Nice of Marvel to give me a light week this time round.

Volume 3 of the All-New X-Men collections covers issues #11-15, but this is a self-contained issue filling the gap before we get to “Battle of the Atom” next month.  That provides an opportunity for a guest artist – David Lafuente, an ideal choice for Bendis’ stories.  Not only is his work nice to look at, but he’s a cartoonist who does wonderfully expressive characters.  His people can act, in short, which is what you need to give these scenes the depth and heart required for them to work.

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Well, I’m assuming this is a two-parter, at any rate.  It doesn’t actually say so, but the collected edition for issues #13-18 is called “Revenants”, and the solicitations indicates that it’s going to be three two-parters.  Legacy is one of those traditionally-minded titles that is structured primarily for the ongoing series, and just happens to include suitable breaks in the action to allow for convenient collection.

“Hope and Glory” is a story that illustrates much of what’s good and bad about the current incarnation of Legacy.  David has come to Britain, no doubt with some mysterious and convoluted plan in mind as ever.  For once, though, the story isn’t told from his point of view, but by guest star Pete Wisdom, cast as the beleaguered official to has to keep David under control.  There’s a dodgy foreign leader in town, and Wisdom assumes that David is planning some sort of attack on him.

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You know what?  Let’s stick with this format for the moment.  Because (a) I suspect it’s pretty soon going to be very ill-advised if not outright impossible to try and hold this blog to any specific schedule, and (b) while it would be going too far to suggest that there is nothing to be said about middle chapters of Uncanny X-Men and Wolverine: Japan’s Most Wanted, neither are they exactly the most inspiring things I could be writing about.

So.  Brian Wood and Olivier Coipel’s X-Men relaunch completes its opening arc this week.  Let’s talk about that.

The story in a nutshell goes like this.  Jubilee returns to America with a baby in tow, who she says is an orphan she picked up in Budapest.  She’s being followed by a guy who turns out to be the current host body for Sublime, the evil viral consciousness from Grant Morrison’s run.  But Sublime’s main concern is the return of his long-banished sister Arkea, another virus who can also control machines, and who’s infecting the baby.

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This started as a capsule for this week’s X-Axis but seems to have grown a bit, so let’s give it its own post.

Wolverine: In the Flesh – This is a comic written by celebrity chef Chris Cosentino, in which Wolverine teams up with celebrity chef Chris Cosentino.  I’ve never heard of celebrity chef Chris Cosentino, who is, in British terms, not a celebrity at all, thus lending an added veneer of weirdness to a comic which is already flagrantly bizarre.  I don’t even have much of a clue of where celebrity chef Chris Cosentino sits on the American celebrity pecking order, although since his resume seems to consist mainly of appearances on reality shows, it sounds as though in UK terms we’re talking about someone significantly further down the pecking order than, say, Gregg Wallace.

(Though Wolverine and Gregg Wallace is a comic I could get behind.  “Sabretooth nearly got me there!  If only there was somebody who could distract him by vividly describing a cake!”)

As if the San Francisco setting wasn’t enough of a clue, this thing has been in the works for years.  It was announced way back at WonderCon in April 2011, when it was supposed to be coming later that year, and when the cover art was already in circulation.  That explains a lot, since Marvel stopped commissioning this sort of blatant shelf-filler a while back – but presumably are willing to bung out a completed story in the hope of recouping some of their costs.

The plot – and, perhaps surprisingly, it does actually have one – involves Wolverine investigating a serial killer in San Francisco.  It is apparently of the most tremendous urgency that this serial killer should be caught, because there could be riots or something otherwise, though quite why people would be rioting about that isn’t really explained.  The presence of celebrity chef Chris Cosentino is justified on the basis that he can comment in an informed way on the killer’s dismemberment of his victims, thanks to his expert knowledge of butchery.  Which actually might have worked as a plot device if celebrity chef Chris Cosentino had contributed anything more elaborate than saying, in effect, yup, those are butchery techniques.  Ultimately it turns out that the killer has some plan involving mutants or something, but it’s really academic, since when he gets hold of Wolverine, he can (in theory) keep butchering him indefinitely because of the whole healing factor – the implication seems to be that he’s selling his victims from a well-reviewed food truck, which is hardly the grandest plan in villaindom, but hey, we can’t all be Dr Doom.  Celebrity chef Chris Cosentino naturally returns at the last minute to help Wolverine beat the bad guy.

But let’s pause there lest this fly by too fast to savour.  I reiterate: this is a novelty team-up comic in which Wolverine joins forces with a celebrity chef whose contribution is to offer informed comment on a serial killer’s butchery skills.  This is a real thing that really exists.  You can buy it!

In fact, the end product isn’t completely incompetent – somebody, whether the credited writer or otherwise, has at least hammered it into a passably structured story.  The art by Dalibor Talajic is never less than acceptable and at times really quite good.  But none of that is ever going to overcome the sheer WTF factor of watching the plot manfully strain to justify a team-up between Wolverine and a guy whose main claim to fame is that he won season 4 of something called Top Chef Masters.  In the manner of stories written by people who know what shape a story is supposed to have but don’t really have anything to say, it ends up gesturing vaguely in the direction of a moral that “you don’t need super-powers to be a hero.  You just need to care.”

Quite right.  It’s not just the Wolverines of this world who are heroes.  There are also the celebrity chefs who write stories where they team up with Wolverine to fight serial killers using their knowledge of butchery.  I think we can all agree that these are the true heroes.

Still, let’s be absolutely fair to this comic.  What it does have going for it is perfectly good artwork, a passable understanding of what a plot looks like (and frankly, it shows more sense of structure and discipline in that department than most of the books that come out of the X-office), and an unshakeable commitment to the bafflingly surreal premise of a team-up comic between Wolverine and celebrity chef Chris Cosentino.  In its combination of a wildly misconceived premise and surprisingly competent execution, it often winds up being perversely entertaining, though not necessarily for the right reasons.

It’s very far from the best thing the X-office put out this week.  But it’s definitely the most memorable.

Hey, remember this book?  I reviewed the first issue and then decided I might as well wait for the trade.  And here it is.

The Max imprint is a funny thing.  It consists of adult-rated stories with established characters, usually taking place in their own little continuity.  Judged as an answer to DC’s Vertigo imprint, it’s a bit of a disaster.  But it’s clearly not intended as an answer to Vertigo.  Max books, in the marketing at least, are defined more by their violent content than by any sort of artistic aspiration.

What’s more, something along very similar lines was tried with Wolverine very recently, in the series Wolverine: The Best There Is.  Although this wasn’t a Max book, it had the same “explicit content” warning label, and showed every sign of having started life as a candidate for the line.  And it was terrible.  It had plainly started off by trying to figure out how it could justify as many gross-out sequences as it could, and then worked back from there.  That is not a good approach to writing a story.

So it turns out to be a pleasant surprise that Wolverine Max sets its sights rather higher.

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It’s a podcast weekend (and it’ll be a few weeks before we pick up again), so don’t forget to check that out in the post now.  Meanwhile…

Gambit #15 – Having largely tied up the storylines that covered its first year, Gambit finds itself in an odd position.  The series is being cancelled with issue #17, so it would feel a bit odd to start something completely new now.  On the other hand, you can’t really do several straight issues of filler to end the book.

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