21 january 2000

It took Ultimate Spider-Man a few months before it blended into the landscape, but ULTIMATE X-MEN has managed to be comprehensively upstaged by the regular title after only one issue. Hmm.

This is the Wolverine issue. In typical style, Mark Millar is keeping it nice and simple for The Kids. Magneto, who is the baddie, has sent Wolverine to infiltrate the X-Men. But Wolverine is captured by the US government, who are also the baddies. (This is now virtually a genre convention - extensive research has shown that the last story in which the US government were not the baddies was published when disco was at its peak.)

The X-Men, who are not the baddies but do wear a lot of black leather, rescue Wolverine from the government and capture him themselves. Magneto is very happy because he only shopped Wolverine to the government in order to increase the chances of the X-Men taking Wolverine in the first place. See, Magneto is a scheming baddie. Boo, hiss.

Now, I know Millar is taking an action-driven approach rather than a character-driven approach, which is fair enough, but I could really do the balance being tilted back a bit more in the other direction. It's not that the X-Men don't have personalities (though in some cases they're very different from the ones they had before), but we're still at a stage when the characters are pretty much interchangeable for the plot's purposes.

Of course, there are some nice throwaway moments here, such as Colossus grumbling about Cyclops acting as self-appointed leader ("Did you know he's a year younger than us?"), and the groundwork being laid for the Scott and Jean relationship to emerge. And the action scenes are very good indeed, with some lovely comic timing. The book is succeeding admirably in everything it's trying to do; I just wish they were trying to get a bit more substance in there beneath the flash.

On the plus side, the anti-mutant prejudice routine isn't as absurdly overplayed in this story. Millar's take on Wolverine is interesting as well, positioning the character as an outright villain at this stage. Traditionally this would lead up to the character turning face four issues down the line on the basis that the X-Men have been awfully inspirational, so hopefully Millar has some idea of how to make this less obvious. His Wolverine also seems to have been drastically depowered from the Marvel Universe's version - he actually gets gunned down successfully, and a throwaway reference describes his skeleton as "semi-indestructible." Probably for the best.

I like the book, but it's still in its grace period as far as getting to the point is concerned. Millar really needs to get some substance in there soon, since at the moment we're seeing a very flashy rendition of a stock plot.

Alas, poor Colossus. I knew him, Horatio - a creature of infinite angst.

Colossus tops himself in UNCANNY X-MEN #390, and for those who've been reading the character's stories from the last decade or so, the big question is why he didn't get around to it sooner. Even by the X-books' standards, Colossus suffered to ludicrous extremes in the 1990s, with the death of his mother, the death of his father, the death of his sister, the return from death, death and subsequent second return from death of his mad brother, and a brief stint as a villain loosely justified by a head injury depicted as a dent in the side of his head. There comes a point when it all just becomes too silly to care about. Salvador Larroca has also taken to drawing him with a ponytail, and if that's not grounds for suicide, I don't know what is.

I know I really ought to care about the death of a character who's been around for 26 years and who I used to really like, but it's been so long since Marvel did anything worthwhile and successful with the character that, quite honestly, I've lost interest. Colossus hasn't even HAD a major storyline in several years. It's not like it makes any great difference to the book whether he's alive or dead. And in fact, this is the first time I've been tempted to agree with those who argue that the Ultimate line detracts from the mainstream bodies - he's alive and well over there, so Colossus isn't dead. A Colossus is dead. They come in six packs, you know.

Poor Scott Lobdell has been lumbered with the job of tying up some outstanding storylines that Morrison and Casey don't want to deal with. The Legacy Virus cure is evidently first on the list, and you can well see why. God knows I'd want nothing to do with it if I was Grant Morrison. How in the name of god do you cure AIDS and get a dramatic superhero story out of it? They've already resorted to killing off Moira MacTaggert in order to try and make the discovery of the cure into an interesting story; now, poor old Colossus gets killed off to try and make the implementation of the cure interesting.

Implementation of the cure is where you really run into difficulty. What are the X-Men meant to do, spend a year running around giving injections to Legacy infectees? Not exactly gripping storytelling. So real world science takes a hefty battering in the attempt to contrive a sacrifice that Colossus can make in an attempt to wring a meaningful story from one of the worst plot ideas of the nineties.

The logic here, it seems, is that when the Virus was first released, it lay dormant until it reached a mutant who used their powers, at which point it was activated. Okey-dokey. This is a retcon, but I'm just about prepared to buy that as making some kind of sense. Now, let's let our resident scientists explain the logic to you...

"But if the only way to release the virus was by taking the life of the first victim...?"

"...Then it stands to reason... My god! You're right! The releasing of the cure would cause the same reaction in the host body!"

Uh?

Does this make any kind of rational sense? The virus kills its first victim, so the cure must as well? This is brainlessly stupid on two levels. One, it doesn't follow at all that the cure needs to be lethal just because the disease was. If anything, I'd say it was pretty much within the definition of the word "cure" that it wouldn't have the same effect as the original virus. Two, are we seriously being told that the cure is some kind of counter- virus which the X-Men are going to release and which is going to eliminate the Legacy Virus from the planet by airborne transmission? Whoever heard of such a thing? Even making allowance for comic book science, this is unbelievably inane. What next - the X-Men discover a cure for cancer, but it takes the form of a small goldfish nailed to a tricycle?

I can see what they're trying to do here. They're desperately casting around for a way to resolve the Legacy Virus storyline with some kind of finality, so they've contrived a type of cure specifically so that Colossus can make a touchingly heroic sacrifice and kill himself in order to cure the virus. This makes some kind of sense, since Colossus at least has a sensible motivation to be self-sacrificing as regards the Legacy Virus, both because he's a nice guy and because he feels guilty about not saving Illyana. Fine. But the plot mechanics that have been resorted to in order to achieve this are so ridiculously contrived that the story just doesn't work.

It looks nice, and the intentions are sound enough given the horrible remit to get a decent story out of the Legacy Virus. But the story goes too far beyond suspension of disbelief to carry it off.

X-MAN is three issues into the Fearful Symmetries storyline and, well, I still don't see what you're all getting so excited about.

Nate goes to a downspiral reality and tells us out of the blue that Nicola, Perpetua and a third character we've never seen before but who's shoehorned into the plot despite serving no discernible function are actually splintered versions of the same woman, so he puts them back together to fight Qabiri. Er, right. Whatever.

Meanwhile, Qabiri smashes up Edinburgh in exactly the same routine he did for the last two issues (a decent enough rendition of my home town by Ariel Olivetti, incidentally), and then goes off to have a fight with the heroes.

I'm bored, so very bored. I don't care about the merging of three cipher characters into one cipher character. We've seen the big fight stuff before. And whatever else Ellis and Grant may have done for Nate Grey, they haven't given him a personality. There's no substance here and I've seen the surface done better before.

Paul Grist is best known for Kane, his self-published crime series which regularly appears on the lists of Comics You Should Be Reading. Throwing scheduling caution to the winds, Grist has now started doing an ongoing superhero title as well with JACK STAFF. It's actually been going for months, but since I got the first four issues this week, I'll take them together.

The inspiration for this storyline, as Grist helpfully explains in one of his editorials, comes from Stern & Byrne's Captain America #253. That's the one where Captain America visits the UK and fights Baron Blood, leading to the aristocratic Union Jack dying and the working class Joey Chapman taking over the identity (ah, social relevancy through spandex). Grist pitched a Union Jack revival to Marvel a while back, which went nowhere.

Jack Staff is fairly blatantly derived from the same concepts. Both Jack Staff and his good friend Sgt. States are blatant stand-ins for Union Jack and Captain America, even down to States having the "forty years frozen in ice" as part of his official history. It's not a story you could have done with the original characters (this one hinges on things going rather differently back in World War II, and on the same UK hero being in place thanks to the wonders of eternal youth), but it's one that's close enough to be effectively an Elseworlds for those two characters.

But there's more going on here than just a Union Jack story wearing a false moustache to deceive the copyright lawyers. Although Grist plays his central storyline pretty much straight, the series is shot through with affectionate tongue-in-cheek blending of the American superhero genre with its UK equivalents. The British equivalent would be the weekly anthology boys' adventure titles, and Grist structures his story in four or five page blocks, each headlined as if it was the beginning of that particular character's weekly instalment. This balances surprisingly well with the overall issue being structured US-style, and contributes to the sense of an established universe.

It also helps that these supporting characters are drawn from sources beyond just the Marvel and DC Universes, giving the book more of a distinctive tone. Yes, there's the World War II superhero team shamelessly standing in for the Invaders, and a Lois Lane- style alliterative journalistic love interest, albeit working for what seems to be the News of the World. But the Q investigators feel rather more British than American, and Maveryk is plainly on loan from an assortment of TV cop shows. Grist even includes the Dad's Army characters in wartime flashback scenes, and then goes for broke by writing in Steptoe & Son as vampire hunters. However, despite the presence of all these jokes that only the British stand a hope in hell of getting, it's kept at the nod-and- wink level, and never detracts from the actual story.

Grist's art style doesn't at first sight seem to lend itself to the superhero mythos. His sketchy black and white linework isn't quite what people associate with the genre. But once you get used to it, it suits the book rather well. The book's eccentric blending of characters from completely unrelated genres seems to suit having an art style different from the usual superhero routine, and since his style is still basically cartooning, the superhero costumes don't look out of place.

As a straight superhero book, the series is simply pleasingly retro in an entertaining way, with the added enjoyment for UK readers of seeing local colour like Eddie Stobart trucks. (Oh, and of showing total disrespect to Captain America, which is always a plus.) But that would be missing the eccentric blending of weirdly out of place characters from other sources entirely. Fun stuff.