This is going to be a short one, because for various reasons I haven’t had time to read all this week’s books.  (Most of them are mid-storyline anyway, although there’s always Silver Streak Comics #24 from Erik Larsen’s Next Issue Project, which is probably going to be interesting if nothing else.)  So, I’m just going to run through this week’s X-books… all seven of them. 

Astonishing X-Men #33 – We’ve reached part three of this storyline, and for once Astonishing X-Men is actually sticking to a monthly schedule.  Mind you, this issue has Phil Jimenez’ contribution downgrade to breakdowns, so I wouldn’t put money on them keeping it up for the rest of the storyline.  Andy Lanning is doing the finished art, and although the results aren’t quite as polished, it looks fine.  Last issue, you may recall, we discovered that the villain was a mysterious baddy who was reanimating dead mutants to use as weapons.  Now, this isn’t quite the same concept as the current “Necrosha-X” crossover over in X-Force, Legacy and New Mutants, but it’s close enough to be a bit awkward.  Anyhow, in this issue, we discover that said baddy is called Kaga, and has a hidden base somewhere.  So the X-Men fight another of his monsters, and then sneak aboard his ship… and, uh, that’s about it.  It’s light on plot, then, and to be honest it’s fairly light on ideas too, so it stands and falls on whether it’s got cool fight scenes – which it does, for the most part.  At least, it’s got enough to avoid feeling sluggish, even though the plot only inches forward.  Even so, if Astonishing X-Men is meant to be the book where creators can tell their own X-Men stories without having the hassle of worrying about wider continuity, you’d hope it would be doing something a bit more distinctive.

Cable #21 – I swear, this book teeters on self-parody sometimes.  We all know the formula by now: Cable and Hope arrive somewhere new, Bishop follows, Bishop tries to kill Hope, Cable and Hope escape yet again… repeat until dead.  Now, last issue ended with Cable and Hope escaping a starship in life support pods, with Bishop pursuing in a space whale.  As you do.  That allows our heroes to spend another couple of years in suspended animation, and so at long last, it’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for: Hope reaches adolescence, and gets her powers.  (They’re the ones you’d expect.)  So, they crashland on Earth, and Bishop shows up again… and this time they beat him!  Which, frankly, after all this build-up, is incredibly anticlimactic – especially so when it then turns out that they can just take his time machine and use it to go home.  If it’s that simple, might it not have been a good idea to set this up as a goal about eighteen months ago?  But never mind… they’re finally going home.  And guess what?  They overshoot, they land in the past, and Bishop gets swept along so that they can do the whole sodding routine one last time.  Now, okay, granted, this goes some way to neutralising the anticlimax of beating him so quickly earlier in the issue.  But god, how many times do we have to see this comic recycle the same plot?  Answer: until the other books are ready for the “Second Coming” crossover.

Oh, and by the way, if Cable and Hope really do arrive in “New Amsterdam, 1614”, as the story claims, then that’s a bit odd, since the town wasn’t founded for another decade.  They’re probably thinking of the founding of the New Netherland colony, which did take place in 1614, but that’s Albany.  To be fair, the art does show a forest, but if that was the idea, shouldn’t the caption just say “Manhattan”?

Dark Wolverine #81 – Moonstone (sorry, “Ms Marvel”) has a nice long chat with Daken and tries to psychoanalyse him.  On the plus side, it’s certainly better than the last arc, which came across as filler.  Giuseppe Camuncoli returns on art, and it’s good, striking stuff – he knows how to make an extended conversation into something visual.  It’s also a story which tries to get some mileage out of Moonstone’s psychiatric background, with the idea that she sees him as an interesting case study.  And for a pleasant change, the story plays down Karla’s manipulative side in favour of the idea that she was basically a legitimate psychiatrist (or at least, that’s how she sees herself).  On the other hand… the pay-off comes down to saying that Daken isn’t as complex as he seems, and that underneath all the charm, he’s basically just a psychopath.  Why would you want to tell that story?  It’s basically an issue devoted to telling the readers that the lead character is much less interesting and much more shallow than he appears.  And… this is good, why?

Uncanny X-Men: First Class #6 – More retro superheroics, with the seventies X-Men still fighting the all-powerful cosmic weirdos, the Knights of Hykon.  The character designs are great – they look unique, but there’s a common theme that makes them look connected.  And the story does a decent job of setting them up as A-list villains, which isn’t always easy in a book like this.  When all is said and done, though, it’s still a straightforward and old-fashioned story, almost a throwback to Marvel’s house style of thirty years ago.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, if you see the First Class books as something intended for younger readers; a series like this has a good reason for being told in that style.  What sticks out a mile, though, is an attempt to retcon the origin of Phoenix, as if it wasn’t complicated enough already.  It’s a trivial retcon, adding an explanation for the solar flares from X-Men #100, but still, I don’t see what it adds, and in an area of X-Men history that already looks like a particularly cumbersome Heath Robinson device, I’d personally steer well clear unless there was some good reason for meddling with it.  And it seems especially incongruous if they’re going for younger readers.

X-Factor #200 – Jumping back to its original numbering.  It’s priced at five dollars, but for that you get 52 pages of story, plus a reprint of Madrox #1 and a bunch of Handbook profiles.  And it’s certainly the best of this week’s crop.  I question the decision to just relocate to New York between issues without offering any explanation, but at least it keeps the team separate from the rest of the X-books and lets them function as the X-team who still have a foothold in the mainstream Marvel Universe (given that the rest of the groups relocated to the west coast).  The main plot sees X-Factor being roped in to investigate weird goings-on with the Fantastic Four, but alongside that, there’s some great character-driven subplots, continuing the triangle with Madrox, Theresa and Layla.  And Peter David has finally hit on the right formula for writing Shatterstar, going back to the original premise that he was bred for show as much as anything.  A smug Shatterstar beating up higher-profile superheroes, posing, and yelling “Are you not entertained?!” just works.  Good issue.

X-Force #22 – Part of the “Necrosha-X” crossover.  And I’m starting to get a bit confused here.  Selene raises the population of Genosha from the dead, only to discover that most of them are still depowered – something which apparently comes as a surprise.  But… hold on, hasn’t Selene already raised a bunch of mutants from the dead?  If most of the dead were also de-powered on M-Day, then she’s been remarkably lucky in her choice of zombies, hasn’t she?  Actually, I suppose there might be a point to this.  So far, Selene’s only revived mutants we’ve heard of.  Most of the population of Genosha were anonymous no-names… so perhaps the idea is that M-Day really did have a disproportionately limited effect on characters associated with the X-Men.  Then again, I’m probably being too generous: that’s always been obviously true, yet very few characters have ever remarked on it, and they don’t start here.  That aside… yeah, fighting, and more fighting, and murky art, and more fighting.  And scheming among the villains, and then more fighting.  The last issue sparked my interest somewhat, with the idea of raising the Genoshans from the grave, but this doesn’t follow through.

X-Men: Legacy #230 – Rogue fights Emplate, part four.  Basically.  I mean, you’d struggle to say that this was a story about anything in particular – it’s simply Rogue getting to be a good old-fashioned hero by beating up a villain we haven’t seen in a while.  Not sure I’d have spent four issues on a story like this, but it is quite good fun.  Mike Carey writes an entertaining Emplate, as a character who’s either a terrifying weirdo or just a ridiculous poser, depending on your perspective.  And since the future direction of this title apparently involves Rogue as the mentor of the X-Men’s trainees, the story might also serve an important purpose by getting Bling! back into circulation, giving her some screen time, and setting up a relationship between her and Rogue.  But time will tell about that.

After everything I said last weekend about December being a quiet month, this is the heaviest week for new releases in quite a while.  Throw in a batch of X-minis (though curiously, none of the regular ongoing titles), and I’ve got an awful lot to cover here.  So…

The Anchor #3 – This is Phil Hester and Brian Churilla’s ongoing series for Boom! Studios.  We reviewed the first issue on the podcast a couple of months ago, and then I more or less forgot to order issue #2.  Oh well.  The premise, you might recall, is that there’s this immortal guy who holds off demon armies in hell, and simultaneously exists in the real world where he fights giant monsters.  That makes him an explicitly Christian superhero (the eponymous anchor is the St Clement’s Cross he wears on his belt), but it isn’t one of those toe-curling evangelical books.  It’s really only a Christian comic in the same sense that Thor is about worshipping Odin.  The story focusses on the “real world” version of the Anchor, and it’s the old standard plot where the army wants to figure out what makes this guy tick.  Naturally, they can’t get very far with him.  Churilla’s art seems to have drifted into slightly more cartoonish territory since issue #1, when he was doing something closer to Hester’s style, but it works very well.  Inventive and interesting, and so far it’s managing to make use of Christian mythology in a way which works whether you believe in it or not.

Anywhere #1 – A six-issue mini written by Tom Akel, who’s a producer at Comedy Central.  Arcana Press have priced the first issue at a dollar, so they evidently have faith in it.  It’s a comedy book about two undermotivated superheroes, Dust and Wormhole.  Back in the nineties they’d have been called slackers.  In practice, they do as little actually superheroing as they can get away with, and just wander aroud getting drunk instead.  All of which is fine as a starting point, but the problem with this first issue is that it’s pretty much totally plotless.  An actual mission emerges out of the blue two pages from the end, but the rest of the story is just a bit of a directionless meander.  To be fair, the characters acknowledge it (“We take it that you, the reader, are wondering where this is going, and so are we”), so it’s obviously a deliberate choice, but it’s really too formless and shapeless, at least for a first issue.  Some of it’s passably amusing, but as a whole, it doesn’t work.

Black Widow: Deadly Origin #2 – Looks like this is going to be one of those awkward stories where Paul Cornell tries to square all the different things that have been said about the Black Widow’s back story at different times by heavy use of the “brainwashing” explanation.  I’m not convinced about this.  Natasha has several perfectly viable and straightforward origin stories, but blending them all together like this results in somebody you can’t identify with at all, and who is literally less than the sum of her parts.  John Paul Leon’s art on the flashback sequences is wonderful, however.

Dark X-Men #2 – If you prefer, it’s issue #2 of a Nate Grey series, told from the perspective of Norman Osborn’s beleaguered X-Men – a mixture of pressganged villains and the genially disturbed.  I realise that a Dark X-Men series also starring the late and largely unlamented Nate Grey doesn’t sound like an especially attractive prospect, but it’s actually turning out to be quite a smart move.  If you don’t really want to read about Norman Osborn’s mock X-Men, well, here’s an actual legitimate X-character.  And since Nate was never very well-developed, he works better viewed from the perspective of other characters who are more rounded.  This is the second Paul Cornell comic of the week, and it’s the better one – it’s got the big ideas and sense of humour that worked in Captain Britain & MI-13. 

Daytripper #1 – A new Vertigo miniseries by Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon.  Apparently it’s going to be a series of individual stories about Bras de Oliva Domingos, a wannabe writer, each one showing an important day in his life.  The idea is presumably that the whole thing should add up into a really thorough portrait of the character.  It’s an unusual structure, and if they pull it off, this could be something very special.  By the way, since it’s a Vertigo book, it’s probably worth mentioning that there’s no surrealism or supernatural elements here; it’s a straight drama.  The first issue picks up with Bras working as an obituary writer, talking up people who have evidently had rather more satisfying lives than him.  Understated, and definitely a story to watch.

God Complex #1 – Michael Avon Oeming’s new project from Image.  It’s a world where the gods of Olympus secretly returned to Earth at around the time of the industrial revolution (not quite sure about the thematic link there, but okay), and there are superheroes wandering around LA who might or might not be connected with them.  Apollo gets bored with being a god and decides to go rogue.  It’s not wholly dissimilar to the current set-up in Incredible Hercules, which in many ways does it better.  Apollo himself is a fairly standard character, and the romantic interest is sketchy at best.  That said, something about the idea of hidden religions still existing alongside the real world (complete with underground worshippers) does kind of work.  It’s patchy, but it has its moments.

Murderer #1 – A “Pilot Season” one-shot from Robert Kirkman and… well, they’re crediting Marc Silvestri as co-creator of the character, but the actual story is drawn by one Nelson Blake II.  And it’s very much a pilot episode, as planned.  Jason is a telepath who hears other people’s voices in his head, which means that he can identify baddies.  (There’s actually a bit more to it than that, but explaining the rest would spoil the ending.)  Basically, it’s Dexter with telepathy, but I suppose that means it could be expanded into a series if need be.  To be honest, though, I think it’s the sort of concept that probably works better as a one-off story; this issue makes the point and makes it well enough, but it doesn’t feel like something with enough depth to support an ongoing title.

Nation X #1 – Yet another relocation for the X-Men means yet another anthology miniseries.  And as usual, it’s a mixed bag.  Simon Spurrier and Leonard Kirk’s “Ghost of Asteroid M” has a nice idea about Magneto finding a message that he once left for people who defeated him, but doesn’t work it up into a decent story.  James Asmus and Michael Allred’s “Road Trip” is a string of disconnected stuff, some quite good on their own, that doesn’t add up to anything in particular.  Chris Yost and Michele Bertiolernzi’s Iceman story actually does have a proper plot, not to mention a reasonable idea about Iceman having trouble adjusting to minor characters seeing him as some sort of elder statesman.  And Scott Snyder and David Lopez do a decent character piece with Colossus and Magik, who’ve had surprisingly little panel time together since she was brought back – I question why something like this hasn’t been done in one of the regular titles, but this story does it well enough.  So there’s some good work here, but probably not enough to make this of interest outside the audience of X-completists.

Necrosha: The Gathering – An anthology one-shot explaining how Selene recruited her henchmen for the current “Necrosha-X” crossover.  Which isn’t a great subject for an anthology, because it results in a lot of stories where characters mope for five pages, before Selene shows up.  Aside perhaps from the Wither story, which tries to bridge the gap from where the character was left at the tail end of New X-Men, there’s not much to any of these stories.  The book does have some unusual artwork in its favour.  Gabriel Hernandez Walta gets some interesting lo-fi visuals out of Blink’s piece (though the story itself seems to assume that everyone reading will remember plot details of the Phalanx Covenant storyline from the 1990s), and Leonardo Manco’s Senyaka sequence is beautiful stuff.  But that aside, it’s forgettable stuff.

Phonogram: The Singles Club #6 – With this issue, we get to Lloyd, the embodiment of over-earnest fanzine culture.  Which means that much of the issue is actually done in the style of a fanzine.  And appropriately enough, even the rest of the issue doesn’t actually take place at the club with everyone else; for Lloyd, the point of experiencing the evening is to analyse it afterwards.  In fact, much the same could be said about his attitude to music itself.  Not, of course, that there’s necessarily anything wrong with experiencing something for the sake of analysing it afterwards (heaven forfend); Lloyd’s problem is more that he’s seeing everything in a rather humourless way and at one remove, and he’s the classic teenage diarist who’s painfully unaware of how adolescent he actually is.  I’m not quite sure that fanzines are the right reference point here, though; surely these days the average Lloyd is online.  In particular, the fanzine aesthetic is retro, which Lloyd is very keen to stress he isn’t.  Then again, perhaps he’s ironically appropriating it – he’s the sort of person who’d think that was very clever.

S.W.O.R.D. #2 – Ah, Death’s Head.  And not just the later Death’s Head from the Marvel UK line, but the original Death’s Head who was the size of a Transformer.  Some of this is playing to the UK crowd, but hell, the original DH was always a great character and well worth dusting off.  Meanwhile, S.W.O.R.D. gets to work rounding up all the aliens on earth, which turns out to be a lot simpler than you’d apparently imagine.  Obviously some of this isn’t going to stick – plotlines from Dark Avengers aren’t going to be resolved in this title – but the book certainly isn’t afraid to go for the big scale.  I’m still not sold on the art, which looks a little rough around the edges for my tastes, but the book’s got some real energy, and doesn’t take itself too seriously.  And it’s funny.  All of which makes it fun reading.

The Unwritten #8 – We’re in the middle of the “Inside Man” storyline, with Tom Taylor stuck on remand in a French prison, and so Mike Carey pauses for an issue to step back and show us the same story we’ve already seen from the perspective of the governor.  Claude Chadron loves the Tommy Taylor books, and so do his kids… perhaps a little too much.  That leaves him with some very conflicted thoughts about the books, and plenty of opportunity to take them out on Tom himself; after all, if there’s one thing that’s clearly bad about the books, it’s Tom’s antics screwing with the minds of innocent kids.  I love this series; Carey and Gross are dealing with a really interesting and complex subject, the impact that a cultural phenomenon can have on people and the point where it becomes unhealthy, but they’re doing it with a very light touch.  It really shows both creators at their best.

Wolverine: Under the Boardwalk – Yet another random Wolverine one-shot.  Don’t ask me why they keep putting them out, perhaps there’s a huge market for this stuff somewhere in eastern Europe.  Anyway, this is a noir story, where Logan is called back to Atlantic City to revisit a minor altercation from 40 years before.  In the end, some things are explained but nothing much is resolved, and it all comes across as thoroughly inconsequential.  In its favour, it does have art by Tomm Coker, but that’s something of a mixed blessing – a character who’s supposed to be in her sixties looks about half that, and when Wolverine shows up in costume (for no particular reason), he looks hopelessly at odds with the rest of the story.  Not very good.

X-Men Forever #13 – Part 3 of “Black Magik”, and oh dear, it looks like Chris Claremont is returning to one of his pet themes again.  Yes, it’s good old mind control and corruption, and while this book has largely steered clear of them so far, that doesn’t make them any more welcome now that they’re here.  To be fair, this time round we do actually have a scene at the end which tries to suggest that people are choosing it willingly, so he might be going for a more interesting take on the subject than usual, but I’ve still seen him do this story so many times before that I don’t relish the prospect of sitting through it again.  Fortunately, this is a fortnightly title, and there are plenty of more promising subplots being juggled, so if this one doesn’t work… well, there’ll be another one along shortly.  Isn’t scheduling great?

If you haven’t listened yet to this week’s podcast, you’ll find it conveniently located one post below.  (Now with revised bitrate!)  On that show, you’ll find reviews of Image United #1, JSA All-Stars #1, and Jonah Hex #50.  One of these comics is good.  You can probably figure out which one for yourself, but go on, listen to the show anyway.

And here’s some other stuff that came out this week:

Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love #2 – In search of a mystical maguffin, Cinderella heads to Dubai and teams up with Aladdin.  Does the world actually need three Fables titles a month?  Probably not, but writer Chris Roberson does a good job of matching the tone of the parent title.  The idea of Cinderella as a spy was set up in the parent title; in practice, she ends up as a relatively straight spy pastiche, perhaps because it’s not that easy to write a cross between Cinderella and James Bond without it becoming hopelessly contrived.  That might explain why they’re using Aladdin, who’s somewhat easier to play with in this context.  It’s not an especially subtle story, but anything with art by Shawn McManus is going to be worth reading.  And they’re right, by the way, that Dubai is a perfect setting for this sort of story in 2009 – it’s exotic, it’s not been done to death, and it’s “a place where billionaires build artificial islands in the shape of things.”

And it’s not the only comic this week that takes place in Dubai.  But we’ll come back to that.

Echo #17 – Behold exposition!  This issue basically amounts to an 18-page explanation of what the Phi Project was actually about.  How much of this is strictly essential to the plot, I have my doubts – in terms purely of the narrative, Terry Moore could probably have pared this down to a fraction of the length and still explained why it matters.  But there’s more than that going on here, because this seems to be Moore spelling out the big idea at the heart of Echo.  It’s a curious mixture of cutting-edge physics, pseudo-science and maths-as-magic… but basically, Moore seems to want to tell us that the Golden Ratio is at the heart of all things.  This idea has been around for centuries, but Moore does a surprisingly effective job of crossing it with experimental physics.  I’m fairly convinced that the plot explanation offered here doesn’t make sense (since most high-level maths and physics is done with variables, surely it doesn’t matter what base you do the maths in?), but it’s nicely pitched as the sort of semi-comprehensible idea that just conceivably might have a glimmer of viability.  And, of course, it’s a testimony to Moore’s ability that he can make 18 pages of exposition into a visually interesting comic.

Jack of Fables #40 – Oh, okay.  I’d kind of been assuming that the two plot threads – our Jack turning into a dragon, and the other Jack trying to be a hero – would tie up by the end of this storyline.  But apparently not.  It seems the dragon stuff is just a sub-plot to build to the next arc.  These last few issues feel like they’ve been something of a necessary exercise to move the characters from A to B – in particular, to make Jack Frost into a proper hero.  The tricky bit is that for Jack to become a traditional fairy tale hero, he has to go through a traditional fairy tale story, which is all a bit predictable.  While it’s entirely readable, the book never quite finds an inventive enough angle to make this material feel fresh.

Pope Hats #1 – New irregular series from one Ethan Rilly, courtesy of a Xeric Foundation grant.  (Here’s his website.)  It’s about a young woman called Frances whose best friend is an alcoholic actress and who is haunted by a vaguely incompetent ghost.  To be honest, this first issue is mainly a scene-setter, introducing the cast and setting up Frances’ problems without really kicking off the story.  But it’s wonderfully observed, beautifully drawn, and frankly good enough to get away with just following the characters around for 32 pages.  I see from Rilly’s website that there’s no actual date scheduled for issue #2 (which means chances are I’ll have completely forgotten about it by the time the next issue comes out), but this is still worth a look.

Psylocke #2 – You know you’re in for a meticulously researched story when the opening caption says “Dubai, Saudi Arabia.”  (It’s one of the United Arab Emirates.)

Fortunately, the rest of the story is so far removed from the real world that research doesn’t much enter into it.  I can see what Chris Yost is trying to do here – he’s trying to do a deck-clearing exercise to clear away a lot of the clutter that Psylocke’s character has picked up over the years, so that she can be used more effectively in future – but the story itself feels mechanical, and Psylocke herself one-dimensional.

Siege: The Cabal – One-shot leading into the Siege storyline.  And, ah, it seems that for the purposes of this series the Asgardians are back in Oklahoma, when over in Thor they’re still camped out in Latveria.  Christ, if they can’t even keep that straight, I don’t hold out much hope for this crossover.  Perhaps this is all perfectly clear if you’ve been reading the regular titles, but since an issue like this is supposed to be the jumping-on point for a major crossover, that’s no excuse.  Anyway, it’s an issue of Exciting Conversation, where the idea is presumably meant to be that the Cabal is falling apart… except that really happened when Namor and Emma left, during the “Utopia” storyline.  On the other hand, Michael Lark gets to draw a very nice double page spread of robot locusts.  Generally, though, I’m just left a bit confused about the state of continuity, and with a nagging feeling that Brian Bendis is trying to force a story beat that actually took place in a different comic three months ago.

Sweet Tooth #4 – Our hero(es?) finally get to talk to some other people who don’t want to kill them, and the story continues to build the big question of just what Jepperd is up to here.  Obviously, the series has been teasing for a while that Jeppard might be up to no good, but Jeff Lemire is building the tension nicely.  Bleak without being unremittingly so, Sweet Tooth has managed to reinvigorate the overused post-apocalyptic setting.

Thor #604 – This is the start of Kieron Gillen’s run, which picks up from J Michael Straczynski’s storyline in progress, and runs through to the Siege crossover.  It’s plainly a transitional story, inheriting a number of plot threads that evidently need to be resolved so that the series is in place for the big crossover in just a few months time.  And inevitably, this book is going to be driven by wider considerations of the Marvel Universe for the next little while.  It’s not an especially enviable remit.  But allowing for those restrictions, it’s a decent issue; Gillen writes good dialogue for the gods, and is clearly having fun with Doom as Frankenstein.  Billy Tan’s not bad on art, though there are a couple of scenes that feel a bit flat (Loki’s address to Balder near the end of the issue needs a bit more spark).

Uncanny X-Men #518 – Hmm, when did it become acceptable again to randomly introduce new mutants for use as cannon fodder?  Wasn’t M-Day supposed to have put a stop to that?  (It happens in this week’s X-Force Annual as well, which suggests a policy change.)  Anyway, this issue the X-Men attempt the incredibly dangerous task of separating Emma Frost from the Void, and… yes, it’s not very well set up, is it?  For one thing, Emma’s been linked to the Void for several issues now, and only with this issue does Matt Fraction really get around to explaining what it actually is.  For another, the plot driver is apparently supposed to be that with the Cuckoos out of action, the X-Men need Emma’s telepathic powers back.  Except… point one, do they?  And point two, what’s wrong with Professor X?  There’s a weak attempt to handwave him away by saying that Cyclops isn’t prepared to put him in the field, but point three, why not?  And point four, since he’s a long-range psychic, why does he even need to be in the field?  This just doesn’t hang together.  Terry Dodson does some good work on the scenes set inside Emma’s mind, but as a story, this has real problems.

X-Babies #3 – Ooookay.  Last month, I wondered why Marvel were promoting their Star Comics collections with a series where the Star characters were portrayed as irritating, punchable and generally crap.  This month sort of answers that question, and in the way I’d sort of expected: just as the X-Babies have been replaced with cutesy versions, so have the Star characters.  Which is sort of fine (though it puts you in the weird position of writing a story where the X-Babies symbolise creative integrity), except that the “real” Star characters turn out to be Marvel-fied versions.  So… the ones who actually looked like the Star Comics characters are still supposed to be cutesy, annoying and rubbish.  I really don’t get what they’re trying to do with this series.

X-Force Annual #1 – A fill-in story with X-Force kidnapping a HYDRA soldier for reasons I won’t explain because they’re part of the plot.  It’s really more of a Wolverine story with added background characters, but whatever.  From a continuity standpoint, this is entirely skippable, but it is by Robert Kirkman and Jason Pearson, and it barrels along quite enjoyably.  As a throwaway over-the-top action story, it’s pretty entertaining.  The back-up strip, strangely, is a “Necrosha-X” crossover featuring Deadpool.  It’s silly, but in the right way; Deadpool can’t keep track of X-Men continuity either, but knows that any story where he can blast his opponents to smithereens with impunity is alright by him.

Less than a month to go before Christmas!  I really must get a tree.

Anyway, it’s been a busy few days, so this is going to be a fairly rushed round-up of the week’s releases – or rather, those of them I’ve actually read so far.

Beasts of Burden #3 – An issue for the cat lovers, as the group’s token feline the Orphan ventures into the sewers in search of the missing Dymphna (from… some earlier story or other).  And naturally, that means rats.  Hordes of them.  What’s really impressive about this series is the way that it’s taken a potentially cutesy concept and made it work.  On paper, a comic about talking pets fighting mystic evil in smalltown America sounds awfully twee.  But the book strikes a perfect balance between anthropomorphising the characters on the one hand, and on the other depicting them as regular animals, and steers clear of the obvious jokes that could be done with the concept – the human owners, for example, are more or less absent from the series.  The result is a truly charming modern fairy tale.

Chew #6 – The start of a second arc.  And now that we’ve firmly established the high concept – every time Tony Chu eats something, he learns about its entire history – the book smartly widens its focus rather than tryint to make that the centrepiece of this story.  The gross-out stuff is teased, only for the book to head off in a different direction.  Instead, this story sees Chu reunited with his former partner John Colby, the guy who took a knife to the head in issue #1.  Now he’s a mad cyborg.  Well, a cyborg, at any rate.  He might be joking about the mad bit.  Or he might not.  This issue is really about introducing Colby to the cast and throwing something new into the mix, with a couple of pages spent on a new long-term plot about very odd fruit.  Good start to the new arc, and it’s reassuring to see that the book isn’t going to be a one-trick pony doing variations on the same gimmick.

Dark Avengers: Ares #2 – In which Ares goes looking for his missing son Phobos, which is a plot from his other books.  But he ends up finding his other son Kyknos, the one you’ve probably never heard of.  This is a wonderfully over-the-top romp.  And it’s nice to see that, aside from acknowledging the fact that Ares works for the government right now, it doesn’t get caught up in all the Dark Reign stuff.  You might even say it’s more of a character piece for Ares, that character being mainly “if it moves, hit it harder until it stops.”  Actually, there’s a couple of nice moments which give him a bit more depth – Ares may be insane and have completely wonky priorities, but he isn’t completely oblivous to the interests of his troops.  Kieron Gillen does a nice job of making Ares as stark raving mad as usual while still allowing him the occasional glimmer of humanity, and Manuel Garcia is just having a great time drawing big mad guys smashing skeletons with axes.  Fun.

Dark Wolverine #80 – Concluding a three-parter, which I’ll try and do a full review for in due course.  Norman Osborn is trying to sort out his image problem by making Daken/Wolverine look appropriately heroic, and so he lines up some Z-list villains to beat.  And by Z-list, we’re talking Emmy Doolin, of all people.  (She’s an obscure Larry Hama character from Wolverine #45-46, back in 1991.)  And as seems to be the norm with this series, Daken ends up doing something which might be genuine heroism, or might just be cynical playing to the cameras.  This isn’t as strong as the previous arc, not least because there’s a major problem at the heart of the story: the supposedly incriminating footage of Daken/Wolverine beating up prisoners is utterly trivial compared to the sort of thing that we have to accept Norman could overcome in order for the “Dark Reign” storyline to happen in the first place.  There’s also a terribly vague ending sequence, which doesn’t work at all, mainly because I honestly can’t figure out what’s happening.  What the hell am I supposed to make of a splash page of a bullet lying in a bloodstained sink that hasn’t even appeared before in the scene?  If the idea is supposed to be that Emmy shot herself then they could hardly have done a worse job of making that clear.  If the idea is supposed to be anything else, then it didn’t even get within a mile of making the point.

Gotham City Sirens #6 – Hmm, I’m starting to lose patience with this book.  There’s a vaguely promising idea in here somewhere – confronting Harley Quinn with another rejected Joker sidekick, albeit one from a staggeringly obscure Silver Age story.  But the story feels a bit mechanical – trap, escape, trap, escape – and the rest of the cast don’t get much to do.  And what we’re left with is a story that’s trying to make some kind of point about the hang-ups of Harley Quinn, which are almost impossible to relate to.  So really, it comes down to making a point about the character, without that point actually having much wider interest…

New Mutants #7 – Because you demanded it – the return of Bevatron!  Yes, the X-Necrosha crossover continues as the New Mutants gets to fight the zombie Hellions.  Younger readers may not recall that the Hellions were the New Mutants’ opposite numbers back in the 1980s.  I always liked them – we never saw that much of them, but they were given enough individual identity to suggest that they would probably have made for a reasonably entertaining series in their own right.  And they had great team uniforms.  So yes, I’m quite happy to spend an issue seeing the New Mutants and the Hellions again – even if the zombie versions don’t seem to have much in the way of personality.  But the whole thing leaves me again with the nagging worry – who is this book actually aimed at, other than readers who well remember the original New Mutants stories from a quarter century ago?  And is that really enough to justify a whole ongoing series?

Uncanny X-Men #517 – It’s a fight scene.  Everyone fights Predator Xs for a whole issue.  Oh, and then, after a whole issue of telling us how awesomely powerful they are, it turns out that you can just shoot them.  In fact, the Atlanteans seem to be holding up perfectly well against one with spears…  So, it’s the sort of issue where the pay-off needs to be the heroes coming up with a really clever way of beating the invincible monsters.  And while we do get that with Rogue’s scene, generally it turns out that conventional weaponry does the job quite passably.  We have a problem here.  There’s also a subplot about the Phoenix force which comes completely out of the blue and leads to people standing around telling us how important this is, without really showing us why.  Not one of Matt Fraction’s better weeks.

Wolverine: First Class #21 – Once again, this is more of a Kitty Pryde story than a Wolverine one.  Wolverine’s gone mad and chases Kitty through the mansion, and if you can’t figure out where this one is heading, then you haven’t been reading comics very long.  Of course, in theory at least, the First Class books are aimed precisely at people who haven’t been reading comics very long, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  It’s a story you’ve probably seen many times before, but  Peter David and Scott Koblish do a solid rendition of it here.

X-Men Forever #12 – You know the deal by now – it’s good old fashioned Chris Claremont, with a main story interspersed with cutaways to the subplots.  The main point of this four-parter is evidently to get Magik back into circulation, as a guy called the Cossack kidnaps little Illyana and… well, turns her back into Magik, basically.  Solid work, and it certainly benefits from the pace of a fortnightly schedule.  Artist Tom Grummett is on particularly good form this issue.  I’m not altogether sold on his new Magik costume (seriously, what’s holding it in place?), but I do like his redesigns for Colossus an Gambit, and the first few pages have some lovely scene-setting.