The preview stories are out of the way, so here comes the first issue of Weapon X proper.  And it's pretty much what the preview issues had led me to expect, really.

A glaring problem with the one-shots was the complete absence of any sympathetic characters at all.  Agent Zero seemed to be set up for that role, but for some unfathomable he isn't in this issue at all.  Instead, we get a cut-price Hydroman called Washout, who doesn't do much to stand out as anything other than annoying.

With Zero out of the way, the book has nobody for the reader to root for.  Wild Child is vaguely sympathetic, but only because he's so pathetic.  Sauron's one-shot set him up along similar lines, but absolutely nothing here picks up on that.  Everybody else would benefit immeasurably from being shot between the eyes at pointblank range.  There are degrees of unpleasantness, but nobody who I want to see live.

The key problem is that there people are not even antiheroes.  You root for an antihero as a protagonist who transgresses moral boundaries in a way that you secretly wish you could.  These characters are just irritating gits.

It is possible to write a story where all of the characters are unsympathetic and still hold the audience's attention, but it's extremely difficult, and nothing here or in his back catalogue suggests that Frank Tieri is the man to do it.  This is just the parade of sadists being nasty to one another which I had been anticipating.  Tieri seems to want to set up the Director as a manipulative mastermind, but his petty office politics makes him look more like a badly scarred Ricky Gervaise.

The title of the arc is "The Hunt for Sabretooth", but the actual plot of this issue involves Weapon X picking up Alpha Flight's Madison Jeffries from the Zodiac organisation who had him when he was last seen.  Cartoon villains like Zodiac don't really fit with the tone that this book seems to be aiming at, but that's what we get for the main fight scene.  Subsequently, our antiheroes head off to recruit Locus, only to find that Sabretooth has killed her first.  This inspires them to remember that he stole some Weapon X files about a year back in a Wolverine subplot, and they finally think that they ought to get around to finding him.  Long set-up, to give the characters a motivation that they already had.

I'd been expecting Georges Jeanty's art to be the redeeming feature of this book, but this is not his best work.  Partly, that's because he has to sell an awful lot of silly drama for most of the book, and there's only so much he can do with it.  But he also turns in a horribly cluttered fight scene with Zodiac, which really doesn't work.  Granted, fight scenes with seventeen characters on panel are not easy at the best of times, but this does not bode well given that he's presumably going to be doing a lot of group fight scenes in this team book.  The art isn't too bad, but aside from the opening dream sequence it isn't all that engaging either.

If Weapon X struck you as an unpromising idea, then this issue will probably confirm you in that view.

Rating: C

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