The Film Festival is on at the moment, on top of which it’s a podcast week, so it’s been a busy weekend.  Which means we’ve reached Sunday night, and I’ve read the X-books and a not a huge amount else.

Check a couple of posts down for this week’s House to Astonish, with reviews of Young Allies, Meta 4 and the Joker’s Asylum: Mad Hatter one-shot.  And otherwise…

Amazing Spider-Man #633-634 – Yes, two issues in the same week.  That’s what happens when a book scheduled for ship three times a month falls behind schedule.

Issue #633 is the final part of “Shed”, Zeb Wells and Chris Bachalo’s revamp of the Lizard.  Now at first glance, killing off the Lizard’s son looks like it could be cheap shock tactics.  But then again, Lizard stories have fallen into a well-worn formula, and maybe the character could do with a wrench to move him on to something else.  Wells is still interested in the core ideas of the character – intellect versus buried instinct – he just wants to cut away some of the clutter, and he does that pretty effectively here.  As for Chris Bachalo, he gets to draw lizard people, and he’s good at that.

The long-trailed “Grim Hunt” story begins in issue #634.  This is supposed to be the plot that all those “Gauntlet” arcs were building to.  Supposedly the point of the Gauntlet was that the Kravinoffs were throwing major villains at Spider-Man in order to wear him down, although to be honest, most of the stories actually seemed to involve them showing up in a plot that was happening without them anyway.  Regardless, this arc is by Joe Kelly and Michael Lark, and it sees the Kravinoffs going after anyone vaguely spider-related in an attempt to revive Kraven the Hunter.  Of course, once you’ve committed to using all of the spider-related characters, you’re stuck with a bunch of guys like Kaine and Arachne who aren’t especially interesting in their own right, and kind of feel like they’re clogging up the story here.  I’m not quite sure about this one yet – Lark’s art is great, but it all feels a bit bogged down in continuity and people I’m not desperately interested in, and I really hope it’s heading somewhere more interesting than just the return of an old villain.

Black Cat #1 – Or Amazing Spider-Man Presents Black Cat, to give it the full official title.  But they’re not using his name on the cover.  This is a vague Grim Hunt tie-in, which is to say that the Kravinoffs are in this one too.  The Black Cat steals something which seems to be an ancestral heirloom.  And at the same time, somebody’s trying to frame her for some badly botched thefts.  Which wouldn’t be a problem but… well, she’s got her reputation to think of.  It’s by Jen van Meter and Javier Pulido, and it’s actually quite good – it’s got the right tone for a Spider-Man project, inverting things so that she’s the lead and he’s the supporting character, but with the sort of good clear storytelling that Amazing has been delivering lately.  This would be perfectly at home on the main title, but for the understandably low Spider-Man content.

Dark Wolverine #87 – This is a filler issue between the Wolverine: Origins crossover and the Frankencastle crossover.  Daken’s sad about having those claws cut out of him last issue – the point, by the way, being that those were the claws that he’d coated with the Muramata blade so that they could be used to kill Wolverine.  Which I completely missed, but then I don’t recall anyone mentioning that plot point in months.  Perhaps they raised it in passing during the crossover, I don’t know.

Anyway… this issue, Daken wanders around Rome, meets a couple of petty criminals and mostly gazes at them.  Also, he delivers cryptic moral homilies.  It’s the sort of story that devotes a splash page to the title character looking moody in front of a landmark.  Somewhere in here, there’s a vaguely interesting idea about Daken’s attitude to these people.  He looks down on them on grounds of power, but not morality.  But it’s terribly, terribly laboured, and comes off as thuddingly “meaningful”.  Not great.

New Avengers #1 – The relaunched New Avengers turns out to be basically West Coast Avengers, only on the east coast.  It’s a second Avengers team, for those heroes of a stubbornly individualist bent, who stuck out the last few years as a renegade Avengers team, and aren’t too keen about meekly going back to hook up with Steve and Tony again.  So it’s basically most of the cast of New Avengers – Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Wolverine, Spider-Man, Hawkeye and Mockingbird – plus Ms Marvel and, weirdly, the Thing.  And they’re back in Avengers Mansion, which has apparently been rebuilt between issues or something.

The set-up is odd – two more or less separate Avengers teams in the same city? – but you can see the publishing logic in keeping together the majority of a successful team.  Plus, after all those years of hiding in warehouses and the like, they do actually deserve a run as a “proper” Avengers team.  The first storyline takes us back to magic, as Bendis evidently isn’t finished yet with Dr Voodoo.  It’s a serviceable enough plot, and at least it means that Stuart Immonen gets to draw fun stuff.  (And there’s some great unconvincing dialogue from a possessed character near the end.)  Basically it’s the sort of thing Bendis was doing in this book already, but without the “heroes on the run” element overshadowing things.  I thought Avengers #1 was stronger, but an okay story and good art means this isn’t bad either.

New Mutants #11 – Well, officially it’s an issue of New Mutants.  In fact it’s chapter 11 of “Second Coming”, and the New Mutants don’t put in much of an appearance.  What does happen: Legion is enlisted to help out; the X-Men and co fight off the Sentinels in San Francisco; Hope decides it’s time she did something constructive; and in the future, X-Force attack an end of level boss.  As I said last week, “Second Coming” is all about ratcheting up the tension from week to week.  As long as it still feels like it’s building to something big, it’s working.   This sort of story doesn’t really play to Zeb Wells’ strengths (on top of which he’s working with a horde of fill-in artists), but at least he gets to make something of Legion’s oddball assault.  Not a classic issue in its own right, but it’s not really meant to be, and the overall story is ticking over nicely.

X-Factor Forever #4 – Still something of a guilty pleasure for me.  It’s very eighties indeed – Louise Simonson really wants to explain a big idea about the origin of the mutant race and whether they’re the future of humanity at all, but in true period style, she’s arranged matters so that the exposition takes place in the course of a lot of running around and fighting.  I do like her take on Apocalypse – the mainstream version of the character ended up as a sort of all-purpose nihilist dictator, while her interpretation is more of an “ends justify the means” type reverting back to the original idea of somebody who thought he was improving matters in the long run.  Dan Panosian’s art doesn’t have much in common with the original series, but it’s genuinely striking, not to mention endearingly over the top at times, and I wouldn’t mind seeing more of this on the right project.