24 september 2000

Well, so much for the fantasy timeline. This is the end of Joe Harris's BISHOP story arc, following which it seems they're sending Bishop back to the mainstream continuity.

Bishop: The Last X-Man has had okay sales, but clearly not of the order that Marvel have come to expect from the X-books. The far future setting, which amounted to an opportunity to do a fantasy quest epic, probably had a lot to do with that. Not that it was a particularly bad idea. Bishop's original gimmick was that he was trapped in his past and viewed the X-Men as legends, so inverting that by trapping him in his future where he's the legend was a perfectly sound idea.

The problem is that a Bishop book is selling to X-Men fans, not fantasy fans. For the most part, X-Men readers seemed to be at best neutral about the fantasy stuff. Worse, readers have been programmed over the years to view anything outside mainstream continuity as irrelevant. By setting itself in such a remote backwater of Marvel continuity, the book immediately reassured readers that they certainly wouldn't be missing anything important if they left it well alone.

Now, personally I don't greatly care how much the impact on the wider continuity is, so long as the story's good. Unfortunately, I'm not particularly interested in the fantasy stuff in the first place. It's not that it's been badly handled - for an example of just how atrocious a superhero fantasy can be, take a look at Avataars: Covenant of the Shield, which is dreadful. Bishop has simply been a pleasant trudge through small villages beset by nasty monsters, and other such genre standards. It's also never really made as much as I'd hoped of Bishop's reaction to finding himself playing the messiah role.

The Chronowar storyline has been a more satisfying ending than I'd anticipated, because it's focused back on Bishop and Fitzroy and pretty much relegated everything else to a war going on in the background. This works reasonably well - by linking Fitzroy's power level to his army's, Harris gives some actual significance to the fight between Bishop and Fitzroy and justifies its position as the centre of the plot.

There are some storytelling elements that don't entirely work. The scene with Shard cutting off her arm in order to get rid of Fitzroy's attempts to turn her back into flesh doesn't work because the apparent idea (that he'd only got as far as converting her hand) was never clearly established in previous issues. A shame, because it's a potentially powerful scene. It also undermines Bishop's supposedly last ditch attempt to blast Fitzroy when he's still able to just grab the man afterwards.

Nonetheless, the central conflict comes across well enough, and the story still works as a cap to the storyline. The storyline as a whole didn't really come off, but at least it was a stab at something different.

Oh look, it's this month's Punisher/Wolverine: Revelation. Jay Faerber returns to the X-books - kind of - with IRON FIST/WOLVERINE #1.

The thought processes behind this book evidently ran something along these lines: Iron Fist is an old Marvel character, and it is therefore imperative that we bang out a miniseries. However, nobody gives a toss about Iron Fist, whose last book was cancelled due to low sales, or about this plot, which comes from the last New Warriors series, which took even LESS time to get cancelled due to low sales. So we'll shove in Wolverine as co-star, even though he's totally superfluous to the plot and adds nothing whatsoever to the proceedings. (Except for the hope of breaking even.)

This betrays a certain lack of confidence in Iron Fist. The outgoing editorial regime was prepared to give miniseries to such blatant no-hopers as Hellcat and Power Pack, but he apparently requires the assistance of Wolverine to justify publication. Wow.

Oh well. As mentioned above, this is a sequel to a storyline that Faerber and artist Jamal Igle kicked off in New Warriors before it got cancelled. When we left off, the Hand's sixteen year old new leader Junzo Muto had stolen Iron Fist's powers. This time round, Muto plans to hijack Iron Fist's earlier abandoned plan to bring his home city of K'un Lun to Earth (yes, this is a plot from Heroes for Hire), by bringing it to Tokyo and having the Hand conquer it.

Pretty obscure source material for the plot, but okay as these things go. I really don't fathom how bringing K'un Lun to Tokyo is meant to assist the Hand in any way, which is a bit of a problem, but in general it's a decent starting point for the miniseries. The problem is that Wolverine's wandering around here for absolutely no good reason, despite having little or nothing to contribute. It doesn't help the series at all to bring in a pointless complicating factor like this when it clearly just wants to get on with telling an Iron Fist story.

Muto actually works better here than he did in New Warriors. In that book, since the heroes were teenagers themselves, the teenage Hand leader just came across as a fairly obvious mirror image villain. Here, the novelty works better, and there's more of a sense of the oddity of these grown men following a teenage boy, together with the fragility of his authority.

It's also nice to see Jamal Igle back, as he's obviously a talented superhero artist who's developing nicely. He pulls off some decent martial arts sequences - particularly difficult when you've got to work with a character design as dated as Iron Fist's.

Overall, it's a decent enough Iron Fist story dragged down by the pointless use of Wolverine. But you still have to wonder quite why Marvel are doing it at all.

With X-MAN #69, Counter-X finally gets around to explaining where Nate Grey suddenly developed an interest in becoming a shaman. This issue the alternate Nate (I'll call him Nate 998 for short) spends a lot of time explaining his philosophy and the whole alternate worlds thing for our Nate's benefit. As the villains charge in at the end, I would hazard a guess that we are heading towards Stock Ending 37C - You Died To Save Me, And Now I Shall Honour Your Memory By Carrying On Your Teachings.

Given that this is basically an expository dialogue issue, the creators keep the interest up fairly well. Granted, we get the obligatory fight between heroes to start things off, but after that the story makes sure to give Ariel Olivetti some good visuals to break things up, and then chucks in the sheer oddity of Nate reanimating Forge's corpse for the all important villain's origin flashback.

I'm coming round to Olivetti's art. His figures are still a bit inconsistent, seeming to have different proportions from different camera angles, but the storytelling is sound, and (with the help of Christie Scheele's colouring) the corpse reanimation sequence is wonderfully subdued and unsettling.

Unfortunately, there's still problems here. There's a blatant violation of the classic "show, don't tell" maxim, as Nate 998 cheerily informs us that he's insane despite displaying no symptoms whatsoever throughout the issue. Since he seems to be far and away the sanest character in the story (including Nate himself), this really doesn't come across very plausibly.

The story also complicates Madelyne Pryor's origin still further, by revealing that she's actually a counterpart Jean Grey from yet a third world. With a bit of Phoenix imagery thrown into her origin flashback to boot, this seems a surprising and rather unnecessary decision to invoke one of the most hideously convoluted areas of X-books continuity, precisely the sort of thing I'd thought Counter-X were meant to be cutting down on.

The book is also running into the perennial problem that the lead character is so powerful that it's difficult to take the villains seriously. Having Mr Scratch turn up as a cliffhanger is less than tense when there's no reason to think that he'll survive more than five seconds against two Nates. If the story really wants us to buy into this character as a serious threat, it needs to do far more to set him up than just have him standing around repeating his "I have brain damage" speech again.

Still, the issue succeeds in its basic aim of setting up Nate's newfound interest in shamanism. But like most of the Counter-X line so far, it's only a partial success.

X-MEN: BLACK SUN lumbers to a conclusion in tediously formulaic manner. Possessed X-Men fight the X-Men Magik absorbed into her sword over the last three issues. Magik fights Belasco and wins. The world is saved. Oh, and Pilgrimm decides to side with the goodies against the N'Garai in an alliance of convenience. Sensationally obvious, monumentally predictable.

Black Sun scores over the rest of the Claremont run by virtue of at least retaining basic narrative coherence, but it fails totally as any kind of commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the new X-Men (which is supposed to be the whole point of the series), and seems at best to be going through the motions. Belasco and the N'Garai remain all-purpose, one-size-fits-all villains whom it's impossible to get worked up about.

Of course, when I say the series has basic narrative coherence, this is said in a spirit of generosity. There is still no apparent reason why Belasco was screwing about with the X-Men in the first place. When Claremont has Belasco shouting "Those accursed X-Men! Will I never be rid of their interference?" (a line almost a bad as "I'd have got away with it if it wasn't for those pesky kids"), even he seems to have forgotten that it was Belasco who dragged the damn X-Men into his plot in the first place.

Equally, Magik's identity is fudged in a hopeless sequence at the end. In classic Neil Gaiman style, she won't reveal her name, because names have power. Fine, but why not just take down the damn hood? If Nightcrawler can recognise her, is Claremont seriously telling us that nobody else can - not even that Colossus can recognise that she isn't Illyana? In an attempt to create some nice character moments, Claremont abandons basic logic.

The art is competent enough, but this remains the sort of thing I hope to see much less of in future.