And so on to this week’s reviews, plus some hanging around from the week before.  You’ll forgive me if I take some of these quickly, it’s been a busy day…

Age of Apocalypse #10 – Age of Apocalypse sells abysmally, so even though it’s heading towards a crossover with the similarly audience-bereft X-Treme X-Men and the somewhat healthier Astonishing, it comes as no real surprise to see the book suddenly racing towards the conclusion.  It doesn’t take a genius to read between the lines when Prophet takes the opportunity to explain that he really wanted to train Jean Grey as his successor but “We’ve run out of time.”  No kidding you have.

Still, at least Age of Apocalypse has shifted gears and started heading for the finish line with several months in hand, which means that if nothing else it gets a renewed sense of momentum and a realistic shot of achieving closure on its main storylines.  While the book has always had a tendency to overdo the visual gloom, this issue has got some of Roberto de la Torre’s stronger visuals, with a bit more emphasis on the big gestures rather than the serious brooding.

All-New X-Men #3 – Oh, it’s that old trick of Bendis’ – the one where he sets up a cliffhanger at the end of one issue, and then spends the next issue building to exactly the same cliffhanger from a different direction.  Still, this book’s schedule is rapid enough that it just about gets away with it.

Instead of delivering the confrontation between the two X-Men teams, this issue goes back a bit and explains what Cyclops’ team have been up to. The big revelation here is that Scott and Emma’s powers have been damaged by exposure to the Phoenix.  And, uh, so have Magneto’s.  For some reason.  That naturally results in a hideously awkward scene in which Magneto flags up that he didn’t actually have the Phoenix Force during Avengers vs X-Men, and we’re told that getting blasted really hard in the final issue was good enough.

It’s the sort of explanation so thumpingly unconvincing that you can’t help wondering whether it’s just a massive cock-up that’s being awkwardly covered at the last minute.  Then again, the whole idea doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense in logical terms, since no previous host of the Phoenix has had this sort of trouble.  Still, I get where Bendis is going thematically, and I’ll give him a bit of slack on that point; it’s supposed to represent literally the way Scott’s team are trying to plough on even though they’ve wrecked everything (or had it wrecked for them).  Nonetheless, a bit more in the “making sense” department wouldn’t hurt, hmm?

Cable & X-Force #1 – The first of two new X-Force titles launching as part of Marvel Now!, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the previous run.  Instead, Dennis Hopeless and Salvador Larroca are basically doing a team book fronted by Cable.

Hopeless has two books out this week, the other being Avengers Arena.  That’s the one getting most of the attention, but I’m steering well clear about it.  Haven’t read it.  Could be brilliant for all I know.  But literally everything about the promotion of the book has made it look like derivative hackwork calculated to provoke online controversy, and I just can’t be arsed.  Fairly or not, it makes me approach all involved with considerable scepticism.

Cable & X-Force, meanwhile, is simply a bit dull.  It’s a first issue that doesn’t get as far as establishing the premise, which is always a warning sign that you’re dealing with a writer who can’t pace for serials.  Cable’s assembling a new team for Some Reason Or Other.  Hope wants to hook up with him.  The team is going to do apparently evil things and the Avengers are going to chase them down.  The reason for all this is Thoroughly Mysterious.

It’s not awful, but it never gets to the point of establishing any kind of hook.  It doesn’t really introduce any of its characters, assuming that everyone knows and cares about them already.  It attempts to set up mystery while giving us no real clues to work with and no particular reason to care.  Hopeless really doesn’t have Dr Nemesis’ voice down at all, and the less said about that costume redesign, the better.  It’s the sort of thing that might turn out, with the benefit of hindsight, to be a good opening twenty pages of a graphic novel, but as a first issue, there’s not enough to it.

Gambit #6 – Guest starring MI-13, not that that’s exactly going to send the sales soaring.  Actually, they seem to be here mainly because James Asmus wants to use Pete Wisdom as an antagonist to hunt Gambit down, which isn’t such a bad role for him.  He’s certainly a more interesting foil for Gambit than having him simply run rings around a beleaguered CIA agent or something.

Sticking doggedly to its heist story format, this issue has Gambit stealing Excalibur and breaking into MI-13’s vaults.  The fill-in art is a bit below usual standards, but it’s okay and largely sticks to the book’s established tone.  And Asmus is continuing to come up with inventive ways to build a heist every issue, which is really quite impressive.  Gambit is kind of lost in the line, but it’s a reliably enjoyable title.

Wolverine #317 – Final issue!  (DISCLAIMER: Issue may not be final.)

Cullen Bunn’s short run concludes by wrapping up his “Covenant” storyline, and does little to dispel the impression of a writer who’s been asked if he wouldn’t mind filling time for four issues.  The basic plot is clear enough by this point.  A long time ago, the Covenant asked Wolverine to kill the “Dreaming Maiden”, whose dreams are apparently going to bring doom to the Earth (seemingly by attracting the Celestials, though it’s left vague).  Instead, he hid her away and somehow convinced her to just stop dreaming.  But that didn’t work out, so now the Covenant are after her again, quite possibly because she’s manipulated them into going after her.

The story doesn’t really work.  For a start, this is not a Wolverine story.  It’s a story about the Covenant, characters mostly created by Bunn for another series, which is being shoehorned in to a title it has no particular connection with.  Okay, it plays vaguely off Wolverine’s long history, but magic and spiritualism is hardly something that fits well with him.  Besides, the Dreaming Maiden is a glorified macguffin which thinks it’s something more profound.  Not very good.

X-Factor #248 – Pip’s not dead, you’ll be pleased to hear.  And hell is coming to earth, which you’ll be less pleased to hear, not least because the magical stories haven’t always been this book’s strongest suit.  I assume we’re building to a big climax with issue #250, and I kind of hope so, since this isn’t a direction that especially grabs me.  Then again, most of this issue is actually about Pip waking up in Monet’s body after saving himself from apparent death by shooting – and the character comedy there works pretty well, especially because Peter David gets the obvious gags out of the way and moves on to more inventive stuff.

X-Men #39 – Domino and Daredevil team up to fight an arms dealer who started off with good intentions but got sucked into a life of crime.  The book is missing from the March solicitations, so this looks very much like a case of blatant filler as the title coasts to its conclusion.  And much of the book is very much your standard team-up filler story, though it does have a genuinely interesting idea towards the end: that the morally flexible Domino is far more judgmental towards the bad guy than the supposedly upright Daredevil.

As this sort of thing goes, it’s perfectly well constructed and the art is better than usual.  And readers of a certain bent can play “spot the old supervillain weapons”.  But it’s still filler.

X-Treme X-Men #7 – 7.1 – Two issue in two weeks.  The first wraps up Kurt’s return to his home world and brings Sage into the cast.  I can’t for the life of me remember how she ended up as an interstellar ambassador, but there she is.  It’s a strangely downbeat story in which the normally cheerful Kurt is given false hope that his parents have survived, Danger tries to torment him, and he tries to obliterate entire robot cities.  Basically, if it’s impotent hate you like, this story’s got it in spades.

It’s a misfire, I think.  Kurt’s appeal as a character lies (lay?) in his more innocent nature and in the idea that he’d come from a rather nice-sounding world where he was just an ordinary kid.  This arc replaces all that with a back story of trauma and horror that just doesn’t seem particularly compelling.

The Point One issue is more fun, the central joke being that the team end up visiting the mainstream Marvel Universe, don’t realise it, and treat the whole plot of Avengers vs X-Men as one of those ridiculous disasters that usually sets up alternate worlds.  Also, it has an alternate Xavier who’s a giant floating whale, which teeters on the verge of Just Plain Silly, but ultimately gets away with it.  It’s a much more cheerful affair and one that plays far more to the book’s strengths.