As it turns out, my comics did eventually show up this week, though not in time to record the podcast on Saturday.  For those who may have forgotten, Al and I both get our comics by mail order, and while we could go and buy comics from Edinburgh’s bricks-and-mortar stores, that would mean buying extra copies of things we’ve already ordered.  So, we’ll be doing the podcast next week, when to be honest there will be more to talk about anyway.

But in the meantime…

Cable #22 – At long last, the end appears to be in sight – after all, the big crossover kicks off at the end of March, and we know Hope gets back to the present then.  And for once, this book does have a bit of momentum as it enters the home stretch.  It’s actually quite a neat gimmick: for admittedly contrived reasons, Cable and Hope are bouncing back and forth in time, with Bishop dragged along in their wake, as they steadily get closer to the present day.  So on the one hand they’re starting at the dawn of Manhattan and moving forward, and on the other they’re working backwards through the storylines we’ve seen over the last couple of years, and eventually they should zero in somewhere in the middle.  That’s quite cute.  But within that framework, we’re stuck with the same old same old – Bishop having One Last Go at killing Hope before the story ends.  It’s the sort of story that works well enough once or twice, but it’s been repeated too often by now.  Without any sense of progression, you can make Bishop a functional character like the army guys who used to chase the A-Team around when an episode needed a nudge, but you can’t build a story around him in his own right.  As for Gabriel Guzman’s art, there are a couple of awkward figures, but he does a good job of establishing the setting for each new location.

Doom Patrol #6 – After the tiresome Blackest Night crossover, this is a decided improvement.  Okay, it’s not really a story.  Instead, it’s one of those issues where a character – Negative Man, to be precise – recaps his entire history, partly for the benefit of new readers, and partly so that Keith Giffen can set out his own take on the character.  Since DC continuity is a notorious quagmire, and the Doom Patrol more than most, it’s actually quite helpful to spell out clearly which bits are meant to count this year.  (Answer: all of it except the John Byrne reboot, as near as I can make out.)  There are some promising ideas in here about mind and body, the issue adds some depth to a character who’s so far been written as sort of cynically flippant, and it generally rekindles my interest in a series which I was on the verge of dropping after the last couple of issues.  Good work in the Metal Men back-up strip as well, which continues to cram more content into ten pages than most books manage in two months.

Great Ten #3 – This is a ten-issue mini about the Chinese government superheroes Grant Morrison introduced in… 52, was it?  There’s an overall storyline about China being attacked by people who claim to be old Chinese gods appalled by what’s happened to their nation, but each issue is also focussed on a different character.  This time it’s Thundermind, a sort of Buddhist Superman.  He’s not technically superhuman, just very enlightened.  To be honest, though, I’m not sure writer Tony Bedard has found the best angle on this character.  He’s opted to make him literally a Chinese version of the Silver Age Superman, complete with mild-mannered secret identity and a Chinese Lois Lane love interest who only has eyes for Thundermind.  Oh, and he became enlightened by finding a magic thingy.  Yes, it’s a classic story set-up, but it’s also so hoary that it makes the character into an automatic pastiche, and I can’t help thinking there must have been more interesting approaches to take here.

New Mutants #9 – In this issue – you will thrill to exposition!  Illyana Rasputin will explain at length her outrageously convoluted continuity!  And Cypher will be reintroduced into the cast, because apparently he’s not dead any more for some reason!  There are so many things about this issue that ought to annoy me, not least the fact that there’s still no obvious reason for the book to exist besides nostalgia.  But Zeb Wells does have lots of ideas about these characters and how they relate to one another.  One thing New Mutants does have going for it is a cast who actually feel like they have a group dynamic.  Last issue’s crossover was rather underwhelming, but this issue is a definite return to form, and I’m particularly glad to see Wells pursuing the idea that a powered-up Cypher is potentially a bit creepy.  Paul Davidson’s art has an appealing icy feel to it, which really works for Illyana’s scenes – and he does rather good robots, too.  None of this entirely gets away from the fact that New Mutants is a book which lacks a compelling reason to exist, but at least it has plenty of other point in its favour.  (And given that Emma Frost has started questioning why the team exists, I wonder whether Wells has something up his sleeve after all… though if he does, and he’s been holding it back for this long, he’s a braver man than me.)

Siege #1 – I’m sure we’ll be talking about this on next week’s podcast, but basically: it’s a Brian Bendis crossover, with all that implies.  It’s not the sort of story that plays to his strengths – even after all this time writing the Avengers, he still seems to do his best work on solo books where he can really get into his characters.  This strikes me as another of those stories where he’s got a few big moments in mind, and then constructed a ramshackle story around them.  So obviously the plot is that Loki is manipulating Norman Osborn into going to war with Asgard, but the story never actually follows this up long enough to explain why Norman wants to do that, at the cost of risking his position and picking a fight with gods, for no apparent upside at all.  You’d expect some sort of scenario where Osborn’s hubris leads him to try and impose his authority on Asgard, but… no.  Instead, they seem to be going for the idea that Osborn has somehow been convinced that Asgard’s a threat, which I suppose has the advantage of dramatic irony; his empire falls apart because, for once, he actually tried to do what he thought was the right thing.  The problem is that Asgard’s been around for years and there’s no adequate reason why he suddenly cares about it now, so it all seems clumsy and forced.  But the bottom line is that it’s got the same problems as House of M and Secret Invasion before them; there’s an idea in here somewhere, but not much of a story.

X-Factor: Nation X – Since X-Factor have relocated from Detroit to New York, this one-shot is basically an explanation of why they’re not involved in Nation X.  At Scott’s request, X-Factor pop over to Utopia, to say hi to old friends, and politely explain why they’re not interested.  There’s a story in there as well – specifically, something about a kind of spirit of ghettos who shows up on Utopia – but basically it’s a debate between Madrox and Scott about the direction of the X-books.  Naturally I’m largely on Madrox’s side – this whole thing seems like a bit of a wrong turn to me – but Peter David does a better job of making Utopia work than the regular X-Men titles have.  Admittedly, he does that mainly by portraying it as a heroically doomed enterprise, which can’t possibly work but is worth a go because nobody can think of any better ideas.  But at least it’s an angle.

X-Men: Legacy #231 – We’ve belatedly reached the “Necrosha X” crossover.  In this issue, a bunch of X-Men go to Muir Isle to investigate one of Blindfold’s prophecies, and end up with… well, something that doesn’t seem to be much connected to the rest of the crossover at all, but I’m not complaining there.  That said, what we end up with is an average X-Men story; Mike Carey’s got a firm enough grasp of the characters to make it readable enough, and it’s nice to see underused characters like Nightcrawler and Colossus getting used, but it doesn’t feel like there’s any particular point to this story beyond tying into a crossover.  Mind you, the last few pages are pretty well executed; it’s a relatively understated take on this particular villain, but probably more effective for it.

Since Diamond have chosen to take a week off over Christmas for the first time I can recall, there’s nothing new out this week – well, except for Blackest Night #6, under some weird distribution arrangement, but I’m not buying that book anyway.  Actually, I kind of hope Diamond keep doing this.  A break from the weekly grind every so often helps it… well, helps it stop feeling like a weekly grind.

I could do a “year-in-review” post, but I’m not going to.  Firstly, I’ve still got last week’s books to review.  Second, I really don’t have time.  (And advance warning: you may be hearing that a lot over the next couple of months.)  And third, you probably know more or less what it would say: the X-books have written themselves into a corner with a post-M-Day set-up which still doesn’t really work, despite some talented writers giving it their best shot, but at least it seems like we’re finally getting to the Hope storyline, which presumably ought to move us on from that.  Not that I necessarily want them to hit the reset button – I tend to agree, actually, that the Marvel Universe as a whole wasn’t well served by having a mutant on every corner – but the current direction is an overcorrection and it’s time to swing back to the middle ground.  With X-Factor caught up in a storyline that was too long for its own good and which didn’t really work as a serial, and New Mutants lacking a clear reason to exist, the best X-book of the year was probably Jason Aaron’s Wolverine: Weapon X, which may not have told any important stories, but certainly entertained me on its own terms.  Oh, and an honourable mention to X-Men Forever, which was an unexpectedly pleasant surprise, even if the last issue was a bit disappointing.

I could have said all that at ten times the length but… well, you know.

Equally, time and common sense suggest that rather than cover everything that came out the week before last, I’ll stick to the X-books and some significant others…

Battlefields: Happy Valley #1 – Another of Garth Ennis’ war minis, which are always reliable.  They can also be a bit formulaic at times, when they’re doing the male bonding routines.  And to be honest, this story about an Australian bomber crew in World War II is one of those – new guy joins the crew to replace the injured captain, has to win over sceptical crew.  It’s done very well, but it’s definitely a bit familiar at times.  That said, there’s a bit more to this than meets the eye, since they don’t bond quite as easily as all that, and Ennis is the sort of writer good enough to get away with telling a well-worn story, because he tells it so skilfully.  There are few people in comics with such reliable storytelling instincts, and that always comes through.

Beasts of Burden #4 – This is the final issue of the current run for Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson’s series about pets fighting mystical evil in smalltown America.  But the plan is apparently to do a series of miniseries, and at times this issue feels like it’s setting up mysteries for an arc story.  Weird thingies raise some guy – presumably a devil-worshipper – from the grave, and the dogs have to get rid of him again.  None of it’s really explained, and to that extent it’s a story that depends on the creators eventually getting to do their pay-off.  But it still works as another encounter between the plucky pets and assorted bizarre stuff.  The threat this issue almost gets into the territory of superhero comics, but it’s the way they handle it that makes this book special; nobody does better animals than these creators, walking the tightrope between anthropomorphic and cutesty, and pulling it off.

Dark Avengers: Ares #3 – The final part of Kieron Gillen and Manuel Garcia’s miniseries, which remains mercifully light on Dark Reign content.  True, the story is that Norman Osborn gives Ares a squad of men to train, in the hope of turning them into elite soldiers – and you can only really do that story with somebody rather dodgy in charge, since Ares is stark raving mad.  But that’s about the limit of the Dark Reign stuff, in a series which is otherwise a tongue-in-cheek story of Ares teaching the soldiers his idea of what war’s all about.  It’s really very good, and I’d recommend getting the collection.  (Granted, as Al complained on the last podcast, they’ve packaged it with the previous Ares series, but it’s good too, so don’t let that put you off.)

New Mutants #8 – Ah.  This is the conclusion of New Mutants‘ three-part tie-in to the “Necrosha” crossover, as the team fight the Hellions with Cypher at stake.  I liked the earlier parts of this story, particularly the idea that a powered-up Cypher is terribly dangerous because almost everything is ultimately a form of communication, and he can understand it all.  The scenes with Cypher providing a running commentary on the subtext of other people’s conversations were great.  This issue… well, we have an extended fight against the Hellions, and then the story just kind of stops.  It’s like Zeb Wells used up all his ideas in the first two parts.  And once again, the book seems willing to take it for granted that readers will be familiar with rivalries from a quarter century ago.  The pay-off is that the story seems to have permanently revived Cypher, although I really don’t follow it: if he’s been freed from Selene’s control and the techno-virus, because the Soulsword has got rid of all the magic, why isn’t he dead again?

Uncanny X-Men #519 – Basically an issue of Cyclops fighting the Void inside his own head, and it’s pretty good.  I still have my doubts about whether Uncanny has done enough to set up the rather obscure concept of the Void before doing this story.  But for those of us who are already familiar with it from other titles, this is a fun issue.  It’s got art by Terry Dodson, which is always a plus; it’s got Magneto starting some politicking, which we all knew was coming; but most of all, it’s got Cyclops beating the Void because his powers of repression are too much for it.  I love that idea.  It teeters on the brink of being too silly, but it’s audacious enough to work – not least because iron-willed self-control and a complete disregard for his long-term mental health really are Scott’s defining features.  One of my favourite issues in a while.

Wolverine: Origins #43 – Cloak and Dagger guest star, as Dagger is vexed by Romulus’ henchman – this being the guy who’s supposed to be terribly threatening despite being blind and not very bright.  I’ve never quite understood what he’s supposed to be bringing to the table to make up for all that.  Anyway, this story gets him out of the way, which is something.  Plus, it makes better use of Cloak and Dagger than we’ve seen in the regular X-Men titles since they joined the cast, and Doug Braithwaite’s art is rather good (though I do think Cloak works better when you draw him as a silhouette rather than a guy in a black body stocking – this guy shouldn’t have highlights).  As with so many issues of this series, fine when it’s not dealing too closely with Romulus, and a bit dull when it is.

Wolverine: Weapon X #8 – In which we find out how Wolverine ended up in that mental asylum in the first place, and why it’s gone so weird.  This feels less like a Wolverine story and more like something Steve Gerber would have created for a horror series, but that’s no bad thing.  The central image, a confused Wolverine in a mental asylum even madder than he is and resisting its attempts to “treat” him, works both because it’s creepy in its own right, and because it plays off all sorts of standard themes for the character.  Oh, and because it’s not afraid to flirt with being over the top.  It’s Wolverine, after all – it’s not an understated comic.

X-Men Forever #14 – The final part of “Black Magik”, and it’s a rather underwhelming issue.  It’s the old mind-control and corruption schtick which we’ve seen oh so many times from Claremont before, and this issue doesn’t really bring a fresh angle to it.  Nor does it resolve much; Kitty is freed, but Magik remains a baddie, and we still don’t really find out much about the original villain.  Still, the subplots are ticking over nicely, and Tom Grummett’s art has some great images along the way.  The nice thing about this series is that, thanks to its fortnightly schedule and old-school structure, when it does produce a story that doesn’t quite work, at least you know it won’t last too long, and there are plenty of sub-plots to keep you interested in what’s coming next.

“Timely Events”

Writer: Peter David
Pencillers: Valentine DeLandro and Marco Santucci
Inkers: Pat Davidson, Valentine DeLandro, Marco Santucci, Patrick Piazzalunga, and Craig Yeung
Letterer: Cory Petit
Colourists: Jeromy Cox, Nathan Fairbairn and Andy Troy
Editors: John Barber and Jody Leheup

It’s been a long while since I reviewed an X-Factor storyline… but then, it’s been a long while since one finished.  I think.  For some odd reason, three of these issues have titles (#40, #41 and #43).  The rest don’t.  Nor do the latter two issues make sense as break points.  It seems to be more or less random.  So, I’m going to take #40-50 as one big storyline – which is certainly how they read – and pick the last of the three titles, simply because it seems the most appropriate.

Peter David has said before that he wants to boost X-Factor‘s sales, which is always a tough job for any title.  Part of his strategy, around the time this storyline started, was a series of shock cliffhangers, such as the pay-off to Siryn’s pregnancy, and the return of Layla as an adult.  As an attention-grabbing scheme, this kind of made sense.  But for most of the last year, the book has been tied up in a highly involved (and highly convolved) time-travel storyline which was making some of us increasingly impatient.

Please note, it’s not the length of the storyline as such.  Long-term planning is a great thing, at least in a book that can be confident enough of its long-term existence to generate the pay-off.  Stretching out a story over a number of years is great, if it’s strong enough to justify it.  The difficulty with this story is that it takes an awfully long time to get anywhere – not so much because of a slow pace or “decompressed” storytelling, but because the plot has so many threads and goes in such circuitous directions that it fills a whole load of pages without really getting to the point.

You’ll notice from the credits list above that this book got through a ton of artists.  But it does manage to keep a fairly consistent look, perhaps because there are no outright fill-in artists – Valentine De Landro and Pat Davidson are there for at least part of every issue.  And the art is pretty successful.  The future Dr Doom is suitably delapidated, and most of the big dramatic moments come off well.  While the art never seems quite comfortable with the giant robots, it’s good with the people.

Cutting through assorted mysteries, the plot goes something like this.  Madrox is taken into the future by Layla Miller, who we left in one of those dystopian Sentinel-controlled futures at the end of “Messiah Complex.”  Now she’s an adult, and hooked up with the Summers Rebellion.  She seems to have brought Madrox there simply to ensure that things turn out as planned.  Meanwhile, the authorities are trying to stop the Rebellion by sending a brainwashed Madrox duplicate, Cortex, back in time to the present with a “Doomlock” device that lets him alter history, so that he can try and kill off the Rebellion’s ancestors.  This he does by possessing a bunch of people and sending them to assassinate, among other people, one of X-Factor’s clients.  Oh, and one of the people he possesses is Shatterstar, who thereby joins the cast.  Meanwhile, in the future, the Rebellion have noticed that people are blinking out of existence, and Madrox is investigating.  He meets up with Dr Doom, who’s already expecting them thanks to yet another time-travelling visit from an even-further-future Layla, and finds out about the Doomlock stuff.  There’s also a subplot in here about the guy in charge of the Sentinels nearly getting kicked out by the government, but again, that’s not really important.  So in the future, the Sentinels make their last big attack on the Rebellion, while in the present, X-Factor fight Cortex.  Finally Cortex is yanked back to the future where Dr Doom tries to use him as a weapon to kill the Rebellion, but he’s beaten there too.  The big Sentinel is defeated, and Madrox is sent back to the present.  Layla goes even further into the past where she relates all of her memories to her own younger self, thus explaining how she “knows stuff”; her real power, it turns out, is actually to bring people back from the dead.

Complicated, isn’t it?  And the way it’s told, the book ends up juggling a multitude of plot threads: Siryn sulking in the office, M and Darwin protecting Cortex’s target, Rictor and Guido being reunited with Shatterstar, Layla and Madrox in the future, and the guy in charge of the Sentinels politicking with other baddies.  It seems to be the challenge of juggling so many threads in a 23-page comic that leads the story to grind to a halt.  Issues #43-46 end up alternating the present-day subplots, so that cliffhangers aren’t picked up until two issues later.  In the future, Madrox and Layla arrive for their first conversation with Doom in issue #43, and don’t conclude it until issue #47.  This is slow by any standards. 

It also means that to follow Peter David’s elaborate design, you have to be keeping track of plot elements that haven’t been mentioned for a couple of months.  This is where readers start getting confused – and when the recap page tells them that Cortex was trying to kill the ancestor of a minor character, they wonder what they were missing.  (Nothing, really.  His target is actually explained in passing in the story itself, but it doesn’t actually matter; the point is simply that Cortex is trying to alter history by killing the rebels’ ancestors.)

Naturally, it’s vastly improved by reading it in a single sitting, where the length isn’t a problem, and the overall scheme becomes clearer.  But that still leaves the big question: what was all this about?  At first glance, it seems to be an extremely clever story full of time loops and such like, but one which isn’t actually saying anything in particular.

Reading more closely, the point seems to be that what at first appears to be a web of unrelated stories resolves over the course of a year into something intricately constructed.  And all this seems to be calculated to support Layla’s worldview: that everything is pre-ordained, and that free will is just an illusion.  The plot includes some seemingly random coincidences to strengthen that point.  Doom’s suite is in the same hotel where Lenore is holed up in the present day; and on both occasions when Trevor Fitzroy opens a random time portal, it dumps a Sentinel to precisely the place where it needs to be to complete the plot.  Layla has given up trying to change history and simply goes with the flow, intervening here and there to ensure that things turn out as she remembered it.  Her reward, if you can call it that, is to complete her memory loop and finally move on to events that she doesn’t know about in advance.  Cortex is trying to change history, but he’s the bad guy, and events seem to conspire against him to prevent it.

By pairing Layla with Madrox, Peter David seems to be writing about free will versus determinism.  Layla’s world is entirely deterministic – it’s on rails, and so it’s meant to be.  (Whether this fits with the traditional Marvel Universe take on divergent timelines is beside the point.)  Madrox, on the other hand, is a one-man embodiment of alternate realities, since his duplicates allow him to explore both options whenever he’s faced with a choice.  As we’ve seen throughout this series, though, that’s no better: a world where every choice is taken ends up being a world where no choices are really taken at all.  There’s no free will on that model either.

Since David clearly isn’t finished yet, I assume this is ultimately heading towards some sort of synthesis of Madrox and Layla’s worldviews.  One way of doing that is to pursue Madrox’s problem to its logical conclusion and argue that a single timeline doesn’t contradict free will, but rather reflects the fact that choices were actually made.  The other is to legitimate the grand design as something reassuring in itself – in other words, to wheel on God.  And it may be no coincidence that the only well-adjusted Madrox duplicate we’ve seen is a priest. 

All very interesting, then, but that still leaves us with the niggling problem that we’ve just had a year-long time travel story to reach the intermediate stage of a multi-year exploration of free will.  And while there are plenty of interesting ideas in here, it’s not altogether satisfying as a piece of drama, because it drags on a bit, and because it’s so keen to stress the idea that everything is on rails.  As a result, it feels at times like an overelaborate exercise in clever plotting, and one whose strengths were always likely to be lost on a monthly schedule.  That said, it works much better when you read it as a whole – and the more I think about it, the more it’s growing on me.