There’s a new podcast up today, and you’ll find it at the next post down.  Reviews include Who is Jake Ellis? (of which more below), Weird Worlds and a more-or-less random issue of Deadpool Team-Up, since at least it was self-contained.  Meanwhile, here in the X-Axis, it’s a fairly restrained week for X-books – we’ve got X-Factor, the penultimate issue of X-Men Forever, and the second issue of Wolverine: The Best There Is.  Will it be any better this time round?  And there’s a couple of other books to round out the numbers…

Knight & Squire #4 – Back at the year-in-review show, somebody asked if there are any books that Al and I disagree over.  Well, this is one.  Paul Cornell and Jimmy Broxton’s extremely tongue-in-cheek miniseries about the British versions of Batman and Robin is the sort of thing you’ll either find endearing or thoroughly irritating; it’s got nothing to do with real Britain, so much as the sort of weird chewed-up mess of pop culture references that might have resulted if the UK had produced comics in the spirit of Silver Age DC.  Following through with the warped logic of an inverted Batman and Robin, this issue introduces the Knight’s loyal butler: Hank, a stereotypical American with a wandering accent (“Y’all for tea, sir?”).

So far this has miniseries been a series of standalone stories, but notionally it’s supposed to be a six-parter, and this is the point where Cornell changes gear and starts to draw stuff together.  The Shrike from issue #1 returns as Squire’s love interest, and the main story – in which Knight’s armour comes to life animated by a copy of his repressed feelings – is played basically straight, even if the central idea is that good old-fashioned repression saves the day.  (Come to think of it, a gag which also worked rather well when they did it with Cyclops in Uncanny X-Men a year or so back…)  There’s a balancing exercise with the tone here; the series has been so deliberately silly thus far that it’s slightly odd to have us suddenly take the characters more or less seriously for an issue.  To some extent Cornell is trying to have his cake and eat it here, and it doesn’t feel entirely comfortable.  Still, if the two sides of the book don’t entirely come together, they do each work on their own terms – and the difficult task of drawing them together had to be attempted at some point.

Unwritten #21 – Part 3 of “Leviathan”, as Tom finds himself stuck as a minor character in Moby Dick.  Actually, a quick Google suggests that Carey may have very good reasons for choosing Bulkington, who apparently “makes an exemplary appearance early in the novel and then mysteriously vanishes from the narrative”.  If the character was some sort of narrative glitch to start with, then he’s a potentially good vehicle for Tom, who does indeed want to get the hell out of there before the story ends (not least because there’s a high likelihood of his character dying in battle with a giant whale if he hangs around that long).

Dumping Tom in a novel for this long with no “real” characters to talk to means that Carey gets around to explaining some of the mechanics involved in “entering” a story in Unwritten, one of those fiddly mechanical issues that has to be covered somewhere along the line.  Carey seems to be going with the idea that the other characters have no existence beyond the novel; they’ll improvise with Tom up to a point, but only so long as the goal is to advance the pre-determined story.  Which, of course, begs the question of what happens if Tom manages to derail the plot entirely.  That could have been done purely by having Tom screw up a key plot point, but (aside from the fact that it would require readers to be familiar with the plot of Moby Dick or another character to patiently explain it to them) that would be a bit obvious; instead, we get some intriguing scenes with Tom trying to literally take over from the narrator.  Carey and Gross build to that nicely by having the in-story scenes change subtly throughout the issue so that narrative captions start to take over the story, and the art style becomes very slightly more like an illustration from the novel.

Obviously Carey’s got greater concerns with this series than simply the mechanics of how his story-in-story worlds work, but the point is that the book makes this stuff entertaining in its own right at the same time as it furthers its bigger goals for the long term.  Always one of my favourite books of the month.

Who is Jake Ellis? #1 – We reviewed this on the podcast, so I’ll be brief here.  Nathan Edmondson and Tonci Zonjic – and by the way, I think on the podcast we said Zonjic was female, and Google now tells me that’s wrong, so, uh, sorry about that, my fault – are doing a five-issue spy series which seems to be using a gimmick somewhat similar to the old TV show Randall & Hopkirk Deceased, in which a private eye was accompanied by the ghost of his dead partner.  Jon Moore is being chased around by all sort of mysterious people for reasons that aren’t really explained, but he has the advantage of a partner that only he can see.  The first issue sets up the mysteries of who’s after Jon and where Jake Ellis came from without really explaining much, but that’s fine, because the issue is carried by some well-executed action scenes and the introduction of the central characters.  Zonjic’s art plays it beautifully; he’s got quite a minimal style, with great use of colour and shadow, and so he’s able to make Ellis look like a vague and shadowy figure without departing overly from the style of the rest of the page.  Lovely sense of body language, too.  The story is good (and is still hitting its stride anyway); the art makes it excellent, and well worth recommending.

Wolverine: The Best There Is #2 – Last month’s debut issue received a pretty unanimous kicking online, and not without reason.  This issue is better, and sheds some light on what went wrong last month – but it’s still some way short of being good.

The book kicks off with Wolverine exchanging notes with, of all people, the Beast.  He was written out of the X-books the better part of a year ago (and he’s still wearing his X-Men uniform here, rather than his Secret Avengers costume), but so be it.  He’s there to give us a chunk of exposition which at least explains what Charlie Huston was going for in last issue’s utterly baffling nightclub sequence.  It turns out that there were two key concepts which the issue utterly failed to convey: first, that Wolverine had been drugged right at the outset of that sequence and was intentionally written out of character throughout; and second, that he was stabbing himself at the end in order to make sure that he couldn’t lose control and hurt anyone until the effects wore off.  In fairness to Huston, his Wolverine is much more in character in this month; but trying to write him subtly out of character in the first issue was a misstep, since it seems to have been universally misread as Huston not getting the voice of the character.

The Beast also helpfully explains that the drug – and heaven knows where Wolverine’s supposed to have gotten a sample – is something to do with the Corruptor, a relatively obscure Nova villain who isn’t actually in this story.  Wolverine returns to the club looking for the people responsible for drugging him and… well, then it degenerates into another mess, as Wolverine fights a bunch of guys in turn for no apparent reason.  The common theme here is that they’ve all got powers that stop you from killing them, but in the absence of any hint of an explanation for what they’re doing there, it’s hard to get away from the feeling that this is the product of a trawl through the Official Handbook for characters with the right powers, no matter how obscure.  Some of them are actually half-decent if obscure characters, like Madcap and Mortigan Goth (who starred in a handful of stories published by Marvel UK’s Frontier imprint seventeen years ago, and hasn’t been seen since).  But the book seems more concerned to use them as a device to crank up the gore levels, in keeping with the rather desperate-seeming “Parental Advisory!” cover blurb.  Technically the book sets up some sort of mystery about what’s going on and why, but in practice it’s just a parade of undermotivated people either attacking Wolverine or advancing the plot.

The art’s not bad; a couple of odd storytelling choices aside, Juan Jose Ryp seems more comfortable drawing Wolverine this month, and his hyperdetailed backgrounds are good at atmosphere.  The double-page spread of Wolverine’s hallucination is really quite good, if you look past some overwrought gore.  On the other hand, he seems to be under the impression that Madcap isn’t wearing a mask, and the less said about his re-design of Mortigan Goth, the better.  Overall, an improvement but still essentially a mess.

X-Factor #213 – One of those post-story-arc issues where disparate threads are brought together and the book takes stock of where it is.  The main plot development this issue, as the cover rather gives away, is that Darwin quits – though as the “next issue” page makes equally clear, just because he’s out of the team, doesn’t mean he’s out of the cast.  Darwin has long been a character in need of a hook, and by linking him to Hela, however vaguely, Peter David may have found one.  In theory, Darwin’s power is to “evolve” to adapt to any situation he finds himself in – whatever that means.  Up to now, it’s generally been taken to mean that he’s got all-purpose defensive powers which emerge as and when needed so that he can’t be hurt.  But as this issue points out, if he’s evolving then some of these changes ought to be permanent.  And that’s a great idea, both because it links more directly to the supposed premise of the character, and because it means something’s at stake when he uses his powers – he’s guaranteed to live, but not necessarily to be unchanged.  Potentially, that’s the hook he’s been missing.

In another nice touch, David plays up Darwin’s departure by bringing the rest of the cast together for a change.  X Factor is a team book in concept, but not really in structure, since the cast tend to spend most of their time scattered among disparate subplots pursuing their own stories.  They hardly ever get together and just do “team” stuff, but it’s worth doing from time to time, especially when, as here, the book is trying to play up a departure of a character who’s still going to be in future issues.  It also means that characters who haven’t had much of a chance to talk lately get a chance to catch up, and David’s always good at that sort of thing.

Yes, I could live without Rahne explaining why she lied about the father of her child; it’s a clumsy piece of religious melodrama which strikes me as too heavy handed for this book.  But generally speaking, it’s a superior superhero team book, or maybe ensemble book would be closer to the mark.  Valentine De Landro’s art is always at least clear and often excellent; and Peter David’s continuing to find plenty of story material in his cast.

X-Men Forever 2 #15 – It’s the penultimate issue, and that means… a big fight!  Actually, this issue more or less concludes the main storyline, so presumably the final issue is going to be epilogue and farewell.  Nothing wrong with that; I wouldn’t want Claremont to rush the ending.  I’m not entirely sold on the Avengers’ role in this story; yes, they fought the X-Men at the start of this volume, so there’s a bit of book-ending going on, but ultimately they’re a distraction who seem to be there as much as anything to make up the numbers on the baddies’ side.  Then again, it gives a bit more scale to a story which would otherwise be the X-Men versus Perfect Storm and a bunch of nameless grunts, so I guess there’s some logic to having them there, even if it’s something of an illusion of climax.  And it’s a well-written fight scene in traditional fashion, with Andy Smith holding his own on art – though the landscape-oriented splash page is a mystifying decision, especially since the lettering refuses to play ball and turn sideways too, giving the impression that the camera has been turned on its side.  Anyhow, while X-Men Forever may be something of a guilty pleasure, it’s nice to see that the series looks to be wrapping up all its stories successfully and heading for a dignified exit next month.