THE X-AXIS
14 October 2007
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This week:
X-FACTOR #24
The Isolationist, part 4 of 4
by Peter David, Pablo Raimondi, Valentine de Landro and
Drew Hennessy
Endangered Species, part 15 of 17
by Christopher Yost and Andrea DiVito
X-MEN: DIE BY THE SWORD #1 - "The Sword is Drawn"
by Chris Claremont, Juan Santacruz and Raul Fernandez
SIMON DARK #1 - "What Simon Does"
by Steve Niles and Scott Hampton
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Now that the autumn crossover season is just around the corner, all the
monthly titles have been dutifully tying up their storylines and
clearing their decks. X-FACTOR is the latest book to do so, finishing
up the four-part "Isolationist" storyline.
As I've pointed out before, until the last few months, X-Factor was
notable for being the only ongoing series that was actually trying to do
something with M-Day. While other writers paid lip service to it, or
hurled explosions at the page in an attempt to disguise the lack of a
proper concept, or just decamped to space for a year, Peter David has at
least tried to make something out of this malformed concept.
What can you do in a world where there are only a few hundred mutants
left? Well, you can have a character like Josef Huber, whose power is
that he shares the powers of every other mutant alive on the planet.
Until recently, this was a terrible chore, but with M-Day, it's been
dialled back to more manageable levels. Unfortunately, Huber still finds
it a terrible nuisance - particularly all the voices he can hear
telepathically - and now he sees a golden opportunity to get rid of the
remaining mutants altogether.
Now, this isn't the greatest concept in the world, but it is at least
trying to do something with the post-Decimation status quo, which is
more than anyone else has managed. And Huber's plan to gather everyone
together for a civil rights march, so that he can blow them all up, has
a certain left-field appeal.
But there are problems with this story. The difficulty lies mainly with
Huber himself. The more I think about this character, the less sense he
makes. We're apparently meant to sympathise with him, at least to some
extent, in that he's genuinely suffering and it's apparently driven him
a bit mad. But on the other hand, he isn't a raving lunatic; he's
perfectly capable of coming up with rational plans and carrying them
out.
Yet Huber has got the powers of all the remaining mutants. Among those
mutants is Forge, who can invent anything. Our attention is
specifically drawn to the fact that Huber has got Forge's powers, at
several points in the story. And that rather begs the question: why
doesn't he just build a device to shut down his powers? In fact, if his
main concern is the telepathic voices, why doesn't he just build a
psi-scrambler to keep them out? We've seen psi-blocking technology
hundreds of times, so it must be within his abilities.
Aren't these much simpler and more obvious solutions than trying to wipe
out every remaining mutant on earth? Did Huber seriously believe he was
going to get all of them, even the wanted criminals, to show up at his
rally?
I'm not sure the story has a very good answer to any of these questions,
other than to wave its hand and say "Yeah, yeah, but he's mad." Which
may be true, but isn't especially interesting. A shame, because there
are plenty of neat little details in the rest of the story. David is
doing great work with his cast - he's certainly fulfilled the promise he
made at the outset to make people love Layla. Pablo Raimondi's art is
as impressive as ever, with some lovely scenes of Madrox in the snow.
But Huber himself doesn't really make sense, and that's a big lurking
problem at the centre of the story.
Oh, yes, and there's also a back-up strip - part 15 of "Endangered
Species." With another two weeks to go, it's looking increasingly
unlikely that anything will actually be achieved in this story, other
than to hammer home the fact that the Beast is taking the Decimation
issue very seriously. Given how badly the immediate aftermath was
botched, there's probably a legitimate need to restate the obvious in
this case. But it doesn't really seem to be leading anywhere.
Rating: B
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You might be forgiven for assuming that X-MEN: DIE BY THE SWORD would be
some sort of X-Men miniseries. Well, it isn't. In fact, it's one of
Marvel's more bemusing promotional stunts.
Die By The Sword is actually a crossover between Exiles and New
Excalibur. Those two titles are actually a very good fit for a
crossover. They're both written by Chris Claremont. There's a degree
of cast crossover. Nocturne used to be in the Exiles before joining
Excalibur. Dazzler is in Excalibur, and her ex-husband Longshot is one
of the Exiles. Captain Britain is leading Excalibur, and his sister
Psylocke is in the Exiles. And so on.
Best of all, the Exiles have a "preserving alternate realities" mission
that fits neatly with the established role of the Captain Britain Corps.
You'd be hard pressed to find two comics more suited to cross over.
But Marvel haven't explained very clearly that this is really a
crossover. Instead, they've labelled it as an X-Men book. That's a
questionable strategy at the best of times. At least X-Men: Emperor
Vulcan features three recent members, and it's a direct sequel to a
year-long storyline from Uncanny X-Men. Die By The Sword isn't an X-Men
series in any way, shape or form. That's not a smart way to protect the
brand.
The solicitation text, to be fair, did mention the Exiles and Excalibur.
Still, the promotion of this series has been fairly lacklustre. Marvel
certainly haven't pushed it as essential reading for anyone who's
following Exiles or New Excalibur, even though it clearly is. Instead,
they've chosen to try and attract the X-Men readers, who will buy the
book only to find that it has nothing to do with the X-Men at all.
And it gets better! Because, you see, this book also blows the ending
of the Albion storyline that finishes in New Excalibur #24 - which isn't
out until next week. Of course, nobody will be shocked to learn that
the good guys win, but this issue does give away fairly major spoilers
for things that weren't so self-evident.
The natural audience for this book is the Chris Claremont fans, of
course, and if you already like what he's doing on either title, you'll
like this. If you don't, well, it's more of the same. The plot
involves the Exiles coming to Earth to reunite with Excalibur (and, in
some cases, reassure everyone that they're alive). Meanwhile, James
Jaspers is back from the dead again, to do a bit more of his evil
reality-warping.
It's nothing out of the ordinary, but it does what you'd expect from it.
Artist Juan Santacruz doesn't have the lightness of comic touch to do an
effective Jim Jaspers, and that's clearly going to be a problem. But
the art is generally solid enough.
The book is what it is, and has no real pretensions of being anything
else. It's an average but inoffensive story. Marvel's promotional
strategy for it, however, is simply baffling.
Rating: B-
------------
On the cover of his first issue, SIMON DARK is billed as "Gotham City's
other protector." That's a very odd tag line, especially considering
that the book has nothing to do with Batman, or anything else that you'd
normally associate with Gotham.
Instead, it's set in what seems to be one of the nicer parts of town,
save for a group of murderous cultists. The local neighbourhood hero -
sort of - is Simon Dark, a sort of childlike boogeyman figure who lurks
in graveyards and pops up occasionally to brutally despatch wrongdoers.
If nothing else, Simon Dark is a commercially odd move for DC. It's a
book about a completely new character who's never been seen before.
It's set in Gotham, but has no guest stars or familiar villains. Quite
simply, it's a cold launch for a new character - in an ongoing series.
Marvel and DC don't do this very often, and there's a good reason why.
Unless the book is accompanied with a barrage of publicity, it usually
fails in the first year - even if everyone agrees that it's good. Quite
why DC are expecting a different result from Simon Dark, I'm not sure.
It certainly has an impressive creative team. Steve Niles is one of the
leading writers in the horror genre, and I can see where he's coming
from with this book - Simon is clearly a sort of modern-day
Frankenstein, freely adapted for use in the DCU. Scott Hampton's art is
moodily atmospheric, and his character design for Simon manages to tread
the fine line between invoking familiar imagery and avoiding outright
cliche.
But this is a vaguely-mature hybrid comic hovering somewhere between
superhero and - actually, horror is perhaps a bit strong, given the
content of the first issue. Urban legend, perhaps. Nonetheless, history
suggests that these things tend to be something of a niche product.
I'd like to be proved wrong, though, because I kind of liked the first
issue. There are certainly problems to be worked through. The cultists
are a bit of a cliche. I question the wisdom of setting the book in
Gotham, a setting so strongly associated with a character who seems to
be completely unrelated. And Simon is very obviously a character
assembled from bits and pieces of other, more famous characters - he
even has Freddie Krueger's jumper.
But the Frankenstein archetype of the childlike monster is a strong
concept and there's enough here to suggest that Simon could work as a
contemporary take on that idea. There's something strangely charismatic
about the misshapen lug, enough for me to give the book a chance to rise
above its admittedly familiar source material.
Rating: B+
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Also this week...
FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN #24 - Oh... god... so... slow. In
fairness to J Michael Straczynski, he wrote this as a weekly serial, and
if it had come out on that schedule, the pacing would have worked a lot
better. But the fact remains that we are halfway through this allegedly
earthshaking story and, to all intents and purposes, nothing happens
until the final page. The inciting event for this plot was Aunt May
getting shot, and that was in the previous arc. Apparently Spider-Man
will finally be presented with his Terrible Moral Dilemma in part three,
which is leaving it a bit late if you ask me. The art's very enjoyable,
so at least the book is nice to look at, but this really isn't getting
to the point quickly enough. B-
STORMWATCH #12 - Somewhat annoyingly, Stormwatch goes out with one of
its weakest issues. The team hunt down a cop killer and take their
revenge, because they're cops, and that's what cops do. Or rather,
because it's a stock plot from vaguely edgy cop shows. It's about as
well done as you could hope for, but it doesn't play to the strengths of
the book, or to the more interesting aspects of the characters. Still,
I've been generally impressed by Christos Gage's writing on this title,
and he seems to be a natural for team books. C+
WOLVERINE #58 - Yikes. I've quite enjoyed some of Marc Guggenheim's
stories, and I don't object to Howard Chaykin's recent art in the way
that many reviewers seem to. But this... this is wildly misconceived.
Apparently the reason why Wolverine can heal from fatal injuries is
because whenever he dies, his soul gets to fight Azrael and then return
to earth. Er... no, no, that's a really awful concept, guys. This is
way off into making the same mistakes as Wolverine: Origins - taking a
perfectly straightforward, well-conceived character, and then
complicating him to the point where nobody could possibly care. In
fairness, Guggenheim may well be using this story to put a stop to such
stupidly excessive uses of the healing factor - though my preferred
solution would be to just stop writing them. Fans of "What was the
editor thinking?" moments will also admire a flashback to World War I in
which the Germans are described as Nazis, and a staggeringly patronising
scene in which Dr Strange explains to the readers what an anagram is, as
though it were an Alan Moore-style piece of mystic esoterica.
Guggenheim has his moments, and Chaykin is still a striking artist, but
this really is completely misguided. D+
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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, through the miracle of dodgy scheduling, the Albion storyline
continues in New Excalibur #24. There are more Sentinels in Ultimate
X-Men #87, and the Starjammers star in X-Men: Emperor Vulcan #2. Plus,
Captain America guest stars (in flashback form only, mind you), in
Wolverine: Origins #18.
--
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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