28 october 2001

Yes, it's a day late, but I did tell you in advance. And hell, it stil makes me over a month more timely than the average issue of New X-Men.

It's also a fairly quiet week without any particularly important issues, so let's bash through them quickly for the sake of keeping the archive complete.

DEADPOOL is still in the Agent of Weapon X storyline. This isn't quite as successful a balance between drama and comedy as Tieri's last issue, which had suggested that he might be on to something, but it's still not at all bad. He seems a lot more comfortable when he's able to play scenes for laughs. That's not a mode that particularly works on Wolverine, which has not exactly benefitted from the strained Jennifer Lopez jokes it's ended up including. Deadpool, in contrast, can deliver appalling jokes and get away with it because it's in character.

The problem with this issue is that while Tieri still has more or less the right mix of drama to comedy, both are just a touch overplayed. Having Vanessa lose control of her ability to change shape as her mental state decays is fair enough; having her turn into Richard Nixon in a bikini is just plain stupid. (Having her turn into Richard Nixon in a suit, on the other hand, might just about have worked.)

The sequence with Agent Jackson visiting Sabretooth's home almost comes very close to working but goes awry at the end. Sabretooth and Jackson's understated reactions to the pile of corpses he's been stacking up in the corner work rather nicely, with Jackson hitting a suitably appalled tone that fleshes out the character a bit more. Unfortunately, Tieri pushes things a little bit too far by wheeling on an excessively cutesy girl clutching a teddy bear, which tips the scene over into melodrama.

Anyhow, much fighting ensues in the usual manner with everyone's motivations making a passable degree of sense and some set-piece action sequences that are a little too contrived for their own good. Nice art by Georges Jeanty, though, who leaps into the cutesy stuff with a bit too much relish, but more or less get the right tone the rest of the time.

X-TREME X-MEN: SAVAGE LAND #2 is a bit of a mess.

Admittedly, hidden races in the Savage Land have never held much appeal for me, so this isn't a story that gets me very worked up to begin with. Nonetheless, this is the sort of story where I really have to work up the effort to slog through it a second time to remind myself what the plot was.

We open with what's obviously meant to be a big set-piece in which the X-Men are chased through a tunnel by a tidal wave. The idea here, presumably, is to give us a sense of urgency as the heroes are pursued by the force of nature through the tunnel. There's a reasonably good double splash page to kick things off, and then it goes hopelessly off the rails as Claremont stops for a page to introduce the cast. We then get five pages of the cast explaining the plot to one another as they are pursued by invisible water through an invisible tunnel, since the art doesn't actually bother drawing in the backgrounds most of the time, even though it's the focal point of the scene.

I'm really starting to wonder whether Kevin Sharpe even speaks English, since the art here shows all the signs of having been drawn from an amateur translation. Bishop gets charged up with energy beams from Thunderbird... and then draws his guns. Was Claremont's plot really that badly written that Sharpe couldn't understand that bit? Well, perhaps, but that would be a really unclear plot. And how hard would it have been to revise those panels, anyway?

Anyhow, that entire opening sequence has no real plot point other than to demonstrate that the X-Men are great chaps who can do the virtually impossible because they're the heroes. Good for them. We then get the Beast and Thunderbird waking up in a village of... oh, god help us, it's another hidden race. Werewolves, this time. Probably appeared in Ka-Zar once upon a time. (Incidentally, somebody has helpfully e-mailed me to point out that the Saurids have indeed appeared before and are incessantly referencing an story that Claremont wrote ages and ages ago for Ms Marvel.)

The Beast is told that all sorts of things happened while he was knocked out. The book presumably didn't have space to show us because it blew ten frigging pages on the world's slowest race from peril. There's some stuff with the locals which I really can't rouse myself to pay much attention to, and finally Claremont gets around to naming the villain as Brainchild, which is handy since I would never have recognised him from the art. This perennial tenth-rate sidekick is not the sort of character that makes me go "Oh good, a Brainchild story." But there you go. At least he's got some history with the characters, I suppose.

Other than the excruciating opening sequence, this is just below par, and in fairness it deals with areas of continuity I don't care about whoever's writing them. Still pretty bad, all told.