It’s a podcast weekend, so don’t forget to check out this week’s show, where Al and I talk about Deadpool Max, Vision Machine and Knight and Squire, as well as rounding up the news and looking at the all-important pricing debate.

I’m a week behind with the reviews, so tons of X-books to write about, plus a couple of other recent releases.  Behind the cut, you’ll find Daken, Deadpool Max, Knight and Squire, the CBLDF Liberty Annual, New Mutants Forever, Superior, X-Force, Wolverine, X-Men and X-Men Forever.

Daken: Dark Wolverine #2 – Back when he was editing the X-Men, Bob Harras, in an interview with Marvel Age, described the Hellfire Club as “the most evil organisation in the Marvel Universe that never does anything.”  And he was right – at that point, the Club had been prominent in the X-books for several years without appearing to take any proactive steps to achieve anything whatsoever.  Now Daken is degenerating into the same sort of character.  Even the recap page can’t seem to figure out what the point of this story is, attempting to explain the character’s motivations in terms of what I’d taken to be a throwaway line from the previous issue: “Daken wants it all and the best way to get it is to deny everyone else anything.”  Seriously, is that really the plot?  That Daken is going to get “it all” by individually denying “anything” to the other 6 billion inhabitants of the planet?  Starting by mildly screwing up the plans of an obscure villain we’ve never heard of?  Come on now.

But to be fair to the recapper, it’s hard to pin down anything more coherent from these first two issues.  What actually happened in issue #1 was that Daken was hired by Mysterious Baddies to capture Wolverine’s girlfriend, presumably as part of the scheme currently in progress in Wolverine’s solo title.  But instead – for no particularly clear reason, unless the plot really is intended to be as the recap describes it – he turned on his employers and helped Mystique get Melita to safety.  In this issue, Daken meanders around musing about stuff; has another chat with his employer, who tries to hire him to kill Mystique, only for Daken to refuse; wanders around some more musing about stuff; meets up with Mystique and goes on a date with her; and finally gets attacked by the possessed Wolverine in the final pages of the issue.  It’s fortunate that another character chose to introduce some action into the story, since left to his own devices, Daken would apparently have been entirely content to fill the pages of the book admiring the scenery and reflecting on matters ostensibly profound.

Frankly, it’s all rather dull and ponderous.  The creators are clearly in love with Daken, and think he’s a mesmerising presence, but they’re not selling me on it.  They kind of persuaded me with the first few issues of Dark Wolverine (before the relaunch), but as time went on, he became less and less interesting.  He now seems to be merely a collection of opaque motivations that can’t be all that important since they never seem to lead to him doing anything anyway.  Even if he’s supposed to be directionless or uncertain, can’t he do it within a more interesting plot?

Deadpool Max #1 – We talked about this at some length on the podcast, but the bottom line is that despite having an impressive creative team in David Lapham and Kyle Baker, it doesn’t really work.  The basic idea is pretty good.  This version of Deadpool is a maniac government agent, kept around because his super powers make him invaluable.  Unfortunately, he’s also prone to getting distracted and wandering off, and he inexplicably thinks he’s engaged in a heroic battle against the forces of Hydra, regardless of who he’s actually fighting at the time.  All of which means that his long-suffering (and eminently disposable) handler has a perpetual fight on his hands to point Deadpool in the right direction and get the mission completed.

Now, that idea, I like.  One of the problems with Deadpool is that he’s a motormouth who tends to blast every other character off the page, so it’s a smart move to do the story from someone else’s perspective in order to stop him completely hogging the spotlight.  And as a set-up for an ongoing comedy-adventure series, it’s pretty sound.  You could get tons of material out of this.

But the material we actually get – justifyin that “mature readers” Max-imprint tag – is mostly a bit crass and uninspired.  As you’ll hear on the podcast, Al thinks it’s homophobic.  You can argue about that, but there’s no doubt it’s overfamiliar and a lot of it isn’t especially funny.  Anyone who thinks it’s a shame that Garth Ennis finally got bored of writing anal rape jokes (about five years after most of us got bored of reading them) will love this, but otherwise, it’s a missed opportunity.  That said, the basic set-up has tons of potential, so it’s always possible they’ll sort out the tone and do something better with it in future issues.

Knight & Squire #1 – Paul Cornell and Jimmy Broxton (channeling Cameron Stewart) with a six-issue miniseries about the British Batman and Robin.  In fact, it’s not really about Knight and Squire at all – instead, it’s an excuse for Cornell to introduce an entire British subset of the DC Universe, filled with the sort of characters that DC would have created in its Silver Age, had they thought about Britain much at all.  Which is to say, the British DCU is mostly a mixture of knock-offs of American characters (a British Joker who’s too polite to do anything particularly evil), and locally-themed novelty characters.  The first issue is more interested in setting up that idea than in pursuing the plot – and when it does get to a big action sequence, it’s not as clear as it might be.  But the characters are funny, and there are a couple of moments at the end which suggest that at least some of the British characters are aware that they’re not quite up there with the Americans.  I’m not altogether sure where Cornell is heading with this – it could be simply some amusing gags about dodgy British superheroes, or there might be a subtext about the awkwardness of British characters in the fundamentally American superhero genre.  Either way, though, it looks like it’ll be entertaining.

Liberty Annual 2010 – You could, of course, just donate some money to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.  But if you prefer to buy something instead, here’s this year’s charity fundraiser.  I remember being a bit muted about the 2009 one, which was a bit on the preachy side.  Whether by accident or design, the 2010 anthology largely avoids that trap.  Darick Robertson’s Conan story has a more general “think for yourself” message.  Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba’s “Chain Game” has a similar point but in a far dreamier parable.  Garth Ennis has fun mocking some of the awful drek that has to be defended under freedom of speech, and a short Boilerplate strip seems to miss the point entirely by attacking unfair contract terms.  Milk & Cheese are dusted off from the archives to spend two chaotic pages alternately championing and mocking freedom of the press, and Don Simpson’s Megaton Man likewise takes the line of championing the right to express views that the liberal readers won’t much care for.  Gail Simone and Amanda Gould do a cute poem about locking our kids away from nasty stuff.  And Scott Morse’s “Phaeton” strip is a prohibition-era vignette which kind of sort of ties in with the anthology’s themes if you squint a bit.  The standard’s generally pretty high this year, the preachiness has been dialled back enormously, and of course it’s all got a good cause.

New Mutants Forever #3 – We’ve reached the mid-way point of this miniseries, and it’s not really clicking.  To be fair, there are moments where Claremont seems to recapture the way he was writing the New Mutants in the first few years of their title, and that’s presumably the intended selling point of this series.  Building the series around Nova Roma, a concept that never really worked in the first place, is less intriguing, though you can understand why Claremont’s doing it, since it was a major dangling storyline from his original run.  But using the Red Skull, who has no particular connection to these characters, and who’s acting as just a generic baddie?  That’s not working for me.  I can only assume Claremont’s going for the “Nazis hidden in the South American jungle” riff, but seriously, that one’s been dead for decades.

Superior #1 – A new Icon book from Mark Millar and Leinil Yu.  Basic concept: kid with multiple sclerosis is visited by an alien who, apparently, turns him into a fictional superhero for a week.  There’s an editorial at the back where Millar talks about how important it is to create new characters, seemingly oblivious to the fact that we’re in fairly familiar Superman-inspired territory here.  (And indeed, Superior’s old-school familiarity appears to be entirely deliberate.)  Even the idea of a kid who turns into a Superman character has been done before, with Captain Marvel or Prime.  To be fair, this one has the added element that the Superman-analogue in question is a well-known fictional icon within the world of the story, but he’s still Superman.

All that being said… this is actually quite decent.  Millar seems to be trying to write something genuinely cheerful and upbeat here, moving away from his trademark flip cynicism, and trying to write something a bit more family-friendly.  You could make a case that it’s another movie pitch in the form of a comic, but if so, it’s a pitch for a PG Disney movie – so at least he’s broadening his range.  In fact, Millar’s early all-ages Superman stories, before he took off as a writer, were generally well received, and it’s nice to see him trying to go back to a side of his writing that he hasn’t really pursued in a while.  Leinil Yu isn’t an obvious choice of artist for a book that needs to echo the Silver Age, but he does surprisingly well here – after all, the character ought to look out of place in a non-Silver-Age world.  And he draws a good monkey.

Uncanny X-Force #1 – Like many people, I rolled my eyes on seeing that Marvel were relaunching X-Force with a new number #1 and a pointlessly confusing adjective.  However… the actual comic, by Rick Remender and Jerome Opena, is a definite step up from the previous incarnation.  Where the previous volume featured an overabundance of claws and corpses and took itself desperately seriously, this book is actually a bit more cheerful, even if everything’s coloured in blue and grey.  The new X-Force are Wolverine’s supposedly secret team designed to do the things that the X-Men won’t countenance in the “Heroic Age” – a troublesome premise because it’s hard to imagine that anything would genuinely shock Scott and Emma at this point, certainly not the sort of investigation that the team have made their top priority.  But while Remender has filled the team with a mixture of the vaguely troubled (Wolverine, Archangel, Psylocke) and the mercenary (Deadpool and Fantomex), all of these guys have a sense of perspective and humour, so instead of another bout of intense slaughter, what we actually get is an energetic and enjoyable, if more than averagely violent, superhero book.  Perhaps most notable is that the book has a team dynamic, something which has been missing from the X-Men proper for years thanks to its sprawling, bloated cast.  If that’s something you miss about the X-Men – well, you’ll probably like this.

Wolverine #2 – Second part of the “Wolverine Goes to Hell” story (and boy, you’d think they’d have come up with a punchier title for that one, considering it’s a crossover with Daken and X-23 – but I digress).  Basically it’s Wolverine being tormented by crazy dead bad guys in hell as Satan tries to break his spirit, while on the surface Mystique rounds up the troops to try and sort things out.  Whether this is what people are looking for in a Wolverine story, I’m not sure, but Jason Aaron and Renato Guedes handle it pretty well, playing up the “How does he get out of this one?” side of things.  At the same time, it seems to be an opportunity for Aaron to bring together Wolverine-related characters both dead and alive in order to perform some sort of stock-taking exercise, so there’s a sense that he’s going to move forward from here.  A subplot with Wolverine’s possessed body going after his adopted daughter Amiko ends up spilling into a back-up strip, in which Steven Sanders’ art could maybe be a bit crisper, but Aaron seems to have some interesting ideas for the character.  Amiko’s an odd character, in that she’s been hanging around in the background for literally decades without her story ever really going anywhere, despite occasional attempts to nudge her in the direction of being important.  Aaron seems to be trying to turn that torpor to his advantage, by writing Amiko as someone with a nagging feeling that she surely ought to be more significant than she actually is.  Nice to see Aaron trying to work, not just with Wolverine, but with the often-neglected supporting cast that goes with him – a book is more than just its lead character, after all.

X-Men #4 – “Curse of the Mutants”, part four.  In this issue, Cyclops does his alpha male thing, and the X-Men fight some vampires, and Wolverine’s a baddie now, and Dracula seems to have vanished off the face of the earth instead of advancing the plot (though to be fair, enough characters complain about this that it’s clearly deliberate, if a bit odd).  Hard to know what to say about it, really.  There’s a fight scene on stage with a dumb rock band which is quite good fun.  Gischler writes Evil Wolverine well, and has a pretty good handle on the characters generally.  And he goes back to one of the ideas I like about this story – that the vampires think they’re doing the mutants a favour, because being a vampire is awesome.  Still, the book as a whole remains merely okay-to-decent; it’s not a standout, it doesn’t seem to be telling stories of any great significance to the characters, it’s just a solid superhero book telling some additional X-Men stories.  Whether that’s enough to sustain the book in the current market, I have real doubts, but it’s eminently readable.

X-Men Forever 2 #9 – Mainly a Kitty Pryde issue, continuing the subplot that’s been running for over a year now, with Kitty turning into an heir to Wolverine.  She also gets to go to Japan, thus giving the cover the opportunity to use the “Hello Kitty” gag that, incredibly, I don’t think anyone’s done before.  (The next issue blurb goes for a rather more tenuous Japanese reference, “Battle Without Honor and Humanity”.)  It’s all very Claremont, but then that’s the point of this book, isn’t it?  Guest art comes from Mike Grell, of all people, and it’s very erratic – there’s some nice clear storytelling, but there are also some decidedly clumsy bits – the layout of page 3, with superimposed Wolverines, doesn’t work at all, and he seems to be drawing the younger Ororo several years older than she should be.