24 june 2001

Thank god there's only the one X-book this week, because I've been out of town for the weekend and I'm running rather late in even getting started. Not that this is going to stop me from opening with three completely blatant plugs.

Plug one: There's another of my Article 10 columns going up at Ninth Art tomorrow morning. This week's column is about the upcoming Marvel mature readers line. Can't remember whether I plugged my previous article about Warren Ellis' Pop Comics manifesto; if you haven't read it, do have a look.

Plug two: If like me you're a completist Auteurs fan, you may need to be reminded that Luke Haines has released a solo album, the soundtrack to "Christie Malry's Own Double Entry." With typical Haines perversity, he is releasing the soundtrack to this obscure film some six months before the film itself will come out. Half of the album is straightforward soundtrack material, but the other half is of great interest to Auteurs fans: a song called "How To Hate The Working Classes", a hard house track (no, really) and Haines singing along to an old record of "In The Bleak Midwinter" with his own unique lyrics. ("If you piss on the altar, you're paying homage to the Church.")

And if you're not an existing Haines fan, go and buy his proper albums first. Then get this one.

Plug three: While I'm at it, I may as well go for something absurdly tenuous and plug Late Night Shopping, on the utterly superfluous grounds that I went to school with the scriptwriter and although I haven't seen him in years, I do remember that he was a big fan of Grant Morrison. So there's your X-connection. It's a rather good independent film, though quite why almost none of the cast could stretch to a Scottish accent when the film is set in Glasgow is a bit of a mystery. Maybe it's meant to heighten the sense of dislocation. Or something.

All of this time killing will hopefully justify me in writing a relatively short piece on CABLE, since the Dark Sisterhood plot is now into its Nth month, and while it's clearly building to a climax, there's not that much to say about this issue that I didn't already say about the earlier chapters.

This issue reunites Cable with Irene and sets about establishing what the Dark Sisterhood's plot actually is (namely, get somebody into a reasonable position of prominence in the US government and then assassinate everyone higher up in the chain of command so that she inherits the Presidency). Not an entirely unreasonable plan as these things go, although being a non-American I roll my eyes at the implication that you take over the world just by being the US president.

There are a couple of details that don't really ring true - for one thing, if the Sisterhood is a genuine family which has been going for centuries, why does the story go out of its way to tell us that all the members are young women? Aren't any of them middle aged? There's also a rather bizarre sequence with one of the three witches explaining the plot to Irene in the guise of a cyberpunk biker called "Cyanide Jane", which just reads like it's on loan from Image circa 1994.

Minor points notwithstanding, it's another solidly constructed issue, and Weinberg and Ryan's run looks to be heading to a decent resolution.

Quite a few years ago, Marvel UK had a go at doing a mature readers anthology title. It was actually pretty decent up until they panicked and started running Death's Head stories. Unfortunately, in a fit of irony, somebody had seen fit to name the book Strip, which at least in my part of the country saw it banished to the soft porn racks in an awful lot of newsagents, making it (a) difficult to find, and (b) embarrassing to buy. Even more so than other Marvel UK books.

LITTLE RED HOT: BOUND is not a porn book. Consequently, creator Dawn Brown might want to think again about that title, which is doubtless convincing any number of potential readers not to even bother with the rest of the solicitation. Frankly, the only reason it's even here is that I needed a couple of issue #1s to pad out the column this week, and I picked it off the shelf to see if it was as bad as it sounded. It's nothing like the title would suggest, but jesus, that title is doing it no favours.

Bound is the sequel to an earlier Little Red Hot miniseries called Chane of Fools (sic). Creator Dawn Brown is a set designer in Hollywood, and LRH (if we can call it that) is her only work in comics. Our anti-heroine Chane is a former bounty hunter who evidently suffered some kind of unpleasant fate in the previous series, though quite what it was is left infuriatingly ambiguous. I'll come back to that.

Anyhow, Chane is now under a vow not to kill anyone (god knows why) and is on the run from the USA. She gets kidnapped by two novice bounty hunters and is forced to assist them in hunting down a mysterious child, in exchange for allegedly getting her out of her problems. This is a relatively standard plot, and it's one which has always triggered my alarm bells - if she's so damn good, how come they were able to capture her in the first place?

Chane is a likeable if genre-standard character, and the book scores rather well in atmospherics with some unusual computer colouring. There are moments when the art breaks out of its pleasant floaty haze for explosions and the like, which can come across as jarring on occasion. There are also a couple of curious storytelling choices (a scene of characters talking about a photograph in which we never see the photograph in shot, for no obvious dramatic reason). Nonetheless, the overall effect is rather impressive.

The main difficulty with this issue comes with its serious problems in properly recapping the events of the first series, which form the basis of the plot. I was eventually able to decipher most of the storyline, not from the story itself but by relying on key plot information contained in an editorial by Brown on the "Image Insider" page (the Image equivalent of Bullpen Bulletins). For example, this is the only point where the issue chooses to share with us that the protagonist is the ex-wife of Satan. I would have thought that that was something worth sharing with us, particularly when the big revelation of issue #1 is that they're hunting for the second coming of Jesus. Although that won't be a big revelation if you read the editorial first, since it gives the plot away. This might well read impressively if you remember the original storyline since 1999 - which I don't - but it's a serious and unnecessary impediment to new readers.

The distinctive art style carries the book a long way, but it's got definite problems to overcome in terms of its storytelling. Mind you, given that it's only the creator's fourth published issue of anything, that's pretty good going.

Also this week:

AMERICAN CENTURY #4 - The end of the Guatemela storyline, and I'm not entirely clear what the point was. Obviously part of the point (helpfully hammered home in this issue) is that Harry Kraft can leave America, but it'll come after him. Unfortunately, I never get any very clear idea of which side in the Guatemalan civil war is worth sympathising with, and consequently I have no clue whether I agree with the American presence or not. I'm instinctively opposed, but I don't really know. I went into this story with zero knowledge of 1950s Guatemalan politics, and I'm leaving with a lengthy cast list but virtually zero knowledge of what the hell they all believed in. Maybe this is standard material in your schools, but it sure as hell isn't in mine, and I'm left wondering whether I'm missing some crucial point that hinges on a working knowledge of Guatemala. Disappointing.

C

BACCHUS #60 - Eddie Campbell's self-published magazine, making a surprise appearance in my local store which has never previously shown the faintest interest in selling it. And to be perfectly honest, I haven't got around to reading the text material which takes up about half the issue, nor am I all THAT interested in reading about the making of From Hell when I haven't actually read From Hell. (And no, I do not want to receive another barrage of e-mail asking me why not.) Campbell's actual strips are excellent, though - mainly non-fiction musings on his life, the inevitability of aging, and the wonderful extra uses for a mis-shapen chair. There's also a nicely vicious little character piece about self-absorbed arts types.

A-

CAPTAIN AMERICA #44 - Having learned that her boyfriend is secretly Captain America, Connie decides that the relationship cannot proceed, for all the fairly obvious reasons. Extremely obvious and very saccharine, but not as grating as Jurgens' usual work.

C+

CAPTAIN MARVEL #20 - Far and away the best cover of the week, although quite what the psychedelic poster influence has to do with the story is not altogether clear. This issue gets back to the story of the evil rival comics store across the road from Marlo's, and reveals the manager's evil plan, which is a wonderful self-loathing gag that I didn't see coming. Hell, it made me laugh. Meanwhile, Rick Jones angsts about being old, although ChrisCross seems to be drawing him at roughly 45. Aside from that art flaw, another good issue.

A-

INCREDIBLE HULK #29 - Ah, a D'Spayre issue. This time the villain's called Animus and mentions that he can't use his previous name for trademark reasons. Not quite sure who he's meant to be, but it's one of those "nasty emotion-manipulating demon gets everyone to fight in a character-revealing way" stories. I've always felt this was a very cheap form of characterisation, and so I instinctively take against this kind of story. Not bad as these things go.

B-

OUTLAW NATION #10 - Basically a plot advancement issue, as Gloves is cut off from the Johnson Family and then heads into a possible trap set by Story. I find myself strangely uninterested, largely because I still don't buy into Gloves as anything more than a set of cliches labelled as a real character. Okay, but not really satisfying.

B-

PETER PARKER, SPIDER-MAN #32 - The end of the Fusion storyline. It has to be said that the big revelation of the nature of Fusion's powers comes across as something of a cop-out, but it makes for an entertaining issue nonetheless. Jenkins did at least have me going with the paralysis thing - clearly it was never going to stick, but he did have me wondering how the hell he was going to get out of this. Just a rather anticlimactic way of doing so.

B+

THUNDERBOLTS #53 - An unusually focussed issue, with the subplots numbering only in single figures. Charcoal is dissatisfied with his life, and is visited by his father in an attempt to recruit him back into the Secret Empire. Cue the characterisation through fighting. Not bad, but to be honest I always found the Secret Empire stuff a bit too camp for this book, and it still doesn't work for me here, even in a toned down form.

B

Next week, Ultimate X-Men enters into its second storyline; Wolverine lumbers onwards with its prison story; and the second issue of the new X-Force. Rather worryingly, that means that New X-Men is going to be at least two weeks late on only its second issue. Brace yourselves for a LOT of fill-in art on this book. It also means the second issue of Brotherhood is going to be late. Hmm.