22 july 2001

BROTHERHOOD #2 - "Who is X?": by X, Essad Ribic and Kent Williams
X-MEN: THE HIDDEN YEARS #22 - "Friends and Enemies": by John Byrne and Tom Palmer
ELEKTRA #1: by Brian Michael Bendis and Chuck Austen
SLOW NEWS DAY #1: by Andi Watson

A quiet week this time round, with only two of the marginal X-books to occupy us. So let's start with THE BROTHERHOOD, which doesn't seem to be attracting all that much attention now that people have got bored of discussing who the writer is when they found out that the first issue was just a bit middling.

It still doesn't really read much like a Howard Mackie book, but as one of my colleagues on Ninth Art pointed out earlier this week, everybody's still scared of saying they like the book just in case it does turn out to be him after all. I'd love to throw caution to the winds and say that this was a great issue, but my reaction's really closer to "okay", and that doesn't really have the same impact.

There are certainly some interesting ideas here, and if nothing else the book is clearly making an effort to abandon most of the spandex genre conventions and approach the mutant concept in a different way. It's trying, and that's got to be welcome. The central idea that the government is threatening to introduce blood tests in schools has some potential, not least because it's very easy to make a legitimate argument for doing it (so that mutants don't end up discovering their powers in big nasty public explosions and killing themselves or bystanders by accident). It's also a nice touch to make the point that this is only going to apply to the state schools, leaving most of the policy's proponents safe in the knowledge that their own kids are exempt.

The concepts aren't bad, but things are a bit more shaky when it gets down to the individual characters. The Brotherhood members are still all a bit interchangeable, and none of them are coming across as particularly interesting personalities as of yet. Michael Asher spends most of the issue doing a fairly standard issue "depressed teenager" routine, and there's no real insight into the goths who are planning to blow up the school - a perfectly valid theme to be bringing in here, but the writer doesn't really seem to know what to do with them other than generally deride their taste in clothes. There also seems to be an obvious continuity glitch, with different scenes appearing to give conflicting information as to how much time has passed since the last issue. (For some purposes, we seem to be on the next day; for others, Asher has apparently been in his room "for days.")

Essad Ribic and Kent Williams' art seems to be settling down into something similar to Duncan Fegredo, with some interesting use of very rough sketching in a few of the backgrounds. As before, there's a serious problem with Asher's character design, which makes him look ten years older than he's supposed to be. It doesn't help that his girlfriend looks about twelve. For the most part, though, the art is excellent stuff; they just need to tweak some of these points.

I really want to like this book, since in concept it's doing all the right things to open up whole new areas for the franchise. In practice, unfortunately, it's not managing them as well as it could. There's still plenty of potential in here, but the book isn't managing to make its characters work yet.

X-MEN: THE HIDDEN YEARS draws to a conclusion this month, and my what an effort Marvel's made to commemorate the fact. I can't help noticing that Byrne hasn't even been given a letters column to do a closing editorial in, although with relations between him and Marvel now at rock bottom I can kind of figure out why not.

There remains a hardcore of fans for this book who will seriously argue that Marvel were making a mistake in cancelling it. This relies largely on the simplistic approach of "you should never cancel anything which is making a profit", but the last few issues of the book haven't made much of a creative case for keeping it around.

Despite being given an extension to the book's lifetime to allow storylines to be wrapped up, this still reads as an unsatisfyingly accelerated race to tie up as many plots as possible. Since Byrne was still introducing new plots all the time, you have to wonder what he was thinking of. There's an entire subplot here involving the Fantastic Four and Magneto that adds precisely nothing and is just taking up pages that could have been used to make the endings of the other storylines less trite. No doubt Byrne finds it fascinating to piss about in mid-1970s Fantastic Four continuity, but it's not adding anything to this book.

This is not a final issue that will win many people round to agreeing that the cancellation was a mistake.

C-

ELEKTRA is back, which I'm sure is providing Bill Jemas with unusually great pleasure even as I speak.

I will make this clear at the outset: for reviewing purposes, I do not care about the political arguments over whether Marvel should or should not be respecting the views of Frank Miller, whatever they may happen to be. Entirely irrelevant to the question of whether the book is any good. I do have serious reservations about the commercial wisdom of relaunching a character whose fanbase so firmly associates her with a particular writer, but the orders for issue #1 seem to speak otherwise.

Nor am I going to get into the wider issues raised by Chuck Austen's computer artwork. Last week I asked you to go and read the article I did about it for Ninth Art; if you have not yet done so, then do it now, because I'm not going to be repeating it here.

So. Any good?

Well... it's patchy. Brian Bendis is onto the right general idea by simply positioning Elektra as an assassin for hire and not getting into her history too much at this stage (though we do get an origin flashback for the benefit of newcomers). She says virtually nothing, and is generally an all-round intimidating presence for the other characters to react to.

The storyline, though, seems a bit formulaic. SHIELD hire Elektra to kill the President of Iraq, who's in league with HYDRA. Elektra suspects that her SHIELD contact is a mole for HYDRA. And that's about as complex as it gets. Elektra and her contact play off one another pretty well, but the plot doesn't seem particularly out of the ordinary. There are bits of this issue that I enjoyed immensely; the whole, though, seems to fall a bit short. It's not at all bad, but it never quite clicks.

The art is an oddity. In principle, it should work. Much of the issue looks very good. There are some obvious repeated panels where it seems to be being done for time savings rather than artistic effect, but the panel to panel storytelling is sound. There's a lovely double page spread of Baghdad. And then, about two thirds of the way through, things start to look very odd.

By the end of the issue, two obvious problems are visible. One is that the closing fight scene is looking a bit stiff. This isn't a technical limitation; it goes to the root of how some of the characters are being positioned. For every panel that looks fluid, there's one with no motion to it at all. Page 34, in particular, is diabolical, with two downed henchmen looking like a dropped action figure, still posed as if they were standing up.

The other glaring problem is that something is just not right with the colouring. The first part of the book has a good pastel look to it, distinctive without being overpowering. But somewhere along the line, however, Nathan Eyring's colours develop a bizarre interest in contour lines. This looks horrible. It seems as though somebody's inadvertantly printed a work in progress which hasn't had the colours graduating properly from one part of the image to the next. I know very little about the mechanics of comic book colouring; but something seems desperately wrong about last third of this book. If this is a deliberate artistic choice, I don't for the life of me see what it's trying to achieve.

The book starts off looking great and ends up appearing incredibly ugly. Surely this can't be what they had in mind.

Bendis seems to have a solid idea for how to play the character, but it doesn't really come through in the final product. The story isn't particularly engaging, and while the first half of the book shows that this art technique can definitely produce quality results, the second half tells a very different story.

Weirdly problematic. I will watch with interest to see how this one ends up.

C+

Over in the reassuring low-fi world of black and white comics with very few lines, Andi Watson returns with SLOW NEWS DAY, a six issue miniseries about an American intern in an English local newspaper.

Given that Watson's last series, the excellent Breakfast After Noon, was about unemployment in the midlands, this is a relatively commercial affair for him. There's an American in it. But with the minimal art style and low-key story, it's still in similar territory. Katharine Washington arrives from San Francisco to find the Wheatstone Mercury is a run-down local newspaper covering absolutely nothing of interest, and doing so in the dullest way imaginable.

Obviously part of the idea here is to lament the decay of the local newspaper, now a total irrelevance largely devoted to carrying classified ads. Katharine's attempts to argue for a slightly more interesting photograph of the school football team show the level that the paper is on - will it be extremely dull, or excruciatingly dull?

Katherine is partnered up with the paper's traditionally minded, and indeed only, reporter. The tension between her moderate attempts to argue for something interesting in the paper and his thoroughly dull traditionalism is the focus here; their Anglo-American squabbling is a bit obvious by Watson's standards, at least in terms of the comments they're making (the old standards about the USA having a world series that nobody else competes in, and such forth).

Tradition says that over the next five issues the two protagonists will come to a mutual understanding of some sort. This being Andi Watson, I have a fair amount of confidence that they will not find themselves covering Really Important News and being catapulted to journalistic stardom, which would be the Hollywood ending and desperately wrong.

The "mismatched partners" structure is a well-trodden path, but this looks like being another strong piece of work from Watson, which is worth your time.

Also this week:

AMERICAN CENTURY #5 - Onto the second storyline, and Harry Kraft is now hanging around in Hollywood. Quite why he's ended up there isn't entirely explained, and I get the sinking feeling that what we have here is a generic protagonist who's going to wander around observing a variety of historical events from the sidelines rather than actually having much of a personality or storyline of his own. God knows I'm not feeling much connection to him right now. It's all very professionally put together, in the sense that makes you feel you ought to like it, and leaves you feeling a bit guilty of finding it rather dull.

B-

AVENGERS 2001 - Kurt Busiek and Ivan Reis tie up the storyline about Goliath being split in two. It's the usual routine where the hero is divided in two and comes to realise that the two aspects of his personality complement one another and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, etc etc. Perfectly competent but nothing very original. The subplots offer a bit more to get your teeth into. Meanwhile, in the backup strip, Busiek does some shamlessly blatant continuity clean-up work, though even he can't do much for Iron Man's history beyond tie up a couple of loose ends and admit that it's all rather complicated.

B-

CAPTAIN AMERICA #45 - Jesus, Dan Jurgens has woken up. This is actually somewhat interesting, despite needlessly complicating its "beat up the immigrants" storyline by revealing everyone involved to be a confused brainwashed dupe. The framing sequence - a funeral - is obviously trying to tease the death of Captain America, which is a nice touch even though Marvel now seem to have ruled him out of the running.

CAPTAIN MARVEL #21 - Having summoned the mother of Grendel to California, Merlin is deeply disappointed to realise that nobody there has even heard of Beowulf. The usual mixture of above average superheroics and cute comedy routines, which makes it good entertainment.

A-

DEFENDERS #7 - Now that they've toned down the inter-team tension to sane levels, this book is growing on me. The plot is shamelessly absurd, of course, and Larsen's art is still very much a matter of taste, but it's starting to hit the right balance between proper storytelling and self-conscious silliness.

B+

GHOST RIDER #2 - Devin Grayson reiterates the same point that we already got in issue #1. The whole thing relies heavily on you accepting that bikers are basically great and the Ghost Rider is wonderful, while poor old Johnny Blaze is a bit sad and pathetic, since he works in an office. It's a cute reversal of the gimmick, but having come up with that idea, Grayson seems to have no idea what to do with it, leaving the characters flailing around in a desultory plot about corrupt truck drivers.

JLA #55 - Hey, it's Bryan Hitch! And he's actually drawn an entire issue! It must be a blue moon. This is a conventional superhero story, but with Waid writing to Hitch's strengths by giving him lots of big explosions and large scale scenes to draw. Hitch seems to be enjoying himself more than usual, anyhow.

B+

OUTLAW NATION #11 - Story Johnson belatedly realises that he's the protagonist and actually takes the initiative for once. Took him long enough. The most entertaining issue this series has done so far, including the line: "I killed my mommy and my daddy doesn't love me anymore. Now monkeys with pliers are coming up the cliffs." Which is good.

A-

PETER PARKER, SPIDER-MAN #33 - Peter reminisces about going to baseball games with his uncle. A nice little character piece. Somewhat interesting that Paul Jenkins is having a go at something as US-specific as baseball, even granted that he could have done exactly the same story in the UK with football. I'd be interested to know from American readers whether Jenkins's depiction of US culture is as painfully embarrassing as most American writers' attempts at Britain.

QUEEN & COUNTRY #3 - In which Tara's boss tries to shelter her from the Russian mafia, and is told not to. An excellent genre book, and it's now clear beyond doubt that Steve Rolston's art works perfectly here. A series you should definitely be looking at.

A+

THUNDERBOLTS #54 - Fabian Nicieza pushes back the boundaries of obscurity with possibly the most ridiculously unlikely character revival in history, whose one and only previous appearance was in an issue of fan magazine FOOM. And you thought the Cobalt Man was obscure. Meanwhile, the Redeemers storyline ticks along nicely, and the unlikely revelation works surprisingly well as a pay-off to the long-running "who's in the third tube" subplot.

B+

The next Article 10 column, I believe, will be up next Friday, since on Monday Ninth Art is going to be carrying San Diego reports. I am not in San Diego. I feel clean.

Next week, in a surprising and unlikely move, Marvel will actually be shipping three X-books on time. The lucky three are Wolverine #166, a double-sized book tying up the prison storyline; the third issue of the relaunched X-Force; and a Dazzler story in X-Men Unlimited.

The late books list stands at: New X-Men #116, which was meant to be out this week but never stood a chance in hell of achieving that; New X-Men 2001, now doomed to be at least a month late with no explanation; Cable #95, which should have been out last week; and Brotherhood #3, which is due out next week but plainly has no hope of getting there.