3 march 2002

It's an extremely heavy week, due to four late shipping titles turning up on top of the three that were actually due anyway. And this is a very, very mixed bunch indeed.

Let's kick off with the final issue of BROTHERHOOD. Any book that gets itself cancelled after nine issues is a bomb, and there's no getting away from that. It's a shame, as in theory it seemed like a great idea for a comic. As originally promoted, what we were going to get was a "street level" book about a terrorist group. And that could have been great.

What we've ended up with is far from the worst X-book ever written, if only because Howard Mackie's work on X-Factor and Mutant X had set standards so poor that it's hard to imagine anyone matching them, even Mackie himself. Whether Mackie actually is responsible for this book is beside the point - what matters is that it's a jumble of stray ideas with no real intellectual content to them, flailing around trying to pad out a book about revolution and terrorism despite the fundamental handicap of containing absolutely no story ideas relating to revolution or terrorism.

Typically devoid of any ideas that actually relate to the book's supposed premise, this final issue brings in X-Force as guest stars, on the basis that the Brotherhood would like to assassinate Doop. This makes a certain degree of sense in that the Brotherhood at least have a vaguely sensible motivation for doing so (although, nine issues into their series, the writer has never actually bothered to establish what the political agenda of the Brotherhood IS, other than vague platitudes about revolution). But typically, nothing actually comes of this idea, as X-Force are just used as a handy plot device to justify a big fight where everyone is killed.

A vaguely sensible explanation is at least given of the relationship between Hoffman, Marshal and Orwell, although it fails as a payoff because Marshal was never established as a character who could be taken seriously - he spent far too much of his time in unintentionally absurd situations that made him, and his plot, a laughing stock. Was there actually any point to last issue's scenes of Marshal dancing with a corpse, other than an attempt by the mystery writer to simulate depth and complexity by being a bit weird? No, of course there wasn't.

This book hasn't failed as obviously as something like Mutant X, which was actually so bad it was laughable, but its failure is still pretty fundamental - a failure to engage with the very ideas that are supposed to underpin the concept, a failure to make the characters plausible, a failure to generate any real dramatic tension. Its demise will not be mourned by anyone.

DEADPOOL sees a marginal improvement this issue as, in amongst the godawful plot, a few flickers of half-decent characterisation are present. I'm tempted to suggest that this might be something to do with Buddy Scalera's contribution, as he's turned up as a co-writer again. Scalera's one solo Deadpool effort really wasn't that bad.

However, this whole storyline remains irredeemably stupid. We have a bunch of Deadpool clones wandering around for no particular reason, really just reprising the same jokes that they did last issue. There's some downright ridiculous nonsense about the Backstreet Boys turning murderous in the middle of a concert. It's tiresome. It's inane.

Now, you could argue that this book is perfectly pitched for an audience of 13 year old boys, and that I'm just being overly critical because, thank christ, I am not a 13 year old boy. You might have a point. I don't care. What it boils down to is this: if you have an incredibly puerile sense of humour, and you felt that Say It Ain't So was just a touch too intellectual and thought-provoking for your tastes - basically, if you think that the jokes in Wizard are not merely funny, but clever and original - you will love this book. Everyone else should steer well clear until this storyline - and this creative team - are firmly out of the way.

Tieri can be funnier than this. He has been before. But this is not funny.

NEW X-MEN #123 is the second part of the Shi'ar storyline, although in fact most of this issue is given over to the X-Men's press conference.

Largely, this is an opportunity for Morrison to set out his stall more explicitly about the wonders that mutants offer for an upbeat and happy future. However, he makes sure to undercut the message somewhat by having Emma and Jean throwing their powers around against the reporters in order to make sure they leave with the "right" angle.

The plot mechanics of this are a little shaky - given that the press conference seems to be being televised live, it's not immediately apparent how it's possible to hold it telepathically in the first place, let alone wipe 30 seconds from the reporters' memories (what's the point if the thing's already been broadcast?). While it works very well thematically, the narrative logic is a little more rickety.

In the main subplot, Morrison finally gets around to giving the mini-Emmas a bit of personality. From the look of things, they started off as a visual gag and have now recurred often enough that somebody thought they should get a personality. The idea seems to be that they're identical quintuplets whose powers only work together. Not a bad idea, and I love the "Stepford Cuckoos" name.

Elsewhere, Morrison is wheeling out some of the standard plot devices, as the Shi'ar turn up in a misguided attempt to wipe everyone out, while the X-Men turn out to be under attack from that old Morrison standard, nanotech. God, he's been using nanotech since at least Doom Patrol, he must be bored of waiting for it to turn up by now.

Even though it's all very conventional, which can be a touch disappointing if you're expecting Morrison to be pouring on the ideas on every page, he does it all very well. This month's guest artist is Ethan van Sciver (with a couple of pages done very comptently by Tom Derenick), and while van Sciver seems to have lavished more attention on the plantlife than anything else, it's still a visually impressive issue overall.

Another good issue, although not one that contains anything particularly unexpected.

The NIGHTCRAWLER miniseries winds up, and although I'm still not convinced this was really a Nightcrawler-specific story, it's been a perfectly solid miniseries. If nothing else, it seems to have had a stronger sense of what it was trying to achieve than any of the other Icons minis that we've seen so far.

Not surprisingly, Kurt succeeds in tracking down and beating up the nasty slave-trader man. But Kipiniak seems more interested in flagging up the question mark over whether any of this is going to make any difference to anyone. As he points out, this is a large-scale social problem, and nothing in this story is going to change that. It's not even illegal in the USA, and Oleg is even allowed to make a semi-credible defence of his position, arguing that at the very least, he wasn't making these people's lives any worse, since they were already diabolical to start with.

Rather than telling us about the evils of slavery - which it already established well enough in earlier issues - this miniseries is more interested in constructing an argument for why it's worth Nightcrawler's time in trying to intervene here, despite the fact that he probably can't make any noticeable improvement. Ultimately he's forced to fall back on faith that if you do enough good deeds, something will improve in the end, while acknowledging that this is not an awfully satisfactory response.

Save insofar as it plays off Kurt's religious beliefs, it's certainly arguable that this story suffers from the flaw of having an interchangeable hero. You could do pretty much the same story with Daredevil, for example, and it wouldn't be dramatically different - although Kurt's status as a trainee priest does provide a handy vehicle for Kipiniak to flag up his faith theme.

Nonetheless, it's nice to see this one has developed into something a little more complex than just a straightforward piece of tubthumping about slavery being nasty. It's perhaps not what people were looking for from a Nightcrawler story, but taken on it's own terms, it's been reasonably successful.

Do you know, I think I'm starting to mellow on Mark Millar now that he's showing a bit more range. ULTIMATE X-MEN #15 is your typical between-arcs bridging story, where we're all reminded of the themes and a plot development crops up near the end to trail the next storyline. They're worth doing from time to time, although it's a bit odd to see this turning up on the heels of a two-issue fill-in storyline by a guest creative team.

Anyhow, the story uses the device of being a column by Professor Xavier about his views on mutants, accompanied by some appropriate illustrated scenes. We're ultimately told that Xavier's column has been pulped on the basis that it was too inflammatory in its "let's all hug one another" liberalness, which is a little hard to swallow when we're also told that he's just about to publish a book on the subject.

But the column gives Millar the opportunity to throw in some new ideas, and new spins on old standard ideas, which seem to be moving us beyond the formula of "indistinguishable characters turn up and be cynical while villains are all very, very nasty indeed." The rather vague idea of "mutant culture" which Grant Morrison has also been playing off crops up again here, but with a rather more concrete idea of what it's meant to be. ("Spike Lee's upcoming Magneto bio-pic" is a particularly good one-liner.)

Bolivar Trask turns up, of all people, but with some tweaks on his theory to make it a little less demented. There's also a rather good scene with Xavier meeting the remains of the Brotherhood of Mutants, and trying to talk them into using less violent methods of achieving global domination.

The token plot advancement is the explanation that Magneto's alive after all, and Xavier has wiped his mind in an attempt to reintroduce him into society. The story spins this as Xavier finding a peaceful solution to the question of what to do with Magneto, without anyone putting forward the usual counter-argument - presumably on the basis that it's sufficiently obvious that it doesn't need to be set out.

The art is competent enough but doesn't do much for me. Whichever one of the Kubert brothers it is this month - the credits don't actually specify, but I'm guessing Andy - there's something a bit too stagey about the way the characters are often posed. Nice colouring, though, which helps.

Not bad, all told. At this rate, Millar's going to get back in my good books.

WOLVERINE kicks off the Logan Files storyline, which judging from the solicitations is largely a device to introduce some of the plot elements from Origin into continuity.

For the moment, though, what we have is that old standard, "the baddies are capturing people who Wolverine is close to." This being a Frank Tieri story, it isn't subtle. Some of the dialogue is just plain awful, full of colourless melodrama. ("Mauvais' premonition a' doom has been weighin' heavy on my mind...")

Much as we've come to expect, there's nothing here beneath the surface - nasty villains do nasty things to nice people. Just rather boring.

WOLVERINE/HULK, in contrast, is at least interesting. Whether it's any good, I'm not quite so certain.

Obviously, if you have Sam Kieth writing and drawing a miniseries it's going to be strange. That's only to be expected. As with his recent Four Women miniseries for Homage, Kieth is taking the puzzle-box approach to plotting here. The actual plot is pretty straightforward - Wolverine crashes an aircraft in the mountains, and is found by a strange girl who tries to lead him to help her father, only to blunder into the Hulk. The point is to leave the audience wondering why the hell any of this is happening.

Kieth's stories generally do tend to make some degree of sense in the end, and the obvious explanation here would be that Logan is being led around by a confused ghost who wants him to sort out something-or-other for her so that she can move on to the afterlife. That's the standard explanation for these sorts of plots, although it still leaves the question of what the hell the Hulk is doing in this story.

The girl's questionable status as "real" is backed up by having her, and her flashbacks, shown in art of deteriorating quality as appropriate, until in many scenes she's appearing as a four-year- old's stick figure. When she's incorporated into otherwise normal scenes, the effect's very bizarre.

It goes without saying that if you do not find Keith's more demented tendencies appealing, you're not going to like this issue. Personally, I've always enjoyed that stuff. But I'm left a little unconvinced as to what he's trying to do here. If there's some reason why he's doing this story with Wolverine and the Hulk - other than the accident of history that Wolverine happened to make his first appearance in the Hulk's series - it's not immediately apparent. There's the definite possibility that this is a stray plot concept about a ghost which happens to have been plugged into the Marvel Universe arbitrarily.

But then, things in Sam Keith books tend not to be immediately apparent in the first issue, so I'm going to give it some more time to see where it's heading. This will certainly not be to everyone's taste, but those who do enjoy Keith's work should feel at home here.

What I've seen of Brian Azzarello's work has left me none the wiser as to what the big deal is meant to be. CAGE doesn't do much to change that.

This is a Max book, and I'm working on the assumption that we're outside mainstream continuity here (although typically, Marvel confuse the matter - and large chunks of the audience - by not bothering to confirm one way or the other). The high concept is that Luke Cage was always a kind of watered down blaxploitation character, so now that the Max line can free him from those restrictions, here he is in a blaxploitation story.

You may or may not agree with the basic premise that underlies that approach. Personally, I haven't had enough exposure to Cage as a character to know or care one way or the other. But it does raise one of the big problems with the Max imprint's approach to these relaunches. What Azzarello is writing here is in effect a different character. Other than the "ooh, aren't we radical" aspect of doing a faintly naughty version of a kiddie character, I just don't see the point in writing radically transformed versions of existing characters rather than just creating new ones.

Since the high concept is to do genre fiction, what we end up with is indeed a genre blaxploitation story. That's a genre which holds absolutely zero interest for me to start with. I'm tempted to suggest that this may be because I'm basically a suburban middle class kind of person who couldn't be much less inner-city if I tried. The whole genre just doesn't carry any resonance for me - at least, not as a starting point.

Unfortunately, what we have here is pretty much just a genre piece. It's so keen to hammer home the big idea of doing a Luke Cage blaxploitation piece that it hasn't actually bothered to do anything other than turn the character into a generic protagonist and shove him in a generic plot. It's rather dull.

If the genre doesn't already appeal to you, then this is not a story that's going to change your mind - because by all appearances, there's not much here beyond a bunch of genre conventions.