THE X-AXIS
13 April 2008
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This week:
WOLVERINE #64 - Get Mystique, part 3 of 4
by Jason Aaron and Ron Garney
NUMBER OF THE BEAST #1 of 8 - "To Raise Up"
by Scott Beatty, Chris Sprouse and Karl Story
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It's an exceptionally quiet week for the X-books, with only WOLVERINE
#64 reaching the shelves. For once, this isn't the schedulers' fault.
They had X-Factor and Uncanny X-Men down to ship this week too. But
neither book has come out, so we're left with Wolverine.
This is the penultimate chapter of "Get Mystique", a storyline built
around Wolverine chasing Mystique around the Middle East - or at least,
the bits where Americans are. At first glance, it's a slightly odd
choice of setting. Neither character has any particular connection with
the area. Granted, the story has one of those "Ah, Logan, my old
friend" scenes, where Wolverine turns out to have a tremendously close
friendship with a local guy we've never heard of. But that happens
wherever he goes.
But this works very well. By way of illustration, compare the Deadpool
storyline currently running in Wolverine: Origins. That's also basically
an extended chase scene, and yet it's rather flat. What is this book
doing right, in comparison?
Well, for one thing, there's a sense of epic conflict between these two,
which Aaron has largely manufactured from scratch over the last few
months. This is where the setting turns out to have been a smart choice
by Jason Aaron. It works partly because Wolverine has pursued Mystique
to the end of the earth; and partly because, by putting them, in a
vaguely alien and barren landscape, the emphasis is firmly on the two of
them.
That lack of familiarity also allows plenty of opportunities for
Mystique to do her shape-changing tricks. It makes the most of her
gimmick: she can be anyone, and anyone could be her. It's an odd
coincidence that Aaron is doing this at the same time as Secret
Invasion, which has plenty of shape-changing impostors running around,
but has yet to produce the sort of clever set-pieces that we're seeing
here.
Aside from that, the story allows artist Ron Garney to cut loose with
some over-the-top explosions and fight scenes. Some of this stuff is,
technically, very silly, but the story gets away with it through sheer
bravado. Garney is doing some of his best work on this arc.
Alongside all this, there's a running series of flashbacks setting up a
previous relationship between Wolverine and Mystique back in the 1920s.
On one level, this is an attempt - somewhat successful - to manufacture
a relationship that the characters didn't actually have until now. But
it also breaks up the desert scenes, and illustrates other sides of the
characters in a more low-key environment. Aaron isn't seriously
inviting us to see Wolverine and Mystique as opposite sides of the same
coin, but he's certainly keen to stress their similarities, as
characters for whom the game has almost become an end in itself.
It's a shame that Aaron and Garney are only contributing a single
storyline to the series. But this is a very strong contribution, well
up to the standards that both creators have established for themselves.
Rating: A
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NUMBER OF THE BEAST is a new miniseries from WildStorm. Told you it was
a quiet week.
The WildStorm Universe titles have been floundering for quite a while
now, lurching from relaunch to relaunch without ever seeming to achieve
a great deal. The imprint presents a real problem for DC. How do you
market it? In its early days, WildStorm was the vehicle for the hot
stories of the early 1990s; but that style is long gone. Then, for a
while, it was a smaller publisher where writers could take a slightly
different approach to the superhero genre, resulting in hits like
Authority and critically acclaimed cult books like Sleeper.
But for the last few years, WildStorm's been looking a bit downtrodden.
The last major relaunch was a fiasco, with most of the new titles
vanishing almost immediately. Subsequent crossovers have sunk without
trace. The theory that the WildStorm characters have a built-in
audience waiting for a relaunch has been convincingly disproven. So
where now?
Well, DC's usual answer is to re-tool the patched and beleaguered
property one more time, in another Crisis-Lite. The solicitations for
Number of the Beast make it sound like such a series, as does the cover
which proclaims its connection to Armageddon and Revelations, two
earlier WildStorm events that didn't exactly set the world alight.
But Number of the Beast doesn't feel like that sort of comic at all. On
a first read through, I was largely baffled as to what it was trying to
do. Second time round, it seemed to make more sense... as issue #1 of a
Paladins miniseries. The familiar characters of the WildStorm Universe
are more or less absent.
The issue opens with a couple of henchmen in an hidden lair dealing with
the remains of the High, a Superman analogue who appeared in a Warren
Ellis StormWatch story a decade ago. That scene ends with a couple of
footnotes referring to other recent WildStorm books you haven't read,
and generally seems to set the book in the direction you'd expect.
After that, however, we switch to an issue about the Paladins,
WildStorm's newly retrofitted quasi-Silver Age superteam, cheerfully
defending their generic city against thoroughly arbitrary and equally
retro attackers. And that basically continues for the rest of the
issue, as the nice heroes bounce around town, villains are taken out,
and bad guys just keep showing up in order to provide more fighting.
What makes this a tough sell, in storytelling terms, is that the big
idea seems to be that the Paladins are appearing in a story that doesn't
make a great deal of sense - it's literally just a string of random
fights - but that they and their opponents seem largely oblivious to
this. One member tentatively raises his concerns that something's a bit
off, but that's literally it. And in order to make this story concept
work, writer Scott Beatty ends up devoting a fair chunk of the issue to
events which, on a first reading, are largely nonsensical. On
subsequent readings, they're also largely nonsensical, but at least the
nonsense seems to have a point.
I'm not generally a big fan of Silver Age retro teams, which are all too
frequently bolted onto nascent superhero universes in imitation of
Marvel and DC. However these are guys are quite fun, and beautifully
designed. Some are echoes of existing characters. Others are
intentionally dated, such as Johnny Ray-Gun, whose power is that he has
a ray gun. But they feel like the sort of characters who wouldn't be
out of place in Kurt Busiek's Astro City. Chris Sprouse's art brings
out their Silver Age tendencies without going for Silver Age homage, and
gives the issue the charm it needs to work.
That said, I'm not altogether convinced that this device works - it's
still a very choppy issue, in which the second half is endearing but
ultimately baffling. As such, it doesn't really get the plot under way,
at least not in any readily comprehensible fashion. But against my
better judgment, I'm coming round to this issue. Meta-superheroes have
been done many times before, but these guys seem like they could be fun
to read about.
Rating: B+
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Also this week:
CRIMINAL #2 - Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are beginning their
relaunched series with a smart move: a series of self-contained
standalone stories, which happen to tie in to the characters we've met
already. This issue, for example, Teeg Lawless returns from his
military service to find that, thanks to the miracle of compound
interest, he's in even worse debt than he thought. Done right, this
should satisfy everyone, not so much by providing a jumping-on point, as
by giving new readers the clearest possible opportunity to see what
Criminal has to offer them. Non-superhero genre comics are a tough
sell, and Criminal's characters tend to hover on the verge of being
unsympathetic (to put it mildly, in some cases), but nobody does this
sort of story better than Brubaker and Phillips. It takes skill to make
these convoluted noir double-crosses seem believable, and not just a
homage to earlier crime novelists. Criminal always manages to make it
work. If you haven't tried it before, and you have even the remotest
interest in the genre, you really should give it a look. A-
ECHO #2 - Terry Moore picks up the pace considerably after the
relatively laid-back first issue. On the one hand, that reassures me
that the series is going to work in serial form; on the other, it does
mean that we're now in rather more conventional storytelling territory.
But this is still excellent work, taking a plot that could easily have
been bog-standard sci-fi thriller territory, and bringing it to life
through the little human details. An excellent series. A
THE LAST DEFENDERS #2 - Well, this is weird. The first issue seems to
have been a feint, teasing a Defenders team that implodes almost
immediately under the weight of its own artificiality. Really, this
isn't a Defenders story so much as a story about poor Nighthawk trying
to put together a new Defenders team in the face of general
indifference. On that level, it's quite successful; Casey and Giffen
generate a lot of sympathy for the poor guy. On the other hand, I'm a
bit confused as to where the rest of the plot is heading, and the whole
thing has a general air (perhaps deliberately) of splattering the page
with concepts drawn at random from the Official Handbook. Beneath the
conventional superhero veneer, this is actually a thoroughly odd comic,
but in quite an interesting way. B+
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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, X-Men: Divided We Stand #1 is the first of two anthologies
about former X-Men. Wolverine: Origins #24 guest stars Deadpool again.
And X-Factor fight Arcade.
--
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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