Why, what’s this?  Yes, it’s an X-Axis post actually showing up on Sunday, when it’s meant to.  Isn’t life great?

If you’re looking for the preview for tonight’s WWE show, that’s one post down (though if you want the short version, it sounds like a dud).  As for the comics, this week’s X-books are New Mutants, X-23 and X-Factor, and there’s, uh, some other stuff too.

Enjoy the reviews in their full glory behind this space-saving cut!

Carnage #1 – You know it’s a quiet month for new books when the umpteenth Spider-Man spin-off miniseries gets a prime spot in Marvel Previews.  But it’s written by Zeb Wells, who’s usually good value, and it’s got art by Clayton Crain, who usually isn’t – but his style has worked well for characters like Carnage in the past.  So why not?

The original Carnage is a bit of a one-note serial killer, so it’s something of a relief to see that this book isn’t interested in him it all.  It’s actually about the Carnage symbiote, and even that seems to be more of a macguffin for other characters to chase after.  What Wells has written here is more a Spider-Man/Iron Man team-up book.  The plot concept is tied to some relatively obscure old continuity – was anyone really begging for the return of Shriek and Spidercide, B-list villains from the “Maximum Clonage” era of fifteen years ago?  But as with his work on New Mutants, while the links to old continuity are explicit, they’re also straightforward enough to be easily summarised: these are characters from Carnage’s old retinue and they’re drawn to get him back.  From there, cue fight.  And it’s a perfectly sound, energetic action story, which avoids falling into the wrist-slitting pretensions that sometimes come with Carnage stories.

What about the art?  I wasn’t at all fond of Clayton Crain’s work on X-Force, which was all too often just murk filling in for atmosphere.   This is better, partly because it takes place in broad daylight. That said, there are several scenes which are still far too dark, though it’s hard to tell whether that’s Crain’s choice or a printing issue.  The plasticky feel of Crain’s art is a good fit for Carnage, and he does some pretty good car chase sequences.  On the other hand, he’s still not great with ordinary people out of costume (though he’s not called upon to do it much in this story), and his designs for two new characters feel uninspired.

All told, it’s decent enough.  But… it’s a bimonthly title, six issues, priced at four dollars.  And it’s not good enough to get me to sign up for that.  Still, if you’re a mid-nineties Spider-Man fan who really wants to know what happened about Carnage and his sidekicks, you’ll be happy with this.

Fables #99 – It’s easy to forget that this book is still going, and part of me thinks it might have been better off wrapping up with the end of the war storyline a couple of years back.  I wasn’t really sold on the previous issue, where Rose Red emerges from months of seclusion to declare that she’s in charge after all, and everyone more or less rolls over and accepts it because the plot demands it.  This issue is better, though; it’s primarily a build-up to the confrontation with Mister Dark in issue #100, a subplot which the book has been carefully nurturing for a good long while now.  Dark’s the sort of villain I normally can’t stand – an essentially one-note character whose job is to embody fear and evil.  Usually that sort of thing is a short-cut for clumsy character moments.  But in the context of a book like Fables, he kind of works.  He’s essentially a foil for the other characters to fight, and his appearances have been kept brief, so he doesn’t have to be an interesting character so much as a credible threat.  His very lack of depth plays into the idea that he’s a fable villain bleeding into the real world where he doesn’t belong.  About half of this story is spent on getting that idea across, and it does so pretty effectively.  And the book also dusts off another subplot to fill the remaining pages, presumably to make sure there’s something to deal with in issue #101.  One of the more satisfying issues in a while.

New Mutants #18 – Part 2 of “Fall of the New Mutants”, a title which depends on you remembering that Marvel published a crossover called “Fall of the Mutants” in the late eighties.  Well, it’s that sort of book.  But, as with Carnage, although the ties to old continuity are present in this story, they’re also straightforward: many years back, the New Mutants handed a bunch of mutant babies over to the authorities for safekeeping, and the authorities took them to Limbo and raised them as soldiers.  (Okay, so you need to know a bit about Limbo as well.  But it’s a regular feature of the series and it’s cropped up fairly often over the last few years across several books, so it’s not in the same category.)  This issue is more or less an extended fight scene as the New Mutants take on the Project Purgatory kids.  But it’s more interesting than that makes it sounds, because it’s also the first time we’ve seen the Purgatory kids act as individuals rather than in an amorphous group.  With the Hellions out of service, there’s a role for a sort of anti-New Mutants, and Wells and Kirk do a decent job here of hinting at potential in the individual characters without turning the story into a parade of introductions.  It’s still a fight issue when all is said and done, but a superior one.

Turf #3 – I didn’t read the second issue of Jonathan Ross and Tommy Lee Edwards’ miniseries – I had vague intentions of getting the trade – but I seem to have pre-ordered issue #3 by accident.   And it’s an interesting contrast.  As we established in the first issue, it’s basically a Prohibition-era gang war story, where one of the gangs happens to be composed of vampires.  (Actually, they’re not strictly vampires, as this issue tries to explain, but they’re close enough.)  Issue #1 seemed to be throwing a bunch of aliens into the mix, but it turns out the alien contingent are there to provide a bizarre odd-couple pairing rather than another warring group.  While the first issue was drowning in prose, by this point Ross has eased off a lot – there are still a few sequences where the letterer is crowding the exposition onto the page, but for the most part the pacing works better.  I’m not quite sure what to make of the tone of this book, though; the premise is self-evidently pulpy and the “next issue” trailer plays to that, but the actual story is played dead straight, if melodramatically.  I’m left wondering how seriously I’m supposed to be taking this – and I’m not altogether sure that the creators know in their own minds.

X-23 #2 – While issue #1 mainly involved X-23 moping around the house, the plot gets properly underway with this issue.  And it turns out that the “Wolverine Goes To Hell” tie-in (seriously, couldn’t they come up with a snappier title than that?) is fairly direct, with the demon Wolverine impostor showing up, and trying to take advantage of X-23.  Actually, after the slow pace of the first issue, this one seems downright rushed, as X-23 sees through the bad guy almost immediately, rendering the whole “posing as her father figure” thing moot.  You’d have thought there’d be a few more pages in that one.  Anyway, at least we now have the story underway.

The challenge here for Marjorie Liu is that the first arc of X-23 would ideally be a story that set out to define X-23’s character – but instead, it’s going to be a second-tier tie-in to somebody else’s story.  That’s not ideal, to put it mildly, and perhaps explains why issue #1 spent so much time on the character material before getting around to the plot.   But if the circumstances aren’t ideal, Liu is certainly making the best of it, by working in material that deals with how X-23 feels about her “father”, her sense of identity, and what exactly motivates her to try and help out.  There’s an interesting ambiguity in whether she’s genuinely driven by a desire to help, or whether she’s simply trying to play the role that’s been assigned to her; that’s a promising direction for the character, and one that can be worked into the crossover without too much strain.  It’s also a good sign that Liu seems to be bringing in Gambit as a supporting character; he’ll be a good counterbalance for X-23’s excessive intensity.

So… not the story I’d have done for the first arc of a new series, but there are plenty of promising ideas for the character, and within the framework imposed by the crossover, it’s doing rather well.

X-Factor #210 – Breaking off entirely from the Las Vegas story for an issue, Peter David spends an issue on two other stories.  One strand is about Rahne going for an ultrasound scan with Rictor in tow.  As you can probably imagine, the results don’t quite fit with Rahne’s version of events, though David’s smart enough to make sure the question is simply resolved for Rictor straight out of the bat.  With David’s ear for dialogue, his characters can spend an issue doing pretty much anything and it’s going to be enjoyable.  And the other half of the issue appears at first to be a fairly straightforward, almost obvious story about an Iraq vet asking M to telepathically sort out her post-traumatic stress disorder.  It’s a cleverly executed sequence, with David deliberately sounding a couple of wrong notes but deferring the big reveal until a closing twist – so that the story reads differently on a second read.  Normally I’d be wary about abandoning the main storyline altogether for an issue, but the two plots covered in this issue are both strong enough for the book to get away with it.