18 july 1999

GENERATION X first, and here's something we don't get very often in the X-books - the high concept story. Generation X wake up one day and discover that not only have they turned into the Hellions, but today's the day the Hellions died. I mean, what more do you need? Should be pretty hard to go wrong with a concept like that.

Actually, it's not quite as original as it appears. The "I've fallen back in time and there's a crisis due on Friday" story is a pulp sci-fi standby, and we last saw it in the X-books when the X-Men visited the Skrulls only a couple of months back. The difference here is that while the X-Men were really just plug-in heroes in that story, this is the Hellions, and this is a situation that resonates with Generation X. And yes, it works. It works well.

Only a relatively small part of this story is drawn from the original Uncanny X-Men #281, which is probably for the best, as it's not the best story in the world. However, the deliberate parroting of parts of the original story do work to create the appropriate mood of fatalism, and Faerber skilfully works in Generation X's actions in such a way as to let the characters act sensibly while still sticking to the original story structure. The inclusion of one genuine Hellion is a nice touch, although I suppose if you're not aware that Empath's appearance in the original is an error, it's really mandated by discrepancies in the sizes of the two teams.

It has to be conceded that the Hellion costumes look pretty awful here, although since the kids react accordingly, that's no problem. In fact, the Hellion costumes are wonderful designs, but only with certain specific art styles. With their diagonal pink and purple design, they did look pretty good with more angular artists and a colourist with a subdued palette. This issue has curvy Terry Dodson and technicolour Kevin Tinsley, and the costumes look horrible. And I suppose they were a bit eighties to begin with. I still like them, though.

If Kurt Busiek were writing this idea, of course, the kids would really have travelled back in time; the story would have doubled as an explanation for the cock-up with Empath; and three long-dormant period danglers would be tied up in one panel of page seventeen. Kurt Busiek is not writing this issue, and consequently it's not really real, as we find out at the end. Instead we have the "my god, the kids could really die in there" hallucination plot device, which gets round the problem and also avoids the difficulty of explaining quite what was happening to the real Hellions. I'm not sure how it's going to affect the next issue, but it works okay here.

Every series needs a high concept story once in a while. Here's one. Good, isn't it?

MUTANT X #12 ties up the Goblin Queen story and... well, I have issues with this book.

Now, let's be clear. There are good ideas here. Doctor Doom as a respected world leader who seems to rank higher than Captain America in public estimation is admittedly an obvious development if you're going to write Reed Richards as a villain, but it fits better with Doom than villainy does with Reed. And the explanation of Madelyne's Goblin Queen powers works effectively (the mainstream universe's version doesn't work in Mutant X, because this universe never had a Phoenix, and so Madelyne couldn't have been automatically linked to the Phoenix force).

The book also does well at creating a sense of scale and global conflict, at least in the first half. There's the usual wonderful art from Cary Nord, let down only by a confusing sequence of seemingly arbitrary guest appearances which I eventually realised was supposed to be Mystique changing form. And the closing few pages, in which Havok considers where he's going next, has some lovely throwaway ideas.

The problem with Mackie, though, has always been that his stories seem much better as ideas than they do in execution, at which stage they rather degenerate into incoherence. Mutant X has pretty much staved this off so far, but signs of the old X-Factor problems are creeping in at the sides.

For one thing, the story ends with Alex supposedly revealing to his allies that he comes from another world. This is nothing short of ridiculous. The first few issues of this series revolved around Alex shouting this information from the rooftops and everyone insisting that he was mentally ill. To write a scene where it's portrayed as something he's telling these people for the first time shows a mindboggling disregard for earlier chapters in the story. (But of course, we've never seen _that_ in a Howard Mackie Havok story before, have we?)

Then there's Doom's role in the plot - enormous build up, but he doesn't do anything. Sure, the UN army needs to be there, but why give him personally such a prominent role if he doesn't tie in with the plot? Introduce him here by all means, but he really just clutters the story when used so much in a story that doesn't concern him.

And then there's the resolution, which is basically that the infuriatingly inconsistently written Scott Summers Jr wishes for the bad thing to go away, and it does. If Scott can do that, and if Madelyne apparently knew he could, why was the Goblin Queen so desperate to capture Scott rather than simply killing him? It makes no sense, and most importantly it lacks the necessary feeling of climax.

An annoying mix of the rather good and the pretty awful.

X-MEN: TRUE FRIENDS #1 is an Excalibur story written by Chris Claremont years ago, with Rick Leonardi's half-finished art now completed and the script given some necessary tweaks to update it. Pleasantly, many of the qualities that made Claremont's 1980s work enjoyable are here in force - it's way ahead of his current output. Heck, it's so 1980s that most of it's even lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Scene one is a flashforward, but scene two puts us firmly in familiar territory as Kitty enjoys a ceilidh (yes, Chris, I know how to pronounce "ceilidh") only to get thoroughly upstaged by a prettier teammate. Ah, nostalgia. How many times have I read this scene with either Rachel or Illyana in the prettier teammate role? Why aren't I slamming this as a lazy reuse of old material? Don't know. Don't much care. (Christ, it's spreading.)

The plot has Rachel and Kitty, through a rather implausible plot contrivance involving a stone circle, which once again I'll let slide because it somehow feels right, travelling back to pre-war Scotland and getting involved with Nazis - specifically, good old all-purpose Baron Strucker (the one who's not the Red Skull) and Geist (the one who fought Wolverine once). Much over the top adventuring ensues, helped no end by Leonardi's cartooning, an artist who always had a great knack for hammering home the emotions without making the melodrama too obvious.

It's all very, very Claremont. Which nowadays is not necessarily a good thing, but when this was written, certainly was. It feels like a homecoming to the stories that got me into comics in the first place. It just feels right. Critical distance? Reasoned analysis? Sod off. I know, intellectually, this is a rather flawed effort with a lot of elements I've seen before. And I don't care.

We're not talking lost classic here. But we are dealing with an almost archetypal example of Claremont's late period X-books writing. And it still does it for me, in a way that today's X-Men - and today's Claremont - simply don't.

I'm tempted not to bother rating this book at all, because there doesn't seem much point if you don't have a bit of distance on the whole thing. But what's a review column if not wildly subjective? So here's a wildly subjective and utterly meaningless rating.

Back to critical distance with a hefty thud, and X-51 launches. (In what Marvel hope will be a soaring mission to the stars, but the initial orders suggest may be a somewhat more earthbound trajectory. But that's another matter.)

First things first. This is a damn sight better than the preview issue led me to suspect. Now, admittedly, my expectations were extremely low. But this issue lands firmly in the category of Above Average.

This story is really just an origin recap, but done with rather more style than the clunky effort in the preview. Special Agent Jack Kubrick goes hunting for Machine Man and interviews some long forgotten supporting characters and antagonists, handily reintroducing them as well. Myles Brickman is, admittedly, a problem - his obsessive distrust of Machine Man, unfounded even by the standards of Marvel Universe prejudice, seems simply silly and the character comes across as an utter halfwit, which I suspect was not the intention.

In the actual plot, Kubrick finds the Brotherhood of Mutants also searching for Machine Man's body and ends up with them besieged by government agents. This section stutters a bit as Kubrick somehow persuades the villains that they need him to find Machine Man, although as it turns out he doesn't have to do much more than wander around and stumble across a severed head. Hard to believe that the Brotherhood needed him for that.

But the conclusion, in which Kubrick gets his head blown off and then turns out to have (somehow) been Machine Man all along, is a much better effort, both bringing in the character's new design and leaving the reader curious as to what the hell all that was about. The only thing that really undermines it is the decided similarity to the identity confusion story that Deathlok launched with only last week.

As for that new character design, well, it's a tad clunky. Certainly Machine Man needed a redesign - Kirby purists will no doubt complain, but if the concept is "robot", the image should not be "man in purple jumpsuit." And as for those extending limbs, well, they should have gone out with prog rock. This new design is at least more contemporary, but it's also rather ugly, which leaves me uncertain as to whether it's much of an improvement. Still, give it some time to appear in action.

A decent first issue, anyhow, especially considering the preview. I remain wary because of Higgins and Bollers' exceptionally patchy track record (this is at the top end of their output - the bottom really does not bear thinking about), but I'll stick around for a while to see where they're heading with this.