Not only is this a day late, but last week’s X-Axis was another postal-disruption catch-up affair… so we’ve got two weeks worth of X-books to get through.  And Marvel are fairly churning them out at the moment, so two weeks is a lot of X-books.

If you’re looking for reviews of things that aren’t X-books, may I direct your attention a couple of posts down, to the latest episode of House to Astonish, where Al and I are discussing Moon Knight, Gladstone’s School for World Conquerors, and Spontaneous.   But for now – X-books, X-books, X-books!

Age of X: Universe #2 – I can appreciate the desire to get maximum mileage out of Mike Carey’s “Age of X” storyline from X-Men: Legacy and New Mutants.  Marvel certainly put a lot into promoting it.  But if ever a story was unsuited for spin-offs, “Age of X” is it.  The central conceit of the storyline is that at first it looks like just another dystopian alternate Earth, with the X-Men holed up in a citadel fighting meaningless battles, only for it to turn out that there’s literally nothing out there beyond the fortress itself.  And now, Marvel brings us Age of X: Universe – a two issue miniseries about what’s beyond the fortress.

Now, yes, technically, it’s what the X-Men think is beyond the fortress – but even that is a bad idea, because in “Age of X” proper, the villains are intentionally generic, and that’s a plot point.  Theoretically, Si Spurrier and Khoi Pham’s story is meant to be explaining where the “force walls” idea came from, but the whole set-up leaves them wrestling with an impossible task, and by this point in the crossover we know that it doesn’t matter anyway.  They end up with an over-the-top “dark”  Avengers team trying to assassinate Magneto, only for Captain America to learn an Important Moral Lesson in the form of a lecture about tolerance.  Even if you disregard the context of the wider crossover, it’s just a rather generic dystopia story.

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Welcome back!

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written one of these, and we’re going to be in catch-up mode for a little while.  As I write this, I haven’t got around to reading any of the books that came out while I was away.  They ought to be showing up at the weekend, along with this week’s comics, in a massively unwieldy pile.  (For those of you who’ve asked, the plan is to record the next podcast on Monday.)

But let’s make a start on the backlog, by looking briefly at the X-books that came out just before I left.  Yes, comics from three weeks ago.  Only on House to Astonish!

Age of X Universe #1 – By the time you read this, “Age of X” will be more or less finished.  I’m still about two thirds of the way through, of course.  But it’s been a good story, in part because it’s turned out to be a rather more interesting idea than it first seemed.  On the surface, “Age of X” is just another dystopian parallel Earth; but with Mike Carey it’s never going to be that simple, and indeed it seems pretty clear at this point that it’s not “real” at all.  Everyone’s holed up in a fortress which is probably the interior of Legion’s mind, and unknown to them, the outside world doesn’t really exist.  The attacking soldiers seem generic because they literally aren’t real characters at all.

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It’s the weekend of the Chicago comicon!  I’m sure all sorts of interesting things have been announced.  I’ll read the round-ups on Monday.

Meanwhile, it’s a busy week for reviews, with five X-books and a bunch of other interesting (or at least noteworthy) titles.  So to work…

Fear Itself: Book of the Skull – Billed as the prologue to the upcoming Fear Itself crossover.  Matt Fraction is writing the main event, but this lead-in one-shot is by Ed Brubaker, presumably because it spins out of his Captain America storylines.  The Red Skull is apparently dead, and his estranged daughter Sin is planning to carry on the family tradition.  So she and Baron Zemo raid an abandoned Red Skull base, in order to lay hands on a Magic Widget which will clearly be of tremendous importance to the upcoming crossover.  The angle is that Sin is going to outdo her father by revisiting one of his failed plans from World War II and getting it right this time.  Cue an extended flashback, with Captain America, Bucky and the Sub-Mariner thwarting a Nazi plan that can fairly be described as enigmatically vague.  Scot Eaton’s art is fine, though the inking’s a bit heavy for my taste.  But the big pay-off is rather undermined by the fact that it really just tells us something that was already in the adverts for the series proper, accompanied by some vague hinting that will no doubt make sense in seven months’ time.  It’s a perfectly acceptable comic, but I can’t honestly say it gets me excited about the crossover.

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Another heavy week for X-books – six of them this time round, even without any of the regular X-Men titles coming out.  There’s some decent stuff in there, though.  Couple of new launches as well.  And since I’m starting this rather later in the evening than I’d normally like to, I’ll get straight to it…

Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis #5 – My god, it’s finished!  It’s actually finished!  The first issue of this series came out last May, if you’re wondering.  I’ll do a separate post looking back on the whole series, and I’m pretty confident that it’ll read a lot better in one go.  The bottom line is that this was a pretty simple, straightforward, direct story, and one that’s far, far too slight to survive being stretched out over nine months.  Frankly I expect it’ll still feel overextended as a graphic novel – in terms purely of story content, it could fit into an annual perfectly happily – but at least it’ll be intact.  Of course, and Emma Frost gets a couple of nice moments, but the story is utterly unsuited for the serial format in which Marvel have shipped it and in which the majority of people will probably read it.

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It’s Sunday afternoon, it’s time to review some comics!

But first… you’ll also be wanting to download this week’s episode of House to Astonish, which you’ll find in the next post down.  In this one, Al and I talk about Brightest Day, Kill Shakespeare and Turf.  And for those of you who don’t listen all the way to the end, keep an eye out over the next few days when Al and I appear on the next episode of The Thumbcast.  We’re doing a panel game based on the BBC radio show Fighting Talk.  (Only not about sport, obviously.)  Should be fun.  We’re recording it on Tuesday, so we’ll let you know when it’s up.  Or you could just subscribe to their podcast too.  I do.

Next week… well, god knows, really.  Theoretically there’s a whole lot of comics out (including two chapters of “Second Coming”, just to prove that Marvel really are the worst schedulers imaginable), but given that Diamond are usually unable to get their heads round a bank holiday, I don’t see them overcoming a volcanic dust cloud.  So it may be an involuntary skip week next Sunday.  Time will tell.

And now, some comics that came out this last week…

Black Widow #1 – Just to prove that Marvel are nothing if not eternally optimistic, this is a new ongoing series for the perennial C-lister, presumably on the basis that she’s in the upcoming Iron Man movie.  Anyone seriously think that’s going to help it get past the year barrier?  No, me neither.  You know, if it were me, I’d take the “series of miniseries” route with these lower-tier characters.  It’s a vicious circle when you start cancelling books after five months, because then readers have even less faith in the next launch (and they’re right to do so).  Seems to me that if you call it a mini then you’re probably going to turn out to be right anyway, and you’ll restore some of the lustre of launching something as an Ongoing Series.

Anyway, the comic.  It’s by Marjorie Liu and Daniel Acuna, a decent creative team.  Despite the silly acres of cleavage on the cover, the interior art has no truck with such nonsense, which is reassuring.  It’s one of those stories where Natasha is attacked by baddies with a Mysterious Agenda, who cut something out of her and then leave her for the doctors to deal with.  And… actually that’s about the extent of the main plot, but Liu fills it out nicely with good supporting roles for the other Avengers (higher-profile characters who nonetheless don’t overshadow her), some neat interactions between Natasha and the other spy types, and a genuinely nasty, if rather implausible, surgery sequence.  Acuna’s art is a good match for the character, who goes well with slightly stylised visuals.  And it strikes a decent balance between using other Marvel Universe characters (to appeal to the Wednesday crowd) without letting them dominate the story (and thus alienating all those movie viewers who are theoretically supposed to be buying the book).  All told, it’s pretty good.  And even if it doesn’t survive for long as an ongoing series, I think it’ll manage to deliver an entertaining few issues with this story.

Brightest Day #0 – See also the podcast.  This is the opening issue of DC’s next universe-spanning thingy, running fortnightly for the next few months.  A bunch of characters were brought back from the dead at the end of Blackest Night; this series is, well, about them.  So it’s an ensemble cast, except the characters have seemingly nothing in common other than being brought back from the dead – it’s a motley crew ranging from the likes of the Martian Manhunter and Maxwell Lord down to Captain Boomerang and Hawk.  I can sort of see why they’ve billed this as issue #0 – it’s really about introducing the vast set of characters rather than kicking off the story proper – but it is essential reading and to all intents and purposes it’s issue #1.  Much depends here on whether Geoff Johns and Peter Tomasi ultimately have a good explanation for reviving this oddball selection of characters, since that’s the central mystery that has to drive this series.  Without that, it risks becoming an exercise in reversing unwanted continuity.  There’s also another possibility, which is that the series manages to do something interesting with the whole concept of how the different characters deal with their reincarnation, but that doesn’t exactly seem to be a priority here.  Fernando Pasarin’s art is lovely, and I thought this was basically fine as an intro issue.  Al wasn’t so sure, to put it mildly.

The Flash #1 – What, another Flash relaunch?  Do you think they’ll ever take the hint and put the poor guy on the back burner for a while to let interest build?  Probably not, unfortunately; it’s alien to DC’s entire way of thinking about their older characters.  So, here’s Geoff Johns and Francis Manapul to kick off another stab at breathing life back into the franchise.  Barry Allen returns to Central City (where everyone apparently thinks he’s been in witness protection or something), and picks up his old job as a forensic scientist.  Which, yes, is backwards… but it’s also a useful dual identity for plot purposes, so I’ve got no real problems with that.  And we’re also back to the old deal where everyone thinks Barry is gifted but incredibly slow, when of course we all know he’s… and so on and so forth.  All told, even as someone who’s not particularly familiar with the character’s history, it’s pretty clear that this is a case of a creative team hammering the reset button as hard as they can and hauling the character back to what they regard as a classic status quo.  The concession to the passage of time is that Central City has become darker and more disillusioned in Barry’s absence – DO YOU SEE THE SUBTLE METAPHOR? – and so presumably he’s going to be setting the world to rights a bit.  But okay, I guess. If you’re going to do the Silver Age throwback routine with anyone, the Flash is a fair choice – his powers lend himself to that sort of story, and he ought to be a shiny, happy hero of the old school.  I like the art; Manapul’s got a simple but expressive quality to his work, though it’s unfortunate that he’s chosen to interpret Barry as a square-jawed hero so traditional that, when he’s not in costume, he’s the least interesting thing on the page.  As for the story… well, it’s throwback city, like I say.  But that seems to be the mood of the industry right now, and to be honest, I don’t have enough investment in any later incarnation of the Flash to have a problem with Johns doing it in this book.  For what it is, which is a very old-fashioned superhero book with a slightly modernised sheen, it works quite well.  Whether that’s what you want is another matter.

Kill Shakespeare #1 – A miniseries written by Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col with art by Andy Belanger, in which a bunch of Shakespeare villains try to enlist Hamlet to, well, kill Shakespeare.  This has had some mixed reviews.  Al and I didn’t mind it; those who knows their Shakespeare say it’s missing the point of the characters.  But is it?  It’s hard to say; after all, the story has a couple of characters departing from the plot of Hamlet completely unprompted, so perhaps they’re not meant to act quite like the characters from the plays.  As I mentioned on the podcast, I have a theory that the characters who want to get rid of Shakespeare are united in being villains from the histories who weren’t actually quite so villainous in real life – Shakespeare had a tendency to take the politically safe option when it came to writing about historical figures who had gone out of favour.  A clearer problem is that the characters are decidedly two-dimensional compared to Shakespeare’s versions – though when you’re inviting comparisons to Hamlet, you’re setting the bar ridiculously high to start with.  It’s basically League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Shakespeare characters, though maybe not with the subtlety.  And as with Moore’s comic, the question lurking in the background is whether this is just a gimmicky idea, or whether there’s actually a point to be made about the plays.  It’s really too early to tell at this point; it could go either way.  Certainly a flawed comic, but for all that, I’m genuinely intrigued to see where the creators are going with this odd premise.

New Mutants #12 – Part 3 of the “Second Coming” crossover, and you guessed it, there’s more fighting.  In fairness, to preserve the idea that this is indeed an issue of New Mutants, the focus is on Cannonball and the others trying to hold off the Right and stop them from providing reinforcements to the other baddies.  And of course, that’s not the focal point of the overall story by any means.  But it does at least provide the New Mutants with a story of their own, instead of getting them submerged into the bigger picture.  Basically, though, there are still two threads here: everyone chasing after Cable and Hope, and the X-Men starting to realise that some of Scott’s decisions are a bit questionable.  It’s not a bad issue – there are some good moments with the New Mutants wavering about whether to obey Scott’s seemingly suicidal attack orders, and a couple of cute ideas such as the bad guys taking out Magik with a “weaponised ritual”.  And Ibrahim Roberson’s artwork is pretty good, though his backgrounds are rather generic.  The downside is that the story seems to have become completely detached from the real world, so that it’s all about people in costumes hitting one another; and it feels at this point like a diversion grafted on to the “Second Coming” story in order to shoehorn New Mutants into the plot and give it a sales boost.  Zeb Wells has written better issues than this, but hey, that’s crossovers for you.

The Pilgrim #1 – This is by Mark Ryan and Mike Grell, and apparently it’s a reprint of a web comic that I’ve never read.  It’s a rather frustrating read.  The central idea is quite fun: much of the issue introduces the Psimex Research Institute, in which the American military is testing people with psi-powers.  The good news is that these subjects actually do have psi-powers – but not very strong ones.  They’re meant to be an intelligence unit; in practice, they’re the thought-controllers of paranoid fantasies.  Combining that with bureaucratic budget arguments is a nice enough idea.  However, it’s topped and tailed with scenes of weird stuff in World War II and Afghanistan which are hard work to decipher.   It’s not even always clear which way your eye should go around double-page spreads.  The opening section seems to be intentionally cryptic, but the closing sequence just comes across as a mess.  There are some major clarity problems here, and I end up with the feeling that deciphering the story is going to be a major headache and more trouble than it’s worth.

The Unwritten #12 – Once again, Mike Carey throws in a single-issue story between arcs.  This one has art by Peter Gross, and it’s fantastic.  Pauly Bruckner is a bad, bad man.  He tried to take Wilson Taylor’s map, and ended up being condemned to the world of fiction. Specifically, he’s now a bunny in Eliza Mae Hertford’s Willowbank Tales, a sort of halfway house between Winnie the Pooh and Beatrix Potter.  And boy, he’s not happy about that.  In this issue, we join Mr Bun as he tries to escape life as a stuffed rabbit, while the other woodland folk try their best to help him fit in.  It’s a simple idea, it’s very funny, and it’s got a clever pay-off to boot.  Easily the best comic I’ve read in weeks, and worth picking up even if you have no interest in the wider series at all.  Simply excellent.

X-Factor Forever #2 – “For six years, writer Louise Simonson steered the course for Charles Xavier’s first class of X-Men in their adventures as X-Factor.  Now the legendary scribe returns to the mutants she made famous for their most daring adventure yet.”  Marvel Comics: never knowingly underhyped.

Now, that said, I liked Louise Simonson’s run on X-Factor, and for largely nostalgic reasons, I’m really quite enjoying this book, which harks back to a long-forgotten supporting cast and a long-abandoned interpretation of Apocalypse.  I suspect if I didn’t have that attachment to the source material, I’d be crawling up the walls at some of this stuff – it’s one of those comics where humanoid robots have “visual input sensors” instead of “eyes”, and where characters stay stuff like “Apocalypse?  Only he could be so diabolical as to combine the Master Mold and Hodge into a single being!”  In other words, it is, in some respects, rather crap.  But loveably so, and in an authentically late-eighties way.  And in its favour, it’s got a completely loopy robot for the heroes to fight, and there’s a jittery energy to Dan Panosian’s art which I genuinely like a lot.  I’m enjoying it; if you don’t remember the original, you might not.

X-Men Forever #21 – In this issue: a convoluted macguffin is explained!  Also, Claremont goes a little further into last issue’s big revelation that Iron Man is the bad guy.  A little disappointingly, he seems to be already setting up the idea that it’s all a feint and that he’s infiltrating them, or something to that effect.  That’s a shame, since I quite liked the idea of doing a story in X-Men Forever that was manifestly impossible in the real Marvel Universe, by gleefully wrecking the cast of another book.  In many ways, Iron Man’s ideally suited to be the well-intentioned anti-mutant superhero, particularly in his Civil War-era version.  Anyway, this is largely a set-up issue as everyone sits around delivering exposition to one another, in preparation for the climax of the first year.  But it’s building well enough, and the pay-off should be good fun.  A fortnightly book can get away with this sort of issue.  (Be honest: is there any book that wouldn’t be improved by a more frequent schedule?)

X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back #2 – I actually missed this when it came out, so let’s cover it now.  Issue #1 had a nice enough set-up, but this one just gets a bit confusing – is Blindfold with the others or not?  Are they in a dream or in the real San Francisco?  Yes, I realise that we’re meant to be asking ourselves what on earth is going on, but the plot here is so murky that it’s hard to get a sense of what exactly the drama is supposed to be.  I recall having similar issues with Kathryn Immonen’s Hellcat mini.  Maybe I’m just slow.  There are some good moments in here, and I really like Sara Pichelli’s art, which gives the characters a real sense of life, and provides a suitably off-kilter tone to Pixie’s scenes.  As a story, though, I’m not sure it works.