Mutant Genesis

 

Chris Claremont & Jim Lee Mutant Genesis (1991)
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in…

Having finished a somewhat exhausting and extended bout of proofreading, I finally claw back some time in which to take a look at what books Santa brought. I begin with Will Self's memoir - which is absorbing and a joy to read - and then this turns up in the mail just as I come to the end of the first part, and suddenly I'm Principal Skinner admiring Ralph Wiggum's display of Star Wars action figures in that Simpsons episode. Look, I hear myself thinking as I gaze at the cover, it's the Beast, and there's Nightcrawler, and why - Psylocke is there too, because apparently I'm still twelve.

After seventeen years, Chris Claremont ceased writing the X-Men in 1991, having become massively disillusioned with what Marvel wanted to do to his characters. I recently discovered the existence of 2009's X-Men Forever, a title wherein Claremont continues the story he would have told had he stayed with the book, thus overwriting whatever the hired hands came up with in his absence; and specifically continuing the story from his final three issues, collected here and retroactively labelled Mutant Genesis for the sake of the sales pitch. These issues were actually the first three of 1991's X-Men, then the brand new collectible companion title to the long running Uncanny X-Men. I used to have them but it really felt like the whole thing had gone tits up, so I sold them and didn't bother restocking during my recent campaign of buying back all the stuff I've flogged on eBay. Anyway, I sort of can't not at least take a look at X-Men Forever, and I therefore bought this as a refresher.

I remember this thing as a complete dog's dinner, and so much so as to have bequeathed me no memory of what happens besides various angry looking mutants flying through the air, page after page after page. What happens is the death of Magneto. Claremont began the rehabilitation of Magneto, the previously somewhat generic supervillain, back in Uncanny X-Men #150, eventually transforming him into a sympathetic character on the grounds of it making for a more interesting, even more plausible story than the usual cycle of superpowered battles and evil cackling. Marvel sort of lost its mind around the beginning of the nineties, noticed how well all those X-books were selling and decided to cash in by upping the marketing campaign and turning the books into something which missed the whole point of why we'd bothered reading them in the first place. Thus was Claremont, the architect of the book's success, reduced to providing snappy dialogue for the story Jim Lee - a proven seller if ever there was - wanted to tell, and the story Jim Lee wanted to tell was mostly a resumption of superpowered battles and evil cackling with Magneto reverting to his nefarious ways so as to keep Rob Liefeld from feeling a bit gay when leafing through a copy in the store.

Amazingly, reading this thing three decades later, I realise it's not bad. It doubtless helps that I'm reading while curious to find out what happened, as distinct from praying it makes some fucking sense without my having to read ten other titles as part of the publisher's increasingly transparent attempts to empty out my wallet. I say not bad, although the story is standard caped stuff demonstrating little of the imagination or flair which had brought the X-books through the previous decade; but Claremont's dialogue carries the whole thing, lending even the most stupid plot twists a sense of gravity - maybe not quite turning a small boy smashing his action figures together into Shakespeare, but certainly something in that direction; and even the restoration of evil Magneto is somehow convincing.

Jim Lee's art is, just as I remember - more or less Rob Liefeld with more than just three facial expressions and without the wonky anatomy - but it doesn't really matter because Claremont's dialogue does all of the heavy lifting; and does it with astonishing grace given that he was effectively filling out his own P45 here. It's a tragedy of sorts in so much as that 1991's X-Men #1, reprinted here, remains the single biggest selling issue of a comic book of all time, and was written pretty much under protest by a man who had to wait another two decades before he was able to finish the story as he wanted it, but it's a testament to his ability that he was able to deliver this swan song in such fine voice.

The Multiversity

Grant Morrison etc. The Multiversity (2015)
I know I said I was getting a bit tired of self-aware comic books pretending that a drawing of a man in a cape is just a different level of reality because of something a theoretical physicist said whilst off his tits on special brew, but sod it - Grant Morrison, for all his faults is occasionally great, and Captain Carrot was on the cover of the first issue. It seemed worth a punt.

I never read Crisis on Infinite Earths so most stuff about the layered realities of the DC universe has been lost upon me, and Final Crisis was incomprehensible. I'm not really sure what this one is supposed to do either, but on the assumption that Crisis happened so as to keep us from having to read about Krypto the Superdog, then Multiversity seems to reverse that particular act of po-faced revisionism and is therefore a good thing. Roughly speaking it seems to be a mash up of Morrison's Zenith and Alan Moore's 1963, or at least has elements inevitably in common with both. We have a load of alternate realities, some of them fairly absurd, under attack by something vaguely Lovecraftian from outside; in addition to which it's all massively self-referential with characters attempting to work out what's going on by reading earlier or later issues of the comic in which they appear. It's not actually big or significantly clever, but even this is acknowledged in online potshots which become caught up in the narrative.

Yet another comic-about-comics treatise retreading the same tired themes.

Ordinarily I'd agree, but what's different this time is that it just about has a story - albeit one in which individual chapters could probably be read in any order - and that it's a hell of a lot of fun.

Multiversity first appeared as a series of loosely related issues of comic books set in different parts of its reality, allowing for a great deal of horseplay. My favourite iteration is probably The Just, set on a world in which Superman's robot legion has rendered caped crime fighters redundant, leaving their offspring to lives of super-powered boredom and killing time; but equally enjoyable is the obligatory trawl through the history of superhero comics rendered in stylistic tribute to Siegel, Shuster, Kane, Kirby and all of the usual suspects. Morrison's Alan Moore fixation is expressed as an issue focused on the Charlton comics characters which inspired Watchmen, and which is clearly a comment on Watchmen, although I have no idea what it's actually saying. We also get Marvel's Avengers with the plates switched and a thinly disguised version of Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon, which is amusing if you like that sort of thing, and happily I do in this instance; and whilst I'm over-thinking such things, I'm sure I recall the evil one-eyed egg with bat wings as one of Dorothy's imaginary enemies from Morrison's version of Doom Patrol.

Multiversity is probably deep, meaningful, and stuffed to the gills with references I didn't get, but it doesn't actually have much in the way of story if you look closely; which isn't a problem because Grant Morrison seems to be at his best when he's all surface and can keep himself from mentioning Aleister bloody Crowley every two pages. I'm not sure this is all surface, but that was how it read to me and I therefore invoke the same difference clause; and yet it is of sufficient complexity as to yield unexpected rewards upon second and third readings. This might be one of the best things he's written in a while.

Phoned-In Adventures from the DC Universe

Alan Moore etc. Phoned-In Adventures from the DC Universe (2011)
What the fuck, I thought, it's Alan Moore - how bad could it be?, and so here we are again. I wondered about those issues of Green Lantern, Vigilante and other historically unremarkable DC titles written by the lad with the beard, having failed to notice them in their day. Specifically I wondered about them a little later by which time I was approaching thirty and somehow still young enough to be able to read X-Men spin-offs without wincing. Had I picked up the material collected here when it was new, I probably would have thought it amazing, but in 2016 I am no longer quite so comfortable extending the benefit of the doubt because a bloke in a cape is fighting crime.

DC Universe - to give the book its actual but arguably less descriptive title - collects old issues of Batman, Superman, Secret Origins and everything else Moore ever wrote for DC comics which wasn't Swamp Thing. There's nothing I'd call genuinely terrible. On the other hand there's a limit to how much you can reasonably expect from a comic about a vigilante who fights crime, drug dealers, drug dealing pimps, drug dealers who sell drugs to the kids on the street, and who calls himself Vigilante; and his superpower is that he has a gun with which he shoots drug dealers who commit crime, I suppose. You can tell that Moore is making the best of it, struggling to work with what is essentially crappy material, but you can also tell that while his heart wasn't really in it, that lecky bill wasn't going to pay itself. Even with generally great art, most of this is roughly as good as a decent run of Tharg's Future Shocks in 2000AD. I've read the Superman strips before in a black and white eighties collection called The Man of Tomorrow, and they're decent for what they are, but what they are now seems underwhelming even given that I'm about four decades past the reading age of the target audience.

The second half of the book derives from comics originally published by companies which were ultimately assimilated by the great DC Comics Borg Cube - much to Alan Moore's public displeasure - mostly relating to Jim Lee's WildCATS about which I know next to nothing. Surprisingly I found this stuff a little more engaging, which I suppose may be down to the less familiar territory and Moore having been granted license to do the sort of thing he does best. Voodoo, centred around some WildCATS character of the same name, is fairly enjoyable as yer typically brainy mainstream Moore fare, although it probably helps if you can pretend it isn't a story about murdered strippers drawn by someone with a massive collection of Bratz dolls. Then there's Deathblow which is incomprehensible and more or less bereft of dialogue, but is nevertheless justified by Jim Baikie's wonderful moody artwork.

Even when he's phoning it in, Alan Moore still makes most of the competition look like wankers. DC Universe is a reasonably enjoyable exercise in barrel scraping which should under no circumstances be mistaken for Homer's Odyssey just because author of Watchmans, V of the Vendettas blah blah blah...