23 september 2000

CABLE #97 is the beginning of David Tischman's run as writer, and the last of this year's X-Men relaunches. Just to reassure everyone that it still counts, they've given it the new trade dress and a nice scrawly logo.

Tischman is currently best known as Howard Chaykins' co-writer on American Century, which is not something I found particularly encouraging. American Century, in which drop-out Harry Kraft wanders around various areas of 1950s historical significance, is a book that started off looking rather good. Nice clean artwork whose slight stiffness seemed suitable for the 1950s suburbia issue, and a willingness to address difficult and unusual subject matter such as Guatemalan politics.

Unfortunately, as that series has gone on, it has become increasingly apparent that it raises interesting issues, rather than actually addressing any of them; that the characters are hopelessly cardboard; and that it suffers from Chaykin's obsession with gratuitous sex scenes, to the point where it starts to read like an unusually ambitious porn script ("Oh look, all my clothes have fallen off. Quickly - let us screw, before the rebels capture the capital.")

With that start in mind, the prospect of David Tischman packing Cable off to Peru in order to, er, fight people who wanted to overthrow the government did not exactly fill me with confidence. Nonetheless, this is a promising start. Tischman has embraced the current Marvel policy of de-emphasising continuity, focussing on the basic core of Cable as a soldier, and retaining the Askani meditation stuff without feeling the need to go into any explanation of where he picked it up. All the material you'd need to follow this story is here; the rest hasn't so much been jettisoned, but just doesn't arise.

Cable is then packed off to Peru to fight the Shining Path, a Communist group who, as interviews perpetually remind us, really exist. Probably the biggest weakness of this issue, and the point where it is worryingly similar to American Century, is that it's not entirely clear why Cable is opposing the Shining Path. The immediate reason is clear enough - he thinks that they stand a reasonable chance of overthrowing the government, which will cause chaos - but we're given no frame of reference to explain how he came to that view, or compare them with the current Peruvian government. They're not given an entirely unsympathetic portrayal, since at least they genuinely want to improve the country, but it's still not clear why Cable has suddenly woken up one day and decided that the prospect of the government of Peru being overthrown is particularly worrying.

Basic data is missing here - I had to check the CIA World Factbook webpage to remind myself whether Peru was even a democracy or not. (It is.) I'd be willing to bet that my total ignorance of Peruvian domestic politics is not entirely uncommon among the book's readership. Even allowing for the fairly decent coverage of foreign news in Britain, it has been quite some time since anything that happened in Peru engaged my attention in the slightest.

Still, it's only the first part of the story. Maybe this time Tischman will learn from the mistakes of American Century and get into the issues properly. He's certainly got a decent artist to work with in Igor Kordey, who goes for the naturalist approach and captures a great sense of the location. His action sequences are pretty solid as well.

It's a strong first issue, and I'm really only worried by my lingering concerns that it'll end up botching the whole thing just like American Century did. For the moment, though, this is worth a look.

Over in the "What are they thinking?" department, the ROGUE miniseries continues its superfluous ramble through continuity limbo.

The hopeless continuity mulch of the first issue isn't quite as obvious here, although Rogue's powers are still a weird mismatch between the movie and comic versions which just end up satisfying neither audience. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that if you want to do a story which defines the character, it really ought to be possible to tell that story utilising the original character. The fact that they've felt the need to use some bizarre hybrid version means that not only has the book fallen at the first hurdle, it's broken its neck in doing so.

Anyhow, this issue is yet another iteration of that popular back-up story "Rogue meets a basically nice man but is driven away from him by the tragedy of her superhuman powers", most recently done in X-Men Unlimited earlier this year, which at least had the sense to keep it to twelve pages.

As in issue #1, Avery really lays it on thick. In order to keep up the strained "caring for poor little animals" theme from last issue, which looked pretty contrived at the time, Rogue's love interest this issue is a shepherd. Now, I'm no expert on the truck stops of North America, but I would have thought that the chances of bumping into a shepherd at such a place were fairly remote. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe all American truck stops have an in-house shepherd, regularly to be found discussing the issues of the day with his friends the cooper, the blacksmith and the wheelwright. Even so, the chances of Rogue stumbling upon a gainfully employed shepherd in contemporary America must surely be slim at best.

But the animal hospital motif must be maintained, so here comes Johnny, Last of the Shepherds to trot through the usual routine in an animal-themed way. Aaron Lopresti's art is quite nice, and the dialogue is okay, but jesus, we get the point already. She's a poor little wounded animal who needs a hug. Great, fascinating. Can we go home now?

Over at Vertigo, Garth Ennis is finally getting to do a series of straight war stories, so maybe this'll finally work it all out of his system.

WAR STORY: JOHANN'S TIGER is the first of the one-shots, and while the content will be entirely familiar to anyone who's ever seen a Garth Ennis story, there's no denying he does it extremely well. Yes, it's another simultaneously heartwarming and depressing story of men bonding under fire.

This time, our lead character is Johann Kleist, the commander of a tank crew in the German Army in 1945. Kleist isn't a Nazi, but as soldiers tend to do in these circumstances, he committed a range of atrocities in the name of his country before coming to realise that he was doing something horribly wrong. As we join the story, Kleist and his crew have deserted in their tank. Kleist plans to cross Germany and surrender his crew to the Allies, before heading off to get himself discreetly killed in battle so that he won't have to live with himself. Cue scenes of tank crew members, who have bonded under fire.

Granted, this is very traditional Garth Ennis territory. But it's still strong material and, without the need to shoehorn it into a series about something else entirely, Ennis is obviously getting to do material he's always wanted to write. If anything, the book's weakness is that it takes itself rather seriously and lapses into melodrama on a few occasions. ("Now the guilt of it is like some animal, some beast that stalks me through the forests of the night. It pounces on me without warning, tears me, smashing me to my knees...")

Still, by keeping the jokes to a minimum for once, Ennis more or less gets away with that kind of dialogue. Chris Weston and Gary Erskine's artwork hits the right tone, as well as making the tanks look impressive rather than ungainly.

Hopefully Ennis is going to leave this material behind for a while after doing these one-shots, because he really has been milking this subject for years now. Nonetheless, it's still a great story.