20 may 2001

In this week's "book completely overshadowed by high-profile relaunch" slot comes CABLE #93. This is the first part of the "Countdown" storyline, which I'm assuming is the final part of the Weinberg run.

In the classic sign of a low-priority book, we've got a fill-in artist. Michael Ryan is off drawing the Citizen V & The V-Battalion miniseries, if you didn't know. That leaves Marvel's current perennial fill-in artist, Thomas Derenick, to do the issue. He plays it pretty straight, aside from some very bizarre use of shadow in a flashback sequence, which is presumably the work of the inker. For no apparent reason, the opening three pages seem to have been shot from pencils, and they look damn good on it as well. The change of style is somewhat confusing, especially as it seems to have no apparent relationship to the story.

Anyhow, our core story here is Cable striking back against the Dark Sisterhood by going around and wiping their minds. This is pretty nasty stuff by X-Men standards, and I assume we're meant to be slightly disturbed by the thought of Cable going around and basically erasing people's identities. It's a rather good idea, although if you start having telepaths demonstrate the ability and willingness to do this kind of thing on a regular basis, it can leave you with long term problems in finding anyone who can be a credible threat against them. Not that Weinberg will have to worry about that.

Over in subplots, Irene tries out her new identity as a black woman and gets some fairly standard scenes in which she experiences the reality of prejudice first hand. Quite what this has got to do with the main story, I'm not at all clear.

Overall it's another solid issue, and it's nice to see that Weinberg is being given a sensible amount of time to resolve his storyline rather than just kicking him off so that the book can relaunch along with the others.

GENERATION X has the unenviable task of explaining why the series is suddenly ending for no apparent reason, with no foreshadowing, after 75 issues. Brian Wood has a manful stab at it, and he's able to come up with some kind of decent rationale for all the characters to give up and go home (aside from Chamber, who gets booted up to the X-Men), but it still comes across as awfully contrived. Which it is.

The story sets about giving the kids a good reason to lose faith in the school, by having Sean do a rather standard "descent into alcoholism" routine following on the death of Moira MacTaggert, and Emma revert to her "evil bitch" persona. Both of these are just about within the characters' usual range, but they still come across as rather strained, given that they come more or less out of the blue. The other characters decide, not unreasonably, that they don't want to be trained by a drunk and a lunatic and all head home instead. There's an attempt to justify this by pointing out that they're not making any real progress at the school, a point which is rather undermined by the fact that Chamber gets to graduate.

The highly artificial requirements of this story pretty much prevent it from being anything particularly great, and so it proves. Perfectly okay, and making the best of an unenviable remit, but somewhat unsatisfactory as an ending to the series.

But the big news, of course, is NEW X-MEN. And the good news is, this one works.

What Morrison and Quitely have brought to this book is a different tone. The basic story elements are not new. An evil person who wants to wipe out mutants is planning to send the Sentinels out to kill them. Again. By rights, this should not be a particularly dynamic start to the relaunch.

But it's all in the tone. The X-Men has always been fundamentally a good, sound concept, which has allowed itself to become mired in soap opera, melodrama, and the endless sequelling of a small number of highly intricate areas of its continuity (the Phoenix mess and the Days of Futures Past being the most obvious repeat offenders).

Worst of all, it has become a depressing book. The X-Men have won convincing victories in only a handful of stories in the last fifteen years. They stagger from mutilation to disaster. They face the absolute certainty of failure and genocide, which has been portrayed as unavoidable for twenty years. For quite some time, this has been a book about some highly miserable people engaging in acts of suicidal pointlessness which, it has been repeatedly hammered home, will change nothing whatsoever.

The dream was made to look like a sick joke at the X-Men's expense.

This, I would venture to suggest, was an error in tone. This whole genre is based largely on wish fulfilment. Who in their right mind would want to be a member of the 1990s X-Men? They were having no fun. Rumour has it that one of them smiled in 1994, but that was probably a guest appearance in somebody else's book.

It says something about how grim the books had become that Morrison is able to do a story about genocide and still be seen as lightening the tone. But that's what he's done. If we're to buy into the idea that humanity's going to die out and be replaced by mutants within four generations - and granted, it hardly comes from a character who should be viewed as a trustworthy source - then Morrison is re-opening the possibility of a whole load of stories where, at the end of the day, the mutants come out on top. It means that the practical application of the X-Men's dream, rather than trying to broker some kind of mildly unsatisfying peace, is to smooth the transition from a human to mutant population. And what that gives you is a book that, in typical Morrison style, is saying "Sure, things are a bit crap right now. But these are just teething troubles. The good times are coming."

There's actually a sense of hope here, and it's been years since the X-Men have had one of those. The characters get to play with lovely sci-fi toys. They seem to be having fun together. There's some nice throwaway moments of comedy to lighten the tension - Nova's lengthy "let's kill all the mutants" speech balances out her menace by having her spend half the issue talking to a bemused overweight dentist. There's some of the bizarre concepts that Morrison's stories are infamous for, without dragging the book off into weirdness for its own sake. This is an upbeat comic. It's fun to read. It doesn't have the back of its hand nailed to its forehead any more. And that's the key.

This is not another JLA. Morrison deliberately avoided doing characterisation in that book (which if you ask me made it a rather dull read, but there you go). This book gives the characters plenty of room to breathe. It's not another Doom Patrol; this is not an attempt to warp the superhero genre into something unrecognisable, but simply to cut back to the core ideas and do it right.

It is emphatically not Invisibles, and that part of Grant Morrison's fanbase who were disappointed to learn that have completely missed the point of what he's trying to do here.

Frank Quitely's artwork fits perfectly with this approach. His characters feel like real people, not cyphers rendered in the way the genre has taught us to expect. The one glitch, I'll admit, is that his Jean Grey does look rather ugly in a few panels, and she could probably do with being a bit less facially lumpen. But you can let that slide when you see the rest of the book, which slides neatly from beautiful psychic images through to a wonderful three page sequence of Xavier fighting off a psychic attack.

This is really excellent. This one really does justify the hype.

My god, that was positive. I need to maintain my balance. Ah, here comes a suitable target for my surplus bile.

ULTIMATE X-MEN #6.

Last issue showed surprising signs of introducing radical concepts such as characterisation and ideas. Fans of Mark Millar will no doubt be relieved to learn that they have been purged from this issue in favour of more explosions.

I think I've finally worked out what it is that leaves me cold about this book. This isn't a series about prejudice, or about evolution. It's not a series about a group of characters, or even a series about action and adventure.

This is a series about Mark Millar, and what a mad bloke he is.

Take that scene of Magneto with a naked President Bush on the White House lawn. Now, god knows I would be in favour of such a thing were it to happen in reality. Vile little bastard, I hold him in total contempt. But that's not the point.

The point is that this scene, in theory, ought to be trying to get across to us what a bad-ass Magneto is. But there's nothing to say about Millar's Magneto, who is just an evil bastard and consequently a very boring character. There's no depth to this guy whatsoever. What this scene is really saying is this: "I, Mark Millar, am a wild, crazy, radical writer, as indicated by the fact that I would write a scene with Magneto tormenting a naked President Bush on the White House lawn."

It tells us nothing about the characters. It does next to nothing to advance the plot. All it does is hammer home, with the subtlety of a brain haemorrhage, that Millar is a mad anarchist type who we clearly ought to admire. Or, to put it more bluntly, who seems to think that we should admire him.

I'm bored of this adolescent exercise in dick-waving. I'm bored of this sneering, supercilious cynicism. (And as a sneering, supercilious cynic myself, I should know.) I'm bored of this dreary series of art-student shock tactics masquerading as a radical innovation. This sort of thing is fine if it's a means to an end (as it tends to be when, say, Garth Ennis does it), but there doesn't seem to any point to this series at all beyond self-congratulation. In comparison with the broken and confused X-books we had when this book launched, it didn't look bad. When you see it up against something that does the concept properly, it is brutally exposed.

Millar has nothing to say about his characters, about his concepts, about anything. All he has to say is that he's the sort of wild man who does mildly offensive scenes with children's characters. So what? Oz did that back in the 1960s. As radical statements go, this is pensionable.

I started off feeling quite positive towards this series, but with the reservation that it needed more substance. It's failing comprehensively to develop any more substance, and the novelty value of watching the same routine every issue is rapidly wearing thin. Now we're six months in and at the end of the first storyline, it's too late to keep saying "Maybe the meat will come." There is no meat. At best, the point of this series seems to be ironic self-parody. Why bother?

I'd feel slightly more kindly towards this book if I got the impression it was aiming for something else and missing. But this seems to be it. This looks like the whole package. And it's a one trick pony that's already tired itself out.

TRANSMETROPOLITAN: FILTH OF THE CITY is the second prestige format one-shot tying into Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's excellent sci-fi series.

The format is the same as before - in theory, this is meant to be a collection of Spider Jerusalem's columns for the Word. In practice, it's nothing of the sort. It's actually a selection of splash page art by a selection of different artists, accompanied by excerpts from Spider's writing. The "collection" gimmick sits rather uneasily with the content, since unless Spider's in the habit of writing very short columns and telling his audience information about their world that you'd think was rather elementary. Does Spider's average reader really not know that Mercury is covered in solar panels and powers the Earth?

Put that out of your mind, though, and the book works well as another rambling guide to the Transmetropolitan world. As before, there's basically three types of page here: pages based on major Transmetropolitan stories, character pieces for Spider and the supporting cast, and weird shit from the Transmetropolitan universe. Unlike last time, the pages flow rather better as a continuous read, and (to the best of my knowledge) they haven't reused some of the minicolumns that were written for promotional purposes back when the series was launched.

It's the throwaway ideas that I like the best. The ludicrous imported English films ("Die, Bastard Vicar, Die"), the history of the Long Pig franchise, the bizarre religions. But the book balances them out with some more reflective material on the characters and the politics.

The selection of artists is pretty eclectic. Aside from the usual suspects (you know, the former Ellis collaborators, the ones like Bill Sienkiewicz who always turn up somewhere in this kind of project), there's some mainstream artists putting in curious appearances. J Scott Campbell? Yanick Paquette from Gambit? Both doing good work, and entirely deserving of the space, but they're not names you'd necessarily expect to find on the roster. Jacen Burrows' double page spread is particularly worthy of your attention, incidentally. He's the artist from "Deep Blue", that Ellis series nobody read because it was in a split book with a vastly expensive porn anthology from Avatar. His rusting giant robots look amazing, and really ought to go some way to landing him a prominent assignment somewhere.