29 october 2000

Well, I'd been worried that what with me being in Yorkshire this weekend, there wouldn't be enough time on Sunday evening to give the week's X-books the attention they deserved. Fortunately for me, Marvel failed to ship three out of the four scheduled titles, so that's alright.

With Fabian Nicieza having only two months to go on GAMBIT, the last thing this book needed was a Maximum Security crossover. Next month we'll apparently tie up the New Son plotline, which is something. But this month, we're going to fight Ego the Living Planet for a few pages (no, Marvel, he's NOT such an exciting visual as to deserve being used in half the books you publish this month), and then we're going to devote the rest of the issue to the origin of the X-Cutioner armour.

Not, you'll notice, an issue about who was wearing the X-Cutioner armour the last time it appeared, which is an actual outstanding plotline that could have used the space. It does get dealt with here, but as an afterthought on the last page. No, this is very specifically an issue about where the X-Cutioner armour came from, and the story of the guy who had it before. Maybe I'm missing something here, but wasn't the X-Cutioner's original gimmick supposed to be that his armour was cobbled together from junk recovered from old Silver Age X-Men villains? Wasn't that part of the point of establishing the X-Cutioner as a friend of the X-Men's Silver Age ally Fred Duncan? So why does the armour turn out to be a guard uniform from an alien penal colony?

This is very strange. It's basically opening an entirely new plotline solely so as to resolve it within an issue (although perhaps inadvertantly it never really explains how the armour actually ended up on Earth). I just don't see the need. This is a story forced on us by the need to do something to tie in with Maximum Security, and it's hard to believe there weren't better things that could have been done with the space.

The guard's story is that he was stripped of his post after deserting in panic during a prison riot. Now he wants to go back in time to sort things out and kill himself at the time in order to prevent that from happening. Fair enough, although this does mean that in order to get the plot to work the X-Cutioner armour miraculously develops previously unmentioned time travel abilities. I've seen worse ideas for filler stories, though.

The plus points of this book mainly relate to Gambit's relationship with his fellow Guild members. By paring down to a nice small group this issue, Nicieza finally gets Emil Lapin and Mercy LeBeau to work as characters. There's some good character dynamics here. The art's not bad either, at least on the pages with regular inker Sean Parsons. The second half of the book, with the guest inker, is rather more variable, but still perfectly acceptable.

This isn't really a bad issue - it would make for a perfectly acceptable filler story if you cut out the nonsense about Ego - but it's a frustrating interruption to the storyline at a time when it really wasn't needed.

Maximum Security crossovers have mainly fallen into one of three camps. First, there's the crossovers that actually advance the overall plot. Not too many of those. Secondly, there's the crossovers that use the story as an excuse to plug in a generic alien villain and have a fight. Rather more of those. Thirdly, there's a few books like Captain Marvel and Thunderbolts which helpfully already had alien-related elements and could get on with business as usual while tipping their hat to the crossover in a token way.

But here on INCREDIBLE HULK, and also over on Peter Parker, Spider-Man, Paul Jenkins has pioneered the audacious approach of doing stories that feature aliens but nonetheless have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the crossover. His Spider-Man "crossover" was a joke story about alien abduction which had precisely zero connection with the crossover. His Incredible Hulk issue is a piss-take of alien conspiracy theories and Area 51 nonsense. This time Jenkins has taken a slightly less purist line and actually made the concession of mentioning the crossover, even though his story has nothing to do with it at all.

It goes without saying that, by totally ignoring the crossover and just taking the piss out of alien cliches, Jenkins is probably producing far better stories than if he'd tried to squeeze something out of the actual Maximum Security concept. It does, however, rather defeat the purpose of doing these crossovers, which is supposed to be to get readers to pick up books they don't normally buy on the promise of getting something related to the overall theme. The flaw in that logic is that what the reader gets from his new title is normally a pile of crap as the writer struggles with a nonsensical edict. This is why Marvel made the right decision in abandoning line-wide crossovers in the first place, and this is also why, even though the core Maximum Security story is okay stuff, the return of the crossover is not something to be welcomed at all.

Still, this is a fun little number, as the Hulk repays a favour to his conspiracy theorist friend Hack by trying to steal an alien genetic hybrid from the US government, while the men in black stand around babbling to one another. It's a total pisstake, and makes a welcome change of pace after the ponderous and overlong Dogs of War storyline.

With Ron Garney gone, Kyle Hotz has come in with a rather different style. Garney tended to specialise in big, bold figures that filled half the page. Hotz is darkly funny, much more character-focused, and when he does get around to doing the token action sequence, it's deliberately absurd. I'd been losing interest in this book with the previous interminable story arc, but this issue has got my attention for a little longer, showing if nothing else that Jenkins does have more ideas for the book than it had begun to appear.