19 november 2000

Oh look, it's BISHOP: THE GENERIC X-MAN.

The final issue of Bishop's solo title makes a compelling argument for its cancellation. It's part three of the Dream's End storyline, and basically amounts to an X-Men story with a slightly higher than average Bishop content.

When Bishop was given a solo title, it had a fair enough premise that justified its existence in the crowded X-Men line. It was set in the far future, and so it inverted the Bishop concept. Now he was a character from the past, and he was being idolised as a legendary figure, a direct mirror of his early relationship with the X-Men. All fair enough. That's a side of the X-Men concept that none of the other books were dealing with, and it's also a concept that's specific to Bishop. Of course, it sold like condoms in the Vatican, so the (outgoing) X-office resorted to its normal fall back position and decided to bring the character back into the present where he could become Just Another X-Man.

And this is what you end up with. Just Another X-book. A competent enough effort in which two writers lumbered at short notice with part three of a crossover they had no part in creating are given a list of plot elements to achieve, and duly achieve them. Lobdell and Pruett make a pretty good stab of what they've been given, at least finding some decent material in Bishop's fight with Sabretooth, and a nice enough scene with him trying to discuss politics with Mystique (who insists on conducting the conversation in the style of Robert Kelly). But it's not a Bishop story, it's an X-Men story.

This is the last issue of this title, theoretically so that it can go on hiatus in place of a Gambit/Bishop miniseries. But at this rate I don't expect to see it coming back. What do you do with Bishop in the present day? Especially once you've stranded all his supporting cast in the far future? Even more especially when Cable is already doing the "soldier from dystopian future" routine in his title. We don't need a Bishop series. This issue is a powerful illustration of why.

I hate to reuse the same joke twice in one column, but IRON FIST/ GENERIC HERO #3 practically cries out for it.

It is by now painfully obvious that Jay Faerber wants to write an Iron Fist miniseries - or, at best, a Power Man & Iron Fist miniseries - but has been ordered to include somebody famous in order to boost sales. Hence, Wolverine and a flotilla of other superheroes stagger around the issue while Faerber hunts for something for them to do. When he's reduced to having Sunfire oppose them on the grounds that they're American (he might be racist, but he's not retarded) you can see the desperation.

As an Iron Fist miniseries, it's decent enough. Faerber seems to have some affection for the character, and Jamal Igle's artwork is pleasing to the eye. As a Wolverine miniseries, it's nothing - you could slot literally any character in the Marvel Universe into this story role and it would work. Power Man would have been a good choice, since at least he has an established relationship with Iron Fist and his mythos. But he wouldn't have sold copies.

Let's be blunt. Wolverine has been inserted into this series to make it economically viable to publish. They shouldn't have bothered, because his presence just damages and confuses the series, which clearly wants to be telling a nice straightforward story about Iron Fist, his uncle, and K'un Lun, but keeps getting dragged away to boring fight scenes so that the cuckoo in the nest can get equal screen time.

It's a shame, because it would have been interesting to know what Faerber and Igle could have done in a pure Iron Fist story. Something rather more interesting, where the Iron Fist mythos could have been given more room to breathe, I'd have thought.

Marvel's annuals long since stopped serving any particular purpose and became a vehicle for glorified fill-in stories. WOLVERINE 2000 is a classic example of this, shamelessly adopting the normal fill-in story strategy of bringing in a completely new character as a co-star so that the story can revolve around them, avoiding the need to change the hero or indeed do anything else with him.

It's a necessary evil of fill-in stories, for which the creative team can't really be blamed, but it does make you wonder quite why - aside from nostalgia - Marvel are bothering to publish annuals at all. It's not as if X-Men Unlimited is overflowing with good ideas that just have to find a double-sized outlet.

As these things go, the Wolverine annual isn't bad. Wolverine meets a Brood bounty hunter who turns out to be hunting down his own transformed family. Decently enough handled, with some effective character moments and a nice little touch in the bounty hunter being vastly less muscular in his origin flashback (before he had any motivation to work out). Jorge Santamaria and Nathan Massengill's art is nothing particularly out of the ordinary, but gets the job done well enough. There's only so much you can do within the confines of a fill-in story, and this is an okay one.

But it's still just a fill-in story. At some point, Marvel should be asking themselves: are we only publishing annuals because we always have done, or is there actually any creative reason at all for them to exist?

The X-FORCE editorial office have evidently got fed up of waiting for Whilce Portacio. Enrique Breccia is roped in to provide rush-job art on the conclusion of "Murder Ballads", and while we've seen better art on this title, I'll take him over Portacio's dated scratchings any day. Actually, the art's sweetly reminiscent of the sort of stuff we used to get in British weekly comics, so that's nice.

X-Force remains, unfortunately, the weakest of the Counter-X books, with only the most tenuous of concepts to hang its hat on, and plots that - let's be honest - betray their origins as something Ellis knocked out in a rather shorter time than usual. Marcus Tsung and his "mutant gene for murder" remain more of a catchphrase than a character (and not a terribly original catchphrase at that), while the subplot about the device attached to Domino's back is resolved only in the very technical sense that it stops.

While the rest of the Counter-X line has clearly benefitted from the revamp, X-Force has comprehensively lost its way. This is entirely substandard stuff. The scripting and art are fine as far as they go, but the underlying concepts just aren't there to work with.

Crossovers are continuing to draw better work from Claremont than we've been used to, but X-MEN #108 still isn't particularly good.

For once, this is not because of the many faults of Claremont's writing that I've enumerated at length over the last few months. The problem comes as much as anything from the fact that this storyline is trying to wring some dramatic mileage from two other plots, both of which outstayed their welcome five years ago - the Days of Futures Past, and the Legacy Virus.

The Days of Futures Past can at least say that it was powerful in its day, and the original story still holds up. But homage upon homage and sequel upon sequel have watered the concept away to nothing. For years Marvel have been trying to convince us that the inevitable future is nasty Sentinels taking over North America. But anyone with an IQ over five knows that that's never going to happen in a shared universe. It's long past time Marvel cut their losses and accepted that.

The only good reason for dredging Days of Futures Past up at this stage is to draw a firm line under that stuff and move on. It may be that that's what Claremont is trying to do here, by having Kelly killed as a martyr for the pro-mutant viewpoint rather than, as before, the anti-mutant campaign. If this is meant to provide an impetus for the Marvel Universe to finally swing away from the faintly ludicrous lynch mob mentality that we've seen in recent years, then that's fair enough.

But Kelly's personality has swung about too much lately to care greatly about him as a character. Everyone who's been observing his campaign seems to think he was rabidly anti-mutant, which means either he converted in the course of this storyline, or he's the worst communicator in North America. If he had a last minute conversion as a result of events in the story, then that would make some kind of dramatic sense, but then what was the point of establishing that he was going to make a pro-mutant speech anyway? Kelly's motivations and attitudes are all over the place here, which makes it very difficult to give a damn about him.

Still, Kelly does get a decent enough conversation scene with Cable, and his death might yet be used as an excuse to change the Marvel Universe for the better. But as a story in its own right, it doesn't entirely work. It has its moments, even so.

The Legacy Virus, on the other hand, has the possibly unique distinction of having cropped up regularly since, what, 1993, despite never having been remotely interesting to anyone. At least DOFP was interesting to start with. The main story here is the X-Men's efforts to get the cure to the Legacy Virus out of Moira's mind before she dies.

Now, this is about as good a way as any to try and make the curing of a virus into an interesting action story. But with material like that, it's inevitably up against it from the outset. After all these years, the sudden discovery of the cure out of nowhere is contrived. Having Moira derive the necessary inspiration from somebody else's work is fair enough - but using Mystique as the "somebody else" is just perverse. Since when was Mystique an expert in medical science? It seems to be the result of a clumsy attempt to link these two storylines together when they have nothing in common and just don't want to go.

The plot for this issue also suffers from having a gaping hole in it a mile across. The X-Men start off just off the coast of Scotland. They need to get Moira to medical facilities. They decide to head for New York, which is halfway around the planet and on the other side of (a) an ocean and (b) a thunderstorm.

Why not head to a hospital in Scotland?

Which would, after all, have the merit of (a) not being on the other side of an ocean, and (b) not being on the other side of a thunderstorm.

I await with baited breath the usual explanations from Claremont apologists of why this is unjustifiable nitpicking, despite the fact that it's the justification for the entire plot.

Anyhow, this utterly contrived situation is basically an excuse for the X-Men to indulge in various exciting stunts in an attempt to save her. Rogue's routine - attempting surgery in an aircraft in a thunderstorm based solely on the talents she's subconsciously absorbed from Cecilia Reyes - is absurd, and a very good example of why leaving her powers in this state can't possibly work in the long run.

On the other hand, the telepaths rushing to get the information from Moira on the astral plane works much better. It's got some good character material for all involved, and Xavier and Moira's final embrace - helpfully rendered by Leinil Francis Yu as a sex scene - works well as a closer for their relationship.

Not a good enough issue to reach the epic heights it clearly aspires to, but an acceptable enough read. Some irritating storytelling glitches could have used addressing - why is the Beast being met off the plane by Gambit, who was on the mission with him? Why does Cable respond to Kelly's request to remove the mask and show him the man by putting ON his costume? But Leinil Yu is on decent form (in the half of the issue he drew), and the issue as a whole more or less holds together.

Whatever else the new regime at Marvel may be, tactful is not top of the list. When Bill Jemas wanted to pick a book as an example of pointless stories that Marvel really shouldn't be publishing any more, you'd have thought he'd go for one that had at least finished. But he chose X-MEN: THE SEARCH FOR CYCLOPS.

Actually, if you read Jemas' comments, his criticism seemed to be more of the fact that Marvel had pointlessly killed Cyclops off in the first place only to reverse it, rather than being directed at this series itself. And he has a point. Nobody took Cyclops' death seriously, everyone expected him to come back, so what was the point in doing it?

Joseph Harris continues his attempt to get something interesting out of this background, mainly by not really focusing on the search at all, but rather concentrating on the idea of Scott and Apocalypse sharing a single body. Cue lots of blood red flashbacks to Apocalypse being attacked by a lynch mob, which suggests that Harris may be trying the rare approach of giving Apocalypse a real personality.

It's a perfectly well done story at its best when it's going for mood (Tom Raney's art is naturally excellent). Cable and Jean's dialogue sequences talking about their feelings over Scott's death are fair enough, but don't take us any further than last issue. And the plot remains rather rudimentary - two issues into a book called "Search for Cyclops", it should really come as no surprise that our heroes are despatched to search for Cyclops.

Even so, Harris is getting something reasonably interesting out of a decidedly dull premise. My sympathies are very much with Jemas that there was no point in killing Cyclops off only to reverse him, but given that the plot had already been embarked on, Harris is at least going about the reversal in a somewhat offbeat manner.

I toyed with rounding off this week's reviews by commemorating one hundred issues of Spawn, but it's not like I have the faintest interest in the book. So off at the other end of the spectrum, here's VOX, a magazine-sized thingy from one Leland Purvis of Eugene, Oregon.

This is, of course, Art with a capital A. You know, the stuff the Comics Journal like. Leland, however, will not lower himself to using the word "comics", and instead bills the publication as a "narrative image quarterly", which is a new one on me. This isn't the only thing in the book suggesting appalling levels of self- importance and pretension; Leland goes on to open the issue with a two-page essay about his creative muse entitled - and I promise you I'm not making this up - "Mindhammer - Prayer to Janus, or note regarding the beginning of creation." One of his other stories is called "The Oracle of Now: Polyphemus' reprise."

Now, the book isn't entirely without jokes, so I'm not entirely ruling out the possibility that Leland is taking the piss with stuff like this. But then you start hitting things like his "Pentad" stories. These consist of five panels in a row, constructed according to "Pentad rules." Pentad rules, which will no doubt be up there with the Dogma Manifesto in no time, are:

1. No repeating images.
2. No visual exposition.
3. Narrative by juxtaposition only.
4. No words.

Or in other words, it's a silent five panel montage sequence. Sounds disturbingly like Leland is trying to come up with a comics equivalent of haiku, and the last man to try haiku in comics was shot before a cheering crowd. In fact, the Pentad vignettes are perfectly acceptable stuff, though they really amount to an experiment on storytelling technique rather than being much of a finished product.

The four full length features here are actually not at all bad once you hack through to them. "Stories" would be overstating it, since Leland seems more interested in doing odd disconnected scenes. Nothing wrong with that if they're effective scenes, and the opening "Tacit" - a man swimming around his inexplicably water- filled house - is actually a very effective mood piece which shows that whatever else you may say about him, Leland can certainly draw. There's a lovely sense of space and weightlessness in this thing.

"Manos" is, well, three pages of a man who's just woken up to find his hands have disappeared. He's understandably perturbed. Not particularly great - odd bodily transformations are pretty much a staple of this sort of thing.

"Winter's Kings" is three old men kicked out of their tribe over the winter in the expectation that they'll die, taking revenge by boobytrapping their corpses so that they'll kill whoever finds them. A nice enough little story.

"The Oracle of Now" (for god's sake) is a man being attacked in his home and being killed, but it's okay because in the course of the experience he learns how to stand up for himself and therefore dies with his spirit restored. Painfully obvious stuff, although the art is excellent.

At least it's trying to do something different, by more or less throwing stories out of the window and concentrating on these odd and disjunctive scenes. And the art is undeniably excellent. However, the thing about experimental material in any artform is that it's doing a wonderful job coming up with new ideas that somebody else will eventually use to better effect. Purvis has some very good storytelling ideas, but he could do with better stories (or, if he prefers, scenes) to tell with them. Even in a healthy comics market, this would be something of a curio for the arthouse fanbase. But hell, there's definitely talent here, so good luck to him.

And for god's sake, don't take it so seriously. A "narrative image quarterly"?