Now this is a packed week, and no mistake.  Only three X-books, but they’re pretty important ones, and there’s a whole bunch of new titles as well.  Let’s get to it…

Avengers: The Children’s Crusade #1 – Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung are reunited for a nine-issue miniseries which, essentially, seems to be the long-delayed Young Avengers #13-21.  Young Avengers was a good team book that got off to a strong start and then disappeared off into scheduling hell while Marvel waited for Heinberg to become available for a second year… and waited… and waited.  Creatively this would usually be the right call, but with hindsight, Marvel would probably have been better cutting their losses and bringing on another writer to try and keep up the momentum.

Heaven only knows how long this one’s been in the pipeline.  There’s even an editorial note on the credits page explaining that some of the characters are in the wrong costumes “because work began on this series many months ago”.  In fact, the Avengers in this issue include Captain America, Iron Man and Ms Marvel, which I believe takes us back to the pre-Civil War status quo.  Come to think of it, this might explain why nobody in the X-books has had the obvious thought of hunting down the Scarlet Witch and persuading her to change things back: it’s the plot of this series, which presumably means it’s been off limits to other writers for years, no matter how pressing the need for somebody to do the story.

Anyway.  What’s it like?  Well, it’s like Young Avengers, obviously.  Not much has changed.  But I liked Young Avengers, when it came out.  It’s a fun, traditional superhero team book, with strongly defined characters, and making good use of Marvel history without degenerating into a flurry of continuity references.  It’s a nice little team book.  The story here is that the Avengers have figured out that Wiccan, the sorcerer who might or might not be linked to the Scarlet Witch, might also share her propensity to go mad, kill everything in sight, and screw up the world.  So, um, how would he feel about some particularly close mentoring?  Well, he’s not too enthusiastic, and he’s especially annoyed about the fact that everyone thinks his mother’s a deranged supervillain.

It’s a good story idea – there’s a good human angle in there, among all the epic stuff.  And the art’s excellent.  It’s just a shame it’s taken so long to appear, since as I say, the X-books really needed to close off this idea a couple of years ago for the sake of their own stories.

Casanova #1 – Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba’s breakout series, now being reprinted under Marvel’s Icon series.  Actually, they’re doing more than just reprinting it – the colouring and lettering have been redone, and they’ve dumped the “slimline” format (best known from Fell) as well.  Oh, and they’ve thrown in a back-up strip too.

Now, Casanova was very much an internet favourite, but I’ve never actually read it before.  It certainly hits the ground running, starting off as if it was joining an established series in progress.  Casanova Quinn is a professional dashing criminal; his dad is the director of EMPIRE, a SHIELD-type organisation; and his twin sister is their star agent.  From there, move quickly on to outrageously convoluted stories about parallel worlds.  And I can see why it’s so popular – it’s got a sort of freewheeling Silver Age lunacy without being an outright pastiche, the dialogue is often hilarious, the art is excellent.

Does it work as a story, as opposed to a string of cool ideas?  Well, mmm.  The hectic pace doesn’t give the characters much room to breathe, but that might be a hangover of the original 16-page format as much as anything else.  And it’s probably a smart move to kick off by hurling ideas at the reader and leave anything more reflective for down the line.  You certainly couldn’t accuse this one of lacking content.  Besides, what’s wrong with a string of cool ideas?

The Great Ten #9 – The final issue of the truncated miniseries, which is a bit of a problem for Tony Bedard and Scott McDaniel, since the structure of the story is to focus on a different team member every issue.  And, um, there are ten of them.  Socialist Red Guardsman draws the short straw, relegated to a supporting role in an issue dedicated to Mother of Champions.  Somewhere near the end, you can pretty much see the point where all involved threw up their hands in despair and reached for the Big Book of How To Wrap Up A Series in Three Pages – Bedard takes it up to the big character beat where the Great Ten and the Taiwanese team agree to work together, and then just stops, apparently on the basis that we can take the ensuing fight scene as read.  It’s, um, not an altogether satisfactory solution, but probably the best one in the circumstances, preserving as much of the content as possible and jettisoning the formula stuff that we all knew was coming.  Even in this heavily compromised form, it’s still actually quite good stuff, but it’s a shame DC wasn’t willing to give it one more issue to complete.

Scarlet #1 – The new Icon series from Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev.  Odd one, this.  Scarlet is a woman who’s, well, disillusioned with the state of the world, I guess, and she’s a vigilante.  She seems to be slightly mad, and she’s got an origin story (which I won’t spoil since it makes up most of this issue’s plot) which isn’t altogether plausible, but then it might well turn out not to be altogether true.  The gimmick is that she breaks the fourth wall, and most of this first issue is given over to Scarlet delivering an extended monologue to the readers.  There’s clearly more to it than that, since Scarlet makes it abundantly clear that she’s not just addressing the readers, she intends to enlist them for something or other.  It looks fantastic, and Maleev is a subtle enough artist to pull off an issue which requires some acting if it’s going to work.  The first issue is ultimately a fairly standard urban vigilante set-up with a first person narrator (albeit with a slight twist of being in vision), but there are hints of something more unusual, and a more drastic use of the fourth-wall device, to come.  Too early to tell, really, but there’s certainly some promise here.

Shadowland #1 – This is the lynchpin miniseries for a crossover spinning out of the current Daredevil storyline, and using some of Marvel’s street level heroes.  If you haven’t been reading Daredevil, well, the idea is that Matt has finally given up on trying to have a normal life, and instead he’s taken up an offer to lead the Hand, hoping that he can turn the lunatic ninja death cult into a sort of Neighbourhood Watch programme with swords.  (They should have signs: “This neighbourhood is patrolled by ninjas.”)  Now – and I may have missed this issue – he’s set up a bloody great prison in Hell’s Kitchen, and the other superheroes are looking at him nervously, because heaven knows it wouldn’t be the first time he’s gone off the deep end.  Needless to say, the idea is that forces within the Hand are trying to corrupt him, so it’s basically a battle for Daredevil’s soul.  Considering that most recent issues of Daredevil have had a fairly muted tone, it’s a bit jarring to see the story suddenly sprout guest appearances by the Avengers and art by Billy Tan, none of which quite seems to fit.  (Besides which, Tan’s Avengers pages aren’t that good, even though they were chosen for the preview – lots of static characters in empty rooms.)  Still, the issue does get across the key idea here, that either Daredevil has a fiendishly clever plan, or he’s completely lost his mind, and we’re honestly not sure which.  I’m enjoying that story, and Daredevil’s scenes are the best part of this issue.  Expanding it to a wider set of characters without damaging the atmosphere may prove to be more of a challenge.

X-Force #13 – This is the penultimate chapter of “Second Coming”, but it’s really the end of the Bastion storyline.  With his big, needless complicated, Sentinels-from-the-future plan foiled, Bastion tries to kill off the X-Men in person.  And, having caused all manner of chaos that the X-Men cleared up for her, Hope finally gets to step forward and use those powers we’ve been waiting for.  I was wondering whether the second half of this storyline gave Hope enough to do, but on balance, I think they probably got it right – if this is heading where it seems to be heading, then Hope’s importance doesn’t lie in defeating the villains of the week, but in setting up the next batch of storylines.  So by all means, let’s have the X-Men be the main heroes and stave off annihilation one last time, instead of having Hope wave her hands and cosmic it all away.  The stimulus for all this, by the way, is that the issue kills off Cable, who sacrifices himself to get X-Force back from the future – and unlike the death of Nightcrawler earlier in the arc, which I still think was a bit cheap, this actually does feel earned, because Cable’s a character who’s completed his mission and is now ready to be removed from the board with dignity.  And the scene is well drawn by Choi and Oback, too.  The second half of the book largely consists of extremely strong hints that she’s Phoenix, and slightly subtler hints that she’s a reincarnation of Jean Grey (there’s a very nice moment where, without spelling it out, we can see the penny dropping for Emma that her position with Scott is under threat).  That leaves the closing chapter to deal with the big question of What Now?  And yes, they’ve kind of slightly given that away in the teasers at the end of X-Men #1 this week, but not really.  I liked this issue – it needed to get across the sense that things are finally turning around and looking up, and it did that.

X-Men #1 – Meanwhile, without waiting for the end of “Second Coming”, here’s the new ongoing X-Men title, and the second part of “Curse of the Mutants”, something which still sounds like it was conjured up by a merchandising guy who’d read a report about Twilight.  Now, as I said last week, I quite liked Victor Gischler’s prologue story in the Death of Dracula one-shot.  The undead politicking was a good read.  I’m less enthused about this issue, in which vampire suicide bombers start showing up in San Francisco and it looks like we’re doing some sort of undead plague angle (which, I guess, allows you to vamp some of the X-Men without it being permanent, but kind of gives the game away too).  The vampire leaders who were interesting characters in the one-shot are barely in this one, which instead does everything from the X-Men’s perspective, the idea being that they assume Dracula must be behind it all.  Which makes sense, but I’m not sure I see how getting the wrong vampire leader would actually make much of a difference to them.

So, not much in the way of scheming villains.  What we do get is an entirely solid superhero story where the X-Men go after some baddies.  Gischler’s got the characters’ voices down, and Paco Medina’s art is quite attractive (though his girls  still look terribly similar).  I quite enjoyed it.  But is it strong enough to stand up to the hype Marvel have thrown at it?  I have my doubts.  It doesn’t have any obvious concept of its own to make it stand out from the other X-Men books, and it doesn’t really have a very strong authorial voice either, so much as a sound rendition of Marvel house style.  Of course, it’s unfair to judge a comic by its hype – if this was the first issue of a six-issue mini, I’d be telling you that it was far better than the usual standard for X-Men spinoffs.  But by hyping it as a landmark event, Marvel may have written cheques that the book can’t cash.

X-Women – A one-shot by Chris Claremont and Milo Manara featuring some of the female X-Men, and if you don’t know why, you evidently haven’t seen any Milo Minara comics.  But in fact, this is remarkably restrained by Minara’s standards.  Outright T&A is largely confined to a couple of pages of beach party – and even that’s pretty mild.  What marks Minara out from your generic superhero artist is that he can do this stuff without having everything degenerate into pin-ups – his characters still act like characters, instead of posing for the reader.  Basically, he doesn’t lose sight of subtlety.  The story… well, nobody’s pretending that the story is the selling point here.  Wisely, Claremont delivers one of his caper stories, and goes for a nice breezy tone with plenty of interesting opportunities for his star artist to show off.  It’s no classic as a story, and it’s unlikely to be remembered as anything more than a curio, but it may well bring Minara to the attention of a new audience, which is no bad thing.

Young Allies #2 – Well, goodness, I’m not quite sure what I make of this series.  You might think that with villains called the Bastards of Evil, it’d be completely off the wall.  But it’s not; it really takes itself fairly seriously.  Which leads us to a downright odd sequence where said Bastards, er, blow up Ground Zero.  And boy, I don’t know what I feel about that.  It’s meant to be offensive – in the sense that everyone in the book, including other villains, regards it as staggeringly tasteless-  and I’ve no doubt it’s written with good intentions, but I can’t help feeling that the book just hasn’t done enough dramatically to go there.  It just feels a bit clumsy, as if a largely innocuous teen book was being crushed under the weight of a reference that’s way out of its league.  It also seems to distract attention from the stars of the book, at a point when you’d have thought the focus ought to be on them and how the team gets formed.  Then again, the bad guys’ plot here is all about getting attention for reasons that remain obscure, and Sean McKeever’s got a good enough track record as a writer that he presumably knows what he’s doing here.  But… yeah, either there’s something quite audacious going on here which will become apparent when we get the whole plot, or it’s misfiring.  I wonder.