REVIEWS: The X-Axis - 6 July 2008

[Paul O'Brien]

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

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This week:

ASTONISHING X-MEN #25 - "Ghost Box"
by Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi

CABLE #5 - War Baby, part 5 of 5
by Duane Swierczynski and Ariel Olivetti

WATER BABY
by Ross Campbell

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So, then, welcome to San Francisco.

When Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi were first announced as the new
creative team for ASTONISHING X-MEN, I had my doubts. They're certainly
an unusual choice. After all, the title was created as a vehicle for
Joss Whedon. And Whedon was a fan, who clearly enjoyed getting to play
with the characters from the classic 1980s stories.

Ells is a very different writer. His stories are much darker in tone.
And he'd be the first to agree that he comes to the genre as a
professional rather than as a fan. Nonetheless, over the last few
years, he's written a number of revamps and relaunches for Marvel, a
task that he seems to approach more as a writing challenge: how can I
make these things interesting? Sometimes the result is a Nextwave,
which genuinely makes some old characters interesting. Sometimes it's
an Iron Man, which nails one of his pet themes onto a character who
didn't need it.

With that in mind, I was bracing myself for the likelihood of some
tinkering with the concept that might well improve it, and then again,
might well not.

As it turns out, we do indeed get a new angle and a new status quo for
the X-Men. It's the new San Francisco setting, already dutifully set up
by Ed Brubaker in Uncanny X-Men. That's the big idea. Now, I don't
know who came up with the SF move, but it's given such prominence in
this issue that I can only assume Ellis at least had a major hand in it.

The new status quo sees the X-Men as the new superhero team of San
Francisco, on excellent terms with the local authorities, and going
about their business in unaccustomed peace and quiet. They've got a new
base which they're just breaking in, and they're all settling into their
new home, where things seem to be pretty much great. Instead of being
outcasts, the X-Men now find themselves in a happy little refuge where
they're probably more popular than any of the other Marvel heroes.

This all seems a bit utopian to last for long, but it's certainly good
news to see the X-Men moving to a setting that offers a break from the
unremitting bleakness of the last few years. If the X-Men are going to
cheer up a bit, I'm all for that.

Anyway, that's the setting. The actual story is half an issue of
gathering the team - in an introductory rather than a literal sense -
following by half an issue of police procedural. A slightly awkward
ending suggests that Ellis is basically writing for the trade and
breaking when the page count runs out. But he does make sure to keep
the pace up, and it reads fine.

Armor takes over the old Kitty Pryde neophyte role, and Storm is back
from the outer wilderness of Black Panther for a brief guest starring
run. Colossus has vanished altogether, presumably to appear in Uncanny
instead. Otherwise, our cast is much the same as before. However, it
has to be said that they've all developed a tendency to talk in
Ellisisms. None of them are out of character, as such, but Ellis'
dialogue has a cadence as distinctive in its way as Chris Claremont's.
You know the sort of thing - "Henry, there had better be coffee or else
I will simply believe there is no god."

The last time we saw Simone Bianchi in these parts, he was drawing Jeph
Loeb's Wolverine arc. But let's not hold that against him; the plot may
have been unintelligble, but the pictures were beautiful. This issue
seems to have printed a little on the dark side, apparently an
occasional problem for Marvel colourists. Consequently, it's a bit
murky, but you can still tell that there are some beautiful drawings.

My only real concern about Bianchi is his predilection for baroque panel
layouts. To be honest, this issue doesn't give him a huge amount to
work with. There's an awful lot of standing around and talking. But
there are quite a few pages made up of random-shaped, overlapping panels
which are at best a prettifying distraction from the story. Look at the
third-last page, for example - what the hell is going on with those
panels in the middle? And why did this casual conversation call for an
ultra-tight close-up on Wolverine's eye? Bianchi draws beautifully, but
I'm not so sold on his storytelling instincts.

On the whole, though, this is a good start - not the ground-up
reimagining that I'd half expected, but a snappy, direct story in an
upbeat new location.

Rating: A-

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The week's only other X-book is CABLE #5, completing the opening "War
Baby" arc.

You'll recall that at the end of "Messiah Complex", Cable fled into the
future with the new mutant baby. Bishop gave chase, hoping to kill the
baby off. And in this storyline, they both spent five issues running
around a future New Jersey shooting at each other and at the locals.

It's all perfectly readable, but I don't get the feeling that we're
heading anywhere. After five issues, what have we achieved? Well, we've
established that Cable can only flee further into the future, which is
one thing. Aside from that, though, all we know is that Bishop wants to
kill the baby and Cable wants to save her... and we knew that in
"Messiah Complex." So the book has basically devoted its opening arc to
setting up a premise that the vast majority of its readers knew already.

Aside from that, there wasn't much to this story. You've got an
unpleasant local regime, and you've got a clunky subplot about a
waitress being inspired by Cable's example to, er, get some really big
guns and kill people. This comes across a lot sillier than it was
probably supposed to, as we never get a good reason to care much about
the fate of this generic dystopia.

Oh, and this issue does drop some very heavy hints about the identity of
the baby - although for most readers, they probably won't do more than
confirm that you're on the right track.

I don't particularly dislike this book. It meanders along happily
enough, and there's something curiously engaging about Ariel Olivetti's
art, with its combination of hyper-real backgrounds and cartoonish
figures. There's a deadpan ridiculousness to the book, which I
sincerely hope is intentional. But it's a quick, superficial read, and
it's taken five issues to advance by a fraction of an inch.

Rating: C+

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The second wave of Minx titles continues with Ross Campbell's WATER
BABY. In many ways, this is one of the strangest books the imprint has
produced to date. It's got some of the best individual scenes the
imprint has produced to date. And yet, and yet...

Here's the outline. Teenage surfer Brody loses her leg in a shark
attack. While she's still recovering, and plagued by recurring shark
dreams, obnoxious ex-boyfriend Jake shows up to visit. For a few days.
Or weeks. Eventually, Brody packs him into a car (along with
long-suffering best friend Louisa) and sets out to drive him home and
get rid of him. Cue road trip.

That's the concept. But put like that, it makes the book sound a lot
more plot-driven than it actually is.

It's really a character-driven book, which slowly explores the awkward
love-hate triangle between Brody, Louisa and Jake. There are no big
confrontations where anyone has blinding realisations, merely small,
semi-revealing moments that are open to interpretation. Dotted
throughout the issue are Brody's shark dreams, surreal sequences which
Campbell also allows to be mildly cryptic.

Let's start with the positive. Campbell's a great artist, willing (and
able) to use subtle expression to hint at what his characters are
feeling below the surface. The personalities are well defined and
clearly well thought through. The opening shark attack sequence is
paced brilliantly, and does one of the best jobs of building menace that
I've seen in comics. The dream scenes are visually inventive and
compellingly surreal.

That's a decent list of good things. And before I move on to consider
where it doesn't quite work, let's be absolutely, abundantly clear about
this. There's a lot of very, very good stuff in Water Baby. Okay?
Right, let's move on.

There are two problems here. One, aside from Louisa, the characters are
irritating. I just don't much like them, and at the end of the day, I
don't greatly care what happens to them. Oh, and they laugh at their own
jokes. Incessantly.

Two, the plot falls apart towards the end. Now, your typical road trip
story goes something like this. Two or three characters go on a trip,
they encounter stuff on the way, they learn something, their
relationship is changed by the experience, the end. In this case, it
would usually be "our relationship is self-destructive and I have got
over the loss of my leg." It's a classic old formula and it usually
works.

But what we have here is a story where nobody seems to learn anything
along the way, and nobody is changed by the experience. There's no
character arc, there's no development, there's no real sense that any of
this particularly matters. What we have is a bunch of characters going
around in emotional circles. There's a grand gesture in the closing
pages which attempts to serve as an ending, but it isn't a culmination
of anything.

Perhaps Campbell was going for a traditional road trip plot and missed
the mark by a mile. Perhaps he was deliberately backing off from
traditional story structure in the name of realism. Perhaps we're even
meant to see the ending as downbeat and vaguely meaningless, because we
have more insight than Brody does - which would take the story into odd
territory for a young adult novel, but you never know. But whatever the
reasons, he ends up spending the second half of his book studying his
characters rather than moving them anywhere - well, except physically.
The story peters out and sputters to a halt.

So, this comic is less than the sum of its parts. And that's
frustrating, because it has some really excellent parts. Most readers,
I suspect, will find the ending weirdly hollow and the story
unsatisfying. But if you can live with the minimal non-plot - a big if,
I'm warning you - then there's plenty of interest in this book.

Rating: B-

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Also this week:

PATSY WALKER: HELLCAT #1 - If you enjoyed the kooky Hellcat story in
Marvel Comics Presents, well, here's an entire miniseries. Hellcat is
called back into service by the Initiative, who have just the state for
her to protect: Alaska. On her own. (Yes, I know recent years have
seen more stories set in Alaska than, say, Missouri - and that the
"first line of defence" justification given for the Hawaii team in this
week's Avengers: The Initiative should apply equally to Alaska. Shhhh.
It's not that sort of comic.) Every bit as cheerfully demented as
Kathryn Immonen's earlier storyline, this probably won't appeal to
everyone's sense of humour - and it's a bit light on the actual story.
Great art, though, and for sheer bounciness in the face of mild threat,
you've got to admire it. A-

SECRET INVASION: FRONT LINE #1 - Brian Reed takes over as writer for the
third Front Line series, and as before, Ben Urich is covering the
megacrossover from the street level perspective. Actually, it's a
B-movie horror story - group of strangers trapped in a building when the
shapechangers invade. It's fine, but I can't help getting distracted by
some bizarre attempts to tell us that Marvel New Yorkers hardly ever see
the superheroes, and live totally normal lives which are disturbed only
"once, maybe twice, in a lifetime." Now, obviously this is one of those
artistic licence things which it's better not to think about directly,
but if by spending so long talking about it, you're only drawing
attention to the problem. If you want to do a story in a city where
they never see superheroes, set it in Boston. For god's sake don't use
New York, which gets conquered by alien races on alternate Thursdays. B

SQUADRON SUPREME #1 - This would be the J Michael Straczynski version of
the team, now with added Ultimate Nick Fury, and written by Howard
Chaykin (but drawn by artist Marco Turini, who I suppose might be
attempting a clumsy emulation of Chaykin's visual style). The Squadron
are barely in it; instead, Chaykin introduces a bunch of characters who
are obviously loose analogues of Captain America, Spider-Man and the
Fantastic Four. Utterly mystifying - I have no clue where this is
heading, or, more importantly, why I'm supposed to care. It certainly
looks like another incestuous case of comics eating themselves. 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, GeNext #3 focusses on No-Name, while New Exiles #8 visits a
Napoleonic world. And Young X-Men #4 sees the team fight the new
Hellfire Club.

--
Paul O'Brien

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