year in review 2000 - part 1

x-men #98-109
uncanny x-men #378-389

THE CREATORS: For the first two months, Alan Davis plotting both books and pencilling X-Men; Terry Kavanagh scripting both books; and Mark Farmer inking X-Men. After that, Chris Claremont writing both books; and Leinil Francis Yu and Mark Morales as regular artists on X-Men. Adam Kubert was regular penciller on Uncanny until issue #384. Salvador Larrocca took over on issue #386 with Tim Townsend as regular inker for the year.

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: On Uncanny, a pretty dismal five and a half issues of fill-in art - none of them under Larrocca's run. On X-Men, a total of four issues (three whole issues and two split issues).

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: The Ages of Apocalypse (yes, you'd tried to forget it, hadn't you?); the High Evolutionary cancels everyone's powers for a while; the six month gap; Claremont takes over and gives us the Neo for several months; the Twisted Sisters attack Archangel and Psylocke for reasons never properly explained; the X-Men rescue the Arcadia from a storm; Maximum Security crossovers; the Dream's End crossover; and a set-up for Chris Claremont's new series.

The story of the year, obviously, is the return of Chris Claremont to the X-Men and how it all went wrong.

The year was not off to a good start before his arrival. The impenetrable Ages of Apocalypse crossover may be a strong contender for the least effective climax to a long running plotline in the history of the X-books, as the books went screaming off on a diversion from the Twelve storyline to give us a month of "What If" stories. Quite why anyone was meant to care was never altogether clear. The next storyline, with the High Evolutionary and Mr Sinister trying to shut down mutant powers across the planet, was rather more like it, but still an obvious water-treading exercise.

And that was that for the Alan Davis run, as Davis took his final paycheck and headed off to do something he was actually interested in. The run as a whole is mostly okay, but far below the standards we expect from Davis when he's feeling inspired.

But none of this was particularly relevant at the time, since Chris Claremont was coming back. Obviously there's no doubting the importance of Claremont as an X-Men writer. His work on the X-Men in the 1970s and 1980s is still the definitive X-Men run, turning them into the unstoppable franchise they've become, and going a long way towards defining the team book genre in the eighties. His departure from the books in 1991 was notoriously acrimonious, and naturally a large proportion of the fanbase viewed this as a homecoming for the one true X-Men writer who was going to hammer things back into shape (preferably by ignoring most of the nonsense published in the nineties).

Others weren't so sure. Sure, Claremont had done some enormously good and influential stuff, but not in the last decade he hadn't. Sovereign Seven had sunk without trace, and his run on Fantastic Four had been wildly erratic before settling down to a reasonable strike rate towards the end. I was trying to keep an open mind as the Claremont run began; on the one hand I agreed that the quality of his work had peaked over a decade previously, but there was always the possibility of a return to form.

What we got, unfortunately, was the Neo.

The Neo, whose storyline sprawled across the X-books for months, were a good idea in theory. The good idea was to introduce a splinter race of humanity who would be to mutants what mutants were to humans. Theoretically that ought to be a great idea. It's an inversion of the X-Men's basic premise that they're ahead of mankind on the evolutionary scale, and that ought to make for good X-Men storylines.

But in practice, the Neo faced a major problem. They weren't noticeably any different from the mutants. With the mutants already on the sort of power level where some of them were chucking mountains at one another, the Neo were always going to struggle to establish themselves as the next step up. Making them more powerful was clearly not an option, because there was no such thing. That left the option of making their powers different in some other way. I'm damned if I can think what that other way might be, and evidently so was Claremont, who gave us such intimidating evolutionary advances as a man with guns for arms (just like in the derided Dark Riders), a man who could seal off buildings, and a teleporter. None of these are bad superpowers as such, but they weren't what the Neo needed if they were to work. The Neo ended up looking like a fourth-rate version of the Inhumans.

Matters were not helped by the gaping plot holes in the Neo storyline (such as the lack of any coherent reason why they were fighting the X-Men in the first place), and Claremont's insistence on hurling new henchmen characters into the story with nothing more than a codename and a costume design to disguise the lack of any actual ideas. The Neo storyline was an outright disaster. The first storyline in the sister book, about interdimensional slavers, was better only in the sense that the villains at least had comprehensible motives. Other than that, it was still drowning in badly thought out characters and lacking in drama.

Things did improve towards the end of the year. The Maximum Security and Dream's End crossovers were readable enough, and seemed to benefit from the requirement to get the story done in one month rather than stretching it beyond endurance. The final two issues setting up Claremont's new spin-off book, with a group of former X-Men investigating Destiny's Nostradamus-like prophecies, actually does look like an interesting idea for a series and has me at least intrigued to see what the book turns out like, despite my dislike for most of this year's X-Men stories.

But the year has been bad for storylines. Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas have been relatively tactful in their public comments, expressing regret that at just the time that the X-Men movie was out, something happened and the X-Men books were producing stories so impenetrable that even the long time readers couldn't follow them, let alone new readers. But the thing that changed when the X-Men movie came out was that Claremont started writing the book. The two book, two team format he struggled with didn't seem to vex any of the other writers of the last decade to this extent. And from my point of view, as someone who was brought into comics in the first place by the original Claremont run in the eighties, watching things go so badly wrong was just painful and frustrating.

So far as this year's artwork is concerned, Adam Kubert made the most of the opportunity to create visually interesting new villains, and while he was perennially unable to maintain a monthly schedule, Tom Raney was producing perfectly good work as the X-Men's regular stand-by artist. Salvador Larroca has been producing solid work in his issues to date; he finally seems to have regained his grasp on storytelling basics which marred some of his Fantastic Four run. Leinil Francis Yu's work on X-Men, unfortunately, has to be regarded as disappointing, looking awkward and coming nowhere close to the promise that was so evident in his early Wolverine issues.

But the contents of the book this year were entirely overshadowed by the backstage events - the departure of Claremont and the surprise recruitment of Grant Morrison as a replacement. Unfortunately, that's a fair reflection on the stories involved.

x-men unlimited #26-29

THE CREATORS: Joe Pruett (writer, lead stories), Brett Booth (penciller, lead stories), Sal Regla (inker, lead stories); assorted guest creators on back-up strips.

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Astonishingly, the services of Ron Lim were needed to split the pages on two of this year's stories. It's a quarterly, for god's sake.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: Ages of Apocalypse; the origin story of Thunderbird; the X-Men fight a mad Russian scientist; and a Maximum Security crossover. Back-up strips featured Wolverine, Deadpool and Colossus. (Issue #27 had no back-up strip.)

One of the best criticisms to be made of the recent wave of X-related cancellations is how in the name of god this entirely unnecessary book survived. Allegedly there is some kind of plan to bring in name creators to do self- contained stories for the series, but we've heard this before.

The plan, at the end of 1999, was that the lead story would tie in with the core X-books and would be part of the central X-Men continuity. The back-up strip would be something self-contained from creators we don't normally see on the X-books. One issue in this format had come out in 1999 and had been less than impressive. 2000 did not see the problem cured.

So far as its attempts to tie into X-Men storylines are concerned, X-Men Unlimited is hobbled by having not just a different writer but a different editor as well. It's on the fringes looking in, and by god does it show. The origin story of Thunderbird, which appeared in issue #27, was a rare example of the series actually doing what it was meant to do. The rest of the year saw two stories playing peripheral roles in crossovers where the real action was going on somewhere else, and a blatant filler story about a mad Russian. Still, at least it wasn't the Neo. Joe Pruett's writing was competent enough, but he had nothing to work with here. As for penciller Brett Booth, he still hasn't really escaped the shadow of Jim Lee, which now makes him look about five years behind the times. The look of the book is unexceptional.

The back-up strips - which only actually appeared in three out of the four issues - were a curious bunch. Issue #26 had a demented little affair by Matt Nixon and Toby Cypress (who?) in which Wolverine rescued a small boy from a cyberspace-themed paedophile called Professor Gibbon. While indisputably offbeat, it was really just a stock "rescue the innocent child" story with odd trappings added on. Issue #28 was a film-noir pastiche trailing Jimmy Palmiotti's run on Deadpool and, thanks to Liam Sharp's art, was far more successful than any of the stories it was trailing. Issue #29 had a Colossus story written and drawn by Cully Hamner in which the character felt guilty about saving his sister over members of the public. An okay character piece, but dispensible.

In fairness to those involved, X-Men Unlimited hasn't been a bad book this year, and its problems don't really stem from any failings on the part of the creators. Its problem is that the basic concept is flawed, and the book might as well be called "Outsize Fill-in Quarterly." It doesn't need to exist.

x-men: the hidden years #4-15

THE CREATORS: John Byrne (writer and penciller), Tom Palmer (inker)

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Zero.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: The Savage Land, some stuff in Africa with a young Storm, the Savage Land, Storm helps beat Deluge, the Savage Land, some stuff in space with the Fantastic Four and the Z'nox, the Savage Land, a little girl has a pet Sentinel, the Savage Land, Candy Southern borrows some clothes, the Savage Land, a bunch of freaks on a boat, Sauron in the Savage Land, and Warren's mother is poisoned.

Of the wave of cancelled X-books that will come to an end early next year, this book and X-Man have had the most vocal protests from fans keen to save them. An unlikely duo if ever there was one.

I have some sympathy for the fans of this book. It is doing something that the other X-books aren't doing at the moment, namely X-Men stories that can be understood without a scorecard, a flowchart and a degree in quantum physics. It's a simple, traditional superhero book which has an understandable appeal to a certain section of fandom.

The problem with this is that it's not an argument for saving the book. The basic reasoning for the cancellation is meant to be that the more versions of the X-Men you publish, the more it dilutes the core concept and damages the overall profitability of the line as a whole. Which is why the book is getting cancelled even though it's profitable. You may well be cynical about whether this is really the reason, given that all the apparently unnecessary X-books happen to be the lower selling ones, while Marvel have somehow identified a pressing need for X-Men Unlimited and Wolverine. But it's the stated reason and it does make a certain degree of sense.

Do we really need a book about what the X-Men were doing during the blank period in their continuity from 1970 to 1975 when the book was on hiatus? No, of course we don't. And yes, there are too many versions of the X-Men out there at the moment - two teams sharing the core books, the Ultimate X-Men team, the cartoon, the film, all with their own variations on the core concept. There is no need for a retro version on top of all these other variations.

The argument for saving the book tends to boil down to an enumeration of the many, many faults of the other X-books and a protest that X-Men: The Hidden Years doesn't have those faults. But this is really an argument for fixing the problems with the other X-books, which Marvel are taking steps to do by replacing the creative teams. Once that's done, what's the fallback creative case for publishing this book? It's rather hard to identify.

As for the actual content of the book... well, as I say, it was a nicely readable selection of old style superhero stories which were okay if you like that sort of thing. It spent far too long messing about in the Savage Land, and by splitting the team up and embroiling them all in different subplots at once, it ended up moving at a snails pace when it should have just done the stories one at a time and got them over with. But it was a perfectly okay book.

It just happens to be a perfectly okay book whose premise of filling in gaps in continuity makes it entirely superfluous. Such is life.

ultimate x-men #1

THE CREATORS: Mark Millar (writer), Adam Kubert (penciller) and Art Thibert (inker)

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: Professor X recruits the X-Men while the evil American government sends out Sentinels to kill and intern mutants.

Included here largely for the sake of completeness, this was the big Marvel launch for December. Being a Mark Millar book, the approach is to take the existing concept and magnify it to as large a scale as possible, leaving us with what's effectively the Days of Futures Past as a starting point. This begs the question of where the hell you go from here. The opening issue is good enough, but Millar is going to need to go somewhere completely new if he's going to get a decent story from here. Maybe he will. We shall see.

Reaction to this title has been noticeably more mixed than the generally enthusiastic response to Ultimate Spider-Man. Many of the criticisms are understandable; Millar's American government sending giant killer robots out to fight mutants in public is clearly not remotely credible. If this is meant to be a shared universe with Ultimate Spider-Man - and supposedly it is - then the book also seems to cause serious longterm problems for the Ultimate continuity, which now has two irreconcilable versions of the USA.

Millar's approach is audacious, there's no denying it. It remains to be seen whether he's really thought this through properly, or whether he will fall prey to one of the many obvious ways that this series could go wrong.

generation x #61-72

THE CREATORS: Jay Faerber and fill-in artists (issues #61-62); Warren Ellis and Brian Wood (writers, #63 on); Steve Pugh (penciller, #63 on); various inkers

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Three and a half, although in fairness that includes the two issues before Counter-X when the book was between regular pencillers.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: Jay Faerber tied up his run with a vampire story; Counter-X started with the House of Correction; Synch died in a flashback; and the Four Days storyline started.

And here's the second of our casualties - something nobody would have anticipated when it was being given the Counter-X relaunch treatment.

Jay Faerber's run on Generation X had started off impressively, bringing the characterisation back to reality after the atrocious Larry Hama stories. Unfortunately, what it had always lacked was a clear direction and any kind of overall storyline. Faerber's run came to an end early in 2000 in much that line - some perfectly acceptable stories but nothing to set the world on fire.

So editor Jason Liebig handed the book over to Counter-X. Apparently the line ended up in the hands of Warren Ellis after discussion with Rob Liefeld had failed, so whatever you may have thought of the actual Counter-X books, just remember that they had to be better than that. The idea of the Counter-X line was that Warren Ellis would produce an outline of what direction each series should go in, with increasingly sketchy plots for each storyline in the first year. His handpicked writers would script over his plots and eventually take over the series for themselves, and his handpicked artists would draw them. Generation X got Brian Wood and Steve Pugh, both perfectly good creators, which seemed a promising start.

The theory behind the Counter-X relaunch - that the kids ought to be more proactive and political - was also sound enough. Rather than going off on some over the top crusade to give the book a bit of attitude, Ellis was playing it fairly straight. Turning up the politics slightly, perhaps, but it was still definitely the same book.

Unfortunately, the opening House of Correction storyline was hideously misconceived. Obviously based on the overreaction to the Columbine massacre, the story had troublesome or just slightly unusual kids being dragged out of school and carted off to the House of Correction, run by the sadistic Warden Coffin. This was stupid. The reaction to Columbine was the right choice of subject for Generation X, precisely the sort of thing that the book ought to have been doing stories about. Ascribing it all to mad sadistic superhumans running secret death camps with zombie cyborgs meant that the story said nothing of value about the Columbine reaction. The opportunity, not to say the point, had been missed. Wood and Pugh had done their best with the storyline, but there was no rationalising around the fact that it was a horribly bad idea for a story in the first place.

The second storyline, a flashback showing Generation X facing increased prejudice and abuse from their fellow students within the school, leading up to the death of Synch in a bombing, was much more like it. Where the House of Correction had been ludicrously over the top, Come On Die Young was grounded in the sort of prejudice that its readers were actually likely to encounter. This is exactly what the X-books should be doing more of. By pitching anti-mutant prejudice at levels of hatred rarely seen outside civil war zones, Marvel have only distanced the X-books from the real world that the readers lived in. In bringing things back to real world levels, this was a far more effective storyline than a thousand Operation: Zero Tolerances.

The book is now in the middle of Four Days, a sequence of character issues which seems to be somewhat abandoning the earlier attempt to introduce a bit more politics into the book. But it's playing to the strengths of the creators, both of whom seem much more comfortable with this material than with the zombie cyborgs.

Steve Pugh's artwork has allegedly suffered greatly from unsympathetic inking. Those who have seen the original pencilled pages tell me that the published version varies from disappointing through to heartbreaking in comparison, with Marvel apparently insisting that they should be inked to make them more Marvel-style. Things have improved recently, but the art is still not quite satisfactory.

The cancellation of this book in the upcoming purge, and the survival of X-Force, bemuses me. If there's any X-book which is clearly not treading the same ground as the X-Men, it's Generation X. They're not even a superhero team. X-Force, in contrast, have degenerated into just another X-team. It is at this point that we note that Marvel have cancelled all the lower selling X-books and express some cynicism as to the genuineness of their stated criteria for choosing which books made the cut. Generation X may be doing basically the same thing that The New Mutants started off in 1983, but you'd have thought that should still be enough to justify its place in the line. Evidently not.

x-force #100-110

THE CREATORS: John Francis Moore (writer, to #100), Jim Cheung (penciller, to #100), Mark Morales (inker, to #100), Warren Ellis and Ian Edginton (writers, #102 to date), Whilce Portacio (penciller, #102 to date), Gerry Alanguilan (inker, #102 to date)

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Five and a half - and they're running a month behind, so that's only out of eleven issues.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: John Francis Moore ended his run; a filler issue tying in with the X-Men story about everyone's powers being cancelled; X-Force hooked up with Pete Wisdom, who got himself killed

John Francis Moore's run on X-Force had arguably run out of steam towards the end of 2000, as he got dreadfully excited about the likes of the Damocles Foundation. It was perhaps time for a change. But the Counter-X X-Force was a change for the worse.

The concept here, as nearly as one could be identified, was that X-Force had decided to hook up with Pete Wisdom and go off to fight underground governmental nastiness. So they're a bunch of proactive superheroes with slight military overtones. This is basically what the concept of the book was all along.

Yet the book insisted on acting as if the team were doing something new and radically different. Domino and Dani Moonstar both walked out on the team as if there was some kind of moral grey area involved here, whereas in fact there was nothing of the sort. The whole concept of the new direction for the team simply never worked. The two opening storylines were adequate superheroics at best (though there's really little excuse for introducing a character with "the mutant gene for murder"). With uninspired stories and a failing direction, the book was in trouble whatever the creators did.

Ian Edginton's writing was competent but not terribly distinctive. This was at least an improvement on Whilce Portacio, whose artwork was distinctive but not terribly competent. Saddling the already struggling team in faintly laughable fetish gear was not the way to sell the new direction. They should have stuck with the Adam Pollina uniforms, which actually more or less fitted with what the book was meant to be doing. Portacio's mangled faces and awkward scratchings were frequently a chore to read through.

This week's issue, beginning the Rage War storyline, is an improvement of sorts, since at least there's a relatively coherent story (as Edginton takes the book straight back to mainstream superhero territory now that he's on his own), and guest artist Jorge Lucas shows us all how its meant to be done (while abandoning the look of the Counter-X relaunch almost completely). But these improvements have come from backing away from the relaunch, which has to be considered a failure.