For those who asked, I might do a Eurovision post later on.  We’ll see how I’m doing for time.

First, though!  Second-tier X-books!

Cable & X-Force #8 – The end of the second arc, which serves mainly to reinforce the book’s gimmick: Cable has prophetic visions of terrible things that are going to happen, and in order to avert those catastrophes, the team end up doing things that make them looks pretty terrible from the outside.  As Domino puts it, “We’re Cable’s X-Force.  We do inexplicable criminal things for little or no reward.”

It has to be said that that central idea is stronger than the particular example of it we get in this issue.  SWORD has been holding a genocidal alien killer captive, intending to extradite him off-world.  Cable knows that vengeful aliens are going to come after him and cause all manner of damage in the process, so they simply break him out themselves in order to get him off the planet.  Since that wouldn’t be much of a climax, half the team also gets stranded aboard his ship, leaving Cable and SWORD leader Abigail Brand to mount a rescue.

Two problems here.  First, the alien himself isn’t very interesting; he’s here to further the set-up rather than to be a very compelling character in his own right.  And second, Brand is way too easily convinced to help.  The whole set-up of the book is that X-Force find themselves committing crimes in order to avert Cable’s visions.  But that doesn’t work if Cable can simply tell the authorities and be believed, which is basically what happens here.  It’s not even as though the story really needs Cable to convince Brand – can’t he just steal a shuttle and go after his team?

But there’s stuff that works here too.  Dennis Hopeless has the voices of Cable and Domino down, and I like his take on Colossus, which seems to be nudging the character back towards the well-meaning farmboy that he’s drifted away from over the years – not by winding back the clock, but simply by putting more emphasis on his sense of moral honour.  It gets back to the roots of what makes the character work, and it’s also a role that fits with the set-up of a morally questionable X-Force team.

Overall, it’s an okay issue, but many of the problems are specific to this story, and most of the strengths apply to the series as a whole.

Gambit #12 – Now officially heading for cancellation, to nobody’s great surprise.  That’s not until issue #17, though, so James Asmus has plenty of time to tie up his storylines.  In fact, this issue seems to resolve the Joelle plot that’s been running from the start of the series.  Perhaps not – there’s still all sorts of questions about her back story that Gambit could dig into over the remaining issues – but Joelle herself is pretty emphatically removed from the board here.

The macguffin that Joelle and Gambit stole from Hydra last issue does indeed turn out to be a lethal bioweapon (as you’d probably expect).  The twist is that Joelle has no plans for it more sinister than her own suicide.  She relates a rather vague origin story in which she accepts an offer of immortality from an unspecified person under unspecified conditions, and grows to regret staying eternally young while watching her daughter age.  So she’s simply been trying to get her hands on something that can kill her.

There’s a plot hole here, arguably.  If all Joelle wanted to achieve was suicide, why did she go to all the trouble of escaping the Hydra base?  Why not just chuck it over herself as soon as she gets her hands on it?  It’s not as though she shows any particular aversion to abandoning Gambit.  I suppose the answer is that she wants to go and say goodbye to her daughter one last time, but that’s a bit convenient, isn’t it?

It’s a strange ending, anyway, since while we get a reasonably clear explanation of Joelle’s motivations, her back story remains remarkably vague.  The next issue, though, seems to be about Gambit trying to rescue his mate Fence from Tombstone, so if there’s going to be any further investigation into her back story, it’s apparently going to come up incidentally.  I think it more or less works, since the emotional context is there even if the details are hand-waved away, but it still feels a bit odd.

Wolverine and the X-Men #29 – One of those stock-taking issues that sometimes appears between bigger storylines, and which serves in part to send a signal to the readers that the book has plans.  It may be titled Wolverine and the X-Men, but this is first and foremost a series about Wolverine as headmaster of the school – sensible enough in terms of giving the book a role in the line.

The first half of this issue is Wolverine giving a hopefully-inspiring talk to the kids about what he’s trying to achieve at the school, before they bury a time capsule.  There’s a well written scene with some of the pupils making their own contributions; Quentin claims to think it’s a stupid idea but contributes one of his T-shirts anyway.  And Idie puts in her Bible, which sends nicely mixed signals about how valuable it is to her – leading Quentin to a rather awkward expression of concern, that gets him nowhere.

(Incidentally, did I miss a scene where Quentin won the school president election?  Because he’s wearing an “Impeach President Quire” T-shire in this story.)

The rest of the issue is the time capsule being opened at some indeterminate point in the future – about 25 years, from the look of it, since one of today’s kids is explicitly identified as being 40.  It’s a mixture of hints about where characters wind up, and fairly unsubtle hinting that Bad Things Are Coming – though tempered by the fact that the school seems to have come out well in the end.  The future Wolverine thinks about sending back a message to try and alter history and avoid the troubles to come, but ends up settling for a friendly message which doesn’t really tell anyone anything – though it does help Wolverine recover a momento belonging to his brother.

After the book seemed to be trying a little too hard with the Savage Land arc, this is a more successful issue.  It sends a welcome and reassuring signal that Jason Aaron knows where he’s going with all this, but just as importantly, it strikes the right balance between sweepingly absurd grand concepts and characters who make emotional sense at their core.  The book doesn’t always get that balance right; sometimes it errs too far on the side of crazy.  But when it hits, which is more often than not, it’s a great read.

X-Factor #256 – End of the “Hell on Earth War”, and there’s a twist.  It’s a strong twist, and the right sort of twist – one that you don’t see coming but that makes perfect sense in hindsight.

Okay, yes, there’s a little bit of fudging going on here when it comes to the rules of the War.  Mephisto, it turns out, hasn’t really won after all.  He’s just declared victory prematurely.  That kind of makes sense, because this is merely a reassertion of the originally stated rules: subduing all the other competitors is great and all, but the winning stipulation is to kill Tier.  The twist is that Guido kills Tier, in order to get the power to bring Monet back to life.  I’m not sure anyone else ever suggested that anyone could kill Tier, and you could argue that this is cheating, but then I guess it’s at least implicit in the rules that Tier’s death would end the war.  You could have had X-Factor debate that possibility at length, but by keeping them on the run for the whole arc, Peter David’s given them an excuse not to stop and think about it – besides which, it’s a hoary moral dilemma, and it would damage the surprise ending.

I’m still not wild about the heavy emphasis on magical stories, and I’m not sure we really needed six issues of the Hell on Earth War to build to this twist – which, after all, is only the next step in Guido’s ongoing storyline, presumably to be resolved over the course of the book’s remaining and final arc.  But it works for Guido.  Having decided to bring Guido back from the dead without a “soul”, David’s then had to wrestle with what exactly that’s actually supposed to mean in practice.  Normally the answer seems to be “just a bit mopey”, but David’s take on it has been rather different, allowing Guido to keep most of his original personality but occasionally show alarming signs of a lack of empathy or moral judgment.  He’s not actively evil, he’s just entirely self-centred and wholly devoid of any sense of perspective.  He doesn’t already know Tier, so he doesn’t care about him.  The obvious question is why he still cares enough about Monet to try and help her, but the answer seems to be that he’s driven by attraction more than compassion there.

It’s an interesting direction for the character, albeit one that I don’t expect to last very long, since I can’t imagine that after the cancellation of X-Factor, other Marvel titles will continue to dutifully depict Guido as the rule of hell.  It’s surely got to work its way through to its natural conclusion in the book’s remaining issues.  But hey, if Guido and Monet’s story is going to be the focus of the final arc, that’s fine by me.