THE X-AXIS
17 February 2008
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This week:
WOLVERINE #62 - Get Mystique, part 1 of 4
by Jason Aaron and Ron Garney
X-FORCE #1 - Angels and Demons, part 1 of 6
by Craig Kyle, Chris Yost and Clayton Crain
FANTASTIC COMICS #24
by various creators
FANTASTIC FOUR #554 - World's Greatest, part 1 of 4
by Mark Millar, Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary
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WOLVERINE's monthly title is now effectively a series of miniseries,
with completely different creative teams coming on for each arc, and
largely ignoring what's gone before. The latest contributors are writer
Jason Aaron and artist Ron Garney, who are responsible for the book's
"Divided We Stand" arc.
As we've come to expect when Wolverine participants in a crossover, this
story is off on the margins somewhere. Apparently, Mystique somehow
escaped at the end of X-Men #207, which doesn't make a tremendous amount
of sense, since as I understood it, her mind was absorbed by Rogue...
but whatever. It doesn't seem to have done her any harm, and as usual,
neither the creators nor the editors seem to register that this might be
in some way anomalous.
Wolverine goes after her, and that's basically our story. It's
Wolverine as hunter with Mystique on the run, and it's all intercut with
flashbacks to their first meeting as friends back in the 1920s.
This is a strange comic. Jason Aaron is best known for his work at
Vertigo, but he wrote an excellent fill-in issue last year which
suggested he was a good match for the series. And for the most part he
is; he's got the voice down perfectly, and his story is a tightly paced
affair where the jokes work and the shocks pay off. It's a simple
premise: Wolverine hunts down the shape****fter, and isn't quite sure
which person is her. Ron Garney is also at home on the book - he's a
great artist for action stories, and Wolverine is precisely the sort of
character who works in bold strokes.
And yet it feels a little off. Obviously, a part of that is the fact
that the story doesn't actually seem to fit with the "Messiah Complex"
plot thread which it's supposed to be continuing. But more
fundamentally, Aaron is going for the idea that Wolverine is especially
determined to get Mystique, and that he's implicitly as bad as she is.
So we've got him accidentally killing the wrong person after mistaking
her for Mystique, which begs two questions: one, er, how? And two,
shouldn't he be a little more bothered about this?
In fairness, judging from Aaron's interviews, Wolverine's behaviour in
the present-day sequences seems to be at least partly intentional. So
I'm open to the possibility that it'll make sense by the end of the
story. But for the moment, it just feels a bit weird, and frankly out
of character. Obviously, that knocks the book down a few marks.
Leave that aside, however, and it's a well-executed chase story, well
paced and convincingly handled. I'm prepared to give Aaron the benefit
of the doubt for now and assume that there's a clear reason behind
Wolverine's slightly uncharacteristic behaviour. On that basis, it's a
good issue.
Rating: A-
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Of all the various elements of "Messiah Complex", X-FORCE were by far
the least successful. Although they were presented as terribly
exciting, they were simply a bunch of tracker characters, and they were
all in the X-Men fold already. When Professor X and Cyclops had an
argument about whether X-Force were too dangerous to be let loose, it
rang utterly false.
Well, here we are with the regular series. Craig Kyle and Chris Yost
have written some good stories in the past, but struggled on New X-Men,
where they seemed unable to hit the right tone. This series might be
closer to their strengths, as gratuitous violence will be at home here.
And there isn't a sup****ting cast to slaughter.
The premise is explained far more effectively than it was in "Messiah
Complex." X-Force are the X-Men's black ops team. They're the group
assigned by Cyclops to take out the really, really bad guys, without the
rest of the heroes needing to know anything about it. So, in other
words, they're the ones who are over the conventional superhero moral
line. This isn't terribly original, but at least it's something to mark
them out from the X-Men proper.
Kyle and Yost take a slightly ambivalent approach to the premise. The
basic idea is that Cyclops has already enlisted the members, who are all
out for revenge on the Purifiers, and he's dumped the team on Wolverine.
Wolverine thinks it's a dreadful idea - the X-Men should be getting
these people back on track, rather than taking advantage of them to form
a black ops squad. He wants them all to give up and go home. But if
the team is going to exist, it might as well be done properly, so he
reluctantly ends up leading them anyway.
So, at least we have an attempt to do something a little more morally
complex than just saying "They're the ultra-violent team, aren't they
cool?" Still, this doesn't really work for me, on a number of levels.
For one thing, it's just a bit bleak and narrow. Wolverine spends much
of the issue telling us that joining X-Force would be the worst possible
thing for these characters, and that X-23 in particular will end up as a
machine rather than a person. Which begs the question: why would I want
to read about that? As a direction, it just doesn't seem to hold out
that much potential. What do you do with it? Do you tell stories in
which everyone is dragged down into robotic depression? Do you turn
round and say, "Hey, Wolverine's wrong, murder can be fulfilling?" I
can't really imagine this concept leading anywhere interesting.
Besides, the concept is riddled with logic holes. It's entirely unclear
why Cyclops would suddenly decide, after all these years, that he wants
to set up a black ops team. He's being yanked into a thoroughly
unsuitable role. What's more, Cyclops claims to be keeping the team
secret from Emma Frost, which begs the questions (1) How? and (2) Why?
In fact, wouldn't this make infinitely more sense if Emma was sponsoring
the team and keeping it secret from Scott?
But then, common sense is apparently at a premium in this book, because
the deniable, secret black-ops X-Men team are wearing X-Men uniforms
with X-logos on them, and are led by the world-famous X-Men member
Wolverine, wearing a slightly recoloured version of his world-famous
costume. As secret teams go, these guys suck.
Unless there's a clever twist coming at the end of the first storyline
to send the book in a different direction, I don't see this working.
It's not horrible, and Clayton Crain's painted artwork is fine if you
like darkness, but nothing here convinces me that it's a strong enough
concept to carry a series.
Rating: C
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FANTASTIC COMICS #24 is nothing if not high-concept. Despite the title,
it's actually the first issue from Erik Larsen's "Next Issue Project."
The idea is to revisit old, long-cancelled Golden Age comics, and to
produce a "next issue" for them, using characters and concepts from the
original series. This is all perfectly legal, because the Golden Age
was so long ago that most of the characters are now public domain.
The original Fantastic Comics was an anthology title from Fox Syndicate
Features. Issue #23 came out in 1941. Larsen isn't sticking too
strictly to continuing the stories in progress, because as he rightly
observes, most of the Golden Age titles got downright desperate by the
end of their run. Instead, this is meant to be more of a representative
issue of Fantastic Comics. Kind of. Sort of.
It's a bit confused about what it wants to be. On the one hand, it's
presented as a kitsch pseudo-Golden Age comic. It's 64 pages, with nine
stories (plus a text piece). There are period adverts. Some of the
colouring is deliberately wonky to match the printing standards of the
time - other stories are coloured straight, depending on style.
On the other hand, the level of faithfulness to the source material
varies wildly. Almost none of the contributors are really trying to
replicate the original stories. Thomas Yeats' "Golden Knight" strip is
probably the closest to a straight pastiche; Larsen's own take on the
generic strongman superhero Samson is a more or less straight take on
the character, but done in his own style.
Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca, the creators of Street Angel, are probably
the most successful contributors in that vein. Their take on "Captain
Kidd" as a womanising adventurer is tongue in cheek without being too
knowing, and almost feels like it could sustain a longer story without
relying on the gimmick.
But other creators take a completely different approach, either
revamping an old concept in their own style, or paying lip service to
the concept while doing something pretty much unrelated. Joe Casey and
Bill Sienkiewicz dust off time-travel story "Flip Falcon in the Fourth
Dimension" as a weird angel-vs-devil affair that looks like the sort of
thing Sienkiewicz was doing for Marvel in the early 1980s. It's
actually pretty good on its own terms, but it couldn't be less Golden
Age, and I suspect it doesn't have much to do with the original story
beyond the very basic concept of "He's got a time machine."
Ashley Wood's strip is... well, it claims to be something to do with war
hero Sub Saunders, but it's basically six pages of obscure panels and
German dialogue, with a payoff that depends entirely on you recognising
a version of his own character Automatic Kafka, and isn't especially
interesting even if you do. A lot of people think Ashley Wood is very
good. Occasionally I see his stuff and agree with them. Other times, I
decide that it's a major case of the emperor's new clothes. This one is
decisively in the latter category - it's wilfully obscure,
self-indulgent nonsense which reminds me of why I never used to like the
guy.
Joe Keatinge and Mike Allred have the strangest task, dealing with the
Fletcher Hanks character Stardust. A collection of Hanks' Golden Age
work was published a couple of years ago. By any standards, he was one
of the more distinctive creators of the period - although he specialised
in one-dimensional heroes pummelling bad guys, his stories feature so
much utter weirdness and disregard for logic that they stand out a mile.
Depending on your point of view, Hanks was either a bizarre anomaly, or
a mad genius liberated from the shackles of "making sense" which would
smother later creators, and pouring (violent) dreamlike craziness onto
the page.
Keatinge and Allred are clearly pro-Hanks, and this story is basically a
tribute rather than a revival. Stardust has been gone for years, and in
his absence superheroes have been replaced by bland protector robots.
In some hard-to-specify manner, everything is depressing and gray. And
then, of course, Stardust comes back to make everything great again.
I'm not sure this quite achieves everything it set out to do. Presumably
it's trying to argue that things were much more exciting in the good old
days when there wasn't the burden of being taken seriously, and people
like Hanks were free to go nuts. But unless you already know who
Stardust is - and while he's the best known character in the book, that
really isn't saying much - you're unlikely to appreciate just how weird
Hanks' stories actually were. He comes across as just another generic
hero from the Superman-archetype production line, and the story seems
like all-purpose nostalgia. It works on that level, but I suspect the
creators were aiming a little higher.
It's a strange book, this. I can't imagine wanting to read a whole
series of them; very few of these stories make any sort of case for the
characters being lost classics. Golden Age comics haven't aged very
well, and the characters were largely too generic to be given a modern
revamp in any meaningful way. But there's still a curious charm to this
comic, if only to see creators playing with decidedly ropey old ideas.
It's a gimmick, and really, the book relies heavily on novelty value.
But in small doses, that can still be entertaining.
Rating: B
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The most hyped comic of the week is undoubtedly FANTASTIC FOUR #554,
beginning the run of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch. Marvel will surely be
hoping that their success with Ultimates can be replicated here.
When this was announced, I had my doubts. Now, on paper, Millar and
Hitch certainly had a lot going for them. It made sense to keep them
together. They were keen on big, sweeping ideas, which was exactly the
sort of thing that the Fantastic Four ought to be about. And the
typical FF story would benefit from Hitch's widescreen art.
On top of that, Millar was making all the right noises in interviews.
As he points out, one of the big problems with the FF is a tendency to
recycle the same old ideas. Far too many creators have looked at the
Lee/Kirby run and treated it as a pool of sacred concepts which
constitute the FF mythos and which should be repeated endlessly. Not
enough creators have drawn the lesson that the FF are explorer heroes
who should be constantly confronted with things that are new, mysterious
and different. This isn't to say that the FF can't have recurring
villains; but strange new phenomena ought to be their stock-in-trade,
and in practice that hasn't been the case. Millar says he's ****fting
the emphasis towards new elements, and I thoroughly approve.
But the Fantastic Four is a ****ny, old-school superhero book full of
nice characters in a rather static nuclear family set-up. It's not a
cynical, dark book. And Millar's output is littered with cynicism. The
tone of his writing didn't strike me as a good match.
To give Millar credit, though, this is perhaps the least cynical thing
I've seen him write in ages. There's nothing dark about any of these
characters, and nothing that tries to be subversive. For the most part,
it's simply a straight take on the Fantastic Four, done in a slightly
over the top way. Johnny Storm seems to have been reinvented as a
drooling idiot, as if Millar doesn't grasp the difference between
"immature" and "moronic", but I suppose it's always possible that he's a
Skrull. (He does have a terribly small role in the story, which is a
bit of a warning bell.)
It's a set-up issue, with no villains and no looming threat. All that
happens is that Millar and Hitch introduce the cast in a "joined in
progress" action prologue, set some subplots in motion, and then bring
in a couple of sup****ting characters. Rather pleasingly, the
cliffhanger isn't a moment of shocking violence, but simply the
unveiling of a Big Idea. And it's all basically fine, with its heart in
the right place, and fabulous art.
With the cynicism removed, though, it's possible to see more clearly the
biggest flaw in Millar's writing. Let me take a couple of examples.
The idea that Reed has refurbished some old Doombots as servants is
mildly amusing. So if you have them hanging around as a background
feature, and then Alyssa Moy shows up to ask Reed about them, that works
(especially because it gives her and Reed something to talk about while
Millar is re-establi****ng their relation****p).
But in the very first panel, Millar has She-Hulk saying "What's the
story behind the Doombots, Sue? They're hilarious!" And that's a bad
line of dialogue, partly because it draws attention to a joke that would
be funnier if the readers were allowed to get it in their own time, and
partly because it sounds as though the creators are congratulating
themselves for being so clever. (Let's be honest... "hilarious" is going
a bit far.)
Example two. Reed is about to visit a school. A woman teacher is
planning to flirt with him; a colleague reminds her that she's married.
She replies, "Bob and I agreed we get a free pass if we ever met a super
hero. Just like half the married couples in America." First sentence?
Fine. Old sitcom cliche about celebrities, transplanted to the
superhero genre. But basically fine.
Second sentence? Awful. It undermines the scene as a character moment
by telling us that there's nothing remotely special about it. It sets
the pro****tion at a level which is absurdly, implausibly high, so it
undercuts the suspension of disbelief. But most im****tantly, it adds
nothing to the gag, other than to hammer it home for the hard of
thinking.
Now, let's be clear: I fully realise that spending two paragraphs
dissecting a single line of dialogue is nitpicking to the extreme. The
point is that Millar does this all the time - he takes a basically
decent idea, and gives it a weirdly inappropriate emphasis and
prominence that makes it a little irritating. Every time I hit one of
these lines, I feel like I'm tripping over a kerb. I could have chosen
other examples from this issue - Reed talking about a one second margin
of error as though it were nothing to worry about (even though he shows
appropriate concern for everything else in the same scene); Alyssa Moy
telling us that she works 19 hour days (while looking like the perkiest
thing ever); pretty much the whole scene with Johnny talking about his
mayfly attention span. And in each case, if it was just dialled back a
little bit, I suspect the underlying idea would work.
So... what we have here is an issue of set-up, with beautiful artwork,
the right attitude, a pretty good grasp of three of the characters (and
I'll reserve judgment on Johnny in case it's a deliberate story), and a
promising central idea. On the down side, the story takes a little long
to get started, there's not much in the way of drama yet, and it's got
more than a few kerbstones.
But it's a happy, ****ny comic, and it's nice to see Millar break out of
that cynical, cooler-than-thou straitjacket. Bright colours suit him.
Rating: B+
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Also this week:
NEW EXILES #2 - The bad news is that some of Chris Claremont's bad
habits are resurfacing. We have yet another mind control villain, and
we have a bad guy loudly proclaiming his name as if it amounted to a
personality. (Which is bad enough at the best of times, but... "Rough
Justice"? Really?) But if you can live with those, it's actually a
decently constructed story, and if Claremont has taken a bunch of
familiar concepts and hit the shuffle button, at least he's put some
work into figuring out a world for the resulting hybrids to inhabit.
Taken on its own terms, it's actually very readable, but I suspect it's
still one mainly for the Claremont fans. B
X-FACTOR #28 - Wolfsbane is written out of the series, and as you'd
expect, Peter David gets an excellent story out of it. Instead of
focussing too much on Rahne herself (the story pretty much shrugs its
shoulders and moves on), David emphasises the remaining members of the
cast, pointing out that between Rahne and Layla, they've now lost both
their "heart" character and their direction. So we're left with the
rest of the team trying to figure out where they go from here. It's a
great example of a writer taking an idea that ought to be damaging to
his series, and turning it to advantage, by making that damage into the
story. Very good. A
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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, Cable & Deadpool celebrates its fiftieth issue by getting
cancelled, although Deadpool still gets to guest star in Wolverine:
Origins #22. (Insert "fate worse than death" joke here.) Meanwhile,
Ultimate Apocalypse returns in Ultimate X-Men #91.
--
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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