23 december 2001

BROTHERHOOD is heading towards cancellation at a rate of knots, and that's particularly obvious from reading this issue. Obviously whichever poor sod is in charge of this book has decided to cut to the end in the hope of bringing some kind of resolution to his nine-issue miniseries.

So here comes X, the secret leader of the Brotherhood. And after months of build-up, he turns out to be... pretty much impossible to tell apart from any other member of the Brotherhood. God alone knows what the point was meant to be of building so much around the question of who X is, given that his appearance is such an obvious anticlimax. Even allowing for the fact that the future plans have been thrown out of the window, I'm at a loss as to what they were ever heading towards.

Anyhow, X is a bit of a twat, who is somehow able to drag together a few hundred mutants to Philadelphia to deliver a nice little speech to them. Quite when the Brotherhood developed into something that could bring together hundreds of followers, particularly given that we're simultaneously being told that the organisation is in desperate straits, is equally mysterious.

But our wisely anonymous writer, as we've seen by now, is not what you'd call subtle at the best of times, and he has a point he'd like to hammer home. Having shown us a riot between the mutants at the rally and the police (in which the mutants seem to be making absurdly ilttle headway given that they're all presumably superhuman), you'd have thought that the idea that X was in opposition to the American establishment was fairly clear. "X" wants to really hammer it home, and so has X attacked in a bar by a man dressed, for no discernible reason, as Uncle Sam. (Yes, it's a novelty bar, but he doesn't appear to be working there, and nobody else is in costume.)

This scene is so breathtakingly stupid that it hovers right on the verge between "incredibly bad" and "downright surreal." It then topples over into "incredibly bad", where it lands with an agonising thud and twitches briefly before ceasing to move.

Meanwhile, Marshall recruits Asher and Malon to turn on the Brotherhood, which they agree to despite a ridiculous lack of build-up. This is probably due to the plot being truncated, but that doesn't prevent it from seeming very clunky indeed.

As is the way of this book, its main redeeming feature is the art, since somehow the very talented Sean Phillips, Kent Williams and Jose Villarrubia have been persuaded to lend themselves to churning this one out. They're putting in more effort than it deserves. The book looks great, but the content is hopelessly flimsy.

Back with the books that people actually read, NEW X-MEN concludes the "Germ Free Generation" storyline this month. Igor Kordey is still filling in on artwork (that's four consecutive months without the supposed regular penciller, if you're counting), but Kordey is great, and seems perfectly at home with some of the weird material he's called upon to draw.

The main drawback of this storyline has been that the villains, John Sublime and his U-Men, don't make for much of a credible threat, and their concept is just a bit too confused. I still don't get why their "trans-species" gimmick leads them on to deciding they want to seal themselves off from germs, since it doesn't have anything to do with the idea at all.

In fact, despite their ambush on Scott and Emma last issue, the U-Men don't put up much of a fight here. Jean gets rid of them singlehandedly, as if there was ever any real doubt, and oddly enough this turns out to be a cue for the return of the Phoenix concept. I'd have thought that was exactly the sort of continuity quagmire Morrison was meant to be steering well clear of, but we'll see where he's going with it. It might provide a good vehicle for some of his bigger and weirder concepts.

This is a nice enough resolution to the story, allowing us to enjoy the U-Men getting routed, and with some nice character moments thrown in - Wolverine's scenes with the new Angel have a nicely credible rapport to them, in particular. The slight misfire on the central concept thankfully doesn't prevent this being an otherwise entertaining piece of work. Good, but not quite up to what Morrison's capable of.

Mark Millar has said in interviews that he doesn't like Gambit, which is a major reason why he isn't in ULTIMATE X-MEN. However, this is a two-part fill-in story by Chuck Austen, and so instead of an X-Men story, we get a Gambit story.

In typical Ultimate-line style, Austen cheerfully dumps most of the existing character, in favour of retaining the basic look and attitude. No nonsense about the assassins and thieves guilds, which despite Fabian Nicieza's heroic efforts are still a bit of a crackpot idea; no godawful Twisted Sister-inspired uniforms. This Gambit is a homeless cajun making a living doing card tricks on the streets of New York.

Austen has also chosen to take a slightly different approach to the accent, which depending on your point of view is either a vast improvement or vastly more irritating. I suspect it depends largely on where you come from - the problem with phonetic accents is that they assume that the reader will "hear" the dialogue in a given accent to start with. Gambit's original accent presumably assumes some sort of neutral American accent; read by somebody whose normal accent is home counties English, it simply doesn't work. Frankly, this is the first time in a decade that I've ever had any clear idea what the man is meant to sound like, because Austen's approach works for my accent. It may not work for yours.

Of course, I can still be picky and point out that Gambit still hasn't learned basic French, since he insists on calling female characters "Cheri" throughout the story. That's the masculine, which would imply that Gambit is both confused and gay. The word they're looking for is "Cherie", and while they may sound identical, it still ought to be right if they're going to put it in print. It's not like "Add an E if the adjective is referring to a female" is a particularly difficult rule of the language. Sorry, but it's the little things that really irk me sometimes.

Art comes from Essad Ribic, another of those eastern european pencillers who, at this rate, will be drawing 90% of American fill-in comics due to their sheer rate of output. I've always liked Ribic's style, and he gives Gambit a nice balance between looking run-down and retaining his charm.

The story is eminently basic - Gambit meets poor little girl whose parents have been done in by, of all people, Ultimate Hammerhead, and sets out to protect her. However, despite the lack of very much happening, it works as a character piece to introduce the character. I had my scepticism about an Austen issue given that I gave up on US War Machine two third of the way in, but then again I gave up on that book because of the art. As a writer, he's got definite potential. Whether this is what the regular readers of Ultimate X-Men, attuned to Mark Millar's distinctive style, are going to be looking for is another matter. Even as a change of pace, it's quite different from what the audience has come to expect from this book. Given that I don't generally like the book, though, that feels like an improvement to me.

On to Silent Month. In fact, this is the strongest week yet for Silent Month, as we actually hit a few books where the gimmick doesn't seem out of place and the plot is properly advanced.

UNCANNY X-MEN is not one of them. It's terrible.

(By the way, if you're wondering how Uncanny X-Men caught up in time to get a silent issue out, it didn't. This is Uncanny's issue for January 2002. All the other silent books are dated February.)

I'm actually beginning to feel a twang of sympathy for Joe Casey. Remember the days when he was writing Cable? Remember the acclaim? Admittedly I never really saw what the fuss was all about, but people, you used to LOVE this guy. A lot of his recent work for other publishers met with very kindly reviews. Mr Majestic had a lot going for it in the early issues (before it became hopelessly pretentious and went off the rails). And now the poor bastard can't seem to get arrested.

The brutal truth is that after a mediocre first issue, it's only been downhill for Casey's run on this book - a view which seems to be almost universally shared by reviewers and readers of whatever persuasion. Now eight months into his run, Casey has yet to write anything which has been particularly well received by anyone, as near as I can make out.

Issue #401 is not going to change that. Ron Garney arrives as the new regular penciller on this book, and some of the problems with this story - not least, the unrecognisability of many of the characters, have to be laid at his doorstep. But the writing is equally unimpressive.

In principle, this issue is about the formation of the X-Corps, with Banshee recruiting an assortment of reluctant villains into his team. Why is this story being done as a silent issue? As with last week's X-Treme X-Men, I haven't a clue. The story would have benefitted immeasurably from including some proper expository dialogue, since whatever point Casey was trying to get across in this issue singularly fails to make it to the reader. What are the X-Corps trying to achieve? What are they even LIKE? Who's in them? I haven't got a clue.

In Casey's original script, the idea that we're not meant to trust the X-Corps would have been conveyed a little more forcibly by festooning them in neo-Nazi regalia. After initial character designs met with a universally derisive reaction, that idea has quite rightly been shelved. It had all the hallmarks of dimwitted shock value, and on any view it was glaringly implausible to have characters like Sean Cassidy wandering around dressed as Nazis. Not only did it seem silly, it also displayed what seemed a hopeless lack of understanding of the characters. The reaction was not exactly unforseeable.

So the Nazi regalia is gone, replaced by... well, by nothing, really. They're still wearing black lined with red, but then you could say that about the X-Treme X-Men costume designs or the Counter-X X-Force designs. If this is still meant to be communicating some sense of menace, it fails miserably.

Worse, most of the characters are unrecognisable. Garney sets new standards in failure here, by failing to make Madrox the Multiple Man identifiable. His drawings are too sketchy for the fact that they're identical even to register. They all look like thugs in identical costumes. In part this is Casey's fault for insisting that they keep their old headpieces (their hairstyles would have been far more distinctive), but the sketchiness of the art must carry a lot of the blame.

Lady Mastermind is singularly unrecognisable, not least because Garney is working from a totally different character design to that being used in X-Treme X-Men LAST WEEK. Surely it isn't beyond the wit of editors to make sure they're using the same general appearance for characters appearing in two stories at once. Quite why she's in jail in this issue when she isn't in X-Treme X-Men (and doesn't seem to get captured either) is equally a bit of a mystery. How anyone might have been expected to recognise this character by sight to start with, considering how obscure she is, is equally baffling - but without that recognition, her dream scene makes no sense. To be honest, I nearly gave up on reading this story six pages in, after a brief comparison with the script showed that vast chunks of the intended story were simply not decipherable from the art.

Equally, as the Blob arrives at the X-Corps headquarters (and at least we can recognise him), he's flanked by two equally unrecognisable characters. Avalanche, wearing a generic helmet and X-Corp uniform, is utterly unidentifiable - but again, without that uncommunicated information, it's impossible to make sense of the Blob's reaction to him. Radius seems to have been drawn with near-total disregard for the previous character design, although he also seems to have suffered from miscolouring of his hair. Yes, even the colourist couldn't work out that he wasn't the Banshee. Again, it's clear from the script that Avalanche, at least, was meant to be recognisable.

The subplot, in which Wolverine goes after Stacy X, is simply impenetrable. The art appears to show her breaking into Bill Clinton's house (and overpowering his guards) for the purpose of using her powers to give him an orgasm. Why she would want to do this is quite beyond me, and even after reading the original script, I'm totally baffled by the entire sequence. Incidentally, the original script had Rudolph Giuliani in that role - evidently abandoned after September 11 sent Giuliani's stock rocketing.

This is a dire, near-incomprehensible issue, and everything that people feared Silent Month would be. It's actually worse than X-Treme X-Men, which could at least be understood for the most part if you were prepared to slog through it carefully enough.

I don't say this sort of thing just to be abusive, but quite honestly, this must be a serious contender for the worst issue of Uncanny X-Men in its almost forty-year history. Everything else, no matter how misconceived (and judging from the script this is also misconceived) could at least be understood by normal human beings. This is a poor idea, not merely badly communicated, but for the most part, not communicated at all.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #50 marks the end of the Dan Jurgens run on this title, which regular readers will know I have particularly hated. It also marks the final issue of the regular title before the character is turned over to the Marvel Knights imprint.

Marvel have chosen to commemorate this, despite the general lack of buzz surrounding this title, with a startlingly large issue clocking in six dollars US and an insane nine dollars Canadian. The contents are a decidedly mixed bag, but they also show the first signs in a while of people wanting to do real stories with this character, aimed at an audience above the age of ten.

Jurgens leads off with a throwaway silent story as the token contribution to the gimmick month. It doesn't really belong in this book, bearing in mind that it's only a Captain America story in name only. Jurgens has taken the option of doing an ultra-basic story, so we have a man made redundant on Christmas Eve who stumbles upon Captain America, helps him foil a bank robbery, and gets a reward. Hooray, the children shall eat after all this Christmas. It's passably done, but the idea is less than original, and the supposed title character's role is totally interchangeable - you could do exactly the same story with almost any solo character in the Marvel Universe.

So far, so unimpressive. The second story is a "let's remember World War II" piece, written by Kathryn Kuder (whose name doesn't mean a great deal to me) with art by Stuart Immonen. It's much what you'd expect from this sort of story, sensible enough but not saying anything particularly new. Immonen's art is impressive, however, as the pages seem to have been shot from his self-coloured pencils. It's different, at least, and somebody should be able to find Immonen a project where he can do some more with this style.

Story three, and we're back to Dan Jurgens. This is the obligatory anniversary jam story in which the character reminisces on his past for a token plot reason, allowing various artists to pastiche earlier work for a page or two. About as good as you'd expect from one of those stories, which is to say that the merit is pretty much confined to nostalgia value.

And that's that for Jurgens, leaving us in the company of rather less obvious choices of creators for the rest of the story. "Relics" has art by Igor Kordey (does the man sleep?!), and it's written by Brian David-Marshall, whose name rings a vague bell but not much more than that. A bit of a mixed bag, this one. The art's pretty good, but the story's downright weird. The point of the exercise seems to be to blow Captain America up so as to set up his big return next month. What we end up with is Captain America being cornered in a ghost town by an entire community of geriatric German rocket scientists who defected to the USA at the end of World War II and have decided to all dress as the Red Skull in order to blow themselves up. This whole thing allows for some oddly surreal artwork but ultimately doesn't make a great deal of sense.

Still, it's all just a set-up to blow him up, and that's something I'm all in favour of. With two stories still to go, the book then goes off on a very strange tangent, giving us a story about a class of schoolkids reacting to the announcement of Captain America's death. The creative team is made up of people you wouldn't expect to see on a Captain America book in a million years (Jen van Meter, from Hopeless Savages? Jim Mahfood, from Grrl Scouts?), and the end result is similarly unexpected. Whether this story had a short enough lead-in time to be written as a conscious reference to September 11, I have no idea. But what we're given is a class of shellshocked schoolkids who, after mature reflection, decide that the appropriate response is to beat up the Indian kid. The little blue-eyed, blond-haired Aryan boy sits by and does nothing about it. End of story. A very strange reaction piece to see in this book, and at this point I'm starting to wake up. It's a pretty good short story, as well.

Finally, we get a more conventional "remembering the fallen hero" piece, from Evan Dorkin and Kevin Maguire (more mainstream, but definitely still a vast step up from the book's usual material). The story largely consists of one-panel reactions from an assortment of characters and members of the public, and again strikes a more ambiguous tone than you might expect (including shots of the profiteers in memorabilia, for example). Maguire's art is perfect for this sort of material, and Dorkin has indeed managed to find something different for everyone to say. Another surprisingly strong piece, which gives more hope that, with Jurgens out of the way, Marvel really are planning to take the character in a more interesting direction.

However, two stories totalling sixteen pages, however interesting they may be, are not enough to recommend an otherwise middling book at this sort of price point. Consequently, those two stories (and to a lesser extent the Kuder/Immonen piece) are unlikely to be read by very many of the people who might enjoy them, since they all dumped this book months ago on grounds of its persistently low quality. Worth looking through if you get the chance, though.