26 september 1999

In a week as eventful as this one, I start to wonder whether anybody's really still interested in the actual comics. But I'm going to plough gamely on. Anybody out there? Anyone finding the front of stage more interesting than what's going on behind it?

Well. While all eyes seem to be elsewhere, BISHOP has a second issue out. In part this issue is about establishing the new society that Bishop finds himself in, although in fact it doesn't take us much further down that line. It's a post-apocalyptic feudal kind of place, and presumably we'll be finding out why in due course. We don't really find out much in the way of detail about it beyond the fact that it's pretty much generally unpleasant, but this'll do for now.

In fact, this issue is mainly about establishing Bishop's relationship with the key members of his supporting cast, and setting up how all these people fit into this nasty future world. (If you're a human, at any rate. If you're a tree, job opportunities seem to have increased enormously.) Jinx and Scorch are set up as mouthpieces of the two opposing views on Bishop. Either he's the legendary hero come to save the world, or he's the useless bastard who got us all in this mess in the first place.

Rather more interesting, and a surprising twist, is the appearance of a character who may or may not be a future Gambit. Yes, the Witness is back and this time he's even more infuriatingly enigmatic than he was last time. Of course, we have the advantage that we know stuff about our timeline's version of Gambit and we can interpret all that this version of the Witness does in that light. Although very little that the Witness does this issue is immediately comprehensible, his place in the overall picture makes perfect sense, particularly his rather hamfisted attempts to remake the mutant community he leads into some kind of ersatz Thieves Guild. Well, robbers, actually, but never mind.

Fitzroy also gets some decent character material, as we're set up not only to understand that he's still in love with Shard but that he has some very strange and quite possibly downright nuts ideas that one day they'll head off into the sunset and live a glorious and romantic life together. If nothing else, it gives the character something else to do other than posture and gloat.

The problem with this issue is that it really is just a series of events serving to establish the character relationships rather than having a strong story of its own. The conflict between Bishop and the doubting Scorch serves as the main narrative drive, but doesn't really go anywhere other than to remind us that Scorch doesn't like our hero that much. It's all very worthwhile in the context of the wider series, but when you get down to it, it's an issue full of set-up.

Artist Georges Jeanty continues to give the future timeline a nicely believable look, and the book certainly reads very pleasantly. In a trade paperback, this would read just fine as Chapter 2 of a wider story; its only real problem is that it could stand to have a stronger story of its own.

Ah, nonlinear storytelling. GAMBIT #10 rather audaciously takes place in two time periods at once, with another one in the prologue and two more in the epilogue. The plot concerns a jewel called the Momentary Princess which appears in Leipzig for a few moments every thirty years or so, and the attempts of various parties to get it when it does.

This means a dynasty story. While Gambit's father, with the help of the Howling Commandos, tries to capture the thing in World War II, Gambit tries for it in the present. As for the villains, what with the Marvel Universe having a bit of a shortage of really scary dynastic villains, it's time to say hello to Baron Strucker and his kids the Fenris twins.

I've never really been that keen on the Fenris twins, who have always struck me as a couple of one-dimensional cartoon Nazis. This issue plays them for laughs, as they blunder around ineptly in some downright ridiculous fetish costumes. They're not really in Gambit's league, but they'll do to get a bit of conflict in.

The issue is really two seperate stories linked by the Momentary Princess plot device. The World War II story is mainly about Jean-Luc LeBeau refusing to trade the gem to Candra in exchange for releasing the Guilds from her control. The present day story seems to be largely set-up, as nobody actually walks away from it with anything (the gem disappears again). But it does introduce the concept of this gem, which I suspect will play some prominent role in the upcoming time travel story, and it serves as a method of bringing Sekmeht Conoway back into the plot.

Good entertainment, even if it does have Fenris in it.

X-MEN #94 is the second half of the Hidden Lives two-parter, and while it kind of resolves bits of the story, you'd be hard pressed to call this a resolution.

Basically there's three seperate strands to this issue, and they don't have much in common. Our A plot has Rogue and Sunfire (who's apparently gone back to his old costume for some reason) clearing Mystique of involvement in the crimes that the fake Mastermind and Mesmero had framed her for, and then going on to hunt down the villains without much success. That's your resolution, really - Mystique gets cleared and the villains are kind of exposed.

The B plot has Shadowcat stumbling across Destiny's journal of Nostradamus style gibberish which may or may not be playing a significant role in upcoming stories. And the C plot is basically Nightcrawler talking to Polaris about Havok.

Normally I don't really like these stories where nothing gets resolved and nothing particularly ties together - in fact, the main reason for getting Mystique involved in this story at all seems to be that she provides a handy plot device link for the A and B plots, and that two out of three ain't bad. But even if it isn't quite the resolution we might have expected, it seems pretty clear that the title is heading somewhere pretty specific in the run-up to the big Twelve crossover at the end of the year. It really does all feel like the pieces of a larger plan.

And what's this? Why, it's a back-up strip trailing the upcoming Hidden Years series. The plot is pretty slight - Xavier uses his mental powers to test his X-Men with illusions, yet again - but it's being used here principally to set up the relationships between the characters at the time the X-Men were cancelled in 1970. Since that run ended only two issues after Xavier cheerily returned from the dead and informed everyone that he'd been in the basement all along and just hadn't felt like telling them, it's not surprising that there should be a fair degree of tension in the ranks.

So, for what it is, it's not bad. Byrne and Palmer's art looks pretty decent, and really the only major criticism is that surely there's room for a bit more plot in ten pages. Well, that and the fact that it's got Marvel Girl's single ugliest costume, but I suppose there's not much to be done about that. I'm still not convinced that Byrne is going to get a decent series out of this concept - he's just put out too much crap lately for me to have any faith in that - but this is a reasonably promising start.

Let me say from the outset that I'm not going to get into the whole question of what X-MEN: CHILDREN OF THE ATOM does to continuity. It certainly raises some questions about what exactly is supposed to have happened with Scott and Mr Sinister and such forth, but there's another five issues to come in which that can be addressed. So. Is it any good?

This series is a retelling, in the loosest possible sense, of the Origin of the X-Men stories that ran as back-up strips in 1968 and 1969. Those stories depicted the individual origins of Scott, Hank, Warren and Bobby and explained how the team was formed. (Jean didn't get one, presumably on the basis that she was seen joining the team in issue #1.) What Casey has done here is to take certain key ideas from those stories and construct a completely new plot around them.

The original stories had a highly episodic format to them - Scott joins, then Bobby, then Warren, etc. Casey obviously doesn't fancy doing an episodic quest story and so he's relocated Scott, Hank and Bobby to New York and put them in the same school, generating an enormous saving of time and allowing him to get on with the plot more quickly.

As main villains, Casey introduces some completely new characters, namely the Anti-Mutant Militia. This bunch are really another iteration of an idea that crops up fairly frequently in the X-books. Since the X-Men's major enemy is really social forces, and yet genre requirements compel the heroes to have fight scenes with the villains, writers keep coming up with characters like this. Be it the Friends of Humanity, Humanity's Last Stand, that priest from God Loves, Man Kills or just another lynch mob, the point is to incarnate the X-Men's main enemy as something tangible, identifiable and, most of all, punchable.

The Anti-Mutant Militia are certainly punchable. I'm slightly surprised by the way in which they're being portrayed here, which veers away from the usual everyman depiction in favour of something closer to the White Power lunatic fringe. The character design of their leader - a man in militaristic costume with a Hitler hairdo - is a mistake, since he looks like he ought to be being mocked on the Jerry Springer show rather than taken seriously on news bulletins. The rest of them are rather better, although the American History X influence looms very large indeed.

Casey also seems to be intending to use Fred Duncan, a supporting character from the early sixties, in a much more prominent role than he originally had (he was in half of Cyclops's origin story). He does a reasonably good job of turning this rather generic figure into a proper character although I'm not at all clear why he's being given such a prominent role at all. Casey seems to like writing stories with a civilian perspective, but since at this stage all of the X-Men are civilians anyway, it hardly seems necessary to provide a further external viewpoint. Perhaps all this will become apparent in time.

Steve Rude's artwork tells the story with his customary skill and style, although it does vacillate wildly as to precisely what time period we're meant to be in. For the most part it seems to be around 1990, or at least the generic recent past, which would seem reasonable. But there are some wildly off moments - Jean's mother, who seems to have been transported through time from the 1960s, or the hopelessly misjudged attempt at a Marilyn Manson figure who looks instead like a renegade from A Flock Of Seagulls. I suspect the book would like to be timeless, but it's not quite getting there - there are a couple too many moments that seem incongruously dated.

For all this, though, Casey and Rude have certainly put some more life into the whole story - and, by dumping continuity wholesale, open up the welcome possibility that things could work out rather differently. Obviously it ends with the X-Men having been formed, but the question is how he's going to get there, and at least this has been thrown into doubt. My usual reservation with Joe Casey stories remains, though - it certainly looks like a quality product, it's amazingly well told, but is there anything much beneath the surface? We'll see. For the moment, though, worthwhile just to admire the storytelling at work.

Once again, time to pick up an extra book to review on the time-honoured principle of "it's a first issue and it doesn't look hopeless." Hence, BLUE.

To be honest, I wouldn't have touched this with a ten foot bargepole if I'd realised the pedigree. It's not the fact that this comes via Image from Action Toys, who by their own account were "designed to create multi-media franchises", although that's certainly not an encouraging sign. It's the fact that Action Toys are the people who brought you Alley Cat, a Nightcat for our times which surely would put off any discerning customer.

So what's Blue? Well, it's certainly a multi-media franchise - it screams "children's cartoon series", although it screams it in quite a nice way. The creators have obviously grasped that there's more to a franchise than a character design, and there's clearly a genuine effort being made here to tell a story. Their hearts seem to be in the right place.

What we have here is a sci-fi story with a teenage girl (take note, demographics people!) who's an orphan and lives with her uncle, who is mixed up in some strange and morally grey conspiracy that intends to develop war robots to defend the planet against invading aliens and is prepared to adopt a morally grey route in order to get the development done on time. Conceptually, a perfectly decent starting point and you can well see how a TV series could be got out of this.

It falls down a bit on its occasional lapses into cliche - Blue's a perfectly likeable character but so far locked firmly into feisty teen heroine mode; and she has a bearded mentor in a robe. Oh, and painfully overliteral metaphor - her world is a kind of apple-core shaped affair with a worker city on the bottom and a bourgeois city on top. "All the product is made by the workers on side B, but all the rewards are reaped by side A." Do you see? Do you see what they've done there? Of course you do, and they didn't need to spell it out for you. One of the great reasons for the Show, Don't Tell approach is that it allows clunky metaphors like this to look subtle. Well, subtler.

The art looks gorgeous, with some excellent use of colour forming another reminder that Marvel (and mainstream DC) need to start paying far more attention to this part of the process. After all, it's the colours that cover most of the page, not the lines. The only real problem with the art here is a few moments of bad storytelling - take, for example, page 20 panel 4, where the conversation suddenly goes off on a strange tangent in reaction to some new information we never see arriving. It doesn't read very well. But for the most part, the art strikes a good balance between cartooning and atmosphere.

Not a bad issue by any means (especially given that it's a "multi-media franchise", a phrase for which I reserve a special place in hell next to "human resources"), let down more by faults in the storytelling than by any fundamental problem with the product. Might be worth keeping an eye on, as it has every possibility of improving with time. And it does look great.