We’ve reached another of those weeks which the X-schedule virtually skips altogether – the sum total of this week’s X-Men related output being New Mutants Forever #1.  It’s a quiet week for new launches as well.  Which is fine by me, since the Edinburgh Fringe is under way and I have lots of other things to see.

But here’s some stuff which did come out this week…

Amazing Spider-Man #639 – Part two of “One Moment In Time”, the story that isn’t so much “because you demanded it” as “because it was an unavoidable necessity which we’ve put off for as long as we could.”  There’s no more interpolated reprint material this time – part one already explained where the wedding story got changed, and this issue has the tougher job of explaining why Peter and Mary Jane ended up living together regardless.  (Incidentally, while I can understand the desire to preserve as many stories in continuity as possible, was it really necessary to have them go on the honeymoon anyway, simply to preserve the canonicity of Spectacular Spider-Man Annual #7 in modified form?)  The argument goes something like this: Mary Jane realises that something Spider-Man-related stopped Peter from showing up at the church, and forgives that, but decides that she doesn’t want to have children with Peter if their life is going to be like this, and therefore she doesn’t need to marry him.  You can practically hear the plot creak under the weight of accommodating an enormous retcon with minimal disturbance to history, and there’s simply no way of taking this story as anything other than an exercise in remedial continuity.  You can of course make a case for this story as a sacrifice to the greater good of the series – but wouldn’t it have been simpler just to declare that they never decided to get married in the first place, particularly given that it was a last-minute development shoehorned into the series to achieve consistency with the newspaper strip?  Granted, that wouldn’t make for a dramatic story… but with the strings so clearly visible, neither does this.

Casanova #2 – We’re still in the reprints of the original series here, which the Icon book is covering two to an issue.  Having originally been intended for reading in smaller chunks, it’s incredibly dense, to the point of sometimes seeming a bit rushed, but with a healthy sense of deadpan lunacy to it.  My reservation about the first issue was whether there was actually much of a story behind it all, but issue #2 goes a long way to answering that point; the emotional core of the thing is evidently about Casanova being yanked to a parallel timeline and having the opportunity to revisit family relationships that he screwed up the first time round.  I still suspect it would be a stronger book for slowing up just a little bit, but that’s a hangover of the format of the original series.

Murderland #1 – One of those books that leaves you mainly thinking “What the hell was that?”  Fortunately, I suspect that’s largely what Stephen Scot and David Hahn were going for.  As I recall, I ordered this book on the strength of Hahn’s name.  The solicitation is a bit murky as to what the book’s about, and frankly, even after reading the thing, I’m not quite sure how to describe it.  There’s a guy calling himself Arabber who’s got some sort of unspecified mission.  There’s a woman called Method who seems to play roles for nefarious reasons.  There’s a general sense that the ground rules aren’t being explained to us and the series isn’t waiting for us to catch up.  There’s plenty of nonchalant violence and deadpan black comedy.  There’s a flip back cover that seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the comic inside.  And I honestly still haven’t got much of a clue about what it’s about.  But, unlike a lot of mystifying first issues, it does make sure that the actual events are clear enough – it’s the explanation for them that’s hard to make sense of.  Thoroughly odd and partially impenetrable, but intriguing nonetheless.

New Mutants Forever #1 – The expansion of the Insert Name Here Forever franchise continues, with Chris Claremont telling a story that he might have done in the eighties had he not left New Mutants with issue #52 or so.  Just to be clear, this has no story connection whatsoever with Claremont’s X-Men Forever (because he left New Mutants several years earlier, and so the deviation point is different).  As New Mutants was a smoother handover, there’s perhaps less interest in this one as a premise – and it’s not altogether encouraging when the first page, which seems to have a different letterer from the rest of the book, manages to mis-spell the names of two of the main characters.

Anyway, Claremont has chosen to go back to the old and abandoned storyline of Selene having plans for Nova Roma, which somehow or other involved her granddaughter Amara.  This subplot had been drifting around for a while, and survived a couple of years into the Louise Simonson run, before being utterly forgotten about by everyone.  Any hope of it being resolved hit the buffers when the whole concept of Nova Roma was dismantled in an offhand retcon in an issue of New Warriors.  So at least this is a story with potential for exhuming.

What we get in the first issue… is the New Mutants being taken by Magneto to visit their new allies in the Hellfire Club.  Sunspot, Warlock and Karma are all gone, for reasons that aren’t really explained clearly.  (If you don’t know, Karma was written out around this time, and Sunspot and Warlock are off appearing in the Fallen Angels miniseries – but the story seems to assume you know all this.)  A bunch of mysterious baddies attack who have their own interest in Nova Roma and, yes, the fight ensues.

It does give some indication of what New Mutants might have done if Claremont had followed up on the direction he was pursuing when he left, an alliance between the X-Men and the Hellfire Club that never really got off the ground.  And Claremont does slip neatly enough back into writing the characters.  In many ways it feels truer to the concept than X-Men Forever, which takes advantage of being in its own universe to tell stories that Claremont would never have been allowed to do in 1991, no matter how sympathetic his editor.  On the other hand, it’s Nova Roma, which was never one of the more successful New Mutants concepts; and so far it’s basically a lot of unexplained fighting.  Mind you, since the Hellfire Club are in it, presumably we get to see the Hellions later on, and Claremont was always great with them…

Rage of Thor – A one-shot by Peter Milligan and Mico Suayan, set way back when in the middle ages, from the look of it.  I forget whether this is a sequel to another one-shot, but the basic idea is that Thor has stormed out of Asgard after yet another argument with dad, and has set up a life as a Norse farmer.  Needless to say, that isn’t going to last.  There’s quite an interesting idea here about the essential shallowness of the “Drink!  Fight!  Girls!” aspect of Asgard’s paradise, and how Thor’s stuck with it because he doesn’t really have anywhere else to go.  But it’s more a comment on the mythological version of Asgard than Marvel’s sanitised version, which is a glitch; and the character arc is rather familiar, which is more of a problem.

Shadowland #2 – So it’s the street level heroes (er, plus Spider-Man) versus Daredevil and his supporting cast, and clearly the idea is that Daredevil is going mad.  Fine as far as it goes, and it’s quite nice to see these characters get a story that’s more or less on their level (though the Ghost Rider seems decidedly out of place here).  I can’t help feeling, though, that the story is being done more effectively in Daredevil’s own title, where there’s a bit more ambiguity about how clearly Daredevil understands that he’s being manipulated.  Here, it seems pretty clear that he’s just lost it, and that a bunch of characters from outside the book are going to have to take him down… and I can’t help thinking I’d rather have seen this story stay within Daredevil‘s own cast.  Mind you, by the standards of crossover minis it’s perfectly decent, not least because it’s got a character-driven story at its core.

Spitfire #1 – Another of the “Women of Marvel” one-shots, but this one has the advantage of giving Paul Cornell an opportunity to pick up on the story he was doing with Spitfire in the cancelled MI-13 series.  Spitfire and Blade get sent to New York to go after a vampire who seems to be causing trouble largely because she’s very old and has nothing better to do.  It’s trying to set up the idea that Spitfire’s troubled by the thought that she might go the same way over time, even though she’s in control of her vampirism right now.  Fair enough as a way of explaining why it’s still a concern to her and not just a generic background angst point, I guess.  I quite like the relationship Cornell has set up between Spitfire and Blade, who seems willing to overlook the fact that Spitfire’s a vampire; but I can’t help feeling Blade’s character needed a bit more work to get to this point, and we’ve ended up skipping to the relationship before it was really plausible.

As Al already explained, we’ve pushed back this weekend’s podcast because he’s buried in sawdust.  The current plan is to record it tomorrow evening.  We’ll be reviewing the new Scott Pilgrim – but I’ll save my comments on that for the podcast.

Now, reading digests takes up a chunk of my time, and to be honest, it’s a fairly quiet week for major releases.  Oh, and I’ve just spent several hours trekking around central Edinburgh trying to find a bookshop that actually had The Importance of Being Seven by Alexander McCall Smith in stock.  Very popular book, here in its home town, it turns out.

So… let’s just run down this week’s X-books.  Of which there are many.

Franken-Castle #19 – Not normally an X-book, but this is the second part of a crossover with Dark Wolverine.  From Daken’s point of view, this is a bit of a filler story while he kills time waiting for his title to be relaunched in September.  For the Frankenstein Punisher, on the other hand, it’s the rematch against the bad guy who kicked off this storyline in the first place.  So it ought to be kind of significant for him.  As it turns out, what we actually get is… uh, an extended fight scene, more or less.  And that’s pretty much it.  Lots of chasing, lots of fighting, Daken gets impaled on stuff so that they can show off his healing factor…  It’s just a fight scene.  And it’s a bit one note – Daken’s never really allowed to come across as a much of a threat, which is particularly odd considering that he ought to be the Punisher’s current nemesis, so it’s basically Daken taking a cartoon beating and running away for 20+ pages.  Now, if you’re going to do a story where the poor man’s Wolverine fights a Frankenstein version of the Punisher, I have no real problem with that being a big dumb brawl… but there really is only a limited amount of entertainment in watching Daken get chainsawed and hit by trains before even I start rooting for the poor bastard to land a punch.  Mind you, Tony Moore’s artwork is gorgeous, and spectacularly over the top, which livens thing up.

Wolverine Origins #50 – It’s over, it’s finally over.  Part of me thinks I should re-read the thing and then do a retrospective post… but that would mean re-reading it, and I’m not exactly filled with enthusiasm for the prospect.  The main story really ended in issue #48, and this two-part epilogue seems to be mainly an exercise in getting Wolverine to realise that he needs to move on with his life and stop letting himself be defined by what Romulus did to him.  Which pretty much sums up the problem with this series.  The whole thing is an attempt to resolve a plot thread which was already closed off quite effectively by Larry Hama in the early nineties.  We already had a story where he regained his memories and explored his past; we already had a story where he confronted the guys behind the Weapon X Project.  And then everyone pretty much stopped talking about it for a decade plus, until this series came along and started trying to re-open the same questions just so that it could close them again.

At one point it looked like the series was going to actively damage the character, by trying to link everything in Wolverine’s past to a single conspiracy theory – and worse yet, one that wasn’t in the slightest bit interesting.  It saddles with Wolverine with an arch-enemy, Romulus, who has never shown the faintest sign of being an intriguing character.  And while in the past it was possible to do pretty much any story set in Logan’s freelance days, the “controlled by Romulus throughout his life” idea served only to shut down story possibilities which were inconsistent with it.

In reality, it seems likely that the title’s main legacy will be the introduction of Daken, a character who might in fact have a few good stories in him.  Other stories that have had occasion to mention Wolverine’s origin seem to have suspiciously little interest in bringing up Romulus, which rather suggests that he may have already been filed under “Bad Idea”.  Let’s hope.

A story where Wolverine gets over his feelings of anger at the people who abused him, achieves some measure of revenge, and decides to move on with his life – fundamentally, not a bad idea.  Except Larry Hama did it better in the nineties.  Wolverine Origins has been a thoroughly unnecessary trudge through old ground, with a lousy central villain, simply in order to come to the conclusion that Wolverine shouldn’t be so hung up on this stuff anyway.  Except, until this series started, he wasn’t.  Four years of comics just to solve a non-problem badly.  Let us not speak of it again.

Wolverine: Weapon X #15 – The concluding part of “Tomorrow Dies Today”, which turns out to be essentially the origin story of a new Deathlok.  Jason Aaron’s actually come up with a neat twist on the classic Deathlok story; this time around, the computer is the sympathetic part of his personality, and the human is a raving lunatic.  The sentimentality is decidedly tongue-in-cheek, and the whole thing is a bit silly, but there are some clever twists in this issue, and some great action sequences from Ron Garney.

But it still leaves me with the question I raised last month: in what sense is this a Wolverine story?  Wolverine’s in it, yes, but it’s so packed with guest stars that his presence alone doesn’t mean a great deal.  Hell, Iron Fist and Spider-Woman are in it.  It comes across as some sort of Avengers story which Aaron is running in Wolverine: Weapon X simply because it happens to be the book he’s currently writing.

I suspect the idea is that the new Deathlok is an ironic inversion of Wolverine – he’s an unrepentant murderer who’s been made nicer by an inept attempt to turn him into a brainwashed supersoldier.  And that might well be something to hang a Wolverine story on… but since Wolverine himself never really gets involved in any of that, the thematic link is very loose.  What we’ve got here is a pretty good origin story for a new Deathlok, but it’s really not a Wolverine story.

Uncanny X-Men #526 – Part one of “The Five Lights”, and I’m relieved to see that the spoilers from Hope’s entry in the Handbook actually only cover this issue.  It also turns out that the X-Men did bother checking out who Hope’s parents were – it just didn’t seem to be anyone significant, which is why we haven’t heard about it until now.  So, with those concerns out of the way… this is pretty good.  We seem to be settling down to a more stable core cast, and Hope’s finally getting to act like a character instead of a plot device for everyone to fight over.  Fraction’s take on Hope seems to be driven by the idea that she’s got to deal with the pressure of expectations from people who expect her to save the mutant race – which is something to work with, at least.  Whilce Portacio starts his run as the new regular artist, and while it’s occasionally a bit scratchy for my tastes, it gets the job done.  Most importantly, though, after several years of the X-Men basically sitting around waiting for something to turn up, we’ve finally got to a point where they seem to have something to achieve again, and the series is all the better for it.  Admittedly, the debut of our first new mutant in ages does come across as a bit of an anticlimax – she never really gets the chance to show off much of a personality, and so we’re never really hooked by her.  But the good outweighs the bad.  The back-up strip is a lead-in to Magneto’s appearance in Avengers: The Children’s Crusade, by that book’s creative team.  Aside from answering the question of when A:TCC is actually set (roughly now), it also makes a real effort to write Magneto consistently with Fraction’s take, and use his X-Men plots as a springboard for Magneto’s role in A:TCC – always nice to see in a shared universe.

X-Factor Forever #5 – Final issue of the miniseries.  This could possibly have stood to lose an issue, since once Apocalypse has explained his grand theory of mutants, there’s not actually much left for the plot to do.  (The final issue tries to get round that by raising the stakes and hauling in Genosha out of nowhere, but it unavoidably feels a bit tacked on.)  Still, it’s been a fun series, and hopefully Dan Panosian’s highly entertaining artwork hasn’t gone unnoticed.  As for the story, the main interest here is seeing Louise Simonson go back to the original core idea of Apocalypse and follow it through to its logical conclusion.  As initially conceived, Apocalypse was supposed to be obsessed with the idea of warfare and strife because he thought it would be good for human development.  In the mainstream Marvel Universe, he pretty much ended up as a maniac dictator and hypocrite who only paid lip service to his supposed “survival of the fittest” doctrine.  In this story, Apocalypse actually means it, and is therefore making a good faith – if highly questionable – effort to avert global catastrophe.  Which is a very different take on the character, and the sort of thing that these Forever stories should be good at – allowing writers to see through a storyline that they never got to finish, even though later stories blocked off the original plan.

X-Men Forever 2 #4 – Ah, Masque and the Morlocks.  This seems a bit of a deviation from the main story, which in itself isn’t a bad thing – Claremont’s generally quite good at cutting between shorter stories and over-reaching arcs.  Mind you, I can’t say I’m particularly thrilled to be revisiting these particular characters; Claremont seems to be going back to the version of Masque we saw in the last couple of years of his original run, where he was a maniac cult leader of the handful of surviving Morlocks.  This made for an okay two-parter that played off the body-horror potential of Masque’s powers, but Masque himself was rather one-dimensional, and that’s certainly how he comes across here.  Still, there are a couple of effectively creepy moments along the way, and some promising subplot material about whether the cast can trust Mystique (even if a lot of the cast end up being horribly naive in order to advance the argument).

X-Men Legacy #238 – Two new X-Men storylines in a week, and two strong issues.  That’s a positive sign for the post-Second Coming era.  With the crossover complete, Legacy goes back to its core format of Rogue trying to mentor the younger characters.  Many of those background characters have been around for years, but remain more or less blank slates that leave Mike Carey free to write whatever he pleases.  This story focusses on Indra, whose personality has never got much beyond identifying his religion as Jainism.  Since Jainism places great stress on non-violence, there are obviously issues here with his involvement in the X-Men.  Of course, this isn’t just an issue of people arguing about ethics; there’s also a cosmic graffiti artist who seems to have escaped from a Spanish-influenced dystopia.  This is exactly the sort of thing I’m looking for from a book about Rogue and the kids.  Oh, and nice art from Clay Mann – a fairly traditional superhero artist in terms of style, but his characters’ acting is coming along very well.