As Al already explained, we’ve pushed back this weekend’s podcast because he’s buried in sawdust.  The current plan is to record it tomorrow evening.  We’ll be reviewing the new Scott Pilgrim – but I’ll save my comments on that for the podcast.

Now, reading digests takes up a chunk of my time, and to be honest, it’s a fairly quiet week for major releases.  Oh, and I’ve just spent several hours trekking around central Edinburgh trying to find a bookshop that actually had The Importance of Being Seven by Alexander McCall Smith in stock.  Very popular book, here in its home town, it turns out.

So… let’s just run down this week’s X-books.  Of which there are many.

Franken-Castle #19 – Not normally an X-book, but this is the second part of a crossover with Dark Wolverine.  From Daken’s point of view, this is a bit of a filler story while he kills time waiting for his title to be relaunched in September.  For the Frankenstein Punisher, on the other hand, it’s the rematch against the bad guy who kicked off this storyline in the first place.  So it ought to be kind of significant for him.  As it turns out, what we actually get is… uh, an extended fight scene, more or less.  And that’s pretty much it.  Lots of chasing, lots of fighting, Daken gets impaled on stuff so that they can show off his healing factor…  It’s just a fight scene.  And it’s a bit one note – Daken’s never really allowed to come across as a much of a threat, which is particularly odd considering that he ought to be the Punisher’s current nemesis, so it’s basically Daken taking a cartoon beating and running away for 20+ pages.  Now, if you’re going to do a story where the poor man’s Wolverine fights a Frankenstein version of the Punisher, I have no real problem with that being a big dumb brawl… but there really is only a limited amount of entertainment in watching Daken get chainsawed and hit by trains before even I start rooting for the poor bastard to land a punch.  Mind you, Tony Moore’s artwork is gorgeous, and spectacularly over the top, which livens thing up.

Wolverine Origins #50 – It’s over, it’s finally over.  Part of me thinks I should re-read the thing and then do a retrospective post… but that would mean re-reading it, and I’m not exactly filled with enthusiasm for the prospect.  The main story really ended in issue #48, and this two-part epilogue seems to be mainly an exercise in getting Wolverine to realise that he needs to move on with his life and stop letting himself be defined by what Romulus did to him.  Which pretty much sums up the problem with this series.  The whole thing is an attempt to resolve a plot thread which was already closed off quite effectively by Larry Hama in the early nineties.  We already had a story where he regained his memories and explored his past; we already had a story where he confronted the guys behind the Weapon X Project.  And then everyone pretty much stopped talking about it for a decade plus, until this series came along and started trying to re-open the same questions just so that it could close them again.

At one point it looked like the series was going to actively damage the character, by trying to link everything in Wolverine’s past to a single conspiracy theory – and worse yet, one that wasn’t in the slightest bit interesting.  It saddles with Wolverine with an arch-enemy, Romulus, who has never shown the faintest sign of being an intriguing character.  And while in the past it was possible to do pretty much any story set in Logan’s freelance days, the “controlled by Romulus throughout his life” idea served only to shut down story possibilities which were inconsistent with it.

In reality, it seems likely that the title’s main legacy will be the introduction of Daken, a character who might in fact have a few good stories in him.  Other stories that have had occasion to mention Wolverine’s origin seem to have suspiciously little interest in bringing up Romulus, which rather suggests that he may have already been filed under “Bad Idea”.  Let’s hope.

A story where Wolverine gets over his feelings of anger at the people who abused him, achieves some measure of revenge, and decides to move on with his life – fundamentally, not a bad idea.  Except Larry Hama did it better in the nineties.  Wolverine Origins has been a thoroughly unnecessary trudge through old ground, with a lousy central villain, simply in order to come to the conclusion that Wolverine shouldn’t be so hung up on this stuff anyway.  Except, until this series started, he wasn’t.  Four years of comics just to solve a non-problem badly.  Let us not speak of it again.

Wolverine: Weapon X #15 – The concluding part of “Tomorrow Dies Today”, which turns out to be essentially the origin story of a new Deathlok.  Jason Aaron’s actually come up with a neat twist on the classic Deathlok story; this time around, the computer is the sympathetic part of his personality, and the human is a raving lunatic.  The sentimentality is decidedly tongue-in-cheek, and the whole thing is a bit silly, but there are some clever twists in this issue, and some great action sequences from Ron Garney.

But it still leaves me with the question I raised last month: in what sense is this a Wolverine story?  Wolverine’s in it, yes, but it’s so packed with guest stars that his presence alone doesn’t mean a great deal.  Hell, Iron Fist and Spider-Woman are in it.  It comes across as some sort of Avengers story which Aaron is running in Wolverine: Weapon X simply because it happens to be the book he’s currently writing.

I suspect the idea is that the new Deathlok is an ironic inversion of Wolverine – he’s an unrepentant murderer who’s been made nicer by an inept attempt to turn him into a brainwashed supersoldier.  And that might well be something to hang a Wolverine story on… but since Wolverine himself never really gets involved in any of that, the thematic link is very loose.  What we’ve got here is a pretty good origin story for a new Deathlok, but it’s really not a Wolverine story.

Uncanny X-Men #526 – Part one of “The Five Lights”, and I’m relieved to see that the spoilers from Hope’s entry in the Handbook actually only cover this issue.  It also turns out that the X-Men did bother checking out who Hope’s parents were – it just didn’t seem to be anyone significant, which is why we haven’t heard about it until now.  So, with those concerns out of the way… this is pretty good.  We seem to be settling down to a more stable core cast, and Hope’s finally getting to act like a character instead of a plot device for everyone to fight over.  Fraction’s take on Hope seems to be driven by the idea that she’s got to deal with the pressure of expectations from people who expect her to save the mutant race – which is something to work with, at least.  Whilce Portacio starts his run as the new regular artist, and while it’s occasionally a bit scratchy for my tastes, it gets the job done.  Most importantly, though, after several years of the X-Men basically sitting around waiting for something to turn up, we’ve finally got to a point where they seem to have something to achieve again, and the series is all the better for it.  Admittedly, the debut of our first new mutant in ages does come across as a bit of an anticlimax – she never really gets the chance to show off much of a personality, and so we’re never really hooked by her.  But the good outweighs the bad.  The back-up strip is a lead-in to Magneto’s appearance in Avengers: The Children’s Crusade, by that book’s creative team.  Aside from answering the question of when A:TCC is actually set (roughly now), it also makes a real effort to write Magneto consistently with Fraction’s take, and use his X-Men plots as a springboard for Magneto’s role in A:TCC – always nice to see in a shared universe.

X-Factor Forever #5 – Final issue of the miniseries.  This could possibly have stood to lose an issue, since once Apocalypse has explained his grand theory of mutants, there’s not actually much left for the plot to do.  (The final issue tries to get round that by raising the stakes and hauling in Genosha out of nowhere, but it unavoidably feels a bit tacked on.)  Still, it’s been a fun series, and hopefully Dan Panosian’s highly entertaining artwork hasn’t gone unnoticed.  As for the story, the main interest here is seeing Louise Simonson go back to the original core idea of Apocalypse and follow it through to its logical conclusion.  As initially conceived, Apocalypse was supposed to be obsessed with the idea of warfare and strife because he thought it would be good for human development.  In the mainstream Marvel Universe, he pretty much ended up as a maniac dictator and hypocrite who only paid lip service to his supposed “survival of the fittest” doctrine.  In this story, Apocalypse actually means it, and is therefore making a good faith – if highly questionable – effort to avert global catastrophe.  Which is a very different take on the character, and the sort of thing that these Forever stories should be good at – allowing writers to see through a storyline that they never got to finish, even though later stories blocked off the original plan.

X-Men Forever 2 #4 – Ah, Masque and the Morlocks.  This seems a bit of a deviation from the main story, which in itself isn’t a bad thing – Claremont’s generally quite good at cutting between shorter stories and over-reaching arcs.  Mind you, I can’t say I’m particularly thrilled to be revisiting these particular characters; Claremont seems to be going back to the version of Masque we saw in the last couple of years of his original run, where he was a maniac cult leader of the handful of surviving Morlocks.  This made for an okay two-parter that played off the body-horror potential of Masque’s powers, but Masque himself was rather one-dimensional, and that’s certainly how he comes across here.  Still, there are a couple of effectively creepy moments along the way, and some promising subplot material about whether the cast can trust Mystique (even if a lot of the cast end up being horribly naive in order to advance the argument).

X-Men Legacy #238 – Two new X-Men storylines in a week, and two strong issues.  That’s a positive sign for the post-Second Coming era.  With the crossover complete, Legacy goes back to its core format of Rogue trying to mentor the younger characters.  Many of those background characters have been around for years, but remain more or less blank slates that leave Mike Carey free to write whatever he pleases.  This story focusses on Indra, whose personality has never got much beyond identifying his religion as Jainism.  Since Jainism places great stress on non-violence, there are obviously issues here with his involvement in the X-Men.  Of course, this isn’t just an issue of people arguing about ethics; there’s also a cosmic graffiti artist who seems to have escaped from a Spanish-influenced dystopia.  This is exactly the sort of thing I’m looking for from a book about Rogue and the kids.  Oh, and nice art from Clay Mann – a fairly traditional superhero artist in terms of style, but his characters’ acting is coming along very well.

This is the weekend of the San Diego Comicon, but to be honest, I usually just wait until the dust has settled and read the round-ups then.  However, I see Marvel have announced Generation Hope, an ongoing series which sounds like it’s the latest incarnation of Generation X.  I’m not… altogether sold on that title, which makes it sounds like a teenage version of the Alpha Course, but it’s written by Kieron Gillen, so there’s a pretty strong chance it’s going to be great.

The same article also features the horrifying words “four Wolverine titles”, but it turns out that that’s counting the Daken and X-23 books.  The two actual Wolverine titles, from the sound of it, are the relaunched Jason Aaron title, and something called Wolverine: The Best There Is, presumably the replacement for Wolverine: Origins.  Charlie Huston and Juan Jose Ryp are an interesting choice of creative team and the series might well be decent, but considering how Wolverine: Weapon X stumbled out of the gate, I can’t help wondering if Marvel are massively overestimating what the market will support.

Anyway.  Quiet week for X-books, quiet week for major releases generally…

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It’s a podcast weekend, so don’t forget to check a couple of posts below for this week’s episode.  As well as rounding up the news, Al and I are talking about the first issues of Scarlet, Royal Historian of Oz and Dr Solar, Man of the Atom.

It’s also a weekend with a deluge of comics and not much free time, so I still have a sizeable pile of books to be read (including pretty much all of my non-superhero purchases for the week).  Still, with six X-books to talk about, there probably wouldn’t be much space for anything else anyway…

Oh, and yes, I know there’s a wrestling show tonight, but I’m not going to have time to write a preview for it.  Just in case any of you were waiting.

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