In his latest weekly interview over at CBR, Marvel editor-in-chief Axel Alonso sings the praises of the anthology format as a place for new creators to cut their teeth at Marvel.  “There are few easier ways to gauge a new writer or artist than to have them work on a short story,” he says.  “It gives you a quick glimpse at how they approach their craft because they have to structure a story with a beginning, middle and end without occupying lots of real estate.”

In theory, there’s a lot of truth to this.  There’s long been a widely held view that British creators who started off at 2000AD learned how to get to the point, if nothing else.  But the ability to structure a story with a beginning, middle and an end has not been consistently in evidence in A+X.

Our lead story, by Mike Benson and Mark Texeira, is a case in point.  Thor randomly picks up a magical artefact and gets transported to Limbo (this being set before the recent Uncanny story).  Magik sense that he’s shown up and goes to investigate.  There’s a bit of fighting with demons, Thor and Magik squabble a bit, and eventually she dumps him somewhere back on Earth.  And that’s literally it.

This is Not A Story.  What’s more, it’s Not A Story with one idea, namely “wouldn’t it be cool if Thor and Magik squabbled a bit?”  The answer turns out to be “no, not particularly”.  Perhaps the theory here was that Mark Texeira drawing demons was bound to be good for spectacle, but it’s really not one of his more visceral efforts.

In the final evaluation, this is the sort of “story” that A+X runs far too often – half an issue with no plot in which two characters squabble underwhelmingly.

Jim Kruger and Ron Lim’s Spider-Man/Cyclops back-up is more like it.  It’s not going to trouble anyone beyond the completists, but at least it’s got a plot and a point.  We’re dealing with the current Spider-Man, who’s really Dr Octopus in Spider-Man’s body.  So the simple core idea here is one is a hero who everyone thinks is a villain, and vice versa.  It’s not that Spider-Man’s change of behaviour goes unnoticed – Cyclops spots it immediately – but since he’s still doing basically heroic and sensible things, or at least things that can be more obviously explained as a misunderstanding.

As a villain, we’ve got Malice, whose possession gimmick dovetails nicely with Spider-Man’s current status quo.  The simple plot is that Cyclops is chasing Malice through the New York subway trying to catch her in a host body, Spider-Man shows up for the obligatory misunderstanding, and then they team up with Cyclops being heroically self-sacrificing to stop Malice, and Spider-Man helping to undo some of the mess afterwards.

It’s simple, but at least it’s a concise story that gets to a point and does something to play off the two characters its chosen.  Whether anyone really wants to read an entire anthology even of this is dubious – the market for such titles has always been shaky – but it’s vastly preferable to the first half of the book.