The big release this week is probably Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Fatale #1, which is indeed excellent – but I figure we’ll be talking about that on the podcast next week.  Besides which, there are seven X-books out, which is a lot – and a couple of them are also fairly noteworthy.  So…

Avengers: X-Sanction #2 – The thing about Jeph Loeb is that he has become a writer who is terribly easy to damn with faint praise.  Over the last few years, his name has been attached to comics so atrocious that these days he can exceed expectations by dint of intelligibility alone.  And it’s only fair to acknowledge that, if you have your expectations set that low, X-Sanction exceeds them comfortably.  It does make sense, in a broad brush kind of way.  The characters have passably intelligible motivations.  And some of the flashbacks to Cable and Hope are genuinely well written – I like the scene of her putting on chunks of metal in an attempt to emulate her father figure.

But while X-Sanction is certainly no train wreck, nor is it particularly good.  And while the plot hasn’t quite fallen apart yet, it certainly requires a degree of goodwill from the reader.  Cable has learned that, in the future, the Avengers will apparently kill Hope or something.  He’s determined to protect her, so he’s come back in time to… well, not kill the Avengers, but capture them, so that he can interrogate them and find out what they want with Hope.  Except first, it seems he’s been to some other point in the future to pick up other Avengers-related technology that Ed McGuinness might like to draw.

Of course, Cable is presumably wasting his time, since the Avengers have yet to express the slightest interest in Hope, and so interrogating them on the topic is unlikely to achieve anything (other than to direct their attention to her, which I strongly suspect is going to be the painfully obvious “ironic” ending to the mini).  There are a number of potential plot holes here, none of which Loeb seems to be going near explaining.  Why attack the Avengers now rather than later?  Why not just ask them what they want with Hope?  Why not stop to do some research during the time he apparently had available to pick up weapons in the future?

None of this would greatly matter if X-Sanction worked as a mindless action comic, which is all it really seems to aspire to be.  But I don’t think it really works on that level either.  There’s nothing especially inventive in any of Cable’s takedowns of the Avengers.  And while Ed McGuinness’ art is pleasant enough in its chunky way, I’d hardly call it spectacular.  In fact, the problem with X-Sanction is that it’s rather pedestrian.  It’s just a rather forgettable fight comic which has designs on being an event, but never manages to summon up any sense of occasion.

Uncanny X-Force #19.1 – Yes, Marvel are still doing Point One issues, the supposed jumping on points!  Considering they do absolutely nothing for sales, and thus seem to be failing completely in their only stated reason to exist, I don’t know whether to chalk this up to bloodyminded denial, or uncharacteristic long-term dedication to pushing a fundamentally good idea until we all come round to it.

X-Force has had a Point One issue already, but this one isn’t actually a jumping on point for X-Force at all.  It’s a prologue to the upcoming Age of Apocalypse series, which starts in… uh, in March.  And which is by a completely different creative team.  Generally a weird call, this one.

As we already saw in the Point One one-shot, the new series takes the line that Wolverine’s mutant forces are the bad guys who dominate the planet, and the guys who would have been anti-mutant crazies in the mainstream universe end up taking the freedom fighter role instead.  Though they’re still anti-mutant crazies, from the look of it.  The AoA X-Men don’t really fit into this model, and from the look of it, this story (and their role in the Dark Angel Saga) are designed mainly to remove them from the board, or reposition the remaining characters to fit the battle lines for the new series.  So, reasonably enough, the remaining X-Men have come up with a great idea to sort everything out, based on what they’ve seen in the mainstream universe: replicate M-Day and wipe out all the mutant forces overnight.  As you can probably imagine, given that there’s still a series launching in March, that doesn’t quite go according to plan.

It’s a decent issue.  Rick Remender embraces the central conceit of the new series, which is to superficially turn all the standard X-Men tropes on their head and create a world where the anti-mutant forces have been unequivocally proven right, giving even the most lunatic members a veneer of credibility, and recasting something like M-Day as a possible liberation.  Billy Tan does some of his best art here, detailed without losing clarity, and keeping an element of delicacy – somehow, X-Force seems to consistently beat its X-office stablemates in terms of getting consistently good, interesting art.

As a prologue issue, it’s pretty good – yes, it’s glaringly obvious that Remender is putting things in order for the upcoming series, but it also does a decent job of selling the premise.  I’m still not quite sold on whether this is going to carry an ongoing series; it seems like something that has the potential to be both gimmicky and unremittingly bleak, which could wear thin rather quickly.  But then again, David Lapham’s writing it, and I’d assume he’s got more sense than that.

Uncanny X-Men #4 – This is a one-shot story from the perspective of a member of the Phalanx who’s been locked up in Sinister’s lab for years and cut off from the rest of his hive-mind.  He escapes when Sinister abandons the lab, and begins the laborious task of getting back in touch with the hive.  The creature loved being part of a hive mind and knows that everyone who gets absorbed into the Phalanx loves it once the transformation is complete, so clearly it’s a wonderful gift to be shared with the world.  But reconstituting his hive turns out to be harder than expected, even before the X-Men show up to try and eradicate him.

And it’s a really good issue.  It’s about getting us to see everything from the Phalanx’s perspective, so that we first sympathise with him, and then feel for him when it all starts going wrong.  For their part, the X-Men are relegated to playing the adversary role – and since they have no real sympathy for the Phalanx, they almost come across more as the bad guys.  Which they are, from the Phalanx’s standpoint.

Brandon Peterson is the guest artist for this issue.  That’s a smart choice, since he’s rather good at techno-organic characters, and does a nice job of giving the main character a bit of soul while still keeping him as fundamentally a bit nasty.

I can see an argument that it’s early in the series to be breaking off from the ongoing storylines like this.  The subplot about Emma’s injury isn’t dealt with here.  (In a nice touch, the X-Men simply show up with Psylocke in her place.)   But it’s a very good single issue, and I’m more than happy to have it here.

Wolverine and the X-Men: Alpha & Omega #1 – This is the Brian Wood Wolverine story which, I would hazard a guess, was probably envisaged at some point as a storyline for the second Wolverine title.  Since Marvel’s publishing strategy is generally moving away from spin-off minis, I suspect this may be a hangover from an earlier commissioning era.

Anyway, the high concept here is that in a typically impulsive attempt to prove his superiority, Kid Omega drags Wolverine (and Armor) into a psychic illusory world where he’s in control.  That world is basically a near-future sci-fi dystopia with Wolverine and Armor as couriers on the run from something-or-other.  Of course, for Kid Omega, now that he’s proved his point by doing this at all, there’s the slight question of what he does now… since the other teachers surely aren’t going to be very happy about this.

Crediting an alarming seven artists on its first issue, the book actually manages a more consistent look than you’d expect.  The basic division is between the real and illusory scenes, and it looks like most of the extra artists are actually inkers helping out Mark Brooks with the illusion pages.

The problem here is that the real conflict is between Wolverine and Kid Omega, but instead we spend most of the time in the illusory stuff, where nothing is really at stake.  I’m not honestly very interested in reading about Wolverine as a courier.  There’s enough in this issue to show that Brian Wood isn’t just going to spend the whole miniseries on that stuff – the final page makes that abundantly clear – and I think he probably does need to devote this time to it in the first issue as part of the build-up, but it could have been a bit more interesting in its own right.  Whether the eventual pay-off justifies it, we’ll have to wait and see.

X-23 #20 – This is the penultimate issue, and Marjorie Liu is putting the toys back in the box.  Although it’s billed as “Girls Night Out, part one”, the titular night out seems to be pretty much over by the end of this issue.  It sees Jubilee dragging X-23 out on the town in order to reprise their conversations from earlier in the series, and then stumbling upon somebody who was associated with her old pimp, so that she can symbolically close the door on the additional baggage that she was questionably saddled with in NYX.  And then somebody shows up to offer her membership in Avengers Academy, as Marjorie Liu works her hardest to stop it reading like a house ad.  Wrap-up stories are often a bit forced, and  Liu is in the difficult position of looking for thematic rather than plot resolution, since there aren’t really any dominant storylines she can hang this on.  But given the inherent problems of the remit, it’s done reasonably well, and Phil Noto’s art is beautiful.

X-Club #2 – In which Dr Nemesis encounters his worst nightmare: a mutagenic starfish that shares his inner monologue with the world, thus undercutting all of his snark.  Okay, that’s a pretty funny idea.  Meanwhile, Danger is shooting things up and occasionally having visions of herself as other Marvel Universe robots.  That’s just kind of a bit confusing, and there’s something of a tone clash between the two strands of the story, as if Si Spurrier can’t make up his mind quite how broadly he wants to play this story.  But there are some nice throwaway ideas in here, and the cliffhanger is well executed.

X-Men #23 – The final part of the “War Machine” storyline (well, that’s what they’re calling the trade paperback, at any rate), and this arc remains a bit underdeveloped.  The underlying idea isn’t bad at all.  A small beleaguered nation gets hold of some second-hand Sentinels, supposedly to use as a deterrent, only for the people in charge to turn them into an invasion force against the hated country next door.  Since they’re Sentinels, the X-Men show up to deal with it, but for once the Sentinels aren’t being used against mutants at all – which potentially raises an interesting idea about how the X-Men might have felt about the original, deterrent idea.  Unfortunately, that idea never raises its head in the story.

What Victor Gischler has ended up writing is a sketchy story about a hawkish politician and a dovish general, intercut with scenes of the X-Men and a random guest star fighting Sentinels – two strands which pretty much don’t meet until the very end, to no particular effect.  It doesn’t really work.

Now, there are also other problems here.  The small nation is a garbled mix of cliches from different continents with a hefty dose of “somewhere in the Soviet Union”.  We’re being asked to take second-hand Sentinels seriously as a major threat, only a couple of months after Schism told us they were a joke – the editors should never have allowed that to happen.  And the story appears to end with General Nabokov being installed as the new ruler of Puternicstan, entirely glossing over the fact that earlier issues told us it wasn’t even an independent country (and he wasn’t even born there).  But these are relatively minor points; the key problem, unfortunately, is that the story just fails to do very much with its potential, and ends up rather flat.