19 may 2002

MUTIES #4 marks a noticeable improvement on previous issues, since it seems to have shed its tendency towards tubthumping social commentary. This is a more character-based issue, and all the better for it.

The series' ongoing world tour takes us to Rio de Janiero, and another admittedly stock set of characters, although fleshed out rather better than in some previous issues. Jisa, an innocent young girl, falls in love with gang member Laolo, who gets her pregnant. After realising that he's a bastard, she leaves him and is taken in by mutant nightclub bouncer Nata.

Given that it's the focal point of the plot, the story is surprisingly coy about the lesbian relationship between Nata and Jisa. What we get is a scene of them holding hands as they gaze at a sunset, while Jisa's narrative tells us that Nata is "breaking down walls, opening my eyes to new possibilities, showing me sides to myself I never knew existed." Oh, and they come very close to kissing in one panel, but not on the lips.

I'm uncertain whether this is a decision to underplay the relationship to avoid the story appearing exploitative (in which case it may have erred a little too far on the side of caution), or alternatively whether it's a desperate attempt to avoid showing two women kissing in a PG-rated book (which would just be depressing - I see no reason whatsoever why primary school children should be prevented from knowing that people of the same sex fall in love, much less any reason for pandering to those who do).

Still, for whatever reason, the overall result is a nice little romance piece which does avoid the series' usual failing of being subtlety-free. Art this time round comes from Trent Kaniuga, who has an unfortunate tendency to draw all his female characters with the same face. Fortunately, he keeps them distinctive through their wardrobes, and he's pretty good on his backgrounds.

Not a bad issue, all told.

NEW X-MEN #126 ties up the Cassandra Nova storyline, and actually features art from Frank Quitely. For those of you keeping track at home, Frank's last issue was issue #122, and as the schedule presently stands, his next issue will be issue #135. By my count, that amounts to an admission that this book doesn't actually have a regular artist at all, but I have no difficulty with Marvel putting different artists on each arc. Just as long as we've seen the back of schizophrenic style jumps every issue. I mean, they do want that trade paperback to look something less than ludicrous, right?

In any event, infrequent though it may be, Quitely's art is as impressive as ever here. That weird blurry effect around Cassandra actually makes sense this issue, and the character work is wonderful throughout. God knows how much Marvel are paying him that he can make a living off drawing four issues a year, but the work is good enough to justify it.

As for the plot, much the same comments apply as to earlier parts of this story. It's marvellously executed, as Morrison neatly pulls together all the various plot threads and knocks everything on the head with a clever little twist at the end. It builds to a great dramatic climax. On the other hand, it's still a pretty basic plot with a villain who's a bit on the one-dimensional side. The whole "mummudrai" concept doesn't interest me as much as it obviously does Morrison; aside from the largely irrelevant stuff about it confronting you in the womb, at the end of the day it's just another in the long line of "dark version of hero" characters.

But it's the little touches that allow Morrison's stories to rise above their generic elements - Jean telling Scott that he's her favourite superhero, and Emma's wonderfully supercilious attitude to the whole story.

Thoroughly entertaining stuff, despite everything.

I'm starting to wonder whether ULTIMATE X-MEN is throwing in ludicrous geographical errors deliberately. Two issues ago, Lands End is in Scotland. Last issue, the A90 is apparently a motorway. This issue, an airport in Berlin has a big sign outside saying "Dublin Airport." Either this is some kind of very odd reality-warp subplot, or somebody's really not paying attention.

Anyhow, the story. The Colossus arc takes the lead this time round, as Scott and Jean try to persuade him to go back to being a superhero again. It's all desperately melodramatic, as Colossus rambles on at length about how he's not happy in the X-Men, but ultimately uses his powers to save innocent sailors trapped in a belated topical reference. It's not bad, but it didn't have to hammer its point quite so glaringly.

The rest of the issue is Xavier and co following Proteus to Germany, where Xavier and Proteus - sorry, David, they're not using the codename - have a nice chat filling out Xavier's relationship with his newly revealed wife and child. This is much more interesting material, particularly on a second read through in the light of the twist ending.

Guest art is from Chris Bachalo, and in true fill-in artist style he goes for a more subdued style than his rather chaotic work on books like Steampunk. Quite honestly, I prefer him drawing like this - although the longer his career goes on, the further his style drifts away from my tastes. This issue is perfectly good, though.

A little mixed, but more good than bad.

X-FORCE is into the third issue of its Bush Rangers storyline, which (despite the crammed and choppy feel of issue #125) seems to be running a little longer than we're used to seeing. I wonder if the story is being stretched out in order to fit with the scheduling of the big relaunch.

It's still another good issue, though, albeit one that plays much more as a conventional superhero story than we're used to seeing in this book. There's a token nod to X-Force's themes of exploiting the public in the opening sequence (which includes a tremendously obscure joke about franchise encroachment that I thought was hilarious, but I can't help feeling must have flown over the heads of a lot of the audience). Otherwise, it's a surprisingly straight plot about X-Force being betrayed by the CIA.

The Bush Rangers themselves remain largely a plot device to further the X-Force/CIA conflict, and to give X-Force something to bounce off while some of the team's interpersonal subplots are developed. As quite a few readers had predicted, Phat and Vivisector's relationship turns out to be a plan to get themselves attention, but matters are complicated by the suggestion that Myles has only come up with this scheme because he genuinely is attracted to Billy. That's a nice little plot there.

Where we're heading with this, however, is to come up with a contrived situation whereby Edie, Tike and Guy have to draw lots to decide which one of them will die. And thoroughly contrived it is too - escape pods on an escape pod? Come again? Despite all that, though, the scene works, because the book really has managed to build up enough attachment to the characters, and the focus is on them rather than on the plot mechanics.

Hey, this has been a pretty good week for the X-books generally, hasn't it?

The AUTHORITY train wreck finally stops spinning its wheels with issue #29. Mark Millar appears to have conceived this story as some kind of celebratory cap to his year-long run on the book, but after the ludicrous wringer that the series has been put through, it can only ring hollow.

When I say "year long", by the way, that's in the sense that it was meant to be twelve issues. In practice, I think it's been a little over double that. What an ungodly mess WildStorm have made of their flagship title. Mind you, that seems to be their speciality these days.

What we have here is a classic example of a storyline shot to hell by insane delays, unfortunately. Millar's work on Authority was never my favourite work of his to start with - the grindingly leaden politics and childlike glee in bodily mutilation do very little for me. And that's something that this final storyline has been particularly guilty of. Yeah, corporations are evil, governments are bad... whatever. I don't care, I really don't. I know there's a market out there for thought-free politics, but it's not me.

Still, I reviewed the first part of "Brave New World", a four issue storyline, in the X-Axis Year In Review 2000. It is now seventeen months later, and this story could not be more stale. Gary Erskine does a reasonable job on art, trying his best to maintain consistency with the Art Adams issues, and technically there's nothing wrong with this issue, but who can care in 2002?

The issue ends with a quite bizarre coda in which, having regained their postion, the Authority decide not to save the world and to make humanity do it themselves in order to teach them a lesson. Humanity duly does so and there is much cheering. God alone knows what point Millar is trying to make in this sequence - he certainly seems confused. He ends the issue with Hawksmoor giving a speech about how the Authority have changed the face of superheroics by making people pay attention to real world issues, and this seems to be intended as a fourth wall sequence addressing the book's influence on the superhero genre.

If that's the idea, then it doesn't work. Aside from the fact that Millar's run on Authority is hardly a seminal influence in the superhero genre, it's difficult to point to much evidence of a general trend towards superhero comics dealing with "world-changing" issues. Even if you accept the questionable proposition that Millar actually dealt with them, as opposed to just using them as evidence of how radical his characters were.

And when the series ends with the Authority adopting a classic Silver Age non-interventionist position in order to force humanity to stand on its own two feet, it's difficult to accept that the book really has taken all that radical a position, when all's said and done. A grab bag of vaguely anti-establishment rhetoric and the proposition that people ought to try to make the world better isn't all that radical - the opposing view has never been any kind of contrary political position, but simply a genre requirement of superhero comics that wish to retain the status quo so that they can continue to be set in a recognisable version of planet Earth. It's a decision to break some genre rules, disguised as something politically confrontational.

And, even within their story, what DID the Authority actually achieve?

The book is of historical interest by dint of existing at all. Other than that, it's difficult to summon any enthusiasm - though admittedly, I never much liked this storyline in the first place.

WAY OF THE RAT is a new series from CrossGen, and at the risk of stating the blatantly obvious, somebody's been watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

This story is not, of course, set in medieval China. This is a CrossGen book, and so it's actually set on a world very, very, very like medieval China. I've always hated that device. My suspension of disbelief doesn't run as far as entire planets virtually identical to historical cultures in all respects, which have only been set up as separate planets for plot convenience - in this case, future crossover potential.

However, for present purposes you can simply pretend that this is the real China, since the book doesn't make a song and dance about it. I still don't get CrossGen's obsession with trying to hammer all these different genres into a shared universe, even if they do have some kind of immensely detailed master plan. But we can ignore it for the moment.

Boon Sai Hong, a thief, steals a magical map and ring which it turns out he's destined to wield. It makes him good at martial arts. There's a heroic martial arts princess after him to retreive the map and ring, a talking monkey, and a corrupt local governor who wants to overthrow the government and take over for himself.

All fairly standard elements, and in many respects this is what I associate with CrossGen's genre books - Chuck Dixon and Jeff Johnson tell the story extremely well, there's a clear affection for the genre, and it's a good little martial arts piece. Given that it's about the only one on the market right now, that certainly gives it an attraction to anyone who's interested in this kind of story.

But on the other hand, it does seem more interested in playing within the established bounds of the genre than in pushing them back. You can argue, of course, that with a dearth of martial arts comics there's no reason to try anything wildly different, and you'd have a point. Plus, Johnson is a good enough artist to get over the usual problem that martial arts comics lack the balletic elements of the films - though it's difficult to imagine how comics are ever going to match up to the gymnastic spectacle that cinema can deliver.

This is a perfectly good take on the genre, with the main catch being that it feels more like a tribute to past stories than a truly original concept of its own. Still, originality isn't everything it's cracked up to be, and if you're in the market for this kind of story, you should be happy enough. What it does, it does well.