It’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote one of these.  But fortunately, they’ve been a quiet couple of weeks.  So I’m just going to do the X-books, because to be honest, there isn’t a great deal else going on.  Check the podcast this week – you’ll find it two posts down – for our reviews of Skullkickers (it’s quite good) and Matt Fraction’s first issue of Thor (it’s very good) along with… well, something from the back catalogue.

Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis #3 – In which we get a recap of the origin story of Dr Crocodile (a character from the 1980s Captain Britain series, if you didn’t know), a brief discussion of how cash-strapped African countries might deal with crazy mutant babies, and a wander into the woods where some more weird stuff awaits.  There’s actually an interesting idea at the heart of this story; what do you do with incredibly dangerous mutant kiddies when you really don’t have the resources to do anything but kill them?  Not that there’s any real doubt about the morally approved answer, granted, but Joshua does have an understandable point of view here.

A couple of points come to mind, though.  First, this is another illustration of why M-Day was a bad idea.  The dilemma here is basically “what does the developing world do with mutants?”, with the Warpies serving as a workaround to dodge M-Day.   Frankly, it would be a stronger X-Men story with actual mutants in it.  Ellis has managed to get around that problem.  But it shows, once again, that far from opening up interesting story ideas, M-Day has just created obstacles for writers to clamber over.

Second, there are still real issues with the pacing of this as a monthly series.  It’ll look great in the collected edition, to be fair.  But four splash pages, one of which just shows cast members running into a forest?  It’s fair enough if you regard the selling point as being Kaare Andrews’ art – and it’s certainly beautiful stuff – but it really does feel dragged out in this format.

Namor: The First Mutant #2 – Not that I’m planning to keep buying this series, you understand.  However many logos you stick on it, Namor is not an X-book.  But it’s part of the “Curse of the Mutants” crossover, so I ordered it anyway.  And after I panned the first issue, it’s only fair to say that this is better.  Having got the actual “Curse of the Mutants” tie-in out of the way, Stuart Moore and Ariel Olivetti are moving on to the story they really want to tell, which is about the new Atlantis going to war with a tribe of underwater vampires.  Something which looked like a plot hole in the last issue turns out to be deliberate, and there’s some attempt to build up an idea of Atlantean society.  A scene with an eccentric geriatric soothsayer telling embarrassing stories about Namor’s childhood is very good.

But there are still problems.  Namor says that he killed the vampires’ leader because “I thought it would end the Aqueos’ attacks on us and our colonies” – but didn’t they spend most of last issue telling us that he was breaking a peace treaty?  (The recap page certainly thinks so.)  The opening scene has an interesting idea about Atlanteans using their Atlantis off the coast of San Francisco to break from their cultural past, but it comes off as a clumsy “coming to America” moment.  And Olivetti’s work remains hit and miss, lacking the grace I’d expect in a Namor story.  Still, better than the first issue.

Uncanny X-Men #528 – “The Five Lights” continues, and this time we’re introducing a girl with fire and ice powers in Nigeria.  This is a very episodic arc – the unifying element is actually the subplot with Emma Frost figuring out how to get rid of Sebastian Shaw – and boy, wouldn’t it be nice if the recap page bothered to remind us of why she needs to get rid of him, because I’m certainly struggling to remember.  Something about Namor thinks she killed him already?  I think?  I don’t remember why…  Still, I like the scenes with Emma and Kitty in this issue – there’s a great rapport between these two that Fraction writes rather well.

The introduction of the “five lights” characters isn’t really working for me so far, because we’re not really getting to know them as characters.  The problem, I think, is that since we’re meeting them all in a state of absolute panic, there’s not much room for anything else to come through.  I’m sure once they calm down a bit we’ll see a bit more from them (and it looks as though Idie is being set up for a Wolfsbane-type role in the new group), but for the moment it’s mostly the local colour that makes the characters distinct.

As for the art, while I’ll happily take Whilce Portacio over Greg Land, whose work seems untouched by human hand, I have to admit there are problems here.  Portacio does the Nigerian scenes quite well, perhaps because the setting holds his interest, but from there we go into a scene with Bobby Drake and Kate Kildare which is little short of abysmal – the opening panel makes Bobby look like Charlie Chaplin, and the rest of the scene somehow manages to take place in a completely blank room except for a single prop that was presumably mentioned in the script.  It’s a really bad scene, and the issue as a whole is frustratingly uneven.

X-Men Forever 2 #8 – The Marauders versus the X-Men and the Starjammers, again.  Halfway through this story, I was wondering whether Claremont had botched his cliffhanger last issue – by bringing back Wolverine only to expose him as a clone and kill him immediately.  But no, he’s going to be around for a while, presumably as one of Sinister’s deranged henchmen.  There’s some oddities in Claremont’s attitude to clones (why doesn’t it matter if you kill them, and how the hell can Sabretooth smell the difference between Wolverine and his clone?).  But still, the last couple of issues have been an enjoyable romp of a fight scene, and that’s fine in a book like this.

X-Men Legacy #240 – Continuing the “Children of the Vault” story.  Clay Mann’s art in this story doesn’t seem to be up to the standards of earlier – perhaps the deadlines are catching up with him, but it means that the story launches with a rather confused action sequence.  A splash page unveiling the Children’s big plot-driving machine works quite well, but overall it’s a step down.  Paras’ big act of self-sacrifice is a bit melodramatic too, but there’s a twist near the end that works better.  Still, not the strongest chapter of this storyline, which has generally been pretty good.

X-Men vs Vampires #1 – Frankly mystifying anthology series in which a bunch of writers have been asked to do stories where members of the X-Men fight vampires, and only a couple of them seem to have been told that they should tie in with “Curse of the Mutants” in any way.  James Asmus and Tom Raney’s “From Husk Till Dawn” is a thuddingly uninspired few pages in which Husk is looking for the captured Jubilee, and fights some vampires, and that’s literally it.  Really, truly dreadful.   Christopher Sequeira and Sana Takeda’s story is better, with Dazzler meeting a bunch of blaxploitation vampires, but it really has nothing whatsoever to do with the crossover, and even taken in isolation it’s no more than diverting.  As you can probably imagine, Peter David does better, teaming with Mick Bertilorenzi in a story about a vampire who’s come to San Francisco with his own agenda, though again it doesn’t gain anything from the wider crossover and would be a better story taken completely in isolation.  Rob Williams and Doug Braithwaite go for a similar idea, with Magneto encountering a vampire he knew in life.  Good concept, not really developed into a story, but it looks nice.  And rounding it off, there’s a reprint of the first half of Uncanny X-Men #159, the X-Men/Dracula story (the second half will be in the next issue), where you can see Bill Sienkiewicz back when he did house style.  The Peter David story is worth reading, but as a package, it’s a bit of a dud.

Holidays are over, it’s back to the normal schedule.

Check two posts down for this week’s episode of House to Astonish, where you’ll also find the link to the podcast’s new Facebook fan page.  And if you’re looking for tonight’s wrestling preview, that’s just below.  (In brief: it looks skippable.)  As for my backlog of chart posts… well, I’m starting to get through them…

Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine #3 – This series isn’t just over the top, it’s completely insane.  The last time Marvel did a Spider-Man/Wolverine miniseries, as I recall, it involved a lot of globetrotting and miscellaneous thugs.  Which isn’t very interesting, but it’s perhaps what you’d expect as the common ground for these two characters.  Jason Aaron, however, is approaching it rather differently, with a series of complete, high-speed lunacy, bouncing between time periods and outrageous big ideas like a pinball.  Each issue has enough material to keep some books going for a year.  The book takes half an issue to race through a died-and-reborn subplot that Joss Whedon stretched out for several months in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  But Aaron and Adam Kubert make it work, because they keep coming back to a relatively clear “what’s going on” throughline, and they’ve nailed the characters’ voices.  It may be ridiculous, but it’s not completely lacking in subtlety; it’s good with the little details that flesh out a scene and allow the book to work at breakneck speed.  Granted, it does seem a little bit odd when the story pauses for a couple of pages for an attempt at actual emotion, but at least it reminds us to care about the lead characters.  Aaron’s good at taking crazy story ideas and giving them a bit of weight without slowing them down, and this is a particularly extreme example.

Hellblazer #271 – The first part of a new arc, and Peter Milligan has still got Shade the Changing Man hanging around.  It’s the sort of thing that could easily slip into cosy nostalgia, but it neatly avoids that trap; Shade’s fairly unsympathetic here, largely because he’s obsessed with trying to recapture his relationship with Kathy, a supporting character from his nineties series, also written by Milligan, who’s been dead for years.  It’s still more a Shade story than a John Constantine story, but it’s a Shade story about the impossibility of turning the clock back.  Even Constantine’s scenes in this issue are closer to surrealism than horror, such as a demented opening sequence with an oracle hairdresser operating out of a memorial in Hyde Park.  Shade may not be acting like he used to, but the style of Milligan’s Shade stories is definitely recognisable here.  An interesting way for Milligan to revisit one of his signature characters, and artists Giuseppe Camuncoli and Stefano Landini are more than able to carry it.  It looks like we’re actually leading into a 1970s story with art by Simon Bisley in the subsequent issues, rather than keeping Shade around for the rest of the arc, but it’s been good to have him back for a brief reminder.

Joe the Barbarian #7 – The penultimate issue of the miniseries by Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy, and the big draw here has to be Murphy’s spectacular artwork.  I’m going to have to re-read this whole series next month when the final issue comes out, to see what I really think of it.  Obviously the big idea is that Joe is hallucinating and he’s experiencing his journey downstairs to get some sugar as a massive fantasy quest incorporating elements from his world.  The big question is whether we have a reason to care about a story which we know is entirely within the main character’s head.  Morrison seems to suggest that the story isn’t a hallucination so much as an alternative perspective on the world, which is all very in keeping with his views on magic, and I’m keeping an open mind about whether he can pull this off.  In some ways it’s a formal experiment; can Morrison really get an interesting eight-issue miniseries about a teenage boy hallucinating while he goes down a flight of stairs, particularly when those hallucinations are so clearly intended to be a fever-dream version of a deliberately cliched quest story?  And somehow, yes, it is holding my attention – but I’m not altogether sure whether that’s because of the story or the strength of the artwork.

New Mutants #17 – I like the idea of Project Purgatory, a military camp stuck in Limbo.  And there’s some very good stuff in this issue.  In recent years Limbo has tended to be written as just a weird dimension where you get lynched by demons, and Zeb Wells is clearly trying to go back to the days when it had more of a sense of place, so that Magik’s status as its ruler can be a bit more meaningful.  There’s also a great opening sequence with Sam and Dani, very well drawn by Leonard Kirk.  But as the New Mutants get drawn into the story proper, it all starts to get a bit hectic and confused – there’s something very odd going on with the timeline, with “two weeks later” captions that don’t seem to make any sense in the context of the scenes, and frankly, by the end of the issue, I was just a bit lost.

Shadowland: Power Man #2 – Even though this is a four-issue tie-in miniseries for a Daredevil event, it’s pretty clear that Fred Van Lente is really trying to set up a character and supporting cast who could work in an ongoing series.  They’re following this with another mini, and I can only assume the idea is to try and get enough buzz from those two books to launch an ongoing title successfully.  And so far, so good, because the story is neatly establishing the new Power Man as a promising new character.  While he does have some tenuous continuity ties to Luke Cage, the real point is that he fits into the “hero for hire” mould which Cage himself long since vacated, and which remains a nice set-up for a series.  Not that the book is in awe of the original Luke Cage stories – this issue also has a hilarious sequence with dodgy old Power Man villains, and poor old Spear gets perhaps the best line of dialogue I’ve read all year, as he tries to give himself a big Claremont-style introduction.  I’d happily read an ongoing title based on this.

Unwritten #17 – The “Choose Your Own Adventure” issue!  Alright, if we’re being completely honest, it’s more a case of offering alternative perspectives on Lizzie Hexam’s back story – there is an option that leads to the “wrong” ending, but most of the others are multiple routes to the same destination, with varying subplots along the way.  But it works very cleverly; it’s done in landscape format to double the number of available “pages”, and the forced jumping around the issue as a clever way of playing up the artificiality and reminding you of what you’re reading.  Unwritten is all about the power of stories, and this is a particularly neat way of getting across the idea that the same events can be made to fit different narratives.  Lizzie’s character is, literally, all about choosing which narrative she wants to impose on the world around her.  Plus, of course, it’s a very funny pastiche of the choose-your-own-adventure gimmick.  Great fun.

X-23 #1 – Marjorie Liu and Will Conrad launch X-23’s new ongoing series, and what do you know – this one doesn’t pick up on the cliffhanger from the Road to Hell one-shot either!  I wonder what Marvel were thinking, publishing a hype story and not telling us where to get the next chapter?  Anyway, we talked about this at length of the podcast.  The bottom line is that Liu has a good handle on the character of X-23, and some interesting ideas on where to take her.  Promisingly, she spends much of this issue trying to get X-23’s development back on track after the backsliding of her time in X-Force.  The art is pretty good, and it’s very much a character piece rather than a hack and slash comic.  The abandoned cast of New X-Men are used effectively as supporting characters.  The downside is… well, there’s no real plot.  There are a couple of subplot dreams setting up something to happen down the line, presumably tying in to the current Wolverine storyline, but the rest of the issue is just a whole load of scenes trying to re-establish X-23’s character.  We’re getting this a lot on Dark Wolverine too – another book co-written by Liu – and it seems to me that there’s a problem emerging here with two much character introspection and not enough story.  Still, it does look good, and it’s got the right idea of where to go with the character, so there are plenty of positives here.

X-Factor #209 – The team go to Las Vegas looking for Hela (though they still don’t realise who she is), which means Peter David gets to have fun with Longshot breaking the bank and Shatterstar finding himself in a city that feels just like home.  Actually, Shatterstar’s maybe a bit too naive in this story, considering that the character has been around since 1991 and ought to understand the concept of actors by now.  But the casino stuff is great fun, not least because the incongruity of the team wandering around in full costume and nobody commenting on it.  And guest artist Emanuelo Lupacchino hits the right tone with the Vegas scenes, which have plenty of energy and enthusiasm.  There’s also a soap opera subplot with Rahne telling Rictor that he’s the father of her unborn child – this is an odd one, because understanding it requires a working knowledge of X-Force storylines circa “X-Necrosha”, none of which have yet been explained to X-Factor readers.  The recap page at least mentions that Rictor isn’t really the father but doesn’t actually explain the rest of the story, which seems an odd choice.  Still, it’s nice to see her being extricated from the dead end of X-Force, and reintegrated into a book where she belongs.