26 august 2001

Remember when people were interested in THE BROTHERHOOD? Back before it launched? As it is, we have a book which is neither particularly good nor spectacularly bad, and so nobody really cares who's writing it. Which was the only point that most people seemed to find interesting anyway. "Who is X" has faded to its rightful position in the audience's priorities, just below "Say, what is Chriscross's real name, anyway?"

This issue ties up the book's initial storyline by giving Asher his big motivation to leave home and run away to join the mutant terrorist circus. The obvious Columbine reference with the two goths planning to shoot up the school never really heads anywhere particularly interesting and leaves me with the impression that the writer was either making a desperate bid for controversy or a desperate bid for credibility, despite not actually having anything to say about the topic. There is nothing particularly tasteless or offensive about this story; it just sits there.

Somewhat more interesting is the idea of compulsory testing in schools for mutants, although the plot logic seems rather confused. Is it really viable to test the entire school population of America under a pretext and not expect the truth to emerge somewhere along the line? And do they really have compulsory HIV tests in American schools? It doesn't seem like much of a human rights excuse, really. The story seems to be confused on the point itself - why does Hoffman say that they are only claiming to identify mutants, when he's previously said that the whole thing is being done under a pretext?

There's also some relatively sound material in the relationship between Asher and his father, who develops a slightly more rounded character this issue. But otherwise the story seems to be floundering in search of a point. If you want to play armchair psychologist, the writer also seems to be demonstrating some very questionable attitudes to women, with Asher's girlfriend being given a throwaway rape subplot, while Asher loses his virginity to Brotherhood member Marabeth, a hopelessly one- dimensional character.

Essad Ribic's artwork is still the most interesting thing about the series, although here he suffers somewhat from four inkers, one of whom adopts a completely different style from all the others.

This is a frustrating book, whose premise has all manner of potential, but so far has come nowhere near realising it.

Apparently DEADPOOL is officially an X-book again. By the way, I know that I'm meant to give it a much longer title with an issue #1, but being a lawyer, I'll go by the indicia, thanks.

Personally, I'm far more interested in Gail Simone's upcoming run on this title than in the Frank Tieri storyline that begins here. However, Tieri's going to be with us for eight months before Simone gets started, so I suppose we'd better knuckle down and make the best of it.

And in fairness, this isn't bad. Tieri makes a reasonable job of the character, even if he's not bringing anything particularly new to the table. This story picks up from Tieri's recent Wolverine storyline reintroducing the Weapon X project, who are being set up as a vaguely sinister bunch of government sponsored superhumans. The difference this time round is that the project is trying to secure their co-operation voluntarily by offering them something for their services. In Deadpool's case, they're offering to heighten his healing factor to the point where it can remove his scarring and restore his normal appearance.

None of this is unreasonable, and it does at least give Deadpool a decent rationale for being involved. And the idea plays rather better here than it did in Wolverine. One of Tieri's problems in that series is a tendency to write stories that take themselves far too seriously, whereas Deadpool's presence practically compels the story to acknowledge its own absurdities.

Quite what the Weapon X project is using its soldiers for isn't fully addressed, nor is the question of whether they're still meant to be a Canadian government project. Still, even though it undoubtedly won't stick (after all, they're changing the name back in four issues time), Tieri has a reasonably promising start here. Admittedly, that wouldn't be the first time.

Art comes from Georges Jeanty, who wisely decides to just draw the story straight. There's more of a cartoon quality here than there was to his Bishop work, but it strikes the right balance.

All told, not too bad. But I'm still more interested in Gail Simone's stories.

NEW X-MEN finally concludes the "E for Extinction" storyline, and much as it would have been nice to see it on something resembling the original schedule, that doesn't really detract from just how good this stuff is.

Anyone still making the complaint that this is an excessively quick read compared to Claremont's lumpen prose was always wrong, but this issue gives the clearest example yet of why. Morrison has devised a story which looks on a casual reading like a nice clean win for the X-Men over the evil villain, and where only on a close reading does it become obvious what's really happened. The hints are all there in black and white; Morrison may be light on the dialogue, but it conveys twenty times more information. There is far more here than meets the eye. You can work it out now if you want, or presumably a wonderful explanation will be following in due course if you can't be bothered. But it's all here.

There are, admittedly, some glaring loose ends - not least of which is what the hell happened to all those Sentinels which were busy smashing up Genosha last issue. Presumably they completed their mission and went to sleep, but nonetheless it seems odd that nobody's bothered by their continued existence. You could justify that by mind control, but it would be a bit of a stretch and doesn't stop the story reading strangely. Much the same applies to Hank's implausibly convenient discovery of the human extinction gene (which doesn't make for very persuasive science either). Or, for that matter, why we should accept a few gunshots as killing Nova when nothing else seemed to do the job.

Still, the overall strength of the story survives these points. This storyline hasn't just been a nice little superhero routine (and really, the book is no more or less a superhero title than it ever was, whatever people say). It's the springboard to take the book in an entirely new direction and reopen all those possibilities in the mutant concept which have been sealed off for years while we trudged tediously towards Days of Futures Past.

Impressive. The more so, the more you look at it.

ROGUE is the second in the Icons miniseries, and god only knows what Marvel think they're playing at here.

According to writer Fiona Avery, she was asked to do a story set outside continuity, though it's not entirely clear whether that means a stand-alone story or simply a story that isn't in the Marvel Universe at all. What we end up with here is a confused mess which seems unsure which version of the character it's using. Avery was apparently aiming to write something compatible with taking place between Uncanny X-Men #171-172, but all is not well.

A couple of points arise here. One, although Avery's been perfectly open about it in her interviews, I don't seem to recall Marvel going out of their way to mention this being a story set outside present continuity, unless you want to read things into a cover that shows Rogue wearing her costume from the current cartoon series (which the actual book doesn't reference either, so far as I'm aware). Books set in the past or out of continuity have a proud track record of selling very badly, and this series seems to have been ordered in comparable numbers to the Cyclops miniseries, set unambiguously in present continuity. I would not be at all surprised to see it piling up on the shelves in future months.

Two, the apparent intention here is to try to get to the core of the character concept and thereby produce something which works more or less equally for all versions of the character. But it's just not that simple. Avery has some reasonably interesting ideas about how somebody might deal with Rogue's powers, but they don't really reflect how the character acted. The upshot is that rather than a core version of the character, what you get is a character who is rejected by most potential readers as being Slightly Wrong. The overwhelming feeling I get from this book is a repeated sense of "Hold on, that's just wrong." Not on a nit-picking, Storm's-got-the- wrong-hairstyle level (though there's plenty of that if you want to engage in it), but on the general sense that these just don't feel like the same characters at all.

The attempts to gloss over the character's continuity do this series no favours, and only confuse matters. On the one hand, she's still vaguely acting like the original character in terms of accent and such forth. But then, she seems to have taken on some of the aspects of the film version's power (not least the visuals and the "oh god, you're draining my life force" routine), a character who had nothing in common with the comic book version besides her name and, in particular, was never distrusted by all the other X-Men in the way she is here. And god only knows why she's suddenly being described as an orphan.

It is one thing to try and gloss over continuity in the sense of drawing a line under it and moving forward. But this is a story explicitly set in the past, and having invoked the character's history itself, it just can't expect to get away with ignoring it all. This is not an uneasy balance between different versions of the character; it has toppled off the tightrope and is plummeting to the rocks below.

The entire approach being taken to this series - apparently by editorial request - virtually dooms it to failure from the start. Neither willing to pin itself to the "real" character, nor prepared to cut ties and proclaim itself an out-of-continuity story, it simply doesn't work on either level. If Marvel don't want to publish a series about Rogue's history, there's a very simple solution to that. Don't publish one.

This sort of thing does NOT de-emphasise continuity. Far from it. By completely failing to fit with any version of the character's history, it just ends up drawing attention to its hazy continuity status. I have no problem with out of continuity stories or alternate versions of characters, but jesus, either do it right or don't do it at all. This is not doing it right. And if Marvel seriously think there's a massive untapped audience for a Rogue trade paperback among people who aren't existing X-Men readers, then they're on crack. Even if any such people do buy the book, they still won't recognise this as their version of Rogue either - so what's the upside?

Anyhow... the story. Professor X tries to help Rogue deal with her powers with a whole load of telepathic exercises. (We'll just ignore the fact that throughout the period of continuity potentially in question, he couldn't actually do that.) Fairly standard observations ensue, and we even get the "fall over and I'll catch you" trust exercise. There's no particular new insight here, and I'm at something of a loss as to where Avery can possibly go with this. After all, given that she's apparently tried to write the story broadly consistently with past continuity, she's obviously not going to have Rogue resolve her dilemmas and cheer up about it all. Because we know what happens to Rogue: she whines about it for twenty years, and nothing ever changes.

This is not exactly subtle character study material. In order to illustrate Xavier's relationship with Rogue, Avery gives him a retroactive hobby of healing injured animals. No, seriously. Presumably his "I am a Nice Man" t-shirt was in the wash. Still, it's very nice of him to help Rogue with all those voice in her head that she never previously had.

Go back to the drawing board and think again.

ANGEL AND THE APE. Who says Vertigo's going stale?

From the never-ending vein of "let's revive an old character, but for grown-ups!" comes possibly the most pointless thing I've read all year. In fairness, the book is clearly aware of its own pointlessness and positively revels in the absurdity of having Angel O'Day accompanied by an inexplicable ape. Philip Bond's art does a great job on the ape's facial expressions, and a generally impressive piece of work livening up a throughly boring piece of writing.

But good art will only take you so far, and the writing is just not there. Heroes are hired to track down lingerie model. Cue usual assortment of tired pastiches of genre cliches which we've all seen a thousand times before, and - this being a Howard Chaykin book - pointless sex comedy.

Thoroughly boring. Believe me, I get the joke. I've just heard it all before.

Finally this week, THE COFFIN.

This is a trade paperback collection of Phil Hester and Mike Huddleston's miniseries for Oni, which had a rather good short story in their summer special a month or so back. So there you go, that's one sale generated.

The basic premise is that Dr Ashar Ahmad has invented a suit of armour which holds the soul inside after death. Having been locked inside at the moment of death, he's effectively now a corpse being carted around in his suit of armour. The short story in the summer special did a rather good job of playing up the basic creepiness of this whole idea.

The miniseries inevitably takes a more plot-driven approach, and as the back cover acknowledges, the end result is a mixture of the sci-fi/horror concept and a more conventional superhero story. Personally, I'd have preferred to see the balance tilted further in favour of the sci-fi elements, which are a unique and interesting concept. The superhero elements do their job well enough as a framework to hang the idea on, but they're still a bit on the generic side, and they result in the suit's abilities being extended in a way which seems to dilute the simple, straightforward purity of the original idea.

Still, it's an exceptionally strong idea, with excellent character designs on the Coffins, and some good atmospheric black and white art from Mike Huddleston. A Hollywood ending takes the edge off it a bit, but it's still worth your time.