The X-Axis - 25 October 2009

It's been a couple of weeks since I've written one of these, so we've got something of a backlog to get through. And of course, as always, don't forget to check out the podcast for more talk about Anchor, Sugar Shock and Azrael.

I'll come back, I think, to Chew #5, Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance #6 and GeNext United #5 once I've had a chance to re-read the whole storylines. But for now...

Anchor #1 - This is a new ongoing series from Boom Studios by Phil Hester and Brian Churilla. Hester has written some interesting off-kilter high-concept fantasy comics in the past, such as The Coffin. This is a more straightforward action set-up, but it's still a pretty weird central idea. There's this big guy, right, and he exists both on Earth and in Hell. In Hell, he's singlehandedly holding off armies of demons who are trying to escape; on Earth, he's a confused guy who feels obliged to fight giant Kirby-esque monsters. It's the sort of idea that could easily be a mess, but actually, it works pretty well - it's got the sense of mythological scale that allows it to get away with such an odd premise.

Azrael #1 - DC have just reshuffled the Batman books again, and so they've dug up this concept for another shot. This isn't the original Azrael - it's a guy called Michael who's picked up the identity somewhere along the line. But writer Fabian Nicieza is sticking with the theme of cults and zealots. Basically, the idea is that the comic cuts back and forth between the present day (where Azrael's a fairly normal vigilante on the fringes of the Batman family) and six months time (where he appears to have gone stark raving mad). A nice enough idea. Granted, Michael's not a hugely interesting character in the present day sequences, and the first issue is an "abusive Catholic priest" story, territory which has surely been stripmined by now. And Ramon Bachs' art doesn't seem entirely comfortable with the action scenes. But nonetheless, there's something interesting in here.

Beasts of Burden #2 - Ah, this is good stuff. Pets fighting mystical evil is an okay concept, but it's all in the execution. Jill Thompson's art brings out the characters without anthropomorphising them too much, while Evan Dorkin's script manages to balance the suburban setting with a lingering sense of threat. This series could easily have been gimmicky or cutesy - or gone the other way and tried too hard to be "serious" - but it's a beautifully judged piece of work.

Cowboy Ninja Viking #1 - Now there's a title. It's a very tongue-in-cheek action/conspiracy story, starting from the intentionally ludicrous premise of an attempt to create government super-agents out of people with multiple personality disorders. Because they've got three personalities, you see, so that's three times as many useful skills they could have. Did it work? No, of course it didn't. But there's still a deranged cowboy/ninja/viking out there as a result. I love the idea, but I'm a bit more lukewarm about the actual comic. The plot's a bit opaque, and at times it feels like it's trying too hard to be clever. The biggest problem, though, is that the lead character has three personalities all of which seem to be essentially the same in different hats, which feels like a waste of the idea.

Dark Wolverine #79 - Boy, this feels like filler. "How many months of Dark Reign left to go? Six? Yeesh... uh, Daken has a fight with some minor villains?" I was more or less behind this series with the first arc, but it's losing me now. One problem is that the plot depends on you accepting that Norman Osborn can't allow his Dark Avengers to be seen beating up villains in public because of the PR consequences. But I don't really see what his problem is. Again, if "Dark Reign" is supposed to be an ersatz Cheney-verse, Osborn wouldn't be concealing the abuse of prisoners, he'd be trumpeting it as a tough-on-crime virtue. It's not as if Daken's even done anything particularly groteque. And when the whole "Dark Reign" set-up requires us to accept that Norman can hold a position of public trust despite a well-documented history of villainy and madness, you can't turn round and expect me to believe he's losing sleep over something like this. It just doesn't work. Oh, and there's a cringingly adolescent bit with a creepy store manager hiding cameras in women's changing rooms, which is just eye-rollingly terrible.

Deadpool #900 - Well, it's an anthology of Deadpool stories. Or rather, half of it's an anthology of Deadpool stories, and the other half is a reprint of Deadpool Team-Up #1, a James Felder/Pete Woods one-shot from years ago which wasn't especially memorable in the first place. A little Deadpool goes a long way, and to be honest, seven consecutive Deadpool short stories is a bit much. Fred van Lente and Dalibor Talajic do a good story with evil mimes, while Mike Benson and Damion Scott turn in a visually interesting conversation piece between Deadpool and a psychiatrist. On the other hand, the Joe Kelly/Rob Liefeld thing is like having sugar injected into your eyes. And Kyle Baker turns in some thoroughly odd-looking art for the last story, which I'm not at all sure works. It's like the comic book equivalent of a low-budget Adult Swim clip-art animation. Mainly, though, it's not that the individual stories are bad, just that it's hard to take this much Deadpool in one go.

Liberty Comics #2 - This year's fundraiser anthology for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which is of course a very good cause. Themed anthologies tend to be hit and miss, and to be honest, this is more miss than hit. There's a lot of creators taking a few pages to inform us that free speech is good, which... well, we knew that, right? I mean, yes, you like free speech and you don't like censorship, and that's awesome, but a lot of the contributions are rather clodhoppingly literal and not especially insightful. Mike Allred does a passably amusing short, and there's a Painkiller Jane strip which gets the theme in quite well. Jason Aaron's opening strip isn't exactly subtle, but it's quite funny. But then there's also stuff like an overearnest, preachy Channel Zero four-pager, of which the less said the better. All in a good cause, but frankly not a great comic.

Sugar Shock #1 - This is the print edition of Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon's online comic, which originally appeared on Myspace Dark Horse Presents. It's actually only 24 pages long - the rest of the issue is filled out with sketch art - but at $3.50, that's still not bad value these days. We talk about this more on the podcast, but if you haven't seen it, the title pretty much tells you what to expect. It's a freewheelingly mental strip which cheerfully digresses all over the place, as an insane rock band (one of whom is a robot, and one of whom insists that she's not a Viking) go off into space to fight weirdness. It's a gag strip rather than a proper story, but Whedon is a good gag writer, with some great non sequitur cutaways. And thanks to Moon, it looks fantastic.

Uncanny X-Men #516 - In which Magneto shows up on Utopia, Xavier protests that the arch-villain can't be trusted, and everyone ignores him. Meanwhile, working through his short list of available remaining villains, Matt Fraction ends up using Scalphunter and a bunch of Predator Xs on a plane, which doesn't seem like that much of a threat to an entire island of X-Men, but okay. This isn't bad, actually. I like the idea of Xavier being sidelined while everyone else is cheerfully inviting Magneto in for coffee. And Greg Land's art is actually less irritating than normal this issue - partly because it looks a little less Photoshopped than normal, partly because there aren't many women in this issue.

Uncanny X-Men: First Class #4 - Storm and Phoenix hook up with the Daughters of the Dragon to fight Nightshade, of all people. I've never much cared for this mid-seventies villain in her leather bikini, and First Class stories are usually at their weakest when the writers seem to be indulging personal nostalgia. Nightshade's plan, it turns out, is to steal a mind-reading machine so that she can give kung fu skills to her robots. Um... yes, maybe if this had actually come out 35 years ago. But reading it in 2009, it just seems to date the creative team.

Unwritten #6 - This looks to be the start of the second arc, as Tom Taylor finds himself in jail awaiting trial for the murder of all those genre writers who got killed in issue #4. Unwritten is easily my favourite Vertigo book right now. It's got a strong, intriguing central idea. And it's turning out to be more than just a gimmick about a character escaped from fiction - it's a vehicle to do stories about genre, and the rules of fiction, and the way a story is experienced by its audience. All of which I find rather fascinating. But it's also got a strong plot as well, and I love to see Mike Carey stretching himself like this.

Wolverine: Origins #41 - Guest starring Skaar, Son of Hulk. Which isn't gratuitous at all, you see, because this series is about Wolverine and his son Daken, so they're going to contrast that with Bruce Banner and his son Skaar... No, I don't really care either. Frankly, even the plot recap on page 1 is enough to make your head bleed. And then we get one of those stories where Wolverine knows Romulus can second-guess his every move, so decides to beat him by taking random advice from a bloke in a bar... Nice art, though, I'll give it that, but the plot has now strayed so far from any sort of logic or common sense that I can't even be bothered being irritated with it any more.

X-Men Forever #9 - Well, my copy has a printing error that makes two pages largely unreadable, which is unfortunate. But mainly, this is the story of Ziggy Trask, the latest member of the Trask family, who's spent her life trying to redeem the family name by building some Sentinels that actually work. Silly woman, hasn't she read Essential X-Men? The Sentinels never work. Actually, there is something interesting about the character - Claremont works hard to present her as somebody basically normal who's grown up seeing the X-Men as the baddies and who isn't evil so much as obsessed with the family business. Also this issue: we get to find out who one of those people in the shadows is! (It's nobody we knew.)

X-Men Legacy #228 - This is part two of "Devil at the Crossroads", the Emplate story that began in this year's Annual. Emplate has kidnapped Bling, because although she's terribly obscure, she also happens to have very handy powers. So this is a story where Bling is held prisoner in a weird interdimensional haunted house by a guy wearing a gas mask, and Rogue has to go after her. Artist Daniel Acuna makes this one work; his self-coloured art has a weirdly oversaturated feel to it that doesn't always click, but turns out to be perfectly at home doing stories about a mad pervert in an interdimensional house. This version of Emplate isn't a mastermind so much as a weirdo, but then creepiness was always his strongest feature, so why not push it to the limit?

Utopia

"Utopia"
Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Utopia
Uncanny X-Men #513-514
Dark Avengers #7-8
Dark Avengers/Uncany X-Men: Exodus
Writer: Matt Fraction
Pencillers: Marc Silvestri, Terry Dodson, Luke Ross and Mike Deodato (with Michael Broussard, Eric Basaldua, Tyler Kirkham and Sheldon Mitchell)
Inkers: Joe Weems, Rachel Dodson, Rick Magyar, Mark Pennington and Luke Ross (with Marco Galli, Eric Basaldua, Rick Basaldua, Jason Gorder, Jay Leisten, Sal Regla, Jon Sibal and Ryan Winn)
Colourists: Frank D'Armata, Justin Ponsor, Rain Beredo, Dean White and Christina Strain
Letterers: Chris Eliopoulos, Joe Caramagna and Cory Petit
Editors: Nick Lowe and Tom Brevoort

Yes, it's the biggest crossover since the last one. And yes, it finished ages ago, but hell, at least the collected edition isn't out yet. I think.

"Utopia", by Matt Fraction and a veritable football team of artists (most of whom, to be fair, are backing up Marc Silvestri on the opening chapter), is a relatively rare example of Uncanny X-Men crossing over with a book from outside the X-stable altogether. In previous years, as Marvel's lead franchise, the X-Men tended to sit out the major events that were designed to boost the sales of lower-ranking titles. But the X-Men's star is not in the ascendance, and so for the first time in ages, Uncanny X-Men finds itself doing a crossover with a higher-selling title.

But in reality, this is an X-Men story which simply happens to take over two issues of Dark Avengers as well. True, Norman Osborn's all over it, but you could say that about all the "Dark Reign" storylines. The other characters from Dark Avengers are more or less banished to the sidelines, emerging sporadically to fill the role where a squad of random HAMMER goons might normally be.

And let's start with the positive. "Utopia" may be sprawling, but it does have a sense of scale. The rapid cutting around Los Angeles in the riot scenes is nicely chaotic. About half of it is drawn by Terry Dodson. It has actual, lasting consequences for the series, by driving the X-Men out of San Francisco proper and moving them onto an island in the bay. The feint of Emma turning on the team is well executed. The "Dark X-Men" turn out to be a relatively engaging team - instead of an outright travesty of the X-Men, they're mostly presented as a group of slightly reluctant draftees who are making a reasonably sincere effort. The big fight scenes with the Avengers come across well.

Plenty to like here. And yet, it doesn't quite work for me.

The first time round, I thought the problem might be that Fraction was once again losing his focus, and piling on too many cameos by minor characters, causing the story to lose focus. Reading it again, though, that's not the problem. There's a lot of characters floating around, but they're mostly in groups, and the number of plot threads isn't so unwieldy. True, "Utopia" could stand to lose things like Dani Moonstar striking a deal with Hela in order to take out Ares in an extremely peripheral subplot. But for the most part, the scale isn't the problem.

In fact, with Fraction trying to sell us on the idea of mass riots on the streets of San Francisco, you can hardly blame him for wading through the list of surviving mutants and hauling out some of the most obscure ones he can find. After M-Day, he can't really have generic mutants wandering the streets all of a sudden. So it's understandable that we suddenly end up with a speaking part for the likes of Meld, a character whose only previous appearance was in the Sentinel Squad O*N*E miniseries, but who has indeed cropped up on the official list of surviving mutants before.

There are some unfortunate lapses of exposition. The raising of Asteroid M is meant to be a big set piece, but the story never really identifies it or explains what it is. You have to read the recap page for that. And the stuff with the Sentry in the final issue comes completely out of the blue, foreshadowed only by a scene which appeared in New Avengers about five years ago. If you aren't familiar with the Sentry/Void concept, god knows what you're supposed to make of it. But again, this is minor stuff.

No, the problem here is... what's the story about, other than shifting the X-Men's status quo from A to B? What actually drives them out of town?

On the face of it, Fraction seems to want to write a story about the entire mutant race being driven into retreat. There's a lot of talk about civil rights campaigns, and mutants as a "people", and so forth. The story opens with our old friends the anti-mutant bigots lobbying for special breeding laws for mutants; it ends with the mutants setting up their own "nation". And that's a problem for starters: the number of surviving mutants is simply too low for this to work. Even so, Fraction nearly pulls that one off.

But there are two main forces at work here: the Humanity Now! coalition lobbying to restrict mutants from breeding, and Norman Osborn making a power play. And neither of them really have much resonance with the X-Men.

The coalition ought to work - but that story shoots itself in the foot when it reveals that they aren't a genuine grass roots movement, so much as a single maniac with mind-control powers. Which means the X-Men get to fight some cyborgs for a few pages, but there's no social movement after all. In fact, the whole storyline seems weirdly disconnected from the Avengers/ X-Men feud, as if Fraction needed something to justify his initial riots, and then wanted to sweep it under the carpet as quickly as possible. It seems a terribly wasted opportunity, since the Proposition X subplot seemed a promising idea.

As for Osborn, Fraction might be trying to tell the story where the X-Men can't stand up to the might of the US government. But Osborn doesn't really work in the role of evil bureaucrat. The central idea of Dark Reign is that he's a dangerous maniac posing as an authority figure. He's a travesty of Nick Fury. Which is fine, if you're writing Iron Man and want to confront him with an ironic moral lesson about power concentrated in the wrong hands. But Osborn is always going to be a supervillain, and he can't stand for authority in general. And he has no real reason to fight the X-Men, other than that he wants more power, because he's evil.

In fairness to Fraction, if Dark Reign is about anything, it's about a corrupt government invoking the trappings of authority to buy un-deserved trust, and he does present the story as something of a propaganda war. And presumably that's the idea: the X-Men flee San Francisco because they lost the PR battle, only to outwit Norman in the end and buy their safety on the beachhead. But for that story, we ought to see some sign of the public reaction, and why it matters so much. And the public are almost totally absent from this plot. There's no room for them. Even when Scott and Norman deliver their respective press conferences in the closing pages, their audiences are represented only by anonymous cameramen.

Oddly enough, this story would probably have worked better during the "Initiative" period, with Iron Man and his Avengers cast in Osborn's role, representing heavy-handed and patronising officialdom. Osborn isn't an interesting antagonist for the X-Men, because he doesn't stand for anything that resonates with the themes of this series.

That's the problem, I think: it's a story where the X-Men are driven out of town by two supervillains, neither of whom have any particularly interesting agenda or theme underpinning them. And the propaganda battle which Fraction seems to be trying to write about is played out in a vacuum, seemingly untouched by audience reaction. For all the epic scale and bombast, it can't help but feel a little hollow.

The X-Axis - 4 October 2009

I was planning to get around to that "Old Man Logan" review today but... well, yeah, maybe tomorrow. And thanks to Marvel's ever-crunched publishing schedule, two more Wolverine storylines wrap up this week: "The Adamantium Men" in Wolverine: Weapon X #5 and "Romulus" in Wolverine: Origins #40. So we'll get back to them. In the meantime, though...

Echo #15 - Terry Moore hasn't exactly been racing forward with this storyline. Over a year into the series, we've finally got to a story point that most writers would have covered in act one. (After all, why did you think the series was called Echo?) Most people wouldn't get away with this, but Moore's good enough with the details that he can carry this sort of slow-burn storytelling, and use it to make the book seem firmly grounded before he starts bringing in the more outrageous parts of the premise. It's the art, though, that really bring the characters to life, and adds the depth to make the book work. Always a pleasure, this title.

Fantastic Four #571 - Well, this is what I'm looking for in a Fantastic Four story. Yes, some of the familiar elements are dutifully namechecked, but basically the Fantastic Four is the Marvel Universe title that can get away with big, sweeping, insane ideas. (I'd say "cosmic", but this isn't the 1970s and it's way past time we thought of a better term.) You could say that this is basically a Reed Richards solo story - or perhaps more accurately, that Jonathan Hickman has created a team book made up entirely of Reed Richardses - and yes, granted, the rest of the team aren't getting a great deal of time just yet. But I'm happy with this; written well, Reed's the most interesting character of the bunch, and I'm glad to see him being used properly, in a story that seems to get what this book is good at.

G-Man: Cape Crisis #2 - So cute! This is Chris Giarrusso's creator-owned book, with his own characters done in the style of the "Mini Marvels" strips that used to appear at the back of Marvel comics and were generally better than the main story. They're kid superheroes in a world with adults, so we've got them fighting bank robbers and delivering papers, with none of that angst-generating secret identity stuff to worry about. Oh, and there's a subplot about dandelions. It's a sweet and genuinely funny book, and what more would you want?

Jack of Fables #38 - Jack Frost keeps trying to start his career as a professional hero, while in a subplot, the title character continues to be tormented by the artist. To be honest, they're going a bit over the top with that subplot, which wasn't exactly subtle to begin with. Naive rookie hero Jack Frost, who achieves very little but looks very earnest in the process, is more entertaining. I'm not really sure where any of this is heading, though - Jack of Fables tied up most of its outstanding storylines in the recent crossover, so the jury's still out on whether it's laying the groundwork for a new direction, or just sort of meandering a bit.

Marvel Divas #3 - Better than the early covers would have you think. Not to mention the title, which is both thunderously awful and utterly unrelated to anything on the interior pages. It's really not the book that people were expecting - more accurately, dreading. In reality, it's a fairly relaxed drama about some C-list Marvel heroines, and the main selling point is the minimal but attractive art from Tonci Zonjic. Now, that said, it's certainly a bit Disease of the Week, and the referencing of Sex and the City feels terribly dated. There's a few overfamiliar elements. It's not a classic. But if you judge by the interior pages, there's still something quite likeable about it, for all its many flaws.

New Mutants #5 - This is a transition issue between the first storyline and the upcoming "X-Necrosha" crossover. (And please tell me it's not going to be Blackest Night with mutants and circuit boards.) Zeb Wells ties up some loose ends from the Legion arc, and establishes why Dani Moonstar is on this team despite having no powers. It's all done perfectly well, but most notable is the guest art by Zachary Baldus. His characters are a bit off model, admittedly, but it's beautifully expressive stuff, and he even pulls off a decent version of Warlock, always a challenge for artists who have to adapt him to their style. I'd cheerfully see him as the regular artist. There still doesn't seem to be much of a premise to this book beyond "let's reunite the New Mutants from 25 years ago", but at least it's being done well.

Uncanny X-Men #515 - This came out last week in America, but Diamond UK managed to delay it. It's the first part of "Nation X", as the X-Men settle in on their new rock. Greg Land is back on art, which is not good, but he doesn't actually do too much damage to this story - although there's an embarrassingly bad Psylocke scene. Fraction seems more focussed than usual with this issue; instead of worrying about his cast of thousands, we've got interesting scenes with Scott and Xavier talking about where the team's going, and a potentially promising new direction for Emma. Thinning down the herd of characters is very much for the best; there's still quite a few balls in the air, but it's enough for Fraction to keep track of and for the stories to actually get across. I was pleasantly surprised by this issue; it's one of his better scripts for the series.

Unknown: The Devil Made Flesh #1 - Despite the issue number, this is effectively the second arc of Mark Waid and Mink Oosterveer's Unknown, since the first miniseries only finished last month. The basic set-up last time was a terminally ill Sherlock Holmes-type detective applying her powers in search of evidence of the afterlife. The finale of that story was maybe a bit much, but the idea was good. With this story, Waid cleverly inverts the premise and throws up all sorts of other questions. It's an odd book, this, a curious mix of the traditional detective story with explanations so bizarre that even the X-Files would have baulked at them. (Yes, infrasound has been credited as a possible explanation for ghost sightings... but not ghosts that look like Zzzzax.) It could easily be very irritating, but it's self-confident weirdness is strangely engaging, and certainly unique.

X-Factor #49 - The penultimate chapter of the seemingly never-ending storyline? Surely not! Actually, about half the issue is devoted to Guido, Rictor and Shatterstar awkwardly discussing homosexuality, which starts off amusing, but ends up labouring the point somewhat. Meanwhile, the plot lumbers gamely on, with one last cliffhanger twist. I'm sure it'll all read much better as a complete story, but as a monthly serial this feels like it's taking forever, and the story even draws attention to one of its own plot holes. There are good bits in here, but it's not really coming together right now.

X-Men Forever #8 - In which Chris Claremont's version of the X-Men fights a Sentinel in the jungle, and then explores one of those remote scientific facilities that bad guys like to build. It's as melodramatic as ever, but it's decent melodrama which holds together on its own terms, and which sets up its mysteries well. Of course, there's always something to live with: this issue, it's Kitty explaining that she doesn't notice the claw coming out of the back of her hand because it's so sharp. Um, fine, but it's clearly much wider at the base, so that doesn't work. (And besides, why isn't she bleeding?) But I'm willing to give Claremont some room with this book, because for the most part he's winning me over. This issue's art is by Steve Scott; his Beast is a bit clumsy, but otherwise it's a solid effort.

X-Force #19 - I have no idea what's supposed to be going on with the cover; it doesn't have much to do with the actual story. This is mostly an X-23 solo story, as she tries to escape the Facility with the help of Agent Morales. X-Force being X-Force, it's something of a bloodbath, though this time it manages to keep the really excessive stuff down to a couple of spots that actually have a chance to mean something. There are some irritating plot glitches - if shooting Kimura on page 4 keeps her down for a couple of pages, why not do it again later on? - but it works as a B-movie chase sequence, and there's something oddly interesting about X-23's deliberately flat dialogue in this sort of story.

The X-Axis - 27 September 2009

Thank heavens for Diamond UK. This would have been a rather heavy week for me, but fortunately the brave distributors have managed to lose Uncanny X-Men and Wolverine: Origins (along with six other Marvel books). Apparently we'll get them next week, once everyone at the warehouse has had a thorough search behind the sofa. But for once, Diamond have actually done Marvel a favour, since that still leaves us with two X-Men books and two Wolverine books. Three of each seems a touch excessive even by Marvel's notably unrestrained standards.

Anyway, the blog should be back to something approaching regular service now. So that long-promised X-Men Forever review will be on its way shortly, as will the round-up of Mark Millar and Steve McNiven's "Old Man Logan" story, which ended with this week's Giant-Size Wolverine: Old Man Logan one-shot. I might also do a full-length review of the "Utopia" crossover - by which I mean, I can't honestly think of much more to say about it, but I'll read it again and see what comes to mind.

Also out this week...

Dark Reign: The List - X-Men - Now, I haven't ordered any of the other List one-shots, but I could have sworn I remember some hype suggesting that they were meant to be important to the plot somewhere or other. What actually happens here is that Norman Osborn throws a tantrum about Namor's betrayal, and sends a big monster to kill the Atlanteans, leading to the obligatory fight. And naturally, it all ends in another stalemate, since nobody can win outright at this stage. (Which is turning out to be the big problem with most Dark Reign stories: the creators are having tremendous difficulty convincing me that something might happen.) To be honest, it all feels a bit peripheral, as if somebody wanted to pump out a few more one-shots based on the Dark Reign set-up - and since we've just come out of an X-Men versus Norman storyline, it seems premature to do it again.

That said, this is more of a Namor story than an X-Men one, so the emhasis is slightly different. And it's got art by Alan Davis, which is a selling point in my book - especially because he's one of the remarkably few artists who's figured out that Atlanteans don't walk, they swim, and whose Atlantis is interesting to look at as a result. As a fight story where the X-Men and Namor battle a sea monster, it's pretty good - but if this is typical of the List books, I don't see how they're advancing the wider plot, except perhaps by having Norman be slightly madder than usual.

Dark X-Men: The Confession - This rather odd one-shot is the pay-off for a long-running subplot about Scott and Emma keeping secrets from one another. I say "rather odd", because you'd expect this story to be written by Uncanny X-Men writer Matt Fraction - it even picks up directly from one of his scenes. Instead, for some reason it's been assigned to X-Force writers Craig Kyle and Chris Yost. Granted, that series does play into the subplot, since X-Force are one of Scott's secrets, but this is still primarily a Fraction plot. So it's rather jarring when the big conversation suddenly starts picking up on plot threads from the tail end of New X-Men and apparently laying the groundwork for the "Necrosha-X" crossover.

That aside, though, I quite liked this. Artist Bing Cansino isn't familiar to me, but his work is reminiscent of Georges Jeanty, and he has the subtlety to pull off a decent conversation scene. His Emma isn't quite as imposing as she ought to be, but in the context of the story it largely works.In the angst-ridden world of the X-Men, it's rather nice to see that Scott and Emma never actually have the big screaming argument depicted on the cover - instead, they sort of look a bit embarrassed at one another, apologise a lot and make up. And, admittedly, they recap the plot a lot - in some very choppy flashback scenes where the narration loses all sense of actual conversation. But I'm pleased to see these two acting like adults, since there are plenty of other characters in the X-books to take the adolescent role. It's the way I wanted to see this story pan out, and it's a welcome surprise to get my wish.

Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance #5 - Oh, we're back with the fill-in art again. Not often you get a six-issue miniseries with two issues of fill-in art. Luckily, Eduardo Pansica turns in a decent job here - the style shift from ChrisCross is noticeable, but it's more than acceptable work in its own right. As for Joe Casey's story, it certainly looks like we're heading for the natural climax where the Super Young Team finally emerge from being pretend superheroes to become genuine ones. Like a lot of Casey's superhero work, this is all terribly postmodern and satirical, but with a seemingly genuine desire to emerge on the other side with an updated, fit-for-purpose genre. Yes, it's got some serious credibility problems if you try to take it at face value, but there are more than enough interesting ideas in here to justify letting Casey run with it, no matter how absurd the notional plot may be.

Hellblazer #259 - I can't quite believe I'm writing this, but guest artist Simon Bisley shows unexpected restraint in this issue. Yes, Simon Bisley. Restrained. I know. But there's a point in the story where everything is supposed to go mental, and a slow build leading up to that, and much to my surprise Bisley plays it straight and makes it work. To be fair, it's been a few years since I've seen his art, but there's a lot more range here than I was expecting. Meanwhile, in the story, it turns out that Peter Milligan's not finished with Phoebe just yet - after all, this is Hellblazer, and just because a character is comprehensively dead is no reason to write them out. There's a good case to be made that John Constantine is basically just a superhero without a costume, and that nothing here is particularly outwith the range you'd expect from a regular Marvel or DC Universe title, but as long as Milligan continues to write the genre well, I have no problem with that.

Spider-Woman #1 - Ah, the Motion Comic. Now, the Motion Comic isn't available in the United Kingdom, for some unfathomable reason, so all I've seen of it is the clips on YouTube. And it's certainly entertaining to hear an actress wrestling with some of Brian Bendis' most overwrought dialogue. But from what I've seen, I can't imagine this being the way forward. As with many earlier attempts at "enhanced comics", what they've ended up with has ceased to be a comic at all, and become a piece of low-budget animation instead.

Anyway, here in Britain, we just get the plain old regular comic. And the art is certainly lovely. Maleev makes great use of colour, and does a fabulous Madripoor. (And thankfully, despite the excruciating cover, this turns out not to be Spider-Woman and her Amazing Friends.) But as a story, it's all rather dreary. Jessica is very unhappy because she's been replaced by a Skrull; SWORD offer her a job hunting down Skrulls; she mopes around for the better part of an issue feeling sorry for herself in moody lighting. It's all terribly ponderous and gloomy, and there's really no obvious reason why you'd want to spend time in the company of this whiny character. With a premise that boils down to a straight revenge plot, it ought to be more of a B-movie romp, but instead it seems to take itself far too seriously (an amusing comic relief cameo from Abigail Brand notwithstanding), and it simply isn't much fun.

Underground #1 - A miniseries from Jeff Parker and Steve Lieber? It's bound to be good. And it is. Yes, the set-up is pretty familiar: businessman wants to turn local cave into a tourist attraction, our heroine is a park ranger who wants to protect it. Nothing particularly new there. But it seems to be mainly a device to get the characters into a cave setting, and the real measure of this book will be what Parker does with them once he's got them there. In the meantime, Lieber is on the usual excellent form. He's always been a great character artist, and the cave scenes allow him to play with shadow and colour in all sorts of fun ways. Even if this does turn out to be just a stock plot in a cave, it'll be worth reading for Lieber's art - but I have faith that we're going to get more than that once the plot hits its stride.

Wolverine: First Class #19 - Peter David is reunited with former X-Factor artist Dennis Calero - which goes to show that the all-ages titles seem to be more of a priority for Marvel than they used to be - as Kitty and Wolverine go into space and fight Skrulls. Now, after Secret Invasion, I've had enough Skrulls to last me for a long while. But this is good fun regardless - the aliens are really just foils for Kitty in space, and David comes up with plenty of little details to make the story work. As usual with this book, it's a straight story aimed at the younger end of the market, but with plenty to enjoy if you just want to see a more traditional sort of X-Men story - besides which, Peter David is writing some of the best Kitty Pryde scenes in years.

The X-Axis - 20 September 2009

After a couple of weeks away, there's something of a backlog building up. So let's start off by ploughing through the X-books and a bunch of debut issues.

Obligatory plug: don't forget to download this week's episode of House to Astonish, where Al and I talk about the big news at Marvel and DC, and review Beasts of Burden, Sweet Tooth and Vengeance of the Moon Knight. Download it here, or visit the podcast webpage, or subscribe via iTunes.

Beasts of Burden #1 - This is a four-issue miniseries - or, more accurately, an "at least four issues and then we'll see how it goes" series - for Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson's stories about cats and dogs protecting their small town from mystic weirdness. Apparently they've been doing these in anthologies since 2003. It's a beautiful comic. Jill Thompson is a wonderful animal artist, and manages to get tons of expression into the cast with virtually no anthropomorphism going on. At first glance it might look a bit cutesy, but there's a dash of genuine nastiness in here which rears its head from time to time. Now, if it's done badly, that sort of thing can come across as a kids' story with some arbitrary adult content nailed on. But this book gets it right; it feels more like a fairy tale from the days before bowdlerisation. If I've got one criticism - and I do - it's that there's a lot of minor characters wandering around who seem fairly interchangeable. That aside, though, this is an excellent book.

Cable #18 - On this issue's thrilling cover: Cable holds a gun and clutches a child. Say what you will about Marvel, but god, they wouldn't know a decent cover these days if it kicked them in the face. Seriously, what is this meant to tell anyone, other than that it's another issue of Cable exactly like the last seventeen? Because there's already a perfectly good logo that says Cable. Use the rest of the page to say something else. Give people a reason to buy the comic. You know, like you used to do before Bill Jemas decided that every cover should be a generic pin-up shot. He's gone now.

Anyway. In the far future, Cable and Hope have fled into space, and Bishop has given chase. You know, Bishop really should have thought of this possibility when he started blowing up vast chunks of planet Earth just to box them in. And the plot problems don't end there, because even though Bishop is in possession of a nuclear device, and he's aboard the only ship in the universe where Hope might conceivably be, and the captain has even told him that Hope's on board, he's not prepared to detonate it until he has "visual confirmation." What? It's a fucking nuke! Just blow up the ship, you moron!

And that's the problem with this series. The characters are quite well written; Hope's starting to emerge as a decent character; in broad strokes, the story isn't bad; but the plot just falls apart on inspection. It's an infuriating book, because I can't help feeling it's only a couple of drafts away from being good - plugging the plot holes, giving Bishop some genuine reason for doubt. (Cable fires off an empty liferaft pod as a distraction, for example, so Bishop's not sure whether she's still aboard.) In the broader scheme, give Cable and Hope something to aim for so that it isn't just an endless parade of "Bishop chases them through a new environment, repeat until cancelled", and instead you have a macguffin providing the illusion of progress. (For example, what Cable and Hope really need is a replacement time machine - or the parts to repair Cable's.)

It exasperates me, this book. It would take so little to solve its problems... but it hasn't been done

Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Exodus - It may have taken until the last episode of the crossover, but at least the Dark Avengers finally have a role to play: they're needed to make up the numbers for Osborn's side in the big final battle. That's still a pretty minor role for a team who are supposed to be the co-stars in this story, though, and I can't help but feel that this story should have been simply an X-Men arc guest starring Osborn and his cronies. The upshot of this arc, if you don't know, is that we're moving on from the never-quite-worked San Francisco set-up already, and now the X-Men are living on an island off the coast. Apparently, for the purposes of this story, 1.2 miles off California is not American soil, which is news to me, since it's comfortably within US territorial waters.

The final issue is basically a big fight between everyone under the sun, with lip service paid to a couple of token subplots such as Dani Moonstar becoming a Valkyrie again. There's a rather good sequence with Emma Frost and the Sentry. But fundamentally, it's the same problem I've had with a lot of Matt Fraction's X-Men stories - the cast is too large, there are too many plots being juggled, there's not enough focus. And to be honest, the Utopia set-up doesn't really interest me. The X-Men in San Francisco could have worked (though it didn't). The X-Men on an island in the middle of nowhere is basically a return to the Mansion with more water and less context. I'm not sold.

Dark Wolverine #78 - This is the start of a second arc, as Daken causes PR problems for Norman Osborn, thanks to his overenthusiastic slicing up of baddies. I'm not sure I even buy that as a premise, to be honest. Yes, the Dark Avengers are meant to be bad guys posing as heroes. But they've never seemed all that bothered about using excessive force in public, and it seems to me that the none-too-subtle Bush-administration metaphor makes it something they wouldn't be ashamed about - if anything, they'd consider it a PR boon. "Yes, we torture and murder bad guys. We're keeping America safe. Got a problem with that, liberals?" Isn't that meant to be the story? Or shouldn't it be? For that matter, if Osborn doesn't want one of his heroes slicing up bad guys in public, why on earth did he recruit a Wolverine in the first place? Slicing people up is his only means of attack!

So... we've got a premise that I don't really buy into, and that's followed by a story Daken doesn't really appear in all that much. There's a convoluted conspiracy plot with Osborn, and some gratuitous lingerie scenes. What I liked about the previous three issues - Daken's playing both sides against the middle - isn't so apparent here, and instead it comes off as an exercise in killing time while the creators wait for Dark Reign to end. We all know Osborn's downfall can't come in this book, so where exactly can any of this be leading? On the face of it, nowhere, and that's a problem. If you want to read yet another Dark Reign conspiracy story, this is a decent one, but I think I'm bored of this set-up and I'm ready to move on, thanks.

Exiles #6 - Jeff Parker's relaunch meets with swift cancellation - though to be fair, if it wasn't for the renumbering, this would be something approaching issue #125. There wasn't a lasting increase in sales, so the decision to pull the plug is understandable; as I've said before, Exiles is a fairly narrow concept and probably due for a rest. Still, Parker had some interesting ideas; rehashing the original Exiles set-up with Morph playing the Timebroker, so that long-time readers knew from the outset that something wasn't quite right, was a clever twist on the formula. And Marvel have at least given him a double-sized issue to wrap things up. Inevitably, it still feels terribly rushed, but we do get a resolution to the Magneto storyline, and a head-spinning explanation of why the Exiles exist in the first place (which, basically, asserts that as different worlds get "fixed", the knock-on effects for the universe mean that the explanation itself is retroactively altered). With hindsight, it's a shame that they didn't give the series a proper rest and then relaunch it with Parker, since that might have worked. But it's probably time to put this concept to bed for the moment.

Magog #1 - From the pages of Justice Society of America, apparently. I've never been especially interested in this character, who always struck me as a slightly off-beam representative of "modern" superheroes when he debuted in Kingdom Come. But hey, it's Keith Giffen, so it's probably worth a look. And, well... it's not terrible or anything, but there's nothing much to grab me. Giffen writes Magog as one of those superheroes who spends his time grumbling about the fact that other heroes won't get involved with street crime or Sudanese child soldiers because they're too busy fighting aliens. So he's a sort of globe-trotting street-level superhero, who's very angry about stuff, and likes smashing up opposing henchmen. Nothing you haven't seen before. It's competent but not very memorable.

Models Inc #1 - At least it stands out on the shelf. The art itself is dreadful - it looks like somebody's put a photo through a blurry filter and drawn a black line around it, and frankly they'd have been better off just using a photo - but the cover layout is different from anything else, and that's something. (And if it's not a doctored photo... well, it looks like one, and isn't that the real issue?) As for the story... it's a revival of some of Marvel's 1950s model characters, written by Paul Tobin with art by Vicenc Villagrasa. And that begs the obvious question: why would you want to revive the 1950s model characters? Was the world really crying out for a twenty-first century take on Millie the Model? Even if it was, I doubt this will be the book to satisfy them, because it's excruciating. I have no idea who this could possibly be aimed at - a clumsy book about models having adventures on the fringes of the Marvel Universe. If it was vaguely witty and had properly defined characters, it might have a certain camp or cult appeal, but it doesn't really manage that either. Oh, and there's a back-up strip about some guy who's apparently on television abroad.

Nomad: Girl Without a World #1 - A four-issue miniseries for Rikki Barnes, the Heroes Reborn Bucky. Rikki's a tricky character - she's actually not bad in her own right, but she's tied to a notoriously awful series in Rob Liefeld's Captain America, and her back story, involving artificially created alternate worlds brought into our dimension, is practically impenetrable. Sean McKeever wisely cuts through all that, by stripping it back to a simple idea: Rikki is from a parallel Earth, she's stuck in "our" world which is familiar but different, and her story is about her trying to find a place. And in the first issue she tries to be Bucky again, only to be warned off by the Black Widow. Given that the series is called Nomad, I think it's pretty obvious where this is heading - but McKeever writes this sort of thing well, and he's keeping the series down to earth with a story about high school politics, of all things. This is a pretty good issue. (Oh, and although the cover is a straightforward pin-up, it's at least got some striking colouring.)

Strange Tales #1 - First of a three-issue anthology of indie cartoonists doing comedy strips with Marvel heroes. The main attraction here is the long-awaited appearance of Peter Bagge's The Incorrigible Hulk, which was completed years ago and shelved when Marvel had a panic about damaging the Hulk licence. It's being serialised over these three issues, and on the strength of the opening pages, it's hard to fathom what Marvel could have objected to. ("Second-hand smoke bad for Hulk! It violate Hulk's civil liberties!") All told, it's a pretty good package. Most of the strips are short enough not to outstay their welcome; Paul Pope's tongue-in-cheek semi-deadpan Inhumans story is quite charming, and Junko Mizuno's inexplicable "Spider-Man moves to a city of spider-people where he isn't very special" story is genuinely sweet. A lot of it's just silly, but that's no bad thing.

The Torch #1 - It's Marvel's 70th anniversary, so it must be time to revive the Golden Age Human Torch again! Actually, on the strength of this first issue, it seems to be more of a comic about the Torch's sidekick Toro - who was apparently restored to life somewhere or other, and if only they still did footnotes, I'd know. Avengers/Invaders? Just guessing. The angle is that Toro doesn't fit in anywhere, because everyone he knew has moved on. If you only read one comic this month about a Marvel superhero feeling that they don't fit in, make it Nomad #1. This is okay, but nothing much more than that, and feels like primarily an exercise in reviving a character for the sake of doing so.

Sweet Tooth #1 - See the podcast for more on this. Jeff Lemire's new Vertigo series is definitely more of an indie title in sensibility, and I suspect it's going to be a tough sell, but all credit to Vertigo for trying it. It's a post-apocalypse story about a kid who's grown up in the middle of the forest alone with his father, and now has to go out on his own. Apparently all the post-apocalypse kiddies have animal characteristics, and Gus has antlers and the expression of a startled deer. In plot terms, all very familiar, but the execution is impressive - even if the metaphor of innocence might as well have a flashing neon sign over it. It's a quiet, bleak and brittle piece, which manages to keep up that mood despite fairly racing through the opening plot. From the preview pages, I had this pegged as likely to be irritatingly quirky, but at full length it turns out to be much more enjoyable than I'd expected. Worth a look, particularly given that Vertigo is still selling its first issues for a dollar.

Uncanny X-Men: First Class #3 - This is a Banshee solo story, and it actually finds a relatively underused part of his history to work with. It's his wife Maeve, whose main function has hitherto been to spawn Siryn and get blown up by the IRA in an angstifying flashback. So, nice idea... but we end up with a rather awkward story about voodoo mutants and a bitter father-in-law. It all feels a bit contrived, and with both Sean and Moira featured prominently, much will depend on yuir tolerance fir the ol' Oirish accent. Adequate for what it is.

Vengeance of the Moon Knight #1 - Only in comics would a B-movie title like Vengeance of the Moon Knight actually seem like a good idea. Maybe the next relaunch can be Abbot and Costello Meet the Moon Knight? Anyway, Gregg Hurwitz and Jerome Opena bring Marc Spector back to New York, and he's out to make a name for himself as a proper, saner hero once again. The main theme seems to be Moon Knight's attempt to re-establish himself as an A-lister, which isn't a million miles away from what they've been doing in Ms Marvel. And although this isn't an official Dark Reign tie-in, there's the obligatory "renegade hero operating outside Osborn's control" schtick. It's all quite well done; the story is well paced, enough is done to acknowledge the previous stories without compromising the fresh start, and Opena's art is beautiful. The drawback is that the themes all seem a bit familiar; by this point in the Dark Reign storyline, we've seen pretty much everything. The back-up is a reprint of Moon Knight #1, not a particularly great story in its own right, but interesting for a chance to see Bill Sienkiewicz in the days when he was still finding his style.

X-Factor #48 - Are we nearly there yet? This storyline feels like it's been going on forever. Civilisations will die, continents will rise and fall, man will colonise the stars, and this storyline will still not be over. Apparently the book is heading for a relaunch with issue #200 (which, if you add up the first and second volumes, isn't that far away - though it's also rather meaningless, since the first 74 issues of volume 1 featured a different team of the same name). So presumably this has to end sooner or later, and I wonder whether it's being dragged out to fit that schedule. Anyway, this issue, the various plots shuffle a little further forward, and that's about all you can say about it. The story is over-long, and that's the bottom line.

X-Men Forever #6-7 - One issue drawn by Paul Smith, one by Steve Scott. And they're nice-looking comics, actually, even if Smith seems a bit sketchy at times. Claremont's characteristic juddling of subplots fits nicely with the fortnightly format, which keeps up the momentum while allowing him to pursue his digressions. Issue #7 is certainly something of a digression, as much of the issue is given over to a flashback story with the Howling Commandos. But it bounces along as enthusiastically as ever, and it's a strangely likeable comic for all its rough edges. As promised before my break, I'll come back to look at this series in a bit more detail... honest.

X-Men Legacy Annual #1 - Actually the first part of a four-part storyline which presumably continues in X-Men Legacy itself, although nobody seems to have thought it necessary to specify that in the comic. It's an Emplate story, which takes as its starting point the reasonable observation that the old Generation X villain was supposed to survive by feeding off mutants, so he's had a tough time since M-Day. For whatever reason, he's finally thought of visiting the X-Men to go looking for Penance - who, you might remember, he could feed on indefinitely because of her diamond body. Well, Penance isn't there, so he tries somebody else instead - presumably you're supposed to either remember Bling! from the Peter Milligan run, or figure out for yourself what her powers must be in order for the plot to work. That piece of exposition aside, it's a solid story which seems to be having fun with Emplate's all-round weirdness - though I wonder whether Acuna's art is too realistic to quite pull him off. There's also a back-up strip, picking up on the "Gambit joins Apocalypse" subplot which we all thought had been abandoned; apparently Carey's going to do something with it after all.

The X-Axis - 16 August 2009

I'm still working my way through my backlog of comics, so let's have another batch of capsules to bring us a little further up to date. Actually, X-Men Forever is due for a full-length review by now, and it's turning out that there's quite a bit to say about that book. But we'll come back to that.

Don't forget this week's episode of House to Astonish, with reviews of Doom Patrol, Lenore and Ultimate Comics Avengers. Download it here, or visit the podcast webpage, or download from iTunes.

Adventure Comics #... um... - This would be the first issue of the relaunched Adventure Comics. With Superman himself off in another storyline, the series has been turned into a Superboy title with a Legion of Super-Heroes back-up strip, thus satisfying the nostalgia cravings of people who live in the past. But you can ignore that if you want. It's actually a single book with a parallel structure - both strips are set in Smallville, both are written by Geoff Johns, there's a degree of plot crossover between the two, but rather niftily it provides an excuse to use two artists on the book. And you get thirty pages of story for your $4. The book also manages to set new standards in bizarre numbering: although solicited as Adventure Comics #1, the cover actually has the number 504 superimposed on the number 1, and the indicia identifies it as "Adventure Comics #1/Adventure Comics #504 (variant cover)". Yes, it's full-scale parallel numbering, a system designed to cause maximum confusion!

As for the contents: the Superboy strip plays off the idea that this version of the character is supposed to be the cloned son of both Superman and Lex Luthor. He's come to Smallville to try and emulate his father... or possibly his fathers. Remarkably little actually happens in this first issue, but Johns gets away with it by providing a sustained piece of misdirection and an effective twist. The idea of the character comes across without heavy exposition, and the book looks great - artist Francis Manipaul and colourist Brian Buccellato do some great farmland.

The Legion, on the other hand, have always struck me as a clumsy idea from the Silver Age who have not adapted terribly well to modern conditions (which is to say, the last few decades). They're passably entertaining here, but I just get the feeling that Geoff Johns is in love with these characters and is not really selling me on why I should share that view.

Battlefields: The Tankies #3 - This is the concluding part of Garth Ennis' Battlefields project for Dynamite Entertainment: a trio of three-issue miniseries, allowing him to indulge in his favourite genre, the war story. There's nothing to link the three stories, but a bit of branding can't hurt to raise their profile. In a closing essay, Ennis announces another nine issues, in the same format, for 2010 - including a direct sequel to one of the first Battlefields arcs. Presumably it's this one, since "The Tankies" comes across more as an introduction of some characters for use in further stories. (And the other two don't really lend themselves to sequels at all.) To be honest, though, this struck me as the least successful story of the three. It doesn't have the emotional hook of "Night Witches" or "Dear Billy", and comes across as a rather generic exercise in dark humour crossed with war-is-hell. It's not bad, mind you - the other two Battlefields arcs were exceptionally strong, and even Ennis's weaker stories are miles ahead of the pack. But he's done better.

Cable #17 - As if to prove that nothing, but nothing, can put an end to this "Bishop chases Cable through time" storyline, with the whole world on the verge of destruction, Cable flees into space... and Bishop gives chase. Again. In itself, it's a perfectly good story, but the broader problem is that the book seems to be going round in circles, and there's no real sense that it's building to anything. Of course, if we drag it out long enough, then I suppose eventually Hope gets her powers and something will come of that... but for the moment, we seem to be stuck on a merry-go-round of chase stories. Presumably the idea is to keep increasing the stakes, but I think they peaked on that when Bishop started blowing up whole continents, and the fate of a couple of spaceships seems relatively inconsequential in comparison. That said, these problems are with the broader picture. As a two-parter, this is perfectly decent - veteran artist Paul Gulacy humanises it all, and there's a nice little scene where Hope is reunited with Cable and figures (after getting it wrong in the recent crossover) that this time she's recognised the impostor. All this is fine, but the series as a whole really needs to get to the point pretty soon.

Citizen Rex #1 - Every so often I pick up a book because the creators are acclaimed geniuses, and then it just washes over me without leaving much of an impression at all. This is a six-issue miniseries by Mario and Gilbert Hernandez, and while I'd love to say that I had some great insight to offer, to be honest, I just though it was self-consciously quirky in a mildly irritating way. Let's just say there's an entire sensibility going on here which doesn't do much for me. I can sort of see the appeal - it's got a strong creative voice, and it's certainly different - but it never really connects with me either intellectually or emotionally.

CyberForce/Hunter Killer #1 - Mark Waid relaunches early Image team CyberForce (and some other Top Cow group you've probably never heard of) in a miniseries which the cover optimistically bills as "summer's hottest event series." Good luck with that. It's a perfectly straight superhero book, loosely themed around the power that technology has in our lives. So there's a too-good-to-be-true new mobile phone on the market, and if you can't figure out where that's heading, you're clearly new around here. It's fine, though; Silvestri's characters fit with Waid's style, and Kenneth Rocafort's art is flashy in a rather enjoyable way (and has some great colouring, too). Better than you're probably imagining it was.

Dominic Fortune #1 - A four-issue miniseries for Marvel's Max imprint, in which Howard Chaykin returns to his cynically amoral 1930s adventurer Dominic Fortune. Chaykin is one of those creators who acquired an indestructible critical reputation for his work in the eighties, when he doing all sorts of experiments with storytelling. He also tends to churn out rather uninteresting sex-and-violence fantasies like this, books which just seem terribly old fashioned, as if they're still rehearsing the stuff that would have been transgressive when the creator was 18. That said, there's something curiously compelling about Chaykin's awkward, blocky artwork, which makes up in presence for what it lacks in elegance. But ultimately it just feels like a stock adventure story with some gratuitous censor-baiting.

Doom Patrol #1 - We talk about this on the podcast, but basically, it's a revival of the original Doom Patrol by Keith Giffen and Matthew Clark, with the three founder members back to being used as a field team by a dubiously unsympathetic chief. This first issue is mainly character bits, hung on a fairly basic plot, but it hangs together quite well, and there's certainly a lot in there. The back-up strip, reuniting Giffen with the rest of the creative team of Justice League International on a suburban-sitcom version of the Metal Men, is great (and makes up for its lack of page count by doing ten-panel pages to squeeze in the content). Giffen is hit or miss - as the closing preview for Magog proves - but this is one of his winners.

G-Man: Cape Crisis #1 - This is the Image series by Chris Giarusso, the guy who used to do those Mini Marvels strips that cropped up randomly at the back of Marvel comics and were frequently the best thing in the issue. This is on somewhat similar lines; while Giarusso doesn't have the opportunity to play off familiar characters, the style is much the same, set in what seems to be a world where some of the kids are superheroes, none of the adults are, and actual villainy seems to be a very low story priority. Giarrusso's comic timing has always been great, and he knows how to play off the genre cliches - I love the scene of G-Man trying to explain his power to the other kids and being cut off with objections that you can't be "kind of invulnerable." (I always wanted to argue that point with Rogue. I mean, I knew what Claremont was getting at by "partially invulnerable", but seriously...)

The Marvels Project #1 - Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting begin a sort of shared origin story for superheroes generally in the Marvel Universe. Presumably. I'm a bit wary of books like this, because overarching conspiracy theories rarely fit neatly with every concept. But we're off to a promising start; from the look of it, it's not so much that there's a single cause for everything, as that the US government is giving things a nudge along, with an eye on the upcoming war. Wisely, Brubaker steers clear of the major Golden Age characters, and opts for the Angel as his protagonist - one of those all-purpose vigilantes who's enough of a cipher that you can impose pretty much any role onto him. Basically, it's Brubaker and Epting doing Marvels in the Golden Age, and as thoroughly readable as that implies.

Ultimate Comics Avengers #1 / Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #1 - Again, check the podcast for more on these. By the way, despite those being the official titles, the logos just say Ultimate Avengers and Ultimate Spider-Man, so evidently sanity dawned somewhere along the line. From the look of these books, neither Millar nor Bendis is really all that interested in Ultimatum and its deck clearing exercise - they just want to put it behind them and get back to business as usual. Avengers comes across as essentially a continuation of Mark Millar's Ultimates, but somewhat more restrained and with the bombast toned down a bit. It actually works quite well; Carlos Pacheco does a wonderful job with some of the action scenes, and personally, I always thought Ultimates was the sort of book that would benefit from dialling it back a bit. Spider-Man is more or less what it always was - New York City has been entirely rebuilt in six months, which is pretty obviously the book's way of saying "Let's just pretend that didn't happen." New artist David LaFuente has done some great work in the past, and has some great moments here, but he still seems to be settling on a style; there's a flirtation with manga here that doesn't seem altogether consistent throughout the issue, and makes the book feel a little rough around the edges. But it's refreshingly light on angst, and that's something to be welcomed.

Uncanny X-Men #514 - Part four of the "Utopia" crossover with Dark Avengers. I can see why Matt Fraction was talking in interviews about needing a flowchart to keep track of his cast. At this point, we've got a cast of thousands wandering the pages of the book - the regular X-Men, the "dark" X-Men, Norman Osborn, the Dark Avengers, X-Force, the Science Team... Come to think of it, there's also an entire subplot about Professor X and the Beast in prison which doesn't even make it into this issue. The Dark Avengers seem, at least so far, to be surplus to requirements, in that their role could have been filled perfectly adequately by generic HAMMER troops, thus paring back the cast list to advantage. I can't help wondering whether this story started off as an X-Men "Dark Reign" tie-in and got turned into a Dark Avengers crossover somewhere along the line, complicating it further. It's quite good fun - the Dark X-Men team are quite well balanced, in that most of the team are actually perfectly decent people, and there's nothing really all that dark about them aside from their connection with Osborn. And Terry and Rachel Dodson have always been great superhero artists. But there's probably too much going on here, and it feels like it'd be a stronger story for thinning the herd of characters and focussing on fewer people with more screen time. That said, Fraction is finding the space for Scott and Emma, who are rightly his top priorities, so it works to that extent.

Uncanny X-Men: First Class #2 - Nightcrawler gets into an argument with the Inhumans over an issue of cultural relativism, and the X-Men have to get him out of trouble. It's okay, and perfectly acceptable so far as it goes, but it doesn't have the charm of the Jeff Parker issues, and some of the team (Jean in particular) feel decidedly out of character.

X-Men Forever #5 - Officially the end of the first arc, "Love -- and Loss!" (yes, with that punctuation), although if there wasn't a "part 5 of 5" on it, you'd probably never know. What a strange book this is becoming. I'll write about it in more detail later, but X-Men Forever has turned out to be a strange hybrid of, on the one hand, ideas that Claremont might conceivably have used if he'd stayed with the X-Men in 1991 and, on the other, stuff that would clearly never have seen print in a 1991 X-Men story in a million years. (Wolverine's dead! SHIELD's run by a second generation staff!) This issue even throws in a weird new spin on the entire X-Men concept, which would have dragged the entire franchise away from the "next step in human evolution" premise. Basically, the idea is that mutants burn themselves out by using their powers, so they're pretty much doomed to die young - making their powers a different sort of mixed blessing. Now, obviously, if this was the regular Marvel Universe, or even the diverged-in-1991 version X-Men Forever was supposed to feature, you could cite tons of obvious counter-examples (Magneto and Wolverine, for example), but this is a parallel universe, so Claremont can do what he likes. And hey, it's something different. The book is all over the place, but with a sort of manic enthusiasm that makes it unexpectedly hard to resist.

The X-Axis - 5 July 2009

Okay, then. Two weeks of stuff to get through, one of which saw an enormous quantity of X-books dumped on the market, with the other seeing a ton of first issues. So some of these might be on the concise side, but it'll get up back up to speed.

I'll come back to the "Ghost Boxes" storyline from Astonishing X-Men, and the "Messiah Complex" crossover arc from Cable and X-Force, both of which finished in the week before last, since they really merit more attention than this. And later tonight, on this week's House to Astonish, Al and I are planning to look at the first issues of JLA: Cry for Justice, Greek Street and Existence 2.0.

But let's take a deep breath and get into the backlog.

Astonishing Tales #6 - The final issue of this low-selling anthology title, from the look of it - which is to say, they don't seem to have formally announced a cancellation, but they haven't solicited any more issues, and that's usually a bit of a giveaway. There's not much here to change any opinions you might have formed before. The Wolverine/Punisher story is lightweight fluff, but it does have quite interesting art, and I like the colouring a lot. Jonathan Hickman's Mojoworld serial with Cannonball and Sunspot is utterly absurd (and, with this chapter, depends on you knowing that Sunspot was a huge fan of Magnum back when he was first introduced in 1983, a character point that has understandably been allowed to fall by the wayside in the intervening years), but it's genuinely funny. The rest is competent but forgettable - an Iron Man 2020 story which seems to be trying to set up the character as an Ellis-style futurist for subsequent stories, and good luck with that one, and a Sabra short which kind of circles the topic of Israeli conscription without ever quite managing to say anything about it. To support an anthology title in this day and age would take much stronger material than this, but then Astonishing Tales was primarily a means of reprinting material originally commissioned for the website.

Batman and Robin #2 - Now this is a good comic. That opening page is a lovely piece of art, and Morrison is doing a great job here with the basic idea of Dick Grayson taking over as the new Batman. Even if they don't know who's in the costume, everyone who met Batman regularly can immediately tell it's a different guy, and his new Robin is just an infuriating brat. So there's a nice little angle about whether Dick can ever meaningfully be the new Batman, as opposed to just a Batman impersonator, which ties back to the old theme of "was Bruce Wayne pretending to be Batman, or was he pretending to be Bruce Wayne?" Alongside that, there's a wonderfully bizarre fight scene with some circus freaks, and more genuinely creepy stuff at the end with the Pig. Better than the first issue, I think.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer #26 - Either I've missed an issue somewhere, or worse, I've stopped caring enough to remember what happened in the previous issue. And I have a sinking feeling it might be the latter. Vampires have insinuated themselves into the mainstream, and the Slayers are on the run from a world that no longer has much time for them. Basically this is a whole issue of people running away and regrouping, with an admittedly cute ending that I'm sure would work much better if I could actually identify the character in the final panel from the art alone. (You can work it out, but I don't think it was intended that you should have to.) Perfectly alright, but not really grabbing me for some reason.

Cable #16 - Well, "Messiah War" sure didn't advance matters a lot, did it? Cable's still on the run with Hope, they're still fleeing further and further into the future because his time machine won't go back, they're still being chased by Bishop, and even Stryfe is still hovering around on the fringes. If the recap page is anything to go by - and so often, it isn't - Hope is supposed to have been deeply affected by meeting X-Force, because they're from her own time period, and "for the first time in her life, she feels like she's found some friends whom she doesn't want to leave behind." Quite why Hope would have any particular attachment to a time period she doesn't remember, let alone care about X-Force more than the people she lived with for five years earlier in the series, I don't really understand, but then, reading the story, I'm not quite sure that's how writer Duane Swierczynski was trying to sell the idea in the first place. What actually happens in this issue is that Hope gets separated from Cable during a time jump and lands two years early, meaning that she's going to have to make her own way and grow up a bit more before being reunited with him. There's some quite nice intercutting between the two of them, and some very good art from veteran Paul Gulacy. It's actually quite a decent issue, but undercut somewhat by the nagging awareness that "Messiah War" ended up heading nowhere, so why should this one be any different?

Captain America: Reborn #1 - Which is effectively an issue of Captain America with "#1" on the cover, but hey, that's what it takes to shift units these days. It seems we're doing the "lost in the timestream" angle, as Steve Rogers relives scenes from his past - which feels like a bit of a cop-out after he got shot in the chest and buried. This is decent enough, but it doesn't have the emotional weight of issue #600, and really, the return of Steve Rogers is the single least interesting aspect of Brubaker's story, so far as I'm concerned. Bryan Hitch seems awkwardly cast on this book - inker Butch Guice and colourist Paul Mounts seems to be trying their damnedest to maintain the tone of the regular Captain America series, resulting in what feels like a stylistic tug-of-war between Hitch's polished faces and something darker and looser that comes through at times. Not sure it really works.

Chew #2 - Thanks to his power to pick up psychic impressions from eating stuff, Tony Chu settles into his new job at the FDA, "the most powerful law enforcement agency on the face of the planet." As with the first issue, there's plenty of dark absurdity and a dash of gross-out comedy, but all while keeping a grounding in reality - a tricky balance to pull off. The basic set-up of Chu and his obnoxious boss is familiar stuff, but it's the comic timing and the details in the art that make it fly. As I said last month, I'm not quite sure where you go with this in the long run, but so far the high concept is working nicely. Oh, and it's interesting to note that, even though this is officially part of a five issue storyline, the first two issues have both been largely self-contained. You'd almost think the creators wanted the book to be accessible to new readers. How unfashionable.

Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Utopia - The first part of the Uncanny X-Men/Dark Avengers crossover, all of which is being written by Matt Fraction, and which should certainly help raise Uncanny's profile. The Humanity Now! Coalition (is the exclamation mark compulsory? Because if it isn't, I'm going to stop using it, if you don't mind) marches on San Francisco with a million people, which rather comes out of nowhere, given that the storyline has only had a couple of mentions in Uncanny to build it up. Actually, this makes a bit more sense when you get to part two, but it comes across very strangely here. And then you get a riot with the humans versus the mutants, and Cyclops singularly failing to calm everyone down. All this provides an opportunity for Norman Osborn to declare that HAMMER need to move in and take control, and there's your plot. If you can buy that premise, the rest is fine, but my problem here is that - repeat after me - there's only supposed to be 300 or so mutants in total, and even though Fraction has clearly been searching through the darkest recesses of The 198 Files to find obscure ones, I just don't buy this storyline with a grand total of 300 rioters (minus the ones who are trying to control the situation, minus the ones who aren't in San Francisco at all). Add another one to the increasingly long list of theoretically decent story ideas, strangled in the crib by M-Day. You can't do this stuff with 300 mutants. It just doesn't work. I'll keep saying it until it stops being true: if the X-office have no ideas for what to do with the post-Decimation set-up, and it sure looks like they don't, then they should be reversing it ASAP and at least provide a set-up that works for the stories they apparently do want to tell, about mutants as a minority population in San Francisco.

Dark Wolverine #75 - In other words, a Daken solo title. The actual Wolverine isn't in this story at all, but with the recent launch of Wolverine: Weapon X, I rather suspect that this is the soft launch of an ongoing Daken series, which will get a more sensible name once Dark Reign is out of the way. (No doubt with a shiny new #1.) In this issue - you'll never guess - Daken is impersonating Wolverine, charming the ladies, and scheming against his fellow villains. I've been skipping most of the Dark Reign tie-ins, but something tells me there's a lot of variations on this storyline being told right now. To be fair, it's well paced, and I like Giuseppe Camuncoli's art, which almost manages to make Daken's dodgy mohawk work. Curiously, even though this is co-written by Daniel Way and Marjorie Liu, Daken doesn't act much like he did in Way's previous stories - he's more flippant than before, for one thing. Granted, it probably helps that he doesn't have to interact with Wolverine here, and he gets an interior monologue to explain himself, but the dialogue doesn't read much like Way at all. As for the story, there's really not much to it other than "Daken winds up his fellow Dark Avengers" - which is done quite well, but where's it heading?

Deadpool: Merc with a Mouth #1 - Because you apparently are perceived to have demanded it, it's a second ongoing Deadpool series. This one is written by Victor Gischler with art by Bong Dazo. (Google says his real name is Angelo Dazo, but you've got to love somebody who changes his name to Bong.) AIM hire our demented antihero to retrieve an item from the Savage Land, and so he goes there and discovers... something that looks like it was intended to be a twist at one point, except they've been giving it away in house ads for weeks. It's the head of the Deadpool from Marvel Zombies. This is a straight Deadpool story in more or less the same style as Daniel Way's work on the main title, and there's no obvious sign of this book bringing a different angle to the character. It's basically an action comedy. But the comedy works - lots of good dialogue, and Dazo pulls off the visual gags effectively - which is really the bottom line here. It's entertaining.

Exiles #4 - The Exiles arrive on another world and have to liberate it from the robots who've already wiped out the human race. Um... that's basically it, really. Entirely solid, not sure what to say about it that we haven't covered in previous months, and it's a busy week so let's move on.

Gotham City Sirens #1 - A team book for female Batman villains, with Catwoman, Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn. The cover is faintly embarrassing, but the interior art by Guillem March is more acceptable (albeit also a bit more wonky). The idea is that Catwoman's not on top form at the moment, and ends up, somewhat against her better judgment, having to hook up with the two crazy girls. Paul Dini writes a pretty strong first issue here, setting up the characters well for those of us who don't read the Batman titles, and pitching his throwaway first-issue villain about right. Rather better than I was expecting, and actually quite enjoyable.

Marvel Divas #1 - This book drew an awful lot of flack for that admittedly godawful J Scott Campbell cover. The title is also somewhat mystifying, since of the four main characters, only the Black Cat could remotely be classed as a "diva" by my understanding of the term. Either Marvel need a dictionary or I do. In fact, they were being a lot more accurate when they billed Robert Aguirre-Sacasa and Tonci Zonjic's comic as Sex and the City with female superheroes (albeit C-list ones, which is kind of the point). The interior art is excellent, in fact, and the opposite of the cover in almost every conceivable way. As for the story... well, they talk about men for 20 pages and then an Issue of the Week plot is unveiled, which is a bit underwhelming. If only there was a stronger story I'd say this was a good comic; as it is, I'd still say it's worth a look on the strength of the art. And in fairness to Marvel, I suppose I can understand their logic in trying to attract attention to the book, but the problem is, they've done so by appealing to lowest common denominator - and in so doing, they've pretty much sent the message that the book would be of no interest at all to those people who might actually want to read 20 pages of Monica Rambeau and Patsy Walker discussing their romantic difficulties. I think that cover will alienate at least as many readers at it attracts - but to be fair, the book was always something of a niche proposition.

Uncanny X-Men #512 - The Beast's "Science Team" go back to 1906 to get blood samples from the parents of America's first mutant. This is in a different league to the preceding "Sisterhood" storyline, and it's hard to believe that both stories are by the same writer, Matt Fraction. Which isn't to say that this is perfect; it starts piling on the cute moments a bit too blatantly by the end, eventually reaching for one of the ultimate time travel cliches. But it's got a focus and enthusiasm that just didn't seem to be there before, perhaps because Fraction is getting an opportunity to write about some of his pet themes, and pay homage to Tesla. He also gets to work with Yanick Paquette on this story, who is rather better suited to draw Fraction's ideas. Best issue in quite a while.

Uncanny X-Men #513 - And then we have this, which is the second part of "Utopia", the crossover with Dark Avengers. It's perfectly fine, it has characters politicking nicely for control of Norman Osborn's new "X-Men" team, and it has the Dodsons on art (actually, with rather less of the cheesecake than usual). It's also unbelievably camp, with Emma wearing black to signify that she's one of the baddies in case anyone hadn't picked up on it yet. I'm in two minds about this; there's a lot of amusing bits, but it also sees Fraction hauling out a cast of thousands yet again, something which has contributed to a lack of focus in many of his stories. He's mentioned in interviews needing a flowchart to keep track of the characters, and one can't help thinking that if the writer's having that much trouble, what chance do we have? I wonder whether this is going to turn out to be another Matt Fraction story in need of streamlining. But it is quite fun if you're prepared to run with the idea.

Wolverine: First Class #16 - Guest starring Siryn and Dazzler, written by Peter David, and with art from the Gurihiru duo. And who wouldn't want a Wolverine series drawn by Gurihiru? They could call it Adorable Wolverine. I love their work, and they're actually very well suited for this book, which, despite the title, is really a Kitty Pryde series. It's a straight Kitty Pryde story for younger readers where she feels jealous of Siryn and Learns An Important Lesson, but it's Peter David and Gurihiru, for heaven's sake, of course it's good.

Wolverine: Noir #3 - In which this version of Logan explains his origin story, and Mariko turns out to be the Japanese equivalent of a flapper. Um... yeah, it's alright, but you know the drill by now: I just don't get why someone thinks the world needs noir versions of superhero characters.

Wolverine: Weapon X #3 - "The Adamantium Men", part 3 of 5. Wolverine runs rings round the twelve members of Strikeforce X for an issue, more or less. The reason why this book works is that Jason Aaron and Ron Garney can take a fairly basic concept for what happens in this chapter, and then make it work with the little details that allow the individual Strikeforce X members to have a bit of personality. That's what makes the difference between an enjoyable issue, and Wolverine beating up randoms for 20 pages. There's a slightly jarring bit toward the end where Aaron starts defending the credibility of his plot in the post-Bush world, which doesn't really work, but he pulls it back pretty quickly with the henchmen from Blackguard's human resources department (who summon back-up by radioing in an "HR Emergency!"). It's what you want in a Wolverine story.

X-Factor #45 - Somebody reminded me the other week that I hadn't actually reviewed X-Factor fully in ages. But then, the story just never seems to come to a natural break point. This issue, in the far future, Madrox meets up with what's left of Dr Doom, while back in the present, some of the team fight a mind-controlled Shatterstar, and the rest of the team aren't even in the book. The future sections are probably the most successful - there's something very likeable about a senile Dr Doom in chronic denial about his reduced circumstances - but it's another solid issue all round.

X-Men Forever #2 - Better than the first issue, I'd say. Claremont teases the death of Wolverine - which he could actually do in this series if he wanted to, since it's out of continuity. Of course, having set up a romantic triangle subplot in issue #1, he's hardly going to end it like that - but it's a good point in the series to remind readers that in theory, at least, this book can tell the sort of stories that would have been ruled out by inter-title continuity even if Claremont had stuck around. And it's got the requisite "How do they get out of that?" factor too. Oh, then Sabretooth shows up for a fight. Nothing groundbreaking here, but it flows quite nicely, the story is definitely stronger than the first issue, and there's a definite retro charm to it.

Uncanny X-Men #508-511

"Sisterhood"
Writer: Matt Fraction
Pencillers: Greg Land with Terry Dodson (epilogue)
Inker: Jay Leisten with Rachel Dodson (epilogue)
Colourist: Justin Ponsor
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Nick Lowe

Actually, there's no title on the published stories. But the solicitations say it's called "Sisterhood", so we'll go with that.

This is one of Greg Land's arcs, and it's all too tempting to roll my eyes heavenward and lament the plastic pictures. We've been there before, though. The problems with Land's art, and there are many, have been exhaustively documented. It's lifeless, it's airbrushed, it's stiff, it doesn't convey emotion, his women all look alike, his rictus grins are absurd. All true, all very familiar.

But usually, I would then lament that Land was undermining the story. And there's the rub. "Sisterhood" is just a lousy story to start with.

On the plus side, Fraction is getting better at juggling his subplots. Before, major storylines were going missing for months at a time, even when they should have been a huge concern for the characters. This time, the first two issues spend more time keeping the plates spinning, before focussing in on the Sisterhood in the climactic second half. That's a big improvement.

Sadly, though, the arc is just all over the place. The plot boils down to this. The Red Queen (apparently Madelyne Pryor, although it's never explained with much clarity) is a disembodied psychic thingie. She wants a body back. Her plan is to revive Jean Grey's corpse and occupy that, because apparently only Jean is powerful enough to hold her. She recruits a bunch of villainesses, she does a test run with Psylocke, she attacks the X-Men in order to recover a lock of Jean's hair, she uses the hair to magically locate Jean's body, but the X-Men trick her in the end, she tries to occupy the wrong corpse, it won't hold her, and she vanishes.

That's the basic plot. I think. It's presented in a terribly confusing way, and it's riddled with garbled developments and outright plot holes.

Why does the Red Queen want a physical body anyway? She seems to be fine as she is. And if that's her only concern, why was she involved in the Hellfire Cult in the arc before last? What was the point of her connection with Empath? If it was only a device to get him into the X-Men's mansion, why didn't she just send him to knock on the door and sign up? Why did the Sisterhood need to go to the trouble of recovering a lock of Jean's hair just to discover that Jean's body is in the X-Men's long-established graveyard under a gravestone clearly marked JEAN GREY-SUMMERS? How does burning through an unsuitable host body leave the Red Queen any worse off than she was before? What's all this gibberish about Psylocke and "murder spirits"?

And that would be bad enough. But there are more fundamental problems. There is a cast of thousands, almost none of whom have any emotional anchor to the plot. The Sisterhood members seem to have been selected using the Official Handbook, a blindfold and a pin. Obscure X-Men associates show up for two panels and then vanish again for the rest of the story. Yes, yes, I know, it's not a formal team book any more. Fine. But it still needs some sort of focus on a defined cast. It's just a hazy mess right now.

Even if you can look past the plot problems, and forgive the lack of focus - what was any of it about? What was it even meant to be about? I really haven't a clue.

For all his faults, Greg Land is not the major problem with this story. The story is the major problem with this story. Fraction has written some very good stuff in recent years, but his work on Uncanny has been inconsistent at best. This one is a shambles.

The X-Axis - 24 May 2009

With one thing and another, it looks like it's just going to be capsules this week. If time allows, I'll review the Umbrella Academy: Dallas miniseries, but we'll see.

Don't forget this week's edition of House to Astonish - download it here, visit the podcast website, or subscribe via iTunes.

And now, this week's books...

Ex Machina #42 - There's something a little simplistic in this "nature versus machines" set-up, but then I suspect that's partly the point. The villain buys into it wholeheartedly, Mitchell's not quite so sure. Besides, the villain's clearly insane. Still, the scenes with rats emerging to attack New Yorkers are very effective, particularly for a book which can sometimes feel a little detached in the way it deals with things. And the thriller subplot with the journalist is building nicely, even if the scenes of people talking about mystery boxes are a little heavy-handed. Seems a bit odd that they're publishing a New Year's Eve story in May - did the book drift off schedule at some point? - but it's a solid title.

Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance #1 - This is one of four "Final Crisis Aftermath" miniseries. From the look of it, they're not really Final Crisis crossovers, so much as "what X did next" stories featuring some of the characters from that series. Dance, by Joe Casey and ChrisCross, is about the Super Young Team, a Japanese group introduced in Final Crisis who aren't proper superheroes at all. They've got the costumes, and they've got the powers, but they're only really interested in dressing up and enjoying the attention. With names like Most Excellent Superbat and Shy Crazy Lolita Canary, they're intentionally hard to take seriously. But while they're shallow, they're not bad people, and their celebrity status is starting to give them pangs of conscience - shouldn't they be out there doing proper hero stuff, and not attending publicity events? If all this sounds a bit familiar, then yes, there's a hint of X-Statix in here, and more than a hint of Joe Casey's own recent run on Youngblood. But despite the inherently weird characters, it's actually played fairly straight, and it manages to make the Team genuinely likeable. Casey has been here before, but I'm happy to see him do it again.

The Great Unknown #2 - Duncan Rouleau's miniseries about an obnoxious failed inventor whose best ideas are inexplicably cropping up somewhere else first. I suspect I'm running ahead of the story here - Feld spends most of the issue trying to figure out what's going on, while I suspect I leaped to the right conclusion at the end of issue #1. But there's a great central idea here, a mysterious online company auctioning ideas stolen from inventors who deserved the credit. And besides, was our lazy and grating antihero really going to do anything with these ideas? You can't help suspecting that he'd have screwed it up somewhere along the line. Love the idea, love the art... pity the book could use a proofreader, one of those corners that shouldn't be cut. But it's worth bearing with that

Hellblazer #255 - The second half of Peter Milligan and Goran Sudzuka's two-parter "Regeneration". The first part set up a rather interesting idea about the disruption caused to communities relocated to make way for the Olympic Games, something that rather gets lost here. Instead, we get a fairly conventional twist-in-the-tale horror story about ghosts of plague victims, although it's also used to further the subplot with Constantine's latest love interest. I have a sneaking suspicion that Milligan came upon some pictures of the admittedly bizarre outfits worn by plague doctors and wrote a story around that, but that's no bad starting point. It's a perfectly fine story - it just stays in fairly safe territory for this book.

Jack of Fables #34 - This is just getting silly. But again, that seems to be the point, as Kevin Thorn starts obsessively re-writing reality for the sole purpose of aggravating Bigby as much as he possibly can. Of course, this begs the question of why Kevin can't just kill him directly (other than "Because there wouldn't be much of a story"), but the story has an answer to that. It's an odd one, this - with Jack off in the parent book, this issue has some of the cast of Fables mired in the deliberate insanity of Jack of Fables, and intentionally spends an issue stretching the suspension of disbelief to breaking point. Could have gone badly wrong, but on the whole they get away with it.

Killapalooza #1 - Adam Beechen and Trevor Hairsine with a miniseries about a rock band called the Clap who have superpowers and are also assassins on the side. In theory, not a bad concept as long as you go way over the top. In practice, a bit disappointing. The characters are largely indistinguishable from one another, the jokes about other bands are rather obvious, the art's a bit murky and indistinct. The fundamental problem, though, is that the premise is obviously too silly to take seriously, but the book never takes the headlong dive into demented absurdity that it needed in order to work.

Uncanny X-Men #510 - Oh dear, this isn't very good at all. It's a whole issue devoted to a fight scene between the X-Men and the Sisterhood, the upshot being (i) that the X-Men learn Psylocke's wandering around again, and (ii) the Sisterhood get hold of something, which is only identified on the last page. Did we really need a whole issue to cover this? Isn't this something that could have been covered in a few pages, setting us up for the return fight when the story reaches its climax? The problems here go beyond Greg Land's art, unfortunately. Matt Fraction has some interesting ideas in this series, but none of them feature in the Sisterhood storyline. Here, we just get a bunch of villains with no personalities fighting the X-Men for reasons which aren't very well focussed until right at the end. There's a really gratingly awful "it's so hot in here, why don't we take our clothes off" scene with the Stepford Cuckoos that could have been in a Chuck Austen issue. It's all a bit lousy. Obviously Greg Land's art doesn't help, with its lifeless characters and identikit women, but in fairness it doesn't feel like there was much here to start with. (Mind you, his cover is another matter. What the hell is going on with Emma's cleavage, and why is it a foot to the right of her chest?) Much as I want to like Fraction's X-Men stories, this arc is dying on its feet, I'm afraid.

The Unknown #1 - Mark Waid and Minck Oosterveer, doing a four-issue miniseries for Boom! Studios which I said I'd review last week. And didn't. Oh well. It's a detective story, anyway. Cat Allingham, "America's foremost detective", is one of those ultra-observant Sherlock Holmes characters. She also has angst. And a big guy as her Dr Watson. You know the drill. But I like the art, and by showing us her (evidently familiar) hallucinations without explaining them, the book gives us an unusual mystery to ponder. The actual case is downright weird ("the world's first quantum crime"), but there's something quite enjoyable about the way the Holmesian ultra-rationalist takes it in her stride - after all, by definition, such characters are always a step ahead. Not sure I'll pick up the rest of the story, but it does have something.

Wolverine: Weapon X #2 - In which Wolverine fights a bunch of private security guards with Wolverine upgrades, basically. Works a lot better than you'd expect, since Aaron and Garney's timing is impeccable, and there's some great use of colour with the glowing green claws on a page that's otherwise mostly blue. If I was going to be critical, I'd say that the story is a bit too cavalier about having people get clawed - it seems a bit too inconsequential. But that aside, it's a pleasant change to have a Wolverine book which is willing to go back to basics, avoid getting bogged down in back story, and show a sense of humour in the process. Thus far, the title is more than living up to my expectations.

Wolverine: Noir #2 - Well, it's certainly very dark. Regular readers know my issue with the Noir books by now: yes, they're done perfectly well, but what's the point of taking existing Marvel characters and shoehorning them into a different genre? I suppose you could see it as a long-term plan by Marvel to try and train their audience to accept other genres, and perhaps that's the strongest case to be made for the line. Anyway, this does pretty much what you'd expect. The art is striking and big on shadow, the writing is well paced but largely an exercise in rehashing familiar noir elements with characters on loan from Wolverine. If you put everything you knew about noir and Wolverine out of your mind, it would hold up reasonably well - but in practice, it's a patchwork of elements from other stories and the joins are so clearly visible that it's hard to take the result seriously.