18 november 2001

Marvel have published two stories this week set in Peru. One is CABLE #99. The other one is Peter Parker, Spider-Man 2001, which contains precisely the sort of depiction of Peru that Cable should be proud of itself for avoiding. The Spider-Man version of Peru depicts a country populated by noble savages who worship spiders (no, seriously) and a city where there are llamas wandering around outside the international airport. I know it's visual shorthand to establish the scene, but for heaven's sake.

In contrast, David Tischman's version in Cable is reassuringly credible. We're still in the Shining Path storyline here, as the Shining Path unveil a completely new route to taking over the country - rather than blow it up, they're going to buy it. This comes a little out of left field, but makes a surprising degree of sense.

Thus far the storyline has been notably better than the comparable South America story in Tischman's American Century series for Vertigo, not least by having characters who are actually distinct from one another. Unfortunately, this issue does see a reappearance of one of American Century's more tiresome trends, in which yet another female character inexplicably throws herself at the hero for no readily apparent reason. Cable has evidently taken precautions against this sort of thing by wearing the most horrendous shirt available to him, but evidently no amount of plot logic, character motivation or sartorial atrocity is going to avert the gratuitous coupling.

Any scene that includes that shirt and dialogue like "Does losing get you hot?" is onto a loser from the start.

Anyhow - crap romantic subplots aside, it's another decent issue, with Tischman and artist Igor Kordey continuing to make their version of Peru sound like it might bear some resemblance to the real one.

Three issues into ORIGIN, we're finally away from the goth mansion. Last month, you may recall, Logan was retroactively revealed to be the pampered child of an aristocrat. This was an unexpected plot twist, but it wasn't clear quite how this addition to Wolverine's back story was meant to benefit the character.

This issue leaves me even more confused. Thrown out of his home due to being a mutant, the dazed and bemused James is taken away to safety by his friend Rose. Since James spends most of the issue babbling incoherently and appearing to be an amnesiac, it's largely Rose's issue, as she drags him down to the lower classes to work in a quarry.

This achieves a necessary plot objective - getting Wolverine into the working class background that the character has generally appeared to come from - but the point of his mental confusion is far from apparent. Keeping out of action, however, does serve to maintain Wolverine as a silent or supporting character for half of his own origin story.

I'm having tremendous difficulty understanding the point of all this. Surely an origin story is meant to be something that informs the character's later actions in some way. I don't see how anything we've seen so far is meant to do that. We've spent three issues, it would seem, establishing details about a part of the character's life that he doesn't remember and which doesn't motivate his actions. Then why do they matter?

The ROGUE miniseries winds up, and at least has the decency to confirm beyond doubt that it's out of continuity by bringing in Jean Grey (who was meant to be dead at the time).

Frankly, I'm glad to see the back of this one. In the absence of anything that could really be described as a plot, this series is presumably meant to have given me some greater insight into Rogue's character. But I don't even recognise this character as any pervious version of Rogue. And much of what Avery has to say about the character is peculiar to her own bizarre patchwork version, who has powers that are helpful to the plot but quite different from those enjoyed by any of her predecessors.

Avery continues to lay on her relatively obvious material with a trowel. A small mutant boy is introduced out of nowhere, to start a convenient fire and provide somebody who Rogue can influence to remain with Xavier, thereby cementing her own none-too-exciting decision. A symbolic owl saves a symbolic watch, in a clunkingly obvious reversal of Rogue saving Xavier. It's all so desperately clod-hopping and sixth-form.

The best aspect of this series, by a very long margin, has been the painted covers. They're by Julie Bell, if I remember rightly, and she really ought to be found a better assignment than doing cover art for lame duck miniseries.

For the moment, this is just the sort of miniseries we do not need to see any more of.

After the extremely unimpressive "Poptopia" storyline, Joe Casey has another stab at convincing us that he has some original ideas in UNCANNY X-MEN #399.

And this is a bit more like it. There's a certain degree of childish shock value in here, but the basic concept of a mutant brothel is an interesting one, and one that I don't recall being done before. The idea seems to be that these are characters who have sexually related mutant powers and are putting them to good economic use. It's left marginally ambiguous whether the brothel staff are actually doing anything beyond using their powers on paying customers, although that may be a parental-rating issue.

Then again, this is another story which raises the recurring question - what the hell are the guiding principles behind Marvel's parental rating system? I can't help feeling there's a lot of parents out there who would be astonished to find that Marvel consider a story about heroic prostitutes being slaughtered by Christian extremists to be PG material.

Nonetheless, there are some interesting points here about the general viability of a mutant brothel, which comes across as a more credible concept than you might imagine. In fact, much of the shock value here comes in the Christian-bashing.

In any event, Warren discovers that his corporation has invested in this place, and goes to investigate. Quite why he and Bobby need to go undercover to investigate an establishment which he already owns is not exactly obvious. It also leaves the story containing some very odd exposition in which brothel staff give out the sort of information about other customers which you really can't imagine them divulging to total strangers. ("Mr Favreau is a billionaire industralist from Portland...")

Things go off the rails towards the end as Casey again resorts to having a bunch of anti-mutant lunatics show up to kill everyone. This time it's a device to get rid of the brothel and allow Stacy X to ride off with the X-Men, but it's still basically just another slaughter.

It also provides us with the first actual appearance of the Church of Humanity, who look like they're every bit as stupid an idea as we'd all expected. A group of gun-toting loonies in full Christian robes, the Church of Humanity deliver dialogue such as "Repent! Judgment is at hand!" and "Let the light of righteousness shine upon her." This stuff is just pathetic. I'm a fairly rabidly anti-religious atheist, but even I'm bored of this tiresome Christian-bashing. The church members seen here don't even qualify as characters - they're caricatured extension of the one joke, which doesn't seem to have merited extending beyond a throwaway cameo.

Unfortunately, next issue we're going to get more of the Church of Humanity. Still, a glimmer of an interesting idea in this issue, and the usual impressive artwork from Tom Raney, even if he has to contend with the ludicrous Church of Humanity character designs.

The new X-FORCE kicks off its second storyline, and gets back to what it does best - taking the piss.

X-Force are working to recruit two new members after ploughing through a fair number of them in the last few issues. Given that Milligan introduces two potential new members in this story, it's fairly obvious where he's heading. But that's not really the point. New owner Spike Freeman wants lots of nice internal fighting to boost interest in his team, and is determined to get the most unsuitable people he can find.

Enter Spike, a black mutant and member of the National Association for Keeping it Real. (And Quesada claims this book doesn't do satire. Sure, Joe.) Spike accuses the Anarchist of not being authentically black enough, and does the now obligatory fight at the press conference routine.

At the other end of the spectrum, Lacuna is a completely irony-free rich white girl who has bought wholeheartedly into X-Force's propaganda and genuinely believes she's trying to join a force crusading for justice. She appears to have the power to, er, do random surreal things. Which would fit in marvellously in this book. Can we keep her?

The book is settling back into its natural mode of mocking the team's celebrity status, with Freeman cheerfully sowing as much dissent as he possibly can in a cute parody of the team book cliches. Spike may be a bit of a one-note joke, but Lacuna has definite potential.

Very funny stuff.

X-TREME X-MEN is certainly looking a lot crisper since they started leaving the pencil lines black. When the colour palette has as many primary colours as this, I think the black outlines are still the way to go. Now we're starting to see what the technology's capable of.

Anyhow, the Australia storyline continues here. A bit of a mixed bag here - the story is sound enough, and the material with Sage and the Hellfire Club is pretty decent. Gambit and Rogue's subplot isn't too bad either. On the other hand, we've got another watery character wandering around adding very little to the plot, in the form of Red Lotus.

Playing up Bishop's police background is fair enough and at least a better gimmick for the character than the paramilitary routine. His segment goes off the rails badly, however, when Claremont hooks him up with rebellious female cop Teri Baltimore. Baltimore is a walking cliche, squabbling with a superior officer within one panel of her first appearance, and unfathomably drawn by Larroca as if she's a time traveller from two centuries hence. God alone knows what Larroca thought he was being asked to draw when he came up with her bike, but the end result is insanely over the top. Bishop and Baltimore top matters off by exchanging a crushing amount of expository dialogue to one another.

Storm and Thunderbird's segment with the Cameron twins is equally mixed. The relationships that Claremont is trying to establish between the characters are reasonable enough, and again it gives Thunderbird something more to do than whine endlessly about being a rookie. On the other hand, revealing Heather as a mutant and then immediately having her name herself (shudder) "Lifeguard", while her brother fights off evil assassins by hitting them with a surfboard, crosses the line into unintentional camp.

Irritatingly mixed. Claremont has got his most annoying writing tics under control, but the story has some glaringly unsuccessful ideas scattered into the basically sound plot - Lifeguard and Baltimore being the most obvious examples.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #36, as you all know, is Marvel's official response to the World Trade Center attacks on 11 September 2001. Given the turnaround times for producing comics, this was written in the immediate aftermath.

Obviously, with source material like this you'd have to go very seriously awry to produce a story that didn't have emotional impact. It could be done - through sheer storyteling ineptitude, inappropriate use of humour or tactless nationalist moralising - but no halfway decent creators are going to fall into those kinds of trap. And indeed, Straczynski and Romita have avoided those pitfalls, producing something which is undeniably powerful if only because it forces you to concentrate on the subject matter for the time it takes to read the book.

It's not immediately apparent from the issue itself whether the profits are going to charity, or whether it's just meant to be an artistic response to the events. (Not that there would be anything wrong with the latter.) It's certainly meant to be at least partly an artistic response, so I'm going to treat it accordingly.

The story has met a somewhat mixed reception. What it actually comprises is various scenes of Spider-Man and other heroes joining the rescue workers in the aftermath of the attacks, with a running monologue by Spider-Man over the top. Well, it's nominally by him, anyway. Other than a couple of lines about what he's seen in his career, most of the narration is unashamed editorialising, delivered in a tone which bears no resemblance to Spider-Man's speech patterns at all. Even in this context, lines like "Graft now their echo onto your spine" and "We stand blinded by the light of your unbroken will" feel uncomfortably over the top.

My reservations are a bit more fundamental than that. Straczynski spends most of his monologue telling us about the fundamental wonderfulness of the human spirit. He obviously wants to draw an upbeat message of strength and courage from the events of September 11. This is fair enough so far as it goes - the behaviour of the passengers who tried to take back their plane, and the rescue workers in New York can quite fairly be used as inspiring examples of what people are capable of.

Straczynski's problem is that he wants to put forward a view of the world where all people are basically nice. He did much the same thing in Babylon 5, where characters would from time to time deliver equally overblown speeches about how we were all one in a spirit of tolerance and mutual acceptance. Straczynski evidently wants to come up with a view of the world in which these are not merely the cultural values presently prevailing in the west, but are actually fundamental to human nature. Straczynski dutifully wheels out a selection of worldwide villains to cry over the towers, and tell us that "even the worst of us" would still condemn the attack.

And here he comes unglued, because he is after all dealing with an attack consciously planned and executed by other humans. In trying to reconcile the attacks with a worldview where such things are fundamentally abhorrent to the human spirit, Straczynski is trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. Humans can do such things. They did.

Straczynski's way around this logical conundrum is to dismiss al-Qaeda as "madmen." This offers a superficially attractive way out for him. He no longer has to explain how these actions are consistent with his glowing view of the human spirit, because the attacks are the work of people who are mentally ill. If they were in a state of proper mental health, he implies, they would not have done such things.

But unfortunately, this doesn't hold up to even casual scrutiny. I have considerable difficulty believing that plans of this scale and complexity are conceived and successfully executed by groups entirely composed of the mentally damaged. Straczynski wants to tell us that all sane humans would reject such behaviour and the mass slaughter of innocents that it entails, but he is wrong. Were we all in the throes of mental illness when we levelled Dresden? What about Hiroshima? How many civilians did we slaughter then? Were we insane, or were we just viewing matters from the perspective of a time when foreign lives meant much less to us? Human morality is based on enlightened self-interest - it's in our interest to act in a certain way towards members of our community, and this we term morality. The catch lies in who you define as being your community. If you define the community as white people, then slavery miraculously becomes morally acceptable to sane human beings. If you define the community to mean the Islamic world (whether or not the rest of the Islamic world shares your view), then your inhibitions towards slaughtering Americans will be considerably reduced.

You do not have to be mad to do these things. You just have to have a very, very different view of the world. None of this is meant to imply that that view is equally valid. Cultural relativism is no excuse at this scale. The point is, humans have been doing this kind of thing to one another for centuries, and that includes us. Straczynski's attempt to dismiss the attacks as the work of madmen amounts to an attempt to dehumanise them so that he can maintain his basically rosy worldview of human nature. But a view of human nature which cannot account for actions of this sort is simply inadequate to the job. The claim that only a madman could conceive such a scheme rings a little hollow considering that, in the week of the attack itself, Marvel published a Garth Ennis story containing a dramatically similar plot.

Unfortunately, what is shocking about the World Trade Center attack is the scale and audacity of it, not the fact that human beings would want to do such things to one another. We may be capable of acts of compassion and heroism, but we have spent the majority of human history treating each other in thoroughly repellent ways. The human spirit is a much murkier place than Straczynski tries to make out, and in trying to convince us that any sane human would condemn the attacks, Straczynski vastly overplays his hand. At that point, the story starts to feel trite and hollow.

Still. There's a limit to what you can expect from a 22-page story rush-written in the immediate aftermath of something like this. It IS a powerful piece, even if that power derives more from the subject matter than from the treatment of it. And it would be nice to buy into Straczynski's rosy view of human nature. I just can't quite bring myself to do so.

GRIP: THE STRANGE WORLD OF MEN is a miniseries by Gilbert Hernandez for Vertigo. Hernandez is one of those creators who was canonised a while back and whose work I have never felt the urge to seek out, so this is probably the first significant piece of his work that I've read.

It isn't awfully good.

In his On The Ledge column to promote the miniseries, Hernandez describes the series as "Something a little nostalgic, but mostly something very new, with no Hollywood pinheads in suits telling me what is and what isn't a good story; no condescending attitude towards my potential audience." If this is the sort of thing that Hernandez has been pitching to Hollywood, then it's no great surprise that they've been telling him to get lost.

The story starts off with Michael Chang on a sidewalk, with no idea of how he got there, and meanders off on a series of tenuously related surreal departure from there. Chang is surrounded by various characters who allude to the background in very oblique ways, but make no real effort to explain the plot. Quite why they don't explain it, even for Chang's own benefit once he explains his situation, is far from apparent.

As near as the plot can be deciphered, Hernandez seems to be suggesting that Chang has done something to himself to remove his memory and quite possibly change his identity. He seems to have been one of the baddies prior to all this happening. This is somewhat reminiscent of Hal Hartley's film Amateur, although that film had the considerable bonus of making sense.

This story seems to be taking a self-righteous pride in its impenetrability. If you're one of those people who liked Monarchy and thought that the utter incomprehensibility of the plot was a strength rather than a sign of clever-clever bad writing, you'll love this book. The rest of us can quietly pass it by.