REVIEWS: The X-Axis - 13 July 2008
Paul O'Brien
13 July 2008
============
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:
YOUNG X-MEN #4 - "Extinction Agenda"
by Marc Guggenheim and Yanick Paquette
I KILL GIANTS #1 (of 7) - "The Hammer"
by Joe Kelly and J M Ken Niimura
THE NEW YORK FOUR
by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly
------------
We have three X-books this week, but once again, they're all in
mid-storyline. That means I have to pick one to fulfil the X-quota. So
let's do YOUNG X-MEN #4. It's nominally the most important of the
three, and besides, I haven't reviewed it in full since issue #1.
Young X-Men is the latest in a stream of titles about trainee X-Men.
From Generation X to New Mutants to New X-Men to the revamped New X-Men
to this book... we've had try after try at making this format work.
Apparently somebody at Marvel really, really likes this "junior team"
concept - but not the actual books that have resulted from it.
Will Young X-Men be any different? Well, it's hard to say, because four
issues in, we're still caught up in an opening storyline based around a
piece of misdirection. As pretty much everyone figured out a while ago,
the Young X-Men are a team of junior mutants recruited by a bad guy
posing as Cyclops. Clearly that's not going to be the premise of the
series, so in effect, four issues in, we still don't know what the book
is actually about. Well, except that it's about the junior team - like
all those titles that came before it.
Now, I quite like the creators on this book. Marc Guggenheim is a bit
hit and miss, but some of his Wolverine stories were good fun, and his
contributions to Amazing Spider-Man have been entertaining. Yanick
Paquette is an above average storyteller, and fine for a book of this
sort. And I quite like some of the cast they're using here. Rockslide,
the world's dumbest superhero, is a fun character. Ink is starting to
show signs of being promising.
But what we're missing is a core idea of what the series is about.
There's not much to invest in here. The team is plainly going to turn
into something else in a few issues time, and there's nothing
particularly gripping going on in the meantime. There's some running
around and fighting, and there's a half-hearted echo of the first New
Mutants story, but what's it about? I get the feeling of filler. And
that's not a good impression for a first arc to give.
It occurs to me that this title might be suffering from the need to play
along with "Divided We Stand." Marvel wanted to launch the book out of
the "Messiah Complex" crossover - but the new San Francisco setting
wasn't available until this month. That might explain the book playing
for time for a few months, before unveiling its actual concept. But if
so, they'd probably have been better off waiting to launch the title,
and using the intervening months to give New X-Men a proper ending.
It's also a questionable decision to do "bad guy impersonates Cyclops"
bang in the middle of Secret Invasion. Surely that plot ought to be
off-limits to everyone else for now?
Anyway, I'm not giving up hope on this book just yet. It's always
possible that it could pick up once we get down to business. But as an
opening story, I'm afraid this isn't getting the job done.
Rating: C+
------------
It's been a while since I heard Joe Kelly's name. He wrote X-Men for a
couple of years in the late nineties, before succumbing to the weight of
editorial interference and quitting.
Since then, he's produced a mixture of mainstream superhero and
animation work, alongside some very quirky side projects. I KILL GIANTS
is the latest such book, a seven-issue Image miniseries with artist JM
Ken Niimura.
Fifth grader Barbara Thorson is a somewhat unco-operative teenager who
does a bit of role-playing on the side. She also kills giants. Or so
she says. The issue contains no real evidence of anything of the sort,
but she's pretty adamant on the point. Mind you, we do see her talking
to fairies at the bottom of the garden. So basically, the question is
whether she's really fighting giants, or just stark raving mad.
On the face of it, the issue points rather strongly towards "stark
raving mad." After all, giants were the favoured opponent of Don
Quixote.
There's an obvious manga influence in the Ken Niimura's art, though
mixed with a sketchiness more typical of black and white indie comics.
It's good with the more straightforward scenes, but there are several
sequences here that only really become intelligible when they're read in
the light of Kelly's interviews. A page of Barbara looking intently up
some stairs, for example, frankly means very little. We've seen this
before with Kelly's more personal projects - the likes of Steampunk
tended towards rather obscure storytelling, usually to their detriment.
Although it's billed as the opening issue of a miniseries, this is
basically a whole load of set-up scenes, and it's better interpreted as
the opening pages of a graphic novel. It falls into the awkward
territory of being mildly interesting, enough that I'd keep reading if
the next issue was in front of me - but possibly not enough to make me
come back in a month's time.
An odd little book. It intrigues me without quite grabbing me. I might
give it another look when the inevitable trade comes out; I suspect
it'll be vastly improved in that format.
Rating: B
------------
Maybe it's just me, but when I heard the title THE NEW YORK FOUR, I
couldn't help imagining a lost Enid Blyton novel. Possibly about a New
Wave band.
Then I came to my senses and figured that it was probably going to be my
least favourite type of story: "I live in a major city and I'm going to
tell you about its poetic soul." Fortunately, it's not like that
either.
No, this is the latest Minx digest - only a week after Water Baby, which
is odd scheduling. Our creators this week are Brian Wood and his Local
collaborator Ryan Kelly, as the imprint continues its strategy of
drawing on talent from the indie scene. Come to think of it, I've never
read Local. On the strength of this, I probably should.
Despite the title and the back cover blurb ("Experience Manhattan
through the eyes of Riley..."), this really isn't a love letter to New
York. Lead character Riley is a shy, sheltered freshman student in New
York, still living at home. Her sister ran away to become vaguely
bohemian; her parents are very uptight about the whole thing. It's
really a story about Riley plucking up the courage to make a break for
independence.
And it does this story very well. It's a gentle plot, but it works
because the characters are detailed and believable enough to make us
care about them and their essentially universal problems. New York is
used well; to be honest, you could do the same story in any major city
with a university, but the story makes good use of the way Riley is able
to slip into anonymity and isolate herself in the city crowds.
"Hold on," I hear you say. "Wasn't this book called The New York Four?
What happened to the other three?"
Ah, yes, well. Mmm. Here's the thing. Remember the first Minx book,
Plain Janes? And remember how that book was supposedly about four
characters, except it was really only about one of them? And remember
how it all made a lot more sense when they announced a sequel?
Well, this seems to be along similar lines. This is Riley's story. The
other three are supporting characters, who seem to have been designed
for future use. One even has a subplot. True, this story needs them
because Riley has to get out there and make friends in the real world,
but to be honest, that's the weakest part of the plot; they go from
total strangers to friends rather speedily.
However. Unlike Plain Janes, where the other three were borderline
ciphers, Riley's co-stars have been developed to the point where I'd
quite like to see the sequels with their stories. They're an interesting
bunch, and while there's some room for fine-tuning the group dynamics, I
can see plenty of material in here.
It seems pretty clear that this is the first of a projected series. But
it delivered a complete story for Riley, and it convinced me that I want
to read the sequel. You can't really ask for much more, can you?
Rating: A
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Also this week:
GENEXT #3 - The first half of a No-Name story. Or rather, a story where
she runs away. She's an odd character; the narrator persists in calling
her "mysterious" and she's never been properly identified, but the rest
of the cast presumably know who she is. This seems to be an odd example
of Claremont writing a story where the characters all know what's going
on but deliberately don't explain it to the readers. Curious, and I'm
keeping an open mind about this. So far, I've enjoyed the series more
than I expected to. The back-up reprint this month is an old What
The--?! story by Kurt Busiek and Kyle Baker, but be warned that it
depends on you having a reasonable familiarity with the X-books circa
the late 1980s. It's patchy at best, but there's some cute parodying of
the likes of the Morlock Massacre. ("127 muties dead... all complete
nobodies, as far as I can tell.") B
NEW EXILES #8 - Chris Claremont's other title sets one of my concerns
about this story to rest, by confirming that, yes, there is a reason why
the level of technology on this particular Earth is so wildly
inconsistent. In fact, it's all quite readable so long as it sticks to
the basic story. A lengthy subplot about Psylocke and Slaymaster
doesn't do much for me, though - for heaven's sake, that story was two
decades ago, and it had a perfectly acceptable ending already. It drags
the book down a few notches. Overall, though, New Exiles is a book
which delivers what it promises: Chris Claremont doing alternate-reality
stories, with everything that implies. It's too busy, but at least the
creators seem to be having fun. 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, X-Factor #33 crosses over with Secret Invasion and She-Hulk
all at the same time, and X-Force #5 continues to rack up the body
count.
--
Paul O'Brien
THE X-AXIS - http://www.thexaxis.com
IF DESTROYED - http://ifdestroyed.blogspot.com
NINTH ART - http://www.ninthart.com
William George Ferguson
<pa...@esoterica.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>THE X-AXIS
>13 July 2008
>============
>Also this week:
>
>GENEXT #3 - The first half of a No-Name story. Or rather, a story where
>she runs away. She's an odd character; the narrator persists in calling
>her "mysterious" and she's never been properly identified, but the rest
>of the cast presumably know who she is. This seems to be an odd example
>of Claremont writing a story where the characters all know what's going
>on but deliberately don't explain it to the readers.
I'm pretty certain that the other students do Not know who No-Name is, or
at least who her parents are. Presumably Cyclops, Emma, and Beast do
(otherwise it's to difficult to explain why she's at the school), but the
students just know that she's another 'child of X-Men' like they are, not
which ones.
One thing we, the readers, are told that the students don't know is that
her parents were both Marvel super-geniuses, which should narrow the pool
of candidates somewhat, especially for the mother (how many female
super-geniuses, ala Reed Richards, Tony Stark, etc., are there).
Maybe she's the daughter of Chuck and Moira.
Hmm, she seems to be associated more with the dark side.
Maybe she's the daughter of Chondu the Mystic and Ruby Thursday :)
--
"Oh Buffy, you really do need to have
every square inch of your ass kicked."
- Willow Rosenberg
~consul
>> 13 July 2008
>> ============
>
>
>> Also this week:
>>
>> GENEXT #3 - The first half of a No-Name story. Or rather, a story where
>> she runs away. She's an odd character; the narrator persists in calling
>> her "mysterious" and she's never been properly identified, but the rest
>> of the cast presumably know who she is. This seems to be an odd example
>> of Claremont writing a story where the characters all know what's going
>> on but deliberately don't explain it to the readers.
> I'm pretty certain that the other students do Not know who No-Name is, or
> at least who her parents are. Presumably Cyclops, Emma, and Beast do
> (otherwise it's to difficult to explain why she's at the school), but the
> students just know that she's another 'child of X-Men' like they are, not
> which ones.
I felt that one of the kids, the boy that everyone seems to think he can track her no matter what, I kept getting the vibe that he was like her brother or something.
I keep thinking of that kid that the New X-Men kept joking was there, and always made references to but we never saw her on screen until there was a big battle, and she helps saved them.
> One thing we, the readers, are told that the students don't know is that
> her parents were both Marvel super-geniuses, which should narrow the pool
> of candidates somewhat, especially for the mother (how many female
> super-geniuses, ala Reed Richards, Tony Stark, etc., are there).
> Maybe she's the daughter of Chuck and Moira.
>
> Hmm, she seems to be associated more with the dark side.
> Maybe she's the daughter of Chondu the Mystic and Ruby Thursday :)
>
>
>
--
"... respect, all good works are not done by only good folk. For here, at the end of all things, we shall do what needs to be done."
--till next time, consul -x- <<poetry.dolphins-cove.com>>