THE X-AXIS
12 November 2006
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This week:
NEW X-MEN #32 - "Whatever Happened to Wither?"
by Craig Kyle, Chris Yost, Mike Norton and Dave Meikis
WISDOM #1 (of 6) - The Rudiments of Wisdom, part 1 of 6
"The Day the Fairies Came Out"
by Paul Cornell, Trevor Hairsine and Paul Neary
STORMWATCH: PHD #1
by Christos Gage and Doug Mahnke
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Okay, let's start with a couple more points on the adverts before moving
on.
First of all, while the quantity is still absurd this week, there's
actually a marginal improvement in placement. We no longer have a
single page of story stranded in amongst five adverts. Some shuffling
has been done. It's still nowhere near remotely acceptable, but at
least it's marginally less obnoxious. In fairness, I have no doubt that
there are at least some people in Marvel's editorial offices gazing at
this month's advert count with despair and trying to make the best of
it.
Secondly, Joe Quesada's explanation of the situation can be found over
at Newsarama, and - in plain English - boils down to "Yeah, we did say
we wouldn't do it again, but when we were actually offered all the
money, we thought, screw you. Turn down adverts merely because all the
pages had already been sold? Whoever heard of such a thing?"
Interesting fact: these books were solicited at 32 pages (which must
include the adverts, since the stories only ever clock in at 23). New
X-Men #32 actually shipped with 48 pages, and the extra 16 are all
adverts. Come to think of it, does that even count as conforming to the
solicitation? It's not a merely aesthetic matter - the over the course
of the month, it's actually a considerable extra weight, and somebody
has to pick up the shipping costs. Last year, as I understand it,
Marvel dumped the whole cost on the retailers, who found themselves
paying for some unexpectedly heavy comics, and getting no extra revenue
in return.
Thirdly, it's been pointed out to me that if you're so minded, there's
this new-fangled file-sharing technology which allows you to avoid the
adverts altogether. And it's free! Now, personally, I don't condone
copyright infringement. But that aside, comics publishers have one big
practical point in their favour when it comes to this issue: online
comics are an awful format, totally lacking in portability, and
requiring the reader to squint at a screen. Obviously, the more
unreadable the actual comics become, the more attractive any other
option appears. This seems an unwise line of thought for publishers to
be encouraging.
Okay, with those points covered, let's move on to the advert-drenched
NEW X-MEN #32.
This is a single-issue transition story, doubling as an epilogue to the
last year's storylines, and as a catch-up on what happened to supporting
character Wither after he ran away several months ago. As with most of
Craig Kyle and Chris Yost's run on this title, it doesn't quite work.
There's a reasonable solid agenda behind it all, but somehow it isn't
clicking.
Last year's stories were all based on an attempt to hammer home the idea
that it was a new and dangerous world post-House of M, and that this
title is now an action book. Unfortunately, the writers went about that
with a string of seemingly random killings, which went on far, far
longer than necessary. By the end of the year, readers were pretty much
deadened to the whole thing; New X-Men had become a literal example of
overkill.
Regrettably, this issue turns out to be a fitting epilogue, as the cast
attempt to mourn their fallen characters, and then realise they have
nothing to say about them. Laurie Collins seems to be of interest
solely as a love interest. Icarus' mother turns up to collect his body,
and spends more time talking about the early days of Cannonball. The
whole exercise feels like it's going through the motions.
Meanwhile, in his half of the story, Wither is still engaged in the
traditional pastimes of adolescent mutants: living rough, and angsting.
A bit of angst is all very well. The X-Men formula was built on it.
But god, all this boy does is angst. Is there nothing else to him? By
this stage, the character has been around for years; surely we should
have moved past this by now. On the plus side, Kyle and Yost seem to
have plans for the character. Perhaps they'll finally move him onto
something else. But there's no immediate sign of it, and frankly, I'm
just bored with this kid's whining.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this book; the story concepts
are decent enough, the characters have potential. And it has guest art
this month from the reliable Mike Norton, whose contributions are always
a welcome sight. This ought to be working, and really, all it needs is
a bit of tweaking to help it bring out the characters and shake off the
cloud of despondency that hangs over the proceedings.
But somehow the whole thing isn't coming to life. It's missing that
vital spark.
Rating: B-
LINKS:
http://www.marvel.com
http://ihatemike.com (Mike Norton)
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After a period in virtual abeyance, Marvel seem to have rediscovered
their adults-only Max imprint. It would be interesting to know what
prompted this change of heart. It seems like only a few months ago that
Marvel were shifting Supreme Power out of the Max imprint, with veiled
mutterings that Marvel simply didn't intend to support its mature
readers titles.
Well, despite Marvel's assumptions, the relaunch of Supreme Power didn't
do much to help sales at all. Perhaps that contributed to their
rethink. In any event, we now have a range of new Max miniseries, among
them Paul Cornell and Trevor Hairsine's WISDOM.
This isn't the first time we've had a mature-readers X-book. The
late-eighties curio Havok & Wolverine: Meltdown got there first. But
Wisdom is the first book to do it in many years. Frankly, on reading
it, it's hard to see quite why it's come out under a mature readers
banner. A bit of inessential swearing aside, there's really nothing
here that would seem out of place in a mainstream title. If you're
looking for a Vertigo type of book... well, this isn't it.
But let's not hold that against it. Ignoring the mature readers banner
(or more accurately, the "Explicit Content" warning), what's it like as
a series? Pretty darned good, actually.
Writer Paul Cornell is best known as a contributor to Doctor Who,
particularly during the lengthy stretch when the show was off the air
but the BBC were producing incredibly convoluted and continuity-laden
tie-in novels aimed at the hardcore fanbase. On art, we've got Trevor
Hairsine, a surprisingly high-profile artist for such an oddball
project. The big problem with Hairsine is that his Bryan Hitch
influence extends beyond the art, which is very good indeed, to his
scheduling - issue #2 has already been rescheduled to January 2007, and
issue #3 hasn't even been solicited yet. Oh dear.
Fortunately, issue #1 holds up quite nicely as a story in its own right,
so the wait won't be too disruptive. Cheerfully ignoring Excalibur
altogether, Cornell has Wisdom as the leader of the in-house superhumans
of British intelligence's MI-13, leading them into battle against
invading fairies from Otherworld. If you're worried about the
continuity, this would fit nicely enough before M-Day, but it's really
not the sort of book where you should be worrying about that kind of
thing.
Basically, it's Pete Wisdom and a gang of oddballs beating up fairies in
a retaliatory strike - "We will show the little gossamer bastards we
will respond to aggression" - and it's great fun. It's witty, it's got
beautiful art, it's clearly not taking itself at all seriously, and it's
still remembered to throw in a couple of interesting ideas about how the
UK relates to its past (although why American readers should be expected
to care, I have no clue). It's tremendously entertaining stuff. Oh,
and it has a sensible quantity of adverts.
Now, a couple of weeks back, I observed that Frank Tieri's take on Pete
Wisdom in the parent title, New Excalibur, had badly missed the mark.
To be honest, Cornell misses it just as badly, but in the opposite
direction. Somewhere along the line, Cornell seems to have lost the
memo about Wisdom being a misanthropic git. In this series, he's suave,
endearing and beloved.
A strong case can be made that this is simply not the pre-established
character, in any recognisable form. I would have a lot of sympathy for
that view. But quite honestly I don't care, because I enjoyed this a
hell of a lot more than I expected to. And frankly, this version of
Wisdom, plus his supporting cast, makes for a better team book than
anything we've seen in New Excalibur itself. It's the absurd details
that make it shine, like Wisdom's team briefing on safety in Avalon.
("Do not join the Round Table. Don't eat anything. Don't pull anything
from anything. Don't marry anything.")
Choice of imprint notwithstanding, this isn't especially grown-up stuff.
But it's enormously good fun, which is far more important.
Rating: A
LINKS:
http://paulcornell.blogspot.com
------------
The ongoing WildStorm relaunch is still in progress, and the latest book
to get an overhaul is poor, beleaguered STORMWATCH.
StormWatch has always lurched from concept to concept. Originally they
were just a fairly generic UN-sponsored superhero team who played second
fiddle to higher profile characters like WildCATS. Then Warren Ellis
wrote it for a while, and ended up turning it into the Authority. But
we don't need two Authorities, so when the StormWatch name was dusted
off, it became a military anti-superhero strike force, a sort of less
puerile version of The Boys. And then it was a government superhero
team for a bit.
Basically, it's a name that can be applied to virtually anything, as
long as it has something to do with the government trying to respond to
superhero type things, however loosely. Christos Gage is the latest
writer to wrestle with the concept, and his take is StormWatch: PHD,
with the acronym standing for "Post Human Division."
This time round, the idea is that budget cuts have put paid to all the
expensive stuff - partly because the Halo Corporation are picking up the
slack over in WildCATS, churning out robot superheroes by the dozen.
With those things around, StormWatch are now surplus to requirements as
a big superhero team. Instead, they're now just part of the police, and
they're a group of experts who deal with superhero affairs with whatever
resources they can scrape together.
So they're the cops who police superheroes, from the look of it. It's a
perfectly viable approach, but haven't we already done this with DC's
Gotham Central title? StormWatch needs to find its own angle, and from
the look of it, the approach is that they're not just normal cops
dealing with bizarre crimes. They're people from the periphery of the
superhero world, more like a black ops squad in tone.
It's hard to pin down, in any more detail, what this book is going to be
like. The first issue is a gathering-of-the-team book, in which
Battalion goes around interviewing the future candidates. Problem is,
there's an awful lot of them, without much in the way of an overall
plot. It ends up terribly bitty, and rather than feeling as though I'm
meeting the characters, I feel more as if somebody's running over a
summary with me. There are some interesting ideas in there, but they're
all fighting for space, and nothing really comes to the fore.
As a concept, it's potentially interesting. But the first issue doesn't
draw me in. Perhaps it'll hit its stride once the team-gathering phase
is out of the way.
Rating: B-
LINKS:
http://www.wildstorm.com
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Also this week...
CIVIL WAR: YOUNG AVENGERS & RUNAWAYS #4 - Not quite as detached from the
crossover as Civil War: X-Men was, but it's getting there. The
crossover is really just an excuse to get the two teams together, to
keep Young Avengers on the shelves in some form, and to bring back, of
all people, Marvel Boy. Not bad as these things go, but I'd expected
better from the creators. Zeb Wells is a quirky and imaginative writer,
but here he's just playing it straight, and it doesn't bring out the
best in him. Artist Stefano Caselli has some major lapses of clarity and
a big problem with making the characters too similar to each other,
which is a shame, since there's a certain rubbery charm to his figures.
Overall, it's adequate but not much more. B-
ULTIMATE X-MEN #76 - Hot on the heels of Ultimate Cable, it's Ultimate
Bishop. Yes, this arc has two simultaneously time-travel paradoxes for
the price of one! Still, Robert Kirkman is building up the plot nicely,
focussing on the action rather than overloading us with baffling
time-travel problems. Ben Oliver is proving to be an impressive artist
for the action sequences, and while the underlying "I have come back
from the future to change history" stuff is old hat, it's still an
energetic take. B+
http://www.robertkirkman.com
WOLVERINE: ORIGINS #8 - I have to admit, the pacing on this book has
improved tremendously. It's shaken off the extreme sluggishness of
Daniel Way's early stories, and this arc seems to be a lot tighter. On
the downside, it's still just an okay arc at best; no matter how you
spin it, it's still just Wolverine fighting Omega Red over a macguffin
from 1991, which wasn't that interesting the first time. But we're
definitely moving in the right direction here, and the book no longer
seems self-indulgent. B
http://www.badpressonline.com (Daniel Way)
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There's more from me at If Destroyed, and if you're desperate for more
Article 10 columns, you can always hunt through the archives on Ninth
Art.
http://ifdestroyed.blogspot.com
http://www.ninthart.com
Next week, Astonishing X-Men #18 sneaks out a month late. Cable &
Deadpool #34 gets back to normal business after the crossover season.
And there's X-Men: First Class #3 - somewhat to my surprise, since I
have no recollection of issue #2. It must have slipped by me, but
normally people e-mail when that sort of thing happens, so apparently
I'm not alone.
--
Paul O'Brien
THE X-AXIS -
http://www.thexaxis.com
IF DESTROYED -
http://ifdestroyed.blogspot.com
NINTH ART -
http://www.ninthart.com
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