WRITERS: WARREN ELLIS, STEVEN GRANT
ARTIST: ARIEL OLIVETTI
While Generation X and X-Force were formerly hot titles that had fallen into disrepair the third Counter-X book, X-Man, was simply never popular. Nate Grey started out as a rough analogue of Cable from the gigantic Age of Apocalypse event and was chosen to be carried over (alongside a few less prominent characters such as the Dark Beast, Holocaust and the Sugarman) when the universe went back to normal. He was one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel Universe at the time - having the same rough abilities as Cable but without the hassle. The problem was he also had teenage angst by the bucket load and it soon became clear no-one was particularly interested in reading the adventures of a over-powered moping MTV reject in a generically-titled book (thankfully he was rarely referred to as X-Man in or out of the strip). An attempt was made to save his flagging profile by putting him front and centre for the Onslaught event but it didn't work and the title was mainly written by the uninspired Terry Kavanagh, whose main attempt to find direction was to rope in a never-ending list of guest stars to try and attract readers - Rogue, Spider-Man (subject of a painfully desperate besties situation in the hopes of getting people to care), Excalibur (with Ellis writing the reciprocal issue of that title, making his feelings about Nate clear...), Havok, Bishop, Stryfe, the Fantastic 4... Nate could barely move without someone more important turning up in his comic.
Various directions were tried as well, from mutant prophet to X-Men ancillary to cosmic hero, none of it working. Like Generation X and X-Force by the end of the nineties Nate wasn't even really getting invited to crossovers either; he got pulled into The Twelve saga through simple genetics as much as anything and didn't show well. Thankfully for Warren Ellis and co-writer Steven Grant, a relative heavyweight at the time with considerable experience, notably deserving a bit of credit for putting The Punisher from occasional guest character to a viable solo property, this just meant they had something of a free rein to do whatever they wanted to the character.
The resulting 15 issues have only a passing place in the Marvel Universe, let alone the other X-Men titles. Nate is first seen as the self-appointed shaman of the mutant tribes, an outsider with bigger matters than the Xavier/Magneto power struggles to deal with. He is presented as incredibly powerful but more mature and thus less irritating, making him a persuasive narrator for this strange new offshoot, focusing on the Spiral - a stack of parallel Earths as a dazzling visual. The first arc, as per the other Revolution/Counter-X titles presented six months after the preceding issue with very little information (there's a brief prelude featuring the death of an alternate Forge; each arc of the revised X-Man would start with a quick teaser for the next arc four issues down the line) sees Nate cross paths with a group calling themselves the Gauntlet, who have similarly opted out of the mutant struggle. Instead they use their abilities for their own gain in the world of business. This in itself is presented as a perfectly valid use of powers; the problem is one of their ventures has stirred up a counter-attack from a parallel Earth, a broken one which barely supports life - what is there has to constantly mutate to survive. These are pretty big concepts for a book which once trumpted a three-corner fight between Nate, Cable and Exodus. The plot unfolds nicely, with the Gauntlet's spiky attitude revealed to be the result of them being the bad guys, having stolen children from the broken Earth to sell on the black market for their advanced organs. At which point Nate coolly summarily executes the lot of them in a chilling but warranted action.
The second arc fills in the gaps; the sales gimmick of pairing Nate up with Madeline Pryor (whipped up by the character) before Ellis and Grant arrived is exploited ruthlessly in a dazzling storyline where it turns out the copy created by Nate has been replaced by a cruel Queen of a parallel Earth, scouting for an undamaged Nate Grey to use as a weapon against rebels. Nate goes through a considerable humbling before meeting that Earth's Nate, more worldly and a shaman to his tribe but less powerful. The pair merge during the course of the story, which is marked again by its' cool, detached air and once more by the crisp, unsettling quasi-painted art of the brilliant Ariel Olivetti, which meshes beautifully with the otherworldly feel of the title. There are things cribbed from other areas of the X-titles - the parallel Forge, Madeline - but they're treated in such an alien fashion that the result feels incredibly fresh.
The third act sees Grant solo but - unlike the other Counter-X books - no drop in quality. It concerns the efforts of a being from the top of the Spiral (i.e. the most evolved Earth) named Qabri attempting to purge Earths touched by world walkers in order to preserve the sanctity of his world and its' Brilliant City. The key seems to lay in three figures - eyeless nun Sister Perpetua, adventurer Nicola Zeitgeist and warrior Hassan. Once again there's an outsider's approach that reaps benefits; when Qabiri attacks a parallel Earth its' defended by a version of Wildstorm's Authority rather than the Avengers and when Earth-616 is threatened (confidently renamed Earth-611 in-story in reference to the five worlds Qabiri destroys higher up the spiral on his way) it's Nate there to stop him, no sign or mention of the X-Men or anyone else. Again it leads to a vivid outsider piece of work which has more in common with Grant Morrison's uncluttered independent view of his work that would come to the X-Men soon after than anything that's gone before.
The final issue continues the tearing up of the Marvel rulebook, with a nightmarish take on Superman's arrival in Smallville instead heralding an alien called the Harvester arriving on Earth. Once again the scope of the story in terms of its' repercussions for the Marvel Earth is huge but the focus isn't, with just Nate alone going in to stop a being who has interwoven itself with everything on the planet before planning to strip it of life. The curiously benevolent amoral (in terms of a complete absence of the things) Harvester makes a fine foil for the aloof but caring Nate, who sacrifices himself at the end - a fantastic way to go out that should have salted the Earth nicely. In fairness it did take Marvel about a decade to destroy it.
If X-Man has a fault it's merely one of timing. A couple of years down the line with Marvel less reticent to cancel and relaunch titles, some distance backed by trades to keep the buzz high and with self-contained stories that took little notice of what other titles were doing it might have thrived. As it is it's largely a secret, buried at the fag end of a hated title. It shouldn't be, it's better; read it if you don't believe me.
WRITERS: WARREN ELLIS, IAN EDGINTON
ARTISTS: WHILCE PORTACIO, ARIEL OLIVETTI, LAN MEDINA, ENRIQUE BRECCIA, JORGE LUCAS
When Warren Ellis was brought on board X-Force was, much like Generation X, a long way from former glories; under Rob Liefield (I know, but the nineties) and the workmanlike Fabien Nicieza the series had been a mega-seller after transitioning from The New Mutants but after both shuffled away it was treated with progressively less respect by Marvel. Cable, a big part of the title's success (I know, but also the nineties) gradually moved away and when Cannonball got his big promotion to the X-Men the title became increasingly forlorn under Jeph Loeb and then John Francis Moore. Even when Sam came back into the fold the readers didn't.
Once again Ellis goes for a more proactive reformatting with the group setting out to make a difference, like Generation X - though here X-Force get a lot more done. The six month gap as part of the Revolution event has seen former team leader Domino and the long-standing Dani Moonstar disappear; in their place comes Pete Wisdom. Wisdom was of course created by Ellis for Excalibur; while he was something of a cult favourite upon the writer's departure for Wildstorm the character ended up in the hands of Ben Raab, who rapidly changed his personality and wrote him out in order to facilitate a romantic reunion between Kitty Pryde and Colossus. He then later guest starred in a rather weak X-Force two-parter set in Genohsa which did leave a nice pre-existing relationship with the team to be exploited; it also gave Wisdom an eyepatch, dismissed as a prop to pick up girls in the second page of the Ellis run.
Co-writer for the series was Ian Edginton, who had at the time an eclectic CV that involved co-writing Ultraforce with Ellis for Malibu, a Blade limited series for Marvel, work for Penthouse Comix and a load of licenced bilge for Dark Horse. Combined with Ellis he created a dizzy world of secret black ops and hidden sleeper programmes for the characters; in addition to Wisdom as a worldly-wise driven consultant the team themselves were shaken up, Cannonball finally showing some sign of his gigantic experience, Meltdown's powers being made more useful, Proudstar dropping the Warpath name and unlocking new powers (courtesy of a backdoor left open by a plot involving the High Evolutionary and a year ahead of Grant Morrison coining secondary mutations) and even the deeply unpopular Jesse Bedlam doing stuff.
This new group were dropped into a story about a genetic engine left over from Cold War spook games being accidentally unleashed on San Fransisco, leading to a tight well-written action arc as X-Force try to get to the bottom of it before the entire population become angry mutants. Whilce Portacio is on art duties and brings the requisite sinews to the meatspore troopers and civilian mutations, not to mention arc nasty Niles Roman, even if his actual X-Force can look a bit odd - Sam especially suffers from some ugly close-ups. Uglier still is the death of Wisdom at the end of the opening arc, part of a stated plan by Ellis to 'salt the Earth' rather than leave the character open for abuse again, an early-career show of sentiment considering what it must to do the man to see the farce the likes of The Authority have been left as.
The second arc is part of the "Shockwaves" mini-event running across the three Counter-X titles, a flashback segment showing how the team got from their status before the Revolution event to the current state of affairs. There isn't much to X-Force's journey really beyond Wisdom turning up at their base and whisking off the bulk of the team; training sequences that illustrate his lessons and resources while also providing a bit more of the character. However, there's also some non-flashback sections as the team attends Wisdom's funeral, briefly clashes with his sister Romany (now a full-on black ops bitch rather than the tetchy amateur scholar seen previously) and reunites with Domino, who takes Wisdom's role of overseer but also needs help with a weird alien creature growing on her back (a nice gruesome visual from Portacio) and Marcus Tsung, an Asian assassin who has the mutant gene for murder. This means that he can just kill people sort-of at will, as long as they're unimportant extras. The actual takedown is somewhat weak but otherwise it's an interesting arc, despite Portacio inevitably falling off the schedule in favour of, successively, the excellent Arial Olivetti (moonlighting from X-Man), Lan Medina and Enrique Breccia.
"Rage War" is the only real straight story the new format gets, entirely shorn of both Ellis and Wisdom (though Sam's started dressing like the latter) and with Jorge Lucas on art. Lucas doesn't quite have the sinewy eye for grim detail that the previous artists did though he does conjure up a few monstrous sleeper agents and the storyline does benefit from a single penciller, even if it does look dull compared to the arc's Olivetti covers. Sadly it's about the only coherent thing as the story turns into a somewhat silly wheels-within-wheels dramarama with the motivations of Wisdom's old Russian contact Valentina Rychenko, Niles Roman, Romany Wisdom and Pete Wisdom all rapidly called into question with X-Force just staggering through confused (though characterisation remains strong) and ending up faking their own deaths, possibly just to clean the slate.
Unlike the other two Counter-X titles X-Force got a two-issue finale, named "Epitaph". Whether this was down to scheduling or because X-Force wasn't - unlike Generation X and X-Man - cancelled but instead radically overhauled as a tiresome satire by Peter Milligan I don't know but it doesn't make good use of the extra space and the overall feeling is that the arc is truncated after a deliberately paced opener followed by a jumbled flashback-told final issue with Domino seemingly as the sole survivor, Romany Wisdom apparently killed off along with the rest of X-Force (spoiler: they all got better, even Jesse) and Pete Wisdom inexplicably back alive. Like "Rage War" it's a crazy cascade of plot twists and buzzwords but still strangely likable.
While nothing lives up to the promise of opening arc "Games Without Frontiers" the Counter-X X-Force remains a solid, exciting slice of mutant action, about as dark as anything in a mainstream X-book was likely to get. Dialogue and characterisation crackle throughout and it's got the most obvious Ellis fingerprints of he three books, lots of turn of the 21st century stuff about secret levels above governments, black budget projects and the seedy underbelly of the universe. Good stuff, overall.
PUBLISHER: MARVEL, 2000-2001
WRITERS: WARREN ELLIS, BRIAN WOOD
ARTISTS: STEVE PUGH, RON LIM
Having got the Heroes Reborn monkey off my back I've decided to go for another Marvel event that I loved back in the day, though I don't hate this one so it could be interesting. In the summer of 2000 Marvel decided to do a line-wide revamp for the X-Men titles under the Revolution event, which simply moved everything forwards six months to free the titles of clutter. Sadly, the main prongs of the strategy were the return of Chris Claremont to Uncanny X-Men and X-Men; a year later he was sent off to the purgatory of X-Treme X-Men while Grant Morrison saved the main title. Anyway. Part of the plan was to try and do something with what had become a bloated family of titles and part of it involved giving three of the most stagnant to Warren Ellis.
Sub-branded Counter-X, these titles were X-Force, Generation X and X-Man, which had all seen some glory days but been poor for years. Generation X had been one of the hottest titles in Marvel's arsenal when it launched as a hip and happening MTV generation version of the New Mutants in 1995 but a succession of poor writers had led to falling sales and it rarely got invited to crossovers anymore or even mentioned by anyone in the main book despite having Sean Cassidey, Emma Frost and Jubilee in the cast.
Ellis meanwhile cut his teeth at Marvel a few years earlier with well-received runs on the likes of Excalibur, Hellstorm and the 2099 universe before absconding to Wildstorm and Vertigo, taking over Stormwatch and then creating in startlingly short order Transmetropolitan, The Authority and Planetary. His role on Counter-X was more of a consultant/editor/overseer; each title followed a similar format with a four-part story catching up with the subject at the point of the Revolution event co-written by Ellis and the actual planned monthly writer, then a second four-parter storylined by Ellis detailing what happened in the six month gap and then regular adventures - though in the event the three titles failed to improve their sales and only managed one 'regular' arc and then a wrap-up before being culled in Marvel's 2001 X-Men revamp.
For Generation X the 'regular' writer working alongside Ellis was Brian Wood, who then was largely known for Channel Zero and had otherwise worked outside of comics. Each Counter-X book would be given a radical format overhaul to try and inject some life, and there's more than a little meta involved in the one given to Generation X. The story opens with the Massachusetts academy in ruins, Synch dead of unspecified causes, the human students along with Artie, Leech and Penance gone and the team unsure of their direction. There's a group realisation that after five years they're not really training to be the next X-Men anymore, a tacit admittance of how little attention the parent books were paying, and the remaining students - Jubilee, M, Chamber, Husk and Skin - decide to be a more proactive force, under the tutelage of Banshee and bankrolled by Emma Frost.
The first storyline concerns their attempts to shut down the House of Corrections, a highly secret prison system where wayward children are illegally imprisoned and tortured by one Warden Coffin, a huge bald maniac with a force of similarly hairless and bruising wardens and his special children. It's all very post-Columbine Dubya-era stuff but generally hangs together well as a character-driven adventure. Wood and Ellis get a good handle on most of the characters with the best writing Jubilee especially had received for years (actually remembering she'd been part of the X-Men for years before she was sacrificed to successfully launch Generation X) while Steve Pugh even remembers she's Asian. Emma Frost, while a supporting character, sparkles while everyone gets something to do. The only weakness is that after three and a half solid issues the arc comes to an indecently rapid ending, with Coffin himself quickly defeated.
The second arc is the roll-back "Shockwaves" micro-event filling in what brought on the change; "Come on Die Young" shows the death of Synch and the destruction of the academy. The main cause is Emma's sister Adrienne, already known as a villain from previous appearances and the weak point of the arc. It's so obvious that she's lying to everyone and causing the increased unrest in the school that it just makes Emma and Sean especially look very silly for even entertaining any other options. The rest of the team are well-represented and Synch gets a decent send-off but really far too much hinges on convenience.
The first - and indeed only - four issue arc exclusively by Wood is "Four Days", about the team having a day off in Manhattan, their adventures being split up into four parallel stories - first we see Chamber's day, then Monet & Jubilee's, then Sean & Angelo's, then Paige's. It's not a bad gimmick but the individual stories are variable. Chamber's revolves around him meeting a deaf girl who can hear his speech and is a punk misfit like him; sadly this brings out Jono's emo side a tad too much. Jubes and M going shopping together and getting involved in a hostage situation isn't a bad bit of team bonding however, the same going for Angelo and Sean (rocked by the discovery of Moira MacTaggert's death) in a deal for security software gone wrong. Piage gets an odd little ghost story but again shows well. Aside from a few wobbly bits in the Chamber issue none of it's bad it just seriously lacks substance for a four-issue arc.
By this point the axe was hovering and there's just time to end the team in #75. It's another rather contrived story with the remaining students all coming to the same realisation that there's no real point in hanging around together and to go their separate ways. It's unconvincing and the relief from the fictional characters is strangely palpable, especially that of Banshee, drinking heavily since the death of Moira despite apparently dealing with it on his road trip with Skin. Emma meanwhile arbitrarily turns into a total bitch in belated reaction to her killing of Adrienne months beforehand as she's rather clumsily turned a bit nasty again in order to be in the right place for Grant Morrison's New X-Men; her behaviour gets noticed by her students who decide to simply not say goodbye in response instead of finding out whether she's murdered a policeman after information about Adrienne or what. It's not really a great sign-off for the team, featuring no real action and a couple of plot red herrings which don't come to anything, which makes it a strangely fitting send-off for Generation X.
Overall the two main strengths of Generation X are the characterisation, especially of the students and despite a slight wobble on the part of the staff in the last issue, and the potential. The first arc points to what could have been a fun team-based action title given a bit more space and fair buzzes in places; the flashback arc loses a lot of this momentum and to be honest showed by the title was in such trouble in the first place while "Four Days" is disappointingly pedestrian and showed that perhaps little was lost when the axe fell. It's not a bad read, there's just a feeling it could have been a lot better.
