REVIEWS: The X-Axis - 8 June 2008
Paul O'Brien
8 June 2008
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For more links, cover art, archived reviews, and information on the
X-Axis mailing list, visit http://www.thexaxis.com
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This week:
ANGEL: REVELATIONS #1 (of 5) - "Senior Year"
by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa & Adam Pollina
WOLVERINE: DANGEROUS GAMES
"Tally Ho!" by Simon Spurrier & Ben Oliver
"Purity" by Rick Remender & Jerome Opena
ULTIMATE ORIGINS #1 (of 5)
by Brian Bendis & Butch Guice
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ANGEL: REVELATIONS came out last week, but slipped past my radar. At
first I assumed that it just hadn't shown up in the UK, which happens
from time to time. But as it turns out, I just didn't spot it on the
shelf.
In my defence, (a) it doesn't have the full advertised title on the
cover, (b) it doesn't look like a typical Marvel comic, (c) it doesn't
have the Marvel logo on the cover, (d) it doesn't have the names of the
creators on the cover, and (e) it was filed alphabetically with all the
IDW Angel books. And judging by the embarrassingly huge pile of unsold
copies, I wasn't the only one who missed it. (The woman behind the
counter agreed that it had been a rather sluggish seller and lamented
the decision not to file it under "X".)
Well, never mind. It's here now.
Angel: Revelations is a five-issue miniseries by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
and Adam Pollina, revisiting the Angel's origin story. It's a Marvel
Knights book, so heaven only knows whether it's supposed to be canon or
not. I have no idea what that imprint is supposed to be used for these
days.
There is something to be said for revisiting Angel's origin story. The
early issues of X-Men didn't bother to explain how the team had actually
come together, or to give the members individual origin stories. That
information was only filled in a few years later, in a series of back-up
strips. They were largely mediocre, and they're almost never referenced
- which speaks volumes for how badly they failed as origin stories.
Even Cyclops' story, which established him as the first X-Man and
introduced the idea that he was a runaway orphan, was largely about a
squabble with the Living Diamond.
Angel's story is particularly odd. It starts off with Warren at
boarding school, but following a change of writer, it lurches off in a
completely different direction and gives him a brief career as a solo
superhero in New York. With this series, Aguirre-Sacasa seems mostly
interested in the private school angle, which was cut off in midstream.
The plot is in two parts. A framing sequence involves a sinister priest
hunting down Warren, who's been the subject of religious visions. So,
from the look of it we're getting a story which plays in some way off
Angel's religious iconography. Fair enough; it's something distinctive
to the character.
The rest of the story, however, sees Warren on the verge of discovering
his mutant powers, in a rather standard high school drama setting.
There's a moderate-to-bitchy cheerleader; there's another jock rivalling
for the girl's affection. There's a roommate who is apparently annoyed
about Warren's interest in said cheerleader, although the word "gay" is
studiously tiptoed around.
The story does manage to make Warren sympathetic despite the fact that
he's a successful rich kid at an expensive boarding school. And that's
something of an achievement. I'll have to reserve judgment until I see
where Aguirre-Sacasa is heading with some of this story, though.
Artist Adam Pollina was a regular fixture on the X-books back in the
nineties, when he did some rather good work on X-Force. He's always had
a tendency to distort and elongate his characters for effect, and since
we last saw him, he seems to have acquired a hint of Larry Stroman.
There are plenty of memorable images here, and a good, creepy atmosphere
in the priest sequences.
But I've got to admit that at times, Pollina seems to be working against
the best interests of the plot. The script bends over backwards to
stress that Warren has been getting leaner, but when everyone looks
equally emaciated, that doesn't quite come across. And the opening page
- a boarded-up haunted house incongruously captioned as "A farmhouse in
the middle of the country" - suggests that writer and artist had
entirely different visions for the scene.
It's a bit of a mixed bag, then. But a lot of it certainly works, and
some of the rest still shows potential. Worth a look.
Rating: B+
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Marvel is now publishing three ongoing Wolverine series. And I know
what you're thinking - that's just not enough! And apparently, Marvel
agree, because WOLVERINE: DANGEROUS GAMES is the second Wolverine
one-shot in four weeks.
But let's not hold that against the book. After all, there's so much
else to hold against it.
This is a story about foxhunting. Foxhunting was banned in the UK in
2004. In fact, up here in Scotland, it was banned in 2002. So we're
really on the cutting edge of topicality here. Perhaps for an encore Si
Spurrier could write a story making fun of The Weakest Link.
For my part, I have no strong views on foxhunting. And there's a reason
for that. The arguments are not clear-cut. Broadly speaking, hunt
supporters would tell you that foxhunting is a traditional community
pasttime of rural life; that the foxes would have to be killed somehow
or other for pest control reasons; and that hunting is no worse than any
other way of doing it. The anti-hunt lobby would broadly accept the
first two points but argue that there are other, more humane ways of
achieving the pest control outcome. Much of the evidence is
inconclusive, and depends on how willing you are to anthropomorphise
animals, and impute human emotional states to them.
Plausible arguments can be made in either direction. If I cared about
the topic sufficiently to read up on it, I might choose a concluded
view. But I don't care, because frankly, the whole subject comes some
way down my list of priorities. What is apparent, however, is that the
debate is attended with such a degree of bitterness and distrust that it
barely qualifies as a debate at all.
What Si Spurrier gives us here is a story about a bunch of British
aristocrats who have implausibly decamped to Louisiana to avoid the ban.
Now, anyone who knows the slightest thing about foxhunting knows that
participation spread rather wider than the tiny elite of "aristocrats",
a class who were virtually wiped out by high taxation in the seventies
anyway. But Spurrier gives us a bunch of caricatures who say things
like "Jolly good show" and "old bean."
You can just about get away with this sort of thing if you're doing
very, very broad comedy, but this seems to fancy itself as some sort of
actual satirical attack on foxhunting. And that's just depressing. On
the strength of this, you have to wonder, not just whether Spurrier has
ever actually laid eyes on a fox hunt, but whether he has ever left a
city. It's got nothing to do with the actual arguments against fox
hunting; it's just a dreary, mean-spirited ad hominem attack which bears
no resemblence to planet earth.
Notionally, the story does deal with Wolverine's own response to fox
hunting. After all, as it acknowledges, he can hardly be opposed to
hunting per se. The problem is, it sweeps the subject aside by having
Wolverine give a little speech about how hunting is wrong when it serves
no purpose. Except fox hunting does serve a purpose: pest control. It
might not be the best way of achieving that goal, and it might not even
a morally acceptable way - but to suggest that it has no purpose other
than as an end in itself is disingenuous.
If you really want to see a decent story about Wolverine dealing with
dimwit hunters, there's a rather good Classic X-Men back-up strip that
deals with essentially similar themes in half the space and with three
times the intelligence. Go and read that instead.
This is a smug, arrogant, self-righteous piece of sneering, and on top
of that, it's half a decade out of date. Spurrier might well be on the
right side of the argument, but he doesn't have to be such a total prick
about it.
And now the plus points. The story is drawn by Ben Oliver, who does a
lovely Wolverine, and makes the best of the horse chase sequences. It
looks great. He's wasted on the material.
There's also a ten-page back-up strip by Rick Remender and Jerome Opena,
in which Wolverine tries to take the moral high ground when fighting bad
guys in Thailand, but ultimately decides not to bother. It's a rather
odd piece, in that it goes back to the old theme of Wolverine fighting
with his bestial nature, it has the bestial side win, and it presents
that as a broadly good thing. This is Wolverine indulging his impulses,
getting away with it, and being satisfied by the rest. I'm a little
uncomfortable with the moral stance here, although a case can be made
that it works in the context of what we know about the character more
broadly.
But regardless, it's miles better than the lead story, and it does take
a slightly unusual angle on a core theme of the character. That, and the
art on the lead strip, are enough to raise this book out of the D-range
- but only by the skin of its teeth.
Rating: C-
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There's been a last-minute blitz of house ads for ULTIMATE ORIGINS.
This is useful, because I hadn't realised we were expected to care all
that much. It's nice of Marvel to tidy that up.
Let's be blunt. The Ultimate imprint has been in the doldrums for the
last couple of years, with falling sales on most of the books. There's
an aura of inertia to the whole thing. The books already exist and they
sell way above the cancellation limit. Therefore, material must be
found to fill the pages. Ultimate Spider-Man is an exception - that
book really does feel like a personal vehicle for Brian Bendis to tell
Spider-Man stories. But otherwise, it's hard to shake the sense that
most Ultimate titles exist because they already exist, not because
anyone has a particularly clear idea of what to do with them.
So Marvel might have left it a bit late to get around to Ultimate
Origins. The series finally explains the hidden secret of the Ultimate
universe, as mentioned... er, in a single issue of Ultimate Marvel
Team-Up a good few years ago. (Inexplicably, the flashback to that
story is captioned "six months ago", which is just weird.)
I was expecting this to be some sort of conspiracy story. I suppose in
some ways it is. But primarily, this seems to be the story of why super
powers exist in the Ultimate Universe at all. In other words, it's the
common origin story that explains why anyone has powers.
I'm not sure you really need to explain this sort of thing. It's a
genre convention that people can have super powers, and with a bit of
artistic licence, that's good enough for me. But the Marvel Universe
does have a standing explanation for the existence of super powers.
It's an old Thor story about the Celestials coming to prehistoric Earth
and tinkering with the Neanderthals. It made passable sense in the
original context, and it has the advantage of being somewhat vague and
mystical. But it's always struck me as a rather awkward explanation for
some books; the further the character veers from the cosmic arena, the
more incongruous it becomes to say that he has superpowers thanks to the
intervention of a cosmic giant. And naturally enough, most writers just
ignore that stuff and treat the existence of super powers as a ground
rule.
I suspect that's what will happen in the Ultimate Universe as well.
Still, if you're going to have a literal origin story for a more
street-level universe, then you can't get away with the Celestials. And
so, here we have something different.
Basically, and without giving too much away, that "something" attributes
the origin of superpowers to the US government's Super-Soldier Project
in the Second World War, so apparently the Ultimate Universe had no
superhumans before then. The suggestion is that they came up with
something, accidentally disseminated it, and now you end up with super
powers.
As an explanation... well, it's okay. It's somewhat more in tone with
the Ultimate Universe, but also rather more specific and limited than
the Celestial stuff. But of course, it's not enough for the series to
provide a workable explanation; it needs to offer a story as well. This
is where the book falters. Stuff happens, and that stuff makes sense,
but none of it really feels like it's leading anywhere especially
interesting. (Ultimate Malcolm Colcord? He wasn't that exciting the
first time round.)
Art comes from veteran Butch Guice. He's always been solid, and this
story shows a nice combination of traditional figures with imaginative
layouts. There's a lovely sequence with the fate of the first prototype
super-soldier: a bloke waving a flag around, who gets gunned down in
seconds.
So, overall... it's, you know, it's solid. It doesn't bog down the
whole Ultimate Universe in some ludicrous conspiracy theory. It's
actually quite workable as an explanation. The art's rather good. But
so far, it doesn't make for a particularly compelling story - and the
Ultimate imprint no longer has the cachet to make "the origin of
superpowers in the Ultimate Universe" an inherently interesting subject.
Rating: B
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Also this week:
CABLE #4 - I'm starting to get frustrated by this book. There are some
basically interesting ideas in here, and the premise has potential. But
the pace is sluggish, and we're stuck wandering around a generic
dystopian future without any particular reason to care about what
happens to it. I mean, it's okay, and there are some nice details, but
I just don't get the feeling that we're making much progress with the
story here. B
YOUNG X-MEN #3 - With this one, on the other hand, I just don't get what
they're trying to do. Presumably we're heading towards a "twist" where
it turns out that the New Mutants haven't become bad guys after all, and
Cyclops is an impostor. But that's been lumbering towards us since
issue #1. As it stands, this book is just a bit confused, and doesn't
make much sense. Maybe things will pick up when we get to the
presumptive twist, but I can't figure out what we're supposed to make of
the book at the moment. Surely they don't expect us to take it at face
value? It all seems horrendously contrived. If there's actually a
decent idea behind this book, for heaven's sake get on with it. 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
http://www.ninthart.com
Next week, Chris Claremont's alternate reality X-Men series continues in
GeNext #2. New Exiles #7 visits a world stuck 400 years in the past.
And X-Force: Ain't No Dog is a one-shot with a double-bill of Wolverine
and Warpath stories.
--
Paul O'Brien
THE X-AXIS - http://www.thexaxis.com
IF DESTROYED - http://ifdestroyed.blogspot.com
NINTH ART - http://www.ninthart.com
Donnacha
"Paul O'Brien" <pa...@esoterica.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:g6OvZdAs9$SIF...@esoterica.demon.co.uk...
> THE X-AXIS
> 8 June 2008
> ===========
>
> aristocrats who have implausibly decamped to Louisiana to avoid the ban.
> Now, anyone who knows the slightest thing about foxhunting knows that
> participation spread rather wider than the tiny elite of "aristocrats", a
> class who were virtually wiped out by high taxation in the seventies
> anyway. But Spurrier gives us a bunch of caricatures who say things like
> "Jolly good show" and "old bean."
>
in Ireland. Hunters who dress up in the traditional reds do tend to come out
with shite like "Jully good show" and "old bean" for effect. To play devil's
advocate for a moment - is there anyone here from the Southern US who can
tell us if there has been any kind of fox-hunting tradition or influx in
recent years?
D.