I've run the maths and this cover is about 23% relevant to the interior.

There are so many problems with this comic that it’s hard to know where to start. Let’s try the title.

As the name suggests, this is a cross-over between secondary X-Men titles Cable and X-Force. I bought it for the Cable parts, a series which I’m (belatedly) following and enjoying to a decent degree. X-Force I couldn’t really give a toss about. There are two things wrong with the title though. First is that X-Force gets top billing. Why’s that a problem? Well, although this collects issues of X-Force as well as Cable, it’s not really about those characters. They’re in it and participate in the plot, but said plot almost entirely revolves around elements from Cable. The X-Force characters pop into Cable’s situation in a literal diversion from the ongoing story in their own comic. It should be Cable/X-Force. The other problem is calling it Messiah War. That’s a perfectly sufficient name, in theory. Trouble is Marvel already realised that and used it for the first volume of this Cable series (where it was woefully inaccurate). This means that if you’re following Cable in trades you need to read Messiah War, Waiting For The End Of The World and then Messiah War. Hmm.

The other glaring issue with this collection is that it’s chocked full of fairly crap art, which makes it a pain in the arse to follow and unpleasant to read. The main perpetrators of these crimes are Ariel Olivetti, Clayton Crain and Larry Stroman.

Olivetti is the regular artist on Cable and at first glance is a fairly good artist. His characters are well rendered and on occasion emote fairly well. Thing is, Olivetti doesn’t do backgrounds. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – a lot of artists over the years, some quite famous and/or talented, haven’t done their own backgrounds. It’s often a practice employed by ‘superstar’ artists with their own studios, where they can get an impressionable young artist looking for work to pick up the slack (or in Pat Lee’s case, get someone else to do all the work and not get any credit for it). Instead of getting another artist to do his backgrounds, however, Olivetti uses photographs. Not very good photographs either. Comic art drawn on photos generally looks quite odd, which can be a boon if odd is what you’re aiming for. Cable isn’t though, so Olivetti fuzzing, graining and blurring photographs for all his backgrounds doesn’t work at all, especially when he’s having to rejig their dimensions to fit. The worst element of this practice is that it means his characters never actually feel apart of their environment (which, if an intentional authorial device, is a pretty basic one) and thus can’t interact with it to the degree required for the story to function. At one point, Cable and X-Force look down from a rocky cliff at a near-by city/structure thing and act like it’s recognisable. Which it isn’t, because it’s a fuzzy, indistinct mess.

Olivetti does most of the Cable issues contained within, but is thankfully relieved for majority of the first two by Jamie McKelvie. McKelvie’s a British artist who made a name for himself on indie title Phonogram. He has a ligne claire style that incorporates a lot of emotion and acting, thus giving his characters actual character. This is handy, as his issues are the first in the series that feature Cable’s ward Hope as a proper character. Up til now she’s been a baby or toddler, acting as little more than a plot device. Here, she’s somewhere around 7 or 10 and not only gets to talk properly, but gets some 1^st person narration captions of her own. Although writer Duane Swierczynski depicts her personality well in the dialogue and monologue, McKelvie’s art really makes her come alive and feel like a real character.

The X-Force issues are drawn by one of that series’ regular alternating artists: Clayton Crain (the other, superior regular artists, the team of Mike Choi and Sonia Oback do the Messiah War one-shot wedged between the McKelvie issues of Cable and the cross-over proper). Crain is a digital artist, creating all his work as rendered pseudo oil paintings in Photoshop (or similar). His work can be best described as ‘murky murky gloom murk’. It is next to impossible to tell what the hell is going on in most of the panels of his issues. Following the fight scenes properly would require X-Force writers Kyle and Yost to stand beside you gently reading the script and handing you tissues to dry your frustrated tears, while continually apologising. The majority of Crain’s art consists of vaguely human-shaped blobs of black and grey attached to a few bright glowy shapes that may or may not be heading towards other vaguely human-shaped blobs of black and grey. Bleh.

The third bad artist in the collection is Larry Stroman, who draws the Bishop mini-series shoved in at the back. Stroman was a mildly popular artist in the 90s who seemed to disappear for a while, before returning to mainstream comics in the past few years, just minus any talent he may or may not have had. I’ve not read any of his 90s work, so I don’t know if he was ever good or not. I find it unlikely given how the early 90s was a nadir of individuality and artistic quality that had everyone trying to draw like one of the Image founders. Stroman’s story-telling is barely adequate, made worse by all his characters looking like partly melted snowmen. At one point he’s required to draw a baby. I think. The script suggests it’s a normal baby, but it’s drawn to look like some kind of evil deformed munchkin creature.

Grousing with the artwork aside, the story’s not too bad. Cable and Hope are still living in the future thanks to a broken time-jump device that allows them to only move further forward into the increasingly fucked up future. Looking for them are Bishop, a rogue X-Man determined to kill Hope before she can bring about the dystopian future he comes from, and X-Force, the X-Men’s wetworks team who want to a) find out what’s happened to Cable and b) kill Bishop. X-Force manage to track Cable’s place in the timestream and jump forward for 24 hours thanks to some primitive time-travel devices that Beast made at some point, I guess. It’s not clear when and how he made them, nor why the X-Men are currently so devoid of time-travel devices given how often super-heroes are flitting around in the timestream. They could just go ask the Fantastic Four – they’ve surely got a time machine lying around. But those are the kind of questions you’re not supposed to ask if you want the story to work.

Anyway, Bishop hooks up with Cable’s evil clone Stryfe (it’s ok, stay with me), who he helps take over and rule the point in the future Cable, Hope and X-Force have just arrived in. And everybody fights.

Bringing in Stryfe is a bit of a daring move as it dredges up all of the convoluted, self-cannibalising, ‘extreme!’ 90s tat that mires Cable’s publishing origins. I think Messiah War manages to get away with it really. Apocalypse is inevitable dragged into things, but it doesn’t get too bogged down in past continuity. All you really need to know is that Stryfe is Cable’s antithesis and has father issues with Apocalypse. I’ve read barely any of the 90s stories that spawned Stryfe and followed everything quite well.

If do you get confused, lost or somehow even interested in any of that stuff though, this trade’s got you covered, as it includes a Messiah War Sourcebook at the back, or, as I like to think of it ‘The X-Office’s Cliff Notes To The 90s!’ The Sourcebook gives profiles on all of the characters involved in the cross-over and tangential other characters and concepts, most of which looks crap and was probably best forgotten, but oh well. The other complaint I have with the Sourcebook is that each of its sections is written from a first person perspective, but whose it is changes between sections and it’s not always clear who’s narrating.

As I mentioned, the other item thrown into the collection is a three issue mini-series about Bishop; a retelling of his entire history, presumably to try and explain why he’s trying to kill Hope. It’s passable, I guess. There’s no getting around the fact that Bishop’s origin also stems from lots of horribly convoluted and kinda crap early-mid 90s stuff. To be fair, I might be looking more favourably on it if it had been drawn by a better artist, but Stroman’s art and Swierczynski’s attempts to delineate it into a clear narrative do little it to suggest it’s worth caring about. It’s also problematic because although it explains Bishop’s motives to the reader, this is the kind of thing he should be telling the X-Men, in attempt to convince them that he’s not just gone insane. The reader’s been aware of his motivation from the beginning of this Cable series, but he’s never actually bothered to try and explain his point of view to the X-Men, which just makes him look a bit obtuse really.

The trouble with the entire collection is that it seems poorly conceived. Although I don’t begrudge the presence of the X-Force characters, given how largely irrelevant the events of this cross-over seem to their title, it would have been better to just run it entirely in issues of Cable, with X-Force as guest stars. That would have at least ensured a more consistent visual element, as the switching between Olivetti and Crain is distracting and awkward. They’re both very different artists, a fact exacerbated by the lack of editorial cohesiveness. The interiors of Stryfe’s throne-room change from a dark, murky underlit, nondescript void under Crain to a bright, empty, dull sandstone room under Olivetti. It’s both artists just playing to their strengths/laziness. The editor of the cross-over should have co-ordinated a solid design on not only that, but the characters involved. Deadpool shows up, but looks entirely different depending on who draws him. Choi & Oback have him looking relatively normal, but in a patchwork costume. Crain has him looking like a zombie, complete with gaping holes in his costume, which Olivetti has sewn back up so he looks entirely normal. And this keeps swinging back and forth. It’s not just the art, either. There are various competing narrative captions from different characters that don’t keep consistent colour schemes from issue to issue. Warpath disappears for almost the entirety of one issue for no reason. There doesn’t seem to be a consistent stance on if Deadpool’s powers are still working. Hope learns both the real and code-names of characters without ever being told them. Her age bounces around all over the place as well, so she looks about 6 in some issues and 12 in others. It’s editorially lax.

The other problem is that if you’re only buying Cable collections , there’s a chance you might entirely miss this volume, given that it’s not included in the series numbering, which is bad as it’s the readers’ first proper look at Hope as a character. If the story had been solely contained in issues of Cable, that could have been avoided (and in an ideal world, McKelvie or Choi & Oback would have drawn the whole story). I suppose the same problem faces X-Force readers, but given how much an inconsequential sidestep this seems for that title, it doesn’t seem as big a problem.

Dear Mr Smith

Thank you for your email on 13 July.

We have gone to considerable lengths to try to satisfy your complaint,

and we are sorry that you still feel that your complaint has not been resolved.

We have credited your online account with £15 and we hope that you will find something you wish to buy on our website.

Having made this payment, confirmed that we have raised this matter internally (i.e. to try to prevent this type of incident happening again) and also apologised to you,

I trust you will appreciate why we need to draw a line under this correspondence.

Yours sincerely

Zxxx Exxx

store customer service advisor

I fully understand why you’re drawing a line under this correspondence. It’s because your company is too craven to actually own up to making a mistake and properly admitting to and apologising for it. You’ve apologised for everything but the initial error that caused this whole thing.

I apologise for the confusion surrounding your initial enquiry

an apology for the confusion surrounding this issue.

I do hope that you will forgive us for the delay in our response to you.

I would also like to apologise for the lack of response

I would like to offer my sincerest apologies for this  misunderstanding.

We apologise for the confusion.

You’ve continually tried to fob me off like some petty simpleton annoyance with ridiculous, contrary and increasingly desperate excuses that stretch the bounds of believability so far I’m surprised that they haven’t snapped back and hit you in the face. Your correspondence paints your company in the eyes of any reasonable person either as liars or incompetents. You can stuff you bloody hush money, as I have no intention of further dealing with a merchant whose word I cannot at all trust. In fact, I will be going out of my way to inform any and all who will listen of HMV’s contemptible bull-shitting condescension and dishonest approach to business, including an online summary of all the correspondence I’ve had to wade through in the vain hope of getting a proper apology and admission of error from you.

Martin S Smith

On 21^st May, the former seemed to happen though. At 10am on the dot, while doing my usual early morning (well, early for me) arsing about on the internet, I received an email newsletter from HMV. You can see it here (linked rather than embedded as it’s rather large).

“Huzzah,” thought I. “LA Noire for £34.99 with a 20% off code means I could get it for just £28. That’s a pretty decent price.” So I dutifully clicked through that link to HMV’s webstore to buy it.

Except it wasn’t available for £34.99, but rather £39.99. Now, does that make a difference? Well yes, £4 difference. Not a lot perhaps, but enough to gall. Besides, if it’s advertised at £34.99, they should be selling it for £39.99. I rooted around HMV’s site for a little bit, trying to see if the price was different between formats (it wasn’t) or if I had to go a certain page for it (long shot and wrong), but alas I could find nothing to get it at that advertised price.

So I emailed HMV customer services about it. Writing at 11:41

 Hi,
I just got your regular email newsletter advertising your pick of new items. In the email, LA Noire is advertised as £34.99, but following the link to your website, it’s only available at £39.99. Shouldn’t these match up? Which is the correct price?

Martin S Smith

Polite, well-written and to the point, yes? Anyway, I left it at that, went about my life, hoping they’d get back to me before the 20% code expired. I assumed I’d at least hear back either way that day.

Skip along to the morning of Monday 23^rd May. The code had expired (well, I thought it had, actually it didn’t expire until that evening, but that turns out to be moot) and I’d pretty much forgotten about the whole thing. But at 10:11 I finally got a reply.

 Dear Martin Smith,

Thank you for contacting hmv regarding the price of ‘LA Noire’. I appreciate the chance to assist you today.

We apologise for the confusion. Please be informed that both price are correct. The ‘LA Noire £39.99 is an interactive game means you can access it through internet. The other ‘LA Noire’ £34.99 is a pre played game means it was a pre owned item but in a good condition.

If you need more assistance, do not hesitate to reply to this e-mail or visit our website www.hmv.com.

Thank you for contacting us and we appreciate your patience.

Kind regards,

Jxx Cxx

Online Customer Service Team

Yeah, just let that sink in for a moment. Let your brain try and digest the nonsense that is that reply. Ready? Ok, so let’s address everything wrong with that email.

 Thank you for contacting hmv regarding the price of ‘LA Noire’. I appreciate the chance to assist you today.

That’s an utterly odd phrase. But anyway.

 We apologise for the confusion. Please be informed that both price are correct. The ‘LA Noire £39.99 is an interactive game means you can access it through internet.

This is complete rubbish. For a start, the sentence doesn’t really make sense. It almost means something, but actually doesn’t at all.

 The other ‘LA Noire’ £34.99 is a pre played game means it was a pre owned item but in a good condition.

Good they explained that, because I wouldn’t have known what “pre-played” meant if they hadn’t explained it with “pre-owned”.

Despite the abhorrent grammar and the fact that it barely makes sense, I got what they were suggesting. That LA Noire’s price is £39.99 and that £34.99 is how much they charge for a pre-owned copy of the game and though they didn’t explicitly say it, they were implying I had mixed these up. Which is fine, I suppose, except…

Except, there’s no mention of pre-owned games in the newsletter, let alone that the LA Noire price is for a pre-owned game. Which is probably because HMV don’t sell pre-owned games on their website. And it can’t have been to advertise pre-owned copies in their High Street stores, because as the original newsletter states in the small print:

 All prices on hmv.com are online only and may differ from HMV Stores.

So bearing this all in mind, I replied later that morning.

 Hi,

I’m sorry, but your reply doesn’t make much sense. You’re saying that £34.99 is the price for a pre-owned copy of LA Noire, but your pre-owned game service isn’t at all mentioned in your newsletter. Furthermore, you don’t even sell pre-owned games on your website, only in-store. And it would be redundant of you to advertise the price of said pre-owned games only available in-store through your website’s newsletter given that the disclaimer at the bottom states: “All prices on hmv.com are online only and may differ from HMV Stores.”
So if it was, in fact, your intention to advertise the price of your pre-owned copies of LA Noire, it’s astoundingly misleading. The newsletter suggests I can purchase LA Noire at a price of £34.99 from your website, when in fact that’s entirely impossible. False advertising like this is disgraceful.

Martin S Smith

After sending that, I went and did what anyone annoyed with something does these days – I went and moaned on the internet. I off-handedly suggested that I should report it to the Advertising Standards Authority, not really thinking I would. But a far wiser poster on the message board I moaned on said that I should, because that’s what it’s there for and consumers should make use of it.

So around midday 23^rd May I lodged a complaint with the ASA, explaining all this (more succinctly than this article, obviously) and including a copy of the newsletter.

It turned out HMV were interested in the newsletter as well, emailing me at 16:04:

 Dear Martin Smith,

Thank you for your reply.

Kindly send the a scanned copy of news letter that you received regarding the price of ‘LA Noire’ so we can further investigate.

We look forward to your reply.

Kind regards,

Jxxx Cxxx

Online Customer Service Team

I replied within a couple of minutes with a composite screenshot of the newsletter and got was assured half an hour later:

 Dear Martin Smith,

Thank you for the screen shot that you provided.

I will forward this to our relevant department so we can further investigate.

Thank you for contacting us.

Kind regards,

Jxxx Cxxx

Online Customer Service Team

And I didn’t hear from HMV again for a while.

But in the mean time, the ASA were taking my complaint seriously. Now, the emails and letters I’ve received from the ASA are actually marked confidential, so I will summarise briefly (and it’s mentioned on the ASA’s site, so it can’t be that confidential).

The ASA agreed to look into my complaint and decided that HMV should get an informal rap on the knuckles and a “we’ve got an eye you” warning. Further, they decided that HMV could informally resolve the matter with me and asked if they could they pass on my contact details.

The contacts details HMV should already have had from when I first complained, yeah? I was wary of this, because I didn’t want to follow this option and just get fobbed off with another lame excuse and have that preclude any proper reprimand. But I was assured it wouldn’t be instead of the ASA dealing with HMV. So I agreed. This was all in June and the month ended with me being assured that HMV should be in contact with me “shortly”.

Meanwhile, LoveFilm, wonderful people that they are, had sent me a rental copy of LA Noire and I was deep into it. (Fitting really that the game is based around discerning when people are lying and knowing when and how to doubt it or prove them wrong with evidence). Getting the game from HMV for the price they’d originally offered was moot, as I was happy to just rent it and if I did want to buy it, I could have gotten it cheaper from other retailers by now anyway.

Remember I said I didn’t hear from HMV again for a while? Well it wasn’t until 5^th July they bothered to get back to me.

 Dear Mr Smith

I am writing in response to your recent communication regarding the price error included in an email to you advertising ‘L.A. Noire’ priced at £34.99.

Stretching the definition of ‘recent’ a bit there, I think. It’d been over a month.

 I would like to offer my sincerest apologies for this  misunderstanding. At the time that our email was sent to you the price of ‘L.A. Noire’ was £34.99. The price of the item was increased to £39.99 by our supplier between the date that our email was sent to you and the date that you clicked on the link, which is what led to the price disparity that you have noticed.

If you’re wondering why I was a bit anal with times and dates earlier on, this is why. I received the email at 10:00 am exactly and read it immediately, of this I am certain. It can’t have been more than five minutes before I followed the link to their site. So apparently the price changed in that five minutes? That’s either bollocks or ridiculous.

 Of course, I appreciate that this was no fault of your own.

Get used to this sort of phrasing.

 I would also like to apologise for the lack of response to your email of the 23rd May 2011. Your email should have been escalated to one of the Online Customer Service Department here, at Head Office for further investigation. However, it appears that due to a clerical error your email was misplaced. I would like to assure you that it is extremely rare for a customer email to go missing, but I do appreciate how this has exacerbated the situation on this occasion.

We are of course, happy to offer you ‘L.A. Noire’ at the advertised price of £34.99, if you would still like to place the order.

In a word; “no”. I checked, LA Noire was a little over £32 on Amazon when this was sent.

  If you would like us to arrange this, please reply to this email with the last four digits of the card that you would like to use for payment and we will arrange the order with the altered price on your behalf. Alternatively, we are happy to place £5.00 of credit in your hmv.com account which can be spent on anything available on hmv.com.

A £5 voucher. Now, that might seem generous, but really, a £5 discount at HMV usually just brings something down to a normal shop’s price.

 I thank you for bringing this error to our attention and I do hope that you will forgive us for the delay in our response to you. I do hope that you have not been discouraged from shopping with hmv.com in future.

Ahaha

 Yours sincerely

Zxxx Exxx

store customer service advisor

Just as I’d feared when the ASA said HMV wanted to informally resolved this with me, I was being fed more nonsense. Though they didn’t say it explicitly, they’re implying that I didn’t follow the link in the email quick enough to get the advertised price before it got updated to match the supplier’s price. Which is bollocks. As I said, I received, read and followed the link in the email all within about five minutes. Advertising a price that’s invalid five minutes after the ad is sent is both ridiculous and possibly illegal. What further rubbishes this excuse is that the email was sent on a Saturday morning. I find it hard to believe that they’d be updating prices on a Saturday morning, especially given it took two days for anyone to reply to my email that weekend, or that the supplier would update their catalogue prices on a weekend.

Needless to say, I wasn’t happy. A bullshit excuse that’s really suggesting it was more my fault than anything else and a £5 voucher to buy me off.

 Hi Zxxx,

While I appreciate your attempts to deal with my complaint, no doubt due in part to the action I took through the ASA about the misleading email in question, I do have a couple of problems with your email.

Name-dropping the ASA just to make sure they knew I was the same person making a complaint and to remind them that an official body had found them at fault.

First of all, your statement that the supplier’s price for LA Noire changed between the time you sent the email and the time I received it and followed its link is, unfortunately, preposterous. The email was sent to me at 10am. I read it and travelled to your website from it within a couple of minutes of receiving it, five at best. Of this I am absolutely certain as my WebMail Notifier immediately notified me of the email and I read it immediately. The notion that your supplier can change their price and that that change can be reflected in your prices on your website within five minutes is, I feel, tremendously unlikely.

Notice that I’m polite and say ‘tremendously unlikely’ rather than ‘complete bollocks’

And then there’s a bit  where I recap my previous correspondence with the other HMV person, because I misread Zxxx’s email and mistakenly thought they didn’t know about all the previous ones. I’m not going to reproduce that bit, simply to face some space. Shut up, yes that’s the only reason.

 As to your kind offer to sell me the LA Noire product for the actual advertised price of £34.99, I can only assume you’re joking. It’s been over a month! Even if I hadn’t already purchased it elsewhere, I could go and order it on Amazon right now for less than the altered price you’re offering me (£32.97 if you’re interested). If I’m honest, the main attraction I had to ordering the item from you at £34.99 in the first place was to use it in conjunction with the limited time 20% off code in the same email, but it took your company so long to get back to me that even if that first response had made me this same conciliatory offer, the code still would have expired and been of no use.

As for being discouraged from shopping with your company again, who can say? All I know is that a £5 discount on anything I’m actually interested in buying from you now would only bring the price down to that offered by other, more reliable, retailers, if that.

Yes, this is me angling for a bigger amount. I figure if they’re going to try and buy me off with a voucher, it might as well be for a decent amount.

Yours faithfully,
Martin S Smith

The next day, I got a shorter response.

 Dear Mr Smith

Thank you for your response to my email.

I do appreciate your comments regarding the length of time since the release of this game and it’s subsequent price reduction at many retailers and the additional 20% discount you wished to obtain. Therefore, I would like to offer to place £15.00 of credit in your hmv.com e-wallet by way of an apology for the confusion surrounding this issue.

Again, I apologise for the confusion surrounding your initial enquiry and emails and any inconvenience caused.

Yours sincerely

Zxxx Exxx

store customer service advisor

I can put this email rather more succinctly: “Ok, here’s £15, shut up and go away.”

£15’s not a terrible amount to be bought off with I suppose (and I was surprised that they went up that easily), but trouble is I didn’t really care about the money. Even £15 on HMV doesn’t really get you much, compared to say, anywhere else on the internet. But the main thing is I still hadn’t had a proper admission of guilt from HMV. Sure, they’d ‘apologised’ a lot, but never for having made a pricing mistake. The complete omission of talking about the core issue in this latest email confirmed they were sticking with the price update explanation. As they see it, they hadn’t made any mistake. Every time they’d ‘apologised’ it was for me having (supposedly) made a mistake/being confused/not having understood them properly or for them not emailing me promptly. Look:

 I apologise for the confusion surrounding your initial enquiry

an apology for the confusion surrounding this issue.

I do hope that you will forgive us for the delay in our response to you.

I would also like to apologise for the lack of response

I would like to offer my sincerest apologies for this  misunderstanding.

We apologise for the confusion.

I was sick of them apologising for the confusion instead of actually owning up to making a mistake. Which I told them, also on 6^th July.

Dear Zxxx,

Thank you for your prompt reply. Your revised monetary apology is somewhat generous (though is still in a losing battle against your company’s uncompetitive prices).

*cough* Well if they could treble the £5 so easily, why not try? I can be bought apparently, just for above £15.

 I’m finding it rather annoying however that, although I’ve received a litany of hollow apologies from your company, you’ve yet to actually take any blame for this mistake. Continually you and your colleagues have offered nonsensical explanations that attribute any mistake and confusion in this matter onto me, which is, frankly, insulting.

The first excuse I received suggested that I had mixed up the pre-owned and normal retail prices for the product, which I quite comprehensively proved to be nonsense. Now you appear to be sticking with this claim that a change in the supplier’s price for the product resulted in your price changing between when the email was sent and when I followed its link, again suggesting it’s my fault for not having read your newsletter quickly enough. I read and followed the link in it within five minutes of it being sent. Either the price had been changed before you sent the newsletter (in which case the newsletter should have been verified before it was sent) and, you knowingly or not, were advertising an incorrect price (as the Advertising Standards Authority have also interpreted) or the price was updated within those five minutes, which given that it was a Saturday morning and you took 48 hours to answer a simple customer email seems especially unlikely.

I want you to admit that you made a mistake! All I’ve had from your company are feeble and patronising excuses that sidestep any culpability on your part and continually try and paint this as a mistake I’ve somehow made, however much you dress it up with empty phrases about ‘confusion’ and ‘apologies’. The only mistake I’ve made in this whole debacle is believing I could get a product for a decent price from HMV.

Yours sincerely,
Martin S Smith

Given the decent response times I was getting with this second customer service rep, I had expected a prompt reply to this, but I didn’t hear anything again for a week. The afternoon of the 13^th July;

 Dear Mr Smith

Thank you for your email.

I am sorry that you are disappointed with my last response to you and I would like to apologise for the delay in my response to you whilst I was investigating this issue further.  However, I hope that in clarifying the contents of my email, I can go some way to restoring your faith in hmv.

Faith in HMV? Fat chance, but ok.

 We have investigated this matter internally and I can confirm that this issue was not caused by any confusion or error on your part regarding the Re/Play and full price of this item.

Yes, this I already knew.

  Our investigation shows that the email was sent on 16th April 2011 and the price for LA Noire was £34.99 for pre-orders placed before the release of the game on the 20th May 2011.

A change in the story again then. Now, the price still presumably changed because of the supplier, but the email was sent long before I got it! Note the mention of pre-orders here. I’ll address that in a moment.

  I must assume that there was a one-off computer glitch in this instance that led to the delay between the email being sent by us and being received by you,

Not entirely implausible, I’ll admit. But I’ve never had a problem with delayed mail to my gmail account any other time and there are problems though, which again I’ll get to in a minute.

  as we have not received any similar complaints regarding this issue.

“It must be a problem on your end, because no-one else has complained!” I don’t think anyone else would have cared much if they noticed. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t.

  However, the IT Team for the website has been notified to ensure another issue of this nature does not occur again.

Again, I would like to offer our apologies for any inconvenience that this issue may have caused you and for our confusion when addressing this matter.

Well at least they’re apologising for their own confusion this time.

 I have arranged for your online account to be credited with £15.00 as promised and I do hope that you will find this a satisfactory resolution to this matter.

Translated: “Look, you’re not getting a bigger amount, so stop angling for it. We’re putting the money in your account whether you want it or not, now go away!”

 Yours sincerely

Zxxx Exxx

store customer service advisor

I was very tempted to let this be an end of it. To take the money, pay over the odds for a Doctor Who DVD and forget about it. Except, they’re still peddling crap.

Suppose this email was meant to be sent on the 16^th May and was offering the pre-order price for LA Noire. Then why does it say LA Noire is ‘out now’? Why doesn’t it have, like with every other pre-order product in the newsletter, a release date under it? Why on Earth would a company send out an email on a Monday claiming a game that’s not available until the Friday is ‘out now’?

Furthermore, why would they advertise a 20% off code five days before it’s active, without any notification of it not yet being active. If a company emails you a discount code, it’s always currently active unless otherwise stated, but there are no dates given here. Online terms and conditions for the code give its time period as Friday 20th May to Monday 23rd May. If this email had been sent and received on Monday 16th, it would have been equally misleading for the voucher not to be working for another four days without any clear indication of this.

This is all either more bullshit or continual corporate incompetent. I’ve almost given trying to work out which.

So I’m not going to let them browbeat me into submission.

 Hi Zxxx

I appreciate the lengths you’ve gone to in investigating this matter. I must say though, this latest explanation has as many holes as all the others.

LA Noire was released to retail on 20th May. If this email was to be sent out on the 16th May, then surely the game’s release date would have been placed between the cover image and the link, as for all the other pre-order items in the email? Instead, it quite clearly says ‘out now’. This not only suggests that the email was created, or at least intended for distribution on, the day I received it (ie after the game’s release), but that if it had been sent on the 16th it would have been erroneously saying the game was out before it actually was.

So your company either planned to send an email saying a game was out days before it was but it conveniently got held up by a ‘glitch’ to the point that misleading statement became correct or the date I received the email was the date you actually intended to send it  but you advertised the wrong price and still won’t admit it.

Yours wearily,
Martin S Smith

Yes, I forgot to mention the thing about the voucher code in that email. Next time, I guess.

Updates if/when they come.

I'm not the only one that sees that she's quite obviously falling, am I?

This September, DC will be rebooting Batgirl, along with every other title it publishes, returning Barbara Gordon to the role, presumably magically removing her disability along the way (though a wheelchair-bound Batgirl would certainly be an interesting direction). This is not that comic, though I will most probably end up talking about it later. Instead, this is the first volume of the last Batgirl relaunch, from late 2009.

Batgirl Rising stars Stephanie Brown as the new Batgirl. Stephanie has a history of Bat related vigilantism, having previously been Spoiler and even Robin for a brief spell. She’s a fun character and deserving of her own title finally. So, new series, new Batgirl – perfect for new readers, right?

Well, no, not at all really. Batgirl quite firmly plants itself as a C-List Bat title, one that will only be read by people following the bigger Bat titles and thus assumes you’re au fait with everything to do with the franchise. You know about when Steph became Robin and why and what happened and how she died and then turned out to be alive, right? Well, Batgirl’s going to assume you do and not explain any of it. This title is so new reader unfriendly it’s a joke. Very little is explained (properly or otherwise) here and it makes for a frustrating read.

The problem isn’t so much the premise, but the execution. Steph is the new Batgirl. Fine. Why? Um… because the previous Batgirl (Cassandra Cain) had a bit of a strop, threw the costume at her and buggered off. It’s not really a motivation for taking up the role. Steph makes the point that wearing the Bat-symbol brings with it a certain cache that helps in fights, more than her relatively anonymous Spoiler costume did. Which is certainly a perk of the change, yes, but it’s hardly a reason. Steph became Spoiler originally to foil her criminal father, Cluemaster. That’s a motivation right there (one which goes completely unmentioned here). The argument could be convincingly made that Steph wants to become Batgirl to prove herself as a proper hero, but no-one involved with this comic seems interesting in making that argument. So instead Steph becomes Batgirl seemingly just because she has the costume, whether the rest of the Bat-Family likes it or not.

Turns out they don’t, which brings in our second protagonist, the original Batgirl, Barbara Gordon. Paralysed from the waist down since the late 80s, Barbara is now the white-hat hacker known as Oracle and uses that position to help Batman and also run the Birds of Prey. Except Batman’s dead and the Birds of Prey have been disbanded and so Barbara is just hanging about, smouldering with generic rage. Now, I’ve read the end of Birds of Prey and I’ve read the following the Oracle: The Cure mini and I’ve even deigned to read Final Crisis, which they both tie into, and I still have no goddamn idea what Barbara’s all moody about here. The reader is bludgeoned with the fact that she’s throwing herself a pity party and in a generally bad mood, but at no point is it explained why. Why doesn’t she restart the Birds of Prey? Why hasn’t she got herself a proper new apartment and computer set-up? Why doesn’t she seem to be talking to Dick Grayson? You’re just expected to know. I had the same problem with Oracle: The Cure and it’s just bad writing, editing and publishing that none of this is explained. Given her sour disposition, Barbara isn’t too happy when she finds out that Steph is the new Batgirl and tries to get her to quit. And instead ends up giving Steph her approval and becomes her mentor.

Barbara being the voice in Steph’s head (very similar to Bruce Wayne and Terry McGuinness’s dynamic in Batman Beyond) is a good premise which has a lot of mileage in it. It sets Steph up for a journey to become a proper hero rather than an ineffective also-ran. It gives Barbara new direction and meaning if they’re insistent on Birds of Prey being dead (which it turns out DC weren’t as Birds of Prey relaunched with Babs a few months after Batgirl was started). But Bryan Q Miller fluffs all of it. The first arc, hell the first issue of any new comic, especially with a new or revised character, should be a mission statement. It should be fun and interesting and intriguing and impressive and leave you with a hook for successive issues, but most of all it should tell you what the series is about, what its characters are like, what their motivation is and why the reader should care. But we don’t get that here. Instead of just telling us why Steph wants to be Batgirl, he bogs down the opening three issue arc with pretentious claptrap and philosophy about self-determination and the reality of freedom, which Steph coincidentally learns in her first few classes at college and understands just as she defeats the villain in issue three. It’s eye-rollingly cliché (right down to Steph triumphantly explaining what she’s learnt to said villain and him not thinking she’s incredibly weird for randomly bringing it up) and acts only to over-complicate the set-up and introduction. There’s a half-hearted attempt at making it a mystery who Batgirl is, but it’s given up after six pages and thus is pointless. The first issue spends far too much time setting up ancillary elements rather than properly dealing with its main cast. Former Teen Titan Wendy is given a better introduction than Barbara, even though she’s completely removed from Batgirl’s story. There’s as much time spent setting up the convenient new police detective character (present along with a previously unmentioned Hell’s Kitchen-esque area of Gotham only to ghettoise the title from using the ‘proper’ Batman characters and locations). The whole opening of the title completely misses the point.

That describes Miller’s work in this volume to a T really. The back cover gives his only other credit as Smallville, which is hardly a resounding endorsement, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is his first comics work. It certainly feels like it, as the first few issues are bogged down with strung out, convoluted and conflicting narration. Not only do we get Steph narrating, but Barbara also, which is actually a nice idea. Their captions are visually distinct from each other (Steph’s purple, Bab’s green) and are all in mixed case font. The problem comes however when Miller insists in bridging over dialogue from other scenes and pages (in ‘voice over’), which is naturally presented in more captions. Still mixed case though, which jars given all the speech balloons the lead into and pick up from are in solid caps. On top of this, Miller repeatedly splits sentences across captions, leaving loads of trailing and broken lines scattered across the page. Multiply that by the three types of captions in continual use (that’s ignoring that the ‘voice over’ captions sometimes split into two different colours to denote different speakers) and throw in the poorly separated flashbacks and scene changes and it all makes for an annoying and confusing read. It would probably work on TV or film, but this is a comic book. Has Miller ever even read one before? Someone at DC editorial should have checked before they hired him. At the very least sat him down and told him to simplify it. But then this is DC and simplifying things is rather against their nature.

This does settle down a bit as the volume continues, but Miller sticks with tagging scenes that end at the bottom of the page with the first line of dialogue from the next page/scene. I’ve always hated that technique. It’s another sign of a TV writer, as it works well there as you can mix the sound over before the picture changes. In a comic book, it just feels artificial and, given it’s always done to play on double meanings and irony in dialogue, very smug. Rather unnecessary really as well. I’m reading your comic, I’m going to turn the damn page and read the next scene, so stop trying to hook me into it. If I dislike a comic enough to want to stop reading it, a little dialogue tag isn’t going to change my mind.

Miller is joined on the title by artist Lee Garbett and inker Trevor Scott. I’ve never heard of either, though Garbett has worked on The Outsiders, which means I’ve probably seen his work before and forgotten. It wouldn’t surprise me if I had, because it’s incredibly mediocre. There are very few bits that are actively bad, if you ignore the fact that everyone has the same nose and, in long shots, no eyes. The problem is that it has absolutely no style and no flair. It’s instantly forgettable. The artistic highlight of the volume is the fill-in art for issue 4 (aside; it always feels weird to me when bad to average artists need fill-ins. Someone doing magnificent work like JH Williams III yes, but an artist like Garbett, whose pages all look as if they were done in half an hour not being able to keep to schedule is a joke). After bookends from Garbett, Tim Levins draws the rest of issue 4 and there’s a noticeable shift in the art as it kicks up a gear. Gone are the potatoey shaped heads and random assortments of odd lines purporting to be facial definition and in come decent facial expressions, slick lines and characters with actual character! Shame it doesn’t last very long.

Batgirl feels very much like a comic that doesn’t aspire to be anything other than mediocrity, which is depressing. The premise is solid (Barbara’s weird time share arrangement in the Batcave notwithstanding) and just because the character is a third-rate hero in the story, doesn’t mean the book itself has to be in reality. Look at Batwoman – a franchise character created largely as a token concession to the LGBT audience and yet her (eventual) solo series has been a massive critical success. It would have been nice if anyone involved with Batgirl cared half as much. Instead this is treated as an unimportant title only to be read by readers of the rest of the Bat-line and thus can never manage to exceed that expectation.

It’s not surprising then that Stephanie’s tenure as Batgirl is to be imminently cut short. Far better writers have made far pithier comments regarding Barbara’s regression from Oracle back to Batgirl. It’s an issue a lot of people feel strongly about and I don’t blame them. The super-hero medium is one that has always played fast and loose with physical injuries. Practically every super-power also comes with the unmentioned ability to miraculously heal from serious injury. So to see Barbara paralysed and for it stick for over 20 years was a refreshing change. Not least because Barbara as Oracle proved that you don’t have to be physically perfect to be a hero. Barbara is a better character in her wheelchair. As Batgirl she has rarely been little more than a relic of the past, a totem of nostalgia for the era of the campy Batman TV series. She was barely being used at all before The Killing Joke, she wasn’t even active as Batgirl any more when she was paralysed. Becoming Oracle made her not only a stronger character but one that could hold a title of her own for over ten years through a turbulent marketplace, with Birds of Prey. The best stories featuring Barbara as Batgirl have all been written since she became Oracle and work largely on the knowledge of what becomes of her. Having her become Batgirl again cannot be anything other than a regression. It’s a slap in the face to all the readers with similar disabilities that have been inspired by her. Using a cosmic reset to either magically cure her or erase the past twenty years of published stories is nothing but a crass cheat and publicity stunt, all to the detriment of the character.

That actually looks more like Marston than the original cover did.

There was, upon announcement of this slice of downloadable expansion for Rockstar’s western epic, a fair amount of eye-rolling, not least from myself. ‘Oh joy. Zombies. That hasn’t been done before.’

Nonetheless, given that Red Dead Redemption was probably the best game of 2010, I was intrigued enough to check Undead Nightmare out. Although I sold my copy of RDR upon completion, so had to settle for renting this stand-alone expansion disc version.

Slight misgivings aside, as soon as Undead Nightmare started, I was struck by just how damn much I’d missed John Marston since finishing his story last summer. He is quite easily one of the greatest video game protagonists of all time – a well realised, fallible human character who wins over the heart of the player despite being, on paper, an amoral criminal. It was good to be back with him.

And it was good to be back in Rockstar’s pseudo-slice of the Old West – an expansive, rolling, seemingly borderless environment that draws you in fully. And if the price for all this is a few zombies, then so be it.

I’m probably somewhere in the middle ground regarding zombies, but it’s hard to deny that they’re reaching something of a saturation point in entertainment media lately, especially games. I think when zombie modes have become a staple of military first person shooters, you know it’s time to move on.

But this is Rockstar, a company whose repertoire demands the benefit of the doubt. And as you’d expect, their take on a zombie apocalypse is as wry and knowing as it comes. Right from the start, when Marston leaves his infected family hog-tied and tells them to ‘stop trying to bite chunks out of people’ and not much later with the reappearance of McDougal, whose fate is obvious once he announces his intentions to ‘walk alone down that dark, deserted street over there’, it’s clear that not only is this is Rockstar still on top form, but that this is Red Dead Redemption back as you remember it.

Except, it’s not. Not really. The events of Undead Nightmare take place during the final act of RDR’s original story, that calm before the storm when Marston’s trying to be a family man and rancher. At that point in the game, Marstron’s fate is sealed. He is effectively a dead man walking and this expansion completely underlines that point. The entirety of Undead Nightmare is an artificial extension of Marston’s story, delaying his inevitable end. Marston is as much a zombie as any he kills. And fittingly, the game is as well.

While it’s nice to get to return to all those locations and to see all those familiar characters again, ultimately it’s a somewhat hollow experience. Bonnie McFarlane is a great character, but her reappearance here does nothing to improve upon the sombre, perfect final scene she had in the main story. Yes, it’s poignant and well done, but it adds nothing new. It’s a shuffling retread of that original farewell.

Every time I play this, I’m reminded of that maxim ‘you can never go home again’. The return to New Austin et al is superficially pleasing, but, just like the hordes of the undead, plagued by feelings of regret and loss. Nothing will capture that original feel of John Marston’s quest for redemption again. Red Dead Redemption was superb because of the finality of its story and Undead Nightmare tampers with that. It would be naive to think that Rockstar aren’t aware of that and there are certainly suggestions that it informs the construction of Undead Nightmare, as the game is infected with a painful nostalgia for itself.

Ultimately then Undead Nightmare is a much like a shambling zombie with a bucket on its head. Funny, enjoyable and entertaining, but ultimately a little bit depressing.

The backdoor pilot can be a very odd occurrence though, used to try and spin-off the most unlikely of characters into their own series. The Simpsons episode Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase lampooned this brilliantly, by showing mock suggestions of ludicrous spin-offs from their show, such as an 80s style, New Orleans basedm action detective show starring Chief Wiggum and Principal Skinner.

This is the first in an occasional series where I plan to take a twisted look at existing episodes of TV shows and view them as backdoor pilots for unlikely characters. And we’re going to start off with Doctor Who. Specifically the worst episode of the new iteration of Doctor Who, Fear Her, because it’s got to be good for something, right?

Series: Doctor Who

Episode: Fear Her (Season 2 episode 11)

Premise: The Doctor and Rose land in London, 2012, which is just when the Olympics happen to be occurring. Their interest in seeing the opening of the games is curtailed though when they discover that children are disappearing from a suburban street, seemingly vanishing into thin air. All because of one of the worst child actors on TV in years.

Backdoor Pilot for: Kel, the council workman with a council pick-axe and a no-nonsense attitude!

What it’s about: Kel is a council workman who cares about his job. Obsessively so. He’s got to tidy and repair streets up in preparation for the Olympics, retarmacking roads to remove pot holes and all that. And he doesn’t like people messing with council property. Because he loves the council. They taught him special council recipes for tarmac! He also doesn’t like being accused of kidnapping children, which is pretty understandable, really.

How would the spin-off work: Kel – Council Warrior! Every episode follows Kel as he lovingly tends to the everyday work of council workman with care and dedication. Episode one, we ease the viewers in with what they’re familiar with – tarmacking. Episode two, mix it up a bit with some grass-cutting, maybe even some hedge-trimming. Along the way, we see Kel deal with irritating and irate locals, who bemoan him for the crucial work he’s doing, even if they’ve been wanting it done for ages. And he’ll be on the fringes of odd goings on, not quite knowing what’s really happening, whether it’s werewolves, alien invasions or ancient pre-human civilisations rising from the Earth. He’ll be there, council equipment in hand to help along someone who actually knows what to do. As long as they don’t break it. Because it’s council property.

Kel could do with a supporting cast, so I suggest a younger trainee council-worker to act as a foil to him. One who doesn’t really care for the council and is just doing the job for the money. This can spur Kel into long soliloquies about the joys of working in the public sector.

Fear Her was set in 2012, so we’re right now in the prime time to start production on a Kel spin-off. Broadcast can start in 2012, picking up right where Fear Her left off. Although, let’s skip the Olympics, yeah?

BBC, my contact details are on the blog.

Chances are the Special Edition will either be 'Grey' or 'Read All Over'.

As is often the case with video game reviews on this blog, this is presented with a hint of reserve. I’ve not yet finished this game, though I’ve sunk about twenty hours into it and I’m about two thirds of the way through the main quest. Also I haven’t been able to touch any of the multiplayer elements because a) I don’t know anyone else with a copy and b) my DS doesn’t like my wireless network. Anyway, with the lack of a decent segue into the review proper, I’m just going to cut short thi-

One of my favourite gaming memories is of Pokemon Blue, back on the original Gameboy. This was in the days before easy, always-on internet access, so I went into the game knowing only hints and snippets of information about the creatures contained within, despite having watched the (awful) cartoon a fair bit beforehand.

Entering the Viridian Forest for the first time, the point at which the game takes off the training wheels and lets you really get stuck in, was a superb moment. Despite only being rendered in monochrome, somewhat blocky graphics, the environment of that forest was so immersive and evocative that it’s burned into my memory.

Every Pokemon game since then has, for me, really been about trying to recapture the feel of that moment with Blue. And it’s futile really. It’s been built up in my mind so much that it’s not going to be trumped by a sequel. It doesn’t help that Pokemon games since that initial Red/Blue pair have all been retreads of the same formula with arguably diminishing returns. Until now, it seems. As Pokemon Black is the first that comes close to fully recapturing the spirit of Blue.

Partially this is subjective. I went in knowing nothing of this new generation of the series, through both wilful and accidental ignorance. This has helped immensely, as it makes every new creature encounter a surprise and an intrigue. But it’s also because Black makes something of a fresh start. So far, 20-odd hours and six gyms in, I’ve yet to see any Pokemon I recognise from any of the previous four games. Which is fantastic. Words cannot express how tedious it was continually seeing Geodudes and Zubats pop up in every cave in every game, Magikarp in every river and Pikachu nestled away somewhere to appease fans. Sure, new creations like Roggenrolla might have an awful pun for a name and a design that errs to odd rather than sublime, but it’s a fresh face, which is enough.

Plus, while Roggenrolla is an awful pun, but it’s also pretty cool, really. It’s impressive just how many such puns and contractions the designers manage to come up with for creatures. Try right now to think of two combinations of fire and pigs. Not easy is it? Step forward Tepig and Pignite. They’re brilliant little names and my anticipation of discovering (through the game, not the internet) what the third stage is called is quite high.

Admittedly, not every new Pokemon is a hit. For every Samuraott (a giant monstrous otter with a samurai sword for a horn) there’s a Vanillite (sentient vanilla ice cream. Seriously). And if you look too closely it’s easy to that Black is using the same patterns and formats, just with a snazzy new coating over the top. The starting options are fire, water and grass again. Your first opportunities to catch things are largely mundane birds, rodents and dog-like creatures. Caves have rock and bat-esque Pokemon. But, a lot of this is common-sense in a way. Bats in a cave isn’t a ridiculous idea, just like always having fish in the rivers make sense. And even more is due to balance. Don’t be fooled, Pokemon games are extremely well-balanced in terms of character classes, their strengths and weaknesses, variety, locations etc. Reusing the same template over and over isn’t laziness; it’s not breaking something that works.

Similarly, the quest is essentially the same as ever. You’re a trainer (read: a young kid shoved out into the wilderness to do research for some professor for no money) and you’re challenging all eight Pokemon gyms for badges, glory etc, along the way fighting an oddly styled and uniformed terrorist group with a high stylist budget. With any other RPG series, repeating that stock, arguably quite bland, plot across five games would be unforgivable, but Pokemon gets away with it (just about), because of its dual-identity as a competitive, multiplayer game with genuine sports like traits. It’s as much about the competition and battling as it is the story, whereas something like Final Fantasy is about the story, with the combat as a tool used to express it.

The area Black succeeds in is that it’s streamlined the concept back down to its bare-bones. Previous games in the series have become bogged down with superfluous crap that distracts from the main quest. These things aren’t even side-quests, they’re just ridiculous time-sinks, like the secret base and underground network from Pearl and the Pokemon Contest nonsense from Ruby. This isn’t to say that there aren’t extra features available in the game. There’s some theatre thing where you shove props onto Pokemon for some reason, but it’s very much kept to the sidelines. As soon as it was introduced to me, I’ve ignored it and the game doesn’t seem to mind at all.

As I said at the top, I haven’t been able to get online with Black, so there are elements I’ve not been able to test. Multiplayer battling is unlikely to be any different from before, because there’s not that much to change. And the Global Trade System worked well enough in Pearl that I can’t see it being anything other than good here. What I can’t speculate on is the Dream World section, which is completely inaccessible to me. My rental copy didn’t come with a manual either, so I haven’t a clue how it works or what it’s meant to do. Not something a reviewer should be admitting, really.

But, as a single-player experience, Pokemon Black is very fulfilling. It’s easily the best in the series since Blue, perhaps even better than Blue, if you ignore nostalgia. My only problem with it is that I’ve got a rental copy and thus can’t keep my save file once I send it back. What will become of my Unfezant?!

Superman was there like a shot to comfort Batman through his indigestion.

To be honest, I was expecting this to be something of a train wreck. DC’s big event comics are a mangy breed, many of them reviled by their own fanbase, let alone everyone else. Not only is this a DC event, but it’s a Crisis, a sub-brand of DC events almost that guarantees it’s going to be less than straight forward. Especially as this is written by Grant Morrison. Don’t get me wrong, Grant Morrison nearly always has great ideas. The trouble is they don’t always make great comics.

I was surprised that I actually found Final Crisis enjoyable. Enjoyable, but far from perfect.

Final Crisis begins with the death of Orion, one of the 4^th World characters (a Jack Kirby-spawned set of cosmic books that has ties to Superman). Strangely, half the cast act like they don’t know who he is (while I don’t know who half the cast are). While Green Lanterns Hal Jordan and John Stewart investigate Orion’s death, the Society of Super-Villains are visited by a man called Libra, who offers them all their greatest wishes. This, he proves by killing the Martian Manhunter.

It’s not a massive spoiler to say that things ultimately lead to the return of Darkseid and many other 4^th World characters. Certainly not as big a spoiler as the one on the cover anyway. Morrison casts the New Gods as fallen deities becoming reborn on Earth, twisting the world to meet their image, which is certainly a very interesting idea. The trouble is that it ends up competing with a different strand about the Monitors, an even more cosmic set of characters that observe and cultivate the multiverse. Here, Morrison posits that by observing the various universes under their control, the Monitors are becoming corrupted by the stories they see, changing from faceless, nameless organisms into fallible, story-driven characters like those they observe. Again, an interesting idea, but it doesn’t really gel with the Darkseid plot. It should have been taken off and grafted to another, dare I say simpler, plot and allowed to be its own story. Here it just distracts from and confuses the main story, rather than adds to it.

That’s before you even take into account that this is written by Grant Morrison. Again, a great ideasman, but he doesn’t always tell a good story. Final Crisis is unfortunately an example of this. It’s like 80% formed, but just falls short of actually working properly. The story is choppily paced. It bounces around between at least half-a-dozen odd ideas that can’t even be counted as plot-threads, because they’re never given enough room to breathe. These plotlets are all under-explained and you’re practically required to have Bachelors in DC continuity to get even the basics of what’s going on. I just about got by, but I honestly couldn’t tell you who Turpin is without Googling it. Morrison doesn’t deign to care to explain and he’s one of the main bloody characters. This will, by some I’m sure, be met by the response ‘well of course you’d have to know who all these people are to read this sort of big comics event’, but that is, frankly, bull. Every comic is potentially someone’s first. That’s the mandate Joe Quesada used when revitalising Marvel in the late 90s and it’s true. And while it’s perhaps not all that relevant for the fourth issue of some obscure little mini series, when it’s a big headline event like Final Crisis, it should be considered. There’s no way I would pass this on to a new or casual reader of DC, because there’s just too much they’re expected to already know going in. Combined with the under-explained panoply of Morrison ideas (big and small), it’s a very confusing read.

This is to say nothing of the artwork. The first two issues are fine, pencilled by JG Jones, perhaps best known for Wanted with Mark Millar back in the early 00s. Thing is, since then, Jones has almost exclusively been a cover artist and there’s generally a reason why artists like him make that transition – because they’re slow. Jones draws the first three issues, which I imagine amounts to the bulk of his lead-in time, and then scatterings of the remaining issues. The rest is covered by a variety of fill-in artists. Carlos Pacheco steps in to do some typically good work, while Doug Mahnke handles the final issue solo, albeit with a wide range of inkers. Frankly, it makes the whole series look like a bit of a mess. Marvel were in a similar position around the same time with Secret Invasion, where series artist Leinel Francis Yu was behind schedule. They opted to delay rather than hire fill-in artists, on the thinking that it was better to have a series uniformly drawn by one artist that would hold up when continued to be sold years down the line in trade paperback format, rather than rush out an uneven looking series to meet the monthly schedule. And looking at Final Crisis, it’s hard to fault Marvel on their decision.

The flow of the art isn’t helped by the break in the issues of the actual Final Crisis series collected for Superman Beyond and a one-shot called Submit. Beyond is pretty good actually. Drawn by Mahnke, it takes Superman away from the main Darkseid plot and expands the Monitor thread with a tour through the mulitverse. It was originally published in 3D, and though it isn’t here, there are odd little relics of that to be found if you’re looking. It’s an interesting two part story, but it caused annoyance when published because it ultimately ends up being essential to the understanding of the plot of Final Crisis. Fine when it’s included here, but when being sold separately and serially, incredibly annoying. Submit is another side-publication that’s essential to understand Final Crisis, to the point that I didn’t realise it wasn’t an actual part of the main series until writing this review (not helped by DC’s trade department’s pretty lousy presentation skills, naming individual issues in tiny little fonts hidden away on the respective covers). It’s a nice little breath of fresh air about Black Lightning and the Tattooed Man, a minor villain who starts to reconsider his position on the hero-villain spectrum in light of the massive cosmic destruction of the planet. I actually wish the Final Crisis series proper had been done like this, taking the story from a single perspective each issue, allowing the reader to both properly digest Morrison’s grand ideas and to get to know the characters better. Submit is let down though by the pretty mediocre artwork of Matthew Clark and, again, a variety of inkers.

With Final Crisis then we have a bit of bloody mess, albeit a strangely endearing one. I really like some of the ideas here, but they’re not well presented and expanded. The book comes with too many caveats for me to recommend it to anyone.

“You should totally read Final Crisis. It’s got some really interesting ideas, but it’s not easy to read and it’s pretty confusing for the most part and you need to know loads of DC stuff going into it and the art’s really uneven and it feels like two different stories shoved together.”

“Why’s it worth reading then?”

“Um…”

This cover would have made more sense with the Cthulhu Christmas story, the one in the previous volume.

I like Penny Arcade. Lots of people do. It’s like a damn conspiracy or something. Some of said people are relatively famous or important and get to write forewords to printed collections of the webcomic, with interesting stories about how they started reading it.

I am not and do not, which is handy, because I don’t have an interesting anecdote. I don’t even remember when or how I started reading Penny Arcade. All I know is that there was a time when I used the internet without reading it and then a time where I did. Reading Penny Arcade M-W-F weekly is as ingrained in me as checking my email and avoiding Ain’t It Cool News. So, in a way it’s a tricky thing to review. It’s like reviewing clouds or oxygen or the concept of bookcases.

Still, never let it be said I don’t like a challenge. For those living under a virtual rock for the past 13 years Penny Arcade is an anarchic web-comic mainly about video games. What makes it anarchic? Because it dares to use foul language and graphic violence for laughs, you know, the complete opposite of all those traditional comic strips in newspapers that are completely boring.

Although it’s described as a gamer webcomic, it’s never been exclusively about games, often providing ‘outsider’ swipes at mainstream entertainment, talking about other elements of ‘nerd’ culture and just making jokes about the inherent oddities and contradictions in modern life. Over the years, that ratio has started to change quite a bit. You are as likely now to find a strip about Dungeons & Dragons as you are a video game, but it rarely affects the consistent tone of the comic .There’s a lot of cross-over between those sorts of topics, so it’s agreeable. The same can’t be said when they produce ‘pilots’ for completely unrelated side-projects though and then devote spaces on the update schedule to let entirely different people continue said projects in lieu of, you know, Penny Arcade.

The Halls Below collects all the PA strips from 2005, a fine vintage that is before the growing tip of that balance. Seven years into the strip, there’s an undeniable confidence to the production. Yes, there’s an occasional mis-step and strip that doesn’t work, but the oeuvre as a whole is consistent in quality and humour. It’s strange to think that the strips collected here were made concurrently with the production of the first reprint volume, Attack of the Bacon Robots.

One thing that’s interesting to see across all these printed collections is the gradual change in Gabe’s art style. The first few proto-Penny Arcade strips are somewhat primitive and limited, but they quickly grow in ambition and talent, to create a smooth style. This has evolved over time, the characters has become taller, their heads less square and more distinct from each other and ultimately the line-work looser and more expressive. If I’m honest, I preferred his art back as it was around this time, perhaps more so in 03 and 04, as I find it a bit overwrought and erring towards the needlessly grotesque at times now.

I realise this is all a little vague, so given the entire back-catalogue is also available to see on their site, I’m going to hotlink a couple to demonstrate what I mean.

'How Many Points Is That' 27th March 2000

'I Will Choke Him' 1st May 2002

'Gabriel's Primary Concern' 14th April 2004

'If I Have Told Him Once' 29th April 2005

'The Lidless Eye' 2nd May 2007

'The Wisdom of Solomon' 23rd September 2009

'Imagine My Suprise' 21st January 2011

As the astute amongst you may have realised, if it’s all online for free still, there’s perhaps not much incentive to buy a printed collection. I would disagree. A book isn’t going to suffer from a failed internet connection or a hardware failure. And they just look nice.

Also, you do get more for your money, with a running commentary on the strips from their writer Tycho, which are frequently illuminating and sometimes funnier than the strips themselves.

By the sixth volume, you’d think they would these collected editions down to an easy art like they do with the webcomic itself, but that’s where your casual presumptions have let you down sir.

I’ve no idea why, but while the first five volumes were produced in relatively quick succession by Dark Horse Comics, this sixth volume arrived much later and from Del Ray Books. No, you’re not missing anything, Del Ray are not a frequent publisher of comics and, to be honest, it shows. This entire volumes feels like a sub-standard imitation of the Dark Horse ones.

The cover is cheap and flimsy card stock and foregoes the funky greyscale pixel art patterns found on the inside of Dark Horse’s heavier, thicker efforts (such as the Space Invaders-esque alien squid design from Bacon Robots). The layout of the entire comic seems to have been done by someone who vaguely recalls seeing the previous volumes, perhaps for a few seconds in a dream one time.

Laying out comic strips isn’t a particularly involved science: They’re small enough to fit two on a page, with some commentary underneath and then bigger ones given a page of their own, maybe a little out of order to accommodate flow.

That isn’t done here, for seemingly no reason. The annual E3 sketches, which previously had a page each to allow for their size and shape, have been squashed two to a page at stupid jaunty angles. Why, I have no idea. It’s not to save pages, because there are frequently two page spreads that, for no reason at all, have panels or random elements thereof, badly cropped and blown up past the point of quality so they’re jagged and fuzzy. There’s no reason for it. It doesn’t look good and it doesn’t sensibly help flow or layout.

When there is blank space on a page, it’s very annoyingly filled. The DH volumes would add in some subtle art, either nicely removed from a strip or relatively stock images of characters, and place them as unobtrusive, desaturated, watermark-style filler. Halls Below instead shoves full colour stock art or mangled panels right in there, regardless of how it reads. Take page 40 and 41: 40 has two regular sized strips on it, with commentary for one. Because of the overwrought new title font and unnecessary double spacing on the commentary text, the second commentary won’t fit, so it’s been shoved onto 41, the page facing, with a stupid little arrow point back across. But what else is on 41? Part of a panel from a later comic, blown far too large, presented in full saturation of colour. It immediately grabs the attention when you arrive at these two pages, before the other page and combined with the unrelated commentary below it, tricks you into initially thinking it’s a comic in of itself.

This may sound picky, but it’s a) intensely irritating for the reader and b) against all common bloody sense. Just like the pages that have, inexplicably, black backgrounds. As anyone who saw a personal website from the late 90s on Angelfire will tell you, reading white text on a black background is not pleasant, especially when it’s not for any good reason.

I honestly don’t know why Penny Arcade moved over to Del Ray, but it’s an almost criminal shame. The end product just feels inept compared to what came before it, almost insult to the material it’s presenting. PA had a good thing going with Dark Horse and they’ve scuppered it for no obvious reason or benefit.

Still, even if this is a throwback, it’s a pleasant one. There’s nothing wrong with a good bit of magic. In truth, it’s surprising magic has taken so long to resurface on television given the past decade’s glut of talent and variety shows. So the big question is whether it’s any good. And, well…

Yeah, fairly.

The format is that three magicians team with a celebrity each to do two tricks in the studio and some pre-recorded street magic each. The studio audience then votes on which team was their favourite, with the bottom one having to perform a forfeit.

That’s not a terrible set-up. I could live without the seemingly mandatory inclusion of celebrity participants, but it’s a hook to get in the masses and an innocuous one at that. This premiere featured Diversity, Bruno Tonioli and Sian Phillips, who are all bearable and famous enough to compensate for the ‘world famous magicians’ being a bunch of nobodies. Maybe it’s just because this is the first magic show on mainstream television in ages, but I’d heard of none of them. Chris Korn and Luis de Matos are perfectly fine stage-workers though (and yes, I had to look their names up), but the duo Barry and Stuart (no surnames here) and intensely unlikeable. They manage to be both gormless and smug at the same time and their tricks rely too heavily on being arch and knowing and making the audience participants look foolish rather than being part of the trick.

There were two main points at which the format fell down in tonight’s show. The first is the fact that all three acts had to make use of the same intensely bland cardboard box in a trick. I can’t see the benefit of that at all really, as it’s a) uninteresting to look at (compared to say the props used in the stylish Frankenstein’s lab take of sawing someone in half) and b) creates continued exposure to the same prop, resulting in you having more time to think and work out how it functions. In this case, all three tricks with the box utilised it having a false bottom (I’m fairly sure about that, but obviously can’t be certain), which is on top of one of the others using one as well. Presumably having to recycle the prop is a gimmick, but it’s one that’s almost certainly only going to be detrimental.

The second real flaw is the forfeit gimmick. I doubt you’d be able to get away with making a show like The Magicians without some manner of voting element these days, even though the audience voting system feels somewhat archaic, though also quite refreshing for it. But the end result of it doesn’t make sense.  The least popular act (in this case Sian Phillips with the hateful Barry and Stuart) have to do a ‘forfeit’ trick, such as tonight’s walking across hot coals. While the two more popular acts just… go off stage. It’s backwards. No trick is ever really going to be a forfeit for the magicians, because they’ll know how to do it and it all equates to screen time in the end, so why are the least popular performers getting the show’s big finale?

Despite all that and an impossibly bland name, The Magicians looks like it could be quite promising for month or so’s Saturday night entertainment.