The X-Axis - 8 November 2009

We have a new podcast this weekend, so see the post immediately below for the comments thread. (You can download the show here.)

Meanwhile, with one thing and another, I still haven't read all of this week's comics... but let's race through the X-books and some of the other releases.

Astonishing X-Men #32 - Last issue, most of the story was devoted to the X-Men rescuing an aircraft in distress. This issue, we get seventeen straight pages of the X-Men fighting a Sentinel. A Sentinel made of meat, admittedly, but a Sentinel nonetheless. This is a throwback to the sort of thing Ellis used to write for Authority - very light on plot, very big on extended action sequences.

There is a plot, but it turns out to involve dead mutants being dug up and reanimated to use as weapons against the X-Men. No doubt there are readers who have been enjoying this premise in Blackest Night and X-Necrosha, and who will be thrilled to learn that they can now read a third concurrent story based on the same idea. In fairness, running into Blackest Night is sheer bad luck. But X-Necrosha is a crossover being published by the same editorial office. Don't they talk to one another? Didn't any alarm bells ring?

Of course, the plot is just a framework on which to hang the lengthy fight scenes, so it boils down to how excited you are about the prospect of a seventeen page fight scene. But it's really nothing to write home about on that level either. The climax is a mystifying sequence which hammers home the fact that Hank's aircraft has no weapons systems, only for him to unleash a barrage of what certainly look to be missiles on the next page. The art is certainly very good, if a bit busy. That aside, it's difficult to get worked up about this.

Black Widow: Deadly Origin #1 - Paul Cornell writes a miniseries retelling the Black Widow's origin. As it turns out, the story is actually set in the present day, but with flashbacks aplenty to fulfil the remit. Tom Raney draws the "present" scenes, with John Paul Leon handling the past - a massive style shift, but one that works fairly well, since at least it keeps the timeframes distinct. Unfortunately, the flashback scenes seem to assume that readers are largely familiar with the material already. For example, there's no attempt to explain how the young Natasha knows Logan, so apparently Cornell thinks all his readers are familiar with Uncanny X-Men #268, a story that came out 19 years ago. Moreover, the flashbacks are terribly staccato and rushed - the likes of Logan, the Winter Soldier and even Stalin show up out of nowhere and move on within panels. It all comes across as a bit unreal and disconnected, I'm afraid.

Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love #1 - A Fables spin-off miniseries, based on the idea established in the main series that Cinderella is secretly working for the Fabletown authorities as a glamorous Bond-style spy. This is by Chris Roberson and Shawn McManus, neither of whom is associated with the Fables franchise, but they're working hard to match the tone of the regular title. The story is actually the better part of a year out of synch with the other books, and I'm not sure the world really needed a third Fables book telling fairly similar stories to the main title. But it's an enjoyable read, and McManus is always an excellent storyteller.

The Great Ten #1 - Ten-issue miniseries, natch, featuring the Chinese state superhero team from 52. Seems odd to dust them off several years down the line, but okay. This first issue is effectively a solo story about Accomplished Perfect Physician - as he says, "not [a name] I would've come up with, but there it is." The basic idea is that some of the group are loyal soldiers of the state, but others, like the Physician, are trying to be more or less legitimate superheroes within the Chinese system. Why put them on the team at all? Well, because at least that way you can keep an eye on them. Bedard's setting himself a tough challenge if he's going to have an ongoing invasion story and focus on a different member every issue - but there's nothing wrong with ambition, and he gets off to a good start here. The pro-government members are handled fairly well; we're not invited to agree with them or even to think there's much moral ambiguity in it, but at least they're allowed to be sincere believers with a plausible viewpoint. Shawn McManus' art is good, strong stuff, and there's some potentially interesting material about Communist China's relationship with its national past. Good start.

Psylocke #1 - Well, that's a subtle cover, isn't it? I'll give David Finch this, though. The cover may be T&A, but at least it's reasonably well-composed T&A. Lots of nice parallel lines. Much better than the utter mess surrounding X-Necrosha #1. Anyway, this is a Psylocke miniseries, and she's going after nineties villain Matsu'o Tsurayaba again. From the look of it, the series seems to be a reconstruction job on a badly damaged character - Chris Yost's script more or less openly acknowledges that Psylocke's become rather directionless and has lost touch with her roots, and evidently the story is going to set out to reconnect her in some way or other. This is work that needs done, if Psylocke is going to be used at all - though frankly, she's such damaged goods at this point that I wonder if she's worth the effort that will be involved in rehabilitating her to dramatic viability. Inevitably, Yost's got a tough job ahead of him making this an interesting story in its own right, and it's all a bit angsty. But it does at least seem to understand what needs to be done with this character - she needs to be redefined clearly so that she can move forward. So that's a good start. The art's a bit fussy - lots of gratuitously curved panels that don't really add anything - but it serves the purpose fine.

Strange Tales #3 - This anthology of indie creators doing Marvel superheroes has been decidedly uneven, and this issue is no exception. The big selling point of the series was the serialisation of Peter Bagge's long-shelved "Incorrigible Hulk." Splitting it into three parts wasn't a particularly smart move (the story was originally conceived as a one-shot, so episode three now opens with a "Minutes later..." caption), and to be honest, it's not a lost classic, but it did work; the Hulk turns out to be somewhat at home among Bagge's characters. The rest of this issue's contributions are a mixed bunch. There's a lot of brief gag strips, some of which take the characters more seriously than others, but most of which are actually funny. In the lead slot, Stan Sakai reimagines the Hulk as a samurai; Jonathan Jay Lee gives us the Punisher as a martial artist and lapsed Confucian. There are a couple of other relatively straight stories which feel like they might have made a decent fill-in issue if they were expanded a bit. But at the other end of the spectrum, Corey Lewis' Longshot strip is all over the place. And Chris Chua's four pages are completely off the deep end - they're barely even comics in the normal sense, so much as a riot of colour and tiny panels leading in weird directions around the page. Technically he fulfils the remit of using Marvel characters, but it's really beside the point. It's not a story in any way, shape or form, but there's something unique and bizarre about it that can't help but hold the eye.

Stumptown #1 - Greg Rucka's new creator-owned series at Oni, with artist Matthew Southworth. We talked about this on the podcast, but suffice to say that it's a detective story set in Portland. While it's not exactly redefining the genre, Rucka has always excelled at this sort of thing, and this series sees him doing what he does best. Southwarth does excellent work here - apparently they've gone to great lengths to get the locations right, but for those of us who don't know Portland, it's more important that the art is reminiscent of the likes of Michael Gaydos and Sean Phillips, good company to be in.

X-Men Origins: Iceman - These origin recap one-shots don't sell a great deal, but I suppose they're providing material for a future collection. And I can see the logic: these are essential bits of continuity, and they might as well be available in a modern style for contemporary readers. In this issue, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Phil Noto re-tell Iceman's origin story, which originally appeared in a back-up strip in 1968 or so. It's a faithful rendition, with all that that entails. In other words, the art's great, the pacing's vastly improved, and the whole thing is given a bit of context. But it's still the same story at the end of the day, so the creators are a bit hamstrung in what they have to work with. Bluntly, the source material is mediocre, and there's only so much that can be done to jazz it up. Still, they've made the best of it, and it does look wonderful.

X-Men vs Agents of Atlas #2 - The second half of a two-part miniseries, as part of Marvel's ongoing crusade to raise the profile of Jeff Parker's much-loved but little-bought Agents of Atlas team. While this has its moments, I'm afraid it does end up falling into the usual tropes of crossover territory - misunderstanding, fight, reconciliation, and so forth. The back-up strip, a lead-in to the Agents' back-up strip in Hercules, is a much stronger piece. Not that this is a bad issue; it's just a bit formulaic, and doesn't really capture the strengths of the regular series.

X-Necrosha #1 - This one-shot, leading into the crossover of the same name, came out last week, but I've only just read it. In fact, "X-Necrosha" is more like an X-Force storyline which is spilling over into X-Men: Legacy and New Mutants - one book gets the core story, the others are just taking the opportunity to have some undead villains show up. It's unfortunate that the story ends up appearing alongside DC's uncomfortably similar Blackest Night, but in fairness to X-Force writers Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost, they've been building up this storyline for quite some time. And you can see why: X-Force are supposed to be the violent, take-no-prisoners, black-ops version of the X-Men, but there's a desperate shortage of expendable mutant villains right now, so anything that generates short-term cannon fodder is helpful. There are three stories in this one-shot; the lead strip is by Kyle and Yost with art from Clayton Crain, and it's pretty forgettable. I'm still not impressed by Crain's murky artwork - his cover for this issue is an ugly mess - and the story seems to be following a rather obvious path. Fair play, though, for (literally) digging up some thoroughly obscure people: if you're wondering, Mortis is Dazzler's half-sister, and Berserker was a one-off character from an early issue of X-Factor. Zeb Wells and Ibram Roberson's Cypher story is fine, but the idea is done better in the New Mutants story that it leads into. Finally, Mike Carey and Laurence Campbell take a different tack on things, more or less ignoring the "under the control of Selene" bit so that they can play with the ghost of Destiny - and that's a story I've got some interest in.

The X-Axis - 11 October 2009

There's not too many X-books this week (which is good, since I've still got a backlog of storylines I wanted to review in full), but we do have a ton of other stuff.

Obligatory plug time: don't forget to listen to this week's episode of House to Astonish, where Al and I review Planetary, Dr Voodoo and Haunt, as well as the usual news and talk. Download it here, or visit the podcast webpage, or subscribe via iTunes.

Right, let's get to work...

Astonishing X-Men #31 - It's back! And through the wonder of scheduling, even though it's on time, it's still late! Yes, this storyline is set before the recent "Utopia" crossover which changed the X-Men's status quo yet again, so by the time it wraps up in five months time (or, let's be realistic, probably more like eight) it's going to be insanely out of step with the rest of the line. Has ever a flagship title sailed so emphatically into the backwaters as Astonishing X-Men?

The issue opens with Abigail Brand and a bunch of SWORD troopers attacking a random Brood outpost, which turns out not to really be the plot at all. Instead, the big set piece this issue is Brand returning to Earth and her craft nearly burning up on re-entry. So the X-Men have to save her. Which they do. And that takes half an issue, which seems a bit excessive. Oh, and then they land and a completely different story wanders by, to set up a cliffhanger that seems entirely unrelated. It's a bit choppy, to put it mildly.

Phil Jimenez takes over from Simone Bianchi on art. That's for the best. Bianchi made beautiful pictures, but they weren't very good at communicating the action - and if your comic is going to spend half its running time on a completely gratuitous action scene, it might as well be decipherable. Jimenez isn't as distinctive as Bianchi, but he's a very good superhero artist, and a better fit for the book. And his cliffhanger splash page is excellent. The overall package is solid enough, but the book still lacks a sense of purpose.

Batman & Robin #5 - I'll say this for Philip Tan, he's come on a long way since 2003, when he drew Uncanny X-Men during the Chuck Austen run. In 2009, he's actually not so jarring as a successor to Frank Quitely. That's not to say there aren't problems here. A scene with the Penguin falling from a skyscraper window which borders on impenetrable. But I can live with it, for the most part. The story here turns out to be the old "traditional hero challenged by new, more violent vigilante" schtick, which we've all seen done before. However, Morrison's also using it to raise the idea of Batman as a brand rather than a character, which plays into his theme of whether Dick can meaningfully become a new Batman rather than a Batman impersonator. And his Red Hood is quite entertaining as a deranged "Dark Batman" figure. Not classic stuff, but good fun.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Eight #29 - I'm teetering on the verge of dropping this book, and I can only imagine the comments to the effect of "What, only now?" Actually, it's starting to illustrate my point about scheduling. Joss Whedon wants this series to have as much story content as an actual season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer would have had. But one monthly comic contains less material than a weekly episode of the TV show (and far less material than four). And so here we find ourselves, two and a half years into the series, nearing the climax of a story that on television would have lasted say nine months. It's not that they're oblivious to the differences - the comic makes plenty of use of montage sequences that wouldn't have worked in the TV show, to speed through the plot mechanics. But it feels a bit meandering. And quite aside from the length of the series, even though the bad guys are a coalition of characters from the TV show, they've somehow ended up as a generic, faceless military unit. It's not quite coming together in the way it might have.

Cable #19 - This issue: somebody finally gives Bishop the reason not to blow up the ship which he actually needed last month. Oh well. It's Cable and Bishop versus the Brood in the far future, and I suppose if you're casting around for an X-Men villain who can crop up in that setting without causing horrible continuity problems, the Brood are the smart choice. It's passable, but the art lacks atmosphere, and the whole thing feels like it's on the verge of degenerating into a generic fight scene.

Chronicles of Wormwood: The Last Battle #1 - This is a sequel to the Chronicles of Wormwood miniseries which Garth Ennis did with Jacen Burrows in 2006. In some ways it's precisely the sort of thing you'd expect Garth Ennis to take to Avatar, which is to say that it's potentially hugely offensive and often in a gratuitously puerile way. But it's got more heart than you'd expect, perhaps because Ennis actually cares about religion, even if he doesn't believe in it. TV executive Danny Wormwood is the Antichrist, but unfortunately for his family, he's an essentially benevolent guy who quite likes Earth the way it is and doesn't want to bring about Armageddon. And since Jesus hasn't been quite the same since getting his head kicked in at a protest rally, the other side aren't making many moves towards the end of all things either. Unfortunately for Danny, Jesus seems to be feeling a bit better... You've got to be willing to put up with Ennis' more blatant censor-baiting - like a lot of Avatar books, it often feels like it's being offensive for the sake of it - but there's actually a decent story in here, and it's got art by Oscar Jimenez, who you don't see around that often.

Criminal: The Sinners #1 - Brubaker and Phillips return to their original Icon series after completing the first arc of Incognito. And the first thing that hits you about this book is the inside front cover and credits page, printed on perhaps the most staggeringly lurid electric pink and red background you've ever seen. I actually flinched on first opening it. It's truly hideous. Good work. As for the story, we pick up on Tracy Lawless, now working as a hitman with a certain lack of commitment to his craft. In the manner of these things, his boss is willing to let him go in return for one last job. Everyone knows this by now, but the storytelling on this book is impeccable, and it's a truly great example of its genre.

Daredevil #501 - This is the first issue by Andy Diggle and Roberto de la Torre, though they're picking up a storyline in progress, where Daredevil has agreed to become leader of the Hand. He hopes to keep them under control and use them as a force for good; they just want a new leader for their death cult. And naturally, the story is "Will the crazy ninjas corrupt Daredevil?" We could all see that coming; what's more surprising is for Diggle's first issue to answer the question emphatically with "Oh god yes." So either the book's going somewhere very odd and dark, or some clever piece of trickery is going to be unveiled in a few issues time. It's a good hook for the new direction, and at least it moves Daredevil away from his overfamiliar role of beaten-down loser. The art seems heavily influenced by Alex Maleev's take on the character, but there's nothing wrong with that, and Daredevil's bright red costume can actually work quite well as something weirdly anomalous in murky lighting.

Doctor Voodoo: Avenger of the Supernatural #1 - I'm so glad they added that lengthy subtitle to distinguish the book from all the other Dr Voodoo titles published over the years. Anyway, we talked about this one on the podcast. It's a New Avengers spin-off, the basic angle being that seventies D-list hero Brother Voodoo has unexpectedly become the new Sorcerer Supreme, and nobody is entirely convinced that this was supposed to happen. So he's stretching himself to breaking point trying to live up to the job. I like the idea, and Jefte Palo's art is excellent; the only real issue here is that the first issue piles on too many crises too early in the book's life. Sure, he's beset by trouble on all sides, but let's at least establish the status quo before we bring it crashing down. Aside from that, though, pretty good.

Doom Patrol #3 - This book really ought to be the other way round, with the "Metal Men" in the lead slot rather than the back-up strip. It's a fun strip, reuniting the Justice League International creative team, and the set-up of the Metal Men living in suburbia is just silly enough to work. The Doom Patrol story is pretty decent too, but it's developing into one of those information-overload series that Keith Giffen likes to right - and, quite honestly, I have absolutely no clue what's supposed to be happening at the climax of this issue when the bad guys are defeated by... uh... something. It involves Rita getting really big, but how that wins the fight, I don't get at all. It's still a fairly interesting story, but it's not as successful as the Metal Men strip at the back.

Gotham City Sirens #4 - I know, I know, but I quite like what Paul Dini's doing with this book. And besides, it's got the Joker in a Joker-themed airship with Joker-themed henchmen. We need more villains with themed henchmen. As one of them says, it "reminds me of when crime was fun - a modern art form." Rather more irritatingly, DC seems to be backsliding into its old habits of not explaining things properly. For example, Hush is impersonating Bruce Wayne. This is a centrally important plot point. Is there an explanation of why he's impersonating Bruce Wayne, and why he's being allowed to carry on doing so, for the benefit of anybody reading this title alone? Of course there isn't. Harley even asks the question directly, and the answer she gets is "It's complicated." I'm sure it is, but if you're going to use him that prominently in this series, then it's part of the plot of this series, so explain it.

Haunt #1 - See the podcast for more on this. It's a new ongoing series from Image, with credits that take longer to explain than the premise. The concept was created by Todd McFarlane and Robert Kirkman; the book is written by Kirkman; the layout penciller is McFarlane's regular collaborator Greg Capullo; the finishing penciller is Kirkman's regular collaborator Ryan Ottley; and the inker is McFarlane himself. Got all that? The actual concept is basically Spawn crossed with Brother Voodoo - or, perhaps more fairly, Spawn crossed with Randall and Hopkirk, Deceased. But it's a sound set-up for a superhero comic, and I can see the potential. The art isn't quite as successful; the three artists seem to be pulling in different directions, and while the result is okay, they've all done better work than this.

Kill Audio #1 - Boom Studios aren't afraid to diversify, I'll give them that. This is a new series by Claudio Sanchez and artist Mr Sheldon (yes, just Mr Sheldon), and it's certainly different. Kill Audio is a little immortal guy living in the city of Sight and Sound, and every so often somebody tries to kill him, which is more of an irritant than anything else. He goes off in search of his creator with a bunch of weirdos in tow, and it turns out that apparently his role in life is to sort out the problems with music. And that summary, if anything, makes it sound far more normal than it actually is. It's not just surreal, it's practically stream of consciousness. Boom are billing it as a story of "adventure" and "mystery", but it's too weird and freeform to work on that level. What it does have going for it is a unique look; the art, done in greys with flashes of bright red, manages to hold the book together. But to be honest, it's so off the wall that it ends up being just a bit irritating.

Planetary #27 - I refer you once again to the aforementioned podcast. The final issue of Planetary is mainly an epilogue. It'll work just fine as the closing pages of the collected edition that they can now bring out. But it's nothing to write home about as an issue in its own right; there's a lot of technobabble and not much drama. It's also fairly remarkable that nobody saw fit to include a plot recap, despite having a blank page on the inside of the gatefold, and despite the fact that the last issue came out three years ago. It might surprise people to hear this, but the details of the plot of Planetary are not fresh in my mind after that long a gap. As in, who the hell is this Ambrose guy anyway? Mind you, now that the thing is finally complete, I'm quite looking forward to setting it aside and reading through it from start to finish.

Strange Tales #2 - This, you'll recall, is the anthology title with indie creators riffing on Marvel Universe characters, the main selling point being the serialisation of Peter Bagge's "Incorrigible Hulk" story, which has been in a cupboard for years. This issue is decidedly hit and miss. In hindsight, they might have been better swapping some of these stories for the material in issue #1. That book was a bit heavy on the snark, while this issue has more strips that seem to show genuine affection for the characters. Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca's mock-seventies blaxploitation strip has a great ear for the awkward collisions of comics trying to apply Silver Age narration to The Issues ("How else could it end when a pusher comes betwixt a voodoo champion and his reformed prostitute lover!"), Jonathan Hickman turns in some gorgeous recruitment adverts for the job of Herald of Galactus, and Matt Kindt more or less plays it straight with his Black Widow strip. On the other hand, Tony Millionaire's Iron Man story peters out badly, and Kikuo Johnson does an Alicia Masters story full of blind jokes which were pensioned off in 1982. Patchy, then, but there's still good stuff in here.

Sweet Tooth #2 - I've been pleasantly surprised by Jeff Lemire's new Vertigo series so far. It's going to be a tough sell for them. The basic plot doesn't sound immediately promising: young survivor of a post-apocalyptic world. Throw in the fact that he's got antlers and looks a bit like a deer, and it starts to sound a bit twee as well. But it's all in the execution. Lemire has a great sense of pacing, and understands how to get loads of unspoken tension into scenes where not a great deal is actually happening. The crucial thing, though, is that the book doesn't feel the need to hammer us over the head with angst and misery; there's certainly a sense of looming threat, but at the same time there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Good stuff.

Vengeance of the Moon Knight #2 - The Sentry shows up, and for once he doesn't want to convey a message from Norman Osborn. This time, he just wants to discuss with Moon Knight the travails of being an insane superhero. With that cover-justifying guest appearance out of the way, we return to the story of Moon Knight continuing to resist the voices in his head, and trying to be a regular superhero again. It's actually pretty good stuff, and I'm enjoying Jerome Opena's art a lot. It's not a groundbreaking title or anything, but it's well put together. Quite why they decided to relaunch the thing from issue #1 is something of a mystery, as it actually continues plotlines from the previous series - the Profile shows up with no real explanation, for example. (Then again, by my count, it's over a year until they can justify adding up all the series and putting out Moon Knight #150, so they might as well relaunch while they can...)

X-Babies #1 - Hmm. As originally conceived, there were two jokes to the X-Babies. One was to have little miniature X-Men acting like immature versions of themselves; the other was to parody the overextension of the line by having the ultimate bad idea for an X-Men spin-off. Their first appearance, reprinted at the back of the issue, isn't even subtle about making that second joke. And when it came out, there were only five X-books. The X-Babies get dug out every few years for another guest appearance, and for my money, the joke's become a bit toothless; so far, this version is basically just a scaled-down, slightly naive version of the X-Men, trying to liberate the Mojoworld from people who want to replace them with bland, wholesome cartoons - inexplicably embodied by characters from Marvel's shortlived and largely forgotten Star imprint. That seems to mean we've got a story where the X-Babies symbolise rebellious creative integrity and, uh, no. That said, pitting the X-Babies against the likes of Planet Terry and Top Dog is such a weird concept that I can't help feeling there must be more to it than meets the eye, though for the life of me I don't know what.

X-Men vs Agents of Atlas #1 - Jeff Parker's Agents of Atlas series, featuring a team of revived 1950s superheroes, has plenty of good reviews but hasn't really managed to turn the buzz into sales so far. So it's good to see Marvel putting some weight behind them, with this miniseries and a back-up slot in Incredible Hercules. This is essentially an Agents story, but it ties in fairly closely with recent events in Uncanny - the X-Men still haven't moved all their stuff out of Graymalkin, so the Agents seize their chance to try and nick something. The X-Men get enough space to make it more than just a guest starring role, and Parker borrows Matt Fraction's introductory caption schtick as well. It's classic superhero team-up territory (misunderstanding, fight), but done very well; the book also cleverly adds some mystery by chucking in a back-up strip which starts off bearing to be a Silver Age meeting between the teams, but seems to be something else altogether. Even juggling the extended cast doesn't seem to trouble Parker. Great fun.

Astonishing X-Men #25-30

"Ghost Boxes"
Writer: Warren Ellis
Penciller, co-inker: Simone Bianchi
Co-inker: Andrea Silvestri
Colourists: Simone Peruzzi with Christina Strain and Laura Martin
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Axel Alonso

Astonishing X-Men was created for a reason. If you want to know what that reason is, hop over to Marvel's subscription site, which still describes the title as follows: apparently, it "takes the style of the X-Men movies, mixes it with the wit of Buffy, and holds it together with the classic flavour that made the X-Men famous." A description that made perfect sense when Joss Whedon was writing the book, and which evidently has not been revisited in the year since he left.

Incidentally, the subscription site also suggests that you allow 6-8 weeks for delivery of your first issue. Given the book's history, this seems optimistic to the point of folly.

But I digress. Astonishing was created as a star vehicle for Joss Whedon; he's long since gone. The problem is what to do with it next. Marvel seem to have gone for the option of making it a book where creators can do more or less what they want, without worrying about the other titles - not exactly out of continuity, but at least off to the side somewhere. And so we end up with Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi.

Bianchi was an understandable choice; his art was generally considered the best thing about Jeph Loeb's ungodly Wolverine run, so there were good reasons to put him on a high profile title. Besides, nobody could deny that he's got his own style, and if this is going to be a creator-driven book, you want people with a voice.

Ellis has a voice too, but, shall we say, it's not one that you particularly associate with superhero comics. He's carved out a role at Marvel over the last few years doing revamps (usually horribly delay-plagued revamps) of second-tier characters. As a rule, for better or worse, he takes a book can gives it a strong central idea to revolve around. Iron Man? It's about the fusion of man and machine. Thunderbolts? Strip away the barnacles and get back to a team of villains posing as heroes, a couple of whom are trying to do the job properly.

With Astonishing X-Men, we don't get that. Yes, Ellis acknowledges the move to San Francisco and plays off M-Day to a degree, but at root his X-Men are Just Another Superhero Team, who encounter a mystery and investigate it for the next six issues. It's hard to pin down what "Ghost Boxes" is really all about.

The plot goes like this. The X-Men are called in to help with a super-powered murder. The victim seems to be an artificially created mutant, and he's been killed by a guy he was tailing. The X-Men give chase and (after a trip to Indonesia) fight said guy, who kills himself, and on inspection turns out to be a mutant from a parallel universe, apparently the point man for an invasion. After all, now that most of the mutants are gone, the world is a much more attractive target for invaders. The X-Men then follow another lead to China, where they meet more artificial mutants and more parallel mutants, and there's a big fight, and everyone points the finger at Forge. Finally, everyone goes to Wundagore to have a chat with Forge, who turns out to have gone mad, and is creating artificial "mutants" to fend off that invasion from a parallel world. He's got a portal to that world (the titular Ghost Box), and the invaders start trying to get through. The X-Men make a break for it, and on Beast's word, SWORD (who were duly mentioned in earlier episodes to set up their involvement in the finale) thwart the invasion by annihilating everything in sight. The end.

It's all rather unfocused. At first it seems to be about an alien invasion; then it changes tack completely and becomes a story about Forge losing his mind, even though the character wasn't mentioned until halfway through. A spaceship graveyard in Indonesia and a hidden mutant city in China both turn out to be nothing more than local colour, entirely peripheral to the plot. It feels like elements from a bunch of different stories strung together in a way that technically makes sense, but doesn't add up to a greater whole.

(And in fact, it doesn't entirely make sense. The final two chapters make great play of the fact that Forge's artificial mutants are shambling monstrosities - but there didn't seem to be anything much wrong with the guy who got killed in chapter 1.)

Matters get even more confused when you remember the tie-in miniseries Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Boxes. The book was rightly castigated for its price tag, but let's focus on the content, which was a string of short stories set in parallel realities. One of those stories, to be fair, did spell out what the invaders were up to, but the main series does that too. The others seem to have no connection to the rest of the story at all. It's all a bit mystifying.

I'm honestly not sure what, in Ellis's mind, this story was all about. There's a bit of dialogue scattered throughout the story about the X-Men taking tough decisions and growing up - there's even an ill-conceived stab at a lost-innocence vibe where character talk wistfully about the simpler days of the Silver Age. But none of this ever connects in any satisfying way with the story, and SWORD's enormo-deathray in the final issue, which zaps a bunch of unseen baddies on the other side of a portal, seems detached from any sort of moral consequences. Nor is it really a story about Forge's mental decline, since no explanation for it is offered.

If you were so inclined, you could probably find some sort of metaphor in Forge's homemade mutants. You could see him as somebody who wants to turn back M-Day and won't move on. I wouldn't be altogether shocked if that's the idea. Then again, it's ironic that you could also view him as a creator who's trying to fill the void left by M-Day, and has ended up creating a shambling mess. Most likely, though, it's neither of these - just a case of a writer without a big idea stringing together a bunch of small ideas and hoping for the best.

Oh, yes, the art. I'd say more about it, but I think everyone's picked up on the issues with Simone Bianchi by now: the individual pictures are beautiful, the panel-to-panel storytelling not so much. The panel layouts are showy, but almost invariably distract from the story rather than supporting it. The action sequences are murky. There's a fair amount of elegant posing. The irritations outweigh the good points in the long run; I can never escape the feeling that the art is showing off when it should be telling the story, and even though it has plenty to show off, that still annoys me.

So far as I can see, Marvel haven't actually solicited any further issues of this title, but there's talk of Phil Jimenez doing the next arc, so presumably it's moving to a de facto "series of miniseries" format. He's a much better storyteller, so I'm happy with that choice. Let's hope that, before his run starts, somebody sits down and works out more clearly what the book's actually about.