendo looks more like an early cut to commercial. Bringing in the parents in the final section is a questionable move as well - they've never been mentioned before, and if they were that bothered about the kids' absence, why weren't THEY doing something about the House? It's a basic plot hole in the House concept, so why draw attention to it?

Steve Pugh's artwork, quite possibly due to an inking style that I've been assured does not flatter his pencils, doesn't really come off that well either. There's just not enough drama in some of the action sequences - Sean coming in through the wall just doesn't look all that dynamic, and surely if there's a sequence calling for dynamism, it's that one.

But that's the picky stuff. The big problem is the whole concept of this four issue story, which has certainly not been up to carrying four months worth of plot and looks to me like it was horribly misconceived from the word go. There are still signs of a promising direction for future storylines, but this one's on crutches. The last thing I want to see in this book is plucky teenagers beating up demonised authority figures - but when Coffin gets dialogue like "I am the establishment. I am the authority. I am, as you say, the man", I get very worried. At best it's cheap, at worst it's downright stupid.

Maybe next storyline.

A busy week, so I'll skip past MAGNETO: DARK SEDUCTION quickly. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but I'm not shifting greatly from what I've said about previous issues, so no point going over it in enormous detail.

More political manouevring and fight scenes in Genosha, tightly plotted as ever. The secret of Carrion Cove turns out to be the machinery that was used to set up the Genoshan mutates in the first place. Magneto wants it partly for the reasons everybody thinks he does, but also because he can use it to get his full powers back. Polaris is being set up as his main opponent for the next issue, which may be a mistake, since she hasn't really had a great deal to do in this series so far other than hang around in the background, leaving her without much of a storyline of her own to build on.

Nonetheless, the plot is coming together nicely, and while the artwork remains a touch garish to say the least, it gets the job done. There's no denying, though, that the cover by JH Williams III and Mick Gray is altogether superior.

More Counter-X underwhelmingness, and X-FORCE.

Well, it's better than Generation X, but I can't honestly work up much enthusiasm here. The main difference lies in the fact that Generation X's villains were hopelessly ill-conceived, while X-Force's are just boringly generic. Aside from that, many of the same comments apply. There are some nice little character sections here, but the storyline's not up to sustaining four issues. There's just not enough here.

As with the other Counter-X titles, Ellis has opted to do his first storyline as an example of the sort of thing to be done with the new direction. But also as with the other Counter-X titles, it's a pretty banal example. The concept is presumably meant to be X-Force investigating concealed government-sponsored nastiness, and that's certainly what we've got here. The problem is that it's not particularly imaginative or original government-sponsored nastiness. There's this mad scientist and he wants to do an experiment. Yes? And? I can understand the desire to do a relatively straightforward story to illustrate the new direction, but for four months? Is this really necessary?

Wisdom continues to be the focal point of the series, to the detriment of the supposed regular cast, leaving us again with the worrying feeling that you could plug pretty much any characters into X-Force's role here. The "next issue" box proudly assures us that somebody is going to die next issue. But none of the team have had any sort of character arc that can climax next issue. Unless Warren is planning to kill Wisdom, it's hard to see how this can possibly be a satisfying pay-off for any of the characters.

These sort of plot-light, character-light widescreen stories worked in Authority, but in that book, the ideas were better, and moreover, they had Bryan Hitch's epic artwork to support them. This has got a pretty nondescript plot, and a decided lack of epic feeling. There's supposed to be a civil war in the streets of San Francisco, but the place looks deserted. Once Portacio has finished with it, it looks like nothing more exciting than a squabble on a street corner.

It pains me to be marking down the Counter-X books, which after all are trying to take the books in the right direction even if they're not delivering right now. But this week, the books that are playing it safe are delivering good solid stories; and the books that are supposedly pushing the boundaries are looking very much like back-of-a-beer-mat efforts. I want to mark this stuff up. I really do. But in all conscience, it's just not very good.

More movie prequels, and for some reason I seem to have got the Wolverine one a week before it was meant to be out. Odd. But I'll come back to that one in a moment. ROGUE first.

Since my rant last week, I've been informed that Marvel will be having the stories packaged in a cheaper format for the cinema market. Apparently, though, the cheaper format in question is a trade paperback, and I still have to seriously question the wisdom of using that format for something which surely ought to be an impulse buy. Anyhow, back in comics fandom we have to put up with the pamphlet with pretensions that used to call itself the Prestige Format, still proudly racking up the price in exchange for the most tenuous increase in quality.

Rogue's prequel is in some respects the most interesting of the three, since she's been radically overhauled for the movie. In fact, they've pretty much kept the name and the powers and dumped the rest. That's understandable - Rogue's back story as a former supervillain is a bit much for the first film, and having both her and Wolverine doing the "mysterious past" bit in one movie would be excessive.

Instead, Rogue is apparently here to serve the role of the innocent character who can be the eyes of the viewer. So basically, she's just a normal teenager. The purpose of this story is to get her from being a normal teenager to being on the run, thereby presumably giving her an excuse to hook up with the X-Men at the beginning of the film.

There's not a great deal of leeway here for the writers, since nothing all that revelatory can happen to Rogue before the film starts. So writers Abnett and Lanning opt for stock plot 7C, "hero gets captured by anti-mutant government forces but escapes." Fair enough - we've got to bear in mind it's aimed at new readers, and it's trying to establish the government's attitude for them.

While it's a plot we've seen a thousand times before, it's a perfectly good rendition. As with the other two prequels, big flashy sequences are kept toned down for an audience that isn't jaded yet and doesn't need to have everything take place on an earth-shattering scale. So it's a relatively small installation this time round, and while the guy in charge isn't exactly three dimensional, at least he's got a sensible motivation (he's a mutant himself, and wants to carry out research to cure himself). For longtime readers like me, it's odd but refreshing to see these standard concepts being played out on a lower scale, and notable how much more effective they are at this level. It may not have much in the way of originality, but I'll take this over bloated rubbish like Operation: Zero Tolerance any day.

The art team of Alan Evans and Rob Nikolakakis are completely unknown to me, but they work well at this sort of low-key level. It's all good clear character work and storytelling, and ideal for these purposes. I wouldn't mind seeing them again, although I can't see them fitting well with the epic tone of the regular X-books. A Wolverine story, perhaps?

Given the price and the fact that we've read it all before, I can't recommend this to anybody who reads the X-books already (or has in the past, for that matter). But it should do well with the cinema audience, and that's what really matters here.

Jay Faerber has a rather easier task on the WOLVERINE prequel, since he's being played pretty close to the normal character. On the other hand, the angle for Wolverine in the film seems to be amnesia, amnesia, amnesia, and that leaves Faerber with a problem. Wolverine can't learn anything in this story, so what can he achieve?

Faerber opts for a common "illusion of change" tactic that used to come up a lot in fill-in issues (back in the days when publishers used to just publish the damn book rather than asking the artist nicely if he'd care to get out of bed, and fill-in issues were a fairly regular sight). Basically, you bring in a completely new character from nowhere who serves as a joint protagonist for this story, and you have something happen to THEM, so that you can simultaneously fulfil the imperative of having something happen to your protagonist without actually having anything happen to your protagonist.

Look back at your fill-in issues. They used to use that one an awful lot. And why not, since it's a perfectly good way around the difficulty, just as long as your guest star has some kind of story that's going to resonate with the title character.

So what we get here is Wolverine meeting a fellow amnesiac and getting into a rousing adventure with her. It's nothing earth- shattering - it's pretty much in the nature of these prologues that they can't do too much - but it gets the job done quite effectively, establishing what sort of character Wolverine is and giving him some nice set piece stunts that you could see working well on a TV show. (You know, if the film does well, they should really look at that. Could be really good.)

Karl Waller and Mark McKenna's art is patchy. It's fine as long as they're sticking to nice straightforward storytelling, but on occasion Waller goes for some odd camera angles and skewed perspectives that really aren't helping the story any. But he does do a good chase sequence, which is supposed to be much harder than you'd think. I can't pass over mentioning that near the end of the book, there's the most garishly obvious art correction I've seen in years.

A perfectly decent Wolverine story, which gets its introductions done as well as having a plot of its own.

There are some books you just can't review without using words like "visually stunning", and THE RED STAR is one of them.

I normally tune out at the first few words of the next sentence, but stick with me. Set in a world of hi-tech and magic (told you), this is the story of a declining USSR which has suffered an unexpected reversal after Afghanistan turned out to be rather better equipped than they'd though. The country names are changed to protect the innocent, but it's pretty obvious what we're getting at here.

So far, quirky but nothing that leaps out at you. And so far as the plot's concerned, by the way, it's an interesting premise and a perfectly good start made in this issue. But it's the art that really grabs you here - a mixture of conventional art and computer work which really gets the epic style they're aiming for. The no-frills Soviet aesthetic works amazingly well in this context, looking simultaneously monolithic and rather sad.

The single biggest problem with this issue is that they've used a hell of a lot of splash pages for particularly large-scale sequences, which doesn't give the plot a great deal of time to go anywhere. In the context of this bizarre story, the splash pages are probably the right choice; the problem lies in the page count. The story would probably have worked much better in longer episodes, but no doubt that was financially unworkable.

Which is annoying, but no reason not to give this a look. For the art alone, it's definitely worth your time.