27 february 2000

GAMBIT #15 doesn't actually have Gambit in it, but it does have a Rogue story following up on the plot thread of what happened to Sekmeht Conoway and the Mengo Brothers after they got left behind in Doom's castle in issue #12. As it turns out, they're in the semi-mythical Folding City, a Latverian facility for investigating spatial anomalies which disappeared into such an anomaly itself. (Although the book doesn't really make it very clear how they got there, but that won't spoil your enjoyment.)

A pet peeve here. Every time comics want to show us a strange, non-linear building, they reach straight for the bloody Escher prints. In the last year or so, Avengers Forever did it and Alpha Flight did it. In fact, I seem to remember it being used to depict Limbo back in the seventies. Now Gambit's doing it as well. But Escher's work became familiar imagery years ago. It no longer really works as a way of signifying the strange and warped. What it signifies is coffee table books and art classes, and it just doesn't work for me. It can still be very pretty to look at, but from a story point of view, surely it's time to start cannibalising somebody else's work.

What does work, however, is the way that this facility doesn't even seem to obey the usual comics logic of this sort of building - doors don't seem to lead to the rooms that you can see through them, and such forth. That's a bit more like it.

Despite Rogue being the ostensible hero of this story, the focus is more on the Mengo Brothers, whose father (by one of those great comics coincidences) turns out to be the lunatic ruling the Folding City. There's a wonderful sequence with their father blithely assuming that they must have come to rescue him rather than just stumbling upon him, and they doubletake before proclaiming in unison "We had searched so long for you, poppa!" It's impressive that these patently absurd characters actually hold up when given something a little more substantial to do.

The new art team of Yanick Paquette and Sean Parsons debuts in this story, and while their work isn't as showy as their predecessors, it's good solid storytelling, and pleasant on the eye. The book looks to be in reasonably good hands here.

Yes, it's kind of a time killer before the six month gap, and no, it doesn't look like it's particularly important to the plot. But it's a nice one-issue story, which is what really matters.

Erik Larsen ends his run on WOLVERINE this month, with a tie-in to the High Evolutionary storyline and a resolution of one of the subplots from his run. Remember all those robots that fought the fake Wolverine and Nightcrawler in the junkyard a few months back? Well, this is the resolution of that plot, which turns out to also involve a subplot from Larsen's Nova stories.

Larsen seems unclear what he's doing here. On the one hand, he seems to be trying to tell a semi-serious story about Wolverine trying to fight without his powers. On the other hand, he writes his villain, the Reanimator, as a total joke, dialogued entirely in cliches. It's obviously deliberate - nobody writes dialogue that bad without trying - but quite what the point is, I'm not very sure. I suppose he must be trying to sell us on how awful it is that Wolverine's now having trouble even against total losers like this guy, but I'm not convinced. At the end of the day, by making his villain look like a complete prick from start to finish, he just makes it difficult to care what happens.

Although admittedly, "Flee before I strip the flesh from your bones and use your intestines to string my guitar" is a good line.

Guest art comes from Graham Nolan, who's turned up doing a lot of competent fill-in jobs lately and presumably must be in line for a title of his own at some point. He does a perfectly good job with what he's given here, and his Wolverine's actually pretty good. Wouldn't mind seeing him again, in fact.

It's an okay issue for Larsen to end his Wolverine run on, but let's face it, it's hardly been a classic set of stories. That dire outer space storyline, followed by a bunch of pointless slugfests and a set of crossover tie-ins... it hardly goes down as a banner period for the title. Which is a shame, because Larsen IS a good writer. Just not on this book.

STEAMPUNK is the new series from Joe Kelly and Chris Bachalo, coming out under DC's Cliffhanger imprint. I think it's fair to say that it seems a little out of place. So far, let's be blunt, the Cliffhanger imprint has emphasised above all else two things: nice simple stories, and big tits.

Steampunk does not have big tits, but moreover it does not have a nice simple story. To be honest, it took me two reads before I twigged that the stuff with the blond woman burbling on about lessons is some kind of dream sequence, at which point the plot at least started to make a vague kind of sense. But this is not easy going, and it seems like it's much harder work than it really needed to be.

At least the title is upfront - this is undoubtedly a steampunk story, with the usual genre requirements of sci-fi-style extrapolation from the technology of the Victorian era. At its core, it's a simple book, with a nasty ruler keeping down an oppressed underclass, and the hero obviously serving the usual messiah-figure role of the man who will beat up the baddies and lead the underclass to liberation and freedom. Simple, huh?

Well, not when Kelly and Bachalo have finished with it, adding an almost incomprehensible three page opening dream scene jumping about gratuitously among multiple flashbacks and coming up with a sum total effect of confusing the audience to no real end. Bachalo's action scenes have also deteriorated badly since he worked on the X-books. They were never his strong point, but hell, at least you could work out what was going on in the past. His design sense remains as impressive as ever, and it's certainly one of the book's strongest points, but he's putting too much emphasis on that and too little on conveying the story.

The steampunk genre has never been one I've felt much connection with. It's got the one basic gag of sci-fi with Victorian technology, which is fine as far as it goes (which isn't very far), but has never really struck me as a basis for telling a straight story. The whole genre seems to have a permanently raised eyebrow and a self-aware smirk that makes me want to punch it. I'm not really sure whether this book is an exercise in pummelling the one joke or whether there's some kind of point to it that's going to allow it to be played straight. Certainly Bachalo's coal-powered cyborgs are impressive to look at, though.

I'm not convinced about this one. Maybe that's because I just don't like steampunk, but it seems to me that we've got here a story that wants to be a fun, straightforward romp, and has got itself bogged down in so many little creative details that it's lost sight of what it was trying to do in the first place. Steampunk is an essentially dumb premise, and this seems to be trying too hard to be clever. But I'll give it a couple of issues, to see whether it settles down into straightforward fun, or develops enough of a point to make it worth the effort.