Tonight’s Wrestlemania preview?  One post down.

This weekend’s podcast?  Two posts down.

Alright, now to run through this week’s X-books!  And it’s quite the eventful week, with one cancellation, one new creative team, and the lead-in issue for the big summer crossover.

Astonishing X-Men #48 – The first issue by Marjorie Liu and Mike Perkins.  We talked about this on the podcast, and for my money it’s a mixed affair.  There’s an obvious difficulty for any of the secondary X-books in trying to find a separate identity for their title, and to some extent Liu succeeds in setting a different tone for her book – even if it’s one that bears little resemblance to the sort of stories that have appeared in this book before.  The title is now aligned with Wolverine’s side of the split, but steers clear of the school in favour of doing stories about some of the staff hanging out in New York over their weekends along with Manhattan residents Northstar and Cecilia Reyes.

Reyes is rather oddly positioned as some sort of romantic interest for Gambit, despite the fact that X-Men Legacy has been positioning him in a romantic subplot with Frenzy.  This doesn’t feel like it’s setting up a triangle; it just comes across as if the two books aren’t co-ordinating very well.  Northstar, meanwhile, comes equipped with a partner who I’m not sure we’ve ever seen before, but who feels suspiciously as though he’s here to get tragically killed in chapter three.

If the basic idea is to get some of the second-tier characters from the east coast faction away from the zaniness of the school and do something a little more grounded, that’s maybe not a bad idea.  Whether we really need another book with prominent roles for Wolverine and Gambit is another matter, and it also has to be said that this first issue is very talky.  If you’re a fan of well-appointed Manhattan flats, it’s very much a comic for you, though, because there’s eight straight pages of people having conversations in them.  The story kicks in near the end, though not to the point of actually establishing the hook.

It’s alright, and it’ll probably pick up in later issues once it hits its stride, but it’s not a particularly great debut issue.

Avengers vs X-Men #0 – Ah, zero issues.  Always thought that was an odd way of labelling a prologue.  Kind of makes sense when it’s added later as a prequel, but if it’s simply the first issue of Avengers vs X-Men, doesn’t that just make it issue #1?

Well, anyway.  What this issue actually contains is a Scarlet Witch story by Brian Bendis, and a Hope story by Jason Aaron, both with art by Frank Cho (who, in fairness, dials back his usual cheesecake tendencies quite considerably in this issue).  The Scarlet Witch story sees her returning to being a superhero and taking on MODOK, and some of the other Avengers trying to bring her back into the fold, only for the Vision to refuse to talk to her.  That’s basically it, and much depends on how far you think the Vision’s reaction is out of character.  I think it’s more or less acceptable; but then, I’ve got no terribly clear sense of what the Vision’s personality is even meant to be these days, since god knows he’s done nothing terribly interesting in years.

Perhaps the more pertinent question is why Avengers vs X-Men is opening with a Scarlet Witch story at all, when most of the hype has been about Hope and the Phoenix.  I can only assume that this is finally heading to the question of whether Hope does “save” mutantkind by reversing M-Day, and since Wanda was important to the original story, they need to find a role for her here.  We’ll see how that goes.

Hope’s story involves her wondering about her connection with the Phoenix, which nobody will talk to her about, and taking off her frustrations by beating up low-end super villains in San Francisco, despite Cyclops’ grumblings that she’s too important to go off on her own like this.  I’m not quite sold on this one; Aaron’s take on Cyclops and Hope’s relationship is logical enough, but doesn’t really match up with the way they’re being written in other titles.  If Cyclops was that desperate to keep Hope out of harm’s way, would he have put her on the Extinction Team in the first place?  And other stories haven’t really established Hope as somebody who takes out her frustrations by going off on her own to beat the crap out of bad guys.  The whole thing feels a bit out of character to me, I’m afraid.

Daken: Dark Wolverine #23 – The final issue, and Daken makes his last attempt to go out in a nihilistic blaze of glory.  And yes, Daken dies.  Not in a way that would cause immeasurable difficulties for anyone who wanted to bring him back, granted – Daken says he deliberately wants to leave a bit of doubt in everyone’s minds – but that’s hardly the point.

For once, this may be a storyline improved by cancellation, since the chance to kill the character provides the opportunity to do an intriguing anticlimax.  Daken wants to go out with a bang in a grand gesture that will leave everyone remembering him as the nihilistic mastermind he believes himself to be.  And in a purely physical sense, everything goes as planned.  But ultimately, nobody really cares.  Instead of treating him as a brilliant manipulator, everyone else just sees him as a rather boring psycho with daddy issues.  The key moment in this issue is when Daken asks “Don’t you want to know why I did all this?”, and Wolverine simply replies “No.”

Daken never reforms, never escapes his hang-ups – instead, his drug-induced moment of realisation is a brief glimpse of understanding of the heroes, and a recognition that he’s just an empty character obsessed with his father.  He achieves some degree of self-awareness, but only in time to realise that he was never the man he thought he was.  And while Wolverine’s left to reflect on where his son went wrong, the bottom line is that Daken’s series ends with him dying a failure, as his first person narration resignedly acknowledges his real motivations.  In a strange way he comes to terms with who he is, but too late for it to matter.  He wants to be acknowledged as a great man; he goes out, even within the context of his own series, as a curio in superhero history.

It’s the ending Daken deserves, but it’s not the one you’d expect Marvel to give him.  In that sense it’s quite a brave direction, and it will be all the stronger if Daken’s story really does end here.  Once Marvel stopped trying to sell us on the idea that Daken was the coolest thing ever, and started running with the angle that he just thought he was – which was pretty much when Williams took over – there was something there.  But that direction logically leads either to this point, or to a well-trodden story of redemption.  Leave it here.  It’s a better story that way.

Uncanny X-Force #23 – The art seemed to have improved with the previous issue, but this month we’re back to sketchiness, missing backgrounds, inconsistent line weight, and wonky colouring that wavers between bright primary colours and murky greens.  Somewhere in here, there’s an interesting story trying to get out, though the sudden twist that the bad guy is a future version of the reformed Jamie Braddock – who can thus only be defeated by killing the present day Jamie – feels like it comes out of nowhere.  The subplot with the Skinless Man feels disconnected from the rest, the stuff with cutting off Fantomex’s face feels way over the top and out of tone with the rest of the story… yeah, it’s not good.

That said, the climax works.  Brian can’t bring himself to kill Jamie, so Psylocke steps in to do it for him.  That’s pretty standard; what’s more interesting is her complaint that Brian just wanted to remain the hero, and leaves her to take the responsibility.  I like that idea, and I think it kind of works for Brian’s character.

But after the very strong previous storyline, this Otherworld arc has been a disappointment.

X-Men Legacy #264 – Christos Gage begins his second storyline, with the arrival at the school of the Mimic and Weapon Omega from the Dark X-Men.  Weapon Omega’s not very well, largely because he feeds on the energy of mutants and he hasn’t had many around yet.  So bringing him to a school full of mutants to get help isn’t a very smart move.  But the Mimic is, well, not the sharpest tool in the box.

I’ve never really cared for Weapon Omega, who’s basically a plot device with no personality.  Gage doesn’t really solve that problem in this issue, though in fairness, since the plot calls for Omega to be a raving lunatic for much of the issue, there’s not much opportunity to do so.  The Mimic gets a better deal, with Gage picking up on the angle from Dark X-Men that he’s not such a bad guy, and kind of well-meaning in his way, but a bit of a loser and hopelessly out of his depth.  Still… it’s ultimately a Weapon Omega story, and I am yet to be convinced that I want to read about him.