21 november 1999

Seven books in one week. And how many of them are any good? Precisely.

Fortunately, we start with one of the ones that actually is pretty decent, namely GENERATION X. Of course, this is a comic relief issue (and a shameless buy-me-for-the-guest-stars job, to boot), but that means Faerber gets to concentrate on the character development. Which, after all, is what he's good at.

The plot, such as it is, is that Artie and Leech have wandered off on their own in New York and are having fun with their image inducers while everyone else looks for them. Faerber hits the right balance between silliness and proper character work, with some nice scenes of Angelo and Everett getting completely waylaid from their search so that they can go off meeting the proper superheroes instead. He also takes the opportunity to get Firestar into an issue and tie up the loose end of her relationship with Emma Frost, which is nice.

Naturally, this issue gives Terry Dodson the opportunity to draw loads of mainstream Marvel characters for a change. His Spider-Man is excellent; his Avengers are possibly a bit too cuddly for their own good. In any event, the bright primary colours look that the title has taken on fits in nicely with New York in its home-of-the-heroes role.

Not much more to be said, really. Pleasant little story, nice art, there you go.

The curse of What If? writers was always to believe that merely by showing an existing character leading a different life, they had told a worthwhile story. MUTANT X slides further into this error with every month.

The point of this story is actually to write Gambit into the series as a regular character. (After all, he's only in three books a month as it is.) The angle is that in this reality his marriage with Belladonna never ended, so he's living in New Orleans with a wife and kid as the leader of a united Thieves and Assassins Guild.

In fact, this isn't such a bad starting point. Unfortunately, the story has not idea what to do with it. Gambit has to join the main cast, so the wife gets killed, the daughter gets kidnapped, and Gambit ends up going off on adventures with Havok and co. Oh, the Guilds? Gambit just assumes they'll fall apart and buggers off without waiting to check. Don't you just love plot requirements?

Amongst all this, SHIELD continue to act as if they have a combined IQ in negative figures, and Bastion shows up as a well-drawn but utterly pointless cyborg figure. Why is his name being given to this totally different character? Because this is Mutant X, and why create an original character when you can use a vaguely similar existing one you have no ideas for?

Cary Nord's artwork is as good as ever, but beyond that this issue has nothing to recommend it.

WOLVERINE 1999 was due out over a month ago. Was it worth the wait? What do you think?

Two stories, both written by somebody called Marc Andreyko. The main story guest stars Deadpool and revolves around a gothic horror writer called Duncan Vess whose numerous stories about werewolves are in fact autobiographical accounts of his past life, since he's secretly a werewolf himself.

Werewolves... Werewolves... Where have I seen this before?

Oh, yes. The 1997 Annual. That was a werewolf story. It was by John Ostrander, Joe Edkin and Leonardo Manco. It was an intelligent story, with proper characters and atmospheric art. In fact, it was one of the better Wolverine stories of the last few years.

This isn't. This is a load of werewolf stereotypes running around fighting one another in the atmosphere-free art of Walter McDaniel. It ends with Wolverine cheerily letting Deadpool go despite the fact that Deadpool openly admits he's here on a hitman job, it's not about anything in particular, and bluntly, it's a load of crap.

The back-up strip is rather better. Not as far as writing's concerned - it's just a gag story where Wolverine goes out to buy some beer and gets into a fight with the Hand. But it has wonderful artwork by Massimiliano Frezzato, who has more atmosphere in a square centimetre of panel 1 than McDaniel manages in his entire story. Frezzato alone makes this issue worth a look. Everybody else makes sure it's not worth buying.

Two duds in a row. Can we get a third?

We can! We can! X-BABIES REBORN!

Let me take you back to 1986, when Marvel first did this joke. Chris Claremont wrote several X-Babies stories in the late eighties, the basic gag being that they were a ridiculous travesty of the X-Men shoved out to milk the franchise by Mojo (who in these stories was usually surrounded by lots of trapping suggesting that he represented Marvel itself - in one case, even the corporate logo of Marvel's then owners).

And they were good, funny stories. And they should have been an end to it. But no, if a joke's worth telling once, it's worth telling repeatedly with diminishing success for a period of thirteen years. Please god, let this be the last one.

This story is a bizarre mess, unable to decide whether it's a joke mining the same satirical vein the characters were originally created for, or whether it's just trying to be entertainingly stupid, or whether it's trying to make a serious point. The latter moments are by far the worst, with heavy handed pleas for us all to read more books and dreadful whiny dialogue about the importance of friends.

But the story fails on all three counts, missing every tone it aims for and ending up in a limp and bloodied mess on the floor. I mean, this is bad stuff. It does have some quite nice art from Juvaun Kirby, but nothing can save a script like this.

Ironically, over on the Bullpen Bulletins page, Chris Giarusso has been doing far better with what's essentially the same idea in his Bullpen Bits strip. Sure, it's patchy, but the anti-Thanksgiving and Columbine strips are well worth a look. If Marvel are determined to keep the X-Babies in print, maybe they should ask him next time. Just a thought.

Meanwhile, back at the plot, X-MEN is ploughing gamely on with the Twelve crossover. Traditionalists might have thought that this being part three of the story, it would have been wise to hold off publication until part two had made it out, but Rob Liefeld laughs in the face of tradition and pisses in the nostrils of storytelling convention.

Fortunately, as the X-Men still haven't come together with the rest of the participants in this storyline, the absence of Cable #75 doesn't really do much damage to the readability of this issue. Sit back and enjoy something we haven't had in a while - a crossover storyline that actually seems to be heading somewhere and has a properly worked out plot.

Admittedly, there are things in this issue that don't make a great deal of sense. After years of foreshadowing telling us that the Twelve would be the people who defeated Apocalypse, suddenly the plot has him hunting them down? How exactly are the Skrulls and the Cult of the Living Pharaoh supposed to be tied in with all this anyway? And how come the five captives of Apocalypse on the last page (drawn by the plotter, remember) show Nate Grey, who isn't on this list, but don't show the Monolith, who's on the list AND has already been captured?

For once, though, I have confidence that all this has been properly thought out. Every plot revelation Davis has made so far seemed to make perfect sense - this issue even comes up with a good explanation for what Polaris and Magneto are both doing on the Twelve list, which should always have been obvious and which doubles as a hint as to what the Twelve are all going to do. There's a real sense of a plan at work, and that buys the story a lot of indulgence when it doesn't seem to make sense.

Admittedly, at the end of the day it's just a big fight against a pointless villain. But sometimes that can be fun.

X-MEN: PHOENIX. Hell, have I read this? Yes, I must have...

As you can tell, it didn't make much of an impression on me. Flicking through, I see that this story serves mainly to establish Rachel's relationship with Blaquesmith and show the roots of the Askani in yet another group of ersatz X-Men that she's gathered around her (basically the same plot as we're getting in Bishop at the moment, in other words).

I really have nothing to say about this. I do not care about the characters, I do not care about the plot and I do not care about the outcome. And it's ugly. There is nothing more to say. Stamp on these pointless little miniseries before they start breeding again.

X-MEN UNLIMITED #25 is the first issue in Jason Liebig's much heralded (by him) new era where it's going to be a core title. And so what do Joe Pruett and Brett Booth give us? A sodding clip show.

The last time Marvel dared to inflict a clip show issue on us was X-Men/Dr Doom '98, in which Dr Doom travelled through time observing the X-Men at various points in continuity. It was absolute shit and one for the all-time "who commissioned this and for god's sake why" list.

This isn't quite so bad since at least there's some sensible rationale for all the flashbacks - the X-Men have just found out that Wolverine's been turned into Death and they're going to share memories of him. All very well, but do we care? The X-Men may be in mourning, but it's not as if we are. We all know he's going to get better. He's got his own book, for heaven's sake.

So out come the flashbacks, mainly from late-seventies stories which were perfectly alright but hardly defining stuff. Also in there is Wolverine #75, where Pruett has unwisely chosen to remind us of the downright stupid scene of Wolverine saving Phoenix from falling out of an aeroplane and... flying to safety under her own power.

As for the framing stuff, it's more or less okay (though how Gambit can seriously claim that the X-Men are his only family when his real family appear regularly in his solo title is difficult to understand). It's very talky, though, and Brett Booth is still just an Image clone.

Perhaps this is the curse of not having the same editor and creative team as the core books. For all that X-Men Unlimited may want to be a core title, maybe it's doomed to sit on the sidelines and comment on the plot.

The back-up strip is infinitely better, even though it's retreading old ground as well. It's one of that strange little sub-genre of Wolverine stories, "Wolverine finds some hunters who don't show the prey sufficient respect, and makes his views known to them in idiosyncratic style." The best, for my money, is still the Classic X-Men back-up strip by Ann Nocenti. But here's a perfectly solid effort from Doug Moench and Mark Texeira.

While it's got nothing in particular to add to what we've seen before in these stories, Moench and Texeira handle the concept well. A Texeira Wolverine story is always worth seeing, and Moench's script is decent enough. Perhaps it goes a bit over the top by ending with a recitation from John Donne (who, in any event, is somebody I've always found downright depressing rather than inspirational), but on the whole it's not bad.

Still. A pointless fluff piece, and a back-up strip that, however good, is still retreading old ground. Not exactly an auspicious beginning for the new era.