20 january 2002

Frank Tieri continues his second DEADPOOL storyline, and I don't much like the look of where this one is going.

In fact, last issue was just a transitional issue to get Deadpool back to life again; this issue is the real beginning of the plot, as Deadpool turns up as an amnesiac in an alley and hooks up with some homeless people. Meanwhile, four wannabe Deadpools turn up around the city.

Yes, you guessed it - it's a parody of the Death of Superman story. Quite why Tieri thinks there's any point in parodying a nine year old story which, to put it mildly, is not an enduring classic, I have no clue. I didn't even bother reading the original story because it screamed "gimmicky junk" from the rooftops, so I'm vaguely resigned to not getting any subtle levels of commentary of parody in this story.

Hold on, what am I saying? Subtlety? In a Frank Tieri Deadpool story? No, perhaps I needn't worry. The one thing that frustrates me about not having any familiarity with the original story is it means that I can't make the following comment with absolute certainty that it's justified. It's fair to say, however, that if there is any real satirical or parodic commentary on the original story contained in this story, I cannot identify it. Which means that for all practical purposes, it amounts to a shameless piece of copying.

Maybe somebody who knows the original story can explain to me the subtle point Tieri is making here. Perhaps there is something dazzlingly clever I'm missing. But it does look... well... like he's just reusing somebody else's plot and hoping that if it's really obvious and glaring, he can get away with claiming it's comedy.

Anyhow, it's the same basic routine, where four Deadpools turn up, each one of them representing one aspect of the lead character. Hero, criminal, lunatic and, er, toilet humour. Well, at least that's Tieri's understanding of the character sorted out. The problem with this routine is that unless you're a very clever writer, what you end up with is four one-dimensional characters all of whom lack what makes the original character interesting. And it's not as if Tieri was ever all that strong on characterisation to begin with. Combined with which, most of the jokes in here are just tiresome - Tieri has obviously heard of Jackass, but he's so off mark in parodying it that I have serious doubts as to whether he's actually seen it.

Tieri's idea of how to write a lunatic also doesn't seem to extend much beyond raving and drooling. Sorry, but making this kind of idea work requires a far more sophisticated level of writing than you're going to find here.

Up till now, Tieri's Deadpool run has been passable, but be it rip-off, pastiche, homage or whatever, this just doesn't work.

ORIGIN. God, I'd forgotten about this book.

Despite being the highest selling X-book and all that, I still can't summon up much in the way of excitement for this title. I can see that they're trying to avoid the obvious by having Wolverine start off as a weak character (which presumably also allows the character to develop into a stronger figure as the story arc of this miniseries), but I still don't get what this is supposed to be adding to the character. And surely an origin story which doesn't define the character in some way is just plain redundant.

There's another two issues left to achieve that, of course, but for the moment we're back in historical fiction as Logan and Rose try to settle in to life with the lower classes. Fairly normal conflicts with bullies ensue. More interesting are the scenes developing Logan's feral side but portraying him as a more submissive creature in comparison to other animals than we're used to.

Quite clever, but ultimately I don't find myself caring where any of this is going. I know how Wolverine turns out; I always did; all that matters is how he gets there, and thus far, none of this stuff seems particularly relevant. The reason Wolverine got by just fine without an origin for 25 years isn't that he needed a "man of mystery" angle to maintain interest - it's simply that the character doesn't need one, at least beyond the more prosaic material about his time as a government agent and his involvement with the Weapon X project. This just doesn't register as an origin story, any more than a miniseries about Peter Parker's nursery school would.

All very pretty, and okay in itself, but... what's the point?

UNCANNY X-MEN 2001 is a frustrating bugger.

And not so much for the writing. After a string of really very bad issues, Casey is back into the relatively acceptable territory of being below average. The big idea (which was only used a few months back in Iron Man, by the way) is that somebody is selling drugs which give people temporary mutant powers. The X-Men must investigate.

Now, it's not a bad story idea, and it works better here - where it has some kind of thematic relevance - than it did in Iron Man, where it was just very silly. It also fits in nicely with the idea in Grant Morrison's book that humans are starting to experiment with "mutant ideas" as part of rebellious youth culture. Unfortunately, Casey never quite gets to grip with any of those issues. He gives us a generic rave and a generic overdose, but never gets around to exploring why anyone would want to take the damn drugs in the first place.

It's really just a set-up for a generic "hunt down the baddy" story, which ticks along passably enough until botching its final act hopelessly by failing to actually resolve anything at all. Some rather rickety plotting is available on further inspection - the Vanisher has driven all other drug cartels out of business by being very nasty to them? What, hasn't anybody tried this before? It's a silly and implausible idea, which doesn't add anything to the story.

So to be honest, despite a basically sound idea, it's not a very good piece of writing. But it's not garishly awful either, and in comparison to the Church of Humanity and the silent issue, hell, I'll take what I can get.

Unfortunately, then there's the art to deal with.

Ashley Wood is back, and he has stretched his range. He now offers us an impenetrable murk of many colours, rather than just sticking stubbornly to beige. And his use of colour is often very effective - in the rave scenes, which actually SHOULD look like a smoke-filled room with artificial coloured lighting, his art is a good fit.

But despite the fact that he's clearly a perfectly good draftsman, Wood remains painfully over-reliant on dousing every single page in murky haze, which damages his panel-to-panel storytelling beyond repair. You can talk about art and experimentation all you want - the fact of the matter is that Wood's role here is to tell the damn story, and he all too often fails utterly in that role because he's busily pursuing his unfathomable misapprehension that the harder a scene is to understand, the more artistic merit it has as a result. This is not a complex story and it does not have any particularly deep subtext. What, realistically, is all of this blurry nonsense meant to be adding?

You can tell it's going to be a hard slog from page 1 alone. It's meant to be Casey's usual "introduce the team with captions" affair, but since none of them are recognisable in the slightest, it fails even to achieve this rather basic aim. Mind you, even if he'd managed to make the characters recognisable on that page, it wouldn't have helped much because they spend the rest of the issue in the obligatory murk.

The story is perfectly comprehensible, but largely because Casey goes back and fills in the missing information through dialogue. Still, key scenes fail to have the impact. The opening splash page is simply indecipherable. About three pages later it's possible to infer that it was meant to depict a riot, but it's a bit bloody late then. The big establishing double spread of the underwater giant also fails to make its point, because (a) on a first look at the page, it's hard to even make out that it's a human figure; (b) it lacks any sense of scale, because the two divers heading down towards the big guy are unrecognisable as even being solid objects as opposed to lighting effects; and (c) it doesn't even come across as depicting an underwater scene. Turn back to it ten pages later once Casey has got around to revealing the necessary information, and it will make sense. But reading it for the first time, it's an intended Big Moment which falls flat because it fails to convey any information at all.

In all fairness, there are moments where Wood does seem to making a reasonable effort to get the point over. The giant rising from the sea to attack the X-Men's jet works. And it works because some fairly conventional storytelling is allowed to dominate over the atmospherics. Plus, the colouring effects are frequently gorgeous. But Wood's art is still awfully bad at conveying the plot, and that's a pretty fundamental problem if you're in the business of illustrating stories. Art is about communicating ideas, and those ideas aren't getting over, then the art doesn't work. Period.

This issue does represent a move in the right direction from Wood, but if he's going to take assignments to work on this kind of book, he's got to move further. I really hope he can find a better balance, because it LOOKS great. It just doesn't read as well.

X-FORCE #123 is an overdue silent book.

And to be honest, it doesn't really work. Milligan has taken the sensible route of trying to tailor a throwaway story to fit the month without wasting any substantial plot points on the gimmick. He's also tried to incorporate the gimmick by having the entire story take place with X-Force trapped inside Doop's mind experiencing surreal hallucinations.

But when you get down to it, this is just another example of one of my least favourite story devices: "The heroes are exposed to hallucinations which clumsily inform us of their secret fears and desires." I've never liked this idea and I don't like it here. This isn't even a particularly good example of the sub-genre, because it's a touch too overambitious in what it tries to convey without dialogue, and some of what goes on is just baffling. I have absolutely no clue what I'm supposed to take from the closing sequence with the Orphan, for one thing.

Another wasted issue caused by a dumb gimmick, I'm afraid. But I've ranted about this gimmick long enough. I can't bothered rehearsing it all over again.

On to X-TREME X-MEN, and an awkward coda to the storyline which semi-resolved in the silent issue.

Although in fact, the issue is split roughly half and half between tying up the outstanding plot threads, and Storm chatting with Jean Grey about plot developments in New X-Men. The point of that latter sequence is presumably to sort out the dangling question of how this tertiary team relate to the main X-Men and provide a rather artificial explanation for why they don't just go back to the Mansion now that Cassandra's been exposed. Some explanation of that was needed, although it gets an awful lot of space here which it doesn't really need given that it's simply a piece of plot mechanics.

Most of the rest of the issue is taken up with Lifeguard trying to rescue Sage from her coma. Claremont is obviously determined to convince us that Lifeguard is a great character, but I don't share his enthusiasm. The basic concept - that her powers only manifest to protect people, not at will - is somewhat interesting. But Claremont blurs it straight off the bat by establishing that her powers also kick in to defend her. What's that got to do with the "lifeguard" gimmick? It also means that she can just charge into battle in confidence that her powers will turn up in time, which eliminates most of the problems that her powers would otherwise throw up for her. Also, Claremont has lumbered her with the worst of both worlds - while her powers, as defined, are totally open-ended and simply allow her to do whatever's necessary, it seems that in practice she always turns into Ms Colossus. Conveniently open-ended and boringly generic at the same time - now that's an unhappy marriage if ever there was one.

Anyhow, Lifeguard wanders around a rather confused mental landscape and finally defeats Lady Mastermind through a downright unfathomable piece of plot mechanics which is just way too convoluted to work as a payoff. The less said the better.

In the other two subplots, Claremont rather ingeniously manages to invoke completely contradictory plot points at the same time. Gambit and Red Lotus expose the Examiner as a traitor to the Triads by producing a great big file of documentation showing that Sebastian Shaw colluded with the Examiner to take over all the major crime syndicates in Australia. Meanwhile, Bishop and Teri Baltimore are unable to arrest Sebastian Shaw for any crime at all, because they have no evidence. Well, what the hell was in the damn file ten pages earlier, then?

Not very good.