It’s a podcast weekend, so be sure to check one post down for the latest House to Astonish, which includes reviews of Pixie Strikes Back #1 (on which, more below), Human Target #1 and The Muppet Show#1.   But without further ado…

Amazing Spider-Man #620 – Notionally part of “The Gauntlet”, this is actually the concluding part of a Mysterio story by Dan Slott and Marcos Martin.  (Those “Gauntlet” tags really don’t seem to signify anything beyond the inclusion of a classic villain.)  I really liked the set-up for this story, with Mysterio inveigling his way into control of a Maggia family by simulating the return of the boss.  And there’s a rather good set piece in this issue with Spider-Man fighting baddies while holding his breath.  But the climax does turn out to be basically a big fight, which is a little disappointing, and I’m also not sure about the wisdom of demystifying Mysterio in the way that the issue does at the end.  All that said, it’s still a solid piece of writing, and the art from Martin (and colourist Javier Rodriguez) is truly excellent.  Visually, this is some of the best work being done in the superhero genre right now, and worth getting for that alone.

Batman & Robin #8 – As with the previous issue, this is a truly odd mix.  On the one hand, it’s a story with a major plot point about the body of Bruce Wayne.  On the other, it’s a tongue-in-cheek affair with Cockney and Geordie gimmick villains in a mock-Silver Age style.  Obviously Grant Morrison thinks that they blend just fine, and to be fair, it’s not as if anyone seriously thought that there wouldn’t be a plot about Bruce Wayne’s body at some point.  Still, it comes across as self-parodying rather than dramatic, and I’m not sure that was the idea.  It’s not that I have a problem with stories that I can’t take seriously – it’s that this issue has stuff which you’d have thought the creators would want me to take seriously, and that’s where it kind of loses me.

Dark X-Men #4 – The penultimate issue of Paul Cornell and Leonard Kirk’s increasingly thinly disguised Nate Grey relaunch.  And if you’d told me a few months ago that Paul Cornell would persuade me that I actually wanted to read a Nate Grey comic, I would have been sceptical.  To be fair, his version of Nate Grey doesn’t bear an enormous resemblance to the original, beyond the powers – he’s drawing more on the shortlived “mutant shaman” stuff from the very tail end of the series.  But even on that standard, this version of Nate is generally rather more likeable and rather more effective; an issue of him and Norman Osborn trying to outwit one another comes across pretty well.  Considering Norman’s chronic overexposure right now, I’m surprised at how effectively this is working.  As for the Dark X-Men, well, they’re rather getting marginalised in their own series at this point, but they’re still well-defined characters when they’re on the page.  So far, a better series than the premise might suggest.

Daytripper #3 – Curses, I seem to have missed issue #2 somewhere along the line.  I’ll have to order it up.  This is Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba’s series where each issue visits the lead character at a different point in his life.  I vaguely remember reading somewhere that each issue was supposed to be a specific day, although maybe I just got that from the title.  Regardless, this issue is a bit more flexible about its time frame.  Recently dumped after a seven-year relationship, Bras drifts around wondering how he’s going to start over, all of which builds to a brilliantly executed “seize the moment” sequence that wrongfoots the reader perfectly.  So far, a very impressive piece of work.

New Mutants #10 – Well, as promised, this issue does kind-of-sort-of reveal why Cyclops is keeping the New Mutants together as a team.  Now, the problem with this book is that so far it doesn’t really seem to be about anything in particular, other than reviving a 1980s comic for the sake of doing so.  Ten issues in, we finally get something more than that, but it’s not exactly a grand central theme.  Putting it very broadly, Wells is trying to re-connect to the idea that the New Mutants are the next generation of X-Men, but instead of being the trainee squad, this time they’re going to be groomed as the next generation of leaders.  This makes reasonable sense, and it’s fine as far as it goes, but I’m not sure it’s really a strong enough idea to build a series around.  But having said that, if you’re not too bothered about the lack of a big central theme, then this issue does have some nice character moments, and generally decent art.  It’s trying to make use of the broader X-books continuity to give itself a context.  And it’s got a thoroughly obscure villain from the late 1980s, which is always nice.  What’s here is perfectly good, it’s just missing a strong hook to make it a great story.

Phonogram: The Singles Club #7 – The final issue of the series is Kid With Knife’s story, and, well, he doesn’t intellectualise things.  Most of this is dialogue-free, as KWK gets high on listening to TV On The Radio, and then goes out on the town.  Really excellent work, this – rather than trying to explain the effect of music, it just shows it, dispensing with the dialogue because this isn’t an issue for smart one-liners.  And it goes without saying that McKelvie is able to carry off a silent issue admirably.  As for the back-up strips… well, more hit and miss than usual, to be honest.  But the Vikings are good.

S.W.O.R.D. #4 – Kieron Gillen’s other book of the week reaches its penultimate issue, as Abigail Brand sorts out some very confused alien invaders, and naturally Henry Gyrich screws everything up.  It’s a shame that this series hasn’t sold better (though a de facto Abigail Brand solo title was always going to be a tough sell), but at least it’s looking set to deliver a nice satisfying wrap-up with the next issue.   And it’s fun.  And it’s got stupid rocks in it.  That’ s enough to entertain me.

Uncanny X-Men: First Class #8 – Final issue of the miniseries, and it looks like the concept is being put to bed for a while after this – though I’m sure it’ll be back when the movie comes out.  The series has just completed a multiparter, but for some reason it’s rounding off by tacking on a single-issue Banshee story.  And of all the things to focus on, Scott Gray has decided to do a story about the leprechauns of Cassidy Keep.  Now, those leprechauns did indeed appear in a late-70s X-Men story… and yes, I suppose technically there is a gap in there to tell a story about how the leprechauns lived when their castle wasn’t being invaded by supervillains (which is effectively what this issue is doing, under the guise of a murder mystery).  It’s competently written, and the art’s quite decent.  But come on.  They’re the leprechauns of Cassidy Keep.  Does anyone really want to read a whole issue about them?

Unwritten #10 – Mike Carey and Peter Gross begin a new arc, “Jud Suss”.  It goes without saying that this series, about fictional characters crossing over into the real world, is largely interested in the power of fiction to influence reality.  The topic of propaganda has been touched on in an earlier issue about Rudyard Kipling, but here the book goes straight to the heart of the matter with the titular film, a Nazi-sponsored film version of a Lion Feuchtwanger novel which was, shall we, not altogether faithful to the source material.  There’s always a risk in using the Nazis, never exactly the most nuanced way of making a point, but Unwritten is the sort of genuinely cerebral series that can certainly avoid any impression of seeming gratuitous.  I’m still slightly unsure whether this was the best example Carey could have chosen, but I’ll see where he’s going with it.

X-Men Forever #17 – Now, I liked last issue’s cliffhanger, but I’m not so sure about this issue’s follow-up.  It seems to take the better part of an isue just to make the point that Something’s Gone Wrong Here, which was surely implicit in the previous issue’s cliffhanger.  I don’t think we really needed an extended “rescue people from a burning building” sequence to hammer it home further, and if anything, having Kurt still scaling walls without his powers just confuses it.  Unfortunately, I feel a bit like I’ve spent 22 pages watching Claremont undermining the effectiveness of the previous issue.

X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back #1 – Kathryn Immonen and Sara Pichelli, formerly of Runaways, are reunited on this Pixie miniseries.  Pixie’s one of those generic X-students who started off as a background character in New X-Men and has slowly ended up getting more and more screen time.  I’m still not quite sure she’s got the fanbase to justify a solo miniseries, but she’s a likeable enough character and serves the “girl next door” role plausibly enough.  The plot: Pixie, Blindfold, X-23, Armor and Mercury are inexplicably all normal schoolgirls in a normal school, and obviously that’s not right.  Cue weirdness, and what looks like an attempt to complicate Pixie’s back story.  The plot gimmick is nothing new, but it’s done well, and the art is gorgeous.  Most importantly, though, it’s an X-Men spin-off mini that feels like it has its own voice (or at least, like its creators do).  It’s different, and that stops it feeling like just another schedule-filler.

It’s a quiet week for the X-books, for a change.  Just the three of them – Cable, Wolverine: Weapon X and one of those inexplicable Wolverine one-shots that keeps on coming for some reason.  (And seriously, what’s the deal with those things?  How many Wolverine fill-ins could anyone actually want in their collection?)  Fortunately, there’s a fair amount of other stuff out too, so…

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Eight #32 – This is the first part of “Twilight”, the storyline where we find out who the eponymous villain actually is.  Or at least, that’s the theory.  This is clearly meant to be a major storyline for the series, and they’ve brought in a big name writer accordingly, in Brad Meltzer.  A weirder aspect is Dark Horse’s promotional campaign, which has already given away the ending – something that would have been a major surprise for a number of reasons.  I suppose the idea was that lapsed readers would go out and buy the arc to find out how said revelation could possibly work.  Anyway, after the last arc, Buffy has got full-blown superpowers, and Twilight is her arch-enemy in a supervillain mask.  The Buffy cast being basically geeks, much of this first issue is given over to them testing her powers against Superman cliches, which is actually quite funny.  More generally, I’m not entirely sold on the direction here.  It certainly looks as if we’re going to get some sort of riff on superhero cliches, but I don’t quite see why that fits in this particular series.  I admit that I’m curious to see where all this can be heading, but I suspect that’s more to do with the spoilers than with in this issue (which, by the way, still hasn’t actually reached the big revelation).  As an issue in its own right, it’s fine – Meltzer has the voices of the characters down, and there’s a cute Kitty Pryde gag – but the “comic book” stuff can’t help but feel a little out of place and forced.

Cable #23 – Well, we’re in the home straight now.  Just two issues to go before Cable and Hope get back to the present and the book ends.  The set-up of this arc is that they’ve finally got hold of a time machine that can go backwards, but it’s a bit erratic and they’re bouncing back and forth either side of the present as they try and zero in on it.  So we get scenes of them in the increasing recent past, interspersed with scenes in the decreasingly distant future as they make their way back through the last two years of stories, culminating this issue with a coda to the first arc.  Structurally, it’s quite clever – while it’s been a bit of a slog to get to this point, I do like the way that the pace has picked up, and the past/future stuff gives the feel of a series collapsing in on itself.  And there’s a lovely scene based on the idea that Hope has literally no clue how to drive.  (“Straight?  What’s straight on this circle thing?”)  On the other hand, the New York of 2044 was a fairly generic dystopia the first time round, and that hasn’t really changed; that’s fine so long as it’s just a backdrop for Cable and Hope, but bringing back Sophie Pettit from the first arc doesn’t really have the weight it should.  The art’s a bit bland too, though it gets the point across, and there are some nicely atmospheric panels during the car chase.  Still, this arc has some momentum, which is the main thing that Cable has been missing over the last couple of years.

Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love #4 – Much as I love Shawn McManus’ art, and it’s excellent here, this series isn’t really clicking for me.  The basic gimmick – Cinderella as a Fabletown secret agent – kind of gets lost, because the character really doesn’t have that much in common with the fairytale Cinderella, or at least that all gets overshadowed by the James Bond riff.  Then we have a plot based on the harem members from the Arab fables spontaneously developing radical feminism after a brief trip to New York.  There’s an interesting idea in there somewhere; you could do something about cross-cultural influences and so forth.  But it’s played on such a simplistic level that it really falls flat; it comes across as one of those clumsy stories where everyone deep down really wants to be American and realises it when they set foot in Manhattan, and that doesn’t work.

Criminal: The Sinners #4 – Criminal is one of those books which is terribly difficult to review because it’s consistently excellent, but it’s consistently excellent in the same way that all the previous issues were consistently excellent.  And that makes it hard to find anything in particular to seize on in an individual issue, which in turn means that you end up giving the same list of the book’s good qualities every month – that it’s a superlative noir book told with great economy and style from two creators who know how to make every element count.

Doom Patrol #7 – Um… well, this is a story where a bunch of characters from previous incarnations of the Doom Patrol, some of them completely unrelated, show up in subplots, apparently because Keith Giffen is about to embark on some grand project to try and tie together all the versions of the Doom Patrol.  Which is fine if you’re a Doom Patrol continuity wonk, and, like I said last month, to some extent the team’s history is such a mess that it really needs a bit of explaining.  But actually trying to make that the centre of your book and lay claim to all the conflicting Doom Patrols as a single heritage is tricky; there’s a risk of trying to find a common thread that simply isn’t there, or complicating the premise unnecessarily.  It’s not like there was ever a grand plan behind the disparate versions of the Doom Patrol, beyond keeping a trademarked name alive, and this issue doesn’t really convince me that the subject offers fertile ground.  This issue also has the final Metal Men back-up strip, which seems to be racing to reach some sort of conclusion, and isn’t entirely satisfactory.  A sixteen-panel opening page is a bit of a giveaway, though in fairness they’re buying space for a couple of splash pages later on, and the creators are good enough to pull off this sort of highly condensed grid page.  It’s fine as a story in its own right, but it’s not a finale (and, to be honest, doesn’t really read like it was intended to be – why introduce a new supporting character now?).

Echo #19 – In this issue, guns.  Also, rainfall.  After the big infodump a couple of issues back, the series has returned its focus to the cast being hunted down by mad and dangerous people, and also by slightly less mad but still quite dangerous people.  But scenes like this show why Terry Moore is a cut above most storytellers; he has the subtlety of body language and pacing to make almost anything visually interesting, even if it’s just four silent panels of somebody drawing a gun and then walking into a convenience store.  It’s the mastery of detail that makes this sort of sequence feel like a good use of space; lesser artists can’t pull this stuff off.  And this is one of the reasons why I like Echo despite its admittedly rather daft conspiracy plot; it’s a monthly reminder of what can be done in an 18-page monthly thriller comic.

The Great Ten #4 – Tony Bedard and Scott McDaniel have set themselves a difficult task with the format for this series about the DC Universe’s official Chinese superheroes.  There’s an over-reaching storyline about China coming under attack from guys claiming to be Chinese gods, and the Great Ten being sent to stop them.  But each issue is also meant to be focussed on a seperate member of the team – some of them loyal party functionaries, some of them basically decent types trying to do their job and keep out of politics, a couple of potential dissidents.  Presumably the idea is that the series should give us a whole range of modern Chinese characters and (like its villains) explore the variety that exists below the Communist veneer.  But it also means that you get issues like this, where the Immortal Man-in-Darkness relates his origin story – or, really, just explains his gimmick – and then fires a few missiles at a baddie.  Mind you, it does look beautiful.

Siege #2 – There are all sorts of problems with this comic.  Norman Osborn is hopelessly undermotivated.  The plot point about him invading Asgard without authority seems to have been completely dropped, so apparently we’re meant to believe that everybody was too embarrassed to try and countermand his orders.  And while the Dark Avengers managed to take out Thor last issue, this time they are sorely vexed by Maria Hill, because this time the plot requires them to lose.  Actually, that pretty much sums up my problem with Brian Bendis’ plotting; he needs the plot to get from A to B, and that’s fine, but he tends to gloss over the internal logic needed to get there.  (For example, if the plot calls for Maria to rescue Thor from the Dark Avengers, at least have her outwit them or take advantage of their internal squabbling or something.  Don’t just have her charge them with a bazooka.) That said, though, this is something of a guilty pleasure.  The art’s great.  Writing Asgardians keeps Bendis away from his usual dialogue tics.  I’m glad that the story seems to be focussing on the (real) Avengers and Nick Fury rather than bringing in the entire Marvel Universe.  And the bit with Sentry and Ares is certainly unexpected, even if it’s one of the less successful moments art-wise, and even if I hope it doesn’t stick.  There are some really good moments in this book; I just wish the structure holding them together was a bit stronger.

Sweet Tooth #6 – Beginning a second storyline, as Gus settles in to his new “home”, and flashbacks finally fill us in on the background of Tommy Jeppard – a washed-up ice hockey player who finds himself cast in the role of antihero in Sweet Tooth‘s post-apocalypse because there’s literally nobody else left.  There’s a fairly obvious direction for this character to go in (especially since it’s a pretty safe bet that he has to be reunited with Gus at some point), but that’s fine; this book works on atmosphere and on having believable characters in extraordinary circumstances, not because it’s particularly unpredictable.  Jeff Lemire’s sketchy, slightly twisted artwork seems a little less at home in the pre-apocalypse flashback sequences, but it’s perfect for the main story with its battered and damaged characters.

Wolverine: Savage – This would be the random Wolverine one-shot I mentioned at the start.  Just in case anyone hasn’t figured out yet that these are essentially Generic Wolverine, the thoroughly generic cover should help to bring the point home.  It’s by J Scott Campbell, but in fairness to him, I’d guess this is probably what Marvel asked for.  The actual story is an all-ages piece by Ryan Dunlavey and Richard Elson, in which Wolverine fights giant monsters to help rescue a missing sushi chef.  Which is certainly different.  And actually, it makes a pleasant change for one of these stories to just be a tongue-in-cheek superhero piece, since most of them seem to go for noir.  Perhaps because it isn’t trying to hard to fit an established genre, this has a lot more individuality.  Elson does a rather hefty Wolverine, but there’s some nice detail in there, and a particularly nice fish-chopping sequence.  Colourist Veronica Gandini gives the book a nice, bright look too.  It’s still ultimately a Wolverine fill-in story, but anyone mourning the demise of Wolverine: First Class might enjoy this.

Wolverine: Weapon X #10 – A self-contained issue, as Wolverine tries to figure out whether Melita Garner is technically his girlfriend or not, and gets advice from the likes of Jubilee and Rogue on the issue.  It’s a fun story, simply because it gets to spend an issue having Wolverine try to dodge the topic.  I’m not so sold on CP Smith’s art.  This guy’s been around for a while, and his sickly colours and stylised panels are certainly inventive.  I’m just not altogether sure they add to the story.  His characters are rather stiff, and some of his tricksier panels are just distracting.  It’s most notable with the scene at Mariko’s memorial, which suddenly throws in a panel of Melita looking sultry in extreme mock-Warhol close-up, completely at odds with the rest of the scene and with her dialogue in that panel.  To be fair, a scene with Melita and Emma Frost meeting in a corridor at night is better (and it’s the only version of Utopia I’ve seen that actually makes it feel like something recently unearthed from the bottom of the ocean).  But I still find his art more intriguing than enjoyable.

Look below, loyal readers, for this week’s podcast, and also for Al’s appeal to save S.W.O.R.D..  Well, Al’s appeal for you to help somebody else’s appeal to save S.W.O.R.D..  Good book.

Anyway, I may have some unread books still in my pile, but it’s Sunday night and time to run through the books I have read…

Amazing Spider-Man #617 – We talked about this on the podcast.  It’s a self-contained issue written by Joe Kelly, focussing on the Rhino.  It’s also part of this “Gauntlet” storyline, although so far that’s really just a slow build in the background.  The basic idea is that there’s a new cyborg Rhino around, and for some reason he wants to fight the original Rhino to earn the name.  But the original Rhino has retired and just wants to be left in peace.  It’s flawed – the new Rhino is a sketchy character whose motivations might politely be described as arbitary – but nonetheless it works, because Kelly has a great take on the original Rhino as a peaceful retired villain who just wants to be left alone.  Good art by Max Fiumara, and there’s also a nice back-up strip fleshing out the Rhino’s reformation.

Black Widow: Deadly Origin #3 – This may be a Paul Cornell miniseries, but it’s very much one for the continuity freaks.  To be fair, he’s trying to sort out Natasha’s convoluted continuity by drawing all the disparate strands together into a single coherent interpretation of the character, and that’s fair enough in theory.  But it makes for a rather haphazard story, and the central nanotech plot device is terribly implausible.  I’m not wild about Tom Raney’s art on this issue either, though the flashback scenes by John Paul Leon are great.  I have to wonder whether there’s much point in doing this sort of story in modern Marvel.  Ten to twenty years ago, if they’d done a series like this, it would at least have redefined the character in a way that would have been applied by other writers going forward.  In 2010, I work on the assumption that most stories will just be ignored by the next writer, which makes continuity unscrambling a thankless task at best.  Besides, I’m frankly not that interested in the minutiae of the Black Widow’s back story; wouldn’t it have been quicker just to sweep most of it under the carpet, rather than sift through it on the page?

Dark X-Men #3 – This week’s other, much better Paul Cornell book.  Despite the name, this is basically a Nate Grey miniseries, and it’s turning out to be surprisingly good.  Like every other Marvel hero these days, Nate fights the Dark Avengers, and amazingly, it turns out to be quite entertaining.  Meanwhile, Norman Osborn’s reluctant ersatz X-Men try to figure out whether they can really be bothered getting involved.  Unlike the overly fussy Black Widow story, this is just a high-energy romp taking advantage of the characters’ over-the-top nature.  And there’s great work on the art by Leonrard Kirk, who goes for the big, bold approach that something like this requires.

Nation X #2 – Another anthology of short stories with peripheral X-Men characters.  Theoretically the linking theme is meant to be the X-Men’s relocation to the island “nation” of Utopia, but actually, only one of the stories is really interested in that – a Jubilee story by C B Cebulski, Jim McCann, Mike Choi and Sonia Oback, which gets some decent material out of the depowered mutant watching from the shore and feeling isolated.  John Barber and David Lopez do a fun piece with Martha Johanssen, of all people – yes, the brain in the jar – which could have been set anywhere, but bounces along nicely.  Tim Fish’s Northstar story is a visit from his boyfriend, but it’s really just the old “we live in different worlds” schtick – done well enough, but nothing new.  And Becky Cloonan turns in a Gambit short which is surprisingly keen to tie in to the character’s current continuity.  It’s really the familiar idea of Gambit brooding over whether he deserves to be with the X-Men, but hey, he’s Gambit, and that’s what he does.  An above average issue, and if Marvel are going to keep churning out these X-Men anthologies, it’s good to see that at least they’re being used as a vehicle to include stories with more of an indie sensibility.

Psylocke #3 – This is another of those “re-stating the character” minis.  And to be fair, Psylocke probably needs one.  She’s become hopelessly confused over the years, and to his credit, Chris Yost is trying to cut through the morass of continuity to focus on what defines her now.  Actually, this series is doing a lot of the right things in theory.  It’s zeroed in on a relatively simple villain from her back story in Matsu’o Tsurayaba, the crimelord who was involved in screwing up her identity in the first place.  And it’s got a story which is actually about Psylocke’s character: she goes after him for revenge because she’s looking for closure, she ends up playing the hero and protecting him from somebody else, and she wonders why she’s doing all this.  All fundamentally sound, albeit that the plot’s a bit contrived.  The big problem so far is that Psylocke herself is a character badly damaged by years of chronic misuse, and thus far she remains rather hard to get a grip on.  It’s tough to identify with her.  Mind you, her ill-defined character is precisely what Yost is writing about, so perhaps everything will fall into place with next month’s concluding chapter.  The other problem is the art, which is way too busy and confused.  In fairness, it’s got a lot of energy, but it doesn’t read very well.

S.W.O.R.D. #3 – Henry Gyrich has seized control of the organisation, Abigail Brand is on her way out, and it’s up to the Beast to sort things out.  And dare I say it, there are plot problems here – if Beast’s a guest of Abigail, and Abigail’s out of power, why is he being allowed to wander around unsupervised?  But leaving that aside, it’s another good issue.  Unit gives us his origin story, which is interesting; Death’s Head is in it again; and the art is growing on me, though Hank still looks like a donkey.  Unfortunately, the series looks like it may not be long for this world.

Uncanny X-Men: First Class #7 – The conclusion of the “Knights of Hykon” storyline, and by this point I’m really confused about who the audience are meant to be.  The Knights themselves are a good solid story for new readers – credible bad guys, with a decent motivation, and they get beaten in a reasonably clever way.  But then there’s also an attempt to tie the whole thing into the Phoenix storyline, and I’d have thought that if you were aiming for new readers, you’d want to steer well clear of that whole quagmire.  The basic idea is that the Knights are peripherally responsible for the sun flares in Phoenix’s origin story, and so they’re indirectly to blame for Jean becoming Phoenix.  Scott blames them for messing up his beloved; Jean is a bit put out that he thinks about it that way.  Now, this isn’t a bad idea in theory.  But First Class is a continuity-implant series set somewhere among the late-70s Uncanny X-Men stories.  And this doesn’t feel like the sort of story you can do as a continuity implant, because the tensions in question were eventually dealt with properly in Uncanny itself, so First Class is setting up a storyline that it logically can’t finish.  I’m a bit confused about that.  Still, leaving that aside, this is a basic but enjoyable piece of traditional superheroics.

Unwritten #9 – The concluding part of “Inside Man”, as everything in the jail builds to the obligatory climax.  In some ways Unwritten is the sort of book that’s most interesting when it’s dealing slowly with its ideas rather than doing the big plot resolutions, but it also knows better than to become a purely cerebral and theoretical exercise in metafiction.  This is a good read, and Carey’s done a good job making the pay-off unexpected.  Tommy Taylor is a fairly transparent Harry Potter stand-in; the story plays off the tension of taking the elements of his mythos and putting them in a plot for which they’re wholly unsuited.  But Unwritten makes that tension dramatic rather than merely gimmicky, and that’s what makes it a superior comic.

X-Men Forever #15 – This issue, we catch up with Storm, who you might recall turned out to be a baddie a few months ago.  Since we last saw her, she’s usurped the throne of Wakanda.  X-Men Forever is theoretically meant to be the stories that Chris Claremont would have told if he hadn’t left the X-Men in 1991, but I seriously doubt that he’d have taken the character in this direction.  For all that Marvel protested otherwise, the short-lived childhood romance between Storm and the Black Panther was an obscure footnote in X-Men history until a couple of years back when Marvel decided to retroactively declare them lifelong lovers, but it’s a central element of this story.  Still, the quality of the stories is more important than whether the book strictly adheres to its gimmick, and Claremont is back on form here after the rather shaky “Black Magik” arc, while Tom Grummett’s artwork is excellent throughout.

X-Men Origins: Cyclops – One of those odd stories that’s kind of following continuity and kind of isn’t.  So we’ve got the bit where Scott and Alex parachute from the burning plane, but not the bit where he uses his powers to break their fall.  We’ve got a framing scene lifted from an early issue of X-Men (the one where Xavier shows Cerebro to Scott for the first time), but a complete dumping of Mr Sinister and the Living Diamond.  And we’ve got a re-write of Scott’s first meeting with Magneto, designed to let him confront Magneto alone.  The object of all this seems to be to strip out irrelevant junk from Scott’s history, and retroactively position him as the future leader who’ll take his own line rather than meekly following Xavier.  If you don’t mind the total disregard for established continuity – and to be honest, many of the changes are for the better, at least if you have Scott’s current role in mind – it’s actually not bad, and Jesse Delperdang’s art is good, clear, strong work.  But readers who know Scott’s background already are unlikely to find anything particularly revelatory here.

This is going to be a short one, because for various reasons I haven’t had time to read all this week’s books.  (Most of them are mid-storyline anyway, although there’s always Silver Streak Comics #24 from Erik Larsen’s Next Issue Project, which is probably going to be interesting if nothing else.)  So, I’m just going to run through this week’s X-books… all seven of them. 

Astonishing X-Men #33 – We’ve reached part three of this storyline, and for once Astonishing X-Men is actually sticking to a monthly schedule.  Mind you, this issue has Phil Jimenez’ contribution downgrade to breakdowns, so I wouldn’t put money on them keeping it up for the rest of the storyline.  Andy Lanning is doing the finished art, and although the results aren’t quite as polished, it looks fine.  Last issue, you may recall, we discovered that the villain was a mysterious baddy who was reanimating dead mutants to use as weapons.  Now, this isn’t quite the same concept as the current “Necrosha-X” crossover over in X-Force, Legacy and New Mutants, but it’s close enough to be a bit awkward.  Anyhow, in this issue, we discover that said baddy is called Kaga, and has a hidden base somewhere.  So the X-Men fight another of his monsters, and then sneak aboard his ship… and, uh, that’s about it.  It’s light on plot, then, and to be honest it’s fairly light on ideas too, so it stands and falls on whether it’s got cool fight scenes – which it does, for the most part.  At least, it’s got enough to avoid feeling sluggish, even though the plot only inches forward.  Even so, if Astonishing X-Men is meant to be the book where creators can tell their own X-Men stories without having the hassle of worrying about wider continuity, you’d hope it would be doing something a bit more distinctive.

Cable #21 – I swear, this book teeters on self-parody sometimes.  We all know the formula by now: Cable and Hope arrive somewhere new, Bishop follows, Bishop tries to kill Hope, Cable and Hope escape yet again… repeat until dead.  Now, last issue ended with Cable and Hope escaping a starship in life support pods, with Bishop pursuing in a space whale.  As you do.  That allows our heroes to spend another couple of years in suspended animation, and so at long last, it’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for: Hope reaches adolescence, and gets her powers.  (They’re the ones you’d expect.)  So, they crashland on Earth, and Bishop shows up again… and this time they beat him!  Which, frankly, after all this build-up, is incredibly anticlimactic – especially so when it then turns out that they can just take his time machine and use it to go home.  If it’s that simple, might it not have been a good idea to set this up as a goal about eighteen months ago?  But never mind… they’re finally going home.  And guess what?  They overshoot, they land in the past, and Bishop gets swept along so that they can do the whole sodding routine one last time.  Now, okay, granted, this goes some way to neutralising the anticlimax of beating him so quickly earlier in the issue.  But god, how many times do we have to see this comic recycle the same plot?  Answer: until the other books are ready for the “Second Coming” crossover.

Oh, and by the way, if Cable and Hope really do arrive in “New Amsterdam, 1614”, as the story claims, then that’s a bit odd, since the town wasn’t founded for another decade.  They’re probably thinking of the founding of the New Netherland colony, which did take place in 1614, but that’s Albany.  To be fair, the art does show a forest, but if that was the idea, shouldn’t the caption just say “Manhattan”?

Dark Wolverine #81 – Moonstone (sorry, “Ms Marvel”) has a nice long chat with Daken and tries to psychoanalyse him.  On the plus side, it’s certainly better than the last arc, which came across as filler.  Giuseppe Camuncoli returns on art, and it’s good, striking stuff – he knows how to make an extended conversation into something visual.  It’s also a story which tries to get some mileage out of Moonstone’s psychiatric background, with the idea that she sees him as an interesting case study.  And for a pleasant change, the story plays down Karla’s manipulative side in favour of the idea that she was basically a legitimate psychiatrist (or at least, that’s how she sees herself).  On the other hand… the pay-off comes down to saying that Daken isn’t as complex as he seems, and that underneath all the charm, he’s basically just a psychopath.  Why would you want to tell that story?  It’s basically an issue devoted to telling the readers that the lead character is much less interesting and much more shallow than he appears.  And… this is good, why?

Uncanny X-Men: First Class #6 – More retro superheroics, with the seventies X-Men still fighting the all-powerful cosmic weirdos, the Knights of Hykon.  The character designs are great – they look unique, but there’s a common theme that makes them look connected.  And the story does a decent job of setting them up as A-list villains, which isn’t always easy in a book like this.  When all is said and done, though, it’s still a straightforward and old-fashioned story, almost a throwback to Marvel’s house style of thirty years ago.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, if you see the First Class books as something intended for younger readers; a series like this has a good reason for being told in that style.  What sticks out a mile, though, is an attempt to retcon the origin of Phoenix, as if it wasn’t complicated enough already.  It’s a trivial retcon, adding an explanation for the solar flares from X-Men #100, but still, I don’t see what it adds, and in an area of X-Men history that already looks like a particularly cumbersome Heath Robinson device, I’d personally steer well clear unless there was some good reason for meddling with it.  And it seems especially incongruous if they’re going for younger readers.

X-Factor #200 – Jumping back to its original numbering.  It’s priced at five dollars, but for that you get 52 pages of story, plus a reprint of Madrox #1 and a bunch of Handbook profiles.  And it’s certainly the best of this week’s crop.  I question the decision to just relocate to New York between issues without offering any explanation, but at least it keeps the team separate from the rest of the X-books and lets them function as the X-team who still have a foothold in the mainstream Marvel Universe (given that the rest of the groups relocated to the west coast).  The main plot sees X-Factor being roped in to investigate weird goings-on with the Fantastic Four, but alongside that, there’s some great character-driven subplots, continuing the triangle with Madrox, Theresa and Layla.  And Peter David has finally hit on the right formula for writing Shatterstar, going back to the original premise that he was bred for show as much as anything.  A smug Shatterstar beating up higher-profile superheroes, posing, and yelling “Are you not entertained?!” just works.  Good issue.

X-Force #22 – Part of the “Necrosha-X” crossover.  And I’m starting to get a bit confused here.  Selene raises the population of Genosha from the dead, only to discover that most of them are still depowered – something which apparently comes as a surprise.  But… hold on, hasn’t Selene already raised a bunch of mutants from the dead?  If most of the dead were also de-powered on M-Day, then she’s been remarkably lucky in her choice of zombies, hasn’t she?  Actually, I suppose there might be a point to this.  So far, Selene’s only revived mutants we’ve heard of.  Most of the population of Genosha were anonymous no-names… so perhaps the idea is that M-Day really did have a disproportionately limited effect on characters associated with the X-Men.  Then again, I’m probably being too generous: that’s always been obviously true, yet very few characters have ever remarked on it, and they don’t start here.  That aside… yeah, fighting, and more fighting, and murky art, and more fighting.  And scheming among the villains, and then more fighting.  The last issue sparked my interest somewhat, with the idea of raising the Genoshans from the grave, but this doesn’t follow through.

X-Men: Legacy #230 – Rogue fights Emplate, part four.  Basically.  I mean, you’d struggle to say that this was a story about anything in particular – it’s simply Rogue getting to be a good old-fashioned hero by beating up a villain we haven’t seen in a while.  Not sure I’d have spent four issues on a story like this, but it is quite good fun.  Mike Carey writes an entertaining Emplate, as a character who’s either a terrifying weirdo or just a ridiculous poser, depending on your perspective.  And since the future direction of this title apparently involves Rogue as the mentor of the X-Men’s trainees, the story might also serve an important purpose by getting Bling! back into circulation, giving her some screen time, and setting up a relationship between her and Rogue.  But time will tell about that.

Less than a month to go before Christmas!  I really must get a tree.

Anyway, it’s been a busy few days, so this is going to be a fairly rushed round-up of the week’s releases – or rather, those of them I’ve actually read so far.

Beasts of Burden #3 – An issue for the cat lovers, as the group’s token feline the Orphan ventures into the sewers in search of the missing Dymphna (from… some earlier story or other).  And naturally, that means rats.  Hordes of them.  What’s really impressive about this series is the way that it’s taken a potentially cutesy concept and made it work.  On paper, a comic about talking pets fighting mystic evil in smalltown America sounds awfully twee.  But the book strikes a perfect balance between anthropomorphising the characters on the one hand, and on the other depicting them as regular animals, and steers clear of the obvious jokes that could be done with the concept – the human owners, for example, are more or less absent from the series.  The result is a truly charming modern fairy tale.

Chew #6 – The start of a second arc.  And now that we’ve firmly established the high concept – every time Tony Chu eats something, he learns about its entire history – the book smartly widens its focus rather than tryint to make that the centrepiece of this story.  The gross-out stuff is teased, only for the book to head off in a different direction.  Instead, this story sees Chu reunited with his former partner John Colby, the guy who took a knife to the head in issue #1.  Now he’s a mad cyborg.  Well, a cyborg, at any rate.  He might be joking about the mad bit.  Or he might not.  This issue is really about introducing Colby to the cast and throwing something new into the mix, with a couple of pages spent on a new long-term plot about very odd fruit.  Good start to the new arc, and it’s reassuring to see that the book isn’t going to be a one-trick pony doing variations on the same gimmick.

Dark Avengers: Ares #2 – In which Ares goes looking for his missing son Phobos, which is a plot from his other books.  But he ends up finding his other son Kyknos, the one you’ve probably never heard of.  This is a wonderfully over-the-top romp.  And it’s nice to see that, aside from acknowledging the fact that Ares works for the government right now, it doesn’t get caught up in all the Dark Reign stuff.  You might even say it’s more of a character piece for Ares, that character being mainly “if it moves, hit it harder until it stops.”  Actually, there’s a couple of nice moments which give him a bit more depth – Ares may be insane and have completely wonky priorities, but he isn’t completely oblivous to the interests of his troops.  Kieron Gillen does a nice job of making Ares as stark raving mad as usual while still allowing him the occasional glimmer of humanity, and Manuel Garcia is just having a great time drawing big mad guys smashing skeletons with axes.  Fun.

Dark Wolverine #80 – Concluding a three-parter, which I’ll try and do a full review for in due course.  Norman Osborn is trying to sort out his image problem by making Daken/Wolverine look appropriately heroic, and so he lines up some Z-list villains to beat.  And by Z-list, we’re talking Emmy Doolin, of all people.  (She’s an obscure Larry Hama character from Wolverine #45-46, back in 1991.)  And as seems to be the norm with this series, Daken ends up doing something which might be genuine heroism, or might just be cynical playing to the cameras.  This isn’t as strong as the previous arc, not least because there’s a major problem at the heart of the story: the supposedly incriminating footage of Daken/Wolverine beating up prisoners is utterly trivial compared to the sort of thing that we have to accept Norman could overcome in order for the “Dark Reign” storyline to happen in the first place.  There’s also a terribly vague ending sequence, which doesn’t work at all, mainly because I honestly can’t figure out what’s happening.  What the hell am I supposed to make of a splash page of a bullet lying in a bloodstained sink that hasn’t even appeared before in the scene?  If the idea is supposed to be that Emmy shot herself then they could hardly have done a worse job of making that clear.  If the idea is supposed to be anything else, then it didn’t even get within a mile of making the point.

Gotham City Sirens #6 – Hmm, I’m starting to lose patience with this book.  There’s a vaguely promising idea in here somewhere – confronting Harley Quinn with another rejected Joker sidekick, albeit one from a staggeringly obscure Silver Age story.  But the story feels a bit mechanical – trap, escape, trap, escape – and the rest of the cast don’t get much to do.  And what we’re left with is a story that’s trying to make some kind of point about the hang-ups of Harley Quinn, which are almost impossible to relate to.  So really, it comes down to making a point about the character, without that point actually having much wider interest…

New Mutants #7 – Because you demanded it – the return of Bevatron!  Yes, the X-Necrosha crossover continues as the New Mutants gets to fight the zombie Hellions.  Younger readers may not recall that the Hellions were the New Mutants’ opposite numbers back in the 1980s.  I always liked them – we never saw that much of them, but they were given enough individual identity to suggest that they would probably have made for a reasonably entertaining series in their own right.  And they had great team uniforms.  So yes, I’m quite happy to spend an issue seeing the New Mutants and the Hellions again – even if the zombie versions don’t seem to have much in the way of personality.  But the whole thing leaves me again with the nagging worry – who is this book actually aimed at, other than readers who well remember the original New Mutants stories from a quarter century ago?  And is that really enough to justify a whole ongoing series?

Uncanny X-Men #517 – It’s a fight scene.  Everyone fights Predator Xs for a whole issue.  Oh, and then, after a whole issue of telling us how awesomely powerful they are, it turns out that you can just shoot them.  In fact, the Atlanteans seem to be holding up perfectly well against one with spears…  So, it’s the sort of issue where the pay-off needs to be the heroes coming up with a really clever way of beating the invincible monsters.  And while we do get that with Rogue’s scene, generally it turns out that conventional weaponry does the job quite passably.  We have a problem here.  There’s also a subplot about the Phoenix force which comes completely out of the blue and leads to people standing around telling us how important this is, without really showing us why.  Not one of Matt Fraction’s better weeks.

Wolverine: First Class #21 – Once again, this is more of a Kitty Pryde story than a Wolverine one.  Wolverine’s gone mad and chases Kitty through the mansion, and if you can’t figure out where this one is heading, then you haven’t been reading comics very long.  Of course, in theory at least, the First Class books are aimed precisely at people who haven’t been reading comics very long, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  It’s a story you’ve probably seen many times before, but  Peter David and Scott Koblish do a solid rendition of it here.

X-Men Forever #12 – You know the deal by now – it’s good old fashioned Chris Claremont, with a main story interspersed with cutaways to the subplots.  The main point of this four-parter is evidently to get Magik back into circulation, as a guy called the Cossack kidnaps little Illyana and… well, turns her back into Magik, basically.  Solid work, and it certainly benefits from the pace of a fortnightly schedule.  Artist Tom Grummett is on particularly good form this issue.  I’m not altogether sold on his new Magik costume (seriously, what’s holding it in place?), but I do like his redesigns for Colossus an Gambit, and the first few pages have some lovely scene-setting.