25 march 2001

GAMBIT & BISHOP lumbers dutifully onwards, much like a drunk lemming staggering towards a cliff.

The story is at least finally stumbling towards some sort of vague conclusion. Cable has captured Stryfe and is going to kill him. Gambit and Bishop have to stop him. Formulaic, but at least it makes some vague kind of sense. Unfortunately, even allowing for this, the book doesn't hold water. There's no coherent explanation of why Cable has suddenly woken up one day and decided to murder Stryfe. The stray plot thread from the original storyline (that Bishop has a symbiote of some kind inserted in him by Stryfe) complicates matters needlessly. And, arguably most important of all, what we're now reading is a makeshift Cable story. It has little or nothing to do with either of this book's supposed protagonists.

The art is decidedly variable. The opening sequence by Cary Nord, with Bishop and Gambit in the graveyard, is reasonably moody, if hampered by the fact that the scene is entirely pointless and serves largely to devour pages. Once they get into the building, we get some rather cartoonish work which, to put it mildly, sits uneasily with the narration trying to convince us that Cable looks incredibly intense and murderous. He looks nothing of the sort.

The story finally gets around to explaining what the thing in Bishop is, but unfortunately does so in a way that doesn't work. We get an explanation of the thing's history, the gist of which is that it's a cosmic entity akin to Satan which has been trapped in the Earth for millenia. Supposedly it was able to attach itself to Bishop as he returned from the future. The glaring plot problem with this is that Bishop didn't reappear on Earth, nor for that matter in this solar system. From memory, I'm not even entirely convinced he was in the same galaxy. This Bete Noir thing evidently has a hell of a reach for an entity that's meant to be trapped in the planet Earth.

Joe Pruett's script seems to be going through the motions without really having much of a clue what any of the characters' motivations are meant to be. He seems particularly at a loss when it comes to Cable, giving him a startlingly dumb "Can you even kill a clone?" speech in an attempt to make some sense of his motivations here.

The unfortunate condition of this miniseries is said to be, at least in part, due to the original plot being vetoed halfway through, as it would have conflicted with plans for the other X-Men books. A quick read of this flailing storyline certainly makes that a highly plausible explanation of the situation, but knowing why it's bad doesn't stop it being bad.

X-MAN comes to a conclusion this week, after seventy-five issues which were, for the most part, derided by virtually everyone. The classic example of a book which stayed in print purely because of the X on the cover, it was difficult (even by X-Men standards) to find anyone who was buying the book because they actually liked it.

The final year of the book has been taken up with the Counter-X relaunch, which attempted to address the obvious problems with the character by reinventing him practically from scratch, and giving him an altogether new gimmick as a mutant shaman, appearing in stories involving alternate worlds. This undeniably improved the book immeasurably, although I emphatically don't subscribe to the view that it made the book into some kind of boundary-pushing classic, as some would suggest. The stories weren't all THAT out of the ordinary, and crucially, Nate remained a complete cipher with little or no personality.

Nonetheless it was a decided improvement no what had come before, so at least the book gets to end a respectably long run on some material that actually merited publication. As the book has no ongoing storylines, this final issue is charged with getting Nate out of the way altogether. It does so by having Nate meet an alien whose race were responsible for life on Earth, and who has come to harvest all the mitochondria. Nate dutifully defeats him in self-sacrificing manner, bringing the series to an end.

It's a perfectly good story, helped by some strong artwork from Quique Alcatena. The presentation of the alien as somebody who actually does love the planet, but from the perspective of a farmer who views the inhabitants as crops, works well. The basic idea of revealing that humans are really just a byproduct for the real purpose of Earth isn't an original one - hell, Douglas Adams has used it - but it's always effective, since humans still haven't got over the idea that they're important in some way, and the reminder comes in handy. The "passing the torch" aspect of the story, in which Nate inspires a local mutant to take over as shaman after his death, is crashingly unsubtle, but at least allows the series to finish on an upbeat note.

Having said that... I still don't really care about Nate. Perhaps the biggest failure of the Counter-X stories was their inability to give Nate a personality. I've been reading this damn book for six years, the protagonist's dead, and I don't care in the slightest. Something isn't working when that's the reaction. If nothing else, shouldn't I care whether the hero lives or dies?

AMERICAN CENTURY is a new ongoing title from the Vertigo imprint. It's of more than usual interest to X-books readers, incidentally, because it's written by Howard Chaykin and David Tischmann, the duo who were originally going to replace Robert Weinberg on Cable. It's going to end up with Tischmann writing on his own, but they're still of interest to us.

More importantly, the book's another of Vertigo's sporadic attempts to broaden their output beyond fantasy and horror books. The line has been looking a bit tired of late, so hopefully it'll be woken up a bit by the arrival of this book, The Crusades and next month's Codename: Knockout (which admittedly sounds dire, but you never know). According to Chaykin's editorial, the inspiration was to do a more left-wing version of Steve Canyon, a strip I've never even heard of let alone read. But it might something to you, so I mention it anyway.

The book is set in 1950s America. Pilot and WW2 veteran Harry Block is living an utterly miserable life of suburban conformity until he receives a call-up for the Korean War and decides to make a break for it, faking his own death and leaving for Guatemala. Presumably the plan is for the series to follow Block and ignore the people he's leaving behind, so the main purpose of all the bit part characters introduced here is to be so irritating as to make Block's decision entirely understandable.

They succeed admirably in that regard. If anything, the book could probably have stood to be a bit more subtle in its depiction of 1950s suburbia, as everybody else is so wildly unsympathetic (except the put-upon black office clerk, who's there to give other characters an opportunity to be racist) that you can only applaud Block's restraint in not killing them all. Still, the idea is to give Block a motivation to leave and kick off the series, and it works on that level.

Art comes from Marc Laming and John Stokes, neither of whom are American, but who do a suitably convincing rendition of the 1950s, playing off all the movie cliches (rows of identical houses with letterboxes outside and so forth) without being too heavyhanded about it. Mind you, I'm not American either, so I'm hardly in a position to judge. The art's been criticised for being a bit stiff, but to an extent the suburban fifties ought to look like that. We'll have to see how well the art adapts to the other settings as the series progresses.

This being a set-up issue, it's impossible to read too much into it about how the series is going to turn out. It's an interesting enough start, though, and definitely worth a look.

ARIA has already had a couple of miniseries at Image, none of which I bought, largely because I still have a default suspicion that any book published by Image with vaguely commercial artwork and a female lead is probably going to be exploitative crap. Aria isn't, but Image only have themselves to blame for acquiring that reputation in the first place.

The premise here is that there's a small group of mythic characters living unnoticed in Manhattan, with Lady Kildare as their "unofficial matriarch." (In case you're wondering, no, there isn't a character called Aria.) Whereas most such stories try to play up the idea of these characters being separate or different from the normal world, Aria takes the opposite approach and places the emphasis on making them fit seamlessly into normal society.

Fantasy isn't a genre that particularly interests me, but the ensemble cast works well, and the creators pull off the trick of making them seem part of the real world without entirely removing their supernatural status. Art comes from David Yardin, on his first major assignment. According to his editorial at the back, he was inspired to go into comic art by Jim Lee, Scott Williams and Whilce Portacio (presumably during their Homage Studios phase), and the influence comes through strongly. Fortunately, Yardin's influence seems to be the period when Lee was doing storytelling rather than pin-up shots - and Lee was very good at narrative back when he actually did some - and the end result looks extremely nice. Raymund Lee's suitably bright colouring helps as well.

The story has Puck coming to New York and doing various unpleasant things to attract the characters' attention. The story takes the approach of depicting Puck as actively malicious rather than merely mischievous, which is the more interesting way to go. His scenes seem a bit at odds with the relatively down-to-earth tone of the rest of the book, and the closing sequence is very oddly paced (to the point where I didn't realise it was meant to be the ending and was flicking through the ads for further pages). I'll be curious to see how the tone works when the series gets deeper into the story, but for now this is an interesting start.