21 April 2002

NEW X-MEN #125 - "Losers": by Grant Morrison and Igor Kordey
BLACK WIDOW #1 - "Pale Little Spider, part the first": by Greg Rucka and Igor Kordey
MIDNIGHT, MASS. #1 - "Bluebeard's Castle": by John Rozum, Jesus Saiz and Jimmy Palmiotti
STARTLING STORIES: THE MEGALOMANIACAL SPIDER-MAN: by Peter Bagge

Just the one X-book this week, on Marvel's wonderful stop-start scheduling system. NEW X-MEN #125 would normally be the big resolution of a storyline, since it's a multiple of 25 and therefore it's supposed to be important for some reason. However, Morrison's pushed the resolution back to next month, so instead this is part four of five.

Let's start with the obvious point. The art on this issue is horribly rushed. On the one hand, I have to admire Igor Kordey's sheer blinding speed. He has pencilled and inked three books this month - New X-Men, Cable, and Black Widow, which I'm going to come onto in a bit. Two of those comics look wonderful. The third is New X-Men, which is rough, sketchy and frequently awkward looking. Kordey is a strong enough storyteller to pull off some of the scenes even on what must have been an insane deadline, but by no means all of them.

Kordey's incredibly speed is certainly impressive. But that doesn't mean that the results belong on a flagship title. While the art on this issue is by no means as bad as some people would have you believe, it is nonetheless nowhere close to the quality that Marvel ought to be delivering on this book. Nor does it do the story any favours. Morrison has obviously plotted this arc with Frank Quitely's artwork in mind. It wants to be crisp, clear, and epic. In practice, it is none of those things.

I don't entirely blame Kordey for that, as his main failing seems to be taking on too much work (and hell, the man's got a family to support - although doing high-profile, low-quality rush jobs may not be a wise long term career move). We wouldn't be seeing this sort of thing if Marvel hadn't got this comic into such a hopeless scheduling mess in the first place.

This issue also features a hideous production error, as a double-page spread (with panels spread all the way across) is broken in half by an advert, seriously impairing the readability of the scene. In fairness, errors happen, and I can't remember the last time I saw this one. But it's still a serious error.

Anyhow, the story. As in previous chapters of this storyline, what we've got here is a stock plot being used as the framework for Morrison to hang some ideas on. This leaves me feeling rather ambivolent about the whole issue. On the one hand, I quite like the idea that Nova is simply setting loose the suppressed "beast" beneath Shi'ar civilisation; on the other, I just don't buy into the plot that everyone is standing around doing whatever Lilandra says when she's so obviously under outside control.

There's some nice material between Angel and the Stepford Cuckoos, but it's hung on a supremely inconsequential plot point about getting a helmet off Emma's head. The scene with Jean trying to download Xavier's mind into her own is a stand-out, though, since not only is it a nice plot idea, it's nicely written and has some of the better art.

Still... taken as a whole, the basic plot here is too off-the- shelf to really be the attraction in itself. This series sells itself on the ideas which are scattered along the way, and on the artwork. At best, this issue is the comic book equivalent of a four-track acoustic demo for music which is intended to be recorded by an orchestra. It still sort of works, but ultimately it's disappointing.

C+

The Max imprint has a third BLACK WIDOW miniseries. It's particularly welcome this week, since it means I can point out over here to see what Kordey can do when he's working on sane schedules. The difference between this and New X-Men is night and day. It helps, of course, that Kordey seems more comfortable with this kind of material. But nonetheless, it's better artwork in every respect.

Greg Rucka is writing this series, and what he's produced here is something closer to a police procedural than anything else. Lieutenant Colonel Starkovsky of the GRU is found dead in an S&M club, strapped into a leather harness and shot through the head. His protege Yelena Belova - the second Black Widow - is packed off to join the police investigation and find out what Starkovsky was up to with her personnel file.

This is the first Black Widow miniseries to feature Yelena exclusively, but the original Black Widow's presence is felt throughout, since Yelena's main character trait remains her desperation to prove herself as the equal of her predecessor, and not merely an impostor who's been given a codename she isn't quite sure she deserves.

Yelena has been presented in an increasingly sympathetic light over the last two miniseries (the second one consisted almost entirely of Natasha and SHIELD tormenting her for no good reason), and she makes an effective protagonist here. Rucka has nailed her character, and despite this being a Max book, the S&M material isn't gratuitous - it's not particularly explicit, and it ties properly into the character's own confused sense of identity. In fact, of the Max books so far, this may be one of the ones which relies least on shock value.

Much better than it sounded in the solicitations (not that it sounded bad there). If you pick up one Igor Kordey book this week - and you really should - then you know which one.

A+

MIDNIGHT, MASS. (yes, the punctuation is in the title) is a new eight-issue miniseries from Vertigo, and it sees the imprint in its comfortable territory of "supernatural but putting a twist on the genre."

This first issue leaves me ambivolent. It's quite good. But it's not particularly exceptional, and the premise doesn't strike me as distinctive. In the town of Midnight, Massachusetts - hence the punning title - are supernatural husband-and-wife investigators Adam and Julia Kadmon, who live in a great big mansion. In the first issue, they hire an assistant, Jenny.

So it's Hart To Hart with ghosts? Well... I'm not sure that's what it's trying to be, but it's not too far off. The book spends a lot of time trying to establish the idea that, despite its name, Midnight isn't remotely gothic and is in fact a nice bright small town with a Starbucks and everything. I get the impression that the book is trying to play off the supernatural elements against a non-gothic setting, but if that's the idea, it doesn't work. The problem is that while the setting isn't very gothic, nor is it particularly opposed to that style, so they don't really play against one another.

Maybe this book hinges on me coming to the story with some preconceptions about the Massachusetts setting. But I don't really have any - sorry, but smalltown Massachusetts is so thoroughly irrelevant to my life that I've never really bothered even learning what the cliches are supposed to be. Perhaps this is why the book doesn't work for me. But what I see is a bunch of stock goth scenes on the one hand, and some pretty buildings on the other. I'm sure I'm meant to see something else in the juxtaposition of genre elements and setting, but I really don't.

Instead, what I get is some goth cliches in slightly brighter lighting than usual, and while it's moderately entertaining on that level, it's nothing out of the ordinary. Some scenes seem to be really looking for something to play against and don't work when it isn't there - such as a scene where Adam briefs Jenny to On No Account Open The Door which is such a hackneyed old plot device that it's crying out for some sort of ironic element, but doesn't seem to have one.

I'll give it another couple of issue, because the art is quite pleasant and I feel there's something in there which ought to be clicking but isn't. Maybe over the next couple of months.

C+

The STARTLING STORIES imprint's second publication is Peter Bagge's one-shot The Megalomaniacal Spider-Man. This is an odd one.

On the obvious level, yes, it's taking the piss out of the more ridiculous aspects of the superhero genre, and the Spider-Man mythos in particular. And on that level, to be honest, it's not awfully good. It's clearly done with some affection for the source material, but the jokes about the silliness of dressing up in costumes and weird relationships of mutual dependence between heroes and villains are not exactly original.

However, Peter Bagge seems to have other things on his mind as well. The plot of this book is, well, bizarre. On learning that his Uncle Ben was in fact a bit of an asshole, Peter is shattered and loses his faith in his life's mission. (So far, so conventional.) Upon reading the works of Ayn Rand, he is inspired to become a megalomaniacal corporate businessman and a fanatical supporter of Ronald Reagan. Ultimately events lead him to realise that he has misinterpreted Ayn Rand's writings and turn his back on the life he has created for himself.

No, seriously. That's the plot.

What little I know about the work of Ayn Rand comes from having once seen the 1949 film version of her novel The Fountainhead, and a quick skim of the Ayn Rand Institute's website which I did ten minutes ago. Rand described her philosophy as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achivement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." The Fountainhead, at least in its film version, is largely devoted to promoting the virtue of an artist pursuing his artistic vision in its pure form despite overwhelming critical and public antipathy. It's a downright weird film, largely because it's trying to hammer a primer in objectivist philosophy into the structure of a 1949 Hollywood movie.

Rand has a reputation as a writer who is right-wing to the point of lunacy, and certainly she was a believer in purist capitalism - although that belief springs from an underlying belief that people should deal with one another by mutual consent for mutual benefit, without the use of force, which would probably enjoy rather wider agreement. She just happened to think that capitalism was the only system that could deliver it, which is more questionable. Bagge's story seems to identify her philosophy with the politics of Ronald Reagan, which isn't entirely unreasonable, although Bagge seems to be insinuating that Reaganism was based on the same misinterpretation of her philosophies that Peter shows throughout the story.

Interestingly, the final panel of this story includes a dedication to Steve Ditko alone. Ditko also spent some of his post-Spider-Man career producing work following a political agenda not a million miles from Rand's, which has also been widely characterised as downright nuts. I feel fairly sure that this is no coincidence.

Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with either Rand or Ditko's work to be entirely sure quite WHAT Bagge is getting at here. I'm pretty sure that Bagge is using Spider-Man, as Ditko's most famous character, to put forward some kind of commentary in relation to Ditko's more overtly political and controversial later work. What I'm not sure about, because I don't have enough familiarity with the material in question, is whether Bagge is using this story to attack Ditko's politics by presenting them as a misrepresentation of objectivism, or alternatively whether he is defending Ditko's stories by saying that the critics of those stories (or at least, those people who criticised them on the grounds of their political content) have missed the point of the underlying philosophy in the same way that Peter does here.

No doubt there is a fascinating discourse buried deep within this story, which will be fully appreciated by the six people reading the book who have a thorough grounding in objectivism and the later works of Steve Ditko. I'm not one of them, and ultimately I have no idea whether Bagge's point holds water or even makes any particular kind of sense. Or, really, what the point IS. Which is annoying, because I have the nagging feeling that it was a really good one.

Also this week:

CAPTAIN MARVEL #31 - It's a post-storyline interlude issue, and a character piece for Marlo. Quite a good one, as well, although I could live without a really bad pun being the pay-off to the last few issues of subplot. Guest art comes from Derec Aucoin, and although a couple of panels look a bit flat to me, it's decent overall.

B+

CITIZEN V AND THE V-BATTALION: THE EVERLASTING #3 - Okay, the plot is beginning to make a reasonable degree of sense, but this miniseries seems to be trying to cram two years worth of storyline into four issues. The result is a story where so much effort is needed simply to follow the plot mechanics that the characters and themes are obscured instead of complemented. At a more relaxed pace this might have worked better, but it's too much for a four issue mini.

DAREDEVIL #32 - An interlude issue, in which a group of police officers discuss the story so far for twenty pages. In most hands this would be an intolerable waste of space, but Bendis is one of the handful of writers who can not merely pull it off but persuade me that it was the best way to use the issue all along. And, of course, there's a bombshell plot twist on the last page. If you're not reading this series, and you should be, then this is an excellent jumping on point.

A+

ESTABLISHMENT #8 - Hey, some development of the characters! If only we'd had that six issues ago, maybe this book wouldn't be facing cancellation. Anyhow, the UK's superteam gets packed off to Russia after the Russian superheroes go on strike due to lack of pay. As usual with this book, it's okay, but it's not amazing.

B-

INCREDIBLE HULK #39 - End of the current story arc, although more accurately, it looks to be the end of Act 1 in Jones' long-term plans for the book. This is a really slow-paced storyline, but Jones is throwing just enough into each issue to hold my attention.

LUCIFER #25 - Death's on the cover, which should be good for a few sales from any Sandman fans who have somehow missed this book so far. This is the beginning of the Purgatorio story arc, and it's largely about the Tarot Deck consolidating their control of Lucifer's world while he lies around being nearly dead. Another good issue.

B+

PETER PARKER, SPIDER-MAN #43 - The comedy and the Sandman plot fit together a bit more clearly this issue, although the device that's used to defeat him is a little on the obvious side. A fun issue, though - I enjoyed the MTV "What is Sand?" spots, and the fundraising record for Carnivorous Beach Awareness. Silly, but then that's the point.

A-

POWERS #19 - Christian is in mourning for the death of Zora, but isn't allowed to get on with it because a secondary character is determined to explain the underlying conspiracy plot to him, even though he isn't interested. I have a little difficulty with the idea that FG-3 managed to completely fabricate a history of childhood friendship (didn't they have any real-life childhood friends willing to expose the truth for money?), but it's still a great issue overall.

A-

PROMETHEA #20 - Alan Moore reaches a part of his philosophy which even its adherents don't fully understand and spends an issue vaguely hinting at meaning on the outskirts. As usual, a mixture of the moderately interesting and the "come off it."

B+

PUNISHER #11 - Hmm. This is apparently the penultimate chapter of this storyline, and I'm starting to think that this is a gimmick in search of a plot. Even the villain's henchmen don't take him seriously, nor does his plan make any real sense, which all adds up a storyline going nowhere fast. When there's no tension, and all the jokes have already been told three times, we have a problem.

C+

Last week's Article 10 column is still up for you to read at Ninth Art.

Shipping next week, Gail Simone and Udon's second issue of Deadpool; Wolverine #175, which will be the last part of the Logan Files storyline if anyone reading this really cares; Wolverine/Hulk #3, which I'm looking forward to much more; and X-Men Unlimited #35, as the anthology starts clearing out its back catalogue. There's also an issue of X-Men Evolution, which I don't review, as well as the X-Treme X-Men: Savage Land trade paperback. The Captain America relaunch kicks off next week, as well.

That leaves a late-running titles list consisting of Origin #6 (which should have been out in January), Ultimate X-Men #17 (due this week), and X-Force #127 (due next week).

Next week, I'm planning to be out of town over the weekend, so I'll either do the X-Axis as a rush job on Thursday night, or just roll it into another column in a fortnight's time. Don't worry, I'll cover the stuff somewhere along the line.