21 october 2001

Before any of you ask, no, I am not reviewing Heroes this week, and no, I'm not planning to. This is partly because the book didn't ship to the UK at all, partly because I never review poster books, and largely because it would be like reviewing a telethon - theoretically possible, but completely missing the point of the exercise.

So, on to CABLE, a book which DC would probably have cancelled by now on the grounds that it sounds a bit like "Kabul." In fact, we get an editorial this month from artist Igor Kordey expressing concern about a vague similarity between the WTC attack and a terrorist deliberately crashing a jeep on page 11, which is so remote I wouldn't even have thought of it if he hadn't pointed it out. Kordey's article is interesting reading, by the way, since he's a Croatian ex-pat coming at this from the perspective of somebody who's actually been in a civil war. He obviously intends it to be upbeat and inspiring, but to be honest there's something deeply depressing about passages like "The meaning of life is really very simple: reproduce and keep your family safe."

In any event, this is the second part of the Shining Path storyline, and it still comes across as a rather more interesting version of American Century (even down to the obligatory "will you shag me?" scene). Tischman's sympathy for the Shining Path is obviously fairly limited, since even though he's given them proper personalities, he's also given them an explicit ends-justify-the- means philosophy which instantly marks them as villains.

Much of this issue consists of Cable as a hostage of the Shining Path teaching children to meditate and discussing politics with the movement's leader. This doesn't sound like terribly promising material, but Tischman and Kordey manage to make it work. Some action scenes of Inza carrying out terrorist attacks break it up effectively, and Inza's dismissals of pleas for mercy give a bit of context to her behaviour.

Kordey's artwork is impressive, giving a strong sense of the location and moving easily into the action sequences. It's a good looking book, albeit with a couple of moments of where the storytelling only really sinks in on the second or third read.

Cable is the least promoted of the X-Men relaunches (unless you count X-Treme X-Men, arguably), but it's been a pleasant surprise so far.

Back at cliche central, a ROGUE hovering uncomfortably between the comics and film versions continues to stumble around pointlessly in a miniseries I'm only buying for review purposes.

This time round, Cyclops is despatched to get Rogue back, and they have a nice chat before stumbling upon yet another throwaway plot that they can tie up in twelve pages before getting back to the all-important emotional melodrama. This time, Rogue meets a nice policeman, and by absorbing his mental powers is able to defuse a bomb. Of course, if this book wasn't trying so desperately to avoid referencing any of her other powers, she could just have flown the damn thing somewhere else or even just stood in front of it... but there you go.

The plot is a cursory affair, without even any real explanation of who the villains are and what they're trying to achieve, leaving us to take it at face value that the policeman is awfully nice, and set up for the "he'll always be alive in my mind" scene which, until Claremont's recent retcon, bore no resemblance to the way Rogue's powers worked in any medium. Again, for the definitive Rogue story it was promoted as, this miniseries sure involves a hell of a lot of things you can't actually do with any other version of Rogue. And incidentally, Avery's claim that she was trying to maintain some kind of place for this story in continuity falls down badly by having Cyclops turn up and chat about Jean as if she was around on a regular basis. (She was dead at this point.)

The artwork from Aaron Lopresti and Randy Emberlin is blandly pleasant, but it's impossible to be enthusiastic about this wholly pointless miniseries, bravely signposting the completely wrong way to deal with inconvenient continuity and being utterly banal in the process.

Over at Vertigo, can you guess what they're launching this week? Yes, that's right, it's another Sandman spin-off. Don't pat yourself on the back too hard, it's not like they're rarities.

Still, THE CORINTHIAN is at least a part of the Sandman mythos that hasn't been run into the ground. Here we have another Croatian creative team, in a story following the popular serial killer in 1920s Venice. Always a nice distinctive setting for a story, if nothing else.

Artist Danijel Zezelj has an article in most of the Vertigo books this month trailing the miniseries, which isn't entirely convincing in some of the themes it talks about. I'm not altogether certain the serial killer really did start to crop up as a phenomenon around this time (isn't Jack the Ripper usually credited as the first major example?), and it seems at first glance a bit odd to talk about the aftermath of World War I as being Europe entering a decline. I'd have thought things were generally getting better, at least in comparison to trench warfare.

Still, the first issue reads well enough. The Corinthian, in the body of German soldier Stefan Wasserman, turns up in Venice with a hairstyle that won't come into fashion for another sixty years or so, and proceeds to annoy the Horsmen War and Pestilence, who have come to visit the town as well. Admittedly, what the plot is - aside from War and the Corinthian making obscure comments to one another - isn't terribly obvious. Nonetheless, the book has some nice conversation pieces, with the Corinthian coming across as a smart-ass cynic being cheerfully abrasive to bemused bystanders.

Having said that, there's an undeniably cumbersome sequence halfway through the book in which War and Pestilence squabble over a blind beggar who's willing to tell them whatever they want to hear in order to get money from them. Perfectly sound as a starting point, but it does soon go off the rails into a clunky (and very, very Sandman-lite) routine about selling stories for a lira - "I'll do anything for you... tell you any story you want..."

Despite its flaws, though, this is a promising enough start. There's a lot of interesting material here, and if they're going to keep churning out the Sandman spin-offs - still the biggest sign of how staid Vertigo has become - at least they're good ones.