Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

Ultimates Annual #2 was, in its own way, a failure of its own timeliness. Telling what was, at that point, the first non-Millar Ultimates

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story to bear the name, it took place after the conclusion of Ultimates Vol. 2 and was thus in the unfortunate position of providing an epilogue to an ongoing plot, with all the implied spoilers that entails. Undoubtedly, it fared poorly because of it. The previous Ultimates Annual had been written by Millar and seemed integral to the Ultimates universe. There was never any way this one could match up.

After all, the issue was written by Charlie Huston, whose radical take on Moon Knight was achieving moderate success, and it was Illustrated by Mike Deodato and Ryan Sook, both decent artists. None of the three, though, had worked on Ultimates before, and at the time, I found the issue a bit underwhelming – it just didn’t seem capable of carrying the reputation it had been afforded.

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Now, as a stand-alone story it wasn’t especially bad. It featured the unsatisfying team-up of the Ultimate Falcon and Ultimate Captain America, seemingly for no other reason than to echo the pair’s friendship in the “regular” Marvel Universe. It then pitted the two against Ultimate Arnim Zola in a fairly pedestrian example of formulaic superheroes, and only Huston’s complicated narration saved it from being utterly generic. It wasn’t rubbish, but it didn’t remotely satisfy.

That’s because, at the time, it was a substantial step down from the work Millar and Hitch were doing, and simply seemed unworthy of carrying the Ultimates name. Oh, if only we had known. Just over 2 years on, I’d give almost anything to have the Ultimates series hit the dizzying-by-comparison highs seen in this issue. Competent. Average. These are words I cannot use to compliment Ultimates 3, that would perfectly fit this annual. The story itself does improve slightly when read in the correct place chronologically, and contrary to what I used to believe, if you’re hungry for Ultimates stories then it probably is worth having a quick look at it.

Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

Despite over twenty years’ worth of work on various X-titles, Chris Claremont was curiously selective in his use of characters, to the point where it’s possible to anticipate the writer’s arrival by a mysterious disappearance from Professor Xavier. Although Scott Summers featured in much of Claremont’s early work on the franchise, he took a back seat after the conclusion of the Phoenix storyline, with this issue forming one of his occasional returns to the team.

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Several issues of seeding, the writer here uses Mastermind to present what’s effectively a sequel to his most acclaimed storyline. Having initially tricked Cyclops into thinking that his fiancé was a resurrected Dark Phoenix, the illusionist has now transferred this identity to Scott himself, pitting the entire team against him. After an opening which (as usual) removes Xavier from the plot, the bulk of the plot concerns Summers’ attempts to expose Wyngarde, taking down the remainder of the X-Men as he goes. With a long-running plot evidently intended to produce this scenario, the writer relishes this moment, focussing entirely on characterisation. With the exception of Rogue (the newly-joined rookie, in contrast to a battle-hardened Shadowcat), the team is well-established, and Claremont appears to be using Summers’ outsider perspective as a method of taking a fresh look at his long-serving cast.

Paul Smith’s pencils play a considerable role in the success of the issue, perfectly capturing the essence of each character in a surprising small number of lines, with consistency of colouring ensuring that John Romita Jr’s wedding scenes don’t jar on first reading.

Yes. Wedding scenes.

In contrast to the more soap-orientated format introduced in the early 1990s, here we have the marriage of a major character not only undertaken with little fanfare, but not even being the primary focus of the issue in which it features. Reading without hindsight, Cyclops’ marriage to Madelyne Prior seems to be the perfect way to remove him from the book, with this issue’s performance a lap of honour. Attention-grabbing cover aside, Uncanny #175 is a curiously gentle piece, from creators absolutely in their element.

Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

As with just about any medium, comics are quite fond of Christmas specials. This year alone, DC have put out two festive-themed titles in the week leading up to Christmas – the not-bad Hellblazer #250 anthology special, and the not-good DCU Holiday Special – and it’s something of a tradition for at least one or two big titles somewhere to break format and tell a Christmassy tale. Upon deciding to do a Dusting Off Christmas Special of our own, there were a few different issues I pondered looking at, including the Paul Dini Detective Comics story “Slayride” from a couple of years back, and 1997’s grisly Hitman #22 .

But I’ve settled for this issue of James Robinson’s superb Starman run, published when the book was pretty much at the height of its powers (in the trade collections, you can find it in book three, A Wicked Inclination, which is probably the best of the lot except for the epic Grand Guignol). As a gathering of breath and summation of the book’s current state of play following the “Demon Quest” storyline, it works well – gathering the core cast together in one place (Clarence O’Dare’s house) for Christmas dinner lets us see the then-current state of their various relationships and interactions. Of particular note is the appearance by the Shade, having properly proven himself for the first time to be on the path towards… well, “heroism” is probably the wrong word to describe the Shade, but he certainly becomes the book’s morally-ambiguous heart as it goes on.

To be fair, as a story about Jack encountering a homeless guy dressed as Santa, helping him recover a stolen locket (containing a picture of his dead family), and eventually inviting him around to the O’Dares’ for Christmas dinner, it veers dangerously towards – and at times into – outright schmaltz. But then, that’s something that Starman was guilty of on occasion anyway – as a character-driven story with a strong moral centre, rooted in nostalgia and ideas of heroism, it was kind of an occupational hazard. If you were reading it at this point (and despite effectively “summing up” the book’s state of play, it’s not so much of a deliberate jumping-on point as the excellent Bobo Benetti issue that would follow a couple of months later), the tone wouldn’t be a complete shock, particularly at the time of year.

With the exception of the deliberate fill-in Times Past issues, meanwhile, this was the first “regular” issue not to feature Tony Harris on art – duties instead taken by Steve Yeowell, who would later become the series’ main artist for a short time inbetween Harris and Peter Snejbjerg. To be honest, though, I’m not sure he completely nailed it either here or when he took over – Harris had created such a specific (and such a brilliant) visual style for the book, and it’s one that Yeowell struggles to match. Snejbjerg’s style was different too, but he at least seemed to get a sense of these strongly-defined characters looking like the same people – but Yeowell’s versions look a bit more generic (his Shade, in particular, is just too darned upbeat-looking). It’s not that he’s a bad artist – in fact, he’s a bloody good artist – but he just wasn’t really the right fit for the series. Still, in the context of a one-off Christmas issue, it matters a bit less, and if his character versions aren’t perfect, there’s generally a nice look to the whole thing, and technically it’s typically strong.

There’s nothing particularly sharp about the issue – which is unusual for Starman – but it’s a pleasantly diverting tale in keeping with the tone of a Christmas special. While I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone looking to get a sense of what Starman was all about or just why it was so bloomin’ fantastic, it’s still a relatively accessible read, and does a nice job of telling an appropriately heartwarming seasonal yarn.

Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

These days, Wolverine’s solo title is a bit of a mixed bag, offering rotating creative teams telling self-contained arcs. Fair enough – it’s not like you can’t get plenty of Wolverine elsewhere. Still, back in the day, Wolverine’s solo title actually felt like a solo title. It had its own supporting cast, and a long-term creative team, and it was generally pretty good.

Back in 1993, the Fatal Attractions crossover had left Wolverine stripped of his adamantium skeleton by Magneto. After taking an absence from the X-Men, Wolverine had finally come to terms with his new situation, which included not-quite-indestructible bone claws and a healing ability that was now working at full-pelt, no longer having to deal with having a metal skeleton. Unfortunately, a side-effect of this was that his unchecked mutation was now causing him to become more and more animalistic, and he found his humanity harder to hold onto than ever.

All of which made for fairly entertaining reading. Of course, fans knew that the adamantium was coming back one day, and Wolverine #100, complete with holographic foil cover, seemed to be the place. Cable’s wayward son, Genesis, hoped to return the metal to Logan, then brainwash him to serve as a disciple of Apocalypse. With the help of the latest X-Men graduate, Cannonball, Logan manages to escape the bonding process, rejecting the adamantium. Unfortunately, as a side effect, his healing factor fully mutates him into a barely-human animal, who kills Genesis then leaves, even as Cannonball discovers that Genesis’ other project – the resurrection of Apocalypse – might just have succeeded.

The artwork comes from Adam Kubert, who was always one of the better 90s superhero artists, and the series clearly benefited from his involvement. While Larry Hama’s writing took a serious downturn in the late 90s, here he shows a good grasp of the serial medium, bringing together several long-running plot threads and offering a remarkably satisfying alternative to “Wolverine gets his adamantium back” (which he eventually would, as depicted in flashback in Wolverine #145.) The ending was, at the time, quite an unexpected twist, and it’s almost inconceivable to imagine Marvel sending one of their most bankable properties on such a strange personal journey – although back then, he wasn’t quite as ubiquitous as he is now.

The title would eventually see Wolverine gradually regain his lost humanity, and it turned out that Apocalypse was indeed back. The focus on Cannonball is quite odd for an anniversary issue of Wolverine’s solo title, but when the lead spends most of the issue strung up and dehumanised, it makes sense to provide a POV character. Despite the gimmick cover, the banner proclaiming “Anniversery Event!” and the fact that it appeared smack-bang in the middle of one of comics’ weakest periods ever, the issue was actually quite a decent event for Wolverine readers, tying up a large number of plots, but launching as many – it’s something you don’t really see these days, thanks to the current trend of trade-focused pacing. For better or worse, they don’t make ‘em like this anymore.

hillside cannibals dvd Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

At the time of publication, this the plotline for the first issue of Fabian Nicieza’s crossover with Mike Carey’s X-Men seemed a rather odd choice. With Cable’s utopian island state being ripped apart by a rampaging bio-weapon, the stage seemed set for an action-packed arc to win over visiting readers from the more popular title. Instead, the writer delivered a reflective and strangely mournful piece, largely set within Nathan Summers’ own mind. With hindsight, however, Nicieza’s preoccupations are all-too apparent.

The end of Carey’s most recent issue had seen Cable agreeing to merge with a psionic parasite, restoring his telepathy and enabling him to fight Hecatomb, with the visiting team’s physical powers obviously no match for the creature. Nicieza rewinds matters slightly, moving back to show Summers musing whether to go through with the deal. His thoughts follows a rather unexpected path, musing that all his recent triumphs, establishing democracy in a fictional eastern European state, starting his Providence think-tank to encourage a new form of society and outwitting that US government’s bids to discredit him, were only possible because he had abandoned his telepathy and oversized guns. It’s a slightly far-fetched hypothesis, reliant on the notion that his psychic “cheating” worked against him, but the writer’s real thesis soon emerges. Nicieza later described Cable’s removal from his own book to participate in the Messiah Complex plotline as “faintly hysterical”, but there’s a tone of real wistfulness here, as the author know ledges that his more complex take on the character he helped define will soon be abandoned.

What seals the deal is the moment where Cable begins to reflect on whether some outside force is governing his life, manipulating into playing the “grizzled, gun-totting tough guy” every time he tries to grow out of his niche in the X-universe. There’s no fourth-wall break here, as Summers’ reflections are clearly crouched in sci-fi language, and such elemental beings showed up fairly regularly in Cable’s solo title. For all that, the attack on Marvel’s editorial policy is unmistakable, with the writer clearly irked by the dismissal of the mix of geopolitics, espionage and super heroics that had become the character’s modus operandi. Nicieza had clearly received his own glimpse of his time-traveller’s future, reduced to a plot device in his own book and forced to regress into a Leifield-esque terminator analogue. Cable & Deadpool #40 is an unexpectedly sobering read, and leaves a striking glimpse of the cost of investing creative energy in a character whose destiny is in the hands of others.

A slight change this week for our usual feature in which we dig out a back issue from our collections to review – as the comic featured here never actually ended up being published. Nevertheless, it’s well worth taking a look at, because… oh, just read on…

The fact that Neil Gaiman had the temerity to bring his Sandman story to an end in 1999 left DC and Vertigo in something of a quandary, as they now had a ready-installed market for a comic, but nothing to sell to them. The spinoff series The Dreaming was their first attempt at sating those fans, but after enjoying little success with it as an anthology series spotlighting a variety of characters – with vastly differing levels of profile – from across Gaiman’s world, they handed it over to Caitlin R. Kiernan, who somehow managed to get twenty-odd issues of overwrought masturbatory fan fiction published as an “official” comic. That didn’t stop them having another go at the anthology format, however, and a bunch of occasional Sandman Presents-branded miniseries kicked off in 1999 with Love Street, a three-parter by Peter K. Hogan which featured a teenage John Constantine and tied briefly into Dream’s imprisonment by Roderick Burgess.

Despite gleefully tearing apart Garth Ennis’ Hellblazer continuity by putting Constantine in London a full year younger than the Ulsterman had posited, it was an enjoyable enough read, and this reader was sufficiently impressed by it – and, more significantly, by some of Hogan’s excellent Dreaming issues – to be excited by the prospect of Marquee Moon, a follow-up set at the height of London’s punk era, again featuring Constantine and his infamous band Mucous Membrane. Sadly, after the initial solicitations, the series was never heard from again, apparently consigned to some cosmic dustbin. Until last year, however, when first the entire script – and then artist Peter Doherty (not that one)’s fully-inked pencils appeared online at Roots of the Swamp Thing (albeit with an accompanying blurb that claims the comic is from 1997, which I believe to be two or three years earlier than the actual date).

And what a great loss the comic – a one-shot, as it turned out, rather than a three-parter – turned out to be. It’s arguably a more entertaining read than Love Street (though not quite the equal of Hogan’s terrific four-part Dreaming story “The Lost Boy”, which I positively urge you to track down), although perhaps that’s because I’m naturally more drawn to a story that features a cameo appearance by the Clash than I am to one rooted in sixties hippy culture. But it turns out to revolve not so much about Constantine (who really gets more of a cameo appearance himself) as it does around spinning out of the single-issue Sandman story “The Hunt”. Telling the story of the “missing link” from that tale – the daughter of Vassily and mother of the unnamed granddaughter – it’s a pleasant surprise that the connection works so well, and in Tamara, Hogan does a good job of creating a strong individual character that shares believable characteristics with both of Gaiman’s originals.

The story itself is perhaps a little straightforward – you’ll be able to figure out the identity of the mysterious other “wolf” long before Tamara does, and it feels like there’s a bit of a jump to get the two characters together that never feels satisfyingly filled in (at what point does he stop being an arsehole? And come to that, what does Vic do so wrong that gets him the “haha, loser” status in the closing “Where are they now?” sequence?). But it’s an enjoyable enough romp through the lives of a ramshackle late ‘70s almost-successful London punk band, and Constantine’s appearance – in full-on twat mode but with an excellent nod to his supernatural savvy – is a joy, even if we have to ignore that Hogan again willfully pitches him as a Londoner rather than the post-Delano Scouser that he really should be.

Doherty’s art, even in black-and-white, is more appealing here than his earlier arc on The Dreaming, although in fairness that might just be partly down to him having to draw less grim subject matter. His characters aren’t always the most pleasant to look at, but he does a good, arrogant young Constantine, and also does a particularly good job of capturing Vassily from Duncan Eagleson’s original. Also, despite his storytelling being a bit one-note and static, he’s a good choice for this by virtue of his skill at getting the various animals to look right – and there’s strong photo-referencing at play for his London locations, even if the same can’t really be said for his Joe Strummer and Mick Jones.

All in all, as ultimately inconsequential as the story is it’s certainly one of the stronger Sandman spinoffs, which makes it all the more baffling that having got a finished script, pencils and inks (the latter courtesy of D’israeli), Vertigo decided against publishing it after the departure of editor Alisa Kwitney. Still, for anyone with an interest in any or all of the Sandman universe, the Hellblazer universe or simply good comics set in punk-era London, there’s plenty to enjoy, and it’s well worth taking a visit to Roots… in order to check it out.

Read Marquee Moon here!