30 january 2000

BISHOP ties up the Kith Trilogy three-parter by fulfilling all my predictions from when I reviewed part one. To be precise, I said that it was basically the Star Trek stock plot, which involves, quote:-

"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."

And what do we have here? Well, welcome to cliche central.

We have our hero riding to the rescue at the last moment. We have the scene in which one of the baddies is killed, inspiring the people to gang up on their attackers ("A name moves through the awestruck crowd like a whisper: 'Kithslayer'"). We have the bit where the nice but gentle leader of the community is reunited with his captive daughter, who isn't dead after all. We even have the heroes leaving behind a renewed and revitalised community flying a new flag demonstrating that the newly- inspired locals will be keeping American... sorry, X-Men values alive without them.

On the bright side, there's some more interesting stuff going on in the subplots with the suggestion that the Witness and his allies in the Hellfire Club may not be quite as decent as we've been led to believe so far. But there's only so far I can mark it up for subplots, and central plots as generic as this simply won't do. It's also got some okay art from Michael Ryan, but not his best; of course, fill-in work rarely brings out the best in him.

Now I hate to give Joe Harris bad reviews, since he seems like a nice guy and he's written some rather good stuff in the past, but quite honestly this is far, far too obvious. If I can predict the ending two months in advance, something is going wrong here.

GAMBIT finishes up the Sunset Dawn three-parter, albeit leaving a few loose ends dangling (such as, for example, what was the deal with that Amanda Mueller woman from the Black Womb trial in the previous issue, who doesn't seem to have much to do with the plot after all?).

Nicieza has done a surprisingly good job of getting a decent story out of raw material as unpromising as the Thieves Guild and Candra - with Ozymandias and the other Externals turning up to bring the lame X-villain count up a bit further. To be honest, the ending all gets a bit confused, with Candra getting tied up in a sideline fight with Sinister and the Externals, and the Thieves Guild giving up the knowledge they've just acquired for reasons that aren't at all clear to me (they haven't trusted Gambit's word until now, so why start now?).

Nonetheless, there's plenty of good material from Courier getting locked into female form permanently, even if I'm not quite sure why we're getting so worked up about Sinister gaining his shapechanging powers as a result (it's not as if his powers have ever really been the point of the character), and the usual teasing subplots setting up Rogue for the next issue, and aligning Archangel with the New Son. It's also got Anthony Williams still doing some of his better work.

In honesty, it's all a bit confused to be one of the best storylines from this book, but it's still a lot better than you'd expect from a story trying to tie up all this continuity clutter. Still, it doesn't quite hit the title's high standards.

Why the Ages of Apocalypse doesn't work, part three: WOLVERINE.

This is not a bad issue, in fact. But the reasons why it's not bad have nothing to do with the Ages of Apocalypse, and its presence in the crossover at all is both superfluous and confusing.

Key problem: Wolverine isn't even one of the characters who was in Egypt having his reality mucked about with by Apocalypse. Nor are any of the other characters appearing in this story. So what, is Apocalypse supposed to have remade the entire world? Or is this just the fake history of the world he constructs for this week's issue of X-Men? And since it adds nothing at all to the ongoing plot, what the hell is it doing in this poor innocent title?

But let's leave the pointlessness of the whole exercise aside and treat it as an Elseworlds. On that undeniably gimmicky level, it's pretty good. It's actually a sequel to the equally gimmicky New Fantastic Four storyline from FF #347-349, in which the Fantastic Four were kidnapped and their place was taken by Wolverine, Spider-Man, the Hulk and the Ghost Rider. Those characters were at the time Marvel's biggest selling solo heroes and the story was a joke sales boost (I think they even changed the banner to "The World's Most Commercial Comic Magazine"), even including a cameo by the Punisher for a full set of gratuitous guests. It was a pretty good story, even so, and worth a revisit - though the changing commercial fortunes of Wolverine's three team-mates, particularly Ghost Rider, make the team seem even odder now than it did then.

Surprisingly, Larsen manages to create a genuine family atmosphere and team spirit among these four absurdly unsuited teammates. There really is some kind of Fantastic Four spirit to this story, unlikely as that may sound. The story also has some nice character material for Wolverine with him talking about how he ended up in this implausible team in the first place.

Ignore the token attempt to make the story look like some kind of major political event in the new FF's timeline and just treat it as an enjoyable romp full of throwaway references for the fans, and it's worth a look. It's certainly the best thing Larsen's done on this title.

X-FORCE #100 is the last issue of John Francis Moore's run - yes, I know Counter-X doesn't start till March, but next issue is a crossover into the High Evolutionary plot with fill-in creators.

It doesn't really tie up the ongoing plots, although it doesn't really seem to be trying. The Triune Understanding subplot is ignored (even though they were dragged into issue #99), and a curious subplot has Siryn regaining her voice and becoming enslaved by some kind of necklace. Unless this is a plot Moore is kindly setting up for the Counter-X boys, you have to wonder why he's using up pages on it.

Let's be honest, the Moore run can be divided fairly neatly into two halves. There's the road trip half with Adam Pollina which was format-breaking for the title and breathed new life into the book when it was looking a bit tired. Then there's the other stuff with Jim Cheung, which wasn't at all bad but hasn't really hit the same heights. Fortunately, he's going out with one of the better late period stories, nominally a story about Dani trying to get her powers back, but really an excuse to visit a few alternate realities and take a retrospective on the title's history without the usual contrived attempts to get all the old cast together.

Which means we get a version of X-Force where Siryn and Deadpool ended up in charge; the New Mutants complete with an old-school Warlock; and even a trip to the mental institution from the botched Shatterstar origin story. It's not deep and it's not clever, but it's a nice nostalgia trip closing the door on this phase of the title's history before Counter-X come in to redecorate. A nice way to end.

Why the Ages of Apocalypse doesn't work, part 4: X-MEN.

A big chunk of why it doesn't work is flagged up on page one, in fact - "First & Last, part 2". In other words, this story's worth reading, so's the one in Uncanny X-Men (which was part one) but the other three issues are completely beside the point. You don't have to shout about it, though.

In fact, this issue is going quite nicely for the first half, after which it goes seriously off the rails. The idea is that we're a hundred years into the future, Xavier's dream has more or less come true, and the X-Men are an intergalactic peacekeeping organisation. Now all the elderly X-Men are getting together to welcome Professor X back, but unfortunately he's on the verge of dying from old age. Well, there's some mutterings about the Legacy Virus, but let's just accept it as old age. That's better.

Where the book scores is on the ideas of how all the characters might end up this far in the future, with Xavier and Jean never quite recovering their relationship after Scott's death (an idea with some resonance for future stories), Gambit married to Marrow, Rogue inexplicably still young and finally in control of her powers, Storm as an elemental, and such forth. A lot of these are cute ideas, well executed, and they're enough to make the book worth a look.

Where it falters is when we get into all the mutants trying to combine their powers to save Xavier's life, by which point it should be obvious where we're heading. Yes, it's the same "I'll try and get you all to use your powers at once" routine as we had in the first part of the storyline, and I groaned inwardly as I realised that we were now back into pretty obvious territory.

Indeed, our heroes fight Apocalypse and the Living Monolith and... they escape?! All that build-up, all that stuff about this being the final battle with Apocalypse, and he bloody escapes? What are they playing at? Kill him, for god's sake! Kill him dead! But no, we get the inconclusive ending where the villain lives to fight another day, preserving an easier route back for Cyclops, but also buggering the storyline's last chance of having a killer ending. It was fizzling out when it sacrificed all its momentum to go into this Ages of Apocalypse routine in the first place; now it's just not really trying, is it?

There's a nice final scene with Jean and Xavier left estranged by what's happened to Scott, but this issue should have been about closure, closure, closure. And on that point, it fails.