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In last week's review of Wolverine,
I unaccountably omitted to mention that it was Frank Tieri's
final issue on that title. From here on, it's going to
be a string of fill-ins before the blessed relaunch.
In the meantime, however, Tieri's work
continues to appear in Weapon X. And this is all
about the level we've come to expect. Issue #6 is the
prelude to the "Underground" storyline, which will bring
Nathan Summers into the series as the leader of a group trying
to bring down the Weapon X Program. We get a story in
two halves - one is Nathan recruiting followers, and one is
the Director being bad.
Nathan's half of the plot isn't desperately
promising. We seem to be back to gun-toting commando
Cable. While I can certainly understand a desire to back
off from the commercially disastrous Soldier X, this
really does come across as an attempt to sweep it all under
the carpet without trying to explain it away. In
fairness, the final few issues of Soldier X are going
to segue the character into the Weapon X cast, so
perhaps this will be decently addressed there.
Nonetheless, this doesn't have the hallmarks of an interesting
take on the character.
Meanwhile, the Director has learned that
his wife is going to remarry, so he pops round to her house to
intimidate her. However, he still loves his kids.
This is apparently what passes for his second character
dimension. Sorry, but it's going to take a lot more than
that to establish the character as anything other than a
psychopath. Tieri seems to be trying to tell us that the
Director is motivated in part by a desire to preserve the
planet for his non-mutant children, but this has been a stock
motivation for X-Men villains for forty years.
Characters this extreme are very rarely
plausible, and Tieri is still not selling me on the Director
as anything more than a caricature. It takes very subtle
characterisation to make the mentally ill interesting as
central characters, and that sort of writing is not on offer
here.
Bad, but no worse than you'd expect by now.
Rating: C
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