year in review 2001 - part one

x-men vol 2 #110-113
new x-men #114-120

THE CREATORS: Up to issue #113, Scott Lobdell writing and Leinil Francis Yu pencilling. Afterwards, Grant Morrison writing and, at least in theory, Frank Quitely as regular penciller. A ton of inkers throughout the year.

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Four, plus a completely missed issue - the book is running late. All those, of course, come during the Quitely run.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: Shadowcat leaves the X-Men; the Eve of Destruction crossover; "E is for Extinction", parts one to three; Professor X turns out to be possessed by Cassandra Nova; and "Germ Free Generation."

This is the third year that I've done one of these annual reviews, and the first time I've bothered to treat X-Men and Uncanny X-Men as separate titles. Until now, they've basically just been a single fortnightly book existing in permanent crossover with each other.

The first half of the year is the tail end of that period, with Scott Lobdell filling in for a few months between the Claremont and Morrison runs. Lobdell's remit seems to have been to clear the decks for the new arrivals and get shot of some unwanted subplots. Issue #110, which tied up the business of removing Shadowcat and Colossus from the cast, is a nice little character piece of the type that Lobdell does rather well. "Eve of Destruction", a hamfisted crossover which looks as if it may have been intended to get rid of Genosha, only to back off at the last moment so that Morrison could do it instead, is largely hopeless and inconsequential material which, at best, kept the fires burning for a few months.

But it's the second half which really counts. What's surprising about Morrison and Quitely's run is that it feels like something totally new, even though when you get down to it, they haven't introduced any wildly different ideas. It's still the mutants in a world that hates them (albeit that Morrison has begun playing up the other viewpoints that are also out there), and it's still using pre-existing ideas like the Shi'ar, the Sentinels and Phoenix.

The difference lies in the tone of the book. While it may be using previous concepts, New X-Men has dumped the longstanding habit of doing direct sequels to earlier stories and played down the book's previous obsession with its own continuity. The book seems to have rediscovered optimism, and dragged itself out of the soap opera rut that it had been in for ten long years (largely because that was the formula that worked for Claremont, and the 1990s X-books were built on a policy of not straying too far from the formula). Not all Morrison's stories have clicked - the U-Men still don't work for me, however much I like the underlying idea - but nonetheless, Morrison has successfully stripped away the years of accumulated barnacles that have attached themselves to the X-Men characters, and pared back to the fundamentally strong concepts that lie at the heart of the series.

The people who grumble that New X-Men isn't the X-Men are wrong. It's not the Claremont X-Men, undeniably, and the two became very closely (too closely) identified with one another over the last twenty years. But there's more than one way to skin a cat, and if this isn't a valid take on the X-Men concept then, presumably, neither was Lee and Kirby's. And they created the damn book. We've had Claremont, and pallid copies of him, for twenty years now. We don't need any more of it. If you want that sort of thing, fine, buy X-Treme X-Men, which is still doing that style of story for those who want to see it. For the rest of us, at long last we're getting to see something new and improved instead of endless iterations on the formula.

Of course, the most infuriating thing about New X-Men is its infernal slowness. Allegedly this is going to be improved next year, since they've made a more realistic assessment of how quickly Frank Quitely can work. We'll have to see about that. In the meantime, we've had a lot to put up with in terms of delays. Quitely's artwork is magnificent when it actually turns up, which at present rates of output would seem to be roughly three months a year. At least we've had solid fill-in work on the other issues - Ethan van Sciver shows promise, and Igor Kordey, who seems to be pencilling and inking a little more than two books a month these days, presumably never sleeps. He keeps up an impressive level of quality, particularly bearing in mind his status as a rush-job fill-in artist.

A year of great success for New X-Men, all told. And if they can just nail that damn schedule down, we can expect things to continue at an impressive level in 2002.

ultimate x-men #2-13

THE CREATORS: Mark Millar writing, Adam Kubert pencilling, and Art Thibert inking.

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: A total of five, by my count (three full issues and two which called for other pencillers to chip in, so we'll call that a half each). Issue #13, of course, is by a guest creative team altogether.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: "The Tomorrow People", parts 2 to 6 (the one with Magneto); "Return to Weapon X" (the one with Weapon X); and the first half of a Gambit two-parter.

This time last year, I was feeling moderately upbeat about Ultimate X-Men, on the strength of its first issue. Skimming through the last year's reviews, however, I see that it took me until the spring to grow to loathe it with a passion.

I'm well aware that I seem to be in the minority in finding Ultimate X-Men so intolerably smug, and I've already written at length this year as to quite why I dislike it so much. But what the hell, it's the end of the year, let's revisit these points again.

What we have here is a nasty and cynical book in which ciphers do nasty things to other ciphers, entire groups of villains have one personality dimension to share between them, and a year into the series, the protagonists are still largely indistinguishable from one another in anything other than physical appearance. Save for using the "everyone hates mutants" riff, Millar seems to have no particular interest in most of the characters he's updating, since he's kept absolutely nothing of their personalities beyond the most superficial elements.

Or then again, maybe it just seems that way, because the book doesn't seem to have a great deal beyond superficial elements. If you're looking for depth, you won't find it here. It comes across, to me at least, as a book which is mainly devoted to convincing us how radical it is, to be doing such nasty and cynical stories with such previously innocent characters. It's shiny and pretty but, in its largely vacuous six-month stories, it's bloated and hollow.

Still, it's Marvel's third best-selling title every month (behind New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men), so the formula is obviously working for a lot of people. Next year, Millar tries his hand at the Avengers with his new series Ultimates. Hopefully he won't just try to repeat the same formula with that, because the results could be very ugly.

uncanny x-men #390-401

THE CREATORS: Scott Lobdell writing up to issue #393, and Joe Casey writing from #394 onwards. Salvador Larroca left as regular penciller with issue #392, Ian Churchill stumbled through a "run" consisting solely of issues #394-396, and Ron Garney has finally turned up as regular penciller with issue #401.

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Five, plus a missed issue. (Issue #390 is a hangover which should have come out in 2000 - we ought to be up to issue #401 by now.)

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: Colossus dies; Cyclops chats with Corsair; Eve of Destruction; the Warp Savant issue; Poptopia; the debut of Stacy X; issue #400 and the Church of Humanity; and the silent issue with the X-Corps.

I've already written about the Scott Lobdell transitional period above, so we'll skip past that to the Joe Casey run.

And my, Joe Casey has made a bit of a twat of himself, hasn't he?

Even allowing for the hype element, some of Casey's interviews in advance of the relaunch are now starting to look monumentally ill-conceived. Take, for example, the one where he told the interviewer that soon everybody would be copying the style of his and Grant Morrison's stories, and they were going to have a huge impact on the comics world. Well, he might have a point about Grant's.

Casey's stories, on the other hand, have been an eight-month parade of mediocrity, arguably some of the weakest material he's ever written. It's worth remembering that Casey is not a hack by any stretch of the imagination. His run on Cable a few years back was enthusiastically received. He got good reviews on WildCATS. I haven't heard too much about his current work on the Superman books, but they don't seem to be getting too bad a response.

Yet Uncanny X-Men is exceptionally poor. I've never been entirely convinced about the Casey bandwagon, and with a leftover Jim Lee clone like Ian Churchill on art, I had low expectations for this relaunch. The trite first issue with Warp Savant was pretty much what I'd expected, but I never anticipated the sort of the decline that followed from that.,/P>

Poptopia managed to be simultaneously a hopelessly shallow attempt to satirise celebrity and a bunch of mutants being shot at in a sewer. Since this boiled down to little more than a rehash of the Cannonball/Lila Cheney romance from New Mutants crossed with the Morlock Massacre (and the two storylines never even interacted with one another), it was astonishing to see Casey seriously trying to pass this reheated material off as something original.

Ian Churchill made a break for it halfway through, leaving Casey stuck with a serious of bizarrely miscast fill-in artists for the rest of his storyline. I really feel for anyone picking up the Poptopia trade paperback - which actually runs up to issue #400 - as they attempt to construct some sense of coherence from a story illustrated by Ian Churchill, Sean Phillips, Ashley Wood and Eddie Campbell. Particularly Wood, who really needs to drastically widen his artistic range before he should be allowed anywhere near maintream comics. Applying the same hazy fogbank to every story, irrespective of its appropriateness, is not big and is not clever.

Issue #399 had an interesting idea in the form of a mutant brothel (where the prostitutes don't actually need to DO anything, they just use their powers on delighted clients). It also had the Church of Humanity, possibly the silliest idea I've seen in years. Somewhere deep in this concept is a good premise, playing off the resistance of more literal Christians (particularly in the US) to the concept of evolution. What it ends up as is a bunch of people in clerical robes with ray guns. This is insanely ludicrous, utterly laughable, and to see it seriously presented as some kind of intelligent story is genuinely surprising.

As for issue #401, the less said the better. In fairness to Casey, this was the gimmick silent month issue, and the gimmick evidently did not agree with either him or artist Ron Garney, given the hopeless inability to convey the plot which both creators displayed throughout the comic. But with a risible subplot about Stacy X breaking into Bill Clinton's bedroom to give him an involuntary orgasm (why, for christ's sake, why?), and the very questionable nature of the whole X-Corps concept to begin with (Casey originally wanted them in Nazi regalia, which is just childish), this one plumbed new depths.

Eight months into his run, Casey has yet to produce anything which seems to have been well-received by anyone. This is perhaps a little harsh on the Warp Savant and Poptopia stories, which are ultimately no worse than a lot of the material which appeared during the 1990s, but Casey himself built up expectations much higher than that. The Church of Humanity and the X-Corps are genuine, outright bad ideas, and their reception is pretty much what they deserve.

When I wrote last week that issue #401 might well be the worst issue of Uncanny X-Men in its history, I had spent a little time trying to think of a worse story. A week later, I still haven't managed to think of any that even come close. Nonetheless, I had thought that a statement as sweeping as that was likely to bring at least a few Casey fans out of the woodwork to defend him, even if only to say that it wasn't THAT bad. That's what normally happens when I write things like that. I was quite looking forward to it. I was interested to see what the pro-#401 argument might be, since I'd been unable to come up with one.

But nothing. Not a single message of disagreement. Several e-mails saying how much they AGREED with the review, but nobody willing to defend the issue, even against the claim that it's the worst issue in over 38 years.

This can't go on indefinitely. If Casey can't turn things round pretty sharpish, you have to figure Marvel are going to take matters into their own hands. Poor Joe - when he got this job, it must have seemed like something that would make his career. Now it looks like something he's going to take years to put behind him. It's kind of sad, really.

Casey can do much better than this. For his own sake, now would be a good time to start.

x-men: the hidden years #16-22

THE CREATORS: Writer and penciller John Byrne, and inker Tom Palmer

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Nil, naturally. This is Byrne.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: Some of the Lost Generation characters turn up; Kraven the Hunter fights the Beast; Tobias Messenger and the Promise; a crossover with something that happened in Fantastic Four in the early 1970s; and cancellation.

X-Men: The Hidden Years was cancelled in July, but its loyal band of hardcore fans - and John Byrne - continue to complain.

The complaints tend to centre on the argument that Marvel should never cancel any comic which is making money. This argument is fundamentally wrong for two reasons. For one thing, Hidden Years was precisely the sort of backwards-looking, history-homaging book that the new-and-improved Quesada/Jemas regime wanted to distance themselves from. Axing it sends a PR message which benefits the line as a whole. Of course, if you love that sort of book, it sends a PR message that you won't like. But you're not the target audience any more, so that doesn't matter. Marvel's PR policy is deliberately divisive - the very fact that fans of this book are so publicly annoyed is IN ITSELF an advert for the line, because it attracts the sort of people who always avoided Marvel since they assumed its books were all aimed at people like you.

For another, and less controversially, there's only so many X-books the market will bear. Even though some hopeless antiquities like Wolverine and X-Men Unlimited are still clinging in there, axing the low-selling Hidden Years has left Marvel with an improved and streamlined group of X-books, and has strengthened the brand as a whole.

As for the actual content of the last seven issues, I see that I couldn't even be bothered to review three of them, which gives you a fairly clear indication of just how much interest I was able to summon up in it. Passable material for readers who particularly like that sort of thing. The rest of us have got on just fine without it. The world is not noticeably a worse place for its departure.

x-men unlimited #30-33

THE CREATORS: Various

WHAT HAPPENED: Issue #30 has Generation X Underground, Nightcrawler, Rogue and Wolverine; issue #31 has Rogue & Phoenix, Cyclops and X-Man; #32 was Dazzler: Behind The Music, Nightcrawler and the Starjammers; and #33 was the all-villain issue.

And here's a book which by all rights should have joined Hidden Years on the scrapheap.

Yet again, we were told this year that we would be getting self- contained X-Men stories by impressive creators. And what do we get? Self-indulgent nonsense like Dazzler: Behind The Music. This has been another year of middling-to-forgettable stories (I could barely even remember anything from issues #30-31), and while the general quality control has improved somewhat from previous years, the anthology format has not taken the book to the level where any sensible creative case can be made for publishing it.

For those people who actually want to read an entire anthology of filler back-up stories, then rejoice, because this is the title for you. For the rest of us, it's disposable.

x-treme x-men #1-8

THE CREATORS: Chris Claremont writing and Salvador Larroca on art.

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Nil.

WHAT HAPPENED: Four issues with Vargas in Spain, and four issues with organised crime and Sebastian Shaw in Sydney.

First things first: yes, this is the worst name for a comic in the history of the X-books. Gambit & The X-Posse was arguably very slightly worse, but since it never saw print, it doesn't count.

This is the book for those of you who still hanker after the opportunity to read Chris Claremont stories the way Chris Claremont used to tell them. Hell, there's a market for it, and they're willing to put the book in the top ten every month.

X-Treme is certainly an improvement on the incoherent material that Claremont was putting out during his abortive run on X-Men and Uncanny last year. Some of his more aggravating tendencies from that period have been wisely reined in. His villains no longer insist on being accompanied by a flotilla of henchmen who stand around telling us what their names are, and the general level of wordiness has declined somewhat. There are still sporadic sightings of both those problems, but we're moving broadly in the right direction.

The general concept of the series is sound enough - a splinter team go off to try and find the diaries that will let them predict the future and act to change it. However, if that's the idea then it seems odd that it's played so small a role in the first eight months. This series has, as its basic premise, "hunt for the objects." You'd have thought that cried out for a quest structure. But in the two storylines so far - and for that matter in their Savage Land miniseries - the X-Men have done astonishingly little in the way of book-hunting. They TALK about the diaries a lot; they stumble upon other people who are hunting for the diaries; but they never actually seem to get around to looking for them themselves.

Perhaps this shouldn't be too surprising, considering that Claremont's X-Men always did have a tendency to sit around at the mansion and wait for the bad guy to show up (which he invariably did in due course). Still, it seems that having set up this framework for his series, Claremont has astonishingly little interest in using it. The book would probably be stronger if the characters showed any real signs of interest in pursuing their supposed quest, as opposed to talking about how they must get around to it some day.

Neither of this year's stories has particularly interested me. The first storyline served mainly to introduce Vargas as a villain, which is fair enough, but did take four months to accomplish. The Australia storyline has floundered more obviously, showing worrying signs of chucking in a load of plot elements at random and hoping they all fall into some kind of order. The introduction of a character called Lifeguard who has the plot-device power to do whatever the situation requires for (seriously, that's how they describe it) is altogether unwelcome.

Salvador Larroca's art isn't quite as clear as you might want it to be, a problem which was particularly noticeable on the silent issue, although in part this may stem from his difficulties in working from a script written in a foreign language. The experiment in shooting his art directly from pencils and letting the colourists sort it out has been broadly successful, although it was a sensible move to go back to printing the pencil lines in black (early issues, which blended the lines into the colours around them, were just a little too murky).

X-Treme is a passable comic for people who still want more of Chris Claremont. Personally, I could live without it. But if you really think that this year's overhaul of the line was a step in the wrong direction, then here's your time capsule, to take refuge from the present day.

wolverine #160-171

THE CREATORS: Writer Frank Tieri, penciller Sean Chen and inker Norm Rapmund.

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Four.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR: The tail end of the Mr X storyline; the Weapon X five-parter; "Blood Sport"; and the current "Stay Alive" storyline.

Ah. Frank Tieri.

Tieri turned up on Usenet a few months back, to vehemently deny suggestions that he had only got this assignment because he was a friend of Joe Quesada. He pointed out that he had originally been assigned the book by Bob Harras. No doubt this is entirely true. Nonetheless, a lot can be read into the fact that people were casting around for explanations of how the new regime at Marvel came to the conclusion that there was a pressing need for three Frank Tieri books a month.

The best of the three, by a considerable margin, is Deadpool, since the basic silliness of Tieri's ideas fits much more comfortably in that book. This time last year, I was reviewing the first issue of Tieri's run on Wolverine, and I thought it looked promising. But that promise hasn't been delivered on. Tieri's stories are shallow and unsatisfying, with an increasingly blatant over-reliance on shock tactics.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Tieri's writing, however, is his chronic inability to actually write a properly structured story. When I was at school, I was taught that a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end. Tieri scorns such conventional wisdom and has intriguingly pioneered a two act structure, comprising the beginning and the middle. With the sole exception of his second Sons of Yinsen storyline in Iron Man, everything he's written seems to just end up being set-up for something down the line. There's never a pay-off. It just keeps on setting up indefinitely.

Three issues of Mr X, simply to establish him as a character. Five issues of Weapon X, simply to establish them as villains, but not actually to achieve anything. The Blood Sport storyline - all over the damn place, with two issues of pointless combat segueing into an utterly irrelevant Ogun storyline with the pay-off being... Wolverine's divorce from Viper? I have little confidence that "Stay Alive" is heading anywhere either.

Nonetheless, sales continue to crawl stubbornly up under Tieri's run. Wolverine is a mess which, bluntly, looks badly out of the place in the new Marvel - where even glaring failures like Brotherhood at least seem to have higher ambitions.