30 april 2000

GAMBIT #17 officially starts the Assassination Game story arc, although to all intents and purposes it really started last month. Anyhow, the basic plot here is simple: somebody has hired loads of assassins to kill Gambit, and he's trying to avoid them. Cue fight scenes.

This being a Fabian Nicieza comic, of course, it's more complicated than that. Not so much in the central plot, which really is as basic as I'm making it sound, but in the subplots. The Thieves Guild is apparently now down to a core of eight characters, everybody else having somehow been slaughtered during the Revolution Month gap. On the one hand, this is good news because it means we can finally do something else with New Orleans. On the other hand, only three of these characters (Gambit himself, Tante Mattie, and Zoe Ishihara) have had much time to establish themselves so far, leaving us with another five cyphers wandering about. This issue does at least clearly establish who they are, but there's a lot more work to be done in fleshing them out.

Gambit's new costume gets its first proper outing in this issue. It's not as bad as all that, when the trenchcoat's being worn over it. Without, it's really a bit too superheroic for its own good. It's not ugly, so much as that it doesn't really fit the tone of the book. Nicieza managed to make the original, garishly ugly costume work by passing it off as some kind of Thieves Guild tradition - the bloody great X on the front of this one will make it a harder job this time round.

Meanwhile, the X-Cutioner's rehabilitation as a credible villain is completed as he turns up and we actually care. In part this is because of a nice little use of the old "who's in the costume" plot, but it also shows how this formerly lame duck villain has been turned around in this title.

With some entertaining fight scenes with Bullseye, the Constrictor and, yes, Deadpool and this is still maintaining its position as the most consistent of the X-books. This is perhaps not the easiest jumping-on point in the series, but it's definitely worth the effort.

Just think, kids, only three months to Liefeld on WOLVERINE. Aren't we lucky?

In the meantime, we'll have to make do with Steve Skroce and his unfashionable use of entertaining plots and good art. The plot, basically, is that Wolverine's been dragged into a squabble between rival crimelords after his friends have been abducted. Entirely generic stuff, of course, but Skroce does it very well, with immaculate action sequences and an appropriate barrage of plot twists. We've seen it all before, but it's been quite a while since we saw it done this well. (And something tells me it'll be quite a while before we see it again.)

Skroce is fairly rocketing through his plot, killing off one of his two main villains this issue. We're only halfway through the storyline and he's already up to the point normally found at the end of the third issue. That means that either he's got something else in mind instead of the usual closing act, or alternatively, we're going to get two final issues where one would do.

Granted there's a plot problem in this issue - after thinking he's been betrayed by Gom, Wolverine doubles back to go after him, even though this surely ought to lead to the hostages being killed, which is what he was meant to be trying to avoid in the first place - but the energy of the thing barrels it past. Surprisingly good stuff.

The Counter-X X-FORCE got off to a rather shaky start last month, but this is more like it. Although James and Jesse still aren't getting much to do, Sam and Tabitha get enough screen time to allay the sense that this is an interchangeable hero story. Steering the plot back in the direction of San Francisco, a city that the title actually has some connection with, helps as well.

It looks like what we're going to be doing here is stories about dodgy things done by secret government departments, loosely based on things they actually did. This still runs the risk of cliche - comics have now reached the point where it would be far more unusual to see a government department that wasn't corrupt - but giving it a link, however remote, to reality helps to avoid that here. Last issue's giant meat robots were just way too ridiculous to have that link. This issue anchors the plot to the US government's well documented experiments into the potential use of drugs in warfare, giving it a basis in fact that helps enormously.

The story does still suffer from a villain who looks decidedly as if he's going to be a generic mad scientist type, though. Established in this issue as a cross between Reed Richards and Josef Mengele, it may be that this will turn out to be misdirection, but if this is what Ellis is going with, it's not that great a basis for an antagonist. For the most part, villains are much better if they at least have some sort of comprehensible motivation. Ellis seems to be developing something of a weakness, both here and in Generation X, for the sort of Just Plain Evil villains who surely went out of fashion thirty years ago. It worked in Authority where the villain's function was to serve as a force of nature for the heroes to prevail over. On the smaller scale in Counter-X, it doesn't play as well.

I've still got my reservations about Whilce Portacio's art. He does a good Meltdown and Wisdom (now that he's doing the hairstyle correctly and dropped the mullet), but his Cannonball looks like a psychotic gnome. The original design was an awkward character, not a repulsively ugly one. Portacio has rather missed the mark here.

The cliffhanger doesn't work either. Since Portacio doesn't actually establish any of the surroundings, it's impossible to know whether the team's car is supposed to be driving off a road or a bridge. And given their powers, there's no real threat in either case.

There's some work still to be done, but this issue does at least rectify the biggest problems with the first and set the series back on track. Of course, it could still generate into an exercise in stating the obvious (nasty experiments are bad), but I'm feeling more optimistic after this issue.

X-MEN UNLIMITED #27 has all the hallmarks of a rush job. Two pencillers (at least sensibly allocated between the main narrative and flashbacks) and six inkers on the main story, and a load of unpublished concept art where the back-up strip is meant to be. In fairness, it doesn't look all that bad. Brett Booth isn't that good a storyteller, but his section is mostly conversation pieces and he more or less gets away with it. Ron Lim, on the more visual flashback scenes, is a solid enough artist to get the story across. Could be a lot worse.

No, the problems with this one lie in the writing. Your writers this time round are Chris Claremont and Joe Pruett, by the way. Since this issue is charged with doing the origin story of Thunderbird, it makes sense that Claremont should be here to do it. It's not so much that it's a bad origin for a character - there's plenty here to work with in future. It's just not that great a story in its own right.

Thunderbird, basically, is from a rich family in Calcutta whose life of privilege goes awry when his mutant powers emerge, his lover is lost to him (after she gets turned into a Sentinel) and he has to leave home. The story itself isn't all that original - in fact, it's got an enormous amount in common with Sunspot's origin - but the character is at least established with a distinct social background that can be used in future.

You may have guessed from the above paragraph that Operation: Zero Tolerance are back - bizarrely, with Bastion in control, even though he was last seen in Warlock having his Bastion personality erased and being turned back into the Master Mold. This could perhaps be some kind of misdirection for the future, but if nothing else, it's utterly jarring. OZT were such hopeless villains the first time round that it's difficult to greet their return with anything more than a resigned groan. There's some suggestion in this story that Claremont intends to play OZT as an underground organisation trying to get back in with the world governments, which would at least be a new angle for them, but I can't say this issue does enough with them to make me enthusiastic.

Leaving aside my lack of interest in the whole OZT concept, the basic idea of them trying to build up their Sentinel stocks by abducting the poor of Calcutta does make reasonable sense. No problem, equally, with Thunderbird's journalist brother investigating and getting captured, leading to him picking up the trail himself. Problem is, it all goes a bit generic from here. A martial artist policewoman (file under: "strong women") is assigned to keep track of him, and they proceed to fall in love. But she's never really given a chance to develop as a character enough for us to care what happens to her, or for us to really buy into Thunderbird's feelings for her.

From there we go into the usual routine where the hero is captured by the villain, the villain mentally enslaves the hero's friends, but they resist their enslavement through the power of their love, and self-sacrificingly allow the hero to win. It's not that any of this is bad as such, but you know - been there, done that.