I’ve been away for a few weeks, so we’ve got another backlog built up.  Let’s cover the digital books first.

A+X #6 – I’m going to assume this is a “poker game” theme issue, rather than just a case of accidentally commissioning the same story twice.

The lead story by Peter David and Giuseppe Camuncoli teams Captain Marvel with Wolverine, which strains the premise a bit given that Wolverine’s been in the Avengers for eight years now.  Anyhow, this is whimsical banter in search of a point.  A couple of mildly amusing moments, but I expect better from these creators, even when they’re going for throwaway.

Mike Costa and Stefano Caselli’s story teams the Thing with Gambit – yes, I’d forgotten the Thing was in the Avengers too, but he was.  This one at least has a plot – a simple one, but that’s fine for the length, and while the execution is middling, the premise and the twist both play nicely off the characters.  It’s nothing to go out of your way to read, but it is at least a proper short story that specifically needs these two characters.

All-New X-Men #9-10 – The solicitation copy for issue #9 promises that “The original five X-Men get new costumes!”  Nothing remotely of the sort happens in the issue itself.  The solicitation copy for issue #10 asks “Who will join Cyclops and his revolutionary crew?  The answer will shock you!”  It won’t, because the answer isn’t in the issue.  What does happen in the issue is that an unidentified character announces their defection as a cliffhanger – so the cliffhanger is something that was in the solicitation.  Oh, and incidentally, despite being utterly misleading, both of these solicitations continue to appear as the description text on Comixology.

What does happen in issue #9: the original X-Men do a Danger Room training exercise for a few pages, the main point being that they’re rookies and aren’t very good yet.  Marvel Girl’s telepathy ethics remain a bit dodgy – though Bendis has badly botched the escalation of this plot, since her treatment of Angel last issue, in front of a crowd of witnesses, far exceeded anything she does in this issue, yet seems to have merited nothing more than mild disapproval.  Nor do I buy for a second the idea that anyone who’s spent any time living with Xavier can’t grasp the issues involved.  While the initial cliffhanger suggested some promise in this storyline, this issue goes a long way towards botching it.

Mystique breaks Lady Mastermind out of jail to join her new Brotherhood, so that’s something actually happening.  And Angel finally gets around to complaining that he can’t see any sign of this “mutant genocide” they were supposedly brought to the present to prevent, and that (also) finally prompts Beast to deliver the long-overdue exposition which attempts to justify that claim.  Essentially, the argument is that Cyclops’s approach is going to spark a war with the humans at a time where the mutants can’t possibly win.  Fine, I suppose, but if that’s the idea, it should have been established long ago.  And then Cyclops’ present day team shows up for the cliffhanger.

With issue #10, Mystique’s crew wreak a bit of havoc while impersonating the original X-Men, and then the entire rest of the issue consists of gripping conversation building up to the big reveal of the aforementioned moment that’s already in the solicited.  Much of the actual tension here lies in young Cyclops getting to hear his older self’s side of the story and concluding that he’s being misled about what happened.

Oh, and incidentally, the plot of issue #10 goes out of its way to mention that Jean can’t read the minds of Scott’s team because they’re wearing psychic blockers.  You may recall that the plot of Uncanny #3, also by Brian Bendis, went out of its way to try and justify the tortuous plot on the grounds that Scott’s team could potentially have their minds read.  This is aggravating.

These are alright issues, I guess – Stuart Immonen’s art covers a multitude of sins, which is fortunate, because it has to.  There are some interesting ideas about the characters.  But we’re ten issues in here, thirteen if you bear in mind that Uncanny is essentially the same book, and the title is taking forever to get to any sort of point.  It’s increasingly clear that Bendis may have embarked on this storyline because he wanted to write scenes with the original X-Men in the present day, not because he had any particularly clear idea for what they would do once they got there.  At this stage, the threat should be far more developed than a few subplot pages in which Mystique is pushing some sort of unspecified plan.

And judging from the discrepancy between the solicitations and the actual stories, if anything the book is actually getting slower compared to the original plan.  What the hell?

Cable & X-Force #6 – Colossus dutifully goes to serve his time in an American jail, and Dennis Hopeless gets some quite good material out of that.  I like the idea that Peter is determined to decline any offer to escape, and there’s some good material with Kitty visiting him too.  Meanwhile, Boom-Boom takes his place on the roster, and the rest of the team break into Colossus’ prison – not to rescue him, but because by a happy coincidence there’s something in the basement.  Oh, and Cyclops shows up at the end.  Nothing like having the same cliffhanger in two books in the same week, is there?

This is settling down into being an entirely solid comic, and one that’s even got a voice of its own in its dry sense of humour.  I’m still not convinced that it’s got anything distinctive enough to carve out a niche in such an overcrowded market.  But it’s doing some good work with Colossus, and that’s earning it some goodwill from me.

Savage Wolverine #3 – You know how I said issue #2 was less obnoxious about the T&A?  Well, cancel that.  This issue opens with a dreadful comedy segment of the tribal chief offering girls to Amadeus Cho which feels like it belongs in Carry On Up The Savage Land.  Oh, and Shanna is being cast in the role of stroppy klutz so that Wolverine can get exasperated with her.  Annoyingly, there’s a reasonably interesting plot in here, and a lot of good visual storytelling, but I really do have major, major problems with its attitude to women.  It’s not that I’m offended by it, as such – it’s too pathetic to get worked up about in that sense.  It’s more that I find the attitude enormously creepy and it completely cancels out any entertainment value the issue would otherwise have for me.  I just don’t want to be in the company of the sort of people who’d produce this, quite frankly.  You might think that’s harsh, but that is my honest response to this sort of comic, and  I suspect it’s a more widespread reaction than a lot of people in the industry realise from inside their bubble.

Uncanny Avengers #5 – Olivier Coipel takes over on art for the start of the second arc.  The Apocalypse cultists from X-Force have got some new babies to raise, but Kang promptly sweeps in to co-opt them for his own purposes.  That aside, it’s mostly an issue of new team members being introduced and more tension between the A and X sides of the team.

Those new members are Wonder Man,  the Wasp, and Sunfire.  Wasp’s been out of circulation for quite a while, and seems as good a choice as anyone for this book, which, after all, does need people who clearly fit into the “traditional” Avengers and X-Men categories.  Wonder Man is more of a problem because he has to be rehabilitated from the storyline Brian Bendis did with him in Avengers.  In fact, “storyline” overstates the coherence of the whole affair; it consisted of Wonder Man randomly insisting that the Avengers ought to shut down, and pointlessly attacking people, with no pay off or reason whatsoever.  The whole thing was pretty much a mess.

Obviously that gives Rick Remender a lot of work to do to justify Wonder Man’s presence on the team and turn him back into a workable character.  His solution is pretty much to acknowledge the broad strokes of Bendis’ idea while ignoring the details (which aren’t worthy of serious attention anyway).  So we have here a Wonder Man who’s prepared to help out the team in a support role in order to lend Wanda a hand, but refuses to fight because he insists that he’s now a non-combatant.  It’s an awkward shift from what Bendis was doing, but that’s more a reflection on Bendis than on Remender, who at least manages to drag the character’s storyline into the ballpark of recognisable human behaviour.

As for Sunfire, he’s been in limbo for a good long while, but I can see the appeal of using him.  He’s an underdeveloped character, and this book needs a few cast members to call its own, without having to share them with other titles.

Havok’s “don’t call me a mutant” speech in this issue has raised a few eyebrows.  Personally, I see it as just not very elegantly phrased.  The idea is presumably supposed to be that he wants to be judged as an individual and not as a mutant, which is pretty much fine.  On the other hand, in downplaying any idea that being a mutant is central to his identity, he’s running counter to pretty much everything the X-Men have been saying for the last few years.  The X-Men have been almost entirely focussed on the notion of building a mutant community since House of M, so it’s odd to have Havok outright reject that approach.  That said, Havok has always been on the periphery of the X-Men and rather less of a true believer than his brother.  A lot depends on Remender’s thinking here.  If Havok’s meant to be setting out the X-Men’s world view, then we’ve got a glitch.  But if this is meant to be his personal view, and something the other X-Men might not actually agree with, then Remender might be on to something.

Uncanny X-Force #3 – So it’s another issue of running around chasing Spiral and her girl, basically.  Not a huge amount to add to what I’ve said about previous issues, really.  It’s quite solidly done, Garney’s art is good, clear and dynamic, and the book shows a pleasing interest in actually explaining key points of history for newer readers.  It’s terribly unfashionable these days to pause the action to explain a character’s origin story, but you just can’t assume that everyone remembers Spiral’s back story from the late 1980s, and taking a moment to hit those key points so that this series stands on its own terms is something that more writers ought to do.  Plus, considering the tangled mess that Sam Humphries has inherited with some of these characters, he’s pretty good at cutting through to the bits of history that matter to his story, so that those flashbacks can be kept short.

It’s also looking as though this story is going to attempt a rehab job on Bishop, who was horrendously misused as a crazed lunatic in the last Cable series, but shows up here in a version of that character which makes pretty clear that it’s going to be explained away as outside influence.  More curious is the nature of that outside influence; the art shows a giant stylised bear within his mind, which looks awfully like Bill Sienkiewicz’s Demon Bear from New Mutants.  That’s a terribly obscure reference for this book, though, and not one that obviously connects to any of the characters the book is using.  Still, if that is where they’re going, I’ve at least got reasonable faith that Humphries will explain it properly when the time comes.

What we’ve got so far is a series that isn’t bad at all, but has yet to develop a clear enough premise and voice of its own to easily mark out a space in the line.  There’s time yet, I guess, but it’s got to hit that big hook soon.

X-Men: Legacy #8 – This issue has Legion attempting to help – kind of – one Santi Sardina, a loser kid who suddenly develops the mutant power to… claim credit for everything.  So if anyone sees anything remotely impressive or laudable while he’s nearby, they’re compelled to give him all the thanks.  As you can imagine, the idea is that this isn’t particularly satisfying.  Legion’s initial idea is to give Santi purpose by encouraging him to become a politician so that he can be the first mutant president, but then he comes round to a route that focusses on Santi himself.

This book is getting a bit Steve Gerberish – we’re getting oddball characters with powers that are of real-world practical utility but no combat value whatsoever.  But it’s also a bit rough around the edges in terms of thinking through the theme.  For example, the problem with Legion’s initial idea is clearly meant to be that he’s focussing on his own agenda rather than Santi’s well-being.  Legion doesn’t seem to have turned his mind to whether Santi would be any good as president, or what he might actually do in the role, or what symbolic value he could have without disclosing how he got the job (which would surely cause some sort of backlash, unless Legion’s imagining a happy America of mental enthrallment).  In short, there are some far more fundamental objections to the idea beyond the one that Legion is ultimately concerned about.  More to the point, you get the awkward feeling writer Si Spurrier hasn’t really thought this stuff through either, or at least is happy to just ignore it because it doesn’t fit his theme.

And while Legion’s eventual solution to Santi’s problem makes sense – do work anonymously so that you know the credit is genuine – the story makes it a bit easy for him by making him an artistic genius.  In fact, Santi’s more of a theme-illustrating concept than an actual character, and that’s where this story doesn’t quite land for me.  But on the other hand, the concept’s a good one.  I like what this book is trying to do; it’s just not always quite nailing it in the execution.

So that’s everything I’m getting in digital format.  Let’s take a very quick race through the other X-books from the last three weeks, since we’ll never get caught up otherwise.

X-Termination #1 / Astonishing X-Men #60 / Age of Apocalypse #14 – We’re three chapters into this crossover and it’s looking pretty dreadful right now.  The plot is basically that all the jumping between dimensions has weakened some wall or other and released… uh, thingies, evil thingies.  They’ve got no discernible personality or agenda, they’re just sort of humanoid devourers.  Since two of the participating books in this crossover are being cancelled, it’s then time to wipe out the cannon fodder.  It feels tacked on to Age of Apocalypse, and frankly, we were never given enough time to care about the later characters from X-Treme X-Men.  There are a few decent moments, mostly involving Nightcrawler, but on the whole it seems to be little more than a mass cull of unwanted characters.

Gambit #10 – Gambit and Joelle break into a Hydra base and steal a thingie.  It’s not one of the more inventive issues and there are some clarity issues with the art – most glaringly, a big establishing shot of the main setting fails to get across the fact that it’s full of stasis tubes containing the guys Gambit will be fighting in the rest of the issue.  And I really don’t understand what’s going on in the closing pages, which can’t seem to make up its mind whether Gambit’s genuinely trying to warm Joelle up or stopping to randomly have sex with her in a snowdrift.  It’s so odd that I can’t help wondering if it’s one of those scenes where the artist has misunderstood the intention of the script, but then what else is Rogue meant to be reacting to when she shows up at the end?

Wolverine & The X-Men #27 – Crikey, Iron Mask.  That’s a villain I didn’t expect to see in this book.  Anyway, this issue Dog Logan tries to prove his theory that he’s the better teacher by leading the kids in battle against the villains he’s brought through time (including the aforementioned western baddie).  The idea is quite good, and at least tries to turn Dog’s status as a C-list Wolverine clone to advantage by defining him as a character who chafes against that.  I confess though that (again) I don’t really understand what the closing pages are going for – once Dog and the kids have been captured by the bad guys, why is it a big deal that he throws a tantrum?  It’s just a weird beat to end on, since we already know Dog’s angry.

X-Factor #253 – “Hell on Earth War” continues, as X-Factor remain on the run (while all the main heroes are too busy fighting the random demon hordes to figure out what the problem is).  The format of hell lords approaching Tier and eventually getting torn about by him is becoming a bit apparent here, but Peter David still finds other ways of gently advancing the plot, so that there’s a sense of progression here which – cough, cough – some other books might care to emulate.