year in review 2000 - part three

the miniseries

Some things never change. For example, every year Marvel will churn out a barrage of miniseries, very few of which can have started off with somebody shouting "I've had a brilliant idea for a story." This year was actually better than most, with some miniseries that really did originate with a story idea; but when they're bad, the miniseries are very bad indeed.

And what better example of this could there be than BEFORE THE FANTASTIC FOUR: BEN GRIMM & LOGAN? This is actually a product of the Fantastic Four office, which seems determined to take advantage of the book's return to popularity over the last few years by churning out tie-in product by the bucketload. One of their bright ideas was to put out some minis about what the characters had been doing before their origin story, which kind of misses the point that they really shouldn't have been doing anything that exciting before fate turned them into superheroes. That being the point of an origin story.

Larry Hama was given the job of doing something about the Thing in the military, and ended up with a bizarre story about Ben Grimm, Wolverine and Sharon Carter behind enemy lines in the Cold War. Abandoning credibility on the first page, the series went beyond merely over the top into being just plain stupid. It's hard to believe from stories like this and Generation X that it's the same Larry Hama who was writing great Wolverine stories a few years ago.

After years of pressure from people who were unfathomably attracted to her brief role in the Phalanx Covenant, BLINK finally got a miniseries this week, in preparation for her ongoing series next year. The appeal of the character still bemuses me.

EXCALIBUR was dusted off towards the end of the year, presumably in order to justify shoving an X on the cover of what was actually a Captain Britain series. Only the one issue out so far, and it looks like a reasonable affair, but doesn't really answer the question of why we need a Captain Britain story.

Deposed Generation X writer Jay Faerber returned with IRON FIST/WOLVERINE, picking up an Iron Fist storyline from his cancelled New Warriors book and bolting on Wolverine in the vague hope that somebody might actually buy it. The result was a Wolverine miniseries that somehow managed to be even more superfluous than last year's Punisher/Wolverine: Revelation, which is saying something. Drowning the story in irrelevant guest stars did nothing to help the Iron Fist story that Faerber clearly wanted to tell, and the end result was a below average Iron Fist story that had Wolverine's name on the cover for unexplained reasons.

MAGNETO: DARK SEDUCTION ended on something of a sour note with a final issue that showed fairly obvious signs of editorial rewriting, including the deletion of the ending to one of the subplots. It also got a lot of stick for the admittedly garish artwork (though I tend to blame the colouring rather than the pencils). It did still achieve the aim of firmly establishing Magneto as ruler of Genosha, and delivered a decent story in the process, but it was disappointing to see Magneto going back to relatively standard villainy at the end. It's not the character's most interesting side.

2000 was the 25th anniversary of the new X-Men, which in theory was commemorated in X-MEN: BLACK SUN. Quite how a miniseries starring a minor supporting character in which all the new X-Men only appeared as demonically possessed puppets while other characters ran around doing all the work is meant to constitute an anniversary celebration is beyond me, but there you go. Viewed as a commemoration, it's nothing. Viewed as a story, it's an unsatisfactorily formulaic affair.

It also served to establish Amanda Sefton as the new Magik, although not to legitimise her in that role. That should have been the role of X-MEN: MAGIK, but that series has proved equally disappointing, treading dangerously close to rehashing the plot of the recent Hellcat miniseries and using an unfortunate mismatch of artistic styles that do not complement one another well.

Upcoming regular writer Joe Casey did a fairly drastic reinterpretation of the X-Men's origins in X-MEN: CHILDREN OF THE ATOM, a book which unfortunately suffered from hideous delays due to problems with the art. As the original back-up stories that he was using as source material were really not awfully good, Casey's changes were a vast improvement, giving the team an actual origin story rather than an episodic series of stories about meeting one another. Relocating the team so that they previously all went to the same school is a bit much (and the only bit liable to really raise eyebrows if Casey insists on trying to incorporate this series as canon), but it's a better origin story than the team had before.

The less said about the X-MEN DECLASSIFIED miniseries the better. A series of faintly silly attempts to suggest hidden backgrounds for the X-Men linked by a framing story that made no sense, the book's only redeeming feature was Pascual Ferry's artwork. Fortunately, the way the storyline seems to be heading, it looks like it's impossible for the issue ever to have happened, which for once is a definite plus.

X-MEN FOREVER is Fabian Nicieza and Kevin Maguire's time travel excursion through X-Men history, already two issues in. I'm very fond of it, although I recognise that it may be a bit continuity-heavy for some. Looks great, though.

X-MEN: PHOENIX (which was still going at the beginning of the year) was an attempt to sketch in more of the history of the Askani, promptly rendered pointless by deleting that entire timeline. It wasn't all that exciting when it was relevant, either.

Ben Raab finished off his X-MEN: THE HELLFIRE CLUB historical miniseries, a selection of self-contained stories about the activities of the Shaw family through Marvel history. Not really an X-Men story at all, but an interesting change of pace for the X-books.

And finally, X-MEN: THE SEARCH FOR CYCLOPS, still in progress. Writer Joe Harris took some exception to Marvel President Bill Jemas publicly wondering what the point of the book was, which was admittedly a novel approach to promotion. Jemas has a point, though, in that for all that Harris is obviously trying to do something imaginative with the book, it's fairly obviously a story designed to hit the reset button for Cyclops and Apocalypse after they were both killed off for shock value in the unsatisfying Twelve storyline.

the year ahead

So that was 2000. And almost none of it will have the slightest relevance to 2001.

Grant Morrison and Joe Casey are your new writers on the X-Men, starting in the spring after an interim run by Scott Lobdell. Morrison seems to be the driving force here, and with the wide range of stories he's written in the past it's hard to know quite what to expect from him. His interviews suggest that he does actually intend to do some characterisation, so it's unlikely to read much like his other major hit, JLA. History suggests a disregard for obsessive continuity and a willingness to hurl big and ludicrous ideas around, combined with an affection for the superhero genre. Whatever else it's going to be, though, it seems a virtual certainty that we're heading for two X-Men titles which will be writer-driven rather than editorial-driven, and it's about time.

Of course, we said that when Joe Kelly and Steven Seagle started writing, and look what happened there. Something of that sort is always a possibility.

Chris Claremont, meanwhile, will be off in his own new series, which is evidently going to focus on the splinter X-Men team investigating Destiny's prophecies. It could be interesting and, if nothing else, should provide an alternative for the section of fandom that Morrison and Casey will alienate. (And they're bound to alienate some people.) The backstage politics that led to Claremont being removed from two flagship books due to evident concerns over the content of the books, and then promptly offered a new title, are intriguing to say the least. But hopefully this series will be able to get the attention back onto the page where it belongs.

The Counter-X experiment is over and only X-Force survives, in what can only be rationalised as a sales-based decision. In fact, Counter-X boosted the sales of all the titles involved (in the face of continuing shrinking sales for almost every other title out there), but evidently it didn't boost them enough. There is talk of X-Force being given a radical overhaul as well, in which case god only know who's going to be working on it, let alone in it.

Wolverine has a new creative team, whose first issue is at least an interesting start. There's talk of a new role for X-Men Unlimited, which would be the only way of justifying its continued existence. And in the midst of all this, thanks to the clamour from their fanbase, Weinberg and Ryan will be continuing with Cable.

The wave of cancellations means we've already lost Bishop and Gambit, and next year will see the end of Generation X, Mutant X, X-Man and X-Men: The Hidden Years. In their place, there's the as-yet-unnamed new Claremont book, and the bizarre sounding Blink & The X-Iles (which, please god, will get a better name before it sees print). Judd Winick and Mike McKone are a promising creative team, but the premise sounds alarmingly like the Cross-Time Caper, which was too long the first time round.

That still leaves us four titles down overall, which is probably for the best. Marvel have also announced plans for a large number of miniseries, however, some of which are supposedly intended as pilots for ongoing series. This is not good news. It has the potential to degenerate into the sort of mess we saw in the mid-nineties, when the X-office was churning out solo miniseries ranging from the merely feeble to the absolutely atrocious. There has been talk of a Rogue ongoing series, which strikes me as appallingly misguided.

And of course, there's also Ultimate X-Men. 2001 will be the year in which that book has to prove the sceptics wrong and satisfy us that Millar hasn't gone sailing off into shock value with no thought for the long term viability of the book.

It's going to be an interesting year ahead. Even though the choice of cancelled books is plainly influenced by sales as much as anything else, we're nonetheless looking at a trimmed down line that has been shorn of some dead weight, and that looks like it will be less editorial-driven than anything the X-books have done in years, in line with the new editorial philosophy of the Quesada/Jemas regime.

2000 will probably come to be viewed in retrospect as an interim year - a few months of X-Men stories that didn't do much, a load of books that got cancelled, the usual assortment of glorified fill-ins on Wolverine, with the Counter-X material a curious blip in the history of the X-books. 2001 has the chance to be much more than that, and with any luck it will deliver.