They tell me there’s some sort of holiday on.  If you are the sort of person who thinks that everything this weekend has to be Hallowe’en themed, then open another window, put it next to this one, and search Google Images for a pumpkin or something.  Spooky.

Welcome to this not remotely special 31 October edition of the X-Axis, in which as usual I’ll be running through a bunch of X-books and a few other titles.  It’s also a podcast weekend, so check the post below to hear Al and me discussing Carnage, Action Comics and JLA/99 as well as running down the latest solicitations and news.

Assorted reviews follow below the cut…

Action Comics #894 – Or Lex Luthor’s Action Comics, as the logo now has it.  This is the issue guest starring Death from Sandman, which come to think of it might also have been somebody’s idea of a Hallowe’en tie-in, or might just be random coincidence.  It’s a sign of how well DC have protected Sandman that a major appearance by one of the characters (with Neil Gaiman’s endorsement) still constitutes something of an event.  I haven’t been reading Action Comics, but I know that Paul Cornell took it over recently and has turned it into a Lex Luthor title – Superman himself being otherwise engaged finding himself or some such thing.  This is billed as “The Black Ring, part five”, but it’s really just a self-contained conversation between Lex and Death; Lex was evidently shot at the end of the previous issue and he’s having some sort of near death experience, but the issue doesn’t seem particularly concerned with explaining what any of that was about.  Nor do you necessarily care, if you’re buying this for the Death appearance, and it’s certainly not information that you need in order to make sense of their conversation.  Personally, I’d rather have had a bit more sense of what was going on in the book generally – the story ends with a few pages of ongoing plot that don’t mean a great deal to me – but hey, Cornell and Pete Woods certainly deliver on the solicitations, with 17 pages of Death and Lex in conversation.  Death feels nicely familiar here – Gaiman supposedly polished her dialogue, and there’s some nice moments with Death casually brushing aside Lex’s complaints about the revolving-door nature of DCU death.  The rest of it’s basically an attempt to explore how Lex feels about these sort of existential questions, with Lex played as a sort of Dr Doom without the camp bits, and it’s quite interesting so far as it goes, but kind of depends on you already being interested in the character, I think.  It’s pretty good, on the whole, but as somebody who’s never much cared about Lex, I can’t say it really hooks me into reading more about him.  Nick Spencer and RB Silva’s Jimmy Olsen back-up strip is a cheerfully ridiculous 2010 update of the equally ridiculous Silver Age series, and all the better for it; hopefully they’ll find some sort of vehicle for it once the back-up strips are dropped in January.

Avengers #6 – The conclusion of the first arc, which winds up more strongly than I’d expected.  I’d like to re-read this arc to see whether it holds together better in a single sitting, but my general impression is that Brian Bendis has been trying to change gears and embrace the “big, crazy ideas” side of the Avengers, with mixed success.  He’s gone for one of those stories where reality starts to break down, which is fine in theory if you want to raise the stakes, but means there’s a tricky balance to be struck in terms of getting the chaos over and still having the story make enough sense to work.  There are some ideas here that I quite like, such as Ultron being entirely reasonable about the situation once somebody explains it to him – and the closing pages loop back nicely to tie in with the prologue.  On the other hand, there are elements that seem rushed or under developed.  The “young Avengers” team from the future never really got much space, though that might be fine if they’re going to be brought back for a future story.  And although Noh-Varr was brought into the cast with much fanfare earlier in the arc, he doesn’t actually get much to do once he’s there, other than hand out gadgets.  Still, the art’s fabulous, it’s got the right idea, and the final chapter does set up a couple of interesting subplots for the future, so maybe I’ll stick around a bit longer after all.

Hellboy/Beasts of Burden: Sacrifice – Hellboy creator Mike Mignola may have suggested this crossover and helped to polish the story, but it’s basically an issue by Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson, which means it’s a Beasts of Burden one-shot that happens to guest star Hellboy.  (In fact, it picks up a couple of plot threads from earlier BoB stories.)  And that’s the right way to play it, I think.  My instinct is that you can stick Hellboy into a different style of story as a guest star and he’ll still be Hellboy, but with Beasts of Burden, the way the stories are told is at least as important as the stories themselves.  There’s enough explosion to lay out the premise for Hellboy readers, but basically he’s the guest star here.  It’s a straightforward team-up, helped by the fact that (for the purposes of this story, at least) he can understand what the animals are saying to one another.  There’s a cute subplot with one of the dogs, designed to make sure that he’s not just a random guest star, and obviously his presence moves the tone a bit from the typical BoB story, but overall Dorkin and Thompson make the team-up work and make the style clash into part of the fun.

Uncanny X-Men #529 – Part four of “The Five Lights”, and the last chapter in this book – the fifth new mutant gets introduced in Generation Hope #1.  I’ve been a little concerned that the previous three issues were a bit samey.  New mutant discovers powers, new mutant has panic attacks, Hope shows up to bring everything under control, wash, rinse, repeat.  This one’s a bit different, because Teon’s a rather different character; although he’s got powers, he seems to have basically the mind of the dog.  So his first-person narration consists entirely of the words “Mate”, “Fight” and “Flight”, with assorted punctuation marks.  That’s literally all that’s going through his head.  Which is such an odd starting point for a character that I’m genuinely interested to see where they’re going with him.  What doesn’t really work for me is the bit where Hope brings him to heel – presumably this guy’s mind was destroyed when his powers were emerged, and bluntly, you’d think the other characters would show him a bit more sympathy.  As in, any.  Over in the running subplot, Kitty Pryde and Emma Frost are colluding to get Sebastian Shaw out of the brig.  Some of this is quite cute – there’s a nice bit where they think they’re fooling Danger.  On the other hand, we’ve suddenly got Kitty wandering around and able to talk to people, which seems to undermine the very dynamic that got her into this storyline in the first place.  Why is Kitty helping Emma, exactly?  (And a note to whoever writes the recaps: explain why Emma wants to get Shaw out of the building.  It’s key information for the plot, and the recap doesn’t even touch on it, despite having acres of space available.  I know why she’s doing it, kind of, but presumably the recaps are aimed at people who don’t remember plot points from six months ago, and if they’re not covering this sort of information, they’re not doing their job.)  As for Whilce Portacio’s art… I’ll still take it over Greg Land but I have to admit that factor’s wearing thin with me.  At its best it’s dynamic, and there are moment when it nails the story beats (like Hope bringing Teon to heel), but it’s hit and miss, and it’s rarely pretty to look at.

X-Men Forever 2 #10 – More of Kitty and mini-Ororo (though nobody seems to have quite explained to Mike Grell how old he’s supposed to draw her) running around Japan trying to figure out what they’re going to do about that dratted Wolverine clone.  It’s your familiar Claremont romp, and you probably know the drill by now.  By the way, he’s still inexplicably fond of the idea that Kitty can teleport by phasing out of synch with the earth’s rotation, which I’ve always thought was a wholly unnecessary way to power-up the character, but so it goes.  There’s a big twist near the end, which I won’t spoil in case any of you are reading this in trade, but initially it works pretty well – it’s one of those character turns that you don’t see coming but which makes sense in hindsight.  Having done that, though, the story rushes breakneck into a string of plot points that seem to come far too quickly for their own good.  In fairness, the solicitations have the book ending in January, so this may be a case of Claremont suddenly hitting the accelerator in an attempt to get to his finale earlier than he’d planned – but it still feels rather rushed.

X-Men Legacy #241 – The final part of “Collision”, as the Children of the Vault’s city starts to merge with Mumbai, and the X-Men – well, Rogue, Magneto and the minor characters they brought with them – have to sort it all out.  If you’ve been reading the book this far, you can probably figure out most of the character beats, but they’re pretty well executed.  I’m not sure the story quite follows through on some of the implications for Indra, but to be fair, much depends on whether Mike Carey is planning to keep using him in the book’s cast – if he is, there’s plenty of time to deal with things in later issues, and the final page tends to suggest that Carey is indeed coming back to him.  Art is split between Clay Mann and Tom Raney, and while the difference is visible, they fit together quite well.  This arc hasn’t been what you’d call an “important” story, but it’s made a nice change to see Mike Carey just tell a straightforward superhero story for a few issues without having to worry about continuity, crossovers and so forth.  It’s actually quite reminiscent of his run on Ultimate Fantastic Four, which was better than the sales would suggest.

X-Men vs Vampires #2 – Another anthology issue of stories supposedly tying in to the “Curse of the Mutants” storyline from the new X-Men title.  Mike Benson and Mark Texeira, to be fair, do take “Curse” as their starting point – in the sense that they want to do a story where Gambit fights some random female baddies and hell, they might as well be vampires as anything else.  It’s mildly diverting fluff, and Texeira gets to do some cool chase sequences, but as a story it’s forgettable.  Simon Spurrier and Gabriel Hernandez Walta do a Rockslide short which  has a bit of fun with the visual of a vampire blue whale but kind of blows it with a cop-out ending – you’ve got to be working on a much higher level of irony than this to get away with “It was a only a dream” in 2010.  Howard Chaykin’s Karma story is actually a lot better than I would have expected – the opening panel of Karma putting nail polish on the toes of her cyborg foot is a lovely idea.  It’s also one of those stories that doesn’t seem to have quite got the message, since the plot is about a vampire running a weight loss class (and understanding why this is a Karma story requires you to remember a New Mutants storyline from a quarter century ago which is only mentioned in passing).  That’s got nothing to do with “Curse of the Mutants”, and rather suggests that Chaykin thought the remit was “Get a vampire in there somewhere”.   But it’s camp and silly, and actually rather good fun.  And it’s a proper story, unlike the first two.  Finally, Mike Barr and Agustin Padilla’s Angel story, which plays off his split personality, and asks the perfectly reasonable question of whether Warren’s Archangel persona is anything more than a murderer who’s ethically indistinguishable from the vampires.  It’s no classic, but at least it’s tried to use the vampires to say something about one of the X-characters, and it deserves credit for that.