christmas eve 2000

IRON FIST/WOLVERINE finally comes to a conclusion without it ever being remotely clear what Wolverine was doing there in the first place.

Well, obviously, we know why he's there. He's there because he's much more popular than Iron Fist, and they wanted to do an Iron Fist story, but they knew full well nobody would buy that. So here's Wolverine, fixed onto the story with a rivet gun and wandering around in search of something to do. While Jay Faerber has juggled the plot mechanics around in such a way as to at least give Wolverine some role in the story, what he hasn't been able to do is make Wolverine more than a generic character. You could slot literally half the Marvel Universe into this role, and when you can do that it's never a good sign.

The need to find something for Wolverine to do has also had the effect of crowding out the Iron Fist story that Faerber presumably wanted to tell. Astonishingly, there's no satisfactory resolution of the Junzo Muto storyline (his plan is foiled, but he escapes). Instead, we get a teased death of Iron Fist, followed by him being packed back off to Earth on the basis that when his mum told him that he still had a family she was referring to his friends, an interpretation which aside from being syntactically questionable is certainly a bit saccharine for my tastes.

There's some good if cartoony artwork from Jamal Igle, who remains an artist worth watching, but unfortunately the series as a whole has to go down as a warning that sometimes it's better not to do a story at all than to do it with a gratuitous co-star.

But you didn't come here to read about that, did you? No, the big news this week is ULTIMATE X-MEN, the second of Marvel's Ultimate line relaunching key characters from scratch.

The difference between this and Ultimate Spider-Man couldn't be more stark. Where Bendis and Mark Bagley have chosen to do a relatively quiet, character-driven book tweaking Spider-Man's origin over a period of six months or so, Mark Millar and Adam Kubert have gone the other way and reinvented the book from the ground up.

Well, not quite the ground. We've still got the mutant concept, we've still got the public prejudice, we've still got a mock school with Professor X in charge, and we've still got Cyclops as deputy leader. And there are Sentinels. Aside from that, you can pretty much throw out everything else and start from scratch. Millar is taking pretty free liberties with the characters he's chosen to use. Xavier is a nice, pleasant chap who has absolutely no moral problem with reading people's minds without consent. Jean is being played as a sarky teenager in leather. Colossus is a Russian mobster. Storm seems to have shed her African back story. The Beast and Cyclops are fairly close to their predecessors, but it's made immediately evident that this book will not be making any particular effort to replicate the original characters, let alone the original stories.

And of course, it's slightly jarring to see characters who resemble the originals in little more than name and powers. But it'll make for less predictable reading, if nothing else. I have no problem with it; some purists will undoubtedly be appalled.

The story here is actually a fairly standard gathering of the forces issue, once you look beneath the oddity of the new characters and the usual blood and thunder style of Millar's stories. The X-Men get recruited, and then all band together to beat up a Sentinel and rescue another mutant (Iceman, played in something close to Children of the Atom mode). The public duly misconstrues what they have just seen and turns on the heroes. Nothing we haven't seen before, but since the first issue has to establish the concept that's only to be expected. Millar's focus is understandably on getting over the mutant concept and the public prejudice which forms the focus of the book, and on that level the book is a success.

Rather audaciously, Millar has fastforwarded straight to the Days of Futures Past and opened with the US government already sending out Sentinels to kill or intern all the mutants. I'm slightly disappointed to see the book going so overboard on this. It's been heavily overplayed in the X-books for the last fifteen years or so and I'd been hoping this title might take a lower key approach to the whole thing. It also begs the question of where Millar can go from here, and just how plausible a more or less Nazi America really is as a starting point. It's perhaps only to be expected from Millar, who has always been keen on turning everything up to eleven as an article of faith, but it does seem odd to be leaping straight into this level of open hatred right at the outset.

It also raises right off the bat the fundamental problem that the X-Men as a concept doesn't want to be in a shared universe, and never did. The X-Men wants to be doing stories about global society being transformed by the arrival of a new stage in evolution. But it can't do that because if you transform Marvel's Earth, it'll no longer be providing the appropriate "real world" backdrop for all the other series. The X-books have ended up dealing with that by holding out the vague promise of the Days of Futures Past apocalypse in the future, and running towards it on a treadmill, continually claiming that we're getting closer when in fact no signs of that are ever apparent and we all know it could never happen. Millar's approach here signals an interesting willingness to disregard that and go for the social transformation by giving us an unrecognisable America from the outset.

But if this is meant to be a shared universe - and the upcoming launch of an Ultimate Marvel Team-Up would strongly suggest it is - it's unfathomable how this is meant to be the same planet, let alone the same city, as the one seen in Ultimate Spider-Man, where fifteen year old suburban kids get superpowers, think it's cool and get cheered by crowds. If they wanted to go this route with Ultimate X-Men, it would have made more sense to just abandon the shared universe altogether. Unless Millar is going to bring things down to Earth quickly (which would not be normal for him), there may be a serious long term problem lurking here for the Ultimate line.

Millar's attempts to distance the X-Men from the superhero genre are also a bit questionable. Clearly uncomfortable with the idea of costumes and codenames, Millar gives us a rather clunking scene in which Xavier claims that they aren't just codenames - the X-Men have been "baptised as posthuman beings." He also tries to explain the costumes away as a device to conceal the X-Men from Sentinel scans (um, if that's the purpose, wouldn't it make sense not to plaster them in X logos?). Neither of these entirely rings true, and Millar would have been better either to turn a blind eye and accept them as a genre convention, or do what he clearly wants to do and dump the costumes and codenames altogether. The X-Men aren't a concept driven by dual identities; they don't need the superhero trappings in order to work.

As an individual issue, allowing for the limitations of being a team formation story, this is still pretty good. Millar has got his over the top action sequences nailed down, and Adam Kubert is a good stylistic match. He's also strong on the quieter scenes, with what looks like a Duncan Fegredo influence coming in. The characters are nicely sketched out, and the whole thing reads rather well. It works as a single issue story; the question is whether Millar really is leaving himself all sorts of long term problems by taking this route.

X-MAN continues its final storyline towards cancellation, and celebrates with a letters page full of people saying it shouldn't be cancelled. Apparently it's "the most unique book Marvel is producing at the moment", it has a "unique voice", and it is "doing something completely new and different."

These adulations are hard to reconcile with the preceding story, which could best be described as Steve & Ariel's Karoake Authority. Our villain, whose motivations are one dimensional, beats the living crap out of a thinly disguised Authority for an entire issue. It's basically an issue of The Authority. Nate hovers around in the background being powerful and not all that charismatic. There are some cute sequences with the Authority, but to the extent that this is any kind of story as opposed to just a ridiculously big fight scene, it's exactly what the Authority does. And does better.

Is it fun? Sure, it's fun in a dumb, world-scale fighting sense. Is it intelligent? Not really. Does it have anything much to say? No. Is it basically just some creators who like the Authority doing some fanfic? Yes.

There's plenty to like here, if you like The Authority and would like to see more of it. But if you think this is unique, original or in any sense new and different, you're out of your mind.

I am not the target market for FANTASTIC FOUR: THE WORLD'S GREATEST COMIC MAGAZINE. I am not particularly interested in the original Lee & Kirby run on Fantastic Four, let alone in a homage to it. I own a copy of this book purely because my shop gave me one for free. (I suspect that may have been a mistake, as it was slipped inside an issue of Captain America.) But hell, it's here now.

The high concept here is that it's a damned shame Lee & Kirby broke up shortly after FF #100, and that it would be great fun to do an epic storyline in their style to slot in after FF #100 and finish off their run. So here's a twelve issue miniseries driven by Erik Larsen in which an assortment of writers and artists will do their best to emulate the Lee & Kirby style and produce a story that could have been their last big blow-out.

If you've read Avengers #1.5, then you know what we're dealing with. If you've not read Avengers #1.5, then basically this is the comics equivalent of an Elvis impersonator or, if you prefer, the Backbeat Band (a selection of alt-rock musicians who did the Beatles covers for Backbeat). It's basically a novelty act, in other words, and the twelve issue running time seems wildly optimistic. I can't imagine anyone but the hardcore Silver Age admirers sticking with this for a year. Even if Larsen has a killer storyline to do, I suspect most other readers will find the homage routine off-putting rather than anything else.

I've also seen the series compared to a tribute album, incidentally. That's a bad analogy. Tribute albums usually consist of bands covering the original artist's songs in their own style ("Bitch In A Coma - Gangsta Rap Pays Tribute To The Smiths"), not bands doing original material but mimicking the style of the original artist. Oasis and Primal Scream the exception.

As a replica of the period, from my admittedly limited knowledge, it's not bad. Larsen's layouts certainly have a Kirbyesque feel to them (save for the whirling arms on the Superandroid, which look like something out of Warner Bros). Most of the finishers achieve a decently Kirby look - Keith Giffen's own style shines through a bit too visibly, and Jorge Lucas' pages are a touch too polite and restrained, but as a whole the book has the right look. The plotting has the usual formula routines (Doom broods in his castle, Ben and Johnny squabble) and looks serviceable enough for the time. It's actually passable in its own right, but not strong enough to hold interest independently of the Silver Age homage.

If you're the sort of person who finds projects like this inherently appealing, you'll doubtless be very happy with it. It achieves what it's setting out to do, which is fair enough. If you're not inherently interested in the Silver Age, there's probably not much else here that'll hold your attention. But then, you're not the target audience anyway.