Angel: Revelations came out last week, but slipped past my radar.  At first I assumed that it just hadn't shown up in the UK, which happens from time to time.  But as it turns out, I just didn't spot it on the shelf. 

In my defence, (a) it doesn't have the full advertised title on the cover, (b) it doesn't look like a typical Marvel comic, (c) it doesn't have the Marvel logo on the cover, (d) it doesn't have the names of the creators on the cover, and (e) it was filed alphabetically with all the IDW Angel books.  And judging by the embarrassingly huge pile of unsold copies, I wasn't the only one who missed it.  (The woman behind the counter agreed that it had been a rather sluggish seller and lamented the decision not to file it under "X".)

Well, never mind.  It's here now.

Angel: Revelations is a five-issue miniseries by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Adam Pollina, revisiting the Angel's origin story.  It's a Marvel Knights book, so heaven only knows whether it's supposed to be canon or not.  I have no idea what that imprint is supposed to be used for these days.

There is something to be said for revisiting Angel's origin story.  The early issues of X-Men didn't bother to explain how the team had actually come together, or to give the members individual origin stories.  That information was only filled in a few years later, in a series of back-up strips.  They were largely mediocre, and they're almost never referenced - which speaks volumes for how badly they failed as origin stories.  Even Cyclops' story, which established him as the first X-Man and introduced the idea that he was a runaway orphan, was largely about a squabble with the Living Diamond.

Angel's story is particularly odd.  It starts off with Warren at boarding school, but following a change of writer, it lurches off in a completely different direction and gives him a brief career as a solo superhero in New York.  With this series, Aguirre-Sacasa seems mostly interested in the private school angle, which was cut off in midstream.

The plot is in two parts.  A framing sequence involves a sinister priest hunting down Warren, who's been the subject of religious visions.  So, from the look of it we're getting a story which plays in some way off Angel's religious iconography.  Fair enough; it's something distinctive to the character.

The rest of the story, however, sees Warren on the verge of discovering his mutant powers, in a rather standard high school drama setting.  There's a moderate-to-bitchy cheerleader; there's another jock rivalling for the girl's affection.  There's a roommate who is apparently annoyed about Warren's interest in said cheerleader, although the word "gay" is studiously tiptoed around.

The story does manage to make Warren sympathetic despite the fact that he's a successful rich kid at an expensive boarding school.  And that's something of an achievement.  I'll have to reserve judgment until I see where Aguirre-Sacasa is heading with some of this story, though.

Artist Adam Pollina was a regular fixture on the X-books back in the nineties, when he did some rather good work on X-Force.  He's always had a tendency to distort and elongate his characters for effect, and since we last saw him, he seems to have acquired a hint of Larry Stroman.  There are plenty of memorable images here, and a good, creepy atmosphere in the priest sequences.

But I've got to admit that at times, Pollina seems to be working against the best interests of the plot.  The script bends over backwards to stress that Warren has been getting leaner, but when everyone looks equally emaciated, that doesn't quite come across.  And the opening page - a boarded-up haunted house incongruously captioned as "A farmhouse in the middle of the country" - suggests that writer and artist had entirely different visions for the scene.

It's a bit of a mixed bag, then.  But a lot of it certainly works, and some of the rest still shows potential.  Worth a look.

Rating: B+

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