1 july 2001

So, here we go with the second ULTIMATE X-MEN story. Another six-parter, I see - will this one be as pointlessly bloated as the first one?

The focus this time around is on the Ultimate version of the Weapon X project. In theory that ought to be the origin of Wolverine, but Millar has decided to tie Nightcrawler and Rogue into the project as well. Straight off the bat that seems like a questionable idea. It more or less works for Rogue, but it dilutes the uniqueness of Wolverine and has nothing to do with the original Nightcrawler character. A recurring theme of this book has been Millar bringing in existing characters while changing them so much that they retain nothing of the original beyond name and aspects of their character design.

Nightcrawler, for example, gets off to a flying start by shooting his opponents with a machine gun, something that the mainstream version of the character wouldn't be seen doing in a million years. Now, it's all well and good to say that Millar shouldn't be bound by the continuity and baggage of the original characters, but isn't the premise of the Ultimate line meant to be to get back to the core characters and present them in a more accessible way? Millar clearly has no interest in the original characters, because he's making absolutely zero effort to preserve anything beyond their most superficial character elements. It does make you wonder why he's bothering to revive them at all rather than simply create new ones. Moreover, all of Millar's reinventions skew in the same direction - they have the same speech patterns, the same sarcasm, the same everything. What we've got here is a team with the same member repeated seven times over, which is a drag to read. Nor is there any particular diversity among his villains.

Millar's penchant for shock tactics is in full effect, but in fairness the Weapon X project really ought to be torturing their inmates, so it doesn't seem as gratuitous here as it usually does. There's also some quite nice material about the idea of the X-Men actually being popular in Japan. A bit of diversity in how people react to the X-Men is much needed, although it does also serve to show up how inane the first storyline was.

Kurt gets something of a redesign here, the general idea being that he's now black rather than indigo and has glowing yellow eyes and mouth. It's quite a good visual, although it does make his facial expression look ridiculous in long shots. A less good idea is having Nightcrawler's teleportation depicted as a ball of flame - that just makes it look like an explosion, and consequently it blurs into the firefight going on around it rather than coming across as a teleportation effect.

Not as grating as the last storyline, but nothing here gives me any reason to think that it won't get back to that level in due course.

From the "are they still publishing that?" file comes WOLVERINE, the one book that wasn't hyped during the relaunch, and for very obvious reasons too. Frank Tieri and Sean Chen's run remains stubbornly below average. It's not terrible, but it certainly merits the level of attention it's been getting from fandom lately (ie, absolutely none).

About the most surprising thing about this issue is that it provides with another fascinating example of the ludicrousness of the Comics Code authority. While three people in a jacuzzi was apparently unacceptable for America's youth, it's just fine for the villain to gouge out and eat the hero's eyes. Even if you believe in the Comics Code in principle, any Code that generates results like that is plainly worthless.

Anyhow, you may recall that this storyline started off somewhat interestingly with Wolverine apparently being framed for murder. It's handy somebody does, because Tieri has evidently forgotten altogether. While he has some moderately interesting ideas here, somebody really ought to sit him down and patiently explain to them that he doesn't need to force them all into the same story. Why has Tieri allowed his story to spend two issues on what ought to be a minor subplot about abusive prison guards? Lack of discipline would seem to be the answer. Why has he shoved two mystical villains into a Wolverine story where they stand out a mile? Probably because he liked the ideas and didn't realise they'd be better off being held back until he was writing a story where they'd actually fit.

The result is a mess, which more or less makes some sense but is throwing so many unrelated ideas into the mix that it lacks all sense of focus. The depiction of the prison is also wildly over the top to the point of being just plain silly. I don't buy into the prison as anything more than a half-thought-out idea, which makes it a shame that Tieri has wasted the last two months on it.

Ah, some quality.

X-FORCE goes into the second issue of its new direction by introducing its real cast, and then delivering a cheery "up yours" to any remaining fans of the previous direction.

Milligan seems to be consciously doing everything he can to turn the readers against his characters, which is an interesting way of going about things. Last issue's X-Force team were a bunch of self-absorbed assholes squabbling about their career prospects. U-Go Girl maintains that attitude throughout this issue in her shameless attempt to be appointed as the new team leader, although Milligan does make a point of showing that she was somewhat upset over the death of her teammates.

The new roster are a slightly different proposition - despite their squabbling when they first come together, they're left open enough for Milligan to bring out a more sympathetic side over time. We're told that Bloke's killed some people in action before, but that's as dodgy as they get. The only thing that Milligan does to turn us against these guys is to implicitly associate them with the hideous people from last issue, which works just fine for the moment.

In keeping with the fact that this book is now a combined media satire and parody of superhero convention, the new cast are a delightfully absurd bunch. Bloke, the most obviously gay hero in history, who turns pink when in combat and whose hobbies include working out and listening to show tunes. Phat, a fairly glaring parody of Skin. Milligan even goes to the trouble of setting up the owners of X-Force as a mysterious and shadowy organisation, and then revealing that they actually work for a thinly disguised Bill Gates.

It's amazing how many people don't seem to get that he's taking the piss. This is not a "grim and gritty" book. It is a ridiculous travesty of a superhero book, which is why we have Michael Allred doing an ultra-deadpan rendition of it on the art.

Our new point-of-view character is the Orphan, a character who Milligan seems to be trying to legitimise as a genuine hero, albeit in a very sarcastic way. On the one hand, he's got reasonably sensible powers (excessively acute senses) and a somewhat traditional superhero origin story (tours the world trying to control his powers, learns martial arts and meditation, all that kind of thing). He's even established as having a connection with Professor X, which at a stroke makes him the one and only character in the book with any real claim on the X-Force name. He's not interested in leading the team, he actually does something fairly heroic halfway through, and he's generally written as a traditional hero type in the midst of all the insanity around him.

On the other hand, he's a parody of the archetypal X-Men character. He's got a power which is presented as a curse rather than a blessing. He chooses Orphan as a codename because his defining traits are angst and self-pity. He uses a special costume to control his uncontrollable powers. And he's an orphan. Yes, kids, he's Cyclops, except with an unhealthy interest in Russian Roulette. Just how sincere is Milligan in trying to establish this guy as a hero? Not very, I'd bet, and it'll be interesting to see where he goes with this. In the long term, the Anarchist is starting to look a better bet for the sympathetic character, as his attitude to the whole operation is starting to look fairly reasonable.

The really interesting bit comes with the appearance of the previous X-Force, who storm a press conference to protest about the hijacking of their name. It's at this point that it becomes apparent why this book is being published as a continuation of X-Force. We're meant to reject these characters as interlopers, and what better way to achieve that than take a series that was probably up for cancellation anyway, and have this new team hijack the title?

The ensuing fight scene is an amazingly vicious rejection of everything Counter-X stood for. Stripped of the ludicrous glamorisation of their idealism and direct action tactics that Counter-X gave them, the previous X-Force stand exposed as a bunch of self-righteous whiners. They can't deal with the fact that the cynical manipulation of the new X-Force has achieved a thousand times more for the image of mutants than they ever managed, simply by throwing principles out the window. Yes, the book's previous heroes come across as idiots - but by the time Counter-X had finished with them, that's exactly what they were. Milligan and Allred are shamelessly pissing on the concept, on the execution, and on the fans who liked it. (They even dump Meltdown's awful Counter-X costume in favour of the Pollina version, which is a blessing in itself.) Absolutely wonderful.

The story even cuts off the end of the fight scene, which is partly an attempt to get over the fact that all the good stuff from X-Force's adventures is on pay per view, and partly to emphasise just how little respect the new creators have for the Counter-X X-Force. To be honest, this doesn't really work. The problem is more in the pacing than the concept, as it comes across as a really weird edit rather than a deliberate omission.

Nonetheless, this is far and away my favourite book of the week, combining vicious cynicism with even more vicious cynicism to wonderfully entertaining effect. If you thought Warren Ellis was a cynic, you're wrong - he's an idealist who tends to write about idealists striving to improve a cynical world. What we have here is unremitting, pragamatic cynicism in which the world is cynical, the characters are cynical, and enlightened self-interest does more to change the world than the previous X-Force ever managed by smashing up nasty corporations.

Scathing and hilarious. I love this book. I really love it.

From the pointless relaunch department, GHOST RIDER is back.

But first, back to Peter Milligan. When he was writing Shade the Changing Man, he opened one issue with a ludicrous essay solemnly asserting that the real theme of the book had been haircuts, and how they were the most important element of any character.

If Milligan's haircut importance theory has any truth to it at all, then it is a worrying sign for this book. For here be mullets. They're bloody everywhere. Bikers with mullets. Truck drivers with mullets. There's a photo of Johnny Blaze in his days as a stunt rider, and while it's not entirely clear, it looks horribly as though he too has a mullet. The Ghost Rider doesn't have a mullet, but then he doesn't have any hair. This is a shame, as it would have been nice for this book to lay claim to the world's first Mullet of Fire. Flaming mullets. Picture the merchandise.

All of these mullets in one comic surely cannot be good for the karma. Devin Grayson's aim here seems to be to portray the Ghost Rider as a hero of the biker community. I am meant to sympathise with the bikers. But the bikers have mullets. And hell, how much sympathy can you summon for a man with a mullet? I don't regard myself as a style obsessive, heaven forbid, but surely one less mullet in the world can only be a good thing.

Anyhow, what we have here is a very basic storyline in which Johnny Blaze - now working in one of your cliched Dull Office Jobs which creative types always seem so smug to have avoided - finds himself turning into the Ghost Rider from time to time, and avenging wrongs on behalf of, uh, bikers. How timely, I've always said there aren't enough books about bikers these days.

There is, let's be honest, a difficulty that any Ghost Rider book has to overcome if it decides the play the idea straight. The difficulty is that a flaming skeleton on a flaming bike is really a bit silly. An undeniably strong image, but a silly one. I'm of the school of thought that says the best way to deal with this is understatement. The more tied to reality the character can be made to look, the more chance there is that he'll come over as weird rather than stupid.

Trent Kaniuga obviously disagrees, as he's given the character a whopping great upper torso more appropriate to the Hulk, and a plume of flame so enormous that when the character is on his bike, instead of looking sleek, he looks triangular. For my tastes, it's far too much and tips the character way over into the realms of "silly."

What with a skeletal plot, a protagonist who looks stupid, and TONS OF F***ING MULLETS, this is a book that leaves me cold.