19 march 2000

Coming up later, books you care about. But first, BISHOP.

Unfair? Okay, maybe, but the most overlooked of all the X-books has certainly drawn the short straw by coming out in the same week as the Second Issue of Counter-X and the Second Coming of Christ. Nonetheless, there's an issue here, and we're doing this in strict alphabetical order, so Bishop comes first.

This is another variation on How The X-Men Died, specifically how they got wiped out in this book's version of the future. Bishop spends the issue relating the story (which he was told last issue) while leading his team to the site of the X-Men's death. The plot reason for this is that the X-Men buried Cerebro at this site, allowing Bishop to use it to find Trevor Fitzroy and advance the storyline. All of which is fair enough.

Thematically, the issue would obviously like to think it's doing something very deep and meaningful, particularly with the reprogrammed Sentinel who sides with the X-Men in their last stand, but when you get down to it it's not all that different from the usual "slaughtered by Sentinels" versions of the future that we've seen before. This is slightly odd, as "How the X-Men died" was such a key part of Bishop's character in his early stories that you'd have thought more play could have been made of his interest in the whole area.

But there you go. There's nothing wrong with it; it simply thinks it's a very significant story when it doesn't really deliver on that point.

After the back to basics Generation X, Counter-X takes a rather more radical approach with X-MAN. This is only to be expected. It is a truth universally acknowledged that X-Man has been crap for the last fifty-eight issues, and given that we're only on issue sixty-three, this is saying something.

But the character has never been hopeless. The problem is that characters as powerful as Nate can't be written as straight superheroes. Something less obvious is needed. This series has never managed to find an approach that works, floundering around from half-arsed idea to half-arsed idea every five months, with about as much direction as a drunk tied to a lamppost with a bungee rope.

Whatever else you think of this issue, it's certainly taking Nate in a different direction. In the last six months, he's apparently become a shaman. Quite what that means isn't very clearly explained, although some kind of "dealing with weird events" seems to play a pretty major part. The issue has a decidedly supernatural bent to it, and seems to be making a conscious effort to pitch Nate as much more enigmatic and inscrutable than he's been in the past.

Nate's depiction is rather jarring, since it doesn't really feel much like the character we've been reading about (well, suffering through) for the last few years. God knows something more interesting needed to be done with him, but there's a drastic break with his established character here which is very odd. I suspect it's deliberate, since the wide-eyed breathless naivety Nate's tended to display wouldn't fit in with the new tone of the series at all - but the counter argument is that if the lead character doesn't fit in with the new direction, the new direction may perhaps not be appropriate for the series.

Having said that, the book does succeed in establishing Nate as unsettlingly powerful, mainly on the "less is more" approach. Nate has tended to suffer in the past from having pretty much generic powers that were simply multiplied a bit. Rather than play up the absurdly high power levels, this issue concentrates more on his ability to subtly manipulate other characters' minds, which is far more effective. In fact, Nate's power levels are arguably rather lower in this issue than they have been in the past, but it does the character a world of good.

The plot concerns a secret society of mutants who have obviously disturbed Something Nasty, which is going round killing them. Nate runs to the rescue. Unusually for stories of this sort, the victims are portrayed as extremely unsympathetic characters, with the exception of a rather generic PA whose main function is to be a sounding board for plot exposition. A seemingly unrelated prequel has the Forge of an alternate timeline being killed in an equally baffling sequence.

Forge's appearance is about the only thing in this issue which has any obvious bearing on the title's history, and it's hard to avoid the feeling that in an attempt to get a workable story out of this perennially dull book, Ellis and Grant have reinvented the book to such an extent that they might as well have simply done a completely new character and been done with it. It's an interesting, if not overwhelming, start to the new storyline, but it simply doesn't feel like an X-Man issue at all. Yes, it can be argued that this is a good thing, but there are degrees.

Art comes from Ariel Olivetti, who was at one point going to draw Warren Ellis's abortive Satana project. Olivetti hasn't been seen in X-books circles since he did the little-remembered Sabretooth and Mystique miniseries. He wasn't very good on it (basically good layouts were undermined by hopelessly distorted and stilted figures), and I wasn't exactly over the moon at the prospect of seeing him again. Thankfully, he's improved enormously. He does some very good architecture, particularly his splash page of the alternate New York with a stone circle in the middle. His horror sequences are pretty good as well. On the other hand, his action scenes could use a little work, and the final panel doesn't work at all, leaving a damp squib where the cliffhanger was meant to be.

Very odd stuff - barely recognisable as an X-Man story at all, and possibly going a bit too far in its determination to reinvent a character who certainly needed it. Certainly interesting, but not yet convincing.

Shall I save you scrolling down by telling you right now that it's a B?

Just in case anybody reading this is completely new to comics (in which case, hi, take a seat and leave your social credibility at the door) X-MEN #100 is the return to the X-Men of Chris Claremont. Claremont wrote the X-Men between 1975 and 1991 which is, you may take it from me, an enormously long time for any writer to work on any title. Actually, he also ghosted several issues earlier this year, which means this isn't his return at all, just a nice round number with a lot of publicity attached, but for the sake of argument let's all pretend we don't know that.

Claremont's first run is widely regarded as the best, at least the definitive, run on the title. And while I might question the wholesale canonisation of his work (his dangling plotlines were every bit as hopeless as the writers that followed him, and he really did tail off quite badly in the later years), I certainly wouldn't question the overall claim. The family-style, soap opera format of his stories became the template not just for the X-books but for pretty much all team books in the 1980s. There's a school of thought that for years team books were basically all like the X-Men (until Grant Morrison started doing surrealist plots in Doom Patrol), and they've certainly got a case.

But, despite the steady improvement in his Fantastic Four work, nothing Claremont has done in the last decade has equalled the popularity or, perhaps more importantly, the significance of his X-Men work. We have a writer who did his best work when designer stubble was still permissible; we have a team that now forms part of a wider line of books in a very different editorial structure. It isn't the same. Claremont has wisely suggested that he wants to take the books in a new direction rather than revisiting old concepts, and to be fair, in this official first issue, that is more or less what he does.

Six months have passed since the last story, in which time the X-Men have changed costumes and line-ups, and Rogue is now leading a team in refurbishing the High Evolutionary's satellite (from the previous storyline) so that Starcore can take it over. You might perhaps question how the hell the X-Men managed to get a government construction contract, but that would be nitpicking, so I'll just take it as read that, somehow, they Just Did. Meanwhile, the Neo - a previously unknown race many of whom were wiped out by the Evolutionary's plan - begin a plan which seems mainly to involve smashing up the satellite (reasonable enough) and gunning for Nightcrawler (for reasons that aren't explained but presumably will make sense in a bit). Cue big fight on satellite and smaller fight on Earth.

And it's alright. I mean, I'd like to tell you that it's a soaring work of genius, or alternatively that it's a dreadful travesty of an issue, but it's alright. The action sequences in space work pretty well. There's some nice teamwork scenes and some clever stunts. It's alright. But not great.

The big problem with this issue is the Neo. They don't work.

The theory, according to interviews, is meant to be that the Neo are some kind of super-mutants, who are to mutants what mutants are to humans. The problem is, the Marvel Universe is already crawling with so many ultra-powerful mutants that the Neo simply don't stand out in comparison. Are they a credible threat? Yes. Are they the superior race that the story wants them to be? No.

I have my doubts about whether the concept is even workable in a universe that has people like Nate Grey running around, but even so, the story certainly doesn't do the Neo any favours. Of the two Neo who make it into battle, one gets beaten up and killed by Cecilia Reyes, and the other can only manage to go fifty fifty with Shadowcat. These are not particularly high powered characters, and if the Neo can't even score a convincing win over them, they aren't going to come over as the superior race the plot requires. Maybe in a few issues time, but not right now when they're being established.

And as the idea of the Neo being different from other mutants doesn't come across, the subplot about Shadowcat supposedly being Neo falls flat on its face. So she's a Neo. This is different from her being a mutant how? There's a reasonable attempt made to give the Neo a kind of tribal quality to them that could serve as the basis for a distinct culture, yes, but in this issue the Neo just don't stand out from the herd.

In the six month gap since the last issue, the characters have moved on in various ways, some of which are interesting and some of which seem forced and artificial. Nightcrawler having quit the team to enter the priesthood is an interesting idea and even though he's obviously going back onto the team shortly, playing up his religious faith as a non-punchable Christian is a potentially good angle. Thunderbird, the new character introduced in a more or less cameo way here, seems rather generic, but then doesn't get much space to make himself unique.

Psylocke's powers have changed again - sure, that's just what this character needed, another arbitrary change. I'll have to see where Claremont is going with this, but I'm not convinced that it does anything to salvage this floundering character. Rogue as leader works surprisingly well, although a sequence in which she discovers that she can safely touch Colossus and promptly snogs him for no apparent reason is utterly contrived and completely fails to convince so far as Rogue's reaction is concerned. ("Hey, I can touch somebody for the first time in my life. Let's snog!" I think not.)

The less said about Pod Person Shadowcat, the better. The blatant attempt to rewind the last decade of character development simply so that Claremont can do it again (but less subtly) is just silly.

Leinil Francis Yu's art, as so often in his recent work, is patchy. Yu's early work demonstrated an amazing talent, but he seems unable to deliver it on a monthly schedule. Some sequences here are stunningly beautiful; others, clunky and awkward. In particular, he never really makes full use of the visual potential of most of the story taking place in zero gravity. But on the other hand, most of the Nightcrawler sequences are excellent.

This is an okay issue, viewed as a "brawl in space" story. Viewed as an introduction for the Neo, it really doesn't work, and viewed as our first taste of the new era, it's decidedly average, with a few good ideas and some thoroughly terrible ones. But I'm not going to jump to any conclusions simply because one story idea hasn't really come off. For the moment, though...