Welcome back!  Normal service is now resumed.

With two weeks of comics to get through (and more arriving shortly), what I’m planning is to run through the X-books from the last two weeks, in order to bring that up to date.  Anything else of interest, we’ll cover it on Sunday.

And now, comics…

Daken: Dark Wolverine #1 – Officially this is a first issue, but in practice it’s a relaunch of Dark Wolverine.  The title is actually a little unfortunate, since writers Daniel Way and Marjorie Liu are trying to tell a story about Daken attempting to move out of his father’s shadow and become his own man.  In an ideal world, then, he’d probably be dumping the “Dark Wolverine” tag by now… but I guess commercial considerations take priority there.

This is a tie-in to the “Wolverine Goes To Hell” storyline currently running in Wolverine itself, and to be honest, the tie-in bits will only make sense if you’ve read Wolverine #1.  But most of the issue is just the usual Daken schtick – Daken manipulates some people, Daken has sex with some people, Daken thinks about killing some people, Daken actually kills some people, Daken reflects in narrative captions on what an awesome predator he is.  It would be unfair to say he’s  one-dimensional – there’s a bit more to him than that, thanks to his obsession with being in control of his own destiny – but they seem to have settled down to writing him as a rather unappealing nihilist psychopath, whose only positive agenda is to assert his own autonomy at all costs.

In itself, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it certainly gives the writers a struggle to make him a lead.  Daken remains a book which is light on plot and heavy on the musings of the title character, and while he’s got something, I don’t find him compelling enough to carry a book simply by wandering around talking to people.  (The writers may disagree, given that they’re prone to having other characters remark on Daken’s “terrible beauty”.)

The book does have good art by Giuseppe Camuncoli and Onofrio Cattacchio, who have nailed the air of infuriating self-satisfied cool that Daken’s evidently meant to have, and who do a sound job throughout the book.  My only real quibble is with the design of Daken’s new costume, which seems a bit too Wolverine-ish for a character who’s supposed to be going his own way – and obscuring the mask in the big unveiling seems a very odd choice.  But for the most part, the art is good stuff.

The character can work, in the right stories – but I think he probably needs more emphasis on plot, and more of a supporting cast to bounce off.  You can’t build a book around a psychopath waxing philosophical unless he’s got some really fascinating things to say.

Franken-Castle #20 – The final chapter of the “Punishment” crossover with Dark Wolverine belatedly sees a couple of interesting ideas emerge.  First, there are parallels between Wolverine trying to save his loathsome son Daken, and the Punisher’s failure to save his own kids.  And second, with more of a meta angle, we have a clash of characters from two generations.  The Punisher dismisses Daken as a rip-off of a genuine legend; Daken sees the Punisher as a fading star desperately clinging on to relevancy after his time has passed.  Considering that the character is currently tied up in something as bizarre and last-ditch as a Frankenstein storyline, it’s hard to argue with Daken’s point.  It’s a weird choice to spend a few pages drawing attention to the characters’ (genuine) inadequacies, and ultimately none of this is really enough to turn “Punishment” into a proper story, as opposed to an overextended fight scene.  The issue also suffers from multiple artists, and the style lurches alarmingly – the two pages by John Lucas are a particularly obvious speedbump, as the story suddenly slips into rushed-looking cartoonish exaggeration for two pages in the middle of a scene.

New Mutants Forever #2 – So far, this mini doesn’t seem to have the energy of Claremont’s X-Men Forever series.  It appears to be more of an attempt to tie up some long-running subplots from the 1980s that were allowed to tail off without getting a proper resolution.  Most obviously, we’ve got the saga of what Selene wanted with Nova Roma – except Nova Roma was never one of the more successful concepts from the 1980s (even the New Mutants letter column acknowledged that the idea hadn’t worked as well as they’d hoped).  There’s also some stuff in here about Warlock’s fear of infecting Cypher with the transmode virus, which was a Very Big Deal Indeed in the late eighties, and really should have got a proper pay-off somewhere along the line.  Judging from the plot of this issue, I suspect I know where Claremont’s heading with it, and I can see how it might work.

However… the series assumes a pretty decent awareness of late-1980s New Mutants continuity, not even bothering to explain why Sunspot and Warlock are away from the rest of the group.  (They were briefly written out so that they could appear in the Fallen Angels miniseries.)  And I’m at something of a loss to understand why the team are fighting the Red Skull, of all people – perhaps Claremont’s trying to do a riff on the old idea of Nazis hiding away in South America, but surely in 2010 that one is decades past its sell-by date?

Wolverine #1 – The series formerly known as Wolverine: Weapon X is relaunched as just plain Wolverine, and kicks off with the aforementioned “Wolverine Goes To Hell” storyline – which will also cross over into Daken and the new X-23 series.  I’ve liked Jason Aaron’s work on this book.  He generally seems to have a good handle on what works in a Wolverine story.  And this story has another strong idea; thanks to magical baddies, Wolverine’s soul gets dragged off to Hell to get punished for his past sins, while his body is running around causing trouble on Earth.  It’s over the top, but still manages to make the character stuff work.  In fact, it’s only been a couple of years since Marc Guggenheim did a storyline about Wolverine visiting the afterlife, but this one seems to have a more solid idea about the character at its heart, so I don’t mind retreading the territory.

What does give me pause is that Aaron seems to be telling a story about Wolverine undergoing religious conversion.  The closing editorial certainly seems to think Aaron’s overall direction is about Wolverine “finding peace” and “finding faith”.  The final issue of Weapon X certainly seemed to be hinting in that direction, and there’s material here to suggest that Aaron is trying to drag Wolverine in the direction of Christianity.  I’ll keep an open mind until we see where this is heading, and I can see some potential in having a “troubled soul” character like Wolverine at least toy with religion, but I can’t honestly say the direction is one that much appeals to me.

Renato Guedes’ art is pretty sound; maybe a little too restrained, but it does pull off a great establishing shot of Hell.  There’s also a rather odd back-up strip with the Silver Samurai battling ninjas amid heavily stylised artwork – something which seems to be there primarily as a backdrop for narrative captions to lay out Aaron’s take on the character.

Wolverine: Road to Hell #1 – Three short stories promoting the launches of Wolverine, Daken, X-23 and X-Force.  (Daken and X-23 have to share theirs.)  As you can probably guess, none of them are unmissable.  The Wolverine story is effectively a deleted scene from Wolverine #1, but it’s quite a good one, and gives some idea of where Aaron’s going with the plot.  The Daken/X-23 thing is a bit mystifying; they’re both looking for Malcolm Colcord, the former director of the Weapon X Project, and then the story ends on a cliffhanger… which isn’t picked up in Daken’s book at all.  Is it in X-23’s?  We don’t seem to be told.  Finally, Rick Remender and Leonardo Manco introduce their new X-Force team, and spend most of the story pushing the entertainment value of Fantomex.  Deadpool looks a bit out of place in this group, and I think they’re going to have trouble with him – as a motormouth character, he tends to dominate every scene he’s in, and it’s interesting that even in this 8-pager, he’s relegated to a subplot.  Still, it’s clear that the new X-Force team isn’t going to have the relentlessly bleak tone of the last one, and that’s a change for the better.

X-Force: Sex and Violence #3 – The filler miniseries wraps up with lots of people fighting one another for an issue.  The series has been a perfectly fine little romp, although I’m inclined to think that two issues would probably have been enough.  But again, after so many issue of X-Force that took the premise deadly seriously, it’s been nice to have a few issues of cheerful nonsense to lighten things up a bit.

X-Men #3 – “Curse of the Mutants” continues, and I’m glad to see that we seem to be getting back to the vampire politics stuff, which was one of the things I thought was more interesting in the prelude.  Having recovered Dracula’s body in some of the tie-in issues, the X-Men put him back together and try to get him on side.  But naturally, Dracula’s not as easy to steer as they would like.

This is basically a straight superheroes versus vampires story, but there are some nice touches to it.  I like the idea that Xarus thinks being a vampire is great, and that he’s giving the X-Men a gift that they simply don’t appreciate yet.  And there’s good use of the relationship between Wolverine and Jubilee, albeit that Gischler has to devote quite a bit of dialogue to re-establishing it for the benefit of newer readers.  There’s a nice cliffhanger, too.  As for the art, Paco Medina is more at home with superheroes than vampires, but Marte Gracia’s colours do a nice job of muting the palette for the stalking sequences.  Above average, I’d say, though the question remains of whether that’s strong enough to convince waverers that they want to buy another X-Men title.

X-Men Forever 2 #7 – Basically an issue of the X-Men and the Starjammers fighting the Morlocks, but Claremont keeps the plates spinning with a couple of subplots, and finally gets to unveil his original idea for Mr Sinister, namely that he’s the creation of a child supervillain.  (Hence the silly name, you see.)  I’m not sure we really needed a whole issue devoted to this fight, but we do get a nice sequence with Sabretooth and his clone, and a strong ending, as Claremont finally pays off something he set up a year ago – we all knew it was coming eventually, but by waiting this long, Claremont makes it a surprise.

X-Men: Smoke and Blood – A “Curse of the Mutants” tie-in one-shot starring the X-Club.  It’s not important to the plot; it’s basically a horror story where the scientists are locked into part of the X-Men’s base with a captive vampire and some of the infected people they’re trying to help.  Gabriel Hernandez Walta is an interesting choice of artist, with atmospheric work that’s a million miles from typical superhero work, and good use of muted colours without losing clarity.  His flashback to the vampire terrorist attack from X-Men #1 certainly looks more freakish than the original version.  As for Si Spurrier’s story, it’s a familiar science-versus-magic thing.  It’s the sort of debate that’s probably best avoided in this context, because it’s just silly to have the rationalist Dr Nemesis denying the existence of magic while fighting a horde of vampires.  The rules of the Marvel Universe skew the debate too far to make it worth having.  (A rationalist in the Marvel Universe would have to accept that magic existed but insist that science could ultimately explain it all in the end.)  In fairness, the scientists do get to win, but the story appears to be going for a “more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in your philosophy” moral that doesn’t really work in a story that uses magic so unequivocally.

Since I skipped last week’s column due to, well, not having any time to write it, there’s a bit of a backlog to get through.  So I’m going to focus on the X-books and chuck in a couple of other books that seem worth a mention.

No X-Axis for the next two weeks either, because I’m off on holiday.  I’ll probably do some sort of midweek round-up when I get back.  In the meantime, don’t forget that there’s a new episode of the podcast, waiting for you just one post down.

And now, the reviews!

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