If you haven’t listened to our latest podcast yet, then it’s just one post below.  Reviews include Iron Man 2.0, Mission and Superman/Batman, so if you want more on those, download the show.

Meanwhile, it’s another classic week of scheduling from Marvel Comics.  From time to time Marvel claim that they try to avoid having everything ship at the same time.  Well, something’s clearly gone badly wrong this week, because Marvel have seen fit to ship all four ongoing X-Men titles in the same week – Astonishing X-Men #36, Uncanny X-Men #533, X-Men #8 and X-Men: Legacy #245 – plus the anthology title X-Men: To Serve and Protect #4.  And that’s not all!  The Legacy issue is chapter 1 of the “Age of X” crossover – and in the same week, Marvel have also shipped the second chapter, from New Mutants #22.

Nobody in their right mind could possibly have thought that this was a good idea, and my first thought was that this was some sort of rush to get material out for the February accounting period.  But no – looking at the solicitations, they really did intend most of this material to come out in the same week.  The exceptions are Serve and Protect #4 and Astonishing #36, both of which were meant to ship in the first week of February.  (Yes, that’s right – keeping up the title’s proud tradition of non-existence, the new creative team are three weeks late with their first issue.)

Amazing Spider-Man #655 – This is the aftermath of Marla Jameson’s death last issue.  Half of it is silent scenes of assorted characters attending the funeral, and most of the rest is a surreal dream sequence of Spider-Man guilt tripping.  It is, in short, a Very Special Issue, but also one of those issues where the creative team stretch themselves a bit more and show what they can do with the medium.  And wisely, the art for this issue has been assigned to Marcos Martin.  He’s consistently one of the best artists working in superhero comics, and the material here really allows him to show how good he is.  If you haven’t seen his work, then seriously, get this issue just so the point can be hammered home.  He’s in a whole different league from most of his contemporaries.  As for the story – well, it’s Peter on a guilt trip, and there’s nothing much new about that.  But that’s fine; this is more about restating the core ideas, and it does that very well.  Killing off Marla turns out to be a surprisingly effective move; she’s not been a major character in many years, but she’s enough of a fixture, and she’s closely enough connected to main cast members, for her death – or at least, everyone else’s reaction to her death – to carry some weight.  A very good issue.

Astonishing X-Men #36 – Now that is an ugly, ugly cover.  Which is odd, since the interior art is much more appealing.  Jason Pearson’s rather blocky take on Wolverine won’t be to everyone’s tastes, but there’s a crispness to the work, and the exaggerated expressions are used sparingly enough to be effective.

This is the first issue written by Daniel Way, and he’s running with the core team that he inherited from Warren Ellis – minus the Beast, who was written out of the X-books a year ago, but of course this title has only just caught up with that.  So it’s just Scott, Emma, Wolverine and Armor.  It’s basically a trip to Japan to fight giant monsters, which is an old trope, but that’s okay if it’s done well.  Roxxon Oil are trying to drill beneath Monster Island, and that goes about as well as you’d expect.  Meanwhile, the X-Men are in Japan to take Armor back for a funeral – Way has picked up on an old throwaway line that Armor’s force field is supposed to be powered by her dead ancestors, and decided to take it literally, asking what happens when a close relative dies.

I’ve not generally been a fan of Daniel Way’s work on the X-books, but this is quite decent.  It’s got a focus that’s often lacking in Uncanny‘s sprawling cast, and it even makes good use of Mentallo, a villain who’s been cannon fodder for years but whom Way rehabilitates pretty effectively in the course of an issue simply by writing him well.  Not bad at all.

Iron Man 2.0 #1 – See the podcast for more on this.  It’s a Jim Rhodes solo book, bringing the character’s status quo more or less into line with the Iron Man movies – in other words, he’s the US military’s Iron Man.  You can see the strings as the character is yanked into line with the films, but writer Nick Spencer more or less gets away with it, by taking the opportunity to wipe the slate clean on a character who’s been badly treated over the last few years, and by setting up some promising relationships between Rhodes and his new colleagues.  You only have to look at Spencer’s other work to see that he likes his high concept stories, and he indulges those tendencies here in devising the mystery that Rhodes is investigating.  Technically, it’s an issue heavy on exposition, but the idea is strong enough – and the execution finds enough opportunities for visual interest – that the book gets away with it.  The art’s rather inconsistent, with multiple artists being thrown at the pages (apparently, to be fair, because Barry Kitson’s been ill).  But it’s a solid first issue.

The Mission #1 – Again, see the podcast.  This is also high concept stuff, but it’s not very good high concept.  What would you do if an angel asked you to kill someone?  Turn it into a rather leaden movie pitch, apparently.  It’s competently done, but it’s a pretty transparent case of running stock characters through a premise which is developed in a rather cliched way.  Give it a miss.

Uncanny X-Men #533 – Part four of “Quarantine”.  And this really isn’t working.  I like the concept of Lobe; he’s a villain who doesn’t hate mutants at all, he just wants to make money off them.  As the story openly acknowledges, he’s a development of the U-Men concept from Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, but with the cultist overtones replaced by rapacious capitalism.  That’s a good idea, and there ought to be some decent stories in it.

But structurally, this arc is a bit of a mess.  The Collective Man subplot seems to have vanished; the Emma/Shaw stuff seems completely disconnected from everything else.  As for Lobe, his plan doesn’t really make sense.  He’s got a designer drug which can give people mutant powers; he wants to make loads of money from it; and he point of the plague is to blackmail the X-Men into signing over the rights to their powers.  But for this to work, you’ve got to accept an awful lot of implausible ideas – not least that Lobe has some hope of running a semi-legitimate business based on this drug if only he gets the X-Men’s signature, and that a significant number of people in mutant-hating America would actually buy the thing.  The story doesn’t sell me on either of these things, not least because the potential customers we do see are such ciphers.  And if the licence is so important, why is he publicly handing out the drug anyway?  There’s a decent premise at the core of this, but there are too many logic problems for the plot to hang together.

X-23 #6 – The concluding part of “Songs of the Orphan Child”, and credit where it’s due – Marjorie Liu has found a way to make Miss Sinister work.  The character has always struck me as one of the less successful aspects of Mike Carey’s run on X-Men: Legacy; she’s supposed to be the result of a botched attempt by Mr Sinister to transfer his mind to a replacement body upon his death.  This might have been intended as a way of giving the character a clean slate, but the practical result was to take an already convoluted character in Mr Sinister, and glue a further layer of complication over the top.  Liu’s elegant solution is to make the “botched mind transfer” into the character’s central concept, so that she’s now a clearly distinct character whose main concern is to avoid (at any costs) Sinister completing his takeover of her mind.  That gives her the motivational hook she was lacking, and it’s a successful development.  On one view, what we have here is really a Miss Sinister story with X-23 standing around watching, but it plays closely enough into this book’s core theme of identity that the story works.  And it’s nice to see X-23 being steered away from maudlin grim-and-grittiness into something with a wider canvas; the character is mopey enough that she needs something else to play against.  There’s some really nice art in this issue, too, even if the book is split between two artists.  Overall, a successful arc.

X-Men #8 – Part 2 of “To Serve and Protect”, an odd name for a storyline given that it’s also being used for an unrelated anthology miniseries.  Continuing the guest-star-team-up motif, this is basically the X-Men and Spider-Man teaming up to face… well, not the Lizard himself, so much as the community of lizard people under New York.  It’s a sequel to the recent Amazing Spider-Man arc “Shed”, in other words, with Chris Bachalo returning on art.  As usual, it’s a mixture of impressive visuals with sporadic confusion, but the good outweighs the bad.  Like Astonishing, the story benefits from keeping the cast small – just Wolverine, Storm, Gambit and Emma in this story – and it’s a well-written team-up story.  Nothing earth-shattering, but perfectly fine.

X-Men: Legacy #245 / New Mutants #22 – The first two parts of “Age of X”, which is being published as a crossover between these two titles – though as yet, it’s far from clear what it’s doing in New Mutants, since thus far it’s a Rogue story through and through.  It’s an alternate reality story, the hook being that Charles Xavier didn’t bring the X-Men together, and the disorganised mutants took a hammering from anti-mutant forces until finally coming together for a last stand.  The dystopian stuff is perhaps the least interesting part of it; the real story lies in figuring out what actually happened in this world (since it’s pretty clear that the party line is not entirely true), and why the story is being told at all (it’s also pretty clear that this isn’t just a random excursion to a parallel world, but beyond that, it’s a bit of a mystery so far).

Carey does a great job developing those aspects of the story, and he’s clearly also put a lot of work into figuring out how some of the characters develop when formative events turn out completely different for them.  Cyclops, for example, is a character who’s been defined by his leadership position since 1964 or so; instead of putting him into an equivalent position in this world, Carey is going the other way and asking how he might have turned out if he’d never had that role.  Other points are hinted at more subtly simply by bringing on characters whose very existence doesn’t quite square with the official version of history, and leaving it to the readers to figure that out for themselves.  For example, if Xavier was never around, what are Legion and Danger doing here?  This sort of thing depends on the readers being reasonably familiar with the characters, since obviously the cast can’t point it out, and arguably it makes the story a little less accessible to casual readers, but sometimes that’s a worthwhile trade-off because it’s just inherent in the story.

I still have reservations that the fortress-under-siege stuff is a bit heavy handed, but Clay Mann and Steve Kurth’s pencils stop the tone from being too bleak, and everything else works well enough that I’ll give Carey the benefit of the doubt on this point.

X-Men: To Serve and Protect #4 – Final issue of the anthology mini.  The Anole/Rockslide story wraps up much as you’d expect, but there’s nothing wrong with doing the predictable ending when it’s satisfying.  It’s been a simple story, but a nice little outing for two underused characters.  Elsewhere, Kathryn and Stuart Immonen send Hellcat and Gambit on a date, which isn’t a story so much as an entertainingly chaotic sketch.  Jed McKay and Sheldon Vella’s “Disco Highway” is a gleefully ridiculous story with Dazzler and the Daughters of the Dragon in a game of cosmic roller derby (“At stake is some poorly-defined cosmic prize offered by the Grandmaster…”) which has a great MODOK gag, though it kind of peters out on the last page.  And “Unforgettable” is a Hercules/Psylocke team-up by James Asmus and multiple artists – yes, on an eight-page story – which is basically a cute gag about Hercules’ clumsy womanising, one that the artists sell very nicely.