The X-Axis - 1 November 2009

Right, then... I am honestly, definitely, genuinely going to catch up on reviewing some recently-completed storylines. There's a pile of them building up next to my desk, "The Adamantium Men" from Wolverine: Weapon X #1-5, "Romulus" from Wolverine: Origins #37-40 and the GeNext United miniseries being particularly overdue.

But first, let's round up this week's books. By the way, my copy of the X-Necrosha one-shot got delayed, so I'll review it next week. However, since Marvel saw fit to ship seven other X-books this week, I think I'll survive. (Marvel claim they try not to ship everything in a single week. Check the January 2010 solicits: week three features both Hulk and Incredible Hulk, both Uncanny X-Men and X-Men: Legacy, both Wolverine: Origins and Wolverine: Weapon X, and both Dark Avengers and Mighty Avengers. And you might have thought that Web of Spider-Man would ship in the one week of the month when Amazing Spider-Man doesn't... but you'd be wrong. If this is Marvel trying, I dread to think what would happen if they started phoning it in.)

Dark Avengers: Ares #1 - Intriguingly, this isn't a Dark Reign tie-in. Given that Marvel generally seem prepared to slap the logo on anything with a Norman Osborn cameo, this is remarkable restraint. Kieron Gillen and Manuel Garcia are responsible for this miniseries. It's a simple idea: Ares is the god of war, Norman Osborn asks him to train up some H.A.M.M.E.R. soldiers, and so Ares gets to play drill instructor. And since Ares is only marginally saner than Lobo, that's clearly a recipe for disaster. This first issue is mainly black comedy with the bemused soldiers trying to make sense of their maniac commander, with the plot rearing its head on the last two pages. And since it's only a three-issue miniseries, you might think that's leaving it a bit late. But the plot's secondary, really. The joke is Ares as drill instructor; the point is about the moulding of soldiers, and there's plenty of material about that. It's brazenly over the top, but so it should be - it's an Ares comic. Fun reading.

Dark Reign: The List - Wolverine #1 - The Dark Reign: The List one-shots are mildly bemusing. They were hyped as something important to the plot of "Dark Reign", but in practice they seem to be just filler stories, albeit by the writers of the characters in question. This one-shot, from Wolverine: Weapon X writer Jason Aaron and artist Esad Ribic, is barely even a Wolverine story. Norman Osborn, in full-blown raving maniac mode, decides to try and capture the World - the place from Grant Morrison's New X-Men run where later versions of the Weapon X Project were based. Marvel Boy, Wolverine and Fantomex head off to stop them. And then Wolverine gets mind-controlled almost immediately, so really, he's hardly in the issue.

Now, here's the odd thing. Aaron's Morrisonesque high concept is that Wolverine and the other inhabitants of the World have been brainwashed by a sort of artificial religion - "a virus that attacks the faith reserves." As such, it only works on people with existing religious beliefs, which is why the cynical atheists Fantomex and Marvel Boy are unaffected. The oddity here is that Aaron evidently sees Wolverine as being religious, even though he's claimed otherwise before. And in fact, the issue is rounded out with a reprint of "A Good Man", a back-up strip from Wolverine #175 which was Aaron's first published work. He won some sort of contest, as I recall. That story likewise hinges on the idea of Wolverine as religious, which makes it a smart pairing for the lead strip, but also results in two stories which, for my money, rather miss the point of the character. (To be honest, I have a sneaking suspicion that Aaron doesn't really understand the concept of idealism without religion.)

Still, all this is basically window dressing for a comic where sarcastic people run around fighting cyborg zombies, so let's not get too worked up about its shaky psychology. It's passably enjoyable, but it's hardly essential reading; Aaron's done better action romps elsewhere, and he's written a better Wolverine story this week.

Gotham City Sirens #5 - Well... hmm. The basic idea here is to pit Harley Quinn and co against a version of the Silver Age Joker, from back when he was goofy and ridiculous and essentially harmless. Which kind of makes sense, because Harley fits better with that version of the Joker. Except of course the Joker's been a cold-blooded psychopath for years, and so to square that circle, Paul Dini ends up reviving... a character from Batman #186 (November 1966). I mean, we're talking about a seriously obscure reveal here. And I'm not altogether sure it works, because part of the problem is that Dini still wants this version of the Joker to be a genuine threat rather than a cornball throwback, so he's trying to have his cake and eat it. I can see why the wider interests of consistency might rule it out, but I actually preferred the approach of previous issues, that the Joker was simply acting that way because Harley was involved.

Jack of Fables #39 - In which Jack Frost continues to become a proper hero, and our Jack continues to become even less of one. And... you know, it's a plot-advancing chapter in the middle of a four-parter, and beyond that there isn't a great deal to say about it. The basic idea of Jack Frost becoming a traditional fairy tale hero pretty much dictates that the story has to be somewhat predictable, which might be the problem with this issue. As a storyline, it really depends on whether they've got a clever idea to draw together the two seemingly unrelated plot strands in the concluding part next month.

Marvel Divas #4 - "Who cares what we're called?" someone asks in the final panel. Defensive much? And the reality is that somebody should have cared what they were called, because Marvel Divas isn't just a bad name for a miniseries, it's an embarrassingly, cringe-inducingly terribly name for a miniseries. The actual content has been much better than you'd expect. That's not to say that it's a lost classic which has slipped under the radar, but artist Tonci Zonic has done great work throughout. Okay, Daimon Hellstrom's acting a million miles out of character for the benefit of the plot, but I'm prepared to let that one slide. And yes, the cancer stuff was a bit disease-of-the-week. But it's had some good moments, the art is strong, the story is acceptable, and the whole thing comes in on the right side of average. Fans of the characters will probably have enjoyed this one.

New Mutants #6 - It's a Necrosha-X tie-in, which means that a dead hero rises from the grave as a mind-controlled zombie and fights... hold on, haven't I seen this somewhere before? Blackest Something? Anyway, the New Mutants don't have that many dead characters to revive, so naturally it's Cypher. And Cypher's been dead for... what, twenty years now? Seriously, if there's that many readers still out there who care about Cypher being brought back from the dead, it's probably time to close the shutters and move into a different line of work. Fortunately, Zeb Wells is smart enough not to peril his story on 80s nostalgia. Instead, most of the issue is devoted to Cypher stalking the New Mutants as they have their big reunion with Professor X, the idea being that the super-powered Cypher can interpret everything, and so offers a running translation on the subtext of everything people say and do. And that's a neat gimmick, well executed. I can't say I'm particularly grabbed by Blackest X as a concept - if there's any mileage in "heroes fight mind-controlled dead friends", DC already expended it. But this issue does manae to do something clever and worthwhile with Cypher's powers, which is about enough to justify the story.

Wolverine: First Class #20 - Talking of pointless nostalgia, this issue guest stars Captain Marvel. It's a two-parter with Skrulls, and while the first half was good, this issue just gets distracted by a guest star who we're obviously meant to think is pretty cool. And it never really persuades me of that. It comes across as a story where we're all meant to go "Ooh, Captain Marvel" - but if this is an all-ages comic then it should hardly be counting on familiarity with a character whose heyday was in the mid-seventies. Decidedly underwhelming.

Wolverine: Weapon X #6 - The book begins its second arc, and weirdness abounds. Logan's in a mental institution, being treated for his delusions that he's a superhero. Now, obviously, we all know that the Marvel Universe won't turn out to be a hallucination. That's not the point. The trick with a story like this is to make it as weird as possible, and generally maximise the WTF element. Jason Aaron and Yanick Paquette pull that off - the institution is done in a way that's so obviously bogus that it only serves to heighten the creepiness, almost as though the characters are wandering around a half-finished set. I do wonder whether four issues is a bit long for a storyline like this, but we'll see how it goes.

X-Factor #50 - Only Marvel would try to get away with publishing two anniversary issues in a row. Yes, this is issue #50, and the next one is issue #200. I know it doesn't really matter, but if you're going to use it as a marketing tool, don't draw attention to the fact that it's all bullshit! Conceal it at all costs! Anyway, this is the long-awaited conclusion of a complicated time-travel storyline that's been going without a break since issue #40. Like a lot of people, I rather lost patience with this arc a while ago, but I'll settle down and re-read the whole thing to see if it works any better as a collection. As for this final issue, I'm mainly just relieved that it's over, but there is a clever twist to explain Layla's "knows stuff" schtick. The series seems to have completely forgotten that her original original mutant power was to advance the plot of House of M, but hey, I wouldn't be reminding people about that either, if I was them.

X-Force #20 - The final part of "Not Forgotten", and again, I'll review the arc once I've re-read the whole thing. Basically, it's another issue of X-23 solving problems with ultraviolence. But then that's her thing. I do wonder whether it's time to advance her character arc and humanise her a little bit more, but then again the idea that X-23's been programmed to kill and has no real-world life experience is what makes her distinctive. Tone it down too much and she becomes Wolverine Lass, something that she presently manages to avoid. (Come to think of it, why doesn't X-23 figure into the plot of Wolverine: Origins? Not that I want her to, but logically, she should, shouldn't she?) The action is endearingly over the top, and it works in large part because Mike Choi and Sonia Oback's art manages to prettify it so much - though it's unfortunate that they make X-23, Morales and Kimura look so similar.

X-Men Forever #10 - What on earth...? This is the funeral of Wolverine, who apparently really is dead in Chris Claremont's alternate reality series. And so a bunch of heroes show up to tell us what a great bloke he was. Much as you'd expect, really. What's puzzling is that Claremont seems to be straying even further from the original premise of the series. Officially, the idea is that Claremont is picking up his original run on Uncanny X-Men from where he left off in 1991. So he's ignoring revelations that appeared after 1991, which is fair enough. And he's doing things like killing Wolverine which would never have been allowed in 1991, which is arguably against the spirit of the series, but still kind of acceptable. But now it turns out that this world doesn't have a Cable, and that a whole bunch of New Mutants stories apparently didn't happen either. Oh, and Warren isn't blue. At which point, not only are we contradicting stories that came out before Claremont left the series, we're contradicting stories that were acknowledged in the pages of Uncanny X-Men. This is all very weird, and it appears to be deliberately confusing - the closing scene contains no intrinsic drama whatsoever, but serves as a cliffhanger by foregrounding what otherwise seems to be a ginormous continuity error. We seem to be on a tipping point where the book either becomes horribly self-indulgent, or turns into a bizarre metatextual game, both of which bear little resemblance to the supposed concept of the book. Curiouser and curiouser... and yet I can't help wondering where on earth Claremont could be going with this. So he's still got my attention.

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 - 30 August 2009

Well, I was planning to write something about X-Men Forever before heading off, but it doesn't look like I'm going to get round to it. (Which is another way of saying: barring a last-minute cancellation of tonight's Book Festival show, it ain't happening.) With that in mind, I'll hold off on reviewing this week's X-Men Forever #6.

So, after this, I'll be away for two-and-a-bit weeks. In the meantime, don't forget to download the latest episode of House to Astonish, where we talk about the rumoured management changes at DC, digital comics, the November solicitations, and other stuff, and review 2000AD, Fantastic Four and King City. Download it here, or visit the podcast webpage, or subscribe via iTunes.

(Oh, and I'm told that, contrary to what we assumed when we recorded the show, the 2000AD strip "Kingdom" has actually been running for long enough to pre-date the current Cable series. Just so you know.)

And while I'm away, you should also keep up with Al's blog at HousetoAstonish.com.

Now, then...

Batman & Robin #3 - This is the final part of the Mr Pyg storyline, which could probably have sustained another issue if they'd wanted. But there's nothing wrong with being concise, and this arc has worked very well, setting up the new Batman and Robin, and giving them an appropriately grotesque villain to fight. Frank Quitely's good at grotesque - he's good at everything, actually, but he certainly knows how to draw a maniac in a pig mask wielding household appliances. And Pyg is a well-pitched character; not a traditional spandex supervillain as such, but comfortably in the familiar Batman territory of lunatics with themed henchmen. It's what you want from a Batman comic.

Dark Avengers #8 - Part five of "Utopia", and by this point I'm really starting to wonder why on earth they're running this story as a crossover - besides the obvious point that it boosts sales. The Dark Avengers are in a whole three pages of this issue, squeezed out entirely by an X-Men-versus-Dark-X-Men story which doesn't seem to have a role for them. In fairness, Matt Fraction is telling a story here which does seem to have some significant ramifications for the X-Men - it looks like we're going to do the "man-made island in international waters" routine, so apparently the San Francisco base is being dropped already. Frankly, if this is where they were heading, it's a shame they got rid of Providence, the man-made island in international waters from Cable & Deadpool - but maybe they weren't planning that far ahead. So far, "Utopia" seems to be suffering from a problem that afflicts a lot of Matt Fraction's X-Men stories: it's a good idea in theory, but it's cluttered up with vast amounts of superfluous characters who are just distracting from the real story. Less is more!

Dark Wolverine #77 - I'm pleasantly surprised to say that so far, I've actually enjoyed this series quite a lot. Now, frankly, in part that's because this version of Daken seems to bear little or no resemblance to any that we've seen before. But until now, Daken has been stuck in the leaden Romulus storyline from Wolverine: Origins, and once you remove him from that context, some rather more interesting sides of his character emerge. In this book, Daniel Way and Marjorie Liu (primarily Liu, judging from the interviews) are writing Daken as a schemer whose main concern is to secure his position and to be in control of his own life. So his main concerns are to make sure he's hedging his bets against the fall of Osborn's empire, and to subtly ensure that everyone around him knows he's not under Osborn's thumb, even if that means unwisely needling his own colleagues. This version of Daken is actually quite interesting, and certainly a viable anti-hero. This three-parter, with Daken playing off the ersatz Avengers against the Fantastic Four, and outwitting everyone in the process, is unexpectedly good fun, and suggests that perhaps Daken actually does have some sort of future as a lead character - in fact, he might even work better in that role.

Dark X-Men: The Beginning #3 - The final issue of an anthology series about Norman Osborn recruiting the Dark X-Men. And like its two predecessors, this too is talk-tastic. Paul Cornell and Leonard Kirk's Namor story at least breaks from the usual format, as it's Emma Frost rather than Norman Osborn who gets to do the questioning. But there's some interesting ideas about Namor's character, and at least they liven things up with the old "journey through the mental landscape" routine - sure, it's a cheap trick, but it does give the artist an excuse to draw interesting pictures. Jason Aaron and Jock do a rather nice intro story for Mystique, which says not a great deal about the character, but does it with suitably outrageous levels of bloodshed and firepower. And having run out of Dark X-Men, Simon Spurrier and Paul Davidson round things off with Norman making an unsuccessful attempt to recruit Aurora; this is the closest thing in the series to a proper story, though it runs into a common problem with split-personality characters, namely that they effectively cease to be characters at all. Still, even if this is a series for completists, there's certainly some entertainment to be had here.

Incredible Hulk #601 - Last month's Incredible Hulk #600 was effectively issue #12-and-a-half of Jeph Loeb's Hulk, so in effect this is the first issue of a new ongoing series. Basically, the new status quo is that Hulk gets the Red Hulk storyline (and it can keep it), while Greg Pak and Ariel Olivetti inherit Bruce Banner and Skaar from the Son of Hulk series. The high concept is that Bruce Banner, one of the cleverest men in the world, is in some ways even more dangerous now that he doesn't have to worry about turning into a musclebound thug at inconvenient intervals. And he's decided to try and do something to steer his son in the right direction. It's not bad at all, though Skaar's motivations are a bit obscure - he apparently hates the Hulk and is indifferent towards Banner, for reasons that were presumably explained in an earlier storyline, but aren't recapped here. Ariel Olivetti's art has the usual issues; his characters are nicely three-dimensional, but they don't always mesh neatly with the scanned-in backgrounds that he uses for outdoor sequences, and so sometimes the characters just look like they're standing in front of a backdrop. Generally fine, though.

King City #1 - We talked about this on the podcast; it's a story originally commissioned by Tokyopop, which is now being reprinted at Image over the course of twelve issues. Or, more accurately, they're reprinting the Tokyopop material for the first six issues, and then creator Brandon Graham is producing six more issues to complete the story. It's one of those books about a thief/spy type in a consumerist future city, and if you were looking purely at the plot, it'd be rather familiar. But there are some engaging quirky bits to liven things up, such as an inexplicably omnipotent cat (which, nonetheless, insists on acting like a normal cat). The real selling point, however, is the artwork, which makes incredibly effective use of negative space, unusual framings, and imaginative ways of implying action - plus crystal clear storytelling. It really is a class above most comics, and the book is worth picking up for that alone.

New Mutants #4 - The concluding part of the first arc, and I'll do a full review in due course (by which I mean, in several weeks time, but hey, maybe it'll be out in time for the collection). It's the end of the New Mutants' fight against Legion, and if you don't know who wins, you obviously haven't been reading this series for very long. Wells has a decent handle on all the characters, and makes imaginative use of Legion's gimmick that each of his split personalities has a different superpower. But on the other hand, it's still fundamentally ended up as a straight hero-versus-villain fight, and while Wells has some good ideas for the team dynamic, it's still not exactly clear what the premise of this series is supposed to be, beyond "reunite the cast of New Mutants". It's good as far as it goes, but it's missing a big central idea.

Wolverine: First Class #18 - Madrox shows up to visit, and Peter David takes the opportunity to do an all-ages version of some of the ideas he's been exploring with the character in X-Factor for a few years now. It's a good little story in its own right, but fans of X-Factor will probably want to pick it up too, to see David writing a younger version of the character and retroactively planting the seeds for some of his recent stories. Francis Portela's artwork is excellent, particularly when you consider that he's saddled with the gaudy green-and-yellow costume that Madrox used to wear in his early appearances - yes, it's striking, but it doesn't exactly blend in. I'm quite impressed by the way he manages to make it work.

Wolverine: Origins #39 - In which Daniel Way attempts to explain what the hell Jeph Loeb was banging on about in that Wolverine arc, and kind of sort of gets away with it. Basically, the idea is that Romulus wants to crown a successor, so he's getting his various pawns to fight one another to the death. And part of Way's explanation is that Wolverine was freed from Romulus' influence when Xavier wiped that part of his memory, so that restoring his memories after House of M actually restored Romulus' influence... hence random fight scenes written by Jeph Loeb. Alright, fine... but what's this successor going to be in charge of, if he's already killed all of Romulus' other pawns? A vaguely frustrating mixture of neat ideas and apparent logic holes, though it's worth noting that artist Scot Eaton is doing some excellent work on this story. Oh, and Romulus actually shows up at the end. He's basically an older vsion of Wolverine, although I have a sinking feeling he might be intended as the brother from Paul Jenkins' Wolverine: The End - and that's another story I was hoping never to have to think about again.

X-Force #18 - Well, you can never accuse X-Force of being subtle, and the closing pages of this issue are about as far removed from subtlety as it's possible to get. We're talking really absurd levels of gore here, although they're so absurd that, combined with some appropriately woozy camera angles from artists Mike Choi and Sonia Oback, the scene actually works on a vaguely surreal kind of level. The rest of the issue feels a bit like an obligatory wrap-up for the "exploding mutants" two-parter, but there's some promising material in the subplots, and somewhat against my better judgment, I rather liked this. The art has a lot to do with that, though - it's a rather more palatable series when Choi and Oback are aboard.

The X-Axis - 6 August 2009

Okay, then, let's make a start on the backlog. I'm not exactly racing through my pile of comics, partly because I've been kept busy with other stuff this week, and partly because I'm confidently expecting this week's books will be late too. Still, let's at least catch up on the X-books.

Dark Wolverine #76 - That title, that title... It's the sort of title so embarrassingly bad that you almost feel compelled to apologise for writing it down. Like I'm doing now, really. I wonder how long you have to spent saying "Dark Reign" fifty times a day before it all just becomes meaningles noises, and calling a book Dark Wolverine starts to sound like a good idea, rather than a skin-crawlingly awful one? But actually, Daken's kind of growing on me. There were a whole bunch of problems with the character in Wolverine: Origins - not least that he was connected to the Romulus storyline, which is an absolute lost cause. If nothing else, "Dark Reign" has got him away from that quagmire, and given him a better context. The story's pretty straightforward: it's Daken politicking within the Dark Avengers, and the basic question is whether he's trying to expose Bullseye as a traitor or set him up - and vice versa. It's nicely ambiguous about everyone's motives, while still making perfect sense. But I'm actually starting to see something promising in Daken here, as a guy who clearly fancies himself as the smartest guy in the room, and whose main concern in life is just to prove that he's in control of his own life. He likes the fact that his teammates don't trust him, because it means they don't believe they can control him. There's something in there, you know. I'm not sure where you go with him as a lead in the long run, if they're even planning to - he seems like more of a supporting character - but I'm coming round to the guy.

Dark X-Men: The Beginning #2 - Fans of pulse-pounding negotiation-packed talking won't want to miss this issue, which features three thrilling stories of non-stop conversation. Oh, all right, that's a bit harsh. But this issue, we get the recruitment scenes of Cloak & Dagger, Michael Pointer and Daken - and despite the best efforts of the writers, that's really just three scenes of Osborn making people an offer that they can't refuse. Paul Cornell and Leonard Kirk (who seems to be channelling Rick Leonardi) have a stab at giving C&D a plausible reason to join the team, and kind of get to the right ballpark. But they rush through it in a way that doesn't give the duo much chance to put up any resistance, and they end up coming across as a bit timid. The Weapon Omega piece is a contrived blackmail scenario that makes you wonder why Osborn would possibly expect this guy to have the slightest loyalty to him. And Daken... well, there's a couple of nice ideas about his character, as he regards himself as the only sane one in the Dark Avengers. But it really is just a conversation. It's pretty clear that this is one of those series they commissioned first, and figured an idea for the content would come along later.

Wolverine: First Class #17 - This issue, Peter David digs up Patch, Wolverine's old disguise from the Madripoor stories. And then doesn't go to Madripoor. It was David who torpedoed this idea in the first place, during a short run on Wolverine where the supporting cast finally got to roll their eyes and make clear that of course they recognised the guy with the really distinctive hairdo. ("But if the psycho with the claws wants to think he's fooling people, hey, let him...") That's kind of the approach here, with Wolverine evidently convinced Patch is an awesome persona, and Kitty finding it all a bit bizarre. It actually comes off pretty well, getting the basic idea to work, without getting into the continuity. The story itself is about a politician from a dodgy Madripoor family; Kitty thinks he's great, and Wolverine's convinced he must be crooked because, well, he's dodgy, isn't he? David manages to tie up the story without giving a clear answer to that question, and still make it satisfying. There's also strong artwork from Ronan Cliquet, who has more than a hint of Darick Robertson. This is a good issue.

Wolverine: Noir #4 - It's the final issue of the miniseries, and I suppose at some point I should go back and re-read this just to see if it works any better as a whole. But at first glance, it's just another tread through the usual noir cliches mixed with recycled X-Men plot elements, and I still don't see why that's supposed to be a worthwhile exercise. At the very least, the front-and-centre artifice of it makes it impossible to get into the story as anything other than a pointless parlour game. I see they've commissioned another X-Men: Noir miniseries, but I don't plan to bother with it.

Wolverine: Origins #38 - Wolverine and Omega Red have a big fight in a prison. It's a pretty good fight, too. And Scot Eaton continues to get better as a superhero artist. Of course, it's all supposed to be building up to some revelation about Romulus, which is the point where my enthusiasm runs out. But he's not really in this issue much - it's more a stalling device to drag it out a bit longer, which happens to pick up on a more interesting subplot from earlier in the series. There's not much to say about it beyond "it's a fight scene", but at least it's a decent one.

X-Force #17 - Ooh, nice cover. I don't normally much care for the generic pin-up covers, but that's a nice X-23 picture. Anyway, if you were expecting Elixir to explain who the baby was, well, think again. We're back to the Leper Queen storyline which the crossover interrupted in progress, so apparently that's going on the back burner for now. That irritation aside, it's not a bad issue - the good guys get to do some heroism, and there's a promising subplot with Wolfsbane that suggests the book might be planning a story which isn't quite as depressing as its usual fare. And we've got Mike Choi and Sonia Oback on art for this arc, whose art is much more enjoyable than Clayton Crain's murk. On the down side, the book is still going for eye-rollingly gratuitous violence in an effort to justify its brand, which I could live without. But, hey, not a bad story.

X-Men Forever #4 - You'll be pleased to hear (unless you're indifferent, which come to think of it might be more likely) that despite the cover, this story does not unveil Dark Shadowcat. Instead, we get Kitty Pryde with one of Wolverine's claws, which doesn't make a lick of sense, but Claremont just about gets away with it by having people act astonished throughout the issue. X-Men Forever is off to a very odd start; in theory, this series is supposed to be picking up where Claremont's original X-Men run left off in 1991, but even if you leave aside the difference of tone between Jim Lee and Tom Grummett's art, it's hard to believe that a continued Claremont run would have featured anything like this. On the one hand, you've got stories he'd never have done at the time - teasing the death of Wolverine, going back to the Kid Storm period from the late eighties. On the other, you've got things like Sabretooth reverting to his late eighties persona and disregarding the way he's been written for the last twenty years. It's all very strange. But there's a certain enthusiasm to the book that carries it along. I'm not sure how much sense any of this will make to readers who don't have a fairly detailed knowledge of X-Men stories from 20 years ago, but somewhat to my surprise, it's proving oddly compelling.

Messiah War

"Messiah War"
(X-Force/Cable: Messiah War one-shot; Cable #13-15; X-Force #14-16)
Writers: Duane Swierczynski (Cable), Craig Kyle & Christopher Yost (X-Force and prologue)
Artists: Mike Choi & Sonia Oback (prologue), Ariel Olivetti (Cable), and Clayton Crain (X-Force)
Letterers: Cory Petit (prologue and X-Force) and Joe Caramagna (Cable)
Editors: Axel Alonso and John Barber

Horribly late, I know.

When I belatedly reviewed the "Ghost Boxes" arc from Astonishing X-Men, somebody suggested that it was terribly appropriate that it was late. By analogy, I suppose, this review should take a year to show up and then achieve nothing.

To be perfectly honest, I've had these issues piled up next to my desk for a couple of weeks now, because I wanted to re-read the thing before reviewing it. Which is all very well in theory, but then you look at them and think, oh god, seven issues of futuristic murk... and you go and do something else.

Apparently, this story is seen as the middle chapter in a trilogy that began with last year's "Messiah Complex", and presumably concludes with something equally messianic in 2010. The previous story saw the birth of the first new mutant since M-Day. Cable disappeared off with her into the future. Meanwhile, Bishop identified her as the kid who had caused disaster in his timeline, and gave chase, intending to kill her and hit the cosmic reset button. And that's the set-up of Cable's ongoing series. (With the minor caveat that they quickly broke Cable's time machine so that he could only escape further and further into the future.)

Now, Hope is apparently tremendously important, so Cyclops - having agreed to pack her off into the future in the first place - is now equally keen to get her back. So we have X-Force being packed off to sort things out, using rickety time machines that will only allow them to stay in the future for 33 hours or so before the stress of time travel starts killing them. In the manner of plot-imposed arbitrary deadlines, it turns out that these slowly-building stresses come on awfully suddenly once the clock runs out.

The stage is set, then, for... well, for something to happen. And then, over the course of seven issues, it largely doesn't.

Here's what this story actually does achieve. For Cable readers, it brings Stryfe into the story - and quite cleverly, to be fair, playing him as a delusional pawn of Bishop, who thinks he's still the archenemy. It also brings Apocalypse into the story, and sets up the idea that he'll want to steal Hope's body once she's grown up. And Bishop's cyborg arm gets damaged. And... yes, yes, that's pretty much all we achieved in the course of seven issues.

For X-Force readers, essentially nothing happened - except that the crossover interrupted a story in progress and stopped the team saving somebody in issue #13. This comes up again right at the end of the crossover, in a hopelessly obscure scene.

It all starts off quite promisingly. Cable and X-Force - particularly X-Force - both suffer from a tendency to take themselves too seriously, so it was a smart move to bring in Deadpool for some comic relief. The opening issues are decent action stories. But pretty soon it just starts going round in circles, and by the end of the story, we seem to be more or less back where we started. X-Force return to the present day, more or less unaffected. Cable and Hope flee further into the timeline, with Bishop still in pursuit. Which is more or less where they were before the crossover. You could be forgiven for thinking that Bishop loses his time machine in this story, which would have been something... but Cable #16 confirms that he doesn't.

Fundamentally, the problem with this story is that not enough happens. You can't do seven issues of build-up with such an anaemic pay-off. Strangely, the final part actually teases a revelation which would have been vaguely meaningful: one member of X-Force announces that he's worked out why Hope is so important. Unfortunately, he still doesn't tell us why. Which seems particularly perverse, as he'll presumably be sharing it with us next month. The smart money, incidentally, is on "She's Phoenix" - which they already hinted at very strongly in the closing pages of "Messiah Complex" and would barely qualify as a revelation at all. But it would still have been better than what they did here.

With no progress on the plot, we're left with a lot of badly explained running around and fighting. Half of that fighting is illustrated by X-Force artist Clayton Crain, and boy, this story does not show him at his finest. Crain does dark and murky and (if you want to be charitable) atmospheric - and he's not even especially good at that. His fight scenes are a chore to decipher, and at times border on unintelligible.

But it's not like the dialogue does him any favours. There are some very strange lapses in exposition in this story. The end of part 1, for example, was evidently supposed to be a big reveal that Stryfe is living in Apocalypse's old base. There was no way any reader could have worked this out from the generic cityscape presented in part 1, and even the next issue takes nine pages to get around to mentioning Apocalypse's name. And the closing sequence of X-Force #16 - which depends on you knowing plot points from before the crossover, which aren't explained in the dialogue, and which aren't explained in the four-paragraph small-print recap page either - is utterly unintelligible. Curiously, it does manage a certain elegiac quality. But I have no idea how readers were expected to follow it. Even if X-Force could normally assume that readers had a working knowledge of stories from four months earlier, this is a crossover! That practically guarantees that a fair chunk of them won't!

This is a disappointing crossover. It starts off well, but never really gets going, before frustratingly petering out. The bottom line is that it simply doesn't have a strong enough story.

The X-Axis - 31 May 2009

Well, heavens, there's just a ton of X-books out this week, isn't there? Next week is a bit quieter, with just Exiles, New Mutants, and something called Wolverine: Revolver. But this week, Marvel are in the mood to drown us.

Three of them, however, are the concluding parts of storylines, so I'll give them full reviews in the next couple of days. That would be Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk, Wolverine: Origins and X-Men: Legacy. (Although I might as well point out now that if you're a Rogue fan, you probably want this issue of Legacy, because it's quite important for her.)

Also out this week...

Battlefields: The Tankies #2 - Garth Ennis's latest war miniseries has a rather uneven tone. It's obviously going for black comedy, but seems to waver back and forth between grim and slightly too silly. That's not to say it falls apart - Ennis is too good for that - but it does feel at times as though two slightly different stories are fighting for space, instead of complementing one another. Even the art seems unsure how graphic it's supposed to be, which means that at times we get fairly innocuous drawings drenched in blood-red colouring in a way that doesn't altogether work. But there's some good stuff in here as well, with Ennis' usual eye for detail, and a rather sweet scene where, for once, the obligatory hesitant, nerdy officer turns out to be talking sense after all.

The Literals #2 - Part 6 of The Great Fables Crossover. You know, I'm a little vague about how these Literals characters are supposed to work. Obviously they're some sort of personification of abstract literary concepts, but what does a personified genre actually do all day? And if they're elements of fiction, in what sense did Kevin "write" the real world? Probably best not to think about it too much, because they work best as a vehicle for a series of jokes, rather than as proper characters. And while that means the stories from their perspective have an uphill struggle, it still largely works. After all, they're the villains of the crossover, and they function rather well as obstacles for the Fables cast to deal with. Besides, the jokes at the expense of the genres are funny.

Rapture #1 - As the week's only significant new release , I imagine we'll probably talk about this on the next House to Astonish (that okay, Al?). But for the moment: it's a six-issue miniseries by Taki Soma and Michael Avon Oeming. It's an unusual collaboration; as well as co-writing, they've shared the art, with Oeming working over Soma's layouts. The result has some of Oeming's usual stark, angular approach, but a bit less stylised and a bit more cartoony. To be honest, the resulting art hovers somewhere between Oeming's usual work and Philip Bond, but that's no bad thing. The story is a sort of post-apocalyptic love story set in a world recently devastated by a war between rather generic superheroes, a premise that seems a bit forced at this stage - not least, the plot-convenient but enormously implausible idea that people are still taking commercial flights during this ostensible global catastophe. That's such an odd feature that a bit of me wonders whether it's deliberate weirdness. Like the art, then, not so sold on the story.

Wolverine #72 - The penultimate chapter of "Old Man Logan", which will be wrapped up in a one-shot at some point down the line. And yes, you guessed it, Millar and McNiven have taken seven issues just to get to the point where Wolverine finally snaps, pops his claws, and goes out to take on the bad guys. It's the sort of lightweight throwaway thing that will probably work well enough as a mildly silly graphic novel, but can't help feeling massively overextended in serial form at eight issues. I realise that this sort of story requires a long build-up for The Big Moment, but again, it's a question of whether you're pacing in page count or publishing schedule. In a big hardback slab, the build-up is probably about right. But in serial terms, we've taken the better part of a year to reach a moment that everyone saw coming last autumn, in a basic story with no real twists along the way, and that's too long to get to the point.

Wolverine: First Class #15 - This month's guest star: Thor. Kitty wants to meet him to impress her friends; Wolverine helps out because he thinks it'll be funny. All good straightforward stuff, but it's very solidly done. Scott Koblish provides art this month, and it's got a comedic quality I don't recall seeing from him before. (With Skottie Young scheduled to do Marvel Adventures Spider-Man, there are some interesting art choices afoot for the all-ages titles.) One other thing: I like the way David has found a new angle on early Kitty Pryde by seizing on a lacuna in the original stories. Those stories made a huge deal about her ballet classes (and even pointed out that she enjoyed them because she got to hang out with normal kids), yet we never actually saw any of her classmates. It would be stretching a point to say that we desperately needed stories about Kitty's dance classmates, but if we're going to have a Kitty and Wolverine series set at this point in history (and despite the title, it is a Kitty and Wolverine series), I'm glad they've found a legitimately underused angle.

X-Force #15 - Messiah War, part 5. Everyone hits one another. Punchy punchy. That's about it, really. So far this crossover has exceeded expectations, but I'm afraid we've finally reached the obligatory mid-storyline punchfest - not really something that plays to the murky strengths of artist Clayton Crain, either. Just to test my goodwill a little further, the story also makes Bishop look like a moron. Not only does he get the chance to kill Hope twice and fail to take the shot, but the second time he actually pauses to say that he won't hesitate. What a dimwit.

X-Men: Future History - The Messiah War Sourcebook - Completist fodder if ever I saw some. It's basically Cable explaining in nice short chunks about the various characters and concepts that have surrounded Bishop and Cable over the years (though Cyclops gets a few pages to tell us about X-Force too). As a catalogue of discarded concepts and aborted interpretations, it's actually quite readable and somewhat interesting. It does pick up on ironic contrasts with earlier stories, and I believe it may be the first comic to acknowledge openly that X-Treme X-Men was the most embarrassingly awful name in history. ("Storm claims it was an inside joke, and blames Gambit. Gambit blames Rogue. I blame society.") So I don't want to be too harsh on it - for what it is, it's entirely fine. But what it isn't is anything much to do with Messiah War, and there's the rub.

The X-Axis - 26 April 2009

It's Sunday! Check below for this week's podcast, and for those of you so inclined, there's also a preview for Backlash.

I'm planning full-length reviews for Wolverine: Noir #1 (which came out last week, but honest, I'll get to it), Detective Comics #853 (the second half of Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert's "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?") and X-Men: The Times & Life of Lucas Bishop. But first...

Astonishing X-Men #29 - Lord, this is slow. This issue, more thrilling exposition, as the mutants from the hidden city explain why they don't like Forge. I suspect it's been made more complicated by the need to cover a continuity glitch: the other X-Men books have been claiming that mutants lost their powers in every reality after M-Day, and since this whole story is about mutants from another reality, that leaves Ellis with some unwelcome and awkward explaining to do. (It doesn't fit with Exiles either, come to think of it. But then it's more important for the X-Men books to be consistent among themselves.) Conceptually, it's all fine as far as it goes, but the pace is sluggish. Simone Bianchi's art is a mixed blessing, too. The individual pictures are often beautiful, and there's a certain grace to the book, but the narrative flow is dubious. Just look at the first scene with Storm and Emma - this is supposed to be a fight scene joined in progress, but there's nothing to indicate action until panel three! And then, at the bottom of the page, there's a random picture of Emma's face, utterly disconnected from anything around it, and without dialogue. There's a lot to like about Bianchi's images, but they often seem haphazard and disconnected from the story - beauty for its own sake.

Fantastic Force #1 - We talk about this in the podcast, but suffice to say it isn't very good. Although it's not quite the atrocity that some reviewers have suggested (like Al), it's certainly mediocre. The book is a spin-off from Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's Fantastic Four, and a storyline in which the entire population of a dying future came back in time and took over a duplicate Earth originally built as a back-up in case of ecological disaster. The Fantastic Force are their local superheroes. So: fine, you've got a duplicate Earth with a transplanted population. There's something in that. You could do stories about people fighting to control this new world, stories about people trying to set the agenda for a world given a second chance... there are parables to be done here. Instead, the story glosses over all that by playing the new Earth as paradise. It tries to focus on the Fantastic Force themselves, which is a mistake, since they're not very inspired characters, and writer Joe Ahearne doesn't bring much to them. As for the art, it tries for a Bryan Hitch feel and can't really bring it off - though to be fair, colourist Chris Sotomayor does some very good work which elevates the art to a degree. Originally intended as an ongoing series, this has been scaled back to a five-issue mini, and subsequently to only four issues, which suggests that Marvel are well aware that they have a dog on their hands. Take the hint. (However, I'll give them credit for effort on the extra material that's been used to pad out the book - instead of regular script pages, there's an extract from an earlier draft with annotations explaining why things changes. If we're going to have these features, that's the sort of thing I'd like to see.)

Hellblazer #254 - The plague and the Olympic Games. Not obvious ideas to connect, but Peter Milligan is having a go. There's an interesting attempt to argue that the Olympics aren't such a good thing - each new city embarks on a program of reconstruction which ends up displacing tons of people for the sake of a few weeks' television and a bunch of new civic buildings. It's a nice starting point for a story, but Goran Sudzuka's art doesn't have quite enough bite for this book. That's particularly apparent when a lacklustre piece of graffiti is solemnly presented to us as a masterpiece by "the new Banksy." Unfortunately, there's an aching gap between what the characters seem to be talking about, and what we can see.

Jack of Fables #33 - Jack is reunited with the cast of Fables proper, and they're about as delighted to see him as you'd expect. Meanwhile, the story gets on with establishing Kevin Thorn as a threat. From what we've seen so far, there's a risk of this guy becoming a cavalier omnipotent in the mould of the Beyonder. I suppose the idea is that Thorn doesn't care about people around him because he sees them as all just part of his fictional creation, but that would suggest he created everything, not just the Fables - in which case, um, isn't he God? Anyway, it's well paced and witty, which makes it as thoroughly readable as ever.

Skrull Kill Krew #1 - See the podcast for more on this. But in a nutshell, it's a seemingly pointless revival of a nineties miniseries which, despite the stellar creative team, was more of a curio than a lost classic. It's not offensive, it's entirely competent, but ultimately it's just there, and doesn't have the sort of hook that would make you go out of your way to read it.

Viking #1 - Again, see the podcast. But Ivan Brandon and Nic Klein's outsize album - priced at a remarkably generous $2.99 - is definitely worth your time. Instead of the usual raiding parties, these Vikings are a couple of Norse thugs preying on their own people, which is an underexplored angle. The art is the star attraction, though, giving the book a powerful and distinctive feel.

Wolverine: First Class #14 - This is the concluding half of a two-parter guest starring Elektra and Daredevil. I'd normally give it a full review, particularly since it's the first story by Peter David - but it's a busy week, and there's nothing unexpected to say about it. It's a straight-down-the-line superhero team-up story, by a writer who knows how these things work. Nothing innovative, but then it's not that kind of book. Ronan Cliquet's art is nicely dramatic, but aside from Elektra, all his women look alike (to the point where the letterer and colourist were evidently relying on clothing to tell them apart - when faced with head shots, they can't keep track of who's talking).

Wolverine: The Anniversary - Yet another Wolverine one-shot. The "anniversary" of the title is apparently something to do with the death of his beloved Mariko Yashida back in the nineties. But the main story, by writer William Harms and artist Jefte Palo, is actually a straightforward fill-in piece with Wolverine on a plane to Tokyo when a bunch of hijackers try their luck. From there, it's pretty much what you'd expect - but it's done well, and the stripped down art is quite striking. There's also a short back-up strip by Jonathan Maberry and Tomm Coker, in which Wolverine fights off a bunch of ninjas and then wonders, for no readily discernible reason, whether they might be ghosts. No, Logan, they're probably just ninjas again. It's Wednesday. Coker's art is lovely, but the story is a confused mess which seems to think it's making some sort of terribly profound point. Overall, though, this is one of the better Wolverine one-shots, thanks to good artwork throughout and a well-executed, if familiar, lead story.

Wolverine: Origins #35 - This is billed as a "Dark Reign" tie-in, but it's a bit of a red skies issue. As near as I can make out, the connection is that regular supporting character Daken is in this issue, and he's also in Dark Avengers. To be fair, though, the storyline's not finished yet, and the link might be stronger when you take it as a whole. Readers who were annoyed to see Daken beat the X-Men singlehandedly last month will no doubt be even more irritated to see him do it again in the opening pages of this issue, but hell, they're only the guest stars. More ludicrous is the idea that, instead of stealing the entire sword when he had the chance, Daken simply cuts a bit out of the blade. Um... how? What was he carrying on his person that enabled him to nick this supposedly indestructible item? I honestly don't get it. Still, there's a neat idea in here somewhere: like any father, Wolverine is trying to live vicariously through Daken, by redeeming him. And he doesn't want to know that this might not be possible. I quite like the basic story Way is trying to tell with these two characters (at least when they stop banging on about Romulus); it's the details that can grate a bit.

X-Force #14 - Part 3 of "Messiah War", and it's a lot of running around and fighting in the far future. Clayton Crain's art is downright murky, but the script is kept bouncy enough. Even though we're off in another dystopian future, Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost have steered clear of hammering the angst. Instead, there's actually some genuine humour in here - I rather like the future Deadpool "helping" his old friend by wandering around shooting dead baddies to make sure they're not zombies. More fun than I'd have expected.

Here's the thing I don't understand about this story, though. The whole thing hinges on the idea that because Hope is the only mutant to be born since M-Day, she's the only hope for mutantkind. But... why? They don't know what her powers are, so they have no reason to think she'll be able to change things. She's just one more mutant. If she's a one-off, her birth changed nothing; if she's the first of many, then mutants are already saved. Unless she's actually going to do something, what's the point of rescuing her? Why is she supposed to be so important?

The X-Axis - 22 March 2009

Tons of X-books this week, as Marvel's ever-erratic shipping schedule strikes again. See below for reviews of Uncanny X-Men #504-507 ("Lovelorn") and the final storylines from Ultimate X-Men and Young X-Men. And that still leaves all this...

Wolverine #71 - The penultimate chapter of "Old Man Logan", as we reach the east coast. It's pretty much what you've come to expect by now: Mark Millar and Steve McNiven doing a dystopian post-superhero Marvel Universe future, with scattered cool ideas, and a serviceable road-trip plot to steer us past them. It's quite good fun for what it is, even if seven issues seems a bit self-indulgent for a fairly slight plot. Mind you, it's paced rather well, and it's not as if anyone buys Mark Millar Wolverine stories for the philosophical depth. It is what it is; you can probably take a guess whether it's your cup of tea, and you'll probably be right.

Wolverine: Origins #34 - The X-Men fight Daken in a serviceable enough story, though one which never really makes it terribly clear why Cyclops has bothered to take the vitally important magic sword into battle rather than just keeping it safe. If you're not following "Dark Reign", then the basic idea is that Daken has been drafted into Dark Avengers as an ersatz Wolverine, apparently to annoy dad. It's a shame that the story doesn't pick up more on the idea of Daken impersonating his father, which would seem to have more story potential than a fairly standard fight with the X-Men; but then, I suppose Way's hamstrung to some extent by the fact that he can't really resolve any of these issues decisively. It's an okay issue, and if you can live with him carrying the macguffin into battle for no obvious reason, Cyclops gets some good moments.

X-Factor #41 - Layla Miller is back, and as you'd expect, that means we pick up on the stories that were left hanging in her one-shot a few months ago. Peter David is still asking people very nicely not to reveal the plot, so I'll confine myself to noting that this issue has by far the strongest narrative of all this week's books, and the most effective twists and turns. There's some fill-in art on a scene near the end of the book, but it's perfectly fine fill-in art, so no problem there. Good issue.

X-Force #13 - Oh dear, we're back to killing characters for cheap heat. Actually, technically this is the second half of a two-parter called "Suicide Leper", so I suppose I should be reviewing it in full - but it's a very heavy week, and I can't really summon up the enthusiasm to talk about more murky bloodshed, so I'm going to rely on the fact that it's also a prelude to next month's crossover with Cable. Actually, the central idea is quite sound: the Leper Queen from Peter Milligan's X-Men run has been roped into a scheme of killing off humans to provoke anti-mutant backlash, she's not desperately happy about it, and she's trying to get herself killed. But it all comes down to the casual despatching of another character - one which, given the time-travel overtones, I suspect will be reversed with a reset button in a couple of months time. Still, the overreliance on killing characters is disappointing, and we're back to the murky and frequently stilted art of Clayton Crain. Not very good.

X-Men: Legacy #222 - Professor X, Gambit, Rogue and a bunch of alien scavengers all stuck in a giant Danger Room simulation. It has all the usual strengths and weaknesses of Carey's Legacy stories. I like the premise of Rogue being stuck with Mystique's voice in her head; it's an interesting variation on the old idea that she'd absorbed Carol Danvers, with some potential for conflict. And the Shi'ar pirates get some very funny dialogue. On the other hand, it's extraordinarily continuity-heavy, and seems to assume that we'll all remember the context of a conversation between Rogue and Gambit from Uncanny X-Men #350 (a mere 157 issues ago!) without it needing to be explained. I do, but I doubt how many other readers will. If you don't mind that, it's a fun issue.

The X-Axis - 1 March 2009

Well, it took me forever to get around to reviewing the concluding issue of NYX: No Way Home (which came out last week), but it's finally up. As for the last issue of New Exiles (also out last week)... um, in the next couple of days. Hopefully.

Fortunately, it's a singularly uneventful week for new releases. Check the podcast to hear Al and me discussing Duncan Rouleau's The Great Unknown, the final issue of Blue Beetle, and the Obama issue of Youngblood (everything you feared and less). Download it here, or visit the podcast web page, or subscribe via iTunes.

And that just leaves three X-books that came out this week...

Wolverine: First Class #12 - This has always been more of a Kitty Pryde book than a Wolverine comic, but never more obviously than here. The story is set in the aftermath of Uncanny X-Men #150, and I can hear the collective mumbling of "So what?" already. Ah, but you'd be mistaken. Because this is a terribly useful point in continuity. It's the first time Kitty meets Cyclops after joining the X-Men, and so the first time she's exposed to his awkward relationship with Wolverine. And that's the story: the other alpha male in the team is back, and Kitty gets to spend an issue in his company and see how he compare. (Wolverine? He's barely in it.) Where Cyclops is concerned, writer Fred Van Lente evidently subscribes to the "uptight emotional cripple" school of thought, but he does a nice job of contrasting the two without actually undermining Cyclops' credibility; more than anything, we're invited to feel sorry for the guy and to dismiss him as far too screwed up to be anyone's mentor, and that's certainly a valid take on the character. It's also nice to see the series move away from the random guest stars, and back to focussing on the cast themselves.

Wolverine: Origins #33 - Do you like exposition? Then you'll love this book, which features fifteen gripping pages of Nick Fury explaining the plot. To be fair, at least it's a new explanation, with plenty of new information to back it up... but still, it's fifteen pages of a guy explaining the plot. Considering the languid pace that this book has taken in the past, you almost wonder whether Way has been politely encouraged to get a move on. As for the content of the explanation... well, this convoluted conspiracy theory has been nothing but a lead weight for Wolverine, so officially dragging James Hudson from Alpha Flight into the mess is a bit like the slow spread of gangrene as far as I'm concerned. It's also a "Dark Reign" tie-in issue, and with some justification, since supporting character Daken has been hauled off to appear in Dark Avengers - leading Cyclops to decide that the fake Wolverine in the Avengers needs to be taken care of. Now this bit, I'm in favour of. "What do the X-Men think about this fake Wolverine?" is not a story that Dark Avengers wants to tell, but it's also territory that really ought to be covered - so if Daniel Way thinks he can get a story out of it, everybody wins. That part of the issue is quite good; but god save us from more of this conspiracy gibberish.

X-Force #12 - This is the first part of "Suicide Leper", an arc based on the Leper Queen character from Peter Milligan's brief run on X-Men. She's not an immediately obvious character to revive, but hey, I suppose they're starting small and working up. It's also a lead-in for the "Messiah War" crossover with Cable, though on the face of it that just means there's a few pages of subplot about time machines. It's... okay, but too violent for its own good (which is to say, it's done so casually so that it doesn't mean anything). Clayton Crain's artwork is patchy. He seems to be lightening up the colours, and there are some nice dramatic explosions. But there's something lacking in his characters, who don't have the expressiveness to bring them to life.

X-Force #11

"Who the Hell is Eli Bard?"
Writers: Craig Kyle & Christopher Yost
Artists: Alina Uyusov & Clayton Crain
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: John Barber

X-Force #11 is something you don't get so often these days: a whole issue devoted to explaining the origin story of a new villain. Now, I'm all for this sort of thing. The X-books could do with some new villains, and it's good to see Kyle and Yost eschewing the tired old mystery-man approach, in favour of giving their new bad guy a clear agenda straight off the bat.

It also means that Clayton Crain - apparently back on duty as regular artist - gets relegated to a framing sequence while Alina Urusov does some much more attractive and graceful work on the flashback. The colouring is a bit washed out for my tastes, but I'll still take that over oppressive darkness any day.

So far so good... but it's not a wholly successful origin story. The basic idea is that Eli was a minor-league Roman Empire politician, whom Selene tried to use as a pawn. Unfortunately he messed up the scheme and she wasn't terribly pleased with him. She cursed him with eternal life (the story actually seems to suggest he's a vampire, but it all gets a bit confused on this point) and he's trying to get back in her good graces.

Basically, he seems to be a smaller-scale version of Thanos, whose early stories largely involved him trying to impress Death by killing loads of people. Eli is set up in a similar relationship with Selene. It's not a bad premise; Selene is an underused character, and enough time has passed since the seventies to make the Thanos/Death set-up fair game to be re-used.

It falls down, though, in two ways. Despite Urusov's best efforts on the art, Eli's relationship with Selene feels cursory and doesn't convince me. And the story spends way too much time telling us that Eli's a weak and pathetic man - which rather undermines his credibility as a villain.

Still, the basic idea's okay, and the art's really rather good.