28 november 1999

As I said last month, BISHOP: THE LAST X-MAN has been a bit generic so far. It needs to establish an identity of its own quickly, as otherwise it can only be a matter of time before Bishop: The Last Issue.

Unfortunately, issues like this one aren't going to help matters. This is the first part of the Kith Trilogy three-parter, and so far it's the Star Trek stock plot. Group of outsiders (landing party) come to isolated community (planet which hasn't developed warp drive yet) and discover that the basically nice people are in the thrall of nasty bullying creatures which they're too afraid to fight back against. The heroes gang up against the nasty bullies and inspire the public to turn against them. Then they go home confident that the newly-inspired locals will be keeping American... sorry, Federation values alive without them.

What we've got here is basically the opening of the stock plot up as far as "The heroes gang up against the nasty bullies", and nothing that obviously suggests it's going anywhere else. I do hope I'm wrong on this, but I have a dreadful feeling it's going exactly where I think it is.

Variations on this particular stock plot stand and fall according to how interesting your nasty bully alien creature is. This issue has a whole load of flying shapes, which is a perfectly good character design but doesn't particularly excite me beyond that. So they're birds. Great.

There are some good ideas in there - particularly the ridiculous but impressive big wooden tower that the locals use for their sacrifices. It's also nice to see Charlie Adlard's art showing up, since while he may not be the most stylish of artists, he's a very good storyteller.

Other than that, I'm afraid there's nothing particularly different here.

CABLE #75. Well, it's not as bad as Blade. And the compliments end there.

The background to this issue is bizarre. Although I believe in reviewing books on their own merits, I think it's only fair to remind you that writer Joe Pruett didn't write it (and it's not at all clear who did), and artist Rob Liefeld's father died while he was working on it. In these circumstances, neither could realistically be expected to produce their best work.

Nonetheless, the book is quite terrible. The issue supposedly forms part two of the Twelve crossover, but you'd be hard pressed to tell. Judging from this issue, nothing whatsoever was ever scheduled to happen in it. The plot is that Cable has been captured by Apocalypse (which we saw last issue). He has a bit of an argument with Apocalypse, and then manages to escape. He has a fight with Wolverine/Death, and beats him. Then he has a fight with Apocalypse, but surrenders when Death threatens to kill Caliban.

That's it. It doesn't take a genius to spot that this is a purely circular plot, and nothing happens of any importance at all. Whether it was plotted by Liefeld or plotted by the editors, the upshot is that the plot has no imagination. The pay-off is supposed to be that Cable is an awfully nice man who would risk the failure of his mission (and the death of millions) in order to save the life of his friend. Lovely, sweet, and wrong. That's not a Cable story. That's a Captain America story. Cable would have said sod it, and killed Apocalypse anyway. He's done it in the past when he was fighting Stryfe. And if the point here is to show how much he's changed, there should have been some reference to the way he used to be. There isn't.

Faced with the ridiculous situation of having to script a story without sight of the plot - a job not dissimilar to dubbing an entire foreign language film on the basis of a two paragraph plot synopsis - Pruett keeps it basic and concentrates on covering for Liefeld's numerous storytelling errors. There's only so much you can do in this situation, and even allowing for that, Pruett lapses into the purple prose too often ("I had risen anew in what the Roman calendar names as the year 1859"). Mind you, even if he was phoning it in, can you blame him?

Pointing out the errors in Liefeld's art is like kicking a three-year-old, and I don't intend to go through the issue in detail. As always, though, there are garish failures of basic perspective, badly choreographed fight scenes, and some examples of plain ineptness. When Wolverine falls off a ledge into a big pit, Pruett not only has to desperately cover for Liefeld's failure to set up the pit in previous panels, but also has to explain what it is. God knows nobody would identify it as a pit from the published art. On the same page, a shadow shows Apocalypse approaching Cable from behind. Naturally, on the next page, Apocalypse attacks from in front.

But what can you say? It's Liefeld. What do you expect?

Normally issues this bad make me reach for the knives and set about ripping it to shreds. Somehow, I just don't feel the urge. This is a sad comic. A pitiful waste of the talents of Joe Pruett, a pitiful use of the talents of Rob Liefeld, and a tragic occasion for Cable and Apocalypse to finally get around to fighting. The book has been building to this point for years... and this is it. If you don't feel a twinge of pity reading this book, you have no soul.

Over in WOLVERINE, the Twelve plot continues, this time in the hands of writers who know what the plot's meant to be and an artist who can draw. Little things, I know, but they make all the difference.

One of the impressive things about the Twelve storyline so far has been the detail in which the plot seems to have been thought through. Pretty much every new plot twist that has come along has turned out to be much more obvious than it seemed - even the seemingly absurd line-up for Astonishing X-Men turned out to have a decent rationale behind it.

The main focus of this issue is the X-Men hunting down Wolverine and trying to restore his normal personality. Unfortunately, while they're all concentrating on that, they don't notice something rather nasty happening to Archangel. This double allegiance swap may at first seem a bit arbitrary, but of course it makes perfect sense. Archangel was the original Death, and he's always hated Wolverine. Giving them both the Death persona is a nice way of playing off that.

It's also nice to see Mike Miller showing up on the title. He's been the best (well, the only decent) thing about X-Man for a while, and given that Leinil Francis Yu's art has looked pretty bad since Dexter Vines started inking him, it makes for a pleasant change. In fact, he's the first artist who's really made that awful Death costume work - even under Alan Davis, it just looked rather goofy.

On the other hand, this issue's litany of flashbacks are unfortunately reminiscent of the flashback story that we saw in X-Men Unlimited next week; and the climax is undermined by giving Archangel a bizarrely cryptic line which is presumably something to do with his still being linked to Apocalypse but doesn't get the point across at all clearly.

Still, it does advance the Twelve plot, it advances it in a sensible way, and it doubles as a Wolverine story. You can't complain too much about that.

X-FORCE is off exploring a long-dead New Mutants plotline. The one about Sunspot ending up in the Hellfire Club eventually. Well, chalk that one up as resolved - he's finally joined, a mere fifteen years or so after the idea was first raised.

It's a bit of a mixed bag, this issue. Sunspot and Dani both get some decent material. Sunspot has Selene trying to convince him of the benefits of joining the Hellfire Club and ultimately resorting to moral blackmail (offering to reincarnte the girlfriend who was killed in his origin story). The reincarnation itself is a particularly good sequence, with the explanation that she's been dumped in the body of a brain dead woman and eventually will just come to accept that she's the person everybody else says she is.

Dani, on the other hand, gets Hela and Blackheart fighting over her. Blackheart's not a particularly good name for a demon, but he does have a great character design, and there's some interesting plot ideas that come out of the storyline.

Everyone else, unfortunately, gets to be occupied by the ever- popular "I will torture you by giving you hallucinations based on a traumatic event probably taken from your origin story" plot device. Why can't supervillains be a bit more imaginative in these things? Isn't putting Sam in a cave-in or James at the scene of his tribe's slaughter all a bit obvious? The one with Jesse Bedlam being institutionalised is quite good, as is Tabitha being threatened with a murder charge after she kills someone in self-defence - but of course, these two don't have such obvious traumas. Sam and James have got obvious ones, and unfortunately Moore has gone for the obvious route.

I'm also not too keen on this whole idea of the Hellfire Club hooking up with demons. It works alright for Selene, and so it doesn't pose a problem for this story, but it's hard to see how it fits in with Sebastian Shaw and the others. Surely the idea of the Hellfire Club is that they're basically the masons to the ultimate degree. Demons in the basement is all too literal.

On balance, still a good read, though.

CAPTAIN MARVEL. Is there any series so obscure that Marvel won't revive it (once they remember it)? This is a revival of the short-lived 1995 series starring the son of the original Captain Marvel, this time with the added gimmick that he's linked to Rick Jones through nega-bands and they have to swap places - only one can be on Earth at any one time. Marvel did this idea with Rick Jones and the original Captain Marvel in the seventies. And even then, it was a homage to Fawcett's Captain Marvel. Another daring new concept from the House of Ideas, then. I give it six months.

Which is a shame, because it's very good. It's written by Peter David, who of course wrote Rick Jones as part of the Hulk's supporting cast for years. David is on comedy mode, and artist ChrisCross, who's always on the verge of cartooning anyway, fits in nicely.

Faced with the old concept of Rick and Cap swapping places, David has chosen to write them as a comedy double act, with Cap as the straight man. This inevitably means that he gets eclipsed by Rick, who gets all the good lines. Still, Marvel's rather sweet attempts to be a nice conventional superhero despite the obvious difficulties of being bonded to Rick Jones are enough to raise him above the rather generic figure he's tended to be seen as till now. (Yes, I know Fabian Nicieza did some decent stuff with him in his previous series, but nobody read it.)

This isn't anything that we haven't seen from Peter David before, but X-books fans who still think that his run on X-Factor is one of the most underrated things ever to come out of the X-books office (and it was) should find plenty here to enjoy.