26 november 2000

GAMBIT #24 is to all intents and purposes the end of the series. There's going to be an issue #25 by a different creative team, but after that, the series isn't coming back. So this is Fabian Nicieza and Yanick Paquette's chance to try and resolve all the outstanding plotlines in a normal sized issue.

It would have helped, of course, if the previous two issues hadn't been off doing completely unrelated stuff instead of driving the plot forward. But nonetheless, Nicieza manages to bring the New Sun storyline to a reasonably satisfying ending in the space available. (And the other outstanding plots are wisely ignored rather than being given rush resolutions.)

The New Sun's story helpfully dovetails with the storyline of the Guilds' prophecies that Gambit's going to bring back the Old Kingdom. Essentially, the idea is that the New Sun comes from a world where they actually went ahead with the prophecies, only to discover that all that stuff about bathing the world in the sun wasn't a metaphor after all. What actually happens if you do the required rituals is that Gambit's powers go out of control and wipe out the population of Earth.

It's a good enough explanation for all the build-up we've had that the story more or less gets past the fairly cumbersome rush- plotting needed to get us to this point. The New Sun simply brings Gambit to his home planet, tells him the origin story, and tries to kill him (so as to make sure that he doesn't destroy his planet in the same way). While it's understandable that the New Sun would at least want to explain himself, it's not altogether clear why he didn't just cut to this point straight from the off - or indeed allow Gambit to simply die in the Antarctic rather than saving him and starting the whole plotline in the first place.

The eventual fight gets a bit contrived as well. It's fair enough to use the deserted planet routine so as to get across just how powerful the characters are, but it's decidedly implausible to have them just happen to land right next to the specific statue that the story needs to tie up the prophecies. (Although having the New Sun as the Gambit who gets killed is a nice touch which I didn't see coming.)

Despite the rush, the issue still works as a resolution to the series. Nicieza and Paquette have been doing good work on this book with a character who didn't obviously merit a series in the first place; and, in their absence, I shan't really be missing the series much. It effectively ends here, with their departure, and this rounds off a generally successful two years.

Skimming the reviews already published on X-MAN #71, I see that there is a certain disparity of viewpoints. We've got some reviewers lamenting the cancellation of this title on the grounds that it's apparently some kind of work of genius which will lead the comics medium into the new millennium, and which should not be "punished for its originality." On the other hand, among reviewers less enthralled by the Cult of Ellis, the issue has been described as "an incestuous circle-jerk."

Well, I wouldn't go that far. But I find myself in much the same position I had on the Casey/Ladronn Cable run - looking at a bunch of acceptably above average comics, and wondering at what point they were declared to be the glorious future of the medium. This is not a bad book, but with the number of eulogies it's had over the past couple of weeks, it has to be a strong contender for the year's most overrated.

What do we actually have here? Like the first two Counter-X arcs, it opens with a seemingly unrelated flashback, presumably setting up the next storyline (presumably now just the closing issue #75). A kindly middle aged couple find a thing that fell from space into a field in Kansas. Do you see? Do you see, it's a take off of Superman's origin! How original, I haven't seen that since... oh, Iron Man, two months ago. It's good to see another creator mining this idea, since it's not overused in the slightest, heavens no.

Somebody should start a website listing all the Superman origin pastiches in comics. See if they can fit it onto the one server. Now, it's not a badly done pastiche of Superman's origin, nicely paced and dialogued. And I can even see how there might be some conceivable reason for playing off Superman's origin in an X-Man story (they're both aliens who fell to Earth and they're both really powerful, which is at least some basis for doing a compare and contrast story). But original? Come off it.

Then to the story proper. This is picking up from the Qabiri scene at the beginning of the second Counter-X arc four months ago. Playing off the interesting spiral idea (better worlds up the spiral, broken worlds down the spiral and Earth in the middle), Qabiri's motivation was established back then as, basically, xenophobia. He's convinced that dimension-travellers from the lower worlds will eventually reach his utopian world and corrupt it, so he's launching a pre-emptive strike to stop them ever getting there. All that was established perfectly clearly four months ago in three pages, and this issue doesn't really go much further with the idea.

Nate becomes involved after offering help to a mutant nun who has visions of the worlds Qabiri has destroyed, and has gouged out her own eyes in an unsuccessful attempt to stop them. Nate takes her to the world Qabiri's currently on, where he's in the course of beating the crap out of a very thinly disguised version of the Authority. Cue, well, Authority-style big fight. (Only slightly less so, because even though Ariel Olivetti's linework has improved enormously, it's still not up to anything even approaching Bryan Hitch or Frank Quitely's work on that book.)

Now... would somebody care to explain to me how exactly this is a pioneering, imaginative book of the sort we need more of, as opposed to just another, admittedly above average, example of the spawning genre of Elliscomics? It's not a bad genre, don't get me wrong. It's not a bad book, for that matter. But it's just another title in what's now a well established genre - take a pinch of Vertigo pseudo-mysticism, add a dash of widescreen action movie stunts, stir with smoke and meths, and there you go.

Consider the ingredients list here, people. Superman pastiche - an idea that was tired when the Silver Age began. A toned down version of the Authority, to remind us all that we read the right comics and can be justly proud of our good taste, and a lightweight version of the Authority's trademark fight scenes. Nate as generic hero, labelled "shaman" to convince us that it's actually a new idea of some sort, when if there IS any difference between "protecting the tribe" and "protecting humanity", it certainly doesn't manifest itself in this storyline. Or any of the preceding ones. But it's vaguely tribal and mystical, so it MUST be a dazzling new idea.

Qabiri's home reality is a thinly veiled version of the Christian heaven, as shamelessly played off by mentally linking him to a nun. Ah, twisted versions of Christian mythology. There's something we've never seen before in Elliscomics. And to top it off, a bit of gratuitous gross-out mutilation, in the form of the age-old "injury to the eye" motif.

I emphasise, and I cannot emphasise enough, that I actually quite like this book. It's pleasantly entertaining, above average genre stuff. Nor do I want to suggest that Ellis himself has stalled into repeating the same old ideas - while the Counter-X line certainly hasn't been his most imaginative stuff by a long way, his announced Pop Comics line for 2001 show that he's still looking to do new things. But in the wake of his past work (and other writers), and clumping around his fanbase and website, what was genuinely different and had real shock value when it was first done has congealed into a new genre - one that Ellis himself lapsed into in doing the Counter-X books. Which is fine, since the point of hiring him was to put an Elliscomics gloss on some existing X-books. X-Man has been given a particularly heavy gloss, and it certainly looks great compared to what it was publishing before, but when you get down to it it's not doing anything particularly new or different. It has its routine, it does it well enough, but dazzlingly original? Give me a break.

As one Fabian Nicieza story closes, another one begins, with X-MEN FOREVER. I'm in a slightly unusual position reviewing this one, since I double-checked some continuity points for this series a while back. That means I have a reasonable idea of what's coming in future issues, which skews my perspective hopelessly.

X-Men Forever is obviously a thematic follow-up to Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco's Avengers Forever maxiseries, in which a bunch of seemingly unrelated Avengers characters were thrown together in a team and wandered around backwaters of Avengers continuity fighting the Time Keepers and tying up some loose ends in the process. X-Men Forever takes the same basic format of an ad hoc team in a time travel story, although this time the main characters are all from the same time frame (meaning that the villain members are actually villains).

This time round, though, there's no immediate threat. Instead, the characters are being despatched by Prosh, a pet character from Nicieza's X-Force run, on a trip back through time to see various past events and understand what the hell was going on. This obviously does provide a vehicle to tie up some long running danglers - the first jump is to the assassination of Graydon Creed, so that storyline should finally get tied up four years late. But, from Prosh's introduction in this issue, it's also trying to get back to the evolution theme that underlies not just the X-Men, but the whole mutant concept, and try to give us some idea of where all this is actually heading. The basic idea introduced here is that, at this rate, the humans will end up supplanting the cosmic powers, and so Prosh wants to give them the necessary information to enable them to make a pre-emptive strike.

That means there's no immediate adversary overreaching the whole story, so much as a long term threat that the characters are trying to avert. The emphasis is much more on the characters, hence the curious assortment that Nicieza has opted for - Phoenix, Iceman, Mystique, the Juggernaut and the Toad. It's perhaps unfortunate that in the time this series has been gestating, the core books have turned Mystique into a lunatic, which doesn't really fit with her depiction here, but there you go. I'll take this version over the Dream's End story that plugged Mystique into a role she was completely unsuited for.

Since this is basically a character driven book, we're pretty well off with Kevin Maguire as artist. Maguire hasn't been seen much in the X-books, but he's a great character artist making the most of the material he's given here. He's pretty good on the cosmic stuff too, of course, though an attempted one page recap of the history of mutation on earth was probably over optimistic and ends up looking decidedly crammed.

Like Avengers Forever, it's something of a bonus for long-time fans who get the continuity references, but less hardcore readers should be fine with it too. As for a rating, like I say, my perspective's too skewed for this to mean much. But let's play safe and go with...