23 may 1999

Call me a sad continuity obsessive, but I subscribe to the old-fashioned school of thought that if you're going to use characters, it is best to be, if not thoroughly informed about their histories, at the very least not pig ignorant.

WOLVERINE/PUNISHER: REVELATION #2 uses the Morlocks, of whom the writers and editors are plainly pig ignorant.

There is not a problem with Revelation being a Morlock with a dangerous power. There is not a problem with the other Morlocks trying to contain her and help her. No, where I have a problem is when the Morlocks, whose level of technology seemed to have pretty much peaked with the Duracell battery and the pointy stick, suddenly find the resources to place her in a suspended animation capsule guarded by big robots. There is a term for this sort of thing, and it is "enormous cock-up." These things are so plainly beyond the Morlocks' ability, to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the characters, that you have to wonder whether any thought at all was given to their inclusion.

(It is, of course, possible that this is a clever double bluff. This seems exceptionally unlikely, since Wolverine doesn't seem to find anything unusual in the Morlocks' retroactive leap up the technological ladder. If it's a bluff by the writers, they've botched it just as badly by having a character who should immediately notice fail to react.)

Anyhow. Back at the plot, the writers have decided to extend the religious theme from Punisher by deciding that while she was in suspended animation, Revelation believed she was in Hell. Now, she's free and hallucinating wildly. This is a basically sound idea, but it remains to be seen whether it will be anything more than just religious trappings shoved onto an Omega Red clone.

So far, this is a pretty average Punisher miniseries with Wolverine wheeled in to boost sales. The best reason to buy it is Pat and Alvin Lee's artwork, which certainly has its own unique and atmospheric qualities. But the story is, at best, nothing special.

X-MEN #90 ties up the Skrull storyline, with the X-Men achieving very little other than to escape. But perhaps this is the point. The X-books have recently been developing the theme of Xavier losing faith in his dream, and the purpose of this story seems to be to confront Xavier with another dismal failure, presumably leading up to the upcoming Shattering storyline.

Basically, Xavier does his usual routine with Galactus, telepathically confronting him and trying to place him in contact with the minds of the whole Skrull population to make him realise what he's doing. All very commonplace, but Galactus simply doesn't care. He's used to committing genocide on a regular basis, and none of this touchy-feely bollocks bothers him in the slightest. Essentially, he tells the good Professor to piss off back to his own planet.

What's happening here is that Xavier is going through the motions of conventional superhero story plotting and getting increasingly baffled when the plots fail to play along. No wonder he's getting disillusioned. I'm starting to enjoy this series again.

The other major development this issue is that Marrow emerges from that medical thingy looking beautiful. This could go one of two ways. One possibility is that Davis can't make the character work and has chosen to reinvent her totally. More likely, though, is that Davis is going for the jugular.

Marrow's character is based heavily on her feelings of ugliness and inadequacy. Changing her appearance goes to the root of her sense of identity. How Marrow reacts to this has the potential to be enormously interesting.

This is all set-up, of course; the story itself is really a showcase for enormous fight scenes with tons of heroes, precisely the sort of thing Alan Davis excels in. When all's said and done, it's fun. Which is surely the point.

After the last couple of stories - essentially interregnums in the overall storyline - the books now seem ready to get back to the plot. It seems that there may, at last, be a shared view of what the story is and how the creators are going to treat it. We may at last be back on track.

X-51 #0 is a preview issue given away with the Wizard X-Men Special, to trail the upcoming M-Tech line. Specifically, this is a trailer for Machine Man's title. Those with long memories have been a bit sceptical about this book ever since seeing that it would be written by Michael Higgins and Karl Bollers. They're the writers who brought you the Cable/Machine Man and Machine Man/Bastion annuals from 1998, both of which had some of the worst writing I've ever laid eyes on. On the other hand, they also wrote Cable 1999, which was much more like it.

This is somewhere between the two, but I'm afraid it's much closer to their Machine Man annuals. It's not very good. Not very good at all.

The intention, clearly, is to try and drum up interest in this rather mediocre character by, first, including some teasers for the plot in his series (basically, he's somehow obtained some technology belonging to Sebastian Shaw which has enhanced his powers and has Shaw hunting him down to find out what the hell's going on). The other plank of their approach is to pretty much acknowledge that Machine Man, with his bland design and hackneyed extendable limbs, is really not that highly thought of by many fans, and to convince us that honestly, he really is cool.

The approach is reasonable. The execution is awful, as Higgins and Bollers overplay their hand at every opportunity. After an okay start, things go badly downhill in a dreadfully scripted flashback. Of course, there's every need to let audiences know who the characters are, but a good writer does this subtly, rather than having his characters stand around telling one another things that they cannot possibly not know. Page five of this story must be a strong contender for the worst infodump ever written, as Tessa cheerily tells Sebastian Shaw (a) who the Hulk is; (b) who the Thing is; (c) who the Fantastic Four are; (d) who Alpha Flight are; (e) who the Avengers are; (f) who the Thunderbolts are; and (g) who Graviton is (the only one of these characters he could conceivably need prompted on).

Good writers do not have Marvel Universe characters explaining to one another that the Avengers are "one of the planet's foremost teams of super-powered Marvels." They know that. It's shoddy and hamfisted. If the information needs to be there (and it doesn't, it really doesn't - what is called for is an introduction to his origin, not a trawl through third rate stories he once appeared in), get the omniscient narrator to do it rather than make your characters look stupid.

After that, things just decay into stupidity. Shaw's men attack Machine Man, and react to his most banal action as if he's just resurrected Lazarus. "H-he's somehow transformed into... into... I-I don't KNOW what!" He's extended his legs, you half-witted pillock. Stop talking as if he's an LSD hallucination.

Or when Machine Man makes a really quite awful joke, and the soldiers say "Huh? It's making with wisecracks! I wouldn't have expected that from a machine!" Basically, nothing happens with the slightest subtlety in this book. Everything is spelt out in neon letters a mile high. The book is crashingly obvious and massively overwritten from start to finish.

Pascual Ferry's art is nice. But then, he's not drawing the ongoing series - he's doing Warlock.