23 june 2002

MORLOCKS is one of those unfortunate miniseries that the readers have largely forgotten about even though it's still going. God knows nobody ever seems to talk about the thing. But the X-Axis is a completist review column, so here's issue #3 anyway.

In fact this issue is probably the strongest in the series so far, but it's still far from perfect. The main failing is still the fact that the individual characters just aren't all that memorable - I'd struggle to name the cast from memory. In fact, I've got the book sitting in front of me, I've read it several times, and I'd still struggle to name some of the characters without sitting down to read it again. Characters like Shatter and Cell just aren't coming across as memorable personalities, and that's a big difficulty.

Anyhow, last issue Eve got the Morlocks into all kinds of trouble by lying about her "last wish", leading to them getting attacked by Sentinels and Shatter losing his arm. This issue, Postman attempts to kick off the obligatory recrimination scene, only to find that most of his colleagues really aren't all that bothered. For one thing, her lying didn't actually cause the attack. For another, the rest of the Morlocks are a fairly vindictive lot and are quite sympathetic to the idea of killing people they don't like.

It's a nice scene and a cute reversal of expectations, but the book soon settles back into routine. Postman gets to deliver his message to his comatose wife, which is all very nice. Christine (um, which one was she again?) visits her parents, who turn out to be very nice and tolerant, but she can't stay because of the faintly ridiculous "Sentinels will attack if you stay above ground for more than seven minutes" concept.

Presumably this is setting up for a cheery resolution in issue #4 where the Morlocks defeat the Sentinels and Christine is then in a position to go off and have a happy ending. The story winds up with a boringly obvious piece of dramatic irony as it turns out that one of the Morlocks was involved in building the Sentinels in the first place.

Despite having a couple of nice ideas, the book still reads very blandly - the lead characters just aren't interesting enough to make me care greatly what happens to them one way or the other, and that's death.

Moving on to books that can be relied upon to generate lots of attention, NEW X-MEN begins its next storyline.

Part of Cassandra Nova's function in Morrison's run is that she provides a rationale for the X-Men to be outed which doesn't simply involve them waking up one morning and changing their mind about their whole approach. Now that she's served that role and been bounced out of the way, we can start on the question of what Xavier's going to do with the new status quo he's inherited.

The answer to that is the X-Corporation, previously touched upon in New X-Men 2001. By this point the X-Men have set up an X-Corporation outpost in Europe to replace Joe Casey's X-Corps, and it seems like the X-Corporation is going to be used as a resting ground for supporting characters in limbo who don't have a plausible motivation to just give up and retire. An assortment of former X-Force and Generation X characters are staffing the new European outpost (plus a couple of wildcards like Darkstar), so we seem to be drifting back to the days when the X-Men weren't so much a team as a loose categorisation.

I'm still a little unclear about the whole X-Corporation concept. Specifically, what exactly is meant to be corporate about them? All we're really told about them is that they're an emergency response squad who deal with calls for help, which sounds to me like an ultra-traditional superhero team model. Nothing inherently wrong with that, or with the X-Men delegating this kind of legwork to the B-list characters, but if there's supposed to be some significance to the corporate imagery, it really isn't coming over. The practicalities also stretch credibility - while I can just about buy the idea that Cerebra can pick up telepathic calls for help from anywhere on the planet, it seems a touch optimistic of the X-Men to promise to answer every single one.

Even so, the X-Corporation now provides a useful standing explanation for what any former X-Men associate is now up to, which should make it a useful springboard for future stories around the world. The idea needs a little clarification, but it has definite promise.

The B-plot, meanwhile, ventures into areas where saner writers fear to tread - the Phoenix arc. There have been some complaints that Morrison is flying in the face of previous stories, but when it comes to Phoenix, the previous stories are already so riddled with contradictions and errors that it's impossible to write anything without contradicting at least one previous story. Morrison's approach here seems to be to set out relatively quickly what the current version of the Phoenix mythology is going to be, and ask us not to worry too much about the details. If you're going to get into Phoenix at all - and I still have reservations that the area is worth the hassle that comes with it - then that's about the best approach I can think of for cutting through the murk.

It looks like we're back to the idea that Phoenix is an entity which possesses Jean and ramps up her powers, which is broadly consistent with the spirit of previous stories. Xavier's characterising Phoenix as part of Shi'ar mythology works well enough - after all, that's how it was presented back in the original Dark Phoenix Saga twenty years ago. Quite what it all means in practice is less clear. Morrison is steering clear of the usual cosmic cliches thus far, in favour of a nicely understated scene of Xavier and Jean doing mind tricks with cutlery. It's a nice routine, anchoring the whole thing in the real world with its Uri Geller echoes.

Igor Kordey is back on art this month, but this time round he seems to have had enough time to do a proper job. It's still not the strongest work he's ever done, but it's a lot less awkward looking than previous issues, and gives a much better sense of his compositional abilities. His Xavier looks about ten years older than most people's, but given his role in the book he really should look middle aged.

All told, another strong issue, albeit with some elements needing a little work.

ULTIMATE X-MEN, meanwhile, ties up the Proteus arc. It's basically a big fight scene, doing the standard routine of "power and inexperience versus teamwork."

Action scenes were never the strong point of guest artist Chris Bachalo even before Steampunk marked his descent into incoherence. While he's avoided the counterproductive flashiness of that book in these two issues, the flow of the action scenes is still rather poor. I really have no clue whatsoever as to what's meant to be going on in the Iceman page, and I'm sure it can't have been all that complicated.

Anyhow, Proteus continues along his established routine of being bitter and nasty, until Colossus comes along and kills him, just like in the original story. It's a little unsatisfying as a payoff, given that we'd pretty much already established that Proteus was bitter and nasty last issue, and Millar leaves himself without anywhere for the character to go (except the morgue).

The old paranoia routine rears its head as well, as characters start to wonder how they know Xavier isn't manipulating them, and how they can even be sure it's sensible to take it on trust. Fair point, but not one that ever seems to go anywhere interesting, since the logic is unassailable. At the end of the day the cast just have to accept that Xavier's not manipulating them, whether it's true or not, or the team splits and the book ends. Maybe Millar has some new idea of where to go with this one, but he'll have to convince me.

A bit underwhelming as the ending for an arc which had its best moments in earlier chapters - although the storyline as a whole has been one of the stronger arcs in the book.

FANTASTIC FOUR is still treading water in the run-up to the Mark Waid run, and this month's fill-in creative team are Adam Warren and Keron Grant. They were responsible for the Marvel Mangaverse: Fantastic Four one-shot of a few months back, which really wasn't at all bad, although it was more of a riff on Japanese source material than on the Fantastic Four.

Grant was the artist responsible for much of Frank Tieri's run on Iron Man. His work there was rather poorly received in some circles, largely because of his predilection for distorted characters which really didn't achieve whatever it was meant to be achieving. Judging from this issue and the Marvel Mangaverse one-shot, Grant seems to have worked that tendency out of his system, and his art is all the better for it. It may look more conventional, but the narrative flow is vastly improved without continual distractions.

Adam Warren isn't quite such an unlikely choice to write the Fantastic Four as he first seems - his strengths have tended to be in character interaction and the ability to write stories which get away with all manner of ludicrous high concept ideas because of their self-awareness. If anything, though, this issue reads as if Warren is toning himself down in an attempt to produce something more conventional as a Fantastic Four story - it holds back from going completely over the top, which might well have been the better course given that Warren is writing an obviously silly story about the Thing shedding clones from his skin.

There's also a very awkward plot device about a "future predicting television", which is just a little too silly to work in a story that isn't outright farcical. Unfortunately, it falls into the axiom that there's no such thing as Nearly Funny.

It's not a bad issue, but this isn't quite the best vehicle for Warren and Grant - both of whom would be more at home on a book that was freer to go completely insane.