So, let’s inaugurate the series with an interview with Paul O’Brien, whose been running his own review site, The X-Axis, since 1999. Prior to that he had posted his reviews to Usenet since 1996. He also writes a comics industry commentary column at Ninth Art. O’Brien’s choices really go to the heart of this interviewing experiment, in that he focuses mainly on covering nearly every Marvel mutant comic that comes out, week after week. Honestly, I was curious why an obviously talented writer would want to confine himself to these parameters, so let’s read on and find out.

CA: What made you decide to focus almost exclusively on Marvel Comics’ mutant books?

POB: It’s really just the way the column emerged. It was the X-books that actually got me into American comics in the first place, so I’ve always had an attachment to them. When I started the column, I was already posting pretty heavily on the X-books Usenet group. I was posting tons of comments anyway, but they were scattered all over the place. And half the time I seemed to be just hijacking some completely unrelated thread so as to throw in some point I wanted to make. Also, I didn’t do “me too” posts – so because I was only following up on other people’s posts, and then only in order to disagree with them, I felt I was coming across as very negative. It seemed a lot easier to just write the whole thing in one column.

Secondly, I’ve always thought that it’s worth trying to do intelligent criticism of the mainstream – and in 1996, you didn’t get much more mainstream than the X-books. It seems to me that that’s a crucial part of the development of any medium; if you’ve got a critical community which is only examining the experimental, the ground breaking and so forth, then really it’s ignoring a huge chunk of the medium. Bear in mind that there were a lot fewer online critics back then; the numbers have gone up hugely since then. When I started, I had the idea of trying to write a comics equivalent of Clive James’ TV reviews. That won’t mean anything to Americans, but basically he pioneered the idea in the UK press of writing TV reviews which were entertaining and covered the mainstream--in other words, they reflected the TV that people actually watched, not the obscure plays and documentaries that were put on because broadcasters wanted to show off how serious they were. And he was funny. I loved his reviews when I was a teenager, and I comprehensively failed to be anything like him whatsoever. (Fortunately for me, he’s been rubbish for years, so this is now a good thing.)

I also just think it’s interesting to see how the line as a whole has developed over the years; you’ve got this vast number of titles playing off the core idea, and it can be interesting to see how Marvel try to use the franchise and how creators try to express themselves within it. To be honest, though, this argument holds a lot less water now than it did a few years back. It’s debatable whether there even is such a thing as the X-books stable any more. They don’t share a common editor any more, they barely interact with one another (even NEW X-MEN and UNCANNY X-MEN hardly ever refer to one another’s plots unless its absolutely unavoidable), and some of the fringe spin-offs like X-STATIX and SENTINEL are so far removed from the parent books that the connection is almost entirely academic. All of which is a good thing, of course.

That said, I’ve been reviewing other books as well for a few years now. I started because I’d spent one too many weeks staring gloomily at this pile of second-tier X-dross and wishing to god I’d come up with a format that would let me write about TRANSMETROPOLITAN or something like that. So I changed the format…

CA: Sounds like it might be worth reading some James, at least the earlier pieces. Perhaps a rough American equivalent writing seriously, but with humor, about pop culture would be Tom Shales. So what else do you read besides the X-titles?

POB Tons. I spend a scary amount on comics every month. I keep meaning to cut down, or at least start asking publishers to send me freebies, but I never get round to it. I used to include capsule reviews of everything else I’d bought each week, but in the last few months I’ve stopped doing that unless I’ve got something I particularly want to say. A lot of the time I was just repeating the same comments, so there wasn’t any point.

I’ll put on my Ninth Art hat here and plug AGE OF BRONZE, BERLIN, LUCIFER, PRIVATE BEACH, QUEEN & COUNTRY-- the usual suspects for vaguely credible commentators, basically. And I pick up a lot of first issues just for review purposes, so I end up sticking with those.

I never got into the DC line so much, probably because their books just weren’t available. DC never had any newsstand presence in Edinburgh in the late eighties, and by the time I realized the city even had an import store, it was way too late for them to hook me. And that store actually appears in UNCANNY X-MEN #225, which was the third issue of that series I bought. It must have been done from photo-reference, because even the display racks are in the right place. So I was dutifully enchanted, because I was thirteen at the time. The only other kid at school who liked comics was a fan of Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison, so I just bypassed the DC superhero line and jumped straight on to Vertigo. Anyhow, all of this means that I’ve never had any emotional attachment to DC’s superhero books. Which I think is kind of interesting--I approach Marvel as a fan and DC as somebody who doesn’t really care, and so I like to think that means I can see it from both perspectives.

CA: Is there much of a comics scene in Scotland? That is, a) is it a popular, non-embarrassing pastime, and b) are there any comics creators of note? Any new Morrisons or Millars on the way?

POB: That depends what you mean by a comics scene, I suppose. If we’re being technical, DC Thomson are based in Dundee, and they still publish the THE BEANO, THE DANDY and so forth--all these kids humour comics which have been around for decades. But if you were a Scottish creator and you wanted to do something in comics that was aimed at audiences over the age of ten, I guess you’ve got the usual three options: pitch to 2000AD, pitch to an American publisher, or self-publish. I vaguely remember seeing a couple of small press Glaswegian comics on sale in Borders once, come to think of it. There used to be ELECTRIC SOUP, which was a Glaswegian comedy book. That’s where Frank Quitely first appeared. But that was years ago. Of course, it’s a small country.

There are comics stores in the city centre of Glasgow and Edinburgh, at least, and the graphic novel sections do seem to be expanding in the bookstores. But it’s no less marginal here than it is in the States.

CA: I was also much more a fan of Marvel as a kid than DC, and I’d wager there are far more of us in our age group, or let’s say those who are between 25 and 40 now, than those who grew up DC fans. There just wasn’t much going on at DC for years until Byrne and Miller emigrated from Marvel to DC. Sure, there’s Moore on SWAMP THING, but that would have been harder to find in your grocery stores and 7-11s.

POB I still run a mile from the Batman and Superman books for the exact same reason a lot of people won’t touch the X-books. I was willing to put in the effort to get into the line when I was in my teens, but I’m not prepared to go through it again now I’m 28. I’m sure DC are losing a ton of potential readers for that sort of reason. But I’m enjoying some of the WildStorm and Vertigo books, though.

Oh, and I’m still reading CEREBUS. It’s a combination of the car crash factor and outright masochism, I guess.

CA: This is an interesting juxtaposition, as I’m sure a big barrier to getting new readers for CEREBUS is that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of hope that this huge epic will end satisfactorily. As far as getting into the BATMAN or SUPERMAN mythos, I agree with you that the proliferation of titles makes it very difficult for a casually interested reader to take the plunge.

So you started the webpage in 1999. What brought this on? Have you ever considered joining another site and leaving some of the technical work to others?

POB: I started the site because I got fed up with people e-mailing me and asking for old reviews. That’s why it wasn’t exactly a work of design genius, especially at first. It was just meant to serve as an archive for a load of Usenet posts. For the last year or so, though, I’ve been treating the website as the primary format.

I’ve had offers to run the X-Axis as a column on several other sites, but I really prefer having control over it myself. The technical work is minimal--that’s what I pay the hosting people for, after all. And these days I write the reviews on an HTML editor--the text version is actually cut and pasted from the website these days. It used to be the other way around until last year.

CA: You have an interesting way of putting together your reviews for the week, with a little introduction and then separate pages for each review, one leading to the next, concluding with some mini-reviews. It works very well for you. What determines the order of the reviews, and do you pretty much review everything you read that week?

POB The order of reviews is the X-books in alphabetical order, then everything else in alphabetical order, then the capsules at the end. Thrilling, huh?

I used to be a bit more fluid about arranging them to try and get some kind of flow into the column from start to finish, but I don’t think that applies so much with the current website format. These days, there’s a reading order for you if you want to follow it, or you can just read the pages in whatever order you want. I want the site to be something where you can easily find out what I thought of any book, years after the fact, without having to read through the rest of that week’s reviews just to see what I was talking about.

I still do the occasional link between reviews, when something leaps out at me – the format ought to be a framework, not a limitation. But generally speaking, I just try to write it as a set of reviews that you could take in any order.

CA: I admit I never even noticed it was simply alphabetical! Wait a second, it’s alphabetical for the mutant titles, and then any other book comes next, alphabetically, so you’re still keeping them somewhat separate.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the impression that a sense of duty is more important to you than the desire to entertain. That’s not meant to insult—I’m always entertained even though I buy few of the titles you review--but what I’m saying is, do you feel you have a certain responsibility to review every issue of, say, WOLVERINE: SNIKT!, a much-loathed miniseries, or EXILES, which you don’t seem to much care for? Do you ever feel like there’s not much reason to review the second or third issue of a book no one likes? That you could better spend your time reviewing something else?

POB: Not really; to be honest, I get plenty of e-mail from people who read the X-Axis precisely because it covers those books. Frankly, negative reviews are probably the most popular thing I do. There have been more than a few X-books over the years that I’ve bought mainly because I enjoy writing the reviews and people seem to like reading them. Take the last year of MUTANT X, for example. It was diabolical, but it was a joy to review. You could hardly go wrong with it.

The reviews ought to be interesting in their own right, whether people are still reading the books or not. That’s what I’m aiming for, anyway. If there’re other books that week that I really want to write about at length, then I will – usually as a review, sometimes by using them as a springboard for an Article 10 column. So it’s not a case of these books occupying space that I’d be using for something else.

CA: Of course in other media, critics review things all the time that they don’t like, because hey, it’s a living. You don’t like the latest James Bond? Well, wait a couple years and you get to relive it all over again with a new installment. But I wonder if the poor reputation comics critics get comes partially (in addition to most of them not being able to write) from this sort of martyrdom of continuing to pay for, read, and spend time reviewing something one loathes. I know a very bright reviewer who started his totally negative review of a recent BATMAN by writing that there were only a couple issues left before Azzarello/Risso started. In other words, he’ll pay to suffer through it for completion’s sake, or because the readers need to know, or…something. Do you buy every mutant title, and if so, why?

POB: I buy most of them, because tracking the progress of the line is the high concept of the X-Axis.

The ones I skip are generally the ones that don’t look remotely promising and are totally detached from the rest of the line. I never bothered with the X-MEN ADVENTURES books that adapted the cartoon series, for example, because I didn’t watch the cartoons either, so there wouldn’t have been much point. I didn’t bother with the recent X-MEN: PHOENIX miniseries that the Mangaverse imprint put out, because it looked like painfully adolescent T&A, and I just didn’t care. I gave up on the X-MEN MANGA miniseries after two issues--it was grindingly dull, and once you’d slated the first issue, there was nothing else left to say about it.

I think there is a certain degree of “I suffer so you don’t have to” with some of the X-Axis, admittedly. I’m a little more ruthless when it comes to other titles.

CA: So tracking the progress of the X-books is the high-concept, understood. But what would prevent you from changing the concept? I see that readers have now come to expect that most mutant titles will be reviewed, but have any asked what you thought of BLANKETS or QUIMBY THE MOUSE?

POB: Not specifically, no. Actually, I don’t normally do graphic novels, though I’ve done a few--I reviewed BERLIN, AGE OF BRONZE and SHUTTERBUG FOLLIES in their collections. To be honest, I haven’t read BLANKETS. Must get round to it.

But yeah, more generally I do get e-mail from people who read the X-Axis even though they have no real interest in the books it reviews, making suggestions for other stuff they’d like to see it cover. Sometimes I do it, sometimes I don’t. A lot of the time I make a mental note to buy the trade because they’re recommending something that came out months ago, and then I completely forget about it by the time the trade comes out nine months later.

CA: I feel like I’m grilling you, so let me change tacks here. When reviewing an ongoing, or a miniseries where not much changes or surprises from issue to issue, how do you keep the review fresh?

POB: With difficulty. You mentioned EXILES and SNIKT! earlier, and they’re good examples of this.

EXILES isn’t a bad comic, but it’s extremely formulaic. How many stories can Judd Winick write about a bunch of exiled heroes arriving in a world where either (a) a hero has gone bad or (b) a villain has multiplied into an army that’s taken over North America? EXILES seems determined to answer that question by repeating the same basic story until Winick runs out of ideas, dies or signs another exclusive deal with DC. In isolation, most of them are okay, but the repetition makes it very hard to find new things to say about it. Fortunately for me, it seems to have a lot of artist changes. And the recent batch of fill-ins at least changed the pace, even if they weren’t any good.

WOLVERINE: SNIKT! is a different sort of problem book, and one that’s coming up more and more. It’s paced exclusively for the trade paperback, which is inevitable because the only purpose of the comic is to let a manga artist do Wolverine in his style. And his style is totally incompatible with 22-page monthly serialization. But the practical consequence is that once you’ve reviewed issue #1 you’re then faced with three more issues where nothing bloody happens, before the final issue comes along and you can do a review looking back on the whole series. (Plus, it’s a non-story which exists only to give the artist something to draw--but that’s another issue.)

This is happening more and more; a comic comes out which is part 4 of 6 and there’s really nothing I can add to what I said about the first three issues. For a while I just used these issues as an excuse to rant about the different pacing issues between serialization and trade paperbacks--but I’ve written that review about ten times, and I’ve done an entire Article 10 column about it. I can’t just keep writing it. I’m starting to get more ruthless about cutting down the space given to those books, but I’ve got to admit I have an emotional attachment to having reviews for the complete storyline. I’m conscious this is a problem with the format.

CA: An emotional attachment. Now we’re getting somewhere. This goes to what I said earlier about a sense of duty. I noticed another reviewer (not the bright one I mentioned above, but a dullard) writing a review of JLA/AVENGERS even though he wasn’t that interested and would have preferred to wait for the hardcover. He reviewed #1 because he felt a duty to his readers, and I must admit, I feel the same, to a lesser extent. There are books that I’ve dropped from the monthly grind because I know I’ll buy the collection, enjoy it more, and write one good, complete review out of it. Is this something you see yourself ever doing? Perhaps even buying the first issue, and if you like it, waiting for the collection?

POB: I’m increasingly inclined to make a jump towards reading more books in trade paperback format, yes. And that would probably mean a format overhaul. From a practical point of view, I’ve always preferred the trade paperback--pamphlets are horrible, flimsy things that fill up vast chunks of space with ugly, ugly boxes and are riddled with adverts. Unfortunately, they also come out months and months and months late--which is a huge disincentive for making the break from reading a series in monthly format to buying it in trades. If you’re doing it with a DC title then you’re effectively resigning yourself to, what, a nine month wait between stories? I just don’t understand the logic of that scheduling. Do they want people to buy the trades or don’t they?

Even though the “wait for the trade” mentality has been around for a good few years yet, I think we’re only just getting the point where the trades are quick enough (and sure enough to come out) that waiting becomes a sensible option rather than a stand on principle. In principle, though, I’d like to do it more often.

CA: You find an excellent tone in your writing that’s very polite, with lots of qualifiers that soften the blows (rather, a bit, not entirely, etc.), but the blows still land. With a real stinker of a book, are you ever tempted to come on stronger—feel free to give examples if you have—or more unabashedly enthusiastic for something excellent?

POB: I think understatement is usually more effective. I try to reserve real broadsides for work that truly deserves it--books which are either genuinely offensive (such as CAPTAIN AMERICA #6) or so mindbendingly awful that the publisher really ought to apologise for having the nerve to charge money for it at all.

I find hugely positive reviews very difficult to write; there’s a reason why a lot of people enjoy reading bad reviews, and making good reviews equally entertaining is tough. On the whole, I find gushing with praise isn’t a style that works for me; I try to be more analytical. And again, if I’m going to rave about a book, I want to save it for those books that are really worth raving about. Otherwise it becomes meaningless.

CA: Don’t you think it’s a necessary challenge to place upon oneself to write that enthusiastic review for that great book? If the majority of reviews are mixed or negative, that hardly seems a fair representation of the industry’s output, nor of your own tastes.

POB: Oh, I agree--when there’s a great book, the review ought to be enthusiastic. But you know, the majority of comics are mixed. And the truly great books are rarer than the really bad ones. Because it’s a lot easier to make a bad comic.

And if you’re buying a lot of first issues more or less blind, as I do, then you’ll hit a lot of rubbish along the way. But you’ll also hit some really great books that make it worth searching for them--if you can afford the bill, anyway.

CA: Now, let’s get into something about the tone of the reviews again. Let’s look at the end of this review of NEW MUTANTS: “…(Keron) Grant seems bored out of his mind. For the most part, he's not that great at the more subtle character work which is necessarily to breathe visual life into the story, and the result is a very bland looking comic. Nor is he getting much opportunity to show off his strengths. This seems to have been a horrible piece of miscasting.

“Overall, an okay issue--but this set-up phase is really going on for longer than it should.”

So…how is an issue with a horribly miscast, bored artist, and slow pacing, still okay? Before you answer, I will admit myself that the summary at the end is often really difficult to get right.

POB: Well, I don’t regard “okay” as a ringing endorsement, to be honest. It’s okay. It’s average. And, of course, you’re quoting the negative stuff out of context there.

Keron Grant’s horribly miscast on that book because he’s an artist who’s capable of doing much better work on certain types of story which are much more action oriented. This is a talking heads book. Grant’s work is stiff and bland, but it’s not horrible. It’s just below par. And the pacing issue is that that book’s chosen to open with six straight issues of “introducing the cast one at a time.” The issue itself is okay; it’s just sitting in a row with five rather similar issues.

CA: Fair enough. How do you rate the X-books of the past couple years? Best titles, best creative teams, best stories?

POB: I’ve loved the Grant Morrison run on NEW X-MEN. I think that’s a textbook example of how to revamp a series--rather than just taking his own idea and imposing it on a completely unrelated series, he’s taken the same basic elements and built them into a different structure. If you stop and look at what Morrison’s done on that book, he’s introduced almost no new ideas. They always had a school, they always had the theme of trying to win over the public. But he’s built them up into a different order.

X-STATIX and Gail Simone’s AGENT X have also both been great books, albeit totally divorced from the X-Men titles themselves.

CA: I agree on NEW X-MEN. I said early on that there was something more personal, and representing more effort on Morrison’s part in this series, moreso than other books of his at the time like MARVEL BOY, perhaps moreso than THE FILTH. While the NEW X-MEN work is less “original”, it’s no less a valid bit of self-expression, as Morrison is clearly refashioning the themes that speak to him into something he can call his own. Would you agree or disagree, and feel free to expand.

POB:I agree absolutely. This is a writer who clearly loves all these crazy old Silver Age superhero comics--he’s not mocking them for being weird, he genuinely loves them for that. Working within the mainstream, to my mind, is a huge part of what Grant’s writing is about. You get some people who approach Grant’s writing on the basis that only the hardcore weirdness like INVISIBLES is “real” Grant Morrison and everything else is watered down. I honestly think that completely misses the point of what he’s about.

And it’s easy to see Grant’s usual themes coming out in NEW X-MEN. If anything, the book’s tailor-made for him. The central premise is that the human race evolve and get superpowers, for heaven’s sake. And he’s started playing it more literally, after 25 years of it being a metaphor for homophobia. You couldn’t come up with a more Grant Morrison idea if you tried. So we’ve got a comic here which has all the building blocks to do things which Grant’s always been interested in. Then, of course, he’s started working in all that stuff about artificial worlds…

CA: Best X-MEN story(ies) of all time?

POB: Hmm. This is the point where I’m meant to rhapsodize about the Dark Phoenix Saga, isn’t it? To be honest, though, I prefer the Claremont/Sienkiewicz run on NEW MUTANTS. The first half, anyway. The later issues look a bit rushed.

CA: Good call. Certainly Sienkiewicz inking has been used to prop up average pencilers before, but the mediocrity of Mary Wilshire shone through.

And the worst, including editorial decisions, poor marketing, whatever?

POB: I’ll never understand what persuaded Marvel that the last year of Mutant X was worth publishing. BROTHERHOOD could have been good, if only they’d hired a better writer to work with the concept. But they didn’t. Chuck Austen’s run on UNCANNY X-MEN baffles me completely--partly because he’s no good, but mainly because he seems to me to represent everything that Quesada and Jemas spent the last few years purging from Marvel. I mean, he’s just reopened the question of Polaris’ parentage--that’s a subplot that ran for four issues in 1968!

Claremont’s short-lived return to the core X-Men titles around the time of the first movie was an abortion, but he’s starting to get back on track now. At least, I like the idea of positioning his characters as the people who reject everything that Grant Morrison’s run stands for--if you’ve got an irreconcilable style clash between two writers, then turn it to your advantage.

CA: I agree with this. The X-Men are strong enough characters that different interpretations can exist side by side, and as you suggest, it’s bad business to only offer one flavor to readers. Joe Casey’s ideas pale next to Morrison’s, generally, so maybe the truly awful Austen is a better choice merely because he can appeal to the fans who can’t handle Morrison’s stuff.

POB: I kind of agree. I think Joe Casey was a mistake because he was going to come across as “Grant Morrison but less so.” It makes perfect sense for the second X-Men title to have a writer who appeals to a different, more traditional audience. I don’t have a problem with that idea at all. And if you tried something similarly radical on UNCANNY, then you’d have two books pulling in different directions--it wouldn’t work. But even if you take the decision to go for something more traditional with UNCANNY, there are plenty of other writers who could deliver that.

CA: What do you think of X-MEN UNLIMITED? Despite some talented creators on that, it seems to me the book, by its very nature, is full of irrelevant stories that hardly have space to be memorable.

POB: I don’t think Marvel have ever had a clue what the point of X-MEN UNLIMITED was. It was launched at around the same time as a load of other UNLIMITED books--SPIDER-MAN UNLIMITED, FANTASTIC FOUR UNLIMITED, and so forth. I think there was even a MIDNIGHT SUNS UNLIMITED, wasn’t there? Basically just a pointless mid-90s version of all those GIANT-SIZE quarterly books from the seventies. And all the others got cancelled, but X-MEN UNLIMITED just rambled on and on and on…

There are some genuinely good issues lurking in there. There’s a good Kitty Pryde story from Greg Rucka and Darick Robertson which came quite near the end, for example. But it’s basically just fill-in after fill-in. No matter how good the creators are, there’s only so much you can do when you’ve got one issue to write a story about a character where you can’t change anything, you’ve got no control over the direction, and so forth. It’s an entire series of fill-ins--why? I’ve never understood the point of the book.

They’ve axed it now, of course. They’re replacing it, apparently, with a book called UNLIMITED X-MEN which is going to be exactly the same except with novice creators. Call me an old curmudgeon, but I can’t say this fills me with enthusiasm.

CA: Of the non-mutant stuff you read, what’s exciting you, who’s at the top of their game?

POB: Love Greg Rucka’s work. Andi Watson’s usually good – though I haven’t been at all impressed with his Marvel stuff thus far. Bendis is usually reliable anywhere, obviously. I could run through more of the obvious people for you…

CA: Are you enjoying Rucka’s WOLVERINE? I was up until the last issue, where I just kind of lost interest. There doesn’t seem to be any challenge for him here; in fact, you may have said something similar in a review.

POB: I like the direction, and I love the art, but I’m having increasing doubts about the plot. Basically, I agree with you that there’s not enough sense of challenge – the villains haven’t been established as posing any threat to him, so it’s lacking tension. The approach to the title is fine, though.

CA: Okay, since you offered, let’s run through a few others, not so much the obvious ones:

Jodorowsky?

POB: Doesn’t do anything for me. I’ve tried some of his stuff, but it just left me cold.

CA: Los Bros. Hernandez?

LOVE & ROCKETS is one of those gaps in my collection that I really must get round to filling. Come to think of it, that’s what I used to say until I decided to be a good boy and try GRIP, which I absolutely hated. I still really ought to read it, but there’s such a long list of books I ought to read. So many things to read, so little time.

CA: Adrian Tomine? POB: Oh, OPTIC NERVE. Never read it.

CA: Paul Grist?

POB: Fabulous. Just an incredible storyteller. Always wonder how American readers make sense of JACK STAFF, but I suppose we always get by with American imports.

CA: James Kochalka?

POB: Well, he’s fantastic, obviously. I really ought to get around to reviewing something by him, now you mention it.

CA: Now back to the grilling. Just kidding. But while there is much to be said for sticking to a plan and doing well at it over a length of time, do you think about improvement, how to make the writing even better? Would a greater range of books push your writing to another level, do you think? I ask this not because I want you to change anything about your sexy, wonderful self, but for the simple belief that the variety of books I read and review has improved my own writing. Practice helps, of course, but I’ve found very different books demand different styles of review, and stretch certain “writing muscles” that wouldn’t be stretched as much if all I reviewed were 22 page superhero comics, much as I enjoy them.

POB: Well, that’s true. I got bored with just doing the X-books years ago, which is why I stopped. But I’ve got the other reviews for that purpose (and you might notice there’s been an increasing number of them in the last year or so). Plus Article 10, of course, which sometimes spills over into being a second review column when I want to spend a lot of time talking about one particular comic.

CA: I’m not saying you only review mutant titles, but of the non-mutant books, we’re still talking pretty much only about other Marvel superhero titles, right, aside from QUEEN AND COUNTRY. Anything that isn’t so plot-oriented?

POB: It’s been pointed out to me many times that I’m a very story-oriented kind of reader. Or at least, more idea-driven. I’m not sure quite what you mean by “plot-oriented”, though. I could reel off a list of non-superhero books I’ve been reading in the last year, but the overwhelming majority are undoubtedly plot-oriented.

CA: That’s what I meant. Anyway, we serious comic-reviewy types shouldn’t care about this stuff, but do you ever get feedback from any pros, and if so, who, or what have they said?

POB: Yes, from time to time. I don’t really want to start running through names because it’s private e-mail. But yes, a fair number of creators read the X-Axis and Ninth Art. For the most part, they tend to be very agreeable about negative reviews. (I’ve even had a couple of e-mails from creators who actually agreed with bad reviews of their own work.) I know a few others read it who haven’t been in touch with me--Mark Millar apparently reads it, for example.

CA: Yes, he’s one of the few creators to really acknowledge that he reads online reviews.

Now, in addition to THE X-AXIS, you’ve been doing your ARTICLE 10 column fortnightly at NINTH ART for a couple years? How did that come about?

POB: Ninth Art is run jointly by Alasdair Watson, Andrew Wheeler and Antony Johnston. Alasdair and Andrew both knew me through X-fandom, and Alasdair and I both lived in Edinburgh around the same time anyway. Andrew asked me to write a column for Ninth Art, and I accepted. They didn’t give me a specific remit, so I was really left to work out for myself what it would be.

CA: Now, myself, I did a column like that a couple years ago, and ended up much happier folding my commentary into the reviews column when I had something to say. I think with a lot of guys with regular comics industry commentary columns, there’s a tendency to inflate a mild irritation about some issue, or a small point, into a whole column, when it’s not warranted. Do you ever think about that? Do you ever feel like you’re stretching something you hardly have the energy to finish?

POB: From time to time, yes.

Article 10 is meant to be vaguely topical. At least, that’s the remit I gave it. I do try to keep a couple of ideas stockpiled just in case the comics industry manages to spend a fortnight with nothing whatsoever happening--and believe me, that happens more than you’d think. But yes, there is certainly the odd week where you stare at the news sites and wonder if you can possibly extract a thousand words from the results of DC’s market saturation programme.

Realistically, once you’ve been doing this for two and a half years, I think it’s fairly obvious where you stand on the big issues. And I don’t like doing columns which just repeat things I’ve said before. So from time to time, yes, you find yourself stretching out some relatively minor point. But I try to avoid pretending that it’s any bigger than it is, at least.

Looking back through the archives, there have been a few columns like that. But to be honest, there are less of them than I’d expected. If I was really having trouble coming up with ideas, I’d just ask to be moved to a monthly schedule.

CA: Have you been satisfied with the way the column has gone so far? Anything you would change or do differently?

POB: I think there’s always room for improvement. What the column lacks, really, is any overall agenda for the industry. But I don’t actually have an overall agenda for the industry. I’m more of an interested observer than a passionate reformer or a crusader for the wider audience. It’s great that those people are out there, but I’m just not one of them.

The column veers a bit too much towards industry commentary, simply because it tends to take its subject matter from topical stories. I’d like to take it more into general areas of comics criticism, and use it to write about things which aren’t tied to a specific review.

CA: Such as?

POB: Well, Article 10 is a good forum to pull together the threads--look at trends, styles that are spreading, and so forth. It lets me take the trend as the starting point and write around that, rather than one particular title. Because it’s a bit artificial if you review one comic and then more or less ignore the specifics of that comic in order to go off on a general survey of, say, decompressed storytelling. A review is at least partly about placing the comic within the landscape. Article 10 lets you start by laying out the landscape, which is a better approach to make certain points.

CA: As far a general comics topic, it’s hard to ignore the influence manga has had on comics, both in terms of reaching new readers, and the resultant push from publishers like Marvel and Dark Horse to try to capitalize on this with new books that ape some manga tropes. What do you think of manga and this new trend?

POB: The best thing about it is that it’s opened up a whole new market of comics readers. The catch is that it’s almost a separate, parallel market. I mean, obviously there’s an overlap. But for the most part, these are different readers, in different stores, reading a different kind of comic. Clearly that’s going to have a massive influence on America’s domestic publishers. What the manga influx has shown is that there is a huge potential market of readers out there who are potentially interested in reading comics but who were not remotely interested in anything the North American publishers were putting out. Granted, manga has the advantage of being exotically foreign, but I don’t believe that accounts for everything.

Naturally the American publishers want to attract that audience, but they seem a bit clueless about how to do it. We’re getting these awkward books that try to straddle the direct market and the manga audiences, and end up satisfying neither camp. Besides which, I’m not convinced that manga audiences will be receptive to manga pastiche--and that’s what a lot of these books are. You’ve got to give them something which is specifically American, not something which is just a second generation copy of what the Japanese are doing. On the other hand, I think there’s a lot to take from the Japanese in terms of genres and formats.

I think this is a very important period for the North American publishers; it’s entirely credible to see them being marginalized by an influx of imports, which would make the Americans a side issue in their own market. On the other hand, it could see a massive influx of new (or at least different) ideas into mainstream American comics which could finally knock them out of that rut they’ve been in for decades.

CA: Most comics reviewers want to create their own comics. It’s a cliché because it’s true in so many cases. Is it true with you? If so, have you pursued this at all? Were you approached to pitch to Epic?

POB: No, I wasn’t approached to pitch to Epic. Bastards.

I’ve never made any real attempt to get into comics. I did vaguely toy with pitching to Epic. For years, I’ve been telling people that somebody ought to bring back Madcap, an obscure CAPTAIN AMERICA villain, so I was going to pitch a series which would have been Madcap crossed with Dice Man. And then I kind of lost interest and didn’t bother. I still think that’s a series that I’d be interested in reading. But not to the point where I want to write it myself.

Really, I’m more interested in taking stories apart to see why they work than I am in writing stories myself. And I’m also a control freak who can’t draw, which doesn’t make for an ideal comics collaborator. If I was going to write fiction, I’d probably do it in prose, not comics. To be honest, though, I’m more inclined to write non-fiction; anyone who knows me professionally will know that if anything, I’m more passionate about the law than I am about comics. I’m really more likely to write a Scots law textbook at some point in the future than I am to write comics.

CA: Madcap was the one with a half-yellow, half pink, pinstriped costume, and a floppy lavender hat, right? Or is that just one of my recurring nightmares?

POB: Correct. Evangelist gains superpowers in the obligatory accident that kills his family. Goes nuts, loses faith in god, decides the world is meaningless and becomes a manic harlequin. He’s kind of a crap villain, really. He doesn’t actually scheme or anything, he just gets bored every so often and runs around Central Park with a water pistol to annoy people. Occasionally he tries to commit suicide and then realizes he can’t because he has healing powers.

The problem with Madcap is that he’s always been written as basically rather depressed about the whole thing. So all he does is mope, albeit manically. The key is to make him into this manic, evangelical absurdist, who wants to go out there and persuade everyone that it’s all totally meaningless--and that’s a good thing. Of course, being Madcap, his idea of evangelism is lunatic situationist stunts and unworkable absurdist communes… Think THE FALL & RISE OF REGINALD PERRIN.

I’d buy it, anyway.

CA: If we weren’t running out of time, I’d ask for your thoughts on Armadillo or the Hypno-Hustler, but let’s wrap this up. What’s your usual routine when you log on to your computer? What sites and columns do you check out?

POB: Routine for writing the columns? I put on some music and write the thing for a few hours, really…

I read Newsarama and The Pulse. Ninth Art, obviously. Rich Johnston’s column, which would probably be regarded as perfectly reputable journalism if it was covering any other medium. I keep a vague eye on ICV2, largely for their sales figures. I’ve started reading Journalista more regularly. I usually have a look at the Fourth Rail. And there are a few message boards I still keep an eye on--useful when I’m looking for something to write about at the weekend.

CA: Hmm, if only there was another comics review column I could think to recommend…

Anyway, thanks to Paul for taking time out of his schedule. Oh, and for those of you surprised by the revelation of NEW X-MEN #146, Paul has explained just how it all fits together. Impressive work.

Next Week: No guarantees of what I’ll be covering, or if an interview will be ready in time. I’m expecting these to run about ever other week, actually. I’ll probably review COLERE NOIRE, THE MAXX VOL. ONE and much, much more.

Chris Allen

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