If you haven’t listened to this week’s podcast, it’s just a couple of posts below.  Go do so.  We talk about the first issues of SWORD, Supergod and Victorian Undead.

This is an unusually quiet week for new releases – everything seems to be in the middle of a storyline right now – but let’s run through the books anyway. 

Dark Avengers #11 – Is it just me, or does Norman Osborn have a tiny itty bitty head on the cover?  Anyway, when I reviewed the “Utopia” crossover, I pointed out that the Dark Avengers didn’t get much to do.  Somebody pointed out that, actually, that’s pretty much par for the course – it’s really a Norman Osborn solo title, with the other guys standing in the background.  And indeed, that’s what we get here.  Since they’re the official government-appointed superheroes, the Avengers have gone off to investigate weird stuff in Colorado, and they’ve blundered into the Molecule Man, one of those virtually-omnipotent characters who’s way out of their league.  Naturally enough, that means the Avengers themselves make cameo appearances, and Norman Osborn has an extended dialogue with the nerdy maniac.  I have no idea why somebody thought it would be a good idea to have a few pages randomly painted by Greg Horn, of all people.  At first it looks as though Horn’s going to do all the pages showing the Avengers trapped in worlds created for them by the Molecule Man… but then they kind of drop that idea and Mike Deodato takes over again.  Besides, Horn is trying for hyper-realism, so he’s a weird artist to be doing surreal dream scenes.  Still, all told, this actually isn’t bad; if you’re going to do a book like this, then it makes sense to do a story where the ersatz Avengers are put in the underdog role and have to actually try and do the job properly.

Echo #16 – Presumably this is going to be the opening chapter of the fourth trade paperback, because it opens with a really blatant piece of recapping.  To be honest, this isn’t the strongest issue of Terry Moore’s series; it’s built around some scenes with Ivy and her Tragically Ill Daughter which end up seeming a bit heavy-handed and sentimental.  (The problem here, I think, is that said Tragically Ill Daughter doesn’t display much of a personality beyond being Tragic and Ill, which makes it all seem a bit disease-of-the-week.)  That said, even when he’s doing material like this, Moore’s storytelling puts most of his contemporaries to shame.  He’s great at the tiny little details of body language which make a character believable.  The odd thing about this series is the combination of those little personal touches with a Hollywood plot and rather one-dimensional villains.  Often it works, when the characters run into the action story elements and play off it; occasionally it feels a bit contrived, and for some reason this issue seemed to be in the latter category.

G-Man: Cape Crisis #4 – Chris Giarrusso’s work on this series has been comfortably up to the standards of his “Mini Marvels” strips, but this issue has some of the best material of the series.  It’s the sequence with G-Man escaping a wood full of… well, I’m guessing it’s a riff on Where the Wild Things Are, but it doesn’t really matter.  There’s just something about vicious monsters with a fully-fledged public transport infrastructure that works for me.  Sure, G-Man‘s story is basically just a framework to hang a load of jokes on, but when they’re funny, I’m fine with that.

Hellblazer #261 – And we’re off to India for a new storyline, so that Peter Milligan can write about gullible western tourists and the heritage of Empire.  Some of this is, well, less than subtle.  (The British nineteenth-century justifications for colonialism were a little more complex than “we’re taught to possess the world,” for example.)  But the basic idea of people trying to exploit a condescending Empire-era ghost is entertaining, if heavy-handed. And Giuseppe Camuncoli is doing great art on this series – good clear storytelling, and he knows how to play up the tongue-in-cheek bits.

Nomad: Girl Without A World #3 – Despite the rather stark covers, the set-up here is almost a throwback to the early years of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Nomad isn’t exactly a character with a built-in fanbase – she’s the “Heroes Reborn” version of Bucky, now stranded in the regular Marvel Universe – but Sean McKeever plays to that by duly positioning her as a Z-list superhero protecting her neighbourhood and her high school.  And the big villainous scheme is… people using mind control to dominate high school politics.  Some of the action scenes are a bit ropey, but I do like the way the book plays the creepily politically-conscious students.  I’m not so sure about the cliffhanger, though – it’s one of those moments where the villain is suddenly revealed to be somebody from another comic entirely who hasn’t been mentioned in years and who would probably have long since been forgotten if they hadn’t managed to scrape an entry in the Official Handbook back in the mid-80s.  Still, it’s something different, this book, and it plays to McKeever’s strengths.

Phonogram: The Singles Club #5 – Ah, the one that got pulped because it had the wrong bar code on it.  They don’t make scandals like they used to.  Each issue of this miniseries is showing us the same club night from the perspective of a different character, and we’ve now reached Laura Heaven, the lyric-quoting girl who hung around with Penny B back in issue #1.  Laura is the pretentious fan looking for identity in the music of her favourite band, and not quite getting it right yet.  It’s the sort of story that, in the past, you’d have done with a fan of the Smiths or the Manic Street Preachers.  But there isn’t really a band like that around at the moment, at least with that sort of profile.  So instead Laura is a fan of the Long Blondes – a risky approach, because frankly, they’re a bit obscure.  (We’re dealing here with a defunct band who never made the top 40 album chart, and who never got a single into the top 20.  Their biggest hit was “Weekend Without Makeup”, if you’re wondering.)  But as usual with Phonogram, it doesn’t really matter whether you know the band or not.  The point is what they mean to Laura, and her love/hate relationship with Penny… and that’s universal.

Thunderbolts #138 – Jeff Parker and Miguel Sepulveda take over as the new creative team.  With storylines already in progress, though, it’s far from a clean break.  To be honest, I haven’t been buying this in a while, and the current line-up really is a motley collection of weirdos.  Nuke wearing a hockey mask and calling himself Scourge?  Mr X, the serial killer from Frank Tieri’s Wolverine run?  The Headsman, from frigging Untold Tales of Spider-Man?  Actually, there’s a nice dynamic here, between the characters who are stark raving mad, and those who are merely mercenaries.  Still, it does feel like a book that’s drifted an awfully long way from its roots – though clearly it’s going to need a new direction in a few months when Dark Reign is over.  In the meantime, Parker tells an enjoyable enough opening story with them, and then sets up, you guessed it, an appearance by the Agents of Atlas.  Let nobody say they haven’t got enough exposure.

Wolverine: Origins #42 – In which Wolverine chats with Bruce Banner for a few pages and then, having apparently exhausted the potential of the mandatory guest appearance, pops off to Japan to speak to the Silver Samurai.  Basically, it’s one of those stories where the bad guy knows how the good guy thinks, and so the good guy has to act out of character to outwit him.  You know the schtick.  It’s always horribly contrived, and this is no exception.  As so often with Wolverine: Origins, it’s got moments where you’re obviously meant to stand back and admire the clever plot twists; naturally, much depends on how clever you think they really are.  Admittedly, it all fits together – the thing is, it fits into a horribly convoluted pretzel.  But Doug Braithwaite’s art is pretty good, and it’s all harmlessly silly.

Wolverine: Weapon X #7 – This is the second part of Jason Aaron’s asylum arc, and evidently he knows better than to drag out the mystery for too long.  This issue doesn’t give us a complete explanation of how Wolverine ended up in the asylum, but it does give us a reasonable idea of what’s going on there: once upon a time it had a sideline in providing mentally unstable but readily deniable hitmen, but now the lunatics are literally running the asylum and the whole operation has gone completely off the rails.  Equally, five issues of Logan shivering in a corner would have been a bit much, but Aaron moves us forward on that one too.  I’m enjoying this one a lot; it’s a weird little story, but with plenty of dark humour, and it knows not to outstay its welcome.

X-Men Legacy #229 – Isn’t this book meant to be part of the “Necrosha-X” crossover?  Oh well, evidently it’s going to join that one late.  In the meantime, we’re still in the middle of a “Nation X” branded arc – which, as you’ve probably guessed by now, simply means it’s the first arc to take place after the move to Utopia, no more, no less.  This issue, Rogue tries to rescue Bling! from Emplate’s clutches.  I realise that’s a bit melodramatic, but Emplate’s a melodramatic kind of guy, and I feel very strongly that he has clutches from which minor characters must be rescued.  Daniel Acuna’s art is perfectly suited to the surreal weirdness of Emplate’s dimension (if slightly less suited to the scenes in the real world), and I really Mike Carey’s take on Emplate, as someone who fancies himself a long-suffering stoic victim of circumstances.