Okay, so let’s take stock… I’ve still got several of last week’s books to do, which I didn’t get around to reviewing during the week.  And as for this week’s books, so far I’ve only read the ones that I’m buying digitally.  (That leaves X-Men #40 and X-Factor #250 to be picked up later, basically.)  Still plenty to cover right now, though…

Age of Apocalypse #11 – Marvel have confirmed that the book is officially being cancelled with the “X-Termination” crossover, and while “cancellation” is a relative concept these days – another run of X-Men? Really? – a quick glance at the sales figures, not to mention the sudden haste with which it’s moving to wrap up its storylines, rather suggests that the book is genuinely being put to sleep.

What we have in this issue is more sudden acceleration towards the climax.  All things considered, the pacing has worked out surprisingly well; though things are plainly being brought forward, David Lapham still has enough space here to avoid any feeling that the finale is too shockingly abrupt, and after all, it’s likely that he always had a contingency plan in the event of the book being canned after a year.

One problem he does seem to struggle with a little is finding a way for this story to feel like a resolution for any of the individual members of the X-Terminated, whose individual character arcs were evidently planned to run over a much longer period.  But the issue offers a clever way of getting rid of the Shadow King, and a nice sense of the whole thing building to a climax of heroic sacrifice, with an effective cliffhanger that suggests Lapham genuinely may be willing to blow up his whole cast for an appropriately nihilistic “victory.”

All-New X-Men #6 – Cripes, this book doesn’t have a release schedule so much as a bombardment.  We’re now into the second arc of the series, though it’s also only the second day – the pacing here only works because the book is shipping so frequently.

Such a rapid schedule also means we get a different artist for the new arc.  It’s David Marquez, who’s previously worked on Ultimate Spider-Man.  His style is maybe a little heavier on detail than Stuart Immonen’s, maybe a little more conventional in layouts, but it shares a similar cleanness, and he’s good with character emotion – making him a good choice for a book as talky as this one.

The issue barely advances the plot at all; there’s a definite sense that Bendis is concerned as much to re-establish his premise for the benefit of trade readers.  So the focus here is on young Jean starting to make friends with Kitty and Storm, and on Scott exploring his new world and having his first fight with Wolverine.  Warren gets a brief segment to meet up with his (as ever, disturbingly chipper) modern self, and the others… well, they don’t get a look in, really.

If you’re prepared to overlook the continuity issues about when and how Jean found out she was a telepath, Bendis writes her quite well, and does a good job of repositioning her as a rookie rather than a returned legend.  His take on Scott is more questionable; it’s fair enough that at this point Scott’s mainly just going to be reacting in a baffled way to what he’s done, but I don’t really get the sense that any of Scott’s original personality underlies those reactions.  Bendis has some good ideas here about putting Scott in the rebel role while casting Wolverine as authority figure, and about Scott losing his authority as leader now that everyone knows how he turned out; but early Scott’s personality is all about brooding guilt and responsibility, and I just don’t buy him reacting to this by going off to be rebellious instead of being overcome by horror at what he’s supposed to have done.  Perhaps he would; there’s a case to be made that once Scott is rejected as leader, he’s also freed from the sense of duty that drives him in the early issues, but I don’t think Bendis makes that case very convincingly here.

First X-Men #5 – The final issue of the miniseries, and I’m afraid this one goes firmly in the “let us never speak of this again” file.  As a story on its own terms, First X-Men is more or less passable, but the problem is that it doesn’t want to be taken on its own terms.  Pretty much everything that happens in this concluding chapter is supposed to get its weight from offering a new explanation for history; the book positively demands to be viewed in the context of X-Men continuity.  Yet it doesn’t really work in that context.

The basic idea is that Wolverine’s makeshift team of mutants pretty much collapses under a serious challenge, and it all goes horribly wrong – thus explaining why we’ve never heard of these guys again.  Most of them wind up dead.  But they do at least take most of the anti-mutant government guys with them.  And as a result of this fiasco, we’re asked to accept that Xavier is inspired to open his school; Magneto is inspired to start the Brotherhood; Wolverine is so depressed by his failure that he signs up for Weapon X; and Sabretooth is so traumatised by the death of his new girlfriend that he’s set on the course towards being a bad guy.

And with the arguable exception of Magneto realising that the time has come to set up a mutant team, none of that works.  Even if you want to shoehorn it into continuity for literal purposes, it doesn’t fit any of the characters’ overall arcs.  Xavier already has a story where he’s inspired to use his powers for good: it’s the one where he meets Amahl Farouk and learns about evil mutants.  Wolverine’s never previously been shown as having signed up voluntarily for Weapon X, and I’m pretty sure the titular Barry Windsor-Smith story expressly shows that he didn’t (in the very scene which this story appears to be echoing).  And a ton of stories have shown Sabretooth as a vicious murderer long before we get to this point.

The “everything you know is wrong” idea can work if the new version of history actually makes sense and seems to be more interesting, but this just doesn’t – it’s a story that isn’t especially interesting in its own right and it doesn’t appear to work as a contribution to wider continuity either.  The art is often quite good in a histrionic way, though even there it feels rushed at times.  On the whole, though, the series is a dud.

Savage Wolverine #1 – Ah, the Frank Cho book.

It’s better than I feared.  Some of what Cho is trying to do here – quite a lot of it, in fact – works.  Some of it doesn’t quite land.  And some of it is just tedious fan service, though that’s less prominent than you might imagine.

The high concept is set up very well.  There’s an island in the Savage Land which has some sort of technology-dampening field on it.  A SHIELD survey group, which has Shanna the She-Devil aboard for no apparent reason other than that the story simply must have a girl in a leopardskin bikini, approaches the island and promptly drops out of the sky.  Everyone is stuck there and the rest of the group have all been killed off apart from Shanna.  Building a raft doesn’t work: you get attacked by sea creatures.  So to get off you’ve got to find the dampening thingy and shut it down.  Then one day Wolverine also lands on the island, and has no idea how he got there.  They team up.

That’s a perfectly fine premise, depending on how long Cho actually wants to run with this.  And there’s plenty here to remind us that Cho’s a good artist who doesn’t get by solely on T&A – the panel of a confused Wolverine waking up on the ground is beautifully done, and there are some nicely physical actions scenes too.  Visually, it’s very good.

Still, there’s no getting away from the fact that your reaction to this book will be unavoidably informed by your tolerance for gratuitous T&A; we all know why Frank Cho is drawing a Shanna the She-Devil story, and it’s not because anyone thinks she’s an interesting character with a devoted fan base.  A fascinating editorial at the back – not credited to Cho, it should be said – offers the intriguing suggestion that the story’s strength lies in taking stock pulp elements and putting a twist on them: “the damsel isn’t as in distress as you thought she’d be; the natives aren’t as clueless as they’re usually portrayed.”

They might have a point about the natives, but this is a bizarre reading of Shanna’s role.  Now, I’ve not got much time for her as a character.  She’s a thinly veiled knock-off of Sheena The Jungle Queen who had a short-lived book in the 1970s and has subsequently stuck around in the unrewarding role of “person to whom Ka-Zar can deliver expository dialogue”.  But she’s not a damsel in distress.  She’s the female counterpart of Tarzan – a “jungle girl”, as they’re often called.  So there ought to be nothing remotely surprising about the fact that she can look after herself in a jungle.  And there isn’t.

And to be fair, the story itself doesn’t really seem to think that there is, so the editors may be misreading Cho’s intentions here.  Still, there’s something about Cho’s whole approach to the character (and the approach of the editors who commissioned him) that makes me deeply uncomfortable.  Sure, the combination of “strong female character” and “unrelenting fan service” is deeply embedded in the whole jungle girl archetype – but that’s why I find the whole genre vaguely creepy and unpleasant in a way that the story plainly doesn’t intend.

Wolverine and the X-Men #23 – Final part of the “Murder Circus” arc, a storyline which is doubtless going to divide readers according to their level of tolerance for absurdity.  Wolverine and the X-Men pushes that boundary more than most X-Men books, and that’s fine; it sets its baseline for weirdness at “really quite high” and has fun from there.  That’s why the Hellfire kids largely work for me in this book in a way that they didn’t in Schism; they were jarringly out of line in a regular X-Men crossover, but they’re pretty much within the usual range of insanity in this book.

Still… Frankenstein running a circus full of zombie clowns.  There’s something about that that doesn’t quite click for me even within this book, and I can’t entirely figure out why.  I think it may be that the story is trying to revel in their absurdity while also trying to make them a vaguely creepy threat, and it doesn’t quite manage to achieve both.

Or maybe I just don’t like circus stories.  Never have, really.  Could just be that.

There are some plot points here of wider importance – more of Idie’s corruption (which isn’t quite working for me, since it’s hard to buy a character change being motivated by quite such absurd plot elements), the introduction of an unlikely ultimate villain who makes a degree of sense given all those Bamfs that have been around since issue #1, and some serious attempt to give Max a personality of his own beyond just being another of the Hellfire kids.  That last one actually does work for me; the other two Hellfire boys do need to be a bit more distinct, and by their standards this story is almost sensible. Mind you, I wonder whether two issues wouldn’t have done to hit the points here; three issues of circus-based mind-control seems a bit much.

Or, like I say, maybe it’s just that I don’t like circuses.