At last, I am up to date with my deliveries!  And with two especially heavy weeks behind us, there’s an enormous pile of books awaiting my comments.  So, we’re going to catch up with the X-books and the major new releases.  Believe me, it’s going to take us long enough.

First things first, though – if you look down a couple of posts, you’ll find this week’s podcast.  Download, listen, you know the drill.

Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis #1 – The second book from Marvel’s new Astonishing imprint, which seems to be intended for stories that are more or less self-contained, or at least semi-detached from the rest of continuity.  This story is by Warren Ellis and Kaare Andrews, and essentially it’s a rebranding of Ellis’s Astonishing X-Men.  Except that Ellis’ much-delayed Astonishing X-Men arc is some months away from finishing… so effectively, Marvel are following DC’s lead here by shrugging their shoulders and moving on to the next arc anyway.  Mind you, considering that the book is already lagging some way behind X-Men continuity (it’s set before the “Utopia” crossover), you can understand why they want to get it out there.

Basic premise: there’s a small town in Africa where kids are being born with weird powers.  Obviously this is of interest to the X-Men, since these people sound suspiciously like mutants (though for some reason the story goes out of its way to debunk that idea fairly early on, on grounds that don’t really hold up).  So it’s off to Africa we go.  And… um, that’s basically the synopsis of issue #1.  This is certainly a book with a relaxed pace, featuring as it does a double-page spread of an uneventful village, a full-page establishing shot of the X-Men’s headquarters, a full page without dialogue devoted to the X-Men putting on their clothes, and another splash page of some nice wildlife.  Mind you, at least this means artist Kaare Andrews has plenty of space to do his thing – though it has to be said that, even allowing for tongue being firmly in cheek, his petulant Emma Frost kind of misses the point of the character.

On the plus side, it’s nice to look at and at least it’s trying to use a setting that we don’t see much of in superhero comics.  But it’s decidedly slow and talky.

Atlas #1 – Jeff Parker’s Agents of Atlas has always struggled to convert its online fanbase into sales.  So there must have been a temptation to throw in something populist with this latest relaunch.  But thankfully, Atlas sticks to its guns, devoting an issue to introducing the 3D Man to its cast.  Admittedly, he got a major role in Avengers: The Initiative of late, but he’s still the 3D Man.  The main story sees him investigating a mystery that obviously has Atlas connections, while the regular cast remain very much in the shadows – a nice way of playing up their gimmick as a team who keep themselves hidden away.  But there’s also a back-up strip explaining some of the story from the regulars’ point of view, so the title characters do at least appear.  Gabriel Hardman’s an interesting choice of artist – you’d think that Atlas might go for somebody self-consciously retro, but instead they’ve opted for a solid and atmospheric storyteller.  Smart move; Atlas works because it plays its cast of 50s obscurities straight, rather than being self-consciously jokey about them, and makes them quirky outsiders instead of just a nostalgia act.  I doubt this story will change anyone’s mind about the series, but hopefully the relaunch will at least encourage a few more people to try it.

Avengers #1 – See the podcast for plenty on this.  Brian Bendis and John Romita Jr unveil the new core Avengers team, which is more or less the roster from early issues of New Avengers with a couple of swaps.  Which is fine by me.  It’s a Kang story, and what that means is that Kang shows up halfway through the issue to tell us that a bad thing will happen, albeit in a temporally confusing fashion.  Bendis is really more of a character writer than a plot man, and there are other books that would he’d be better suited to.  The frustrating thing about his stories is that he usually has solid ideas but they’re often unnecessarily undermined by ropey plotting.  If you didn’t like his earlier Avengers stories, well, there’s no real reason to think this will be any different.  I do like the basic idea, and I like the art; there’s some decent character work with the main players, as you’d expect.  But something tells me Bendis is also the sort of writer whose tendency to gloss over tedious plot mechanics will make for painful time-travel stories.  It’s a decent enough debut issue, but there’s nothing really to suggest that this series will steer clear of the problems that tend to plague Bendis when he’s writing this sort of thing.

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #1 – God, this really doesn’t interest me at all.  This must be what the X-books look like to normal people.  Having enjoyed the early issues of Batman & Robin, I’m now starting to be reminded of why I dropped Grant Morrison’s Batman run in the first place.  Bruce Wayne isn’t dead, he’s just stranded in the past.  From the look of this, it’s going to be Bruce coming through time and (presumably) fighting Vandal Savage in each era.  Which is fine, I suppose, except that I don’t really care about Vandal Savage and a bunch of cavemen hitting each other kind of leaves me cold.  It’s got art by Chris Sprouse, so it looks the part, and it certainly gets its idea across well enough… I just have the sinking feeling that I’m not very interested.

Birds of Prey #1 – Yes, yes, I know, I always whine when DC revive an old property just for the hell of it.  But I’m playing my Hypocrite Card for this one, because it’s Birds of Prey by Gail Simone and… well, okay, Gail Simone and Ed Benes, whose art was never my favourite feature of the book first time round.  Actually, though, it’s fine here, and relatively light on the eye-rollingly glaring cheesecake stuff that used to interrupt the story from time to time.  Oracle get her old crew back together to deal with a baddie who specifically demands it, and the reunion scene is nicely played in a way that tells us it’s kind of a big deal for the characters without going over the top.  And just to stop you thinking this is going to be a complete retread of the original series, it’s also got Hawk and Dove (hence the Brightest Day crossover tag, as Hawk is one of the characters revived for that storyline – there’s no sign of any other plot tie-in, though).  Once you get past the bird theme, Hawk is of course a singularly unsuitable member of the Birds of Prey, which is precisely why I’m looking forward to seeing Simone write him.

Booster Gold #32 – Along similar lines, Keith Giffen and J M DeMatteis are reunited as co-writers on Booster Gold, who was one of the main comedy figures in their legendary Justice League International run.   It’s not branded on the cover, but to judge from the last page, this is going to tie in with the Justice League: Generation Lost series (also co-written by Giffen).  This first issue basically sees Giffen and DeMatteis picking up the status quo that they inherited from Dan Jurgens – Booster as a deliberately obscure time-travelling hero who goes around sorting out the timeline – and superimposing their style on it.  If you’ve read the earlier stories then you know the schtick, and it’s basically along the familiar lines, but it’s still an amusing read, complete with a supervillain who’s just a little too keen to hammer home her “obsessed with a giant eyeball” routine.  Artist Chris Batista turns out to be a fairly good match for them – it’s bright, happy stuff, maybe more comfortable with the action than the comedy, but still fitting the material.

Dark Avengers #16 – The final issue of the series is basically a Siege epilogue and it’s actually quite satisfying.  Norman Osborn has been defeated, so all that remains is to put an end to his ersatz Avengers – um, except for Daken, who has his own book and has to escape.  With him out of the way, though, this issue makes an effective job of providing a sense of resolution.  One of the things I like about the wrap-up of Siege is that there’s no attempt to segue into the next story – the bad guys are defeated, the good guys won, and that’s an end of it.  I’m not sure Bendis ever quite reached the full potential of his take on Norman Osborn – part sincere hawk, part maniac – but the closing scene with him in jail is lovely.

Frenemy of the State #1 – There being a big pile of these still to go, I’ll refer you to the podcast for proper discussion.  This is Oni’s new ongoing series about, well, a sort of society heiress who’s secretly a spy.  It’s a bit light on rounded characters, but the idea has some potential.

Justice League: Generation Lost #1 – DC’s other biweekly series, written by Keith Giffen and Judd Winick with art by Giffen and Aaron Lopresti, seems like it might be a better read than Brightest Day is turning out to be.  Maxwell Lord is back from the dead, and he has a plan to use his mind-control powers to set the world to rights.  (Which is his scene from Brightest Day #0 – this issue explains what he was after.)  Maxwell Lord is terribly, terribly dangerous, and so all the heroes are desperate to stop him… until everything ends up falling on the second-tier heroes from Justice League International.  This isn’t a semi-comedy book, but it does seem to be making an attempt to rehabilitate Lord as somebody who started off well-intentioned, and I really quite liked the closing twist.  Might stick with this one for a bit.

New Mutants #13 – Chapter 7 of “Second Coming” and, uh, let’s see, what happened in this one again?  Let’s see… plot point, plot point, token scene with the title characters, subplot setting up the X-Club’s tie-in one-shot…  Ah, here’s a rather good scene with Dani and Hope, where Zeb Wells does probably the best job yet of showing us that the X-Men’s extended cast resent the amount of effort that the X-Men are putting into protecting this allegedly vital character.  Yup, liked that bit.  Other than that, it’s one of those crossover stories that has a lot of plot to chew through, and ends up leaving the New Mutants themselves with nothing much to contribute.

Wolverine #900 – The mind boggles, doesn’t it?  A Wolverine #900 one-shot?  Are there really people in Marvel so dumb that they didn’t understand that Deadpool #900 was a joke?  This isn’t a comedy issue at all, in any way shape or form – it’s an anthology of Wolverine shorts, titled by somebody who has heard of humour but never really seen it in action.  It opens with a vignette that’s really little more than an opportunity for David Finch to draw Wolverine (and hey, if you want a few pages of David Finch drawing Wolverine, here they are).  Dean Motter and Greg Scott contribute an atmospheric noir piece, incongruously drawing on the plot of Jason Aaron’s tongue-in-cheek Wolverine: Manifest Destiny miniseries.  It’s not bad at all.  Todd DeZago and Jason Craig’s “Desperate Measures” is a 90s throwback dusting off Marrow, of all people, in order to make a point about the body as a weapon.  Sound idea, art’s a bit rough.  Marc Bernardin and Pow Rodrix’s “One Night Only” is competent anthology-fodder (it’s one of those “character X does this every year even though you’ll never hear it mentioned again” things), while Matt Yocum and Jake Bilbao do a decent strip with Wolverine helping a Delightful Little Girl through the power of violence.  Oh, and there’s a couple of reprints to round off the package – one is the disappointing back-up strip from Wolverine #50 (presumably because it’s by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness, which might interest a few people), but the other is a rather good Spider-Man/Wolverine story by Zeb Wells and Paolo Rivera which probably passed largely unnoticed on its original appearance in Amazing Spider-Man Extra #2, and which genuinely merits another printing.  On the whole, not bad as these anthologies go.

X-Factor #205 – You’ll be shocked to learn that the entire cast are not, in fact, dead.  This is the second part of the “Second Coming” tie-in arc, which interrupted a bunch of storylines in progress.  Peter David makes a reasonable job of turning that to his advantage – so, for example, poor Baron Mordo’s evil scheme was coming along nicely until the anti-mutant maniacs showed up to start shooting everything.  Mind you, it’s still an attempt to accommodate an unnecessary crossover, and one which feels more like a belated hangover from the original Bastion crossover, “Operation: Zero Tolerance”, than anything much to do with “Second Coming”.  It’s not a story that the book really needed, but if you’re going to do this sort of tie-in, at least Peter David and Valentine de Landro are making something of it.

X-Factor Forever #3 – In this issue: fighting!  And exposition!  At the same time!  Yes, it’s authentically late-80s.  If I’m being honest, there’s an element here of a relatively thin plot not advancing all that much, but being fleshed out with fight scenes.  But against my better judgment, I don’t really mind – I liked Louise Simonson’s run on X-Factor, and on a more contemporary level, I’m enjoying Dan Panosian’s energetic, angular artwork.  I can’t honestly say I’d recommend it to people who don’t have affection for the original series, but that’s hardly a major problem for a book which is unashamedly going for the nostalgia market.

X-Men Forever #23-24 – And that wraps up the first year of Chris Claremont’s X-Men Forever. I’ll try to find time to do a full review of the closing arc, but basically this is the pay-off for the Consortium arc, which climaxes in yet more plot twists that Claremont would never have been allowed to do in the regular Marvel Universe.  But that’s fine by me; while X-Men Forever long since diverged from the notional idea of “what Chris Claremont would have written if he hadn’t left in 1991”, it is delivering a series where Claremont doesn’t have to worry about accommodating anyone else’s stories and can cheerfully do his own thing.  And that gives the book a genuine feeling of enthusiasm which overcomes a lot of sins.   It’s not an all-time great story, but it’s told with commitment.  Issue #24 is a funeral story serving an epilogue for the season, and it’s fine as one of those pause-to-reflect issues that a superhero book needs every so often.

X-Men Legacy #236 – “Second Coming” part 8.  Bastion puts a big red globe over San Francisco and traps the X-Men inside.  Along with the population of San Francisco.  But hey, you can’t make an omelette and so forth.  It’s a bouncy little superhero story, but the art’s very much hit and miss.  As so often, Greg Land veers between genuinely effective splash pages and faces that seem to have been pasted in from random sources with awkward expressions.  Colourist Justin Ponsor makes it all pleasantly bright and shiny, though.

X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back #4 – I’ll come back to this miniseries in a later post.  I’m not quite sure what I think of this one, to be honest.  It’s certainly different, and it makes quite good use of the teenage characters.  But I’m not sold on the overhaul of Pixie herself.  Okay, they’ve already linked her to Limbo, so I can see the logic in giving her some other magical connections… but the Mastermind stuff seems a bit unnecessary.  Still, a visually interesting mini with its own voice that actually had a story to tell about its title character, and that’s always a good thing.

Zatanna #1 – And once again, see the podcast.  Zatanna, a retro stage magician who’s also a real sorceress, is a minor-league DC characters who I’ve always quite liked, but giving her an ongoing series seems a bit optimistic in the current climate.  Still, she’s got something different, and Paul Dini and Stephane Roux do a good job here setting up the premise.  It’s not so much that the plot is out of the ordinary.  It’s more that Dini throws random magical elements into the real world to give the murder scenes a darkly absurd quality, and that’s where the book gets to be distinctive.

So, let’s bring you up to date.  Last week, I skipped doing any reviews, because I was still waiting for that week’s books to arrive, and it’s rather hard to review books you haven’t read.  Now, those comics duly showed up on Monday.  This week’s comic, on the other hand, haven’t.  And so what we’re going to do is review books that came out a week and a half ago.

Not that I’m particularly bothered, to be honest – I have a pile of trade paperbacks waiting to be read as it is.  But that’s why we’re running a week behind schedule here.

Oh, and before anyone asks, no, I haven’t read the Sentry story, and no, I’m not planning to.  It does sound god-awful, but it’s the sort of god-awful which gets quietly forgotten after a fortnight, so who cares?  Perhaps it’s an ironic meta-twist: for the Sentry to save the Marvel Universe, everyone must forget him again, and to achieve that, he strives to appear in the sort of stories everyone would prefer to pretend they never read.

Amazing Spider-Man #630 – The first part of “Shed”, a Lizard story by Zeb Wells and Chris Bachalo.  There’s a tried and tested formula for Lizard stories which has been in use for over 40 years; well-meaning Curt Connors tries another experiment, it all goes terribly wrong yet again, and he turns into a man-sized lizard and goes nuts.  “Shed” doesn’t depart from that formula, so much as do it in the creators’ own style.  And it works well; there’s a nice slow build to the inevitable, and Bachalo is clearly enjoying himself with the transformation.  Actually, this is some of the best work I’ve seen from Bachalo in ages.  For a good long while, he was producing work which was visually interesting but frequently obscure or downright unintelligible.  This, however, is visually interesting while being absolutely clear and easy to read.  Okay, a couple of his characters seem a bit off-model – his Peter Parker still doesn’t look quite right to me, even allowing for differences in style – but that’s minor.  A good issue.

Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine #1 – The first release from Marvel’s new, vaguely-defined Astonishing imprint.  From the sound of it, the idea is that these ought to be continuity-light stories.  They’re being sold as entertaining stand-alone comics that don’t require any knowledge of history and don’t interact with any other stories.  Not sure I’d have chosen a cod-Silver Age adjective as the brand, but it doesn’t really matter.  This miniseries is by Jason Aaron and Adam Kubert, and it opens with the heroes already stranded back in prehistoric times.  Unfortunately, the meteor that annihilates the dinosaurs is on the way.  It’s a solid opening, but one that leaves you wondering whether six issues of Peter and Logan trapped in a jungle might be a bit much.  But then the story races through an explanation of how they got there (kind of), and then it ramps up the plot to a whole other level of epic madness by the end of the first issue, so that instead of stretching the concept to six issues, Aaron is actually bashing through it in an issue and moving on to something more.  And Adam Kubert gets to draw a lot of weird stuff.  It’s a fun, unpretentious and fast-paced action story, and that’s good enough for me.

Batman & Robin #12 – Erm… I have a sinking feeling that I’m not really very interested in any of this.  We’re now in the territory of setting up the return of Bruce Wayne and messing around with established members of the cast who don’t particularly interest me.  And there’s some decidedly ropey fill-in art in the middle of the issue, which doesn’t help.  But I just don’t find myself with a reason to care about any of this.  I suspect I’ll be dropping this book quite soon.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Eight #35 – Evidently building to the big climax, as baddies invade the earth and supporting characters get together to help fight them.  Brad Meltzer, writing this arc, certainly has decent instincts for pacing a comic.  And there’s an interesting idea in here somewhere, with Angel wanting him and Buffy to move on a higher plane and leave the world behind them to sort itself out.  The problem is that the outcome of their dilemma is never really in doubt – aside from the fact that we all know the title character isn’t going to write herself out of the series, it’s never really presented as an attractive enough option to make it a properly dramatic dilemma.  If anything, the big mystery here is why Angel thinks it’s such a good idea.  For this to work, Buffy and Angel have to at least be toying with the idea that it’s All About Them.  And of course, since they’re the lead characters, in a sense it is all about them.  But there’s a leap of logic in making that the basis of a dilemma, which isn’t quite convincing.

Hellbound #1 – Or, if you prefer, X-Men: Second Coming – Revelations: Hellbound.  But I’ll go with just Hellbound.  This is a three-issue miniseries tying in with the “Second Coming” crossover.  As it turns out, that means it’s a story taking place in the margins of the the crossover.  Over in the main story, the bad guys are trying to take out all the X-Men’s teleporters, to mess with their transport.  As a throwaway part of that story, Magik gets banished to Limbo.  This story is about the team who get sent to bring her back – and while the likes of Gambit and Dazzler are in there to make up the numbers and give the cast some credibility, it seems to be mainly a sequel to the story where the New X-Men went to Limbo and got tormented by demons.  This first issue is mainly devoted to Cannonball recruiting his team, and I quite like the way it’s played – the younger characters like Pixie and Anole flatly refuse to have anything to do with rescuing Magik until they’re directly ordered to do so.  Partly it’s because of what happened to them in that New X-Men story, but partly – and this is the bit that intrigues me – they seem to be rebelling against their “second class character” status.  They’ve seen nothing much to like or respect about Magik, and as far as they can see, they’re being told to drop everything and risk their lives to save her simply because she’s a more established character.  The newer characters chafing against the X-establishment’s glass ceiling… I kind of like that as a dynamic.

iZombie #1 – A new series from Vertigo by Chris Roberson and Mike Allred.  It’s one of those “monsters in the modern world” kind of set-ups.  Gwen is a zombie, which wouldn’t normally be a promising start for a lead character.  But fortunately, she remains pretty much normal as long as she remembers to eat brains once in a while.  Which is why she’s working as a gravedigger.  For the most part, this first issue is spent introducing Gwen and her similarly eccentric supporting cast, and it’s pleasingly quirky.  The plotting is more dubious, though.  The story tries to hold back the revelation that Gwen is a zombie for most of the issue, as if this could possibly be a surprise to anyone who had seen the cover or read the title.  And it ends with a rather rushed scene where Gwen eats somebody who’s been murdered, and then promptly decides to go and investigate.  Which makes me wonder whether the promising sitcom set-up that takes the greater part of the issue is going to end up turning into Tru Calling.  There’s more good than bad in this first issue – much more – but it’s not an unqualified success.

Shadowhawk #1 – A relaunch of Jim Valentino’s 90s vigilante.  It says “#1” on the cover, but I can only assume this is continued from somewhere-or-other.  Basically, the original Shadowhawk is (for some reason) back in his old city, with nothing but the costume on his back.  While he’s been away, a rather nicer Shadowhawk has been around.  What sort of vigilante will he be?  That’s more or less the deal. But it’s not very well done for new readers – the book seems to take familiarity with the character for granted, so it doesn’t even try to explain who he is, where he’s been, why he came back, or anything of that sort.  From a combination of Wikipedia and guesswork, I’d assume this is something to do with Image United, but it would be nice to cover it here… or at the very least to sketch out the premise of the character.  Not a good introduction to the character, and a bit clumsy in general – it’s pretty forgettable, all told.

Uncanny X-Men #524 – “Second Coming”, Chapter 6.  This is basically a break in the action so that everyone can mourn Kurt and some people can glare at Scott.  There’s evidently meant to be some tension here with Scott being blamed (and everyone being a bit unsure about Hope as well).  In itself, this is a fine idea, but there are problems.  If we’re now doing a story where everyone questions why Hope is so important and where Scott’s obsession with her is controversial, why has nobody questioned Hope’s importance until now?  And is Kurt’s death really Scott’s fault in any meaningful way?  It’s not like he sent Kurt on a pointless suicide mission.  As so often with the X-books these days, the frustration is that the ideas are sound but the execution is wonky.  “Why is Hope so important and do we trust Scott’s judgment?” is an interesting direction, but it’s a question that the characters should have been asking for two years, not two months.  Still, there are good moments in here, and the book does go out of its way to give Kurt a proper send-off in his own title – though I’m still not sure which character is supposed to be officiating at the ceremony, because I can’t recognise him from the art…

No podcast this weekend, for the reasons explained in the post just below.  We’ll be back in a week’s time.  In the meantime, I’ll make a start on my comics backlog.  Regular readers will recall that last week, Diamond UK didn’t ship anything because of the volcano.  So two weeks’ worth of comics showed up at my house on Friday, and needless to say, I haven’t read them all yet.

But on the principle that I’d better get up to date with the crossovers, because there’s another chapter just around the corner, let’s start with the X-books and the Siege tie-ins.

Dark Wolverine #85 / Wolverine: Origins #47 – These are the first two parts of “Reckoning”, a crossover in which Wolverine and Daken team up (well, kind of) to go after their mutual arch-enemy Romulus.  Presumably this is heading to the final defeat of Romulus in the closing issues of Origins.  It’s a rare example of a story which probably should be a crossover, because it genuinely is important to both characters, and shouldn’t be taking place off-panel for either book.  But of course, this is Wolverine: Origins, so it’s time for yet more convolutions.  Wolverine, it turns out, correctly predicts that Daken will betray him, and uses him to feed bad information to Romulus.  That’s fine as far it goes, except for one thing: we’ve only just seen that story in Origins‘ previous arc, with Ruby Thursday in the place of Daken.  Yes, they acknowledge it; yes, the idea is that Wolverine is messing with Romulus’ head to draw him out.  But a bit more variation, surely…?

It’s not a great story, unfortunately.  As usual, Romulus is the least interesting thing about this book, and a Millar-esque determination to keep Daken unlikeable threatens to drain most of his potential appeal as a lead character into the bargain.  Stephen Segovia, drawing the first part, is the sort of hyperactive artist who can be quite enjoyable when he’s doing melodramatic insanity, but doesn’t really suit an issue of conversations around tables.  Will Conrad, on the second, is generally solid, though his Romulus is almost unrecognisably off-model.  Mind you, I actually prefer his design, which has the merit of not being quite so ludicrous.

The big reveal, though, is Daken explaining Wolverine’s great plan: he’s going to defeat Romulus by exposing him to the world and ruining his mystique.  It’s one of those moments where you pause and go, “Really?”  Because, point one, four years to get here, and we’re doing The Wizard of Oz?  And point two, are we really doing a story based on the proposition that after all the mystery, Romulus is a bit disappointing and dull when you finally get to see him?  You almost have to wonder whether it’s a gesture of grand self-parody, but I have a sinking feeling it probably isn’t.

Mighty Avengers #36 – The final issue before the reboot.  And to be fair, there’s more finality about this than you might expect, because it is indeed the end of Hank Pym’s splinter group of Avengers.  Or rather, it’s the end of Hank Pym’s storyline.  Officially this is a Siege tie-in, but it qualifies for that banner mainly by having the rest of the team appear in subplot pages fighting the Thunderbolts in a mirror of Thunderbolts #143.  The meat of the issue is actually Hank, Jocasta and a couple of ultra-obscure guest stars taking on Ultron and his army of robot brides in a fantastically absurd climax.  It’s just plain nuts, but Dan Slott tempers the goofiness by playing up Hank’s painful lack of empathy for Jocasta to give it a slightly bitter undercurrent.  Good issue.

New Avengers #64 – It’s a Brian Bendis issue during a crossover, so you know what to expect: flashbacks!  Yes, the Avengers themselves are pushed to the margins in order that we can spend an issue looking in on the Hood and his army of Z-list villains.  Mike McKone’s art on the Siege sequences is a bit muddled – it’s one of those “hurl characters at the page” routines which kind of gets over the chaos but gives you no real idea of what’s going on or where.  But to give credit where it’s due, Bendis does get something out of the Hood himself, a character way out of his depth with the A-listers, who is just realising that this possibly isn’t going to work out so well for him.  Technically this is the last issue of New Avengers before the relaunch, but in practice it seems to be building to some sort of “last stand of the Hood” thing in the New Avengers: Finale oneshot, which sounds suspiciously like plain old New Avengers #65 to me.  Bit lacking in terms of plot, but this is one of those Bendis stories which does enough with the character moments to stand up anyway.

Thor #609 – In this issue!  Loki explains his motivations!  And… um… well, yes, that doesn’t work out very well for the story, to be honest.  Because Loki’s motivations, it turns out, are so slender and contrived that it unavoidably results in a scene where Loki says “Just because” and a bunch of other characters gawp at him and complain that the plot doesn’t make any sense.  And   The idea seems to be that Loki is causing trouble for no particular reason; he’s just a stirrer by nature.  He is, after all, the God of Mischief.  Actually, as a take on the character, this could work.  The problem is that it’s been set up as some sort of mystery, “What’s Loki up to?”  And if the answer turns out to be “Nothing in particular”, then that’s, shall we say, a bit of an anticlimax.  On the plus side, there’s a neat scene with Balder at the end, and a cute bit with an atheist supervillain.  But… mmm.

Thunderbolts #143 – The final issue before the new direction, and what you get is the team continuing to implode while they fight the Avengers.  Or rather, while the ones who can be bothered fight the Avengers, and the rest make a break for it.  It’s two thirds of a good issue, at which point it suddenly turns into an issue of Mighty Avengers and most of the team just sort of get beaten without it feeling like a pay-off.  There’s a nice little epilogue with Ant-Man and the Headsman’s brother, and then the issue ends with an introduction of the new status quo which isn’t a segue so much as a handbrake turn.  The bottom line is that it all feels a bit truncated.  Good art, though.

X-Factor #204 – This is a “Second Coming: Revelations” tie-in, which means it’s not actually part of the “Second Coming” storyline, but it’s a tie-in to the crossover anyway.  In practice, that means that for no readily apparent reason, Bastion has decided that this would be a perfect time to attack X-Factor as well, something he could have done at any point.  And again, the contrived plot alarm sounds as soon as you have characters asking the unavoidable “But why, sir?” questions.  Still, leave that point aside and it’s a good issue.  David’s villains have a nice line in tortured yet vaguely consistent logic, and there’s a nice spread from the stark-raving Bastion at the top of the chain of command down to basically sane military types who are simply trusting to the chain of command.  Valentine De Landro’s art is on form.  The crossover is turned to advantage by having it literally interrupt the Baron Mordo storyline in progress.  And the cliffhanger ending is another winner, simply on the “Hold on, that can’t have happened, can it?” level.

X-Men Forever #22 / X-Men Forever Annual #1 – Issue #22 is the middle chapter of a three-parter where the X-Men finally go to confront the Consortium, and basically it involves them all going to the bad guys base and fighting them.  It’s fine, it’s a good old-school superhero routine, but there’s not much more I can really say about it.  The Annual is a flashback story explaining the start of the Logan/Jean love affair which was a plot point in earlier issues.  Of course, the romantic tension had been established long, long ago, so it’s really a question of putting the two characters in a situation where they can be nudged in a different direction.  In practice, that turns out to mean a story where they go undercover to investigate a dodgy holiday resort run by evildoers, and etc etc.  At times it feels like some romantic character moments which have been bolted on to a fill-in story, but it does hang together on the whole.

X-Men Legacy #235 / X-Force #26 – Parts 4 and 5 of “Second Coming”, in which there is running around, and there is chasing, and there is fighting, and Somebody Dies.  The all-important death comes in X-Force (which is an odd choice, since you’d think you’d want it in one of the X-Men books), and I don’t know quite what to make of it.  To be honest, I don’t really buy it.  It’s treating a major (albeit largely unused) character as cannon fodder, and killing him off at a suspiciously early stage in a 14-part story where we all know Phoenix will be along sooner or later.   If they’re serious, then frankly it feels a bit desperate – in a sense, I doubt they’re serious about it because I give them more credit than that.  We shall see what happens.  That aside… Legacy has art by Greg Land, who’s having one of his better days.  There’s still some awkward posing and stiff expressions to drag things down, but less than usual, and he actually does quite a good Warlock, perhaps because the character is so unavoidably at odds with the rest of his style.  X-Force has Mike Choi and Sonia Oback, and very little space for its nominal lead characters – it’s mainly Rogue, Kurt and Hope on the run from Bastion.  The art errs on the side of over-busy, and loses some of Choi and Oback’s style in the process, but it’s not bad.

X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back! #3 – Okay, then, so now we have a clear explanation of what the hell was going on in the first two issues, and we’re heading for the big finale!  It’s still a decidedly off-kilter story, as you’d expect from Kathryn Immonen and Sara Pichelli.  I’m not quite sure why you’d want to tie Pixie to the Mastermind sisters, who don’t really seem like characters that have much in common with her.  But I like the basic take on Pixie, as well as the exasperation of the supporting cast.  Immonen gets X-23’s character, which is very hard to write well, and understands how to make her work in a group cast.  And the art is lovely.  This could still go either way in the final issue – it could redefine Pixie in an interesting way which will give other writers somewhere to work from, or it could end up cluttering her up horrifically.  The series so far has been wonky enough that it’s hard to call.  But I’m definitely intrigued, and that’s the key thing.