THE X-AXIS
28 October 2007
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This week:
CABLE & DEADPOOL #46 - "Eight to Save the Universe!"
by Fabian Nicieza, Reilly Brown and Jeremy Freeman
X-MEN #204
Blinded By The Light, epilogue
by Mike Carey and Mike Choi
Endangered Species, part 16 of 16
by Mike Carey, Scot Eaton and Andrew Hennessy
X-MEN: FIRST CLASS #5
"Smash"
by Jeff Parker and Roger Cruz
"The Talking Board"
by Jeff Parker and Colleen Coover
FOOLKILLER #1 (of 5) - Fool's Paradise, part 1 of 5
"A Day Late and Forty Thousand Dollars Short"
by Gregg Hurwitz and Lan Medina
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The present state of CABLE & DEADPOOL is a little confusing. With Cable
supposedly dead, in the service of a wider X-Men storyline, the book has
warped into an unspoken Deadpool Team-Up series. Cable, we know, is
getting an ongoing solo title after the "Messiah Complex" crossover.
The obvious inference is that Cable & Deadpool is either killing time in
a transitional phase, or simply waiting for the inevitable.
This month's guest stars are the Fantastic Four. Thanks to an ongoing
time travel story, Nicieza is able to use them twice - a Lee/Kirby
version who can't understand why Deadpool thinks it must be 1967, and
the current version with the Black Panther and Storm.
The point to all this doesn't really become clear until the final
scenes. The idea is that once again, Deadpool is inspired to try his
hand at being a hero, following Cable's heroic sacrifice, and his recent
team-ups with iconic heroes such as Captain America and the Fantastic
Four.
Now, we've been here before. Deadpool's awkward attempts to become a
hero were a central theme when Joe Kelly wrote his stories. But it can
work, and there are certainly worse things you could do with him. The
key in Kelly's stories is that Deadpool doesn't quite have the right
motivations to become a hero. He doesn't actually have any altruistic
urges to help people. Instead, he's ashamed of the sort of person he
is, and also hopes for the respect of his peers. So he tries to do the
right thing, not entirely successfully, and for reasons that are
slightly dubious. Nicieza seems to be going for a more straightforward
approach of actually inspiring Deadpool to do good, and I'm not sure
that's necessarily the most interesting way to go.
Anyhow, the wider purpose of this story is to expose Deadpool to the
Fantastic Four, and allow him to be impressed by them. That's fine.
But it only works if there's a story along the way, and unfortunately,
that's where the issue falls down.
Nicieza has always had a weak spot for writing pseudo-scientific
gobbledegook, and then placing it at the heart of his story. This story
does it in a self-deprecating way, but it still does it. The plot, put
simply, is that Deadpool and his sidekick Bob show up in the Baxter
Building in the past, because they're lost in time. The past FF agree
to stick them in a time machine and send them home. On their way, they
bump into the present day FF who are coming back to retrieve them, and
they nearly get lost until the two FFs team up to retrieve them.
That's basically it. But to follow that, you've got to hack your way
through dialogue like "Can you narrow the egress points for their
chronal signatures to minimise our search parameters?" and "They're
creating bifurcated timelines with themselves as the fulcrum for the
divergence stream." The story certainly acknowledges how silly this
stuff is, but some of the dialogue is actually essential to explain
what's going on. The latter, line, for example, is as close as the book
comes to explaining why the FF are so worried about Deadpool becoming
lost in time again.
The other problem here is a lack of drama. There are no villains, no
antagonists, and no moral choices. Deadpool shows up in the past, has
the obligatory misunderstanding fight with the FF, and is then offered a
lift home. From there on, everyone is simply solving a minor practical
problem described in gibberish.
Now, it's a perfectly readable issue. There are some fun moments, and
some cute dialogue. Reilly Brown's art is always charming, and the
sequence with Deadpool and Bob in the time vortex is visually
impressive. And at least there's a serious attempt to advance
Deadpool's story.
But overall, this suffers from the curse of most team-up books - the
need to shoehorn a fresh guest into the plot every month seems to be
taking precedence over the stories.
Rating: B-
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X-MEN #204 is billed as the epilogue to "Blinded by the Light." What
that means, in practice, is that it's a bridging issue between "Blinded"
and the upcoming "Messiah Complex", but they're sticking it in the same
trade paperback as the preceding arc.
As you'd expect, it's mainly an issue of build-up for the crossover.
After several issues of running around fighting, this is the point where
the X-Men and the villains each sit down to regroup before the big
upcoming event - whatever it might be.
For the X-Men, that means the first explicit acknowledgement that
Rogue's team really doesn't exist any more, as the cast of Astonishing
X-Men effectively march in to take over the book. This is a smart move;
Astonishing is so detached from the rest of the line that it's long
overdue for the other writers to pick up the characters and start using
them.
Cyclops mourns the death of his son, which might be a little obvious,
but really is necessary if you're going to kill off a close relative.
The decision to gloss over his reaction to his father's death in Uncanny
X-Men just baffles me, the more I think about it. Brubaker has
effectively killed off Corsair and then bent over backwards to minimise
any impression that people care, which seems an odd approach at best.
We all know Cable's not dead, but at least Carey is trying to sell us on
the idea that it matters to the other characters.
Cannonball has some sort of vaguely-defined brain injury, which
apparently means that he just talks quite slowly and stays in bed. This
doesn't seem entirely consistent with the way Sinister's attack was
presented last month, and it comes off as an anticlimax. On the other
hand, Carey has better luck with Mystique and Gambit, giving them both
at least some good reason for turning on the X-Men: they're trying to
protect Rogue following the Hecatomb storyline, and they think
Sinister's better placed to do it. Traditional X-Men fans will even be
stunned to see Rogue having flashbacks to scenes from stories by other
writers - once again, Carey stands out as one of the only X-Men writers
in recent years who clearly cares about how his stories fit into the
wider history, and understands that continuity can be a resource as well
as an irritant.
Guest art comes from Mike Choi and his regular partner, colourist Sonia
Oback. The two previously worked on the X-23 miniseries, and their work
here is a little more bland. But then, it's a fill-in, so you can't
expect wonders. They can certainly tell a story, and they're easy on
the eye. The double-page spread of Rogue's incoherent flashbacks comes
across very well.
Overall, it's a reasonably efficient issue of build-up. Carey has
written much better than this, and this comes across as an exercise in
moving the pieces into place. But crucially, it does do the job of
making "Messiah Complex" seem like a big deal which we've been building
to for months. Carey isn't telling us a story so much as selling us a
crossover, but his sales pitch is effective.
The back-up strip features chapters 16 and 17 of "Endangered Species",
although there's no clear divide between them. The reason for this
last-minute scheduling change is that chapter 16 was supposed to appear
in New X-Men #43, which is running late and won't be out until next
week. I wait with interest to see what happens if it can't get back on
schedule in time for the crossover.
"Endangered Species" is an odd story. The plot, such as it is, saw the
Beast wandering around the Marvel Universe looking for various ways of
reversing M-Day. He meets assorted guest stars, he asks for help, he
tries collaborating with evil scientists. Finally, he comes to Transia
to speak to Wanda herself in a cryptic final chapter that basically
consists of Wanda delivering a "Be careful what you wish for" morality
tale and wandering off.
This isn't really a story so much as an extended build for the
crossover, and an exercise in remedial plotting. When Carey started
writing the X-Men, the Decimation storyline had been botched so
spectacularly that one had to wonder why the story was ever allowed to
proceed in the first place. With the benefit of hindsight, one gets the
impression of a pet idea being foisted on editors and writers who had no
clue whatsoever of what they were going to do with it, and chose to play
for time by ignoring it for as long as possible in the hope that
something might spring to mind. That's pure speculation, mind you, but
the important point is that the books read that way.
Of course, a plot as drastic as "Almost all the mutants lose their
powers and the race is going to die out" can't sensibly be put on the
back burner in that way, and the result was an embarrassing fumble.
Hence "Endangered Species", which has had to do the legwork of showing
up in four titles for four months hammering home the point that,
whatever previous stories might have suggested, this is a big deal, and
an important thing. It also allows Carey to work through a checklist of
obvious solutions that needed to be closed off.
None of this makes it an especially good story, but it does at least
give the impression that Carey knows where he's going with this. And
that's important in itself, because a sense of direction is one of the
things that's been missing from the X-books ever since Grant Morrison
left. It's been a dreary lurch from arc to arc with no sense of any
wider agenda at all - and, if anything, a positive attempt to avoid
having a wider agenda, perhaps because of the difficulties of
accommodating Astonishing's unpredictable schedule. But you can't have
three X-Men titles set in the same building which don't talk to one
another. If you want to have three writers doing three independent
books, get them to write three different books.
If nothing else, Carey has brought back a sense of direction and a
connection with the book's past. What he hasn't yet managed is to write
a particularly strong story on the back of that - but given the wreck
that he inherited, his steady repair works deserve some respect.
Rating: B+
------------
X-MEN: FIRST CLASS has generally been reliable for good old-school
superhero stories. But last issue was a little shapeless, and this
month's story is perhaps the weakest so far.
"Smash" guest stars the Hulk. And that's basically the plot. It guest
stars the Hulk, and the X-Men fight him for most of the issue.
Okay, there's a little more than that. The X-Men are helping the US
Army to look for the Hulk. So they hunt for him, and they find him, and
they fight him. But then Rick Jones shows up to explain who the Hulk
is, and Professor X learns (completely out of the blue, so that the
story can end) that the military want the Hulk as a weapon. So the
X-Men go home. And that's the plot.
This is decidedly underwhelming. I was going to say that the Silver Age
Hulk isn't a very interesting character, but actually, that's going too
far. The problem, more accurately, is that he's only an interesting
character when the story is about him or Banner. In a story like this,
he's just a big lug who yells a lot, which isn't particularly
enthralling.
More to the point, the story turns on the X-Men learning things about
the Hulk which are very familiar indeed. This is, of course, an
all-ages book, and I suppose that to a very young reader who's
unfamiliar with the Hulk, this might seem fresh. But even for that
audience, there are better ways to introduce the Hulk than to write a
story where he fights the X-Men for almost a whole issue, while his back
story is squeezed into a one-panel flashback.
The fight scene itself is reasonably well done, and there's a good art
sequence with the Hulk slowly figuring out that Marvel Girl is lifting
him off the ground. But mostly, this is a disappointingly routine
effort.
Writer Jeff Parker can do much better than this - as he proves in a
two-page back-up strip with art by the returning Colleen Coover. These
light comedy pieces have incredible charm and life, and I'd love to see
them expanded to get more space in the book.
Rating: C+
------------
Finally for this week, the Max imprint dusts off Steve Gerber's old
FOOLKILLER character for a five-issue miniseries.
Writer Gregg Hurwitz is a crime novelist who did a rather good Wolverine
Annual a few weeks back, so I'm approaching this series with an open
mind. I have to say, it doesn't do much for me. Still, it's got a
strong voice and, on its own terms, I think it's probably achieving what
it sets out to do. Whether that will be to everyone's taste is another
matter entirely.
The story follows Nate, a low-grade heavy who gets in trouble with his
bosses after trying to skim money for himself. With two of his family
killed and a few weeks to repay the money before they come back for
more, Nate goes hunting for the local vigilante, the Foolkiller, to help
him out.
Hurwitz's take on the Foolkiller is that he's a "punishment fits the
crime" figure who kills criminals in ways that are both supposedly
appropriate, and exceptionally gory. To all intents and purposes, in
this issue at least, that just makes him an even more sadistic version
of the Punisher. This is not the most interesting take on the
character, and it isn't really what Gerber created. Gerber's
Foolkillers were essentially intolerant serial killers who went around
killing anyone they looked down on. The version from the 1990
miniseries started off as a vigilante pursuing criminals, before
deteriorating into far more questionable targets as the series went on.
On the face of it, there's none of that here. The Foolkiller goes after
criminals - which he admittedly defines widely enough to include white
collar crime - and sadistically murders them. And that's about it,
really. It's possible that, like Gerber, Hurwitz plans to take this
standard antihero as a starting point to be explored over the following
chapters, but to judge from his interviews, he really does see the
character as a close sibling of the Punisher. And if so, he's kind of
missing the point, really.
In a particularly odd sequence, the Foolkiller is shown mutilating a
group of rapists who are identified as lacrosse players in an obvious
allusion to last year's Duke University lacrosse case. The charges in
that case were dropped six months ago, so not only does this come across
as crass and exploitative, it's also out of date. I'm amazed the editor
let it through.
This is a staggeringly violent and unpleasant comic, without even much
in the way of black comedy to make it digestible. There are no
especially sympathetic characters, and it has to rate as perhaps the
bleakest thing I've read all year. No doubt that's intentional, but
quite why I'd want to read such a thing, I'm not so sure.
The original Foolkiller characters were deconstructions of the vigilante
genre. This seems to be an attempt to retool the Punisher to appeal to
the audience for Saw. There may well be an audience for that book, but
the entertainment value escapes me. Still, there's no denying that
Hurwitz seems to have created the book he set out to make. In that
rather twisted light, it has to be judged a partial success of some
sort.
Rating: C
------------
Also this week...
SHE-HULK #22 - Peter David takes over the series and yanks it in a
completely different direction by turning Jen into a bounty hunter and,
more or less, promising to explain it at some later date. This could
easily come across as totally arbitrary, but David makes it work with
some nicely judged "What the hell is going on?" moments. I'm not quite
sold on the new direction just yet, but they've got my interest. B+
X-MEN: DIE BY THE SWORD #2 - The second part of the Excalibur/Exiles
crossover sees a bit of fighting and a lot of wandering around the
Exiles' pink castle. The weird character design for Rouge (no, that's
not a typo) is quite appealing, but the story gets bogged down with
recently-introduced Exiles characters who don't have defined characters,
and don't get them here. Still, the series delivers what it promises,
I'll give it that. B-
------------
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, New X-Men #43 belatedly completes its lead-in to the big
crossover, just in time for X-Men: Messiah Complex to kick off the main
event.
--
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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