It’s been a hectic week, so after skipping last week’s column, I’ve got something of a backlog to get through.  Fortunately I have a couple of nice long train journeys to make this week, so I should catch up soon enough.  But in the meantime, I’ll round up the recent X-books and a few other new releases.  (And by the way, I’m far enough behind that I’m going to be reading some of these pretty much as I review them, but hey, that’s life…)

Choker #1 – New miniseries from writer Ben McCool and artist Ben Templesmith (though you’ll notice Templesmith’s name comes first on the cover).  In a dystopian near future, embittered ex-cop Johnny Jackson is working as a private investigator, but gets his chance to return to the force if he can solve a case yadda yadda.  It’s very much from the School of Warren Ellis.  There are a couple of nice touches in here – officially regulated Police Brutality is a fun idea – but the story and characters are pretty familiar.  Naturally, Templesmith does great dystopias, with a mixture of caricature and suffocating misery.  Still, the whole thing wears its influences a little too visibly.

Dark Wolverine #83 – Hmm.  This is a Siege tie-in, which is a challenge for the writers because Daken has nothing to do with Asgard.  Now, since they’ve spent the last few issues setting up subplots with other members of the Dark Avengers, I’d have expected the book to spend its time resolving those stories before the team implodes at the end of the crossover.  But instead the book is approaching this the hard way, and trying to do a story where the Fates attempt to enlist Daken to put Asgard’s history back on track.  Why Daken?  Well, to be fair, he asks that question too, but the answer really boils down to “just because”.  I do like the idea of Daken being so obsessed with self-determination that he refuses to play along with the embodiments of destiny, but the story can’t get away from the feeling that Daken is being lashed to a plot that has nothing to do with him.  And I’m increasingly convinced that the book took a wrong turn in backing off from the early issues where Daken was a more ambiguous character – right now, there’s a dearth of even remotely sympathetic people in the book, which makes it hard to care.  (Oh, and the story also depends on you knowing all that stuff about breaking the cycle of Ragnarok from a Thor storyline five years ago, which may be confusing to readers who don’t know what the Norns are talking about.)

First Wave #1 – The start of a six-issue mini from Brian Azzarello and Rags Morales, launching DC’s new pulp universe – basically, a world with Golden Age characters like the Spirit and Doc Savage, plus Batman.  So, okay, it’s kind of about reconnecting superhero comics with their roots.  I’m always a bit sceptical about trying to shoehorn unrelated characters into a single series, and this doesn’t really win me over.  It’s one of those stories where a previously unmentioned character from another book shows up at the end and you’re meant to recognise them and go “Oooooh.”  It also feels rather like a Doc Savage story with some other characters squeezed in.  Inoffensive, but it doesn’t grab me.

Girl Comics #1 – This, by the way, is one of the books I’m reading as I write this.  So, let’s ignore the squirm-inducingly awful name and see if Marvel’s anthology by all-female creative teams is any good.  Colleen Coover does a nice enough two-page intro, but the first actual story is “Moritat” (well, I think that’s what it says) by G Willow Wilson and Ming Doyle, which soars completely over my head and crashes against the back wall in ugly fashion.   Bad start.  Trina Robbins and Stephanie Buscema’s Venus story is a cute and stylish riff on updating the Golden Age series.  Valerie d’Orazio’s 4-page Punisher story kind of makes its point in the first page, but it’s a great first page.  Lucy Knisley’s Dr Octopus 2-pager is okay.  Robin Furth and Agnes Garbowska do Hansel and Gretel with Franklin and Valeria Richards in full storybook style, and it’s beautiful stuff.  Best thing so far.  And… hey, Devin Grayson!  There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.  Well, she does a vignette with the Scott/Jean/Logan triangle, which is pretty decent, and Emma Rios’ art is lovely.  So, bit of a mixed bag, but that’s standard for these Marvel anthologies.  Really don’t get what that opening story was going for, though.

Nation X #3 – Another anthology, and to give Marvel their due, at least they use these books as an opportunity to run a different style of work.  Chuck Kim and Gabriel Hernandez Walta open with an Armor/Danger story that picks up the obvious loose end of “Hey, isn’t anyone angry about having Danger on the island?”  The story’s nothing to write home about, though at least it ties off the problem, but the art’s great, with good use of the visual hook of Armor’s powers.  Grace Randoph and James Harren do a Magik/Anole story (because we were all waiting for a Magik/Anole story, weren’t we?), which kind of misses Anole’s character, but gets the current take on Magik rather nicely, with a clever play on the “character X learns an important lesson” story.  And it looks fantastic.  Chris Yost and Karl Moline do, of all things, a story about Madison Jeffries and Diamond Lil.  This seems to be an attempt to give a proper send-off to a character who was casually killed off in the “Necrosha-X” crossover; it’s fine, but feels like it’s being done largely for the benefit of people who were reading Alpha Flight twenty years ago.  And finally, Corey Lewis does a typically hyperactive New Mutants story, which is, well, hyperactive but good fun.  Not a bad strike rate.

Wolverine: Weapon X #11 – Start of a new storyline, “Tomorrow Dies Today”, as Deathlok comes back from the future to kill some superheroes who don’t exist yet.  Meanwhile, Wolverine has a drink.  Once again, Jason Aaron’s got the right idea here – there’s a tricky balance to strike in having tongue firmly in cheek, but still keeping a bit of drama in there, and it shifts tone effortlessly when it needs to.  The opening sequence, with a rookie superhero on his first night, is fabulous; so is Logan’s conversation with Steve Rogers, but for entirely different reasons.  Ron Garney returns on art, and he’s perfectly suited for these stories.  Great book.

X-Factor #202 – This does seem an odd storyline to run immediately after a relaunch, as it appears to be more of an epilogue to the extended time-travel arc that came before it.  I don’t quite buy the evil Reed Richards, either – there’s a nice idea that being Reed Richards is so much fun that you don’t really need a wider plan than that, but it just doesn’t seem right for this particular character.  Art’s a bit stiff at times, too.  Mmm.  It has its moments, of course – obviously it does, it’s a Peter David story, and he’s always above average – but it’s not my favourite issue.

X-Force #24 – Right, then, let’s see if I’m following this right.  The Vanisher has just teleported X-Force to Genosha, where Selene has revived a zombie army.  Wolverine declares that they’re going to fight their way through said army in order to get into Selene’s castle.  Everybody agrees that this is virtually suicidal, but that they must do it anyway.  Now, can you see the glaring plot hole in this story?  That’s right, nobody thinks of asking the Vanisher whether he could simply teleport them into the castle, thus avoiding the need to suicidally fight a zombie army. And just in case any readers hadn’t spotted this point, which seemingly eludes the entire cast, the Vanisher actually does teleport himself into the castle four pages later, which as far as I can see proves pretty conclusively that all the characters are morons.  Yes, I realise they’re trying to get to the point where the Vanisher enters the castle alone, so that he can have his moment of heroism, but hey, set it up properly.  And yes, I realise the idea is that he runs away and then has second thoughts – but they’re already planning their suicidal assault before he leaves, so that doesn’t work.  Unless I’m missing something, this one has plot holes beyond salvation.  As for Clayton Crain’s art, well, it’s the usual tedious murk, I’m afraid.

X-Men Forever #18 – Scott Summers has quality family time with his son.  And since Nathan never turned into Cable in this reality, it’s time for another rendition of that old favourite, “The baddies kidnap Nathan, who is Very Important.”  Solid enough, decent art, but nothing exceptional.

X-Men Legacy #233 – The end of Legacy‘s very loose “Necrosha-X” tie-in.  When I say “loose”, I mean that it’s basically an unrelated Proteus story, and that Necrosha-X has been used to justify using Destiny, a character who died years ago and would otherwise have had to show up in a dream scene or something.  But hey, that’s fine – if you’ve got two “back from the dead” stories going at once, by all means lash them together.  This issue… well, the X-Men fight Proteus.  I’m not quite sure what this has to do with the new direction of Rogue acting as a mentor for the junior X-Men, but it’s a good fight issue, it makes great use of Magneto, and Clay Mann’s artwork is strong, so I’m not complaining.

Welcome to another Sunday evening round-up of the week’s comics.  Of course, the big news in comics this week is apparently that DC has given some people new job descriptions, but we’ll leave that for the podcast.  Just two X-books this week – Uncanny X-Men and the final issue of the Psylocke miniseries.  Why, it’s almost within reason.  Don’t worry, though, because it’ll be back to normal next week, with a thoroughly excessive quantity.  Meanwhile…

Battlefields: Happy Valley #3 – The concluding part of Garth Ennis and PJ Holden’s story about an Australian air crew in World War II.  The basic plot is pretty obvious – the crew are on their last mission before completing their tour of duty, except for the new, idealistic, wide-eyed pilot, and you can probably figure out from that where this is heading.  The big set piece, unfortunately, isn’t conveyed as clearly as it might have been, and the plot is fairly predictable.  But Ennis raises his game with the coda, where any sense of heroism is undercut as the story ends up going unrecognised by an impersonal wartime bureaucracy.

Black Widow: Deadly Origin #4 – Paul Cornell wraps up this rather ornate miniseries.  The title might lead you to expect a re-telling of the Black Widow’s back story – which would make sense, since Marvel will presumably want some sort of introduction to the character on the shelves in time for the upcoming Iron Man movie.  But rather than explaining her history, Cornell seems moe interested in deconstructing the various scattered interpretations of the character over the decades, and seems to take a working knowledge of her background for granted.  The common thread ends up being a rather hazy idea about Natasha escaping the shadow of her occasional supporting character Ivan, and a claim that her recent actions have been driven by a common theme of, um, doing good.   It’s all terribly confused and convoluted, and Ivan’s actions seem terribly contrived.  More to the point, it never really manages to get across a coherent vision of the character, which seems to have been the aim.  This seems to be more a case of overambition, with the story struggling to digest and present a horde of scattered continuity references, but it never comes together.

Chase Variant One Shot (Is All I Need)  – Rich Johnston writes a one-shot for Image, with various artists contributing.  The high concept is that Chase Variant thinks she’s a genetically engineered assassin who was different from the rest of the batch.  In fact, she’s a character in a trading card game, which is why her life consists of seemingly random fighting.  So the “story” is accompanied by the card-playing running along the bottom of every page.   It’s a clever conceit, but it’s a single joke which, by its nature, resists being turned into a story – the very plotlessness and defiance of narrative logic being sort of the point.  These three stories seem to have started life as contributions to an anthology, and they’d probably have worked better in that format, where the concept wouldn’t have had to carry a whole issue on its own.  It’s weirdly amusing, though.

Dark Avengers #14 – Okay, seriously, in what sense is this a Siege tie-in?  It’s a flashback story taking place before Siege, in which the Sentry goes nuts again and Norman Osborn has to talk him down.  And it’s well enough written, but how is this any more of a Siege tie-in than any other Sentry story published in the last two years?  Victoria Hand gets a nice scene at the beginning, Moonstone gets a truly dreadful one later on, and overall it’s okay if you don’t mind the pop psychology of Sentry stories… but so far, there’s no discernible link between any of this and the crossover which it claims to be part of.

Devil #1 – Manga creator Torajiro Kishi does an original four-issue miniseries for Dark Horse, intended for the American format.  It’s basically a vampire story, although it’s the modern version where there’s a disease going round which turns people into “bloodsucking superhumans.”  Takimoto is a police officer who goes around killing the resulting “devils”, while Migiwa is the liberal one who wants to treat it as a public health issue.  From the look of it, she will be learning an important lesson about life: some vampires just need shooting.    The art’s great, and the glowing white “devils” are a lovely visual.  The story is quite familiar, though, and the mismatched partners are distinctly off-the-peg.  It also chews up pages on action sequences, but the art’s good enough that I can let that slide.  Interesting, and it certainly looks good, yet the story doesn’t really hook me.

Joe the Barbarian #2 – Okay, then.  Joe is having a diabetes-related hallucination, and the idea is that he sees himself on some sort of fantasy quest while trying to get downstairs.  The way that the story throws in moments of lucidity gives the whole thing a nicely trippy quality.  The star of the show, once again, is Sean Murphy’s art, which builds a beautiful fantasy world from a mixture of common genre tropes and incongruous elements from Joe’s room.  It’s basically the idea of presenting an everyday challenge as an epic quest, quite literally so.  The concept isn’t entirely original, but the execution is brilliant.

Psylocke #4 – Chris Yost clearly understood the need to refocus and redefine Psylocke, a character who’s become hopelessly confused over the years, and so I was hoping that this miniseries would achieve some much-needed remedial work.  In the end, the series never quite gets that far.  Picking up on a long-forgotten Wolverine subplot from the last decade, Psylocke finds out that the guy she’s trying to kill is actually being kept alive so that Wolverine can torment him.  So she ends up killing Matsu’o in order to release him, rather than to take revenge on him.  And that’s fine – she achieves what she set out to do, but in a way that theoretically gives her some closure and symbolically puts that chapter of her life behind her.  The thing is, having done so, she doesn’t seem to be moving on to anywhere in particular, and that’s the missing element that stops it from quite completing the job.  That said, it does set the character on the right track, and if Uncanny chooses to pick up on this material, it may prove to have done her good.  As for the art, it’s decidedly patchy – sometimes it’s fine, if a bit nineties, but sometimes everything’s over-rendered to the point of ugliness, and many of the action sequences are just plain confusing.

Uncanny X-Men #521 – Magneto goes up a hill to meditate, while some of the X-Men team up with Fantomex to beat up baddies.  Oh, and it looks like Kitty Pryde is coming back.  Greg Land’s artwork has certainly been made more palatable by toning down the overly polished and airbrushed feel and making it a bit rougher around the edges.  The problem here lies with the villains.  Their schtick seems to be that they want to copy mutant powers and make them available to everyone.  This idea of democratising superpowers is a reasonably interesting one.  Fraction did something vaguely similar in the opening issues of Invincible Iron Man, and here he’s basically recasting Grant Morrison’s cultish U-Men as a supervillain team.  But they’re a supervillain team without much in the way of personality or presence – the leaders a rather bland smartass, and the rest are pretty much a blank.  There’s a decent idea here, and I’m all for Fraction doing more stories along this theme, but these guys just need a bit more charisma.

It’s a podcast weekend, so be sure to check one post down for the latest House to Astonish, which includes reviews of Pixie Strikes Back #1 (on which, more below), Human Target #1 and The Muppet Show#1.   But without further ado…

Amazing Spider-Man #620 – Notionally part of “The Gauntlet”, this is actually the concluding part of a Mysterio story by Dan Slott and Marcos Martin.  (Those “Gauntlet” tags really don’t seem to signify anything beyond the inclusion of a classic villain.)  I really liked the set-up for this story, with Mysterio inveigling his way into control of a Maggia family by simulating the return of the boss.  And there’s a rather good set piece in this issue with Spider-Man fighting baddies while holding his breath.  But the climax does turn out to be basically a big fight, which is a little disappointing, and I’m also not sure about the wisdom of demystifying Mysterio in the way that the issue does at the end.  All that said, it’s still a solid piece of writing, and the art from Martin (and colourist Javier Rodriguez) is truly excellent.  Visually, this is some of the best work being done in the superhero genre right now, and worth getting for that alone.

Batman & Robin #8 – As with the previous issue, this is a truly odd mix.  On the one hand, it’s a story with a major plot point about the body of Bruce Wayne.  On the other, it’s a tongue-in-cheek affair with Cockney and Geordie gimmick villains in a mock-Silver Age style.  Obviously Grant Morrison thinks that they blend just fine, and to be fair, it’s not as if anyone seriously thought that there wouldn’t be a plot about Bruce Wayne’s body at some point.  Still, it comes across as self-parodying rather than dramatic, and I’m not sure that was the idea.  It’s not that I have a problem with stories that I can’t take seriously – it’s that this issue has stuff which you’d have thought the creators would want me to take seriously, and that’s where it kind of loses me.

Dark X-Men #4 – The penultimate issue of Paul Cornell and Leonard Kirk’s increasingly thinly disguised Nate Grey relaunch.  And if you’d told me a few months ago that Paul Cornell would persuade me that I actually wanted to read a Nate Grey comic, I would have been sceptical.  To be fair, his version of Nate Grey doesn’t bear an enormous resemblance to the original, beyond the powers – he’s drawing more on the shortlived “mutant shaman” stuff from the very tail end of the series.  But even on that standard, this version of Nate is generally rather more likeable and rather more effective; an issue of him and Norman Osborn trying to outwit one another comes across pretty well.  Considering Norman’s chronic overexposure right now, I’m surprised at how effectively this is working.  As for the Dark X-Men, well, they’re rather getting marginalised in their own series at this point, but they’re still well-defined characters when they’re on the page.  So far, a better series than the premise might suggest.

Daytripper #3 – Curses, I seem to have missed issue #2 somewhere along the line.  I’ll have to order it up.  This is Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba’s series where each issue visits the lead character at a different point in his life.  I vaguely remember reading somewhere that each issue was supposed to be a specific day, although maybe I just got that from the title.  Regardless, this issue is a bit more flexible about its time frame.  Recently dumped after a seven-year relationship, Bras drifts around wondering how he’s going to start over, all of which builds to a brilliantly executed “seize the moment” sequence that wrongfoots the reader perfectly.  So far, a very impressive piece of work.

New Mutants #10 – Well, as promised, this issue does kind-of-sort-of reveal why Cyclops is keeping the New Mutants together as a team.  Now, the problem with this book is that so far it doesn’t really seem to be about anything in particular, other than reviving a 1980s comic for the sake of doing so.  Ten issues in, we finally get something more than that, but it’s not exactly a grand central theme.  Putting it very broadly, Wells is trying to re-connect to the idea that the New Mutants are the next generation of X-Men, but instead of being the trainee squad, this time they’re going to be groomed as the next generation of leaders.  This makes reasonable sense, and it’s fine as far as it goes, but I’m not sure it’s really a strong enough idea to build a series around.  But having said that, if you’re not too bothered about the lack of a big central theme, then this issue does have some nice character moments, and generally decent art.  It’s trying to make use of the broader X-books continuity to give itself a context.  And it’s got a thoroughly obscure villain from the late 1980s, which is always nice.  What’s here is perfectly good, it’s just missing a strong hook to make it a great story.

Phonogram: The Singles Club #7 – The final issue of the series is Kid With Knife’s story, and, well, he doesn’t intellectualise things.  Most of this is dialogue-free, as KWK gets high on listening to TV On The Radio, and then goes out on the town.  Really excellent work, this – rather than trying to explain the effect of music, it just shows it, dispensing with the dialogue because this isn’t an issue for smart one-liners.  And it goes without saying that McKelvie is able to carry off a silent issue admirably.  As for the back-up strips… well, more hit and miss than usual, to be honest.  But the Vikings are good.

S.W.O.R.D. #4 – Kieron Gillen’s other book of the week reaches its penultimate issue, as Abigail Brand sorts out some very confused alien invaders, and naturally Henry Gyrich screws everything up.  It’s a shame that this series hasn’t sold better (though a de facto Abigail Brand solo title was always going to be a tough sell), but at least it’s looking set to deliver a nice satisfying wrap-up with the next issue.   And it’s fun.  And it’s got stupid rocks in it.  That’ s enough to entertain me.

Uncanny X-Men: First Class #8 – Final issue of the miniseries, and it looks like the concept is being put to bed for a while after this – though I’m sure it’ll be back when the movie comes out.  The series has just completed a multiparter, but for some reason it’s rounding off by tacking on a single-issue Banshee story.  And of all the things to focus on, Scott Gray has decided to do a story about the leprechauns of Cassidy Keep.  Now, those leprechauns did indeed appear in a late-70s X-Men story… and yes, I suppose technically there is a gap in there to tell a story about how the leprechauns lived when their castle wasn’t being invaded by supervillains (which is effectively what this issue is doing, under the guise of a murder mystery).  It’s competently written, and the art’s quite decent.  But come on.  They’re the leprechauns of Cassidy Keep.  Does anyone really want to read a whole issue about them?

Unwritten #10 – Mike Carey and Peter Gross begin a new arc, “Jud Suss”.  It goes without saying that this series, about fictional characters crossing over into the real world, is largely interested in the power of fiction to influence reality.  The topic of propaganda has been touched on in an earlier issue about Rudyard Kipling, but here the book goes straight to the heart of the matter with the titular film, a Nazi-sponsored film version of a Lion Feuchtwanger novel which was, shall we, not altogether faithful to the source material.  There’s always a risk in using the Nazis, never exactly the most nuanced way of making a point, but Unwritten is the sort of genuinely cerebral series that can certainly avoid any impression of seeming gratuitous.  I’m still slightly unsure whether this was the best example Carey could have chosen, but I’ll see where he’s going with it.

X-Men Forever #17 – Now, I liked last issue’s cliffhanger, but I’m not so sure about this issue’s follow-up.  It seems to take the better part of an isue just to make the point that Something’s Gone Wrong Here, which was surely implicit in the previous issue’s cliffhanger.  I don’t think we really needed an extended “rescue people from a burning building” sequence to hammer it home further, and if anything, having Kurt still scaling walls without his powers just confuses it.  Unfortunately, I feel a bit like I’ve spent 22 pages watching Claremont undermining the effectiveness of the previous issue.

X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back #1 – Kathryn Immonen and Sara Pichelli, formerly of Runaways, are reunited on this Pixie miniseries.  Pixie’s one of those generic X-students who started off as a background character in New X-Men and has slowly ended up getting more and more screen time.  I’m still not quite sure she’s got the fanbase to justify a solo miniseries, but she’s a likeable enough character and serves the “girl next door” role plausibly enough.  The plot: Pixie, Blindfold, X-23, Armor and Mercury are inexplicably all normal schoolgirls in a normal school, and obviously that’s not right.  Cue weirdness, and what looks like an attempt to complicate Pixie’s back story.  The plot gimmick is nothing new, but it’s done well, and the art is gorgeous.  Most importantly, though, it’s an X-Men spin-off mini that feels like it has its own voice (or at least, like its creators do).  It’s different, and that stops it feeling like just another schedule-filler.