THE X-AXIS
27 June 2004
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This week:
ASTONISHING X-MEN #2 - "Gifted, part 2 of 6"
by Joss Whedon, John Cassaday and Laura Martin
EXCALIBUR #2 - "Forging the Sword, part 2 of 4"
by Chris Claremont, Aaron Lopresti and Greg Adams
MYSTIQUE #16 - "Unnatural, part 3 of 5"
by Sean McKeever, Manuel Garcia and Jay Leisten
WEAPON X #25 - "War of the Programs, conclusion"
by Frank Tieri, Tom Mandrake and Brad Anderson
THE WITCHING #1 - "Fly Me To The Moon"
by Jonathan Vankin, Leigh Gallagher and Ron Randall
------------
We're now into the second month of Reload, and the newer books are
beginning to hit their stride.
ASTONISHING X-MEN has got off to a decent start. If the editorial
direction for the books is to go back to basics, then Whedon and
Cassaday are handling it the right way. The book picks up from the
starting point Morrison left behind, shifts style to a more traditional
approach, but has enough style of its own to stop it seeming like a mere
retread. It's clearly heavily inspired by the Claremont stories of the
eighties, but it isn't attempting to clone them.
Whedon has spent his first couple of issues setting up his core cast and
establishing where the tensions lie. For the most part, he's got the
right balance between playing off the history and stopping that history
from overpowering the story. It makes perfect sense, for example, for
Kitty to be unusually wary of Emma Frost, given that Emma was the first
villain she encountered. But to follow the idea Whedon's setting up,
you don't require to know anything more about the story; and what you do
need to know is suitably explained.
It looks like Whedon is particularly keen on Kitty and Emma. That
shouldn't really come as much surprise. The heroic teenage girl and the
reformed villain are two of his favourite character types, and here he's
got two of them just waiting to be used. His Emma possibly veers a bit
too far in the direction of villainous ambivolence rather than mere
arrogance - after all, Emma hasn't actually done anything all that bad
in over a decade. Still, there's mileage in the idea that she's
conscious of not being cut out for the role.
Granted, there's nothing desperately new or innovative being added to
the mythos here. We have a new villain, but thus far he's not doing
anything particularly novel. The idea of wiping out mutant powers as a
medical cure has been flirted with before. Plus, there seems to be a
glaring plot hole - Ord was apparently trying to draw out the X-Men, but
why would he expect them to turn up in response to a kidnapping which
has nothing to do with them? The story makes some play of the fact that
Cyclops is taking the team on this mission precisely because it's not
the sort of thing they normally do, and he's trying to reposition them
as heroes in the public eye. So either Ord knows something we don't,
which is possible, or Ord has just fluked his way into success with a
wildly optimistic plan.
But for the most part, I can let these problems slide. It may not be
the most ambitious comic in the world, but it has a clear idea of what
it's trying to do, and it pretty much succeeds. Whedon has nailed the
characters, and John Cassaday's art is typically beautiful, adding a
degree of delicacy to the story.
If this is the direction Marvel want to go in, then this is certainly
the way to do it.
Rating: A-
LINKS:
http://www.marvel.com
http://www.johncassaday.com
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I expected to be really, really irritated by EXCALIBUR #2. But I
wasn't. I wasn't irritated at all.
I was too busy laughing for that.
Chris Claremont is a bizarrely inconsistent writer these days. X-Treme
X-Men oscillated between "quite interesting" and "absolutely terrible."
It seems to depend largely on whether he's stretching himself and
exploring new ideas, or whether he's sticking doggedly to pet themes.
The former tends to be fairly decent. The latter is frequently horrific
- as, for example, with the last arc of X-Treme X-Men.
Reload seems to have led to a curious split. Uncanny X-Men is perfectly
readable and fairly enjoyable. Excalibur, on the other hand, is
absolute dross. It's impossible to be genuinely irritated by this
issue. Instead, I find myself sniggering at the sheer desperate
petulance of the whole enterprise.
As I've said before, there's nothing inherently wrong with bringing back
Magneto. He was only really killed in order to add a sense of finality
to "Planet X", and those sorts of deaths are fair game for reversal.
However, Claremont simply bulldozes the entire storyline aside by
blithely dismissing Morrison's Magneto as "an impostor." Which, by the
way, completely screws up Morrison's storyline, because thematically it
has to be the real Magneto.
To be fair to Claremont, X-Men is also unpicking the same story -
proving that when Morrison leaves, the X-office really can go from
nought to clueless in sixty seconds - and it may well be that a proper
explanation is being reserved for that book. Still, it doesn't take
much examination to see the plot of this issue crumble, Austen-style,
into an ill-thought-out mess.
For example: Xavier was apparently not surprised to see Magneto alive in
Genosha. It seems they were expecting to meet up. That means there was
communication. If there was communication, why doesn't Magneto know
about the death of Jean Grey and "his" attack on New York? If he can
contact the outside world, wouldn't he have noticed this sort of thing?
If he can't contact the outside world, how did Xavier contact him? And
even then, why didn't Xavier tell him?
If, on the other hand, Xavier wasn't expecting to find Magneto there,
why didn't he show any signs of surprise? On either view, why does
Xavier assume that this Magneto is the real one and the one from New
X-Men was the fake? And why should anyone else?
Come to think of it, given that Magneto was in a wheelchair the last
time we saw him, how did he get restored to health when he's apparently
spent the whole time trapped in a radioactive wasteland with no
hospitals? (At least Morrison's plot has the justification that he
leaves Genosha at some point - Claremont's version has apparently been
trapped here, or at least has chosen not to leave, throughout.) In
fact, given that Genosha was reduced to an uninhabitable radioactive
wasteland, how did any of these people survive at all?
All of these points at least need to be addressed in order to give the
story the slightest believability - but Claremont apparently feels
otherwise. In fact, his revisions of Magneto's history go further back,
as apparently we're also meant to forget the fact that just before
Morrison came along, Magneto was raising an army and planning to conquer
the world. Come to think of it, he didn't blackmail the UN into handing
over Genosha, either. It was Alda Huxley's idea to give it to him. He
accepted the deal because he'd just burnt out his powers in the middle
of another old-school world conquest attempt, and it was the best deal
on the table.
Excalibur comes across, at the very least, as an exercise in arrogant
and petulant disdain for the work of other writers. Claremont's hardcore
fanbase will doubtless be delighted with the book, but the broader
commercial wisdom of this approach is extremely doubtful. After all,
Morrison was outselling Claremont by more than two to one.
Throw in a general lack of drama, no interesting villains and some
entirely annoying supporting characters, and the result is an absolute
mess. The art doesn't do much to save it - Lopresti's linework is
competent enough but hardly striking, and the whole book is marred with
some very dodgy colouring. Liquid! seem to have developed a love for
texture patterns, and as a result the book is full of two-dimensional
textures dumped awkwardly onto objects that are being viewed at an angle
(and seemingly retaining the same resolution no matter how far from the
camera they are). Look, for example, at the walls on page 3, panel 2.
Or the floors on page 5. It really doesn't look good.
Two issues in, then, and Excalibur is looking like an absolute
trainwreck. Worse than I'd ever anticipated.
Rating: D+
LINKS:
http://www.aaronlopresti.com
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MYSTIQUE is now halfway through "Unnatural", and sticking to the proven
formula.
Lots of running around corridors in this one, and a bit of shouting
between Mystique and Shortpack about her priorities. Plus, some more
fighting. It's not easy to review in isolation, since it's just the
middle act of a story that's already established its course by now. We
know the formula by this point, we know it works, and the issue's as
good as ever. There's just not a lot to say about the middle chapter of
the storyline.
Oh, hold on. We've got a new inker, Jay Leisten. That's worth
mentioning. Let's see, has the new inker marked a major departure from
the formula?
....
Well, the lines are a bit heavier, I guess. And it's a little bit
looser. Otherwise, not much difference, though.
Perfectly solid action issue, as per usual. What more can you say?
Rating: B+
LINKS:
http://www.seanmckeever.com
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WEAPON X wraps up "War of the Programs" with issue #25. Mind you,
saying that perhaps gives an undue impression of closure.
Although Weapon X tends to work in fairly short arcs, with three or four
issues becoming the norm, and it does steer clear of undue
decompression, it would be a little misleading to infer that anything
really gets resolved at the end of any of these arcs. This turns out to
be another "conclusion" which doesn't really conclude anything, so much
as lead into the next act.
There's nothing wrong with that - it worked perfectly well on New X-Men,
for example - but labelling the stories in that way does give the
impression that you're actually heading for a resolution of some sort,
and makes it a little annoying when you end up with a plot advancement
instead.
What actually happens this issue, basically, is that the Weapon Plus
programme lure Wolverine, Fantomex and Agent Zero to the site of an old
Weapon X test, and deliver some exposition. Apparently the Weapon X
team have "gone underground", though that still doesn't really explain
what happened to all of their staff and the inmates of Neverland -
something I'd rather assumed this arc was getting round to in due
course. Weapon Plus thinks that one of the three is in the pocket of
Weapon X and so, having fulfilled arch-villain obligations by delivering
some exposition, the baddies send in the soldiers to kill everyone. Big
fight, the heroes escape.
Okay for what it is, but it doesn't really take us much further forward.
The main achievement of this arc has been to straighten out the
needlessly complicated interrelationship between Weapon X and Weapon
Plus, and to tie up a dangling plot thread from New X-Men (what did
Wolverine see in the Weapon Plus files?). But we don't seem to be that
much closer to resolving the cliffhanger from four months ago, and most
of the supposed major characters haven't been seen in ages.
Even though Weapon X isn't a series that goes in for decompression,
Frank Tieri often seems to have struggled to juggle the various subplots
for all his characters. People have a tendency to go AWOL for months at
a time in this book, giving individual arcs a stop-start feel. With the
title presently overrun by guest stars to the (literal) exclusion of
most of the regular cast, there's a definite danger of momentum being
lost elsewhere.
Rating: B-
LINKS:
http://www.comicscommunity.com/boards/tommandrake
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The shadow of Neil Gaiman still looms large over Vertigo. Sandman
brought in a whole new audience of goths and Tori Amos fans, and while
the imprint continues to produce a range of other material as well,
Vertigo haven't been shy about continuing to mine the seam.
The latest effort is THE WITCHING, an ongoing series by Jonathan Vankin
and Leigh Gallagher, which features - you guessed it - three witches.
Yes, it's the triple-goddess archetype yet again. An idea that Vertigo
haven't just beaten to death, but continued to bludgeon for a good few
years after it stopped breathing. Be honest, if you were trying to come
up with a stereotypical Vertigo book, it would features three witches,
at least one goth, and a guest appearance by a character from the
Sandman mythos. And lo, The Witching offers all these things.
So does the book have anything new to add to this (let's face it)
well-worn theme? Well, up to a point. Vankin tries to present magic as
something which isn't all that mystical, and fits practically into the
everyday world. The robes and ceremony are more about inspiring belief
from others than anything else. This isn't exactly a novel idea either,
but it does at least mark some difference of approach for the assorted
Sandman spin-offs, which have generally tended to approach the subject
from a more fantasy-oriented approach.
It's not, however, an enormous difference from what's been done before
in this theme. It'll doubtless appeal to Vertigo's core fantasy
audience, but if you're not into this kind of thing already, this isn't
going to be the book to persuade you. There's a lot of exposition
without much in the way of narrative thrust, and as I say, it's got a
definite whiff of Vertigo-by-numbers.
Rating: B-
LINKS:
http://www.vertigocomics.com
http://www.jonathanvankin.com
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Also this week:
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #509 - Marvel have hyped this issue on the basis of
two things - it's the start of a new storyline, "Sins Past", and it's
the first issue with art by Mike Deodato Jr. Deodato seems to be back in
favour after a few years when a lot of dodgy work was appearing under
his name. His recent work on Hulk and, for that matter, Witches has
been attractive, though, and he makes a good match for this title, with
likeable versions of Peter and Mary Jane. This, of course, is the Gwen
Stacy storyline, an idea that doesn't immediately appeal to me. I doubt
they'd do anything so crassly foolish as to bring her back from the
dead, but tinkering in long-gone history doesn't do much for me either.
B
http://www.planetaesbornia.com.br/mikedeodato
CAPTAIN AMERICA #28 - The final issue under the Marvel Knights banner
before the book is sent back to the mainstream Marvel editors. Which,
by the way, leaves me wondering what happens to Captain America & The
Falcon, which also shipped this week - do we really need two Captain
America books? (Since I'm on the subject, Captain America & The Falcon
#4 features staggeringly ugly art, even by Bart Sears' standards. I
really don't understand why Sears or his editors think this stuff is
appealing.) Anyway, the Marvel Knights approach hasn't worked for Cap,
although Robert Morales' brief run has clicked a little better than some
of the material that came before. I honestly don't think the character
has the weight to stand up to this kind of approach, and he's better off
with a more old-school direction. Morales signs off with a two-part
time travel storyline that hovers on the edge of incomprehensibility and
features a lot of nudge-and-wink stuff about comics being really popular
in another timeline. Nice art from Eddie Campbell, though. C+
QUEEN & COUNTRY #25 - Hey, a single-issue story. Queen & Country
doesn't do many of those. Tara goes off to Switzerland to catch up with
her estranged mother, who's about to get married to somebody half her
age. Meanwhile, there's some reshuffling going on back at the office.
A good character piece, with strong art by Steve Rolston. Besides, it
makes a nice change to get the character away from work for once. A-
http://www.onipress.com
http://www.gregrucka.com
http://www.steverolston.com
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Last week's Article 10 is still up at Ninth Art.
http://www.ninthart.com
Next week, it's relatively quiet for a change. Ultimate X-Men #48
continues the serial killer arc. Wolverine / Punisher #4 wraps up the
Peter Milligan miniseries, and X-Statix #24 continues the Avengers arc.
--
Paul O'Brien
THE X-AXIS -
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