No podcast this weekend, for the reasons explained in the post just below.  We’ll be back in a week’s time.  In the meantime, I’ll make a start on my comics backlog.  Regular readers will recall that last week, Diamond UK didn’t ship anything because of the volcano.  So two weeks’ worth of comics showed up at my house on Friday, and needless to say, I haven’t read them all yet.

But on the principle that I’d better get up to date with the crossovers, because there’s another chapter just around the corner, let’s start with the X-books and the Siege tie-ins.

Dark Wolverine #85 / Wolverine: Origins #47 – These are the first two parts of “Reckoning”, a crossover in which Wolverine and Daken team up (well, kind of) to go after their mutual arch-enemy Romulus.  Presumably this is heading to the final defeat of Romulus in the closing issues of Origins.  It’s a rare example of a story which probably should be a crossover, because it genuinely is important to both characters, and shouldn’t be taking place off-panel for either book.  But of course, this is Wolverine: Origins, so it’s time for yet more convolutions.  Wolverine, it turns out, correctly predicts that Daken will betray him, and uses him to feed bad information to Romulus.  That’s fine as far it goes, except for one thing: we’ve only just seen that story in Origins‘ previous arc, with Ruby Thursday in the place of Daken.  Yes, they acknowledge it; yes, the idea is that Wolverine is messing with Romulus’ head to draw him out.  But a bit more variation, surely…?

It’s not a great story, unfortunately.  As usual, Romulus is the least interesting thing about this book, and a Millar-esque determination to keep Daken unlikeable threatens to drain most of his potential appeal as a lead character into the bargain.  Stephen Segovia, drawing the first part, is the sort of hyperactive artist who can be quite enjoyable when he’s doing melodramatic insanity, but doesn’t really suit an issue of conversations around tables.  Will Conrad, on the second, is generally solid, though his Romulus is almost unrecognisably off-model.  Mind you, I actually prefer his design, which has the merit of not being quite so ludicrous.

The big reveal, though, is Daken explaining Wolverine’s great plan: he’s going to defeat Romulus by exposing him to the world and ruining his mystique.  It’s one of those moments where you pause and go, “Really?”  Because, point one, four years to get here, and we’re doing The Wizard of Oz?  And point two, are we really doing a story based on the proposition that after all the mystery, Romulus is a bit disappointing and dull when you finally get to see him?  You almost have to wonder whether it’s a gesture of grand self-parody, but I have a sinking feeling it probably isn’t.

Mighty Avengers #36 – The final issue before the reboot.  And to be fair, there’s more finality about this than you might expect, because it is indeed the end of Hank Pym’s splinter group of Avengers.  Or rather, it’s the end of Hank Pym’s storyline.  Officially this is a Siege tie-in, but it qualifies for that banner mainly by having the rest of the team appear in subplot pages fighting the Thunderbolts in a mirror of Thunderbolts #143.  The meat of the issue is actually Hank, Jocasta and a couple of ultra-obscure guest stars taking on Ultron and his army of robot brides in a fantastically absurd climax.  It’s just plain nuts, but Dan Slott tempers the goofiness by playing up Hank’s painful lack of empathy for Jocasta to give it a slightly bitter undercurrent.  Good issue.

New Avengers #64 – It’s a Brian Bendis issue during a crossover, so you know what to expect: flashbacks!  Yes, the Avengers themselves are pushed to the margins in order that we can spend an issue looking in on the Hood and his army of Z-list villains.  Mike McKone’s art on the Siege sequences is a bit muddled – it’s one of those “hurl characters at the page” routines which kind of gets over the chaos but gives you no real idea of what’s going on or where.  But to give credit where it’s due, Bendis does get something out of the Hood himself, a character way out of his depth with the A-listers, who is just realising that this possibly isn’t going to work out so well for him.  Technically this is the last issue of New Avengers before the relaunch, but in practice it seems to be building to some sort of “last stand of the Hood” thing in the New Avengers: Finale oneshot, which sounds suspiciously like plain old New Avengers #65 to me.  Bit lacking in terms of plot, but this is one of those Bendis stories which does enough with the character moments to stand up anyway.

Thor #609 – In this issue!  Loki explains his motivations!  And… um… well, yes, that doesn’t work out very well for the story, to be honest.  Because Loki’s motivations, it turns out, are so slender and contrived that it unavoidably results in a scene where Loki says “Just because” and a bunch of other characters gawp at him and complain that the plot doesn’t make any sense.  And   The idea seems to be that Loki is causing trouble for no particular reason; he’s just a stirrer by nature.  He is, after all, the God of Mischief.  Actually, as a take on the character, this could work.  The problem is that it’s been set up as some sort of mystery, “What’s Loki up to?”  And if the answer turns out to be “Nothing in particular”, then that’s, shall we say, a bit of an anticlimax.  On the plus side, there’s a neat scene with Balder at the end, and a cute bit with an atheist supervillain.  But… mmm.

Thunderbolts #143 – The final issue before the new direction, and what you get is the team continuing to implode while they fight the Avengers.  Or rather, while the ones who can be bothered fight the Avengers, and the rest make a break for it.  It’s two thirds of a good issue, at which point it suddenly turns into an issue of Mighty Avengers and most of the team just sort of get beaten without it feeling like a pay-off.  There’s a nice little epilogue with Ant-Man and the Headsman’s brother, and then the issue ends with an introduction of the new status quo which isn’t a segue so much as a handbrake turn.  The bottom line is that it all feels a bit truncated.  Good art, though.

X-Factor #204 – This is a “Second Coming: Revelations” tie-in, which means it’s not actually part of the “Second Coming” storyline, but it’s a tie-in to the crossover anyway.  In practice, that means that for no readily apparent reason, Bastion has decided that this would be a perfect time to attack X-Factor as well, something he could have done at any point.  And again, the contrived plot alarm sounds as soon as you have characters asking the unavoidable “But why, sir?” questions.  Still, leave that point aside and it’s a good issue.  David’s villains have a nice line in tortured yet vaguely consistent logic, and there’s a nice spread from the stark-raving Bastion at the top of the chain of command down to basically sane military types who are simply trusting to the chain of command.  Valentine De Landro’s art is on form.  The crossover is turned to advantage by having it literally interrupt the Baron Mordo storyline in progress.  And the cliffhanger ending is another winner, simply on the “Hold on, that can’t have happened, can it?” level.

X-Men Forever #22 / X-Men Forever Annual #1 – Issue #22 is the middle chapter of a three-parter where the X-Men finally go to confront the Consortium, and basically it involves them all going to the bad guys base and fighting them.  It’s fine, it’s a good old-school superhero routine, but there’s not much more I can really say about it.  The Annual is a flashback story explaining the start of the Logan/Jean love affair which was a plot point in earlier issues.  Of course, the romantic tension had been established long, long ago, so it’s really a question of putting the two characters in a situation where they can be nudged in a different direction.  In practice, that turns out to mean a story where they go undercover to investigate a dodgy holiday resort run by evildoers, and etc etc.  At times it feels like some romantic character moments which have been bolted on to a fill-in story, but it does hang together on the whole.

X-Men Legacy #235 / X-Force #26 – Parts 4 and 5 of “Second Coming”, in which there is running around, and there is chasing, and there is fighting, and Somebody Dies.  The all-important death comes in X-Force (which is an odd choice, since you’d think you’d want it in one of the X-Men books), and I don’t know quite what to make of it.  To be honest, I don’t really buy it.  It’s treating a major (albeit largely unused) character as cannon fodder, and killing him off at a suspiciously early stage in a 14-part story where we all know Phoenix will be along sooner or later.   If they’re serious, then frankly it feels a bit desperate – in a sense, I doubt they’re serious about it because I give them more credit than that.  We shall see what happens.  That aside… Legacy has art by Greg Land, who’s having one of his better days.  There’s still some awkward posing and stiff expressions to drag things down, but less than usual, and he actually does quite a good Warlock, perhaps because the character is so unavoidably at odds with the rest of his style.  X-Force has Mike Choi and Sonia Oback, and very little space for its nominal lead characters – it’s mainly Rogue, Kurt and Hope on the run from Bastion.  The art errs on the side of over-busy, and loses some of Choi and Oback’s style in the process, but it’s not bad.

X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back! #3 – Okay, then, so now we have a clear explanation of what the hell was going on in the first two issues, and we’re heading for the big finale!  It’s still a decidedly off-kilter story, as you’d expect from Kathryn Immonen and Sara Pichelli.  I’m not quite sure why you’d want to tie Pixie to the Mastermind sisters, who don’t really seem like characters that have much in common with her.  But I like the basic take on Pixie, as well as the exasperation of the supporting cast.  Immonen gets X-23’s character, which is very hard to write well, and understands how to make her work in a group cast.  And the art is lovely.  This could still go either way in the final issue – it could redefine Pixie in an interesting way which will give other writers somewhere to work from, or it could end up cluttering her up horrifically.  The series so far has been wonky enough that it’s hard to call.  But I’m definitely intrigued, and that’s the key thing.

It’s Sunday afternoon, it’s time to review some comics!

But first… you’ll also be wanting to download this week’s episode of House to Astonish, which you’ll find in the next post down.  In this one, Al and I talk about Brightest Day, Kill Shakespeare and Turf.  And for those of you who don’t listen all the way to the end, keep an eye out over the next few days when Al and I appear on the next episode of The Thumbcast.  We’re doing a panel game based on the BBC radio show Fighting Talk.  (Only not about sport, obviously.)  Should be fun.  We’re recording it on Tuesday, so we’ll let you know when it’s up.  Or you could just subscribe to their podcast too.  I do.

Next week… well, god knows, really.  Theoretically there’s a whole lot of comics out (including two chapters of “Second Coming”, just to prove that Marvel really are the worst schedulers imaginable), but given that Diamond are usually unable to get their heads round a bank holiday, I don’t see them overcoming a volcanic dust cloud.  So it may be an involuntary skip week next Sunday.  Time will tell.

And now, some comics that came out this last week…

Black Widow #1 – Just to prove that Marvel are nothing if not eternally optimistic, this is a new ongoing series for the perennial C-lister, presumably on the basis that she’s in the upcoming Iron Man movie.  Anyone seriously think that’s going to help it get past the year barrier?  No, me neither.  You know, if it were me, I’d take the “series of miniseries” route with these lower-tier characters.  It’s a vicious circle when you start cancelling books after five months, because then readers have even less faith in the next launch (and they’re right to do so).  Seems to me that if you call it a mini then you’re probably going to turn out to be right anyway, and you’ll restore some of the lustre of launching something as an Ongoing Series.

Anyway, the comic.  It’s by Marjorie Liu and Daniel Acuna, a decent creative team.  Despite the silly acres of cleavage on the cover, the interior art has no truck with such nonsense, which is reassuring.  It’s one of those stories where Natasha is attacked by baddies with a Mysterious Agenda, who cut something out of her and then leave her for the doctors to deal with.  And… actually that’s about the extent of the main plot, but Liu fills it out nicely with good supporting roles for the other Avengers (higher-profile characters who nonetheless don’t overshadow her), some neat interactions between Natasha and the other spy types, and a genuinely nasty, if rather implausible, surgery sequence.  Acuna’s art is a good match for the character, who goes well with slightly stylised visuals.  And it strikes a decent balance between using other Marvel Universe characters (to appeal to the Wednesday crowd) without letting them dominate the story (and thus alienating all those movie viewers who are theoretically supposed to be buying the book).  All told, it’s pretty good.  And even if it doesn’t survive for long as an ongoing series, I think it’ll manage to deliver an entertaining few issues with this story.

Brightest Day #0 – See also the podcast.  This is the opening issue of DC’s next universe-spanning thingy, running fortnightly for the next few months.  A bunch of characters were brought back from the dead at the end of Blackest Night; this series is, well, about them.  So it’s an ensemble cast, except the characters have seemingly nothing in common other than being brought back from the dead – it’s a motley crew ranging from the likes of the Martian Manhunter and Maxwell Lord down to Captain Boomerang and Hawk.  I can sort of see why they’ve billed this as issue #0 – it’s really about introducing the vast set of characters rather than kicking off the story proper – but it is essential reading and to all intents and purposes it’s issue #1.  Much depends here on whether Geoff Johns and Peter Tomasi ultimately have a good explanation for reviving this oddball selection of characters, since that’s the central mystery that has to drive this series.  Without that, it risks becoming an exercise in reversing unwanted continuity.  There’s also another possibility, which is that the series manages to do something interesting with the whole concept of how the different characters deal with their reincarnation, but that doesn’t exactly seem to be a priority here.  Fernando Pasarin’s art is lovely, and I thought this was basically fine as an intro issue.  Al wasn’t so sure, to put it mildly.

The Flash #1 – What, another Flash relaunch?  Do you think they’ll ever take the hint and put the poor guy on the back burner for a while to let interest build?  Probably not, unfortunately; it’s alien to DC’s entire way of thinking about their older characters.  So, here’s Geoff Johns and Francis Manapul to kick off another stab at breathing life back into the franchise.  Barry Allen returns to Central City (where everyone apparently thinks he’s been in witness protection or something), and picks up his old job as a forensic scientist.  Which, yes, is backwards… but it’s also a useful dual identity for plot purposes, so I’ve got no real problems with that.  And we’re also back to the old deal where everyone thinks Barry is gifted but incredibly slow, when of course we all know he’s… and so on and so forth.  All told, even as someone who’s not particularly familiar with the character’s history, it’s pretty clear that this is a case of a creative team hammering the reset button as hard as they can and hauling the character back to what they regard as a classic status quo.  The concession to the passage of time is that Central City has become darker and more disillusioned in Barry’s absence – DO YOU SEE THE SUBTLE METAPHOR? – and so presumably he’s going to be setting the world to rights a bit.  But okay, I guess. If you’re going to do the Silver Age throwback routine with anyone, the Flash is a fair choice – his powers lend himself to that sort of story, and he ought to be a shiny, happy hero of the old school.  I like the art; Manapul’s got a simple but expressive quality to his work, though it’s unfortunate that he’s chosen to interpret Barry as a square-jawed hero so traditional that, when he’s not in costume, he’s the least interesting thing on the page.  As for the story… well, it’s throwback city, like I say.  But that seems to be the mood of the industry right now, and to be honest, I don’t have enough investment in any later incarnation of the Flash to have a problem with Johns doing it in this book.  For what it is, which is a very old-fashioned superhero book with a slightly modernised sheen, it works quite well.  Whether that’s what you want is another matter.

Kill Shakespeare #1 – A miniseries written by Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col with art by Andy Belanger, in which a bunch of Shakespeare villains try to enlist Hamlet to, well, kill Shakespeare.  This has had some mixed reviews.  Al and I didn’t mind it; those who knows their Shakespeare say it’s missing the point of the characters.  But is it?  It’s hard to say; after all, the story has a couple of characters departing from the plot of Hamlet completely unprompted, so perhaps they’re not meant to act quite like the characters from the plays.  As I mentioned on the podcast, I have a theory that the characters who want to get rid of Shakespeare are united in being villains from the histories who weren’t actually quite so villainous in real life – Shakespeare had a tendency to take the politically safe option when it came to writing about historical figures who had gone out of favour.  A clearer problem is that the characters are decidedly two-dimensional compared to Shakespeare’s versions – though when you’re inviting comparisons to Hamlet, you’re setting the bar ridiculously high to start with.  It’s basically League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Shakespeare characters, though maybe not with the subtlety.  And as with Moore’s comic, the question lurking in the background is whether this is just a gimmicky idea, or whether there’s actually a point to be made about the plays.  It’s really too early to tell at this point; it could go either way.  Certainly a flawed comic, but for all that, I’m genuinely intrigued to see where the creators are going with this odd premise.

New Mutants #12 – Part 3 of the “Second Coming” crossover, and you guessed it, there’s more fighting.  In fairness, to preserve the idea that this is indeed an issue of New Mutants, the focus is on Cannonball and the others trying to hold off the Right and stop them from providing reinforcements to the other baddies.  And of course, that’s not the focal point of the overall story by any means.  But it does at least provide the New Mutants with a story of their own, instead of getting them submerged into the bigger picture.  Basically, though, there are still two threads here: everyone chasing after Cable and Hope, and the X-Men starting to realise that some of Scott’s decisions are a bit questionable.  It’s not a bad issue – there are some good moments with the New Mutants wavering about whether to obey Scott’s seemingly suicidal attack orders, and a couple of cute ideas such as the bad guys taking out Magik with a “weaponised ritual”.  And Ibrahim Roberson’s artwork is pretty good, though his backgrounds are rather generic.  The downside is that the story seems to have become completely detached from the real world, so that it’s all about people in costumes hitting one another; and it feels at this point like a diversion grafted on to the “Second Coming” story in order to shoehorn New Mutants into the plot and give it a sales boost.  Zeb Wells has written better issues than this, but hey, that’s crossovers for you.

The Pilgrim #1 – This is by Mark Ryan and Mike Grell, and apparently it’s a reprint of a web comic that I’ve never read.  It’s a rather frustrating read.  The central idea is quite fun: much of the issue introduces the Psimex Research Institute, in which the American military is testing people with psi-powers.  The good news is that these subjects actually do have psi-powers – but not very strong ones.  They’re meant to be an intelligence unit; in practice, they’re the thought-controllers of paranoid fantasies.  Combining that with bureaucratic budget arguments is a nice enough idea.  However, it’s topped and tailed with scenes of weird stuff in World War II and Afghanistan which are hard work to decipher.   It’s not even always clear which way your eye should go around double-page spreads.  The opening section seems to be intentionally cryptic, but the closing sequence just comes across as a mess.  There are some major clarity problems here, and I end up with the feeling that deciphering the story is going to be a major headache and more trouble than it’s worth.

The Unwritten #12 – Once again, Mike Carey throws in a single-issue story between arcs.  This one has art by Peter Gross, and it’s fantastic.  Pauly Bruckner is a bad, bad man.  He tried to take Wilson Taylor’s map, and ended up being condemned to the world of fiction. Specifically, he’s now a bunny in Eliza Mae Hertford’s Willowbank Tales, a sort of halfway house between Winnie the Pooh and Beatrix Potter.  And boy, he’s not happy about that.  In this issue, we join Mr Bun as he tries to escape life as a stuffed rabbit, while the other woodland folk try their best to help him fit in.  It’s a simple idea, it’s very funny, and it’s got a clever pay-off to boot.  Easily the best comic I’ve read in weeks, and worth picking up even if you have no interest in the wider series at all.  Simply excellent.

X-Factor Forever #2 – “For six years, writer Louise Simonson steered the course for Charles Xavier’s first class of X-Men in their adventures as X-Factor.  Now the legendary scribe returns to the mutants she made famous for their most daring adventure yet.”  Marvel Comics: never knowingly underhyped.

Now, that said, I liked Louise Simonson’s run on X-Factor, and for largely nostalgic reasons, I’m really quite enjoying this book, which harks back to a long-forgotten supporting cast and a long-abandoned interpretation of Apocalypse.  I suspect if I didn’t have that attachment to the source material, I’d be crawling up the walls at some of this stuff – it’s one of those comics where humanoid robots have “visual input sensors” instead of “eyes”, and where characters stay stuff like “Apocalypse?  Only he could be so diabolical as to combine the Master Mold and Hodge into a single being!”  In other words, it is, in some respects, rather crap.  But loveably so, and in an authentically late-eighties way.  And in its favour, it’s got a completely loopy robot for the heroes to fight, and there’s a jittery energy to Dan Panosian’s art which I genuinely like a lot.  I’m enjoying it; if you don’t remember the original, you might not.

X-Men Forever #21 – In this issue: a convoluted macguffin is explained!  Also, Claremont goes a little further into last issue’s big revelation that Iron Man is the bad guy.  A little disappointingly, he seems to be already setting up the idea that it’s all a feint and that he’s infiltrating them, or something to that effect.  That’s a shame, since I quite liked the idea of doing a story in X-Men Forever that was manifestly impossible in the real Marvel Universe, by gleefully wrecking the cast of another book.  In many ways, Iron Man’s ideally suited to be the well-intentioned anti-mutant superhero, particularly in his Civil War-era version.  Anyway, this is largely a set-up issue as everyone sits around delivering exposition to one another, in preparation for the climax of the first year.  But it’s building well enough, and the pay-off should be good fun.  A fortnightly book can get away with this sort of issue.  (Be honest: is there any book that wouldn’t be improved by a more frequent schedule?)

X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back #2 – I actually missed this when it came out, so let’s cover it now.  Issue #1 had a nice enough set-up, but this one just gets a bit confusing – is Blindfold with the others or not?  Are they in a dream or in the real San Francisco?  Yes, I realise that we’re meant to be asking ourselves what on earth is going on, but the plot here is so murky that it’s hard to get a sense of what exactly the drama is supposed to be.  I recall having similar issues with Kathryn Immonen’s Hellcat mini.  Maybe I’m just slow.  There are some good moments in here, and I really like Sara Pichelli’s art, which gives the characters a real sense of life, and provides a suitably off-kilter tone to Pixie’s scenes.  As a story, though, I’m not sure it works.