23 january 2000

What a selection. Time to break out the coffee, I'll need help staying awake until I get onto the good stuff.

Start with MUTANT X, I suppose, and for the first time since the Goblin Queen storyline ended, the book shows faint glimmerings of a direction. Of course, I've read enough Howard Mackie stories to know that faint glimmerings is generally all there is, but it's a start.

These glimmerings come from two directions. Firstly, the introduction of the Mutant-X world's Mr Sinister, a character who actually has some compelling reason to meet Havok, which makes for a pleasant change in this title. With the introduction of a Cyclops counterpart into the book, this is a sensible time for him to show up, and putting Jean Grey in as his sidekick is a potentially interesting twist. I suspect we're heading for a retread of his "I will manipulate people to defeat Apocalypse" routine, but at least the potential is there to go somewhere more unusual.

Secondly, there's a couple of dream scenes in here with Alex being haunted by an archenemy making all manner of "You took everything from me" type comments. Although his attacker's not identified, the pretty hefty implication is that it's the real Mutant X version of Havok - the one whose body he's occupying - which is another good idea for where to take this book. See, you CAN do unforced plots in this title when you put your mind to it.

All of which bodes, if not well, at least slightly better than normal for the future. Unfortunately, for the moment we've got to put up with Alex and Scott being captured by Mr Sinister and then escaping again in a story which doesn't take their relationship anywhere, despite the fact that it's obviously crawling with potential, and which doesn't make for a particularly exciting plot. Promise for the future does not get you a good review now.

X-MAN only has two issues left under present management before being handed over to the tender mercies of Warren Ellis and his Warrennettes. This is the first part of a closing storyline that actually doesn't look that bad.

It's one of those stories where the hero wakes up to find himself in a strange and incomprehensible jail and tries to find out how he got there and how he gets out. We've seen it before. It's not a bad variation on the theme, though. Mike Miller's art gives us some nice Giger-influenced machinery and manages to keep his characters distinctive despite them all being in identical costumes with blank masks. Which surely can't be easy.

In the way of things, this issue is basically a load of running around looking confused in preparation for the big revelation next issue. This is the easy bit, of course, and unless the writer has a genuinely new idea, the revelation can often be disappointing. Even so, this is a generally successful run through an admittedly formulaic story, and it's not without its appeal.

I genuinely hope the next issue keeps up the quality, since Kavanagh's been plugging away on this book for years, albeit with near total lack of success, and it would be nice for him to end with something that works. Just for long service. Oh, please yourselves.

So much for the B-squad, time for some Vertigo.

DEADENDERS is written by Ed Brubaker, whose Scene Of The Crime detective series was one of the best genre books Vertigo have put out. This time he's trying his hand at science fiction, although in fact what he's turned out is a rather odd genre mix.

It's not long before the book sets originality alarms ringing, with the opening caption "New Bedlam, USA, approximately 20 years after the cataclysm." Yes, we're in post-apocalyptic territory here. We then establish that there's an us-and-them class divide in place, in the course of a conversation between a broadly villainous corporate type and his more sympathetic sidekick. Truly the cliche is strong in this one.

Stick with it, it picks up. Fortunately, the "cataclysm" turns out not to have been quite as cataclysmic as these events tend to be in stories like this, and so while Brubaker is still deep in us-and-them territory, his society is a thousand times more interesting than any of this dreary neo-feudal crap that writers seem determined to wheel out for stories like this.

Out in Sector 5 - the unpleasant bit where our hero lives - life actually goes on, if not as normal, then at least in a fairly recognisable way. There's an economy out there. The phones still work. The cars still drive. It's grimy and ugly, and clearly a damn sight worse than the nice middle class area, but neither is all that far removed from the present day. In fact, Sector 5 is more retro than anything else, with its hero looking like he's got lost en route to the set of Quadrophenia.

The plot involves our hero, a drug dealer who has hallucinations of the world before the cataclysm (which he's too young to have seen) being hunted down by corporate types who seem to think he's some kind of messiah. What makes it worth reading is pretty much the way Brubaker makes his world come to life, and the less-is-more nature of his apocalypse is far more successful than you might expect. Well worth a look.