REVIEWS: The X-Axis - 15 June 2008

[Paul O'Brien]

THE X-AXIS
15 June 2008
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X-Axis mailing list, visit http://www.thexaxis.com

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This week:

X-FORCE: AIN'T NO DOG
"Ain't No Dog" by Charlie Huston and Jefte Palo
"Hunters & Killers" by Jason Aaron and Werther Dell'edera

ETERNALS #1
by Charles Knauf, Daniel Knauf & Daniel Acuna

BURNOUT
by Rebecca Donner & Inaki Miranda

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If you like throwaway Wolverine stories, then this has been the month of
your dreams. On top of his three monthly titles, the last few weeks
have already seen the release of two Wolverine one-shots. And now we
have X-Force: Ain't No Dog. Nominally, it's a spin-off from the new
X-Force title, but the lead story stars... guess who? Correct.

What on earth is going on here? Who could possibly have decided that
the world needed seven Wolverine comics in a single month? (And that's
before you count any of the team books that he also appears in.) People
have been saying for years that Wolverine is overexposed, but this is
getting farcical.

Of course, you can't blame the creators for Marvel's scheduling
diarrhoea. So what have we got here?

Well, "Ain't No Dog" itself is a full-length story by Charlie Huston and
Jefte Palo. Huston is the pulp novelist responsible for the recent Moon
Knight relaunch, which I rather liked. Palo's name doesn't mean much to
me; from the look of it, he likes his Frank Miller and his Mike Mignola.
The art is over the top, but pleasing enough in a rough-edged, highly
stylised sort of way.

The story, though. The story. There's a token plot, in which Cyclops
sends Wolverine to defeat a bad guy and recover the microchip in his
head - an order which Wolverine takes rather literally. But that's
beside the point. It's really just an excuse for Wolverine to slaughter
people while assuring us that they're not innocent.

From the look of it, the idea is that we should revel in Wolverine's
violent excesses, but find his impassive black humour a little
disturbing. It's morally ambiguous, do you see? The problem here is
that Wolverine's ambivalence towards his violent tendencies is not only
well documented, it's been one of the key themes of his character for
decades. Even the current X-Force series has stressed that Wolverine
doesn't want the rest of the team to end up as killers like him. So a
story like this, where Wolverine is blackly delighted by the whole
thing, seems to miss the point of the character rather badly.

There's also a back-up strip featuring Warpath. This one's bland but
serviceable. X-Force is playing Warpath as a character who's willing to
kill for the right cause, but who's troubled by the trail of bodies he's
now leaving behind him. Writer Jason Aaron duly makes that point at
more length. It's fine, and it does as much as could be expected from a
fill-in story, which can only flag up the idea rather than advancing it.
The art is forgettable, but adequate, and the colouring helps add a bit
of atmosphere.

Overall, this is simply a book we didn't need. It's hard to imagine
anyone so bereft of Wolverine and Warpath stories that they might
actually yearn to own this, and the Wolverine story misses the mark
quite significantly. But on the other hand, Palo's art has its
strengths, and the back-up strip's not bad.

Rating: C+

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It's been the better part of two years since Neil Gaiman's Eternals
series, but Marvel have finally got around to launching an ongoing title
on the back of it.

I'm a little surprised it's taken them so long; Gaiman's series plainly
set out to give the Eternals a new status quo that would be a
springboard for future stories. The premise, if you've forgotten, was
that the Eternals had been banished to live among mankind as normal
humans, but that some of them had got their memories back. So, the
revived Eternals now have to find all the others, in time to defeat
something called the Horde when it shows up.

Now, in the interim, a rather similar idea has been used prominently in
Thor. Perhaps the delay in launching this series has something to do
with Marvel not wanting the books to tread on each other's toes. Or
perhaps they just weren't terribly sure whether the Eternals miniseries
- which did okay, but was hardly a blockbuster success - had actually
generated enough interest to justify an ongoing series. Mind you, if
that was the concern, the delay won't have helped any.

The new series is written by the Knauf brothers, coming off a decent run
on Iron Man. In theory, this book goes off in a different direction
altogether; it's cosmic characters in the real world. But they're
taking a fairly down to earth approach. There's a lot of Eternals making
their way in the real world, and not much of people flying around in
Jack Kirby costumes.

It's not bad. It sets up the premise efficiently enough, and it makes
sure to focus on a core cast. But there's something missing. I don't
find myself caring all that much about whether the Eternals find each
other, perhaps because none of the characters are particularly strongly
defined. The only real threat here is the possibility that the Horde
are going to show up and destroy the planet, but we all know that's not
going to happen. For this to work, I need to root for Ikaris, Thena and
Makkari to succeed... but they're rather watery characters who don't
much interest me.

So it's one of those awkward books that doesn't really do anything wrong
- in fact, it gets most things right - but falls short in giving me a
reason to get involved. It's fine for the most part, but it doesn't
draw me in.

Rating: B-

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Finally for this week, we have Burnout, which kicks off the second wave
of digests from DC's Minx imprint.

As you almost certainly know, Minx is meant to draw in teenage girls by
offering a sort of comic book equivalent of the young adult novel.
Despite the packaging, it's not English-language manga. The hope,
presumably, is to offer the comics-receptive teenage audience a domestic
alternative to manga, instead of a domestic imitation. In practice,
this has tended to mean digest versions of the sort of comic that Oni
used to put out five years ago. That might explain why Minx is aimed at
teenage girls, but reviewed mainly by adult men. Like me.

Burnout is the first comic by Rebecca Donner, one of various novelists
who've contributed to the imprint. It's an unusual story, which starts
off as a teen romance and then wanders off elsewhere. There's a lot
going on in here, and I'm not entirely convinced that the book makes all
of those elements work. Still, there's no denying that it's ambitious.

Danni and her recently-divorced mother have moved to a small logging
town in Oregon, and end up moving in with mom's new alcoholic boyfriend.
There, Danni falls in love with her prospective stepbrother Haskell, who
turns out to be a devoted environmentalist and eco-saboteur. (The story
prefers the term eco-terrorist, but that's probably pushing it.) Danni
soon ends up drawn into his one-man campaign.

The interesting, and welcome, thing about this story is that it manages
to maintain a decidedly ambivalent moral line on Haskell. On the one
hand, we're evidently meant to admire him as a man of principle who
stands up for what he believes in, putting himself at risk for a worthy
cause. But at the same time, he seems hopelessly naive about the
persuasive value of his actions. And although he clearly believes he's
taking care not to hurt anyone, it's debatable whether he understands
the practicalities as well as he thinks he does.

This is all quite interesting, and makes for a surprisingly balanced
moral debate. Other bits of the story don't work quite as well. A
subplot about the abusive stepfather doesn't get enough space to grow
beyond cliche, and ends up feeling tacked on. I think I see why it's
there - it allows the story to end with somebody drawing practical
inspiration from Haskell's off-beam example - but it doesn't quite fly.

By this point, the Minx imprint has developed a standard protagonist: a
feisty teenage girl who usually learns a lesson of some sort in a
coming-of-age story. Danni doesn't fit that picture. She starts off
confused, latches onto Haskell as a cute guy with strong and seemingly
persuasive opinions, and has moments of realisation, but still seems to
end up as a spectator. On a first reading, the ending seems decidedly
odd and unresolved.

There's a reason for that. Although it starts out as a romance,
somewhere along the line this turns into another very familiar story: a
misguided hero of passion and conviction is brought down by his lack of
understanding. It's a tragedy, in other words. But the tragic hero is
Haskell, not Danni. She's just the narrator. Presenting the story from
her perspective, as if she was the star, has the effect of distracting
us from a basically familiar plot because we keep waiting for Danni to
do protagonist-type things. And she never really does, which initially
makes for a rather unsatisfying read. I suspect, though, that it may be
the sort of story that improves with re-reading.

Either way, it's a slightly odd entry for the Minx imprint, since it
isn't really a girl story at all. Whether that's a strange misfire of
this particular story, or signals the imprint intentionally diversifying
from its rigid adherence to Protagonists Who Could Be You, I'm not sure.
We'll have to wait for future stories.

Artist Inaki Miranda isn't familiar to me, although he's done some work
on Fables and 2000AD. He does a good job here; there's nothing flashy,
but his characters are expressive, and he makes the finale look suitably
impressive.

This is an interesting book, albeit not a totally successful one. It
doesn't quite fit the Minx template, but that's not necessarily a bad
thing.

Rating: B

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Also this week:

GENEXT #2 - Chris Claremont and Patrick Scherberger's miniseries about a
third-generation X-Men team is turning out to be surprisingly readable
stuff. Despite the cumbersome premise and the ties to X-Men: The End
continuity, Claremont has kept the focus squarely on the characters, and
the series is recapturing some of the appeal of early New Mutants. I'm
concerned to see Claremont dusting off the Shockwave Riders, of all the
obscure villains, especially as there still doesn't seem to be much of a
concept behind them. But that aside, this series has been enjoyable so
far. B+

NEW EXILES #7 - The start of a new storyline, and this time we're
visiting an alternate world where the British Empire is being run from
New York. Claremont seems to be settling down into a format of bouncing
through rather complicated parallel worlds, and simultaneously
developing his character subplots just as he would with any other team
book (but which previous Exiles writers have tended to skip). There
might be a shade too much going on, but it's basically a decent book. B

SKAAR: SON OF HULK #1 - Mystifying ongoing series spinning off from the
"Planet Hulk" storyline. The basic idea is that when the Hulk's
pregnant wife died, the kiddie survived after all and grew up on Sakaar.
Apparently Hulkspawn are resilient beasties. The first issue, frankly,
is a bit of a mess - it races through events at breakneck pace, and most
of what it presents is a garbled selection of fantasy elements which
worked surprisingly well in "Planet Hulk" but just seem laboured here.
It seems to be simply a generic barbarian comic, and I don't quite
understand what (if anything) writer Greg Pak is trying to do beyond
that. Considering that Pak's original storyline worked quite well, this
is rather disappointing. C-

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There's more from me at If Destroyed, and apparently the Ninth Art
archive is going to back online at some point...
http://ifdestroyed.blogspot.com

Next week, Wolverine takes a detour from regular continuity to begin
"Old Man Logan", the new Mark Millar/Steve McNiven arc. X-Factor
reaches a turning point. And Ultimate X-Men has more of the Ultimate
Alpha Flight.

--
Paul O'Brien

THE X-AXIS - http://www.thexaxis.com
IF DESTROYED - http://ifdestroyed.blogspot.com
NINTH ART - http://www.ninthart.com