year in review 2000 - part two

bishop: the last x-man #6-16

THE CREATORS: Joe Harris (writer), Georges Jeanty (inker) and Art Thibert (inker)

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Two, although one of those was the final issue with a different creative team.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: The end of the Kith trilogy; a Clan Hellfire story that never really led to anything; a Sentinel explains how the X-Men died in this timeline; Bishop meets a giant who lives under a bridge; Bishop raises an army to defeat Trevor Fitzroy, although his sister and Fitzroy are both killed; Bishop goes back in time and rejoins the X-Men.

And here's another casualty - this time, one that's already finished its run.

The idea of the Bishop series was actually quite good. Take a character who comes from a future timeline that views the X-Men as messiah figures. Send him into an even further future where he's viewed as a messiah figure. Turn the concept upside down and show us a different side of the character.

So why didn't it work? Well, for one thing, setting it in a far future timeline is never good news for sales. It automatically marks the series out as a book that isn't going to have any impact on the ongoing storylines. Large numbers of people then conclude that it must be full of stories that don't matter, and so they don't buy it. Unfair, but there you go.

Also, it was trying to be a fantasy book. Like Maverick before it, it was trying to sell X-Men fans a different genre altogether. And quite why the far future bore more resemblence to Middle Earth than Middle America was never entirely clear to me. For those who actually wanted to read a fantasy book, the title was keeping them perfectly happy. For most other people, it was a reasonable book in a genre they weren't interested in, and which they therefore didn't buy. It had decent art, and it was obviously something Joe Harris was really enjoying writing, but it wasn't going to get people into a genre they weren't already interested in.

Originally, Marvel's solution to this problem was to bring Bishop back to the present and shove him into the X-Men again. We got two issues of this, neither terribly good, before the new editorial regime thought better of it and just cancelled the book. A solo Bishop title set in the present day would have been totally superfluous. In the present day, he ends up retreading the same territory as Cable - a military hero from a dystopian future who has come back in time to avert that timeline. Frankly, Marvel would have been better off just stranding him in the far future and being done with it.

Like Maverick, Bishop suffered from being a decent enough book in a genre that the X-books readers weren't particularly interested in. Creatively, as a title unlike anything else in the Marvel range, you could certainly justify it being there. Commercially, though, its cancellation did not really come as a surprise.

cable #77-88

THE CREATORS: Joe Pruett (writer, to #78), Robert Weinberg (writer, #79 onwards), Michael Ryan (penciller, #79 onwards), Andrew Pepoy (inker, #79 onwards)

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Three. But two of those were before Ryan came on, and I'm pretty sure the third was because he was off doing a fill-in on a higher profile book.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: Ages of Apocalypse; the Undying storyline; Cable rescues Rachel Summers from the far future; the Dream's End crossover and an epilogue

Cable has been one of the X-books' quiet successes this year. With all the attention off on the much-hyped Counter-X and the return of Claremont, Robert Weinberg and Michael Ryan set about doing intricately plotted, consistently entertaining storylines that won them an appreciative audience. It may not have become one of those titles that it's fashionable to like, but it did have a fanbase that could save it from cancellation. Which is preferable, if you ask me.

Coming off the back of a Rob Liefeld run (for which the most charitable adjective would be "brief"), the new creative team launched into the Undying storyline, which clocked in at six months and was still pretty densely plotted at that. While the basic ideas are nothing new - warring future timelines, possession by evil beings - Weinberg structured them into stories that work despite the familiarity of the concepts. Yes, there are a few lapses here and there - Cable's tour of the utopian future was one of the few really clunking scenes - but overall the book has succeeded in making these old ideas work again.

Michael Ryan seemed to have been stuck as Marvel's favoured fill-in artist after his impressive salvage job on the Heroes Reborn Avengers. Even with the appalling schedules of fill-in work he was producing good material, but this was the first real opportunity to see him working on the same timescale as other artists. While he's not an artist with a distinctive style that leaps out at you, he's a solid storyteller who's dealt well with a wide variety of story requirements.

The book has faltered a bit in the last two months as it's been dragged into the Dream's End crossover. Now that that's out of the way, things can get back to normal - and with any luck, Cable will be removed from the X-Men roster where he never really belonged, allowing this book to get on with whatever it feels like doing.

Perhaps not that original, but solidly entertaining. It's good to see this one survived the cut.

gambit #14-25

THE CREATORS: Fabian Nicieza (writer, #14-24), Yanick Paquette (penciller, #15-24), Sean Parsons (inker, #15-24)

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Three. One before Paquette arrived, one after, and one missed issue during his run.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: The end of the "Sunset Dawn" time travel story; the Escher issue which didn't have Gambit in it; the issue of flashbacks covering the six month gap; the Assassination Game; the unification of the Thieves and Assassins Guilds; a Maximum Security crossover; the end of the New Son storyline; and a final issue by a different creative team.

Another casualty of the axe.

Gambit has been a pleasant surprise over the last couple of years. When the book was launched, the general consensus was that nobody was that interested in seeing more of Gambit, and that in any event Marvel had missed the boat on his popularity by about five years. As it was never one of the higher selling X-books, the latter point might have had some force to it, but Nicieza managed to make Gambit a likeable and interesting character, strip away much of the pointless enigma around him, and tell entertaining stories with him.

With Nicieza's removal from the title this year, the book rushed somewhat to resolve the New Son storyline with issue #24, and was hampered even more by losing the preceding issue to an entirely unnecessary Maximum Security crossover. But the resolution of the story still worked, and despite some loose ends, Nicieza's two years on the book stand as a good self-contained storyline.

The book's second year wasn't quite as strong as the first, partly due to the rush to finish the main storyline, and partly because of the introduction of a large number of rather anonymous Guild members as supporting characters, most of whom never really developed strong personalities of their own. But the series still developed entertaining stories that paid off for regular readers.

The new regular artist, Yanick Paquette, obviously wasn't on the same level of flashiness as Steve Skroce, whose elaborate set pieces had dominated the first year before he cheerily buggered off halfway through a major storyline. Paquette's work was still perfectly sound storytelling, despite the usual dense plotting.

Without Nicieza writing, the title is unlikely to be missed (nobody else has been able to regularly tell decent solo stories with the character). It's a shame the book wasn't given more time to let its main storyline play out, but at least it still worked.

mutant x #18-28

THE CREATORS: Howard Mackie (writer) and assorted artists

FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Um, eleven. The book didn't seem to have a regular artist this year. (There was no issue cover dated March 2000, hence eleven rather than twelve.)

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: The "Jack and Diane" story about two soldiers in the Children of Humanity; some nonsense about Professor X as a villain and the heroes siding with Apocalypse; Hank's intelligence returns and then goes away again; vampires and morlocks beneath New York; and a story about Wolverine finding his family again.

Another one that's being axed next year, and thank god.

Mutant X has continued its degeneration into the most tedious and obvious sort of alternate reality story, where characters continually bump into other versions of characters we already know, but who are gratuitously different. The opportunity to create an entirely different world and do something with it has been wasted, and the Mutant X universe has ended up being just like the Marvel Universe, only with slightly different continuity and worse writing.

In fairness, the Jack & Diane issue, and the issue about Hank regaining his mind only to realise that he's going to lose it again, were both decent enough, if crashingly unsubtle. But the rest of the year was the usual mediocre stuff - dreary "epics" about Professor X as a villain and Apocalypse as a hero which had no point other than the obvious role-switch and dragged on for months regardless.

Amazingly, some otherwise sane people claim to like Mutant X. These tend to be the people who are put off by the dense continuity of the other X-books. That tells you how bad that continuity has become, since in terms of quality of ideas and originality, Mutant X is probably the worst book in the line. The potential of the concept has been totally squandered, and the book will not be missed.

wolverine #148-159

THE CREATORS: Erik Larsen (writer, #148-149); Steve Skroce (writer/penciller, #150-153), Lary Stucker (inker, #150-153); Rob Liefeld (plotter, #154-157, penciller #154-155), Eric Stephenson (scripter, #154-157), Ian Churchill (penciller, #156-157), Norm Rapmund (inker, #154 onwards); Frank Tieri (writer, #159 onwards), Sean Chen (penciller, #159 onwards)

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Three, all between the runs of other pencillers.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: An Ages of Apocalypse crossover; a crossover with the power-removal storyline in X-Men; Steve Skroce's "Blood Debt" storyline; the Watchtower two-parter; the two-part thing with Spider-Man and underground monsters; a filler about Zaran the Weapons Master; and the beginning of the Frank Tieri run.

It's been another bitty year for Wolverine. Following the departure of Erik Larsen after a disappointing run ending with two rather unnecessary time-killing crossovers, the series was handed over to Steve Skroce for a four-part storyline that has to be the highlight of its year.

While Skroce's martial arts story about a criminal family in civil war was nothing new in terms of the writing, it gave him all the opportunity he needed to show off his undeniably impressive artwork. One of the best stories the book had seen in years, it was disappointing to learn that it was only down as a four issue storyline.

It was even more disappointing to learn that the book was then being handed over to Rob Liefeld, a creator who has never been associated with artistic excellence. In fairness, the four issue Liefeld run (and wasn't it originally announced as six?) was better than much of his work. It wasn't appalling, it was just dull and obvious, using Wolverine as a completely generic hero in a duo of unremarkable and unimaginative stories. We have seen far worse from Liefeld, but that still doesn't mean it merited publication.

The book has now been handed over to Frank Tieri and Sean Chen, whose first issue came out this week. Tieri was responsible for this year's annual about a Brood hunter, which was passable fill-in material but nothing much more than that. His first issue is rather more interesting, with bursts of black comedy and ultraviolence that suggest he's been studying his Wildstorm books avidly. I could live without female villain duos called T and A (just far too obvious), but the first issue at least has me interested in where Tieri is going with this. Chen does some rather good combat scenes which make me suspect he may be more suited to this book than to his previous assignment on Iron Man.

Wolverine survived the cull, amid widespread criticism that the book had been creatively bankrupt for years and didn't deserve to live. There's something to that, but he's still a character who can carry a solo book entirely different from his team stories. The Skroce storyline was the only one to show it this year, but Tieri and Chen's Tarantino routine might be able to justify the book's existence in 2001.

x-man #61-72

THE CREATORS: Terry Kavanagh (writer, to #62), Mike Miller (penciller, to #61), Bud LaRosa (inker, to #62); Warren Ellis and Steven Grant (writers, #63 onwards), Ariel Olivetti (artist, #63 onwards)

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: Nate spent two months in a Shi'ar prison, which nobody cares about. Madelyne Pryor turned out to be a mad supervillain from a parallel world although actually she wasn't from that parallel world but from another parallel world where she was that parallel world's version of this world's Jean Grey. Apparently this simplified matters. Nate met a parallel Nate Grey, became a shaman, beat up the Madelyne Pryor, and came back to earth as a shaman.

And we end with the last of the cancelled books, and the one that generated the most controversy of all.

For years, X-Man has been the most derided of the X-books, classic proof that Marvel will print any old crap with an X on it, and sell enough copies to completist halfwits like me to keep it profitable. Aside from a brief flicker of being interesting a couple of years ago (the Purple Man storyline had something going for it), the book has not justified its existence since issue #4. Many would argue that what X-Man needed was not a relaunch, but cancellation.

Nonetheless, X-Man was included in the Counter-X relaunch, and - realising that he was onto a loser with anything even remotely resembling the existing book - Warren Ellis changed it beyond recognition. Swiftly dumping the entire supporting cast and redesigning the character, Ellis gave the character a new role as a shaman, defending Earth for incursions from parallel worlds.

In theory this is somewhat interesting, and the book has swiftly picked up a hardcore fanbase who maintain that it's the most imaginative thing in the X-books in years and that Marvel are mad to cancel it. I disagree. I think it's a fairly well done superhero book which has fooled people into thinking it's much more clever than it really is by using the word "shaman" instead. Nate's shamanism basically consists of being apart from the human race and using his superhuman powers to fight baddies. He is also from another world which has been destroyed. What we have here is Superman in a more contemporary costume. That's fine, but to argue that it's doing something wildly imaginative and different is to be deceived by the surface.

I should emphasise that I do not mean this as a criticism of the actual book. The cliches became the cliches because they were very good ideas in the first place, and there is a lot to be said for the argument that pop culture is all about taking old ideas and dressing them up so that people think they're getting something wildly new and specific to the moment. It's all about making old ideas seem fresh again. By convincing its audience that they are not merely reading something good, but actually reading something pioneering and imaginative, this book has achieved that in spades. Counter-X has undoubtedly improved this book immeasurably.

Ariel Olivetti's artwork remains not quite to my tastes; while the anatomical catastrophes of a few years back seem to be a thing of the past, I still find his linework rather awkward for my tastes. His covers, on the other hand, have been spectacular and I would love to see him given the time to illustrate a book in that style.

There is a lot to enjoy in the Counter-X stories, although the book is hardly flawless. The cliffhanger ending with the two Nate Grey's being attacked by Scratch didn't work because the story had failed to establish that Scratch was immune to their powers (and therefore that he posed any kind of threat to them). The Authority pastiche in the current storyline, while entertaining in the Authority's widescreen style, is ultimately a copy of something that book does better. The characterisation remains decidedly threadbare throughout.

But there are some interesting ideas to balance this out in the way the old alternate worlds idea has been presented, and when all's said and done the stories have worked well as superhero books. It's a book which could have happily gone on for some time producing decent material; but I can't really subscribe to the majority view that we're losing something stunningly important by cancelling it.