23 july 2000

Well, it's taken a year, but BISHOP finally gets round to having Bishop and Fitzroy meet up.

The series had been building up towards a big clash of armies at this point, so it's nice to see the series wrongfooting us by presenting something different instead. Admittedly, we do get Bishop's army charging into Fitzroy's castle, but since they get their heads kicked in (and we're still only in part one), evidently Harris is heading somewhere less obvious with this plot.

Instead, the main focus of the story is on Bishop trying to rescue his sister Shard from Fitzroy. Fitzroy has been turning Shard back into a human form (she's been an energy being for some years now), and in a nicely judged scene, Harris establishes Fitzroy's motivations as being pretty unpleasant. Shard's pretty much been reduced to a plot device in this series, but at least she's an effective plot device, giving Bishop and Fitzroy something else to fight about other than the fantasy world the series has set up. Since I'm not particularly interested in the fantasy stuff, I'm pleased to see the story focusing on this side of the conflict instead.

The supporting cast get some reasonable material as well, but nothing unmissable. They're not really the point here, and it's interesting to see that Bishop clearly regards saving their entire world as a lower priority than rescuing Shard.

The back-up strip in this issue is a Nom story, in which he gets found by a load of other giants who declare him to be the reincarnation of their king. It's a pretty basic rehash of a stock myth, and nothing very inspiring.

Those who have been liking Harris' fantasy stories will probably not welcome the swing in focus back to Bishop and Fitzroy, but since I never cared much for all that stuff, I'm pleased to see the book getting back on track.

On the assumption that X-Force isn't going to pull off a surprise when issue #105 finally comes out some time next decade, X-MAN had the strongest of the opening Counter-X arcs, but mainly by default. While the broken world concept was an interesting one, it was still let down by tedious villains and being at least a month too long.

This is the beginning of X-Man's Shockwave arc, explaining what happened during the six month gap, and as with Generation X, it looks like an improvement. Frankly, I suspect a major factor here is the lesser involvement of Warren Ellis, who wrote the first arcs in some detail but is stepping back to a more general story outline role here. With writers on the books who have more time to devote to making the story work rather than just having a good idea in the first place, things seem to be taking an upturn. God knows the pacing here is much better than in any of the issues in the first arc.

We start with another teaser for a future story arc - something about a renegade angel leaving heaven to make sure that the lower worlds don't get up to his world and corrupt it, which is potentially interesting. But since it doesn't look like we'll be getting to it for four months, I've got to wonder why it's being put in here. It's a strong scene, but other than re-establishing the higher and lower worlds idea at the outset, it's not entirely clear what it's doing here.

The main purpose of this story, though, is to chuck the status quo with Madelyne Pryor out of the window at the first possible opportunity. Obviously, removing Madelyne from the book was a good idea (and in point of fact, she hadn't appeared for months anyway). Her relationship with Nate is just far too convoluted to explain to new readers, and this issue doesn't even make the attempt. For anyone wondering, Maddie is the psychic re-creation of the clone of the woman whose counterpart on Nate Grey's home world was his genetic mother. The mere fact that I have to use sentences like that to describe what's going on in the book is a pretty damning indictment of what it degenerated into at an early stage. Admittedly, a vague stab at explaining that she's somebody Nate created as a mother figure would not have gone amiss here.

Anyhow, Madelyne doesn't get properly written out - we're simply told that another Madelyne from another universe has replaced her and is manipulating Nate in various ways. This is borderline okay if we're never going to see the new Madelyne again after this story; if she's going to be a recurring character, then it's just convoluting things even further. Given that Warren has a thing against recurring characters, though, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on this one.

Ellis establishes the nastiness of Madelyne and the powerfulness of Nate by having her make him destroy Quito. For the benefit of those of you who don't do pub quizzes regularly, that's the capital of Ecuador. I feel obliged to point this out because when Grant Morrison obliterated the city of Montevideo in JLA, an amazing number of readers seemed not to know it was a real city. It's the capital of Uruguay, population over a million. Odd that you seem to be able to get away with demolishing entire capital cities when they're south American, yet people would scream about it if you did it with somewhere in North America or Europe. South American life, it seems, is now so cheap that you have to wipe out millions of the poor sods just to generate enough dramatic effect to advance the plot. Kind of depressing, when you think about it.

Although it IS an effective scene, and in fairness, this is a case where something on that scale was probably called for. It's also good to see that this issue starts off with Nate much as he was before Counter-X started, suggesting that there really is a proper character arc planned out in this story, rather than just a total junking of the character.

An improvement on the first Counter-X story - equally strong ideas, but definitely better in the execution.

X-MEN is still fundamentally hobbled by a complete lack of any villains I could give a rat's ass about.

Some decent characterisation ideas are emerging in the X-Men themselves, of course. I've no real problems with the way they're being written, and the positioning of Nightcrawler as a dove counterpoint to Rogue's aggressive leadership style is a nice idea. I've still no clue why Gambit is leading a team (and yes, this issue tells us clearly that he's the leader), and Claremont still shows no signs of wanting to share the reason with us. He really ought to, since Gambit's a downright bizarre choice.

But while Claremont is getting some decent material out of these little character subplots, it can't get round the fact that this is just another vacuous "let's rescue our teammates" affair in which the villains have absolutely nothing of interest to them whatsoever. I just do not care about these people, I do not care whether the X-Men beat them, I do not care how. I do not want to read about them. They're boring. They're mediocre. They're nothing. They're ciphers. In Killion, Broadside and the Goth, Claremont has actually succeeded in creating characters less interesting than the Dark Riders.

Am I getting the point across clearly enough?

Claremont goes out of his way to establish that one of Killion's slaves is a character who was a one of the various alternate Captain Britain's seen during the Cross-Time Caper, back in the late 1980s. Ah, so this'll be the same idea as Caledonia, then, will it? The enslaved parallel Captain Britain that Claremont wrote into the Fantastic Four and then proceeded to do absolutely nothing with? Forgive me if I doubt that it's going to be any more interesting the second time around.

There's also some bizarre arbitrary plotting here. Did I miss the sequence last issue when the X-Men traced the villains to Hong Kong? Has the story ended up here purely to allow Claremont to indulge a pet interest, or is there actually some point to it? Well, if there IS a point, I'm damned if I can see it.

Leinil Francis Yu's artwork is still out of place on a superhero team book. This is one of his better issues so far, but he still seems hopelessly miscast on this title. He really belongs on solo books with a less obviously superheroic slant. It could be a lot worse, but I'd really rather see him moved onto a book more suited for him, and Tom Raney given the monthly slot on this title.

It's not an awful issue - it has its story, and it tells it competently enough. But it's still got the fundamental problem that the story's not interesting. The X-Men need better villains, and not the unending series of clunkers Claremont has inflicted on us since his return.

SENTRY is easily the oddest thing Marvel have published in years, which of course has to be a good thing.

If you believe Marvel's publicity, this is a relaunch by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee of an obscure forgotten character created by Stan Lee and Artie Rosen, who first saw print a week before the Fantastic Four. Of course, if you believe Marvel's publicity, you've been had. The character's completely new, and we are entering the realm of metafiction here.

What this issue actually consists of is a man called Bob who seems to be a delusional alcoholic convinced that his drink is really the secret serum that turned him into the Sentry, a major Marvel superhero nobody remembers any more. Curiously, Bob's flashbacks take the form of panels supposedly lifted from his old comics, giving Jae Lee the opportunity to give us rather good pastiches of early sixties Marvel and mid-eighties grimness.

Clearly what Jenkins and Lee are up to here is in part a look at the iconic hero figure. The Sentry needs to be made a 1960s-era Marvel character to have that kind of iconic status, although there are some elements of contemporary DC stories leaking through as well (most obviously, the dog sidekick complete with cape). Equally, doing the flashback to his turning point and the start of his descent in the style of the mid-eighties is presumably heading somewhere towards telling us that this is where superhero books started to lose some of their magic.

Quite where the alcoholism fits into this, I'm not entirely sure. I'm kind of taking it as read that the Sentry's archenemy, the Void, is just a hallucination representing his addiction. But just when you think the book is just about a nutter who thinks he's a superhero, the story swerves you by revealing that, if nothing else, he really can fly.

It's a dark and surreal affair, broken up with garishly ridiculous and deliberately cliched comic panels. I doubt very much that Jenkins is heading towards anything as obvious as Bob being just a washed-up superhero. This is what Marvel should be doing more of - a genuinely intriguing and low-key start to something truly bizarre.