I don’t know if anyone outside the UK knows this, but we’re having something of an industrial action situation with the postal service at the moment. The upshot is that, well, you know those comics that came out last Wednesday? They arrived today. So, with apologies for the delay, let’s get right to it.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 609: I’ve got a theory about this storyline, which is that everything about it is as 1990s as possible, on purpose. Return of Clone Saga villain? Check. New bad guy with a 1990s-style armour suit? Check. Bad guy’s secret identity something improbably macho like ‘Damon Ryder’? Check. Bad guy named after monster from early-1990s blockbuster movie? Check. Artist paying way too much attention to boobs of female lead? Check (although that one’s not an exclusively 1990s thing, sadly).  The whole package is a little too eye-rollingly predictable for comfort and the pacing is irritatingly bitty. The revamped ASM has had some ups and downs but this is the first real complete misfire it’s had for quite a while. Disappointing.

EX MACHINA 46: You know that thing about showing a gun in the first act if you’re going to use it in the third? Well, that comes into play in a fairly literal fashion here with another of the alien trinketry McGuffins that litter Mitchell Hundred’s life being brought front and centre as the series goes hurtling towards its conclusion, pinballing the story off all the characters as it goes. Not much in the way of new information gets revealed this issue, but there’s some effective atmosphere building being done with Suzanne and Tony Harris gets to stretch his legs a bit with a stylishly-framed fight sequence. This month’s civics lesson in disguise is on abortion statistics, if that floats your boat.

CHEW 5: You’re lucky you get to read these reviews rather than have me read them out loud to you, because my jaw is still on the floor after the multiple layered twists and shocks in this issue. Tony’s world comes down around him in a classic Everything You Thought You Knew Was Wrong style, and it makes what was already a great series into a truly first-class one. If you aren’t reading this, I heartily recommend picking up the tpb when it comes out, because Layman and Guillory are firing on all cylinders here and it looks like they’re just getting started.

ELEPHANTMEN 22: Part seven of the eight-part Dangerous Liaisons series deals (partly) with Simm, the mysterious figure who’s made it his business to follow Vanity Case around and ingratiate himself into her life. It also follows Hip and Miki as they track down Ebony, fresh from his rampage last month and apparently none the wiser for it. The return to an ensemble cast approach is refreshing after the last six issues of character showcases, but while it’s still pretty good it’s weaker than last month’s for three main reasons – firstly, Simm just doesn’t have much of a character yet, and while the single-character issues were a device that was in danger of becoming repetitive, Simm is ironically one of the characters that could do with a bit more fleshing out; secondly, Andre Szymanowicz’s art is striking in a Seth Fisher meets Moebius sort of way but he needs to work on keeping characters on-model from panel to panel; and lastly there are a couple of cameos from old UK sitcom characters that are just a bit on the too cute side and detract from the mood of the scene they’re in. Not the greatest issue, then, but still worthwhile.

COWBOY NINJA VIKING 1: File this one under ‘noble failure’. Here’s the pitch: a guy with a multiple personality disorder, which manifests itself as a cowboy, a ninja and a viking, which in turn are represented via different hats and custom speech balloons depending on which of them’s talking at any given moment, is tracked down by agents working for the doctor who turned him into a weapons-proficient super-spy and reactivated to take down another three-way nutjob. Sounds reasonably involved and complex? You bet, and that’s before we even reach the part where the story is told in three time periods over the course of a week, presented out of order. Or the part where the custom speech balloons don’t match the hats the personalities are wearing. Or the part where the art is so sketchy you can’t tell if the character who’s just had his head chopped open is the same character you’re seeing being recruited for a job a couple of pages later. Or the part where the three ‘distinct’ personalities speak almost identically, rendering the whole concept a bit moot. There’s no shortage of ambition here, it’s just not working in the execution. If you want to read an action comedy about a super killing machine with three smart-mouthed voices in his head then I hear Deadpool is popular right now – you could try that instead.

So, that was my haul for this week (along with Azrael, which we reviewed on the podcast, but in short – good concept, plays nicely with framing sequences, art lets it down somewhat, costume isn’t a patch on the original, worth checking out if you’re an Azrael fan). What did you read?