After last week’s deluge of X-Men titles, this week Marvel change tack to ship three Wolverine titles.  Yes, okay, one of them is Daken.   But still…

Avengers Academy #10 – Well, that’s odd.  The cover of this issue is the Academy trainees and the cast of New Avengers teaming up to fight magic thingies, with a big “Magic 101” banner over the top.  And the interior… features Hazmat spending a day off with Leech, and Speedball delivering a lesson about how he feels about the Stamford disaster from Civil War.  And that’s a perfectly good story, albeit of a rather deck-clearing sort.  It addresses the obvious question of why Hazmat doesn’t just get her hugely inconvenient powers removed for good, using one of the various well-established techniques available in the Marvel Universe for such endeavours.  And it continues the detoxification of Speedball, who’s going to require a lot of that sort of thing before he’ll be anything other than the poster child for really inane ideas, but points for trying.  What it doesn’t do… is bear the slightest resemblance to the story advertised on the cover.  Strange choice.

Daken: Dark Wolverine #6 – This is billed as “Empire, Act 2, part 3 of 4”. Last month I pointed out that part 1, where Daken visited the Fantastic Four, seemed to be a completely unrelated story.  Well, that point becomes a little clearer here, as a macguffin from that issue turns out to be important here, though I’d still query whether it’s really a single arc.   And part 4, it turns out, doubles as the first part of “Collision”, a crossover with X-23.  That’s a curious sort of four-part story, and no mistake.

Anyhow, Daken’s still in Madripoor, where he claims to be helping out Tyger Tiger in taking down a ring of evil bankers.  Can you guess where this is going?  Well, if you’ve been reading the series thus far, then yes, you’ve probably figured out that Daken screws everyone in order to pursue his own secret agenda.  Incidentally, Tyger Tiger is the current ruler of Madripoor and not, as the recap page claims, a vigilante.  That’s a very strange error, because it’s a central plot point.

This series has been bogged down in “What’s Daken up to?” stories for some time, and in a sense it’s still doing more or less the same mystery.  Is Daken just an insane nihilist, or is he deliberately trying to echo parts of Wolverine’s past life, or does he have some more concrete idea in mind?  It’s not necessarily a bad set-up.  My major problems with earlier arcs were that Daken didn’t really seem to do anything in particular, making his motives largely academic; and that the book was pretty much devoid of sympathetic characters, given that Daken himself evidently wasn’t going to fill that role.  With this arc, though, Daken’s plans finally start to develop a sense of scale; and the writers seem to be positioning Tyger Tiger to fill the gap where the book’s heart ought to be.  As a result, it’s one of the stronger Daken arcs.  And Giuseppe Camuncoli’s art remains a strength for the book – it’s nice to see somebody putting some thought into the range of locations that Madripoor theoretically always provided, instead of sticking the familiar back streets.

The Intrepids #1 – A new series from Image, written by Kurtis J Wiebe and drawn by Scott Kowalchuk.  It’s a sort of retro team book, dumping the superhero trappings in favour of a mad scientist vibe.  A scientific genius called Dante has taken in a group of abandoned kids, fitted them out with super powers (sorry, “augmentations”), and sent them to battle mad scientists who do things like make cyborg bears.  It’s a familiar set-up – mentor and team of young wards – and while it’s got the Silver Age aspects of, well, cyborg bears, it’s mostly played straight.  I kept expecting it to be a little more over the top, but it’s not really trying for that; ultimately, it felt more like a premise that would make for a pretty good Saturday morning cartoon.  It’s a good solid book with well-defined characters and the potential for long-term development; and while it’s not tremendously original, it does find a way of doing the classic Silver Age team book dynamic while removing the superhero trappings.  It’s missing the sort of stand-out moment that would really grab the attention, but there’s certainly promise here.

Joe the Barbarian #8 – The thing about serialisation is that the first issue of this series came out over a year ago.  Grant Morrison’s stories often work by seeding clues in the early issues that pay off later on, and I’m sure that if I sat down and read the whole thing as a graphic novel, it would come together much better.  I’ll try and find the time to do that.  But reading it in single issues?  The art’s lovely, but the ending is pretty much what you were probably expecting all along, and I can’t honestly say I have a strong enough recollection of the earlier chapters for the details to really work.  It comes across as a bit of an anticlimax.  Still, I suspect it’ll work better read in one go…

Wolverine/Hercules: Myths, Monsters & Mutants #1 – A four-issue miniseries by Frank Tieri and Juan Santacruz.  It’s a belated sequel to a Hercules miniseries that Tieri wrote in 2005, now co-starring a character who has no connection to Herc whatsoever.  To be fair, that Hercules mini was quite decent, and Tieri immediately sets about defining some common ground between the characters that gives him something to work with, specifically the fact that they’re going to outlive pretty much everyone they know.  There’s even a flashback to their first meeting, which is staggeringly obscure continuity – it’s from a six-page back-up strip in Marvel Treasury Edition #26.

As a throwaway caption explains, this is set “Years ago” – I can’t help wondering if that’s because somebody belatedly noticed that the villain, Matsuo Tsurayaba, was already killed off in last year’s Psylocke mini.  Fortunately, that’s not really a major problem, because it looks like the real focus of this mini is basically going to be Hercules and Wolverine teaming up to fight mythical stuff (and occasionally pausing to bemoan the inevitable passing of all else that lives).  It’s more a parade of cool stuff than an actual story – this issue opens with a seemingly irrelevant flashback to a giant Nazi robot attacking Paris, after all – but it’s good natured stuff and perfectly enjoyable.  The art’s a bit patchy but generally pretty decent.  The real question is whether there can possibly be enough demand to support yet another Wolverine mini, but the book is fine.

Wolverine: The Best There Is #4 – Well, it’s getting better.  Which is to say, this issue is neither unintelligible nor incoherent.  Winsor wants to experiment on Wolverine’s healing factor in order to learn about… well, ostensibly to develop a cure for his son, though that might not be the real reason after all.  Cue an issue of people torturing Wolverine and discussions about how his healing factor works.  Like several writers of recent years, Charlie Huston seems understandably vexed by the way Wolverine’s healing powers have become more and more exaggerated over the years, and he’s hunting for a solution.  His explanation – which has the merit of simplicity, at least – is essentially that the more it gets used, the stronger it gets.  As before, there’s a halfway interesting idea in there, but it isn’t developing into much of a story.  It’s hard to avoid the feeling that Huston has started off with a remit to write a mature readers Wolverine comic and worked backwards from there, resulting in a story which is literally just a string of healing factor stunts in a row.

X-Factor #216 – Spider-Man guest stars.  Or rather, J Jonah Jameson does, as he shows up in the traditional role of giving X-Factor their mission and nudging them in the direction of the plot.  From the look of it, this is where we get back to the subplot set up a few months ago, about the woman who’d been programmed with false memories and got Monet to erase them.  There’s a nice little mystery being set up there.  There’s also a good subplot scene with Layla and Rahne; it’s not so much Layla’s ultimatum to Rahne that’s interesting as the fact that she’s uncharacteristically taking such an active role at all.  I’m not quite convinced that the guest stars add much to the book beyond some window dressing to accompany the exposition, but Peter David writes them entertainingly enough that I’m willing to let it slide.  (And the Black Cat’s on the cover of the next issue, so to be fair, he might not be finished with the Spider-Man characters just yet.)  Always a reliable book.