20 february 2000

After the very dodgy Kith trilogy, BISHOP gets back on track with a story focusing more of Bishop's role in his new timeline, and the internal politics of the rebel movement. Admittedly, that basically boils down to "can you trust Clan Hellfire", but it's still more interesting than those damned Kith.

It's also good to see that Bishop's history as a member of the X-Men is actually becoming a plot point. This goes a long way to making his little band of ersatz X-Men seem less contrived; and the use of a wrecked Sentinel to tell Bishop what happened to the rest of his team is a nice touch.

There's nothing particularly original in the Clan Hellfire plot, but having introduced them as pretty dodgy characters to begin with, Harris does succeed in at least making them look like credibly decent characters after all, so that his swerve at the end of the issue more or less works. On the other hand, I'm slightly disappointed to see that Samarra Shaw is apparently going to be a villain after all. She seemed quite interesting as an ally of convenience; played as a straight villain, she comes across as more of a straightforward vamp type, which has really been done before.

This isn't a great issue, but it's getting back to the themes that make the book potentially interesting, which is reassuring after three issues of "outsiders save the town from the baddies". Hopefully the book can build on this to get itself back on track.

Jay Faerber's run on GENERATION X comes to an end, but unfortunately it's not with a story that shows off his strong points.

Faerber's great strength on Generation X has been his grasp of characterisation, which has carried even some of his more tenuously written action issues. When he came onto the book after Larry Hama's trainwreck of a run, the sudden re-emergence of actual characters made a real impact. And while his action scenes perhaps needed a bit of work, and his run never really developed much of a storyline, he could be relied on to make you care about the characters.

Well, he could until recently, anyway. Last issue was basically a big fight for no good reason, and this is an attempt to play off Buffy the Vampire Slayer which doesn't really come off. Admittedly, I've never summoned the interest to sit through an entire episode of Buffy, so maybe this is full of great side references that I don't get, but as a story it falls short. The big problem is that M finds herself playing a generic heroine role, despite being probably the least suited member of the cast for the job. Other than a vague bit of dismissiveness towards her fellow pupils at the beginning of the story, for most of this issue M does nothing that you couldn't see Husk or Jubilee doing just as easily. So what's the point of a single character issue if you're not going to focus on the single character?

It's not Faerber's fault that his final issue gets lumbered with four fill-in pencillers of varying styles, including one particularly jarring style shift in the middle of a fight scene. But really, this is Faerber on a particularly bad day. Not the way to go out.

God knows I can understand if Faerber's heart isn't really in it, having just been replaced by the younger, sexier.... well, okay, the balder, chain-smoking model. Basically, though, if you feel like sitting down and reading the Jay Faerber issues, stop at issue #59.

And now X-MAN, a book whose writer is also going out on a low, but not one that leads me to remind you of past glories. Because there really aren't that many.

Aside from a brief flickering of genuine interest around the time Nate was living in New York and messing around with the Purple Man, Kavanagh has never really made this title worthwhile. But let's be honest - under all its various writers, under all its various diretions, this book has been rubbish since issue #5. How it has droned on for another fifty-seven issues in the absence of any actual ideas is a mystery. Whatever the Counter-X team do with this book (and I'll be honest, they're not creators I've been particularly enthused by in the past), they surely can't make it any worse. I suppose a degree of credit has to be given to Kavanagh, in fact, since at least he did write the one period of the title when it did show some real potential. Even if he wrote many more when it didn't.

Last issue actually wasn't bad, setting up a two-part alien prison story with some alright character work and a suitable aura of grimness. This issue is Nate escaping and revealing the conditions in the prison to the government (which turns out to be Lilandra Neramani, since it was the Shi'ar all along). It's pretty poor.

Instead of Mike Miller we've got art from Ben Herrera, who doesn't do a bad job, but is really more serviceable than anything else. We've got an alien called a Darkle (no, honestly) hanging around for no obvious reason. We've got a bog standard escape plot and nothing that really takes the prison idea anywhere new. Like much of X-Man, in fact, it's a rather dull plot adequately executed. And, in fairness to it, it does double as an excuse to tie up a stray plot thread from a few months back.

I still remain convinced that somewhere in this book, there's a potentially good character who could appear in decent stories. At last, somebody else is going to get a go at proving it, and frankly, it can't come quickly enough.

X-MEN really ought to be treading water between major storylines as well, but the High Evolutionary plot doesn't seem to be quite turning out that way. Where you'd normally expect to find a pleasant but inconsequential little story marking time for a month, instead we have something which is going for the planetary scale sweep. They could have got a major crossover event out of this; it's rather jarring to see it cropping up as a throwaway, to the extent where I spent half the issue wondering if this was going to be yet another What If story. This is what happens when you train your readers to assume that big plots only happen in crossovers, I guess.

The High Evolutionary has eliminated all the mutant powers on Earth and, perhaps surprisingly, the X-Men have taken his advice and split up to pursue normal lives. Save for Nightcrawler, who's never had a normal life to begin with and hangs around the mansion instead, feeling depressed. The book is full of nice character touches like this - Rogue discovering that now that she can touch people, her inability to fly leaves her without much of a choice in the matter, or Storm reminiscing about the last time she lost her powers.

Genosha gets used as the main thrust for the plot, which makes sense since you'd expect it to be where the effects would be most notable. As more and more people come to the conclusion that Claremont is having a damn sight more input into this storyline than his lack of credit would indicate, it's good to see Magneto being written as a sympathetic character again. Hell, let's be blunt: it's good to see Magneto being written properly again.

Okay, now the reservations.

This issue is extremely confused about its timescales. On the one hand, the X-Men are acting like it's been at least a month since they lost their powers. Kitty's at college, Peter is apparently an artist with an exhibition coming up (absurdly quick by any standards, in fact), Ororo and Sarah have signed up as charity workers and are happily working at a summer camp. Yet not much seems to have happened in Genosha in the same time, and the Neo are still carting around their dead as if it happened earlier in the afternoon.

The overall effect is slightly weird, not least because this is effectively a shift onto real time, and we're going to get a six month gap before the next issue, to boot. Aside from sitting rather uneasily with the attempt to reassert Kitty as having aged three years her time in twenty years worth of publication, the sudden timeshift caught me off guard.

There are also plot logic problems that niggle with me. If Magneto is badly ill, and trying to keep control of a wartorn country, what on earth is he doing running around the streets of Hammer Bay shooting up robots with a ray gun? That scene wasn't needed; the Acolytes could have rescued Hank and Bobby just as effectively.

And why is Magneto proposing that the powerless X-Men fight the High Evolutionary rather than, say, the Avengers? Normally, I don't have much time for the "why don't they phone the Avengers" complaint, but come on. We were reminded about their existence in the previous part of this story when the X-Men pointed out to the High Evolutionary that the Avengers wouldn't take kindly to the erasing of Firestar and Justice's powers. Yet now the heroes are contemplating an almost suicidal attack on the High Evolutionary rather than picking up the phone? If you're not going to use the other heroes, don't mention them.

Nonetheless, this is an entertaining issue, with a lot of character and plot advancement, and at its core, an interesting idea being followed through pretty well. If this is the sort of thing we're going to get after Claremont's return, I'll be happy enough with that.

Oh look. X-MEN UNLIMITED has an Ages of Apocalypse story, three weeks past its sell-by date. And it wouldn't have been much good then either.

I'm not going to waste time reviewing this in detail. It's a fight scene. Various characters flutter around to let us know where they are at this point in the potential future, but very little of it is particularly interesting (or surprising, in view of the fact that we've seen the follow-through already in last month's X-Men). The plot of the issue, though, is... a fight scene. That's basically it. Not worth your time.

Brett Booth drew both this story and this week's X-Men. As this issue comes complete with four fill-in inkers and looks rather worse, I assume this drew the short straw and got to be the rush job. Booth is an alright artist who was one of the better Image clones to emerge in the mid-nineties but who has never escaped from the shadow of his overpowering Jim Lee influence. (Or got the hang of texture.) There are worse people to look like, and Booth's basic storytelling is sound enough, but he really lacks a clear identity of his own. The foundations are there, but his development seems to have stalled.

Liebig's plan to revitalise X-Men Unlimited by tying it more closely to the core books looks to be backfiring badly. Far from being a real participant in the main plot, the title has found itself knocking out superfluous chapters of crossovers. This is actually a step down from before, when at least it was bashing out self-contained stories.

The back-up strip this month is another Wolverine story (uh, any plans to do somebody else?), and it's not much good. The plot is a fairly obvious affair of Wolverine rescuing a kid from a mad scientist. Despite the blatant paedophiliac overtones and the bizarre name-dropping of cyberspace (utterly irrelevant to the plot), the story is really nothing unusual, and leaves Toby Cypress' odd but interesting art with nothing to work with.