19 september 1999

GENERATION X celebrates its fifth anniversary with a double-sized issue containing the return of their one and only recurring villain and, moreover, the school dance.

As tends to be the case with this series, the real interest lies in the character development - Emplate's really here to provide a fight and act as a springboard for the next storyline rather than because he does anything particularly interesting in itself. Which is fine, it's a superhero comic, but it's not really the important stuff.

The important stuff is the kids going to the school dance, hiring tuxedos, generally chatting about stuff, and - most important, this - being forced by circumstances to pair off and flag up how they all relate to one another. In fact, the very fact that they DO have relationships with one another shows how far the characters have come under Faerber. At least there actually is a dynamic between these characters now. Twelve months ago they were well established characters as individuals, but seemed to just co-exist rather than interacting. It's a great improvement.

In fact, it's a shame we don't get to see more of the dance, since what we do see is great stuff. M and Skin end up going together because both of them are sitting around waiting for somebody to ask them out and consequently don't get any other offers. (Skin's monologue to Artie and Leech is classic - "Leech and Artie happy to listen to Skin whine", they reply cheerily). Chamber ends up with a ludicrous comedy goth, and Jubilee and Synch go together on what Jubilee would like to think is a date, but isn't.

Meanwhile, a seemingly gratuitous guest appearance by Iceman becomes rather less gratuitous as it gives Emma a good opportunity NOT to go with Sean and therefore sheds a bit more light on her relationship with both of them. It's all a wonderful opportunity to take these character interactions which have been bubbling under for a while now and shove them out into the light of day. It's almost a shame the genre requirements force the issue to move on to the big fight, which is, you know, perfectly good but not the same.

Anyhow, even if you don't like Emplate's bits, it's a very entertaining story and a great example of what makes Generation X one of the best X-books at the moment. Characterisation, pure and simple.

X-FORCE 1999 is in large part an exercise in picking up dropped plotlines, as the title might suggest. For one thing, it's a Rictor and Shatterstar story (and as Fabian's said, it really doesn't benefit in the slightest from having X-Force in there as well - a story so densely plotted does not need superfluous characters wandering around). For another, it picks up on the Martin Strong and Neurotap subplot which hasn't been heard of since Fabian was writing the regular title. And for a third, it resolves a one page subplot which turned up in his last issue back in 1994.

This is a lot to deal with, especially since only two of the threads are really related - although it's been done as a Rictor and Shatterstar story, it could as easily have been done with the regular cast. As a result, it's a hell of a cramped story and doesn't come off as well as it might. It would have made a great three part fill-in storyline on the regular book, but this issue really becomes a rush to get through the plot.

It reminds me vaguely of why I don't like JLA, in fact - tons of ideas, all plainly good ones, and you just wish the story would do something with them rather than throwing them at you and moving on. Martin Strong's symbiotic relationship with a deformed autistic mutant is a fascinating idea, and totally wasted in a story that has bugger all to do with it.

Hmm. This is all starting to read a bit negatively, isn't it? It's not a bad story, it's just an underachieving one that has more ideas than it can really deal with, and consequently it's a bit disappointing. The art's decent enough (albeit that there's the cock-up with the flying pillars of earth which we'll draw a discreet veil over), and it's okay, but you know Nicieza is capable of better.

Mysterio ought to be a great villain for X-MAN - after all, given that Nate is all but invincible in a straight fight, it makes sense to give him villains who avoid a straight fight at all costs and prefer to manipulate from behind the scenes.

Terry Kavanagh obviously grasps this point, quite correctly going for the angle that Nate feels most threatened by not knowing what the hell is going on around him and the idea that somebody is messing around with his mind. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the level of imagination needed to make Mysterio work.

Mysterio looks superficially like he ought to be an easy villain to make work - a few illusions, a little manipulation, bingo. It's not that simple. There's a very good reason why Mysterio was such a third-rate schmuck until Kevin Smith came along, and it's that it's far, far too easy to just have him throw some disorienting illusions (ridiculously beyond the scope of what his special effects gimmick ought to justify) at the hero and call it a story.

Now Smith's story, that's a great example of how to write Mysterio properly. Far from powering up the villain's gimmick to absurd proportions, Smith wrote a Mysterio who used comparatively low-grade, subtle manipulations to trick the hero in clever and detailed ways. The story works because Mysterio isn't being obviously showy. He takes pride, as he should, in not being showy. A good special effect, after all, is one you don't recognise as such.

This, on the other hand, is a classic example of the obvious trap - disillusion the hero, have him come through at the end, and power up Mysterio until he's something rather closer to Mesmero and a villain whose whole gimmick should surely be subtlety turns into a prancing twit again. There's nothing wrong with this story that hasn't been done wrong a thousand times before, of course, but it's still wrong. And giving Mysterio vague and undefined mind control powers completely misses the point of the character. He doesn't NEED to control your mind. You do that bit yourself.

It's a shame to see a character who had just been redeemed so successfully returning to Z-grade prat so quickly, but there you go. Somebody will write him properly again in the end. But it's not going to be Fast Lane, and it certainly isn't going to be this.

Well, QUANTUM AND WOODY is back. Never read it first time round, mainly to annoy the people who kept trying to get me to read it. If you bastards won't read Infinite Jest, I'm not going to read your favourite series. So there.

But every week I look for some kind of new series to review here, and to be honest I was planning to try it, and anyhow, it was this or some piece of blood-and-tits shite from Chaos, so here we go. I'd been considering holding off till next issue, actually, but what the hell.

Now, I realise that this is a gimmick issue. The gimmick is that if the series hadn't been cancelled in the first place, it would now be up to issue #32, so here's issue #32. Rather foolishly, I had picked the book up thinking that if it was out of context already, how could I be at that much of a disadvantage from not having read the thing before? I mean, it'd be just as if it was the real issue #32 and I was starting to read it then, right?

Wrong. This isn't out of context at all. It screams its context from the rooftops. It's clearly designed to be read and interpreted in the light of the previous series. How the hell did we get here from there, is what I'm meant to be thinking. Except of course I'm not, since I don't know where there was. Woody's a black girl? Sure, fine, whatever. Quantum's a tad chubby? Okay, sure. The original Woody's a villain? If you say so. Am I supposed to be getting something from this?

Now, sure, I can look at the story, and I can vaguely follow the general idea, and I can get roughly a third of the jokes, and I can see it's obviously a well put together affair, but since it's not even a complete story (it's a notional part three of four), there's really no way to describe it from a newcomer's perspective without using the words "Completely Incomprehensible" in a rather prominent way. And this from a writer who said that he thought Deadpool wasn't accessible enough. To be honest, it isn't, but if Deadpool is hard to get into, this is like Fort Knox.

This gimmick is, commercially, a mistake. It was a mistake when Image did it with Images of Tomorrow and it was a mistake when Marvel did something broadly similar with Flashback Month (check the sales chart for that month and see the Marvel titles drop). Being a gimmick with a spectacular track record of creative and commercial failure, not to mention enormously exclusive of newcomers, it seems a downright perverse way of starting any series - especially one whose sales last time round could never really be described as healthy.

Christopher Priest has justified the approach by saying that family (ie, the existing fanbase) come first. That's an extremely short-term view. How are the fanbase served by giving them a glimpse into a future a year and a half down the line while simultaneously scaring off the new readers that are surely needed if the book is ever going to get there?

I'm not going to bother giving this a rating. There's no point. Either you already know the book and have a perspective so different from mine that my views are beside the point, or you don't and you'll just be baffled no matter how good it might theoretically be. Is it any good? Well, it does look generally as though if I understood what the hell was going on, I'd be enjoying it. But I don't, and I'm not. Make of that what you will.

For christ's sake, if any issue of a series should be a good jumping on point, surely this should have been it?