29 april 2001

This is the last week before the first of the relaunches is scheduled to hit the shelves - Uncanny X-Men, to be exact. Even from here, the shadow of what's about to come makes this week's books look rather beside the point in comparison. But on we go.

CABLE is still in the middle of the Dark Sisterhood storyline which will conclude Robert Weinberg's run. The main point of this story seems to be to use the Sisterhood to cut off Cable from the X-Men, which makes me wonder whether it's part of the original storyline or whether this is Weinberg trying to set things up for his successor.

In any event, for reasons that I find slightly unconvincing, Cable has decided to fight the entire Dark Sisterhood on his own rather than bringing in the X-Men. The X-Men get a scene attempting to justify why they're no longer interested in Cable - basically, Professor X decides that the Sisterhood is all some kind of scam that Cable's come up with to give him an excuse to go off and "fight evil he alone can comprehend." All of this comes across as a little contrived, as well as making Professor X look rather dumb for falling for a scam that Rachel Summers sees through in two panels later in the book.

Getting Cable away from the X-Men is nonetheless a good move, since he never fitted in there anyway. Weinberg also works in the suggestion that Cable was responsible for the murder of Robert Kelly by telepathically controlling the assassin, which is just about credible and serves to work that rather pointless crossover issue into the overall storyline.

Weinberg continues his attempt to portray the Dark Sisterhood as basically controlling everything, which is starting to seem rather over the top. I realise that he's going for the paranoia angle here, but the sheer scale of the Sisterhood's infiltration of everything that moves goes beyond my suspension of disbelief. I just don't buy into the idea that any conspiracy can be that widespread and yet remain that secret.

This is all starting to feel like a rather lengthy way of achieving a status change for Cable. We've got the idea by now; time to get on with it.

Over in the "Hell, are they still publishing that?" division, the Frank Tieri WOLVERINE run rumbles inconsequentially onwards. The pattern is pretty apparent here - Tieri has some basically interesting ideas, a reasonably handle on the character, and a clear idea of what sort of atmosphere he's going for. Unfortunately, he's not managing to construct a solid story around these elements.

Having been framed for murder, Wolverine and the Beast head off to lie low for a while. Nick Fury decides to track him down, and sends an undead bounty hunter called the Shiver Man after him. This is pretty much where the story structure goes to pot, since there's no apparent connection between the Shiver Man concept (which dominates the issue) and the supposed ongoing storyline. Tieri seems to have just chucked in this character at the first opportunity without any real consideration to the question of whether he has anything to contribute to the plot.

The guest penciller is Mark Texeira, which would normally be a very good thing, but suffers here from inking that really takes the edge off his work and makes it just look rather cuddly. Some of the compositions still shine through, but the end result is still rather disappointing.

Scott Lobdell rounds off his interim X-Men run with X-MEN #113. After a decent start, this has turned into a microcosm of Lobdell's original run - the character issues are pretty good, but by god the crossovers aren't.

This is a godawful mess of an issue.

The makeshift team of X-Men fight Magneto and defeat him. None of the new characters introduced at the outset seem to serve any real function here other than to provide warm bodies for the fight scene, leaving it even more baffling than before why anybody bothered to introduce them in the first place. If they REALLY wanted to do this story, they'd have been much better advised to just do a scratch team from the X-Men supporting cast, and use the two issues thus freed up to focus on the Genoshan politics, which, after all, are meant to be the central point of the story.

Having defeated Magneto (and telepathically shut his powers off while his guard was down), the X-Men do the usual "And here's how we did it" speech, only for Wolverine to stab Magneto with his claws. What follows is decidedly curious.

Given the way in which this issue was promoted, this is presumably meant to be the shocking death of Magneto. Everyone reacts in a mildly appalled way for a whole one panel, and then Professor X delivers a speech to the assembled Genoshans about how we all really ought to hug one another more often. The X-Men then go home.

Okay. Here's why this is shit.

For one thing, the X-Men's reactions are totally wrong. For Wolverine to have a go at assassinating Magneto isn't altogether unreasonable, but at least half of the characters present should be able to summon up a damn sight more outrage than this. Instead, they decide to indulge in a spot of political oratory. This makes very little sense for the characters.

For another, it makes no plot sense. Magneto is surrounded by an army of loyal mutant followers numbered in the thousands. Their response to his assassination is to stand there peacefully and listen to Professor X recite some platitudes at them. Even you accept Genosha as a one-man state, this just makes no sense. The X-Men should be dead, overwhelmed by enormous odds from an entire army of loyal followers of the guy they've just killed. Instead, the Genoshans listen politely and offer them a cup of tea. This is just silly.

And it doesn't resolve the central conflict, which was how the X-Men were going to stop Genosha from declaring war on the rest of the world. I simply don't buy into the idea that the Genoshans are going to forget about the idea now that Magneto's out of the way.

I don't normally do the fanboy routine of calling for a story to be reversed, but as the death of a major character who's been around since 1963, this is about as ineffectual as you can get. Interestingly, the actual script of the issue never clarifies that he's dead, leading me to suspect that the issue has already been marked for retconning. Of course, if he's not dead, it leaves it even less clear how the X-Men are supposed to have resolved the central conflict.

This is hopeless. It's not as egregiously laughable as Mutant X, but in terms of dismal failure in everything it set out to do, it's right down there.

X-MEN UNLIMITED #31 is the book's second issue in its new anthology format. What this seems to mean in practice is that whereas before the book published one extremely inconsequential story that nobody would have bothered to commission if there hadn't been a need to fill pages, now we get three extremely inconsequential stories which are mildly interesting, but still basically for the completists.

"Monsters" is a Jean Grey and Rogue story by Michael Golden, the artist who co-created Rogue in the first place. Golden has recently been seen knocking out some decidedly substandard covers for the closing issues of Mutant X, but this is a different matter. Apparently shot from pencils, the story has Jean Grey and Rogue out in a crowd in New York, brushing into some passing evil person and going nuts as a result. Golden does very effective crowd scenes here, and the story is a reasonable enough vignette.

"Hindsight" is a Cyclops story by Brian Stelfreeze, which is basically an opportunity for him to give a martial arts demonstration in fending off a bunch of muggers. Cute, but inessential.

Finally, "Gold" is an X-Man story by Steven Grant and Charlie Adlard, in which Nate Grey rescues a mutant girl with the power to turn objects to gold, who can't exist in the outside world because she catches fire. Much the usual X-Man routine here, and if you thought that was a stunning book (and for the life of me, I still don't see what's supposed to be so out of the ordinary about it) then you'll no doubt feel the same about this.

Three decent enough stories, but they all feel more like back-up stories. Much like a B-sides collection, this is largely a completist product, though for the completists it's a nice change of pace.

CODENAME: KNOCKOUT is a Vertigo series which launches with a zero issue this week.

I have never understood the thought processes that go into comics marketing these days. Putting out a half-length story and charging full price for it would be viewed in any other medium as taking the piss, but comics publishers seem to view it as an entirely reasonable way of doing business. The other approach that Vertigo have been keen on lately is doing a vastly expensive first issue, as happened with Crusades.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but isn't the point of the exercise to get the books into as many hands as possible? Wouldn't this be better served by making the first issue cheap and good value, in order to encourage people to buy the damn thing? Discounts, rather than de facto price rises?

Anyhow, Codename: Knockout gets a 16-page opening story and a little essay at the back. The announcement of this series raised a few eyebrows in Vertigo's fanbase, largely because it seems so out of place in the line. The tag line is "Get some IQ with your T&A," and basically what we have here is a book about a overtly sexy female secret agent with a gay male sidekick, doing a send-up of the usual routines associated with these things.

God knows Vertigo have needed to spread their wings a bit, given that they were settling into a rut of being the Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore cast-off line. But quite why anyone thought they needed a book like this is beyond me.

What we have in this first story is a bunch of rather obvious and tired jokes about the genres it's meant to be parodying, which adds absolutely nothing to the thousands of prodies that have gone before it. Neither particularly funny nor remotely sexy, and with nothing new to say about anything, this is pretty much the worst case scenario I had in mind for how this book might turn out. This is a barn door target for parodies, and lazy writers have been after it so many times that the barn was long since reduced to rubble. Austin Powers should have drawn a line under this routine. It's been done to death.

It may, of course, be the case that something more is coming in the regular series. Tough; the point of these issues is surely to give us an indication of what to expect. And if the book's anything like this, I have no interest in it at all.

Instead of spending your money on that, may I direct your attention to THE WAITING PLACE, BOOK ONE, the first trade paperback collecting Sean McKeever and Brendon & Brian Fraim's series.

This book covers the first six issues of the series, and comes complete with testimonials from Paul Jenkins, Warren Ellis and Kurt Busiek, so it must be good. And indeed it is. Actually, checking Sean McKeever's website, I see that this is the entire first volume of the series, which has picked up again more recently. (You know, given that the book ends on a cliffhanger, this is the kind of information which it would be nice to have included without me needing to go hunting around the creators' websites to try and work out if and when the story's going to be resolved.)

Set in the small town of Northern Plains, the series follows a group of mostly teenage characters, most of whom are rather keen to get the hell out of there. This isn't to say that this an entire series of characters whining about how crap their hometown is; rather, it's a running background theme. The obvious non-teenage exception in the cast is the twenty-four year old video clerk who has never got in gear to leave the place, whose role seems in large part to be "There but for the grace of god..."

The book succeeds in creating a range of highly convincing characters, and the strength of the story lies in how wholly plausible it all is. This is perhaps why it seems rather odd for the plot to start introducing rather more dramatic elements towards the end - they feel strangely out of place in such a restrained story.

Artists Brendon and Brian Fraim keep the story suitably grounded in reality. There's something a bit samey about their characters' faces (not as evident in their more recent work, from what little I've seen - this material dates from 1997), but they've got the location down perfectly.

There are a few rough edges in here - characters seem to spend a surprisingly high proportion of their time talking about their feelings - but as a debut it's exceptional, and it's pretty damn good by any standards.