Yes, it’s only technically still the week that these books were released, and tomorrow there’ll be a whole new bunch. But still, these are last week’s comics. So! Onward!

DETECTIVE COMICS 856: JH Williams continues to use this book as, in essence, an instruction manual for artists who really want to dazzle a crowd. Lots of eye-poppingly gorgeous two-page spreads, inventive use of panel layouts and a pretty neat division of art styles between the halves of the lead character’s double life (more dark and painterly and with more irregular panels for the Batwoman sections, more clean pen-and-ink and regular panelling for the Kate Kane moments) mean that this continues to be the most beautiful Bat-book being published at the moment (sorry, Mr Quitely). In terms of the story, in this issue we finally get a bit of light shed on what Alice’s nefarious plot actually involves, and it’s a bit of a let-down – such a crazy villain surely shouldn’t have such a prosaic goal in mind? That aside, Rucka keeps the plot rolling and even manages to give us some bittersweet moments that remind us that this book’s two stars are linked by more than their sexuality. The backup (Co-feature! Erm, Second Feature! Oh, come on, backup) suffers a little from being completely breakneck, without a second to catch a breath – with only ten pages to play with, there isn’t a lot of time to slow down the action, but a few more quiet moments wouldn’t go amiss. Not quite the strongest issue of this run so far, then, but still a hundred miles better than most Big Two books on the stands.

INCREDIBLE HERCULES 133: The headline character of this issue only shows up in flashback, as the seventh smartest man in the world gives us the Reader’s Digest version of his origin story and career highlights while reading up about the Hero’s Journey. Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente (who has been moved to a new, larger enclosure that was paid for by your donations) give us a story that’s great for new readers, I’ve no doubt (particularly given that Amadeus Cho’s backstory is to be found in half a dozen different titles), but for old hands who’ve been following the character since his debut this is little more than a clip show with a cute conceit. Still, the introduction of the sixth smartest man in the world at the end of the issue (and the fact that he’s not just an evil version of Cho) bodes well for a storyline to come that’s more in keeping with the standard of quality that this book’s had to date. That’s not to say this issue’s bad – these guys are skilled enough to make even a recap book worth reading – it’s just not quite up there with the rest of the run.

INCREDIBLE HULK 601: Speaking of Greg Pak, he finally manages to wrest the Hulk away from Jeph Loeb again and almost instantly, as if by magic, manages to make it a book worth reading again. The brains-and-brawn double act of Banner and Skaar (a character whose name never becomes less embarrassing and painful to type) are set on causing a bit of trouble, and Banner sets about hoodwinking six of the eight smartest people in the world into inadvertently helping him out with that aim. Ariel Olivetti’s figurework continues to impress, and if there was ever a character for whom his propensity for musculature was appropriate it’s the mega-Conan muscle-lump that is Skaar (nngh), but the constant Photoshopping of backgrounds is getting beyond annoying now. The promise of a fight with the Juggernaut in the next issue is enough to bring me back for that, but the first issue of this new direction doesn’t actually do much to demonstrate the, y’know, direction. The Savage She-Hulk backup strip isn’t the strongest work any of the creators involved have put their name to, but it’s always nice to see Michael Ryan’s art and the second-tier Gamma Squad are a nice surprise, particularly given that it appeared the concept had been entirely forgotten about.

DARK AVENGERS 8: Betrayals, revealed secrets, the highly ambitious plans of Scott Summers and what by my count are two and a half pages of the title characters of this book make up the penultimate part of the big summer Dark Avengers/X-Men crossover. I mentioned in my review of the last issue of Uncanny X-Men that it would be nice to see more of the Dark Avengers in this story, and that goes double for this issue, particularly given that this is meant to be the Dark Avengers’ book. Given that this appears to set up another major change in the X-Men’s status quo, I’d be a bit miffed if I were someone who was only reading the X-titles – not since Stephanie Brown and Jack Drake were both killed (yes, yes, I know) outside of the pages of Robin have so many important changes to characters’ status quo happened outside their own book, and it’s a little dissatisfying as a result. Also, I know this isn’t Uncanny and thus doesn’t have the little caption boxes introducing the characters, but if there are going to be so many interchangeable blondes there should really be some way of telling who any of them are, and Luke Ross’s Mike Deodato impression doesn’t help shed much light on that. A weak link in what has otherwise been a largely enjoyable crossover, mainly saved by the chutzpah of a Cyclops who’s laying down more smack than he has done in years.

AVENGERS: INITIATIVE 27: New artist Rafa Sandoval comes on board with what is literally a book of two halves, one much better than the other. That’s not to say the second half of this issue, with Hardball helping out the Shadow Initiative grunts as they strive to retake the 42 Negative Zone prison that was lost to Blastaar in War of Kings is bad – far from it, it’s a nice little slice of action that lets Sandoval stretch his muscles on his first time out – it’s just that the first half is so much better. The initial section of this issue deals with the life story of Johnny Guitar, a one-time Dazzler villain (and a real character to boot) and his partner Doc Sax, as the train with the Shadow Initiative. Told as a letter from Johnny Sax, this is a nicely judged story that hits the right balance between sad and touching, as Gage imbues a gag villain with more personality than a lot of other books would care to do – but then again, this is Avengers: Initiative, where there’s no such thing as a ‘gag villain’. On the whole, a pretty great first issue for the new creative team (although whoever took the decision to put four characters on the front of the issue who don’t appear in the book at all needs to ask themselves why they made that choice).

So, what did you read this week?

Now, I don’t want to say too much about this here, because we’re going to be talking about it on the next episode of the podcast in much greater detail (in all likelihood), but if anyone out there is a fan of Lenore by Roman Dirge and is wondering whether the first issue of the new series from Titan is any good, I would say run, don’t shamble, to your finest local funnybook emporium and grab yourself a copy, because it’s sterling stuff.

If you aren’t aware of Lenore, the cutest zombie in the universe, then this is the perfect time to acquaint yourself with something that’s equal parts Jhonen Vasquez and Edward Gorey, but with more subtlety than the former and more visceral gags than the latter. It’s cute and horrific at the same time and is well worth a few bucks of anyone’s money. Forego that holofoil Ultimate relaunch, and get to know the sweetest, deadest, most horrifically superb heroine in modern comic books.

I’ve been on a back-issue re-reading kick for the last few weeks, ever since I decided to tidy out the elephant’s graveyard of comics under the bed (goodbye, issues of Marvel Adventures Avengers, you were great at the time but space is limited and I may not need to revisit Batroc’s Dating Agency any time soon. Actually, scratch that, that one’s coming back out of the recycling pile). I’ve ploughed through all 109 issues of the original run on Thunderbolts (including the Avengers/Thunderbolts mini, but not including the Fightbolts… thing), and while it’s interesting to track the ups and downs of that title and the dips in quality that occur whenever there’s a creative regime change on the horizon, picking the run apart will take more than just one post.

Having finished that, I set about tackling the run of Cable & Deadpool trade paperbacks which I’d accumulated – and by the way, if you were considering buying that series in trade any time soon, I’d get on it pretty sharpish if I were you, because some of the individual volumes are going for a pretty penny on Amazon Marketplace – and it didn’t take me long to remember why I’d bought them in the first place.

Cable and Deadpool was always a weird book. I mean, just looking at the title, it was neither fish nor fowl from day one. It was launched in the wake of the cancelled Agent X and Soldier X, and reeked a little of Marvel wanting to keep the characters in circulation but not having any ideas on how to do that beyond shoving them together in a room and hoping they would somehow capture an audience by little more than the application of the equation “Cable readership + Deadpool readership = Cable and Deadpool readership”. It was not a particularly auspicious name for a book that nobody expected to last beyond its first year.

Quite aside from the fact that it was a meal made of leftovers, it was also a showcase for two characters who together symbolised the worst excesses of the 1990s. Cable was filed under ‘big guns’, ‘pouches’, ‘mysterious past’, ‘grim’ and ‘glowing eye’. Deadpool was filed under ‘anti-hero’, ‘mysterious past’, ‘pouches’, ‘kills a bit’ and ‘rip-off of another character’ (seriously, if Deathstroke the Terminator was Seth Brundle and Bugs Bunny was an unlucky insect of the order Diptera, then Deadpool was the shambling result of the teleporter accident). By all rights, they should have been consigned to the same 1990s graveyard as Century, Blackwulf and Nightwatch.

What went right with the characters, though, was that creators who weren’t interested in the low-rent origins of the pair got their hands on the characters. Joe Kelly turned Deadpool from ‘evil Spider-Man with guns’ to a rounded character who used his machine-gun quippery to mask his self-loathing, his fear of being a hero, and his fear of not being a hero. Guys like Robert Weinberg, David Tischman and Darko Macan took Cable’s basic premise of a man fighting a hopeless war across time all by himself and extrapolated a lonely, tired soldier’s story from that weak start point.

By the time Fabian Nicieza, himself the co-creator of Deadpool, got his hands on the characters with their joint title he was in a position to really do something with them, and he did. He turned Cable into a modern-day messiah, setting up an island haven for all who wanted to join him (and thus setting himself up on the watchlist of every country in the world) and Deadpool into his buddy-stroke-foil. Story after story played out with Cable as a chessmaster playing a long game, and Deadpool as his favourite pawn. Supporting characters from both of the principal players’ backgrounds (Domino, Weasel, Irene Merryweather) played key roles, as did fairly random guest stars from the four corners of the Marvel Universe (Diamondback, Commcast, the Cat).

Artist Patrick Zircher, a former collaborator of Nicieza’s on Thunderbolts, handled most of the first half of the series after a short initial run from Mark Brooks. Zircher’s angular style, miles away from the Deodatos and Finches so beloved of Marvel both at the time and since, gave the book an unusual look that helped to differentiate it from so many of the other titles on the stands at the time. After he left, the book went through a number of different fill-in and substitute pencillers before finally settling on Reilly Brown, who started with a fairly shaky couple of issues before growing into the role and finally taking on co-writing duties on the final few instalments.

Unfortunately, although Cable & Deadpool was rattling along quite happily in a wibbly wobbly world of its own, the dictates of the wider Marvel line (specifically Mike Carey’s X-Men run) brought down the hammer in the form of the death of Cable. As a book called Cable & Deadpool isn’t a whole heck of a lot of good without, y’know, Cable, the book was only able to limp on for another eight issues as a sort of ersatz Deadpool Team-Up book before being cancelled with issue 50.

While it lasted, though, it was a blast. Gag-a-minute, intrigue-heavy, and for the most part self-contained (well, sort of. It was a continuation of the Niciezaverse, which is the long, single story that Nicieza’s been telling in every Marvel book he’s written for the last ten years, so there were storylines that originated in issues of Citizen V and the V Battalion). It’s the kind of thing Marvel would do well to publish now, when the rest of the line is tied up in Secret Civil Initiative Reign War Hulk. What kind of weird, topsy-turvy world do we live in when the thought of a book starring two thrown-together examples of the nadir of the nineties is an attractive proposition?