the miniseries

Although the days of Marvel churning out as many miniseries as they can manage seem to have finally passed, this doesn't seem to have resulted in any noticeable quality increase in the stuff that's left. It's been another patchy year at best for the miniseries, with the quality ranging from good to downright atrocious.

The Shattering tie-in ASTONISHING X-MEN was easily the worst of the batch, an amazingly feeble and cursory trudge through a story that wasn't that great to begin with. Better creators might have been able to make this story about the Mannites work, but the book that actually saw print was thoroughly dreadful. Cable #75 is certainly the worst X-book of the year, but Astonishing X-Men #3 is running it very close.

MAGNETO REX, the other mini charged with advancing the overall plot, was rather better. Although it didn't really work as a story in its own right, it did do wonders in clearing the continuity clutter from Genosha and establishing a new status quo with plenty of potential. Next year's Magneto miniseries should be able to take this plot in very interesting directions.

The token Marvel Knights miniseries WOLVERINE/PUNISHER: REVELATION was also a bit underwhelming, although since it was a continuation of the unsuccessful Punisher relaunch that's perhaps not surprising. Pat and Alvin Lee's art was often impressive, but the writing was simply average. It's another to add to the long list of inoffensive Wolverine side projects that nobody remembers any more (Wolverine/Gambit: Victims, anyone?).

X-MEN: TRUE FRIENDS wasn't actually an X-Men story at all, but an old uncompleted Excalibur story dusted off, completed and finally published (with insanely long delays). The first couple of issues were an enjoyably nostalgic reminder of late eighties Claremont, which after all is what got me into comics in the first place. The last issue, which attempts to portray the Queen as a mystical heroine, was unintentionally hilarious and pretty much torpedoed the series for me.

X-MEN: CHILDREN OF THE ATOM has been delayed for months, but we did get to see issue #1 of Joe Casey and Steve Rude's rewrite of the X-Men's origin story. The wholesale junking of the original episodic continuity has allowed Casey to turn the team's formation into a proper story rather than just a series of events, and despite the horrific delays encountered by the series, it'll still be worth waiting to see how it turns out next year.

X-MEN: PHOENIX is a continuity patch series intended to tell us what Rachel Summers did on arriving in Cable's timeline. Do we care? Probably not, and this miniseries hasn't done a great job of convincing us we should. All predictable stuff - she's outraged by events and starts forming the Askani clan. Well, I'd never have guessed that. John Francis Moore has also failed to get Rachel's character down, and generally it's been a very missable affair.

X-MEN: HELLFIRE CLUB is Ben Raab and Charlie Adlard's history of the Hellfire Club, which basically amounts to a flashback story in a different time period each issue. It's quirky stuff for the X-books, and although none of it's particularly ground breaking, it's still been an entertaining read.

So which is the best X-Men miniseries of 1999? Tricky one. I'd love to give it to X-Men: Children of the Atom, but I'm not giving out any rewards on the strength of one sixth of a series. X-Men: True Friends would have got it for the first two issues, but wrecked its chances with issue #3. Magneto Rex did good things for the overall plot but wasn't all that great in itself. It's really got to be X-Men: Hellfire Club.

the year ahead

Expectations are running high, both for the return of Chris Claremont to the X-Men books, and for the relaunch of X-Man, X-Force and Generation X under the Counter-X imprint. But for rather different reasons.

The Claremont return has got a certain section of fandom, namely the ones who wish the nineties had never happened, wetting themselves. They're desperate to wipe as much of the nineties as possible and are really quite hoping that Claremont will trample on everything he doesn't like. Judging from his interviews, I don't think he will - at least, not intentionally. He seems more interested in going forward from where the X-Men are now, which is surely the right way to go. It's been almost a decade since he last wrote the books. I'd be willing to bet most of the readership - as opposed to most of the online fans - started reading the X-Men after he left.

Of course, another section of fandom is pretty concerned by the whole prospect, pointing out that Claremont hasn't written anything really good since he left the X-Men; that his Fantastic Four is okay but nothing special; and that, in essence, Claremont hit his creative peak in about 1983. They expect weak stories and a continuity train wreck. Certainly Claremont's brief and terrible run on Wolverine in 1998 tends to support this point of view.

I'm not certain what to expect, though. Claremont's work on Fantastic Four has been steadily improving, and although it's still patchy, it's now at least got an acceptable hit and miss ratio. Maybe a return to the X-Men really will bring him back to his earlier heights. What I'm pretty sure of, though, is that he will make a hopeless mess of continuity, since that's what he's done on all his other X-related projects in the last couple of years.

Counter-X is a different matter. This is a rather curious arrangement where Warren Ellis starts off more or less writing all three books and fades out over the course of a year, leaving his handpicked writers to take over. All accompanied by his handpicked artists, naturally. The reasoning is obvious - today's comics fans are impressed by creators more than characters, and the easiest way to kickstart interest in some fading titles is therefore to associate an impressive creator with them. The same deal as Marvel Knights, basically - get interest from the involvement of a beloved creator and then try to hook the readers with a quality product.

The line-up of creators is interesting, if nothing else, although some people seem to have unrealistic expectations of how odd the final product is going to be. At the end of the day, these are still X-books and they are still Code approved. To judge from some of the comments I've read, there are people out there expecting Generation X to feature (a) petrol-bomb wielding heroes yelling "Information wants to be free!"; and (b) scenes of genital torture. The reality may fall short.

In fact, the publicity has been surprisingly vague about what's going to be in any of these books; the comments about X-Force don't amount to much more than "X-Force are going to be in it." This could be because the new direction is such dynamite that they want to hold it back and let word of mouth spread when the issues come out. Alternatively, it could be because Counter-X is really just an attempt to do the existing concepts better and there's not all that much to say. We'll have to see. It'll probably be good, and the hand of Warren Ellis will no doubt be very noticeable - but I'm thinking StormWatch Ellis, not Strange Kiss Ellis.

Elsewhere... Erik Larsen is being kicked off Wolverine to make way for Steve Skroce as writer/artist. Larsen's run hasn't been a success, but Skroce is untried as a writer. His art will be great, his stories could go either way. This means a new artist for Gambit, but so long as Fabian Nicieza is still there the book can't go too far off the rails. And Cable has a new creative team who are really complete unknowns to me. There should be plenty of good reviewing material here, if nothing else.

We live in interesting times.

Now then, a quick look through this week's books.

BISHOP: THE LAST X-MAN #5 - The Kith storyline continues, and it turns out that the Kith are already in league with Trevor Fitzroy. Meanwhile, Gambit shows up again and starts to advance the storyline. As I said earlier, it's perfectly good but it doesn't stand out from the crowd.

B

BLAZE OF GLORY #2 - John Ostrander's revisionist take on the Marvel Western heroes continues, and quite nicely too. The real appeal, though, is Leonardo Manco's excellent artwork, which just can't be faulted for atmospherics and drama.

A

BRAVE OLD WORLD #1 - A group of computer programmers go back in time due to the Millennium Bug and find themselves in 1900. Although the culture clash scenes are handled well, the central idea is really too silly to work in a book that seems to want to be taken seriously. Alright if you like that kind of thing.

C+

DEADPOOL #37 - Christopher Priest finally gets back on track and actually takes the plot somewhere. Deadpool gets the power of Thor and heads off to enjoy himself. Decent art from Jim Calafiore, as well. Hopefully he'll be sticking around. The title is still much stronger on comedy than on drama, but this is definitely worth picking up after the disappointing beginning to the Chapter X storyline.

A-

DEATHLOK #7 - Deathlok goes to visit his sister and ends up in a fight with the sort of minor villain that Joe Casey seems to adore - in this case, Puff Adder from the Serpent Society. Despite Leonardo Manco's absence, this is a fairly good issue, and the plot finally seems to be moving at a sensible pace.

B

4 HORSEMEN #1 - The Four Horsemen return to Earth for the millennium and find themselves being feted instead of feared. The opening rock concert feels about fifteen years out of date to me, and I rather suspect this is going to end up as a heavy handed piece of irony in which all the Horsemen over the course of the series end up finding that life on Earth has changed to the point where a good culling could only be an improvement. Therefore - I predict - they'll be heading off at the end of issue #4 to leave humanity to it. That's certainly where issue #1 goes with Famine, and you know the way these things tend to work. It does have a nice balance between comedy and drama, though.

B-

HITMAN #46 - There be fighting. There be dinosaurs. Blood. Fighting. Dinosaurs.

A

I DIE AT MIDNIGHT - Kyle Baker's one-shot in which a dumped boyfriend commits suicide, only for his girlfriend to come back. He's got until midnight to get the antidote, without telling her. Cue increasingly absurd shenanigans. Very funny, and well worth the admittedlty high cover price.

A

PETER PARKER, SPIDER-MAN #14 - Hulk smash. Reader yawn.

C

PLANETARY #8 - Warren Ellis's genre hopping takes him to 1950s B-movies. Deadpan comedy abounds as suspected Communists are put through Amazing 50ft Woman type experiments for the hell of it. Funny and slightly unsettling.

A

TOMORROW STORIES #5 - Okay, I'm going to admit defeat on this. A Greyshirt story about superstring theory? A Cobweb pastiche of interwar surrealist writing? This isn't so much going over my head as entering into orbit. Is it any good? Buggered if I know.

-

X-FORCE #99 - It's a homage to the original Demon Bear storyline, and there's a rather nice Bill Sienkiewicz cover for the occasion. The story is crawling in subplots, as Moore is presumably trying to resolve his stories before the end of his run. All good quality stuff, and it's good to see that the Moore/Cheung run looks to be going out on a high after the patchy Damocles Foundation storyline.

A

Next week... well, the shipping schedule is such a mess that it seems a bit pointless to guess. The books actually scheduled to come out are the first two parts of Ages of Apocalypse (Uncanny X-Men and Cable), the third issue of X-Men: Hellfire Club, and X-Men: The Hidden Years. But the late books list is mounting horrifically - Gambit, Mutant X, Uncanny X-Men 1999, Wolverine and X-Men: Phoenix are all overdue.