25 november 2001

ELEKTRA & WOLVERINE: THE REDEEMER is not a comic. It's an illustrated short story by Greg Rucka, accompanied by art from Yoshitaka Amano. Amano has done this kind of thing before on Sandman: Dream Hunters, although he's actually better known as a video game designer. Rucka, meanwhile, has been doing crime novels for quite a while now on top of his comics work. It's a promising combination.

Originally this was going to be published as a graphic novel, but Marvel seem to have decided that they don't like that format after all, so this is the first section of a three-part serialisation in the prestige format. I've never liked the prestige format, which offers the worst of both worlds - all the extra cost of a graphic novel with all the protracted waiting of a monthly serialised story. My usual rule of thumb is that if the Canadian price tag makes me double-take, the book is probably overpriced. This issue costs nine dollars Canadian, and I can't help thinking there must have been a more reasonable format to get this story out there.

Anyhow, I've never read Rucka's crime novels, but he looks to be in his usual territory here. After one of Elektra's hits goes wrong, she's left with an underage witness to bump off. Wolverine is brought in to protect the girl by a government agency who still have a hold on him. A nice straightforward plot, with the real interest coming from the questions over what everyone's real motivations are. Interestingly, Rucka has chosen to play up the amnesia angle with Wolverine, letting him do a subplot where even Wolverine doesn't know quite why he's supposed to be involved in this storyline in the first place.

While Rucka sticks with third person narration throughout, his narrator spends alternate scenes identifying with either Elektra or Wolverine. That's not so unusual in Wolverine's case, since he's been talking in first person narration in his book since the late 1980s. It's more of a departure for Elektra, whom writers tend to leave as a more distant and enigmatic figure, with an element of supernatural mystery as to quite how she does all these wonderful things.

Rucka strips away all that, giving us direct access to Elektra's thought processes and expansive details of the mechanics of how she does everything. That has the effect of grounding Elektra far more in the real world, and what Rucka seems to find more interesting is the chance to play off the character against her underage witness (who has a rather glaring parallel with Elektra's own origin story).

There's an odd tension here between Rucka's text - which seems to want a very down-to-earth tone and has taken away much of Elektra's mystique to that end - and Amano's stylised art. In its own right, it's excellent, atmospheric artwork. The trouble is that while it fits nicely for the Wolverine scenes, his Elektra is off into stylised and eerie territory - precisely the sort of thing the actual text isn't doing at all. What Amano is drawing isn't what I'm seeing in my mind's eye when I read the text, and so it doesn't always work for me. The highly stylised backgrounds on some of the later art pages also seem to be pulling in a different direction for the text.

Nonetheless, it's a good read, and Amano's artwork is excellent if you're able to look at it in isolation from the text (or, I suppose, allow it to guide your mental image of the story - but I can't do that, which might be why I've never really liked illustrated text stories to begin with). The biggest downside here is the stratospheric price tag, but that's prestige projects for you.

ULTIMATE X-MEN is still in the Return to Weapon X storyline, and cheerfully telegraphs the plot by having Wolverine tell us that he had everything planned all along. So we're back with the very obvious plot, where the heroes escape the Weapon X project and, this being a Mark Millar story, the villains are probably destroyed and humiliated. Ho hum.

As so often with Ultimate X-Men, this one read rather well on the first read through, but on the second time round all the obvious plot silliness starts to leap out at me. I have real difficulty with the idea that Wolverine's adamantium cage can be broken into by a rocket launcher; I have even more difficulty with the idea that he suddenly decides to be really nice to Nick Fury, who at this point in the narrative has done absolutely nothing to merit it.

Much of the rest of the issue is the usual assortment of scenes of Weapon X personnel torturing mutants for the sake of it, which gets tired very quickly. Millar's villains have no psychological credibility - even though people do terrible things to one another, Millar fails to convince me that any of his villains are real people. He has a stab here, giving Wraith a speech about the need to protect his daughter against rogue mutants, but the sheer scale of pointless malice which Millar has attributed to the character in the past just can't be rationally explained.

Of course, those who like Ultimate X-Men tend to say that it's rather like an action movie, and it's great as long as you're prepared to ignore the fact that the plot has more holes than a sieve, the characters have one dimension at best, and the story has the subtlety of a knife in the eye. But I don't like action movies, so that cuts no ice with me.

Dumb, and more obviously so the more you look at it.

No particularly interesting new series this week, so instead here's the first Bruce Jones issue on INCREDIBLE HULK.

There's evidently been a change in the status quo since last issue, since Bruce Banner is now wandering around communicating with a mysterious individual by e-mail, and seems to have severed contact with his Paul Jenkins supporting cast. There's no real explanation for what's supposed to have happened, but I'll give Jones the benefit of the doubt since the overall impression is that this is meant to be a plot point and he'll be getting to it in the end.

While Banner is busy exchanging e-mails that don't appear to advance the plot much, he's busy hiding out from... well, it's not very clear who. One of the problems with this whole set-up is that it doesn't actually generate any dramatic tension yet because it's not apparent who Banner is hiding from or what his purpose is in doing so. There are various background details establishing that the Hulk seems to have killed somebody in a rampage the previous day, but Banner doesn't seem much bothered by this. The mystery is centring over why Banner is doing all this, but that seems to be a background subplot in this issue.

The main story seems to be firmly in the territory of the old TV show, as Banner meets a nice chap in the community he's blundered into, and helps him out with his minor-league problems in a Hulk-related manner. It's not a desperately interesting story, to be honest - "nice black kid drawn into joining gang" is hardly original material, and I don't see much of an original spin on it here.

The issue is strong on atmosphere, and Jones takes the interesting decision to keep the Hulk himself entirely off-panel, even though his presence is felt throughout the plot. Banner feels like a totally different character from the one in the Jenkins run, mind you, and I can't honestly say I come out of this story with more than mild curiosity as where this is heading.

Might just be a slow start, but it doesn't quite grab me yet.