Oh good, another Axis tie-in.  We definitely haven’t flogged the inversion horse to death yet.  I’m so glad we’re getting it again here.

Let’s recap why these tie-ins largely don’t work.  The whole “inversion” angle is fine for a few issues of Uncanny Avengers where you camp it up to the nines and have the heroes go crazy so that other people have to step in and save the day.  But when you try to extend it beyond that, you find that it kind of works with the villains, but it’s a lost cause with the heroes.

(more…)

Nitpickers may quibble with the idea of doing Axis: Revolutions this week, given that it still has an issue to run.  But nothing else is wrapping up this week, and Revolutions is an anthology title, and it’s clear enough by this point that it can be safely filed as one for completists only.

Also, the solicitations for issue #4 tell us that (a) there will be a She-Hulk story and (b) there will be a story written and drawn by Howard Chaykin, and I have a terrible feeling they will be one and the same, and that is something I do not want to see, because the fact that Howard Chaykin made some good comics thirty years ago doesn’t alter the fact that everything he does with female characters is abominable now.  (That said, the “next issue” box at the end of issue #4 promises Iceman and Dr Doom stories, so who the hell knows.)

(more…)

The first volume of Jason Latour’s Wolverine and the X-Men run was pretty much an outright catastrophe.  The main problem was an excessively complicated plot, which didn’t entirely make sense to start with, and which was told in a massively confusing way.  So whatever good ideas were in there got lost in a welter of confusion.

Given such a disastrous start, it is perhaps unsurprising to see that Latour’s second volume is his last.  In fact, he doesn’t even make it to the end of the volume, with the final issue – originally solicited with his name – turning out to be written by Frank Tieri instead.

(more…)

Once again, everything is in mid-storyline this week.  So instead let’s quickly check in on how the sprawling Axis crossover is doing, six issues in.

Despite being billed as Avengers vs X-Men: Axis, the core series is really just a re-labelling of twelve issues of Rick Remender’s Uncanny Avengers, which had been building to a big confrontation with the Red Skull from an early stage.  Uncanny Avengers has always been somewhat semi-detached – and indeed, while there are tons of tie-ins being published here, they don’t actually impinge on the main Avengers and X-Men titles, which are getting serenely on with business as usual.

(more…)