It’s not just Eurovision Song Contest posts this weekend – we have the weekly reviews too!  Am I not good to you?

Oh, and while I remember: next week’s podcast will probably be up on Sunday instead of Saturday.  But don’t worry, we’re not skipping another week.

Lots of X-books this week, but otherwise it’s a pretty quiet week (save for a couple of new launches at Marvel).  So…

Blind Science – Another one of those “Second Coming” tie-ins where Marvel can’t seem to make up their mind what the full title is (the indicia opts for X-Men: Blind Science), so I’ll just go with the short version.  This is an X-Club one-shot, and if you’re not following Uncanny, the current line-up is down to Madison Jefferies who used to be in Alpha Flight, public domain Golden Age hero Dr Nemesis, and Joss Whedon’s character Kavita Rao.  As with the Hellbound miniseries, this isn’t part of the central “Second Coming” storyline, so much as a separate story which springboards from the same events.  They could have run it as a subplot in “Second Coming” and it would have worked, but in the interests of decluttering the main story, it’s probably a smart move to hive it off like this.

The X-Club have been lured off to investigate a complete red herring, and find themselves transported to yet another dystopian alternate future where Bastion turns out to have been basically right.  Mutants have gone crazy, and only Kavita Rao can save the world by re-creating her “cure” for mutant powers from Astonishing X-Men.  Now, this is a pretty solid idea.  Kavita is one of many characters who’s been sucked into the X-Men’s ensemble cast and never seems to get much attention.  But in theory, at least, she’s supposed to be trying to atone for trying to “cure” the mutant race, so putting her in a situation where she ends up atoning by doing exactly the same thing has some nice ironic possibilities.

Writer Si Spurrier has a good handle on Rao.  The other two X-Club members aren’t really so important to the plot, but he uses them pretty well for snappy dialogue and comic relief.  Dr Nemesis is usually written as having better judgment than this, but hey, it’s not his story – and his Batman tendencies are one of the reasons why Rao normally gets overshadowed.  Paul Davidson and Francis Portela’s art is basically solid, though some of the scenes with weird energy creatures are a bit hard to follow on first reading.   I’m not completely convinced about the ending, which teeters on the brink of being a cop-out.  But on balance, I think it works, because it’s a story about Rao not falling into the trap of hearing what she wants to hear, and the ending fits with that.  Pretty good, all told.

Dark Wolverine #86 / Wolverine: Origins #48 – The concluding two parts of “Reckoning”.  There’s still two issues of Origins to go, but this seems to be the end of the Romulus plot – presumably, what remains is just epilogue.  And… well.  On the plus side, some of the stuff with Daken is quite good.  He doesn’t get to switch sides outright, but he does get to reject the idea of following in the footsteps of Romulus, even if only because he doesn’t want his life to be defined by fulfilling a role in somebody else’s conspiracy.  That’s fair enough, and in line with what they’ve been doing with Daken in his own title.  And the final page throws in an interesting idea with Wolverine trying to force Daken to go his own way by removing his claws – presumably to make absolutely sure that he can’t be a second-rate Wolverine any more.

So Daken’s part of the story isn’t fantastic, but it’s solid.  Romulus, on the other hand, remains as big a mess as ever.  As it turns out, Wolverine doesn’t want to expose him after all.  But what we actually get is a story where Cloak dumps Romulus into the Darkforce Dimension.  Granted, at least Daniel Way made a point of using Cloak in earlier stories to set that up.  But really, that’s it? He gets dumped in a prison dimension?  It begs the question of why Cloak didn’t do it earlier in the story.  But more to the point, it shows the weakness of Romulus as a concept.  Way is trying to do a story here where Wolverine comes to terms with his past – but when his past is embodied by a character as feebly conceived as Romulus, it’s just never going to work.

Dazzler #1 – Another of 2010’s “Women of Marvel” one-shots featuring female characters.  Surprisingly, this is also bannered as a “Necrosha-X” crossover.  Yes, you remember how Dazzler’s sister Mortis was used in that story, apparently as the result of a long night trawling through the Official Handbook for characters vaguely related to death, even though she never got to do anything much, and barely interacted with her sister?  Well, this issue is Jim McCann’s attempt to tie up those loose ends.  The “Necrosha” tie-in is… that Mortis is in it.  Mortis hires Arcade to kill Dazzler, and as you can probably imagine, that doesn’t go especially well for her.

McCann clearly loves Dazzler.  Aside from tying up the Mortis threads, he’s also trying to do a story where Dazzler deals with the detritus of her past continuity and asserts herself as a proper, viable character instead of just an anachronistic throwback.  The results are mixed.  The story seems to assume an awful lot of knowledge about Dazzler’s relationship with her family, which comes from comics published over a quarter of a century ago, and really needed to be properly explained in flashback.  And the story makes a bold but doomed attempt to convince us that the X-Men are reluctant to allow a comatose Mortis onto Utopia – even though the place is already swarming with asylum-seeking supervillains, and Mortis is surely too much of a D-lister to warrant an exception.

But on the other hand, McCann’s evident love of the character comes through, and she does come across as an interesting, rounded hero here.  It’s just that the story seems to involve resolving subplots about her family relationships from the backwaters of 1980 continuity.  Still, I wouldn’t mind seeing McCann do more with her.  I like his basic take on her.

Oh, and as for the art, it’s variable.  Kalman Andrasofszky and Ramon Perez, doing the bulk of the story, have a good sense of scale but are rough around the edges at times.  Francesca Ciregia’s work, on the epilogue, is an odd combination of minimalism and melodrama, which more or less works, but really makes Alison look like she needs a hairdresser urgently.

Not a particularly great story in its own right, but there’s something in here.

Secret Avengers #1 – The second Avengers title, by Ed Brubaker and Mike Deodato, is the “shadow ops” squad – although that’s a concept which sits a little uneasily with the inclusion of characters like Valkyrie, Beast and Nova.  But perhaps that’s the point, to do spy stories with superhero characters and play to some extent off the resulting incongruity.  I’m not altogether convinced that it works here?   Why on earth is Steve Rogers sending the Valkyrie on an undercover assignment?  And, having smashed through a window in full costume with his face exposed in full sight of a load of enemy soldiers, none of whom he kills or arrests, why does he think that “we’re getting away with no one knowing who we are”?  These are plot problems that trouble me.

The book might also benefit from explaining the back story.  The plot involves people chasing after an artefact connected to the Serpent Crown.  That’s fine; chasing after Marvel Universe macguffins is precisely the sort of thing this team should be doing.  It’s just that nobody pauses to explain what the Serpent Crown actually is, which is surely an important plot point (particularly as it has past associations with Roxxon, who also feature in this story).

But on the other hand, I like the idea of plugging these characters into a slightly different genre, and I like some of the odder choices of characters.  It’s good to see they’re still using Ant-Man (and I trust Ed Brubaker not to let him degenerate into just a generic character seeking redemption for his criminal past).  Beast is an interesting choice precisely because he doesn’t seem to fit in here at all.  And the closing twist is nicely executed.  Mike Deodato’s art is also well suited for this sort of superhero/spy hybrid.  A few glitches, but plenty of potential here.

Thunderbolts #144 – The first issue of the book’s new direction, with Luke Cage assembling a squad of imprisoned supervillains trying to earn their way out of jail.  It’s the Suicide Squad, in other words, but that’s pretty much in keeping with the premise of the series, and it’s nice to see some of the older characters being brought back into the cast.  Again, some of the new cast members are downright odd choices – you’d have to be very trusting to let the Juggernaut out on missions, for example – but Jeff Parker does a persuasive job of explaining, at least, why somebody might have thought these people were good candidates.  Granted, that takes a lot of explaining, and it’s only really in the last couple of pages that the story gets properly underway.  But it does introduce a potentially interesting team, and follow it up with a strong cliffhanger, so that’s a good first issue for the new direction in my book.

Wolverine: Weapon X #13 – Yes, three Wolverine comics in a single week – it’s another triumph for Marvel’s schedulers.  Much as I like Jason Aaron’s take on Wolverine, I’m starting to wonder about this story, which is so packed with guest stars that it’s turning into Avengers vs Terminator.  It’s a good enough Avengers story, and Aaron writes his guest stars quite well – though his version of the new Captain America has a rather odd passive-aggressive streak.  It just doesn’t feel like a Wolverine story.  Come to think of it, the same can be said of Aaron’s Dark Reign: The List – Wolverine one-shot, which turns out to be connected to the plot here.  It’s enjoyable enough as a superhero action story, I just don’t quite get why it’s appearing in a Wolverine solo title.

X-Force #27 – Part 9 of “Second Coming” opens in curious style with the X-Men fighting the invading Nimrods over the course of nine (nearly ten) silent pages.  It’s an odd device, and actually does lend the scene an air of being more significant than Just Another Fight Scene.  But it isn’t entirely successful; thanks to the usual variations in artistic style, and the lack of a familiar costume, a scene where I’m clearly meant to think “Oh no, they maimed so-and-so!” actually prompted the reaction “Who’s that meant to be?”  I mean, I do like Mike Choi and Sonia Oback’s art, but I really needed some dialogue there to identify the character.

Other than that… well, “Second Coming” is still basically an action story that continues to ratchet up the scale.  But on a weekly schedule, I think it’s working.  For all the running around and hitting things, there are two big ideas they’re trying to get across.  First, Hope’s return from the far future has improved matters in no way whatsoever and is causing all manner of chaos and destruction – so maybe Bishop was right.  And second, the X-Men are getting neatly boxed into a corner issue by issue, building a “last stand” feel.  Those two ideas are coming across pretty strongly, and that’s why I think the story is still basically working.  And it’s been put together better than a lot of recent X-Men stories – for example, they’ve laid the groundwork for Cable’s one last time-jump quite well in the past couple of issues, but they’ve done so by raising the possibility in a completely different context.  If nothing else, it gives the impression that it’s all building to something important.

X-Men Origins: Emma Frost – I really have no idea any more what the official line is on the continuity status of these one-shots.  Valerie d’Orazio’s story, for example, seems to be following the general ideas of the shortlived Emma Frost series rather than the details; but at the same time, the story ends by leading in to a specific scene from Uncanny #131.  As an origin story, it goes up only as far as her villain phase.  Perhaps inevitably, that makes it slightly unsatisfying, since we know the character long since moved on to something else.  To be fair, the story tries to lay the groundwork for that, by playing up the idea that Emma was always genuinely keen on teaching, and giving her a conflicted attitude to her authoritarian father (whose approach to life, by the end of the story, she ends up embracing).  Ultimately, though, as with many of the Origins one-shots that have to impose some sort of narrative structure on fragmented flashback material, it has a few interesting ideas about the character but isn’t really able to make them into a satisfying standalone story.