REVIEWS: The X-Axis - 2 November 2003

[Paul O'Brien]

THE X-AXIS
2 November 2003
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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:

NEW MUTANTS #6 - "(Just Like) Starting Over"
by Nunzio DeFilippis, Christina Weir, Mark Robinson, Pat
Davidson and Scott Elmer

X-STATIX #14 - "Back From The Dead, part two"
by Peter Milligan and Mike Allred

X-TREME X-MEN #33 - "Intifada, part 3 of 5: Manifest Destiny"
by Chris Claremont, Igor Kordey and Scott Hanna

CAPER #1 - "Market Street, part one"
by Judd Winick and Farel Dalrymple

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NEW MUTANTS #6 wraps up the first trade paperback. I was going to say
that it concludes the first storyline, but that's not really accurate.
There hasn't been an overreaching plot to these issues. Rather, it's
been a series of stories designed to get the cast together.

Much as we've come to expect, this is another issue which does the job
perfectly adequately without ever managing to set the world alight. The
cast is dutifully assembled, a loose end is left dangling in order to
stop everything from seeming too neat and convenient, and some subplots
about the relationship between the characters are established. As
usual, New Mutants does exactly what it says on the tin.

And yet somehow it seems to completely slip off everyone's radar. About
the only time it crops up in my e-mail is when people wonder how the
title is going to be affected by the destruction of the school over in
New X-Men. Since that hasn't even been tangentially referred to in this
title, this means that - at least judging from the people who e-mail me
- people are more interested in how the title will be affected by a
different book entirely than in anything which has actually been
published in New Mutants itself.

This seems dreadfully harsh, because it's not a bad comic. At worst,
it's average. Usually, it's above that. But there's something about it
that lacks charisma. In theory it does all the right things, yet in
practice it just doesn't stick in the mind. Perhaps it's the new
characters, who haven't really come across as particularly disinctive.
Halfway through this issue, I found myself going back to the recap page
in order to check David Alleyne's name - and he's been around for two
months now. Somehow, it just goes straight through and leaves no
permanent impression.

Which is frustrating, because there's plenty of decent material in this
title. Admittedly, this particular issue suffers from some very
rushed-looking and awkward art, especially in the opening fight scene.
But then, it's a short notice fill-in job following Keron Grant's
departure, so there are mitigating circumstances.

That point aside, though, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with this
issue, or indeed anything we've seen. It just feels a bit muted. It's
all a bit... beige. It lacks spark. But that's all it really lacks.
The structure is there; the characters are decent concepts in theory,
but don't quite leap off the page.

The title isn't really working, but there's no reason in principle why
it shouldn't. It needs tweaked, and the characters need to come to life
more. It's heading in the right direction in the way that Dani's
written; but the newer characters, who dominate the book, aren't working
in the same way.

I want to like the book, because it's very close to working. But it's
not quite there.

Rating: C+

LINKS:
http://www.marvel.com

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X-STATIX ships for the second week in a row, and apparently we can
expect another one next week too. In other words, now that they've
finally got the rewrites out of the way, they're ploughing ahead in
order to get back up to speed.

Two issues into "Back From The Dead", I'm pretty much convinced that the
creative team have indeed taken a conscious decision to botch the
rewriting. True, on the surface, everything has been conscientiously
distanced from Princess Diana by relocating her home country to "Europa"
and replacing her with pop star Henrietta.

But you barely need to scratch the surface to see that the story is
still drowning in references to Diana. Henrietta's pet charities are
listed as landmines, AIDS and eating disorders. She commissions
garishly horrible costumes from a designer who works for her friend
Elton John. This is scarcely subtle stuff, and without the context of a
Princess Diana story it makes little sense.

And in fact the story doesn't make much sense, at least if you take it
literally. The general impression is that nothing has been done to
revise the plot in order to let it make sense for a character other than
Diana. A bare minimum has been done to comply with executive edict, but
the story which has been produced is one that only makes sense if the
reader disregards all of those changes and mentally rewrites everything
to reference Diana instead.

It's as if Milligan and his editors have concluded that everyone reading
the book will already know from the publicity that it was going to be
about Diana, and have chosen to forcibly remind the audience of that at
every turn by doing the most hamfisted job imaginable of removing her
from the comic. If they can't do the story openly, they'll make sure
that nobody paying the slightest attention could possibly miss the
point.

For readers of the ongoing series, that's probably a fair assumption.
For anyone buying the trade paperback in a year's time - assuming that
Marvel even produce one for this storyline, and I wouldn't bet on it -
it may be a lot more confusing.

In fact, as written in this story, Diana would have been a fairly
sympathetic character by the standards of X-Statix. True, she's image
conscious and gratingly irritating, but if you disregard Spider-Man's
bafflingly gratuitous appearance, she's genuinely written as the only
person in the story who seems to have any real interest in doing good.
Of course, like X-Statix themselves, it's entirely possible that she's
doing it primarily because it fits with her image strategy.

The actual story here is inevitably overshadowed by the gimmick and the
rewriting. It's rather easier to mentally cut-and-paste Diana into this
issue than it was with the first part, and the story is more successful
as a result. But the sheer oddity of both the story and the
circumstances in which it sees print are very hard to see past.

Rating: B

LINKS:
http://www.aaapop.com

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Rounding off this week's X-books is X-TREME X-MEN #33, the middle
chapter of "Intifada."

Claremont's point seems pretty clear by now. Robert da Costa has been
using the resources of his branch of X-Corp to quietly colonise Valle
Soleada as a haven for mutants. He clearly thinks this is a very good
idea indeed. But in fact all that he's doing is making the situation
worse, by encouraging racist tendencies in the mutant population and
radicalising the embittered human minority.

It's another variation on the usual plea for mutual tolerance and
co-existence, but this time round Claremont is making a point of
stressing the idea of a co-existence of communities. There hasn't
really been a mutant community in his stories until now (unless you
count the Morlocks), and it lets him play the same old themes in a way
that relates more clearly to the real world. With reasonable subtlety,
Claremont confines his topical references to the story titles - it
doesn't take a genius to see how all this stuff must relate to
Claremont's views on Israel and Palestine, or indeed the concept of
Manifest Destiny, but none of these points are ever addressed directly.

One of the odd things about this arc is that despite being the prime
mover behind the whole thing, Roberto has been confined to a few
subplots. Presumably the plan is for him to emerge from the shadows at
a later stage, but it does mean that thus far Claremont hasn't really
established why he's doing all this. The pitfalls of the whole approach
are glaringly obvious to the readers, so it does beg the question of why
Roberto remains happily oblivious. There are plenty of tenable reasons
why he might, but the story should probably be getting into that side of
things by now.

The arc is probably running a little long; it feels like it could stand
to lose an issue and tighten up a bit. The point was largely apparent
last issue, after all. It doesn't help that the themes of this arc
don't really lend themselves to superhero stories; it does end up a bit
on the talky side. Still, on the whole the story is going into some
interesting areas.

Rating: B

LINKS:
http://kordey.ca

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Finally for this week, CAPER. This is one of Judd Winick's projects for
DC, and since he's still technically the regular writer on Exiles
(despite having been on a DC exclusive contract for months) it even has
an X-connection.

It's a crime series, although in a rather odd format. Strictly speaking
this is a twelve-issue miniseries, but it's actually a series of three
four-issue arcs, each following different members of the same family,
decades apart. By the way, even though it isn't a Vertigo book, it's
still a mature readers title. Don't ask me how DC decide what goes in
what imprint these days. I haven't got a clue any more.

The first arc picks up at the turn of the century, with the Jewish mob
in San Francisco. I'm not particularly familiar with the history of
American organised crime, but apparently this is loosely based on
history. At this stage, the Jewish aspects of the story are largely
surface material, to be honest - but it does freshen up what could
easily be overfamiliar material by changing the setting drastically.

Brothers Jacob and Izzy are debt collectors, a task somewhat hampered by
Izzy's over-enthusiasm. He doesn't quite seem to grasp that people pay
up more easily if they're still breathing. The tone is leaning towards
black comedy, but Winick and artist Farel Dalrymple (who's doing the
first arc) still create a surprisingly believable setting for the story.

Winick often seems like a split personality as a writer. Whereas Exiles
is heavily formulaic and largely an exercise in playing with continuity,
Caper has little in common with it aside from the cute dialogue that
Winick almost always delivers. That's about the only stylistic link.
And this is much better work - even if the plot is somewhat familiar
territory, Winick and Dalrymple give it their own distinctive style.

Good work, and light years away from Winick's X-books.

Rating: A-

LINKS:
http://www.dccomics.com
http://www.frumpy.com (Judd Winick)
http://www.fareldalrymple.com

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Also among this week's comics...

CATWOMAN #24 - End of the road trip storyline, although since it leaves
the single biggest storyline unresolved - presumably for the anniversary
issue next month - it's not really the end of anything. As somebody who
doesn't have much grounding in the DC Universe, this arc really hasn't
worked for me. It's largely been an exercise in yanking Selina and
Holly around the DC Universe for the purpose of meeting guest stars, as
far as I can see, and I have no clue what the point is of establishing
links between this book and Hawkman. Brubaker and artist Guy Davis have
kept it readable enough, but it seems to have dragged the book off
course. B-

SILVER SURFER #2 - Remember this book? It's been three months since
issue #1 came out, a delay caused by the need to get a completely new
artist after the previous one disappeared off the face of the planet.
Obviously, this kind of thing doesn't help the pacing much - especially
when the book's on a very slow build indeed, with the Silver Surfer
being kept to a very minor role as the story follows Denise Waters, the
mother from last issue. That said, this is a slow build which works,
and Denise's collapse is nicely written by Chariton and Weiss. In the
greater scheme of things, it's also for the best that Lan Medina was
given time to do the art properly - it doesn't have quite the same
beauty as Milx's work, but it's more than up to the job. B+

VENOM #7 - Meanwhile, the world's most painfully slow comic makes some
moves in the right direction. At least there's some degree of action in
this issue, and some subplots actually get advanced. Not that it's a
desperately good story - it appears to hinge on the highly unlikely
coincidence of Wolverine and Venom just happening to bump into one
another in a remote village in the Northwest Territories. Still, at
least the pace has marginally increased. A bit late now, though. C

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Last week's Article 10 is still up at Ninth Art. http://www.ninthart.com

Next week, Exiles #37 concludes the "Fantastic Voyage" storyline;
Sentinel #9 continues "No Hero"; Weapon X #15 kicks off a new arc;
Wolverine #7 does the same; Wolverine: The End #1 begins a curious
six-part miniseries; and X-Statix ships its third issue in as many
weeks, dragging itself back onto schedule.

--
Paul O'Brien

THE X-AXIS - http://www.thexaxis.com
ARTICLE 10 - http://www.ninthart.com
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