26 may 2002

Ah, DEADPOOL. It's been so long since I was able to be truly enthusiastic about this book. I remember the feeling.

Fortunately, Gail Simone and Udon are really hitting their stride as the book heads towards the obligatory relaunch. The book is hitting the right balance between ludicrous comedy and proper story, and most importantly, it's managed the knack of writing utterly insane plots without requiring the cast to act out of character in the process. Last issue was still feeling its way at a few points, but this time round things have clicked.

As with last month, the approach here is to have a self- contained story together with ongoing plot development. It's quite rare these days to see a comic so obviously being structured with the monthly title in mind rather than the trade paperback. Personally, I approve - besides which, it helps to make this book nice and accessible for those of you who aren't already reading the title.

Last month, you may recall, Deadpool beat the Rhino by shrinking him to a few inches in height. Rather than just forget about that, this issue runs with the joke, as Deadpool dementedly attempts to enlist the Rhino as his new sidekick. By driving a ring through his remaining horn and using him as a keyring.

Yes, it's Humiliate The Rhino month, and yes, you can make him look even dumber than he already did by virtue of being a man dressed as a rhino. But despite putting the character through perhaps the single most debasing issue in his history, Simone still writes him as a proper character, impotently enraged as Deadpool cheerfully dumps him a hamster ball at the end of the day (in one of the funniest Deadpool scenes in years).

The main plot is an excuse for a Dazzler guest star role, as Deadpool is hired to protect her from an maniacally obsessed anti-disco assassin. Again, the issue puts the boot into disco with abandon, but still writes Dazzler herself properly. Her song lyrics are wonderfully atrocious, though - "If you're worried 'bout inflation / Crying children, acid rain / Put your dancing skates on!"

As for Udon's art, they're getting the hang of Deadpool, though he still doesn't look quite as badly scarred as he should. But their mini-Rhino is hilarious.

Great stuff.

Well, look on the bright side. When Marvel do the blurb for the ORIGIN trade paperback, they can honestly say it was a long-awaited story.

While this series has never been particularly bad, it's never lived up to the hype Marvel tried to give it. And the single biggest problem is that there's no apparent reason to care about any of this stuff. It has no discernible relevance to the character's later life. Nor is it all that interesting in its own right.

Logan's jealous because proto-Jean is running off with a cypher, and meanwhile an early version of Sabretooth has come to be nasty to him. Cue lengthy fights in hexagonal cages which are a creakily obvious reference to the bar fight scene in the X-Men movie, and way too blatant to have any dramatic impact beyond "Jesus, that's derivative."

Eventually Logan kills proto-Jean with his claws in a horrific accident which could keep you occupied for ages trying to fathom out how the mechanics of it all could ever conceivably work, by which point I'm already resisting the temptation to skim to the end.

Boring. Pretty, but boring. This was not a story that needed to be told.

WOLVERINE/HULK #4 concludes the Sam Kieth miniseries, which means that you've either already read an issue and decided for yourself, or you're too late to start now.

There are plenty of valid criticisms you could direct at this series, most obviously that it's taken four months to get to a conclusion which is pretty much exactly what most readers will have seen coming halfway through issue #2. But the series still works because of the entertainment value of the admittedly slow journey to get to that point.

This sort of gratuitous weirdness certainly won't be to everyone's taste, and given the slow pacing, it'll probably work better in the trade paperback. Sam Kieth fans will be pleased enough with it, though.

The X-FACTOR miniseries, meanwhile, continues to be much better than anyone expected.

This is a baseball story, and being British, I tend to tune out at this point. But that's not really the point - the concept instead is of a top sportsman who happens to be a mutant. Rather than taking the obvious route, the guy's mutant powers are totally unrelated to the fact that he's good at baseball (and the sort of low-level but marginally useful power that it's relatively easy to accept in this kind of context).

This puts the focus on questions such as whether he has a duty to come out as a mutant for the good of his people. In other words, it's a good old fashioned mutant-as-allegory piece, this time on the vexed question of whether gay celebrities have a duty to be open about it.

Of the two core characters, Aaron Kearse takes the lead role this time, as Jensen continues some interesting exploration of the character's attitudes towards the mutant population he's supposed to be protecting. There's a good balance between portraying him as a basically decent person and still showing him as hopelessly uncomfortable about the whole idea of mutants. Interestingly, his attitudes are expressly linked to his (seemingly quite normal) Christian beliefs, which gets into some areas that mainstream comics often shy away from.

Despite the occasional tendency towards overwrought narration, the book remains suitably understated, with a credible real world feel to it, helped no end by Arthur Ranson's excellent artwork. He may not be showy, but he tells a story far better than most of the artists who are.

Once again, this series is proving a pleasant surprise.

THE AMAZING SCREW-ON HEAD is a one-shot from Mike Mignola, and very, very weird indeed.

Well... actually, it's not all that weird. It's doing the old routine where you take an extremely basic and deliberately cliched plot (hero prevents villain's scheme and saves the day) and just hurl loads of deliberate weirdness at the reader. So our hero is, um, an amazing screw-on head, who is sent on a mission by a painting of Abraham Lincoln, charged with preventing Dr Zombie from raising a nasty demon.

It is, of course, totally absurd. What makes it work is a degree of consistency in the absurdity, which allows it to feel like an entire world, albeit an insane one, rather than just a collection of random concept gags. Although the bizarre dialogue is often genuinely funny in itself. ("It's as you say, sir. All really intelligent people should be cremated, for the sake of national security.")

One issue is probably about the running time of this gag, and even then the story abandons narrative entirely to end on four splash pages depicting "three horrible old women and a monkey." It's shamelessly silly, and it goes without saying that it won't be for everyone's sense of humour. But on its own terms, it's a success.

THE HOOD is a miniseries under the Max imprint, and the first book from Max to feature a completely new character. It's also, for that matter, the first book written by Brian Vaughan to feature a protagonist of his own creation. Vaughan was last seen working on a revival of Swamp Thing over at Vertigo, which is tantamount to wearing a sign around your neck saying "I am not Alan Moore, please kick me." This time, luckily for him, there's no such baggage.

This is a villain book, but some things never change, and so we kick off with an origin story. In fact, though, the origin itself is nothing too out of the ordinary (character stumbles upon mystical power object, gets powers), and the real interest is in setting up the character himself.

Parker Robbins is a small-scale criminal in the Marvel Universe New York. Much of the point of this issue is to establish just how far along the "villain" spectrum he actually is. He's perfectly happy doing robberies (from other villains, it would appear), rather admires the Spider-Man rogues gallery, but draws the line at getting involved with people like HYDRA. He cheats on his pregnant girlfriend with a Russian prostitute, but does seem to genuinely love her and his mentally damaged mother.

The HYDRA sequence, incidentally, doesn't really work. While I like the idea of bringing back the Corporate HYDRA angle from years ago, it's apparently not enough for Parker to reject HYDRA on the grounds that he doesn't agree with them - he has to go into a rant about the evils of terrorist organisations to boot. For one thing, I don't think HYDRA ever actually were a terrorist organisation. They're an evil organisation who want to take over the world, which isn't the same thing, and I'm a stickler for terminology here. More to the point, though, it feels like a forced topical reference, and a reference which wasn't needed to make the point. If he'd simply rejected them as a neo-Nazi organisation, which they arguably are, the scene would have run much more naturally and still established the point that the character has moral standards he won't cross.

Art comes from Kyle Hotz, whose work here is if anything more restrained than his normal exaggerated style. It's a good style for the story, though, taking things just seriously enough without becoming humourless.

There's not too much indication in here of where the series is going to go, since there's nothing much in the way of long term conflict established. Nonetheless, overall it's a promising start.