As you’d expect, there’s not a great deal out this week.  But hey, there’s a few X-books and a couple of things I didn’t get around to doing last week, so…

The Guild: Vork – The first of a string of one-shots about the characters from Felicia Day’s Guild web series.  Vork’s an eccentric control freak stuck with looking after his incredibly irritating (and infuriatingly anarchic) grandfather.  It’s written by Day along with Jeff Lewis (the Vork actor), and it’s got Darick Robertson drawing the in-game scenes, with Richard Clark covering the real world.  It doesn’t take a genius to see where this one’s going, but that doesn’t greatly matter.  It’s a nicely told story which combines a semi-serious plot with cheerfully insane details, and manages to make Vork somewhat sympathetic by giving him an even more obnoxious character to deal with, without undermining his fundamental annoyingness.  And it’s well paced for the single-issue format, something we really don’t see enough of these days.

Thor: Wolves of the North – Yet another in the seemingly endless Thor spin-offs that Marvel are churning out at the moment.  (I know they’re building up material for the film, but are there really going to be that many people who’ll want 15 random Thor trade paperbacks?  And if they’re that indiscriminate, why not just sell them the back catalogue, or dust off Thor: Vikings or something?  I really don’t get the logic.)

Anyway, this one’s by Mike Carey and Mike Perkins, which is a solid enough creative team to make me give it a shot.  It’s set back in the Viking period, and the basic idea is that there’s yet another war going on up in Asgard.  This time, though, Hela is trying to outflank the good guys by sending her forces via Earth, which is obviously causing a bit of trouble for the hapless Norse.  Enter Thor to sort it all out.  It’s a good looking book, and the central concept’s quite neat, but somewhere along the line it wanders off into a tacked-on love story between Thor and a girl who’s inherited the leadership of her tribe, and kind of loses focus.  Wonderful art, though.

Widowmaker #1 – This four-issue miniseries was originally going to see print as a crossover between Black Widow and Hawkeye & Mockingbird, except those books both got cancelled.  You may well wonder why they’re bothering to publish it at all; I have a sneaking suspicion that it may involve changes to Hawkeye that will have knock-on effects for New Avengers, which might mean they’re compelled to follow through.

A crossover between these books makes reasonable sense in theory, since Mockingbird and Black Widow are both supposed to be some sort of spies, and Hawkeye started off as the Widow’s sidekick.  But one book is going for grim and gritty while the other has just finished an opening arc dealing with the Phantom Rider, all of which suggests a pretty gruesome tone clash could be in the offing.  This issue would have been Hawkeye & Mockingbird #7, and it’s slightly odd, leaning closer to the darker tone of Black Widow while still wheeling out Soviet superheroes and getting into a dangling plot thread about where the Ronin costume came from in the first place.  But the relatively light feel was what I liked about H&M, and this isn’t a direction that does a great deal for me.  At least the Lopez’ art holds to its familiar style, though.

There are some weird pacing choices here – the cliffhanger is basically a repeat of a reveal that was already done at the start of the issue.  The plot doesn’t entirely make sense – if the Ronin identity has been around for years, why are the Soviets simply assuming that Hawkeye, of all people, was Ronin all along?  And there are some bizarre anachronisms in here.  The KGB hasn’t existed since 1991, and its Russian successors have completely different names.  Yet the story has characters talking about the KGB as if it still existed, and discussing KGB technology as if it were cutting edge.  Even more bizarre, the Russian superheroes call themselves the Supreme Soviets, a name which was rather clever back in the 80s (the Supreme Soviet was the Soviet-era legislature), but was long since dumped in favour of “People’s Protectorate” and latterly “Winter Guard”.  There’s even a reference to Siberian labour camps, and those were shut down by Krushchev, for god’s sake.

Conceivably these could be intentional all-is-not-as-it-seems story points, but to be honest, that’s not how they come across, and the impression is that the book is literally a quarter century behind the times.  Then again, somebody’s done their research, because the whole story is built around the Dark Ocean Society, which might sound like something late-nineties Warren Ellis would have created on an off-day, but is indeed a real thing.  A weird mishmash of references here, and more confusing than successful.

Uncanny X-Men #531 – Kieron Gillen comes aboard as the new co-writer, though since he joins the “Quarantine” storyline already in progress, there’s no drastic change of style.  Instead, this issue keeps the various balls in the air and focusses on the developing the various plot threads.  And it has to be said that this one is pretty well structured.  Read month to month, Uncanny can sometimes feel like a horde of unrelated ideas; with this story, there’s more sense of the threads dovetailing.

Most of the X-Men are still laid up in quarantine on Utopia, waiting for the flu epidemic to work through.  I’m not sure this is quite as dramatic as it wants to be – by the nature of the story, it boils down to Kavita Rao standing in a lab delivering expository dialogue about her experiments.  Despite the title, though, this isn’t really the focus of the story arc, so much as a plot device to keep most of the team out of circulation and leave a smaller cast to deal with the real threat.  That involves chasing after a bunch of amateurs who have been empowered by the Sublime Corp as a “new” X-Men team – they’re not villains as such, they’re just terribly enthusiastic.  In Chinatown, the Collective Man is trying to take over organised crime.  And in a subplot off at the end of the book, Emma Frost is still trying to decide what to do with Sebastian Shaw – only for Fantomex to try and take matters into his own hands without really thinking it through.

What it’s lacking – so often the case with this title – is well-defined characters.  Yes, we’ve got a clear group of ad hoc X-Men, but nothing much turns on which characters they are, and from what we’ve seen so far they might as well have been chosen by pulling names from a hat.  The imposter X-Men have a single personality trait to share between them.  And the Collective Man, a character who’s been around for decades, appears to have suddenly discovered an interest in organised crime… just because.  The typically wooden artwork of Greg Land doesn’t exactly help – the demented grins are in full force here.

But it’s structurally sound, and there are some interesting ideas in here; I like the idea of the Sublime Corp wanting to monetise mutants as a resource, especially because it plays quite neatly against the “threat of extinction” set-up.  Still, not quite firing on all cylinders.

X-Men #6 – The concluding part of “Curse of the Mutants”, and boy, there’s a story that didn’t live up to the hype.  Supposedly the idea for this storyline originated from the sales department, who figured that vampires were popular right now because of, uh, Twilight and so forth.  I have no idea whether that’s true or not, but what speaks volumes is that it’s distressingly plausible.  (Coming in 2011: the X-Men take on Justin Bieber.)

Despite my initial cynicism, Victor Gischler briefly had me interested in this storyline with his Death of Dracula prologue one-shot.  That story had some interesting ideas about the vampires seeing the X-Men as kindred spirits, and set up some potentially entertaining stories about internal politicking within the vampires.  But even with six issues to play with, none of that has really come to anything, and the storyline has petered out in a flimsy anticlimax.  The entire threat of this storyline was supposed to be that hordes of vampires were descending on San Francisco, massively outnumbering the X-Men.  And then they attacked the X-Men and, er, lost.  Yes, there was a contrived attempt to credit the win to some horribly convoluted plan that Scott had come up with (a plot thread which isn’t followed up at all this month), but the bottom line is that after months of build, it turned out that the vampires just weren’t much good.  Dracula, whose revival was earlier presented as a central part of the story, didn’t even play a part in defeating the vampire army – thus making the X-Men look like utter morons for reviving him in the first place.

In this final issue, Dracula goes after Xarus to reclaim his throne.  And much the same problem arises here.  Early chapters presented Xarus as a brilliantly effective schemer who had outwitted all his enemies and was potentially leading the vampires on to unimagined new successes.  And then last month he just chucked all his forces at the X-Men in a frontal attack and got thrashed.  So this month, it turns out that Xarus is (with retroactive effect) just a dimwit, and Dracula despatches him without much resistance, while the other vampire characters – completely forgetting the internal politicking subplots set up at the start – just sort of stand around and shrug.  As for Blade, it seems that his role in the storyline – other than to fulfil a team-up mandate that requires a guest star – was to stand on the sidelines and bitch about the plot holes.  What’s the point in adding him to an already over-extended cast, if you’re not going to give him something worthwhile to do?

Yes, there are a couple of nice scenes with Cyclops (possibly) bluffing Dracula, or Blade trying to talk the X-Men into killing Jubilee, whose transformation into a vampire seems to be the only lasting consequence of this story.  And the art’s quite good – Paco Medina is a solid superhero artist, who pulls off a couple of very nice confrontations here.  I’ve had problems in the past with all his characters looking alike, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem here.  Still, for all that, the bottom line is that it’s just a weak story, and one that doesn’t feel like it was ever thought out very clearly.  I like some of the details in this book, I actually quite like the general feel of it, but the story is a total dud.

X-Men Legacy #243 – The concluding half of “Fables of the Reconstruction”, a strange little two-parter which appears to be not so much a story as an exercise in shuffling characters into place for something else.  The idea here is that San Francisco is still rebuilding from the crossover a few months back and, in a goodwill exercise, Cyclops has sent a bunch of mutants to help out on a random building site.  (And yes, it’s a fair point that this seems a rather arbitrary way to go about things, with a crew who aren’t particularly suited for the task anyway.)  The first part, told in flashback, made clear that something was going to go horribly wrong and basically suggested that Omega Sentinel was going to go mad and kill everyone when her original programming re-asserted itself.  This issue, it turns out that the Horrible Thing is that she does go crazy, but gets rather brutally beaten by Hellion, who doesn’t appear that bothered by what he’s done.

I can only assume that the idea here is to continue a subplot with Hellion, who also seems to figure in the promotional art for the upcoming “Age of X” crossover.  As he’s one of the stronger characters the X-books have created over the last decade, and one who’s been allowed to fall into neglect, it’s good to see him being brought back into circulation, and it provides some reassurance that maiming him during “Second Coming” wasn’t just an exercise in gratuitous slaughter.  Mind you, the moody and violent version of the character seen here bears little resemblance to the more sympathetic version that Marjorie Liu wrote in the opening issues of X-23, which isn’t entirely reassuring if you’re looking for evidence of a coherent plan.  As for poor old Omega Sentinel – a thin character who also hasn’t been used in a while – I have a suspicion that she was selected for this role on the basis of being one of the more expendable characters on the island.

I’m not quite sure who Carey wants us to root for here.  The way it’s put together tends to suggest that we’re supposed to agree with the X-Men and be disturbed by Hellion’s use of excessive force.  But Hellion’s response – which is basically to point out that Karima was trying to kill them, and dismiss Cyclops as a hypocrite who holds the younger X-Men to a standard that he’s entirely abandoned himself – is a pretty sound rebuttal.  Perhaps there’s more going on here than meets the eye, as regards Carey’s approach to the X-Men’s current moral standards, or perhaps the main body of the story just didn’t manage to get across the idea that Hellion was using excessive force.  Interestingly, Hellion doesn’t try to defend his actions on the grounds that Karima asked him to kill her, even though she explicitly did.  You’d  have thought he’d want to bring that up, but it seems he’s more keen for this to be seen as his victory, or to use it as an excuse to vent his frustration with Cyclops.

Carey’s earned enough of my trust to give him the benefit of the doubt on these points, so I’ll assume that these aren’t contradictions so much as a deliberate attempt to make sure that both sides have a respectable argument.  Still, “Fables of the Reconstruction” feels more like a case of advancing subplots than a coherent story in its own right.  As for the art, Paul Davidson’s work is nice and clear, but his faces are a bit too ugly and samey for my taste – compare Rogue and Hellion on the last two pages.

It’s Christmas!  Well, it’s not really.  But it’s the last X-Axis before Christmas (and given that this week’s delivery will no doubt be subject to the combined vagaries of the holiday season and snow disruption, I’m kind of assuming I won’t see it this week).  Fortunately, I have two weeks of arrears to get through, which includes a whole bunch of X-books and a few other titles worth singling out, so plenty to work on here…

Black Panther: The Man Without Fear #513 – A curious book, this.  It’s picking up its numbering from Daredevil, and the basic premise is that the Black Panther is trying to take over as the local superhero of Hell’s Kitchen now that Daredevil is out of the way.  But although Foggy Nelson puts in a brief appearance, it’s really a case of the Panther taking over Daredevil’s setting, rather than his supporting cast or his storylines.  In fact, it’s an equally direct sequel to Doomwar (the recent Black Panther mini), which apparently ended with T’Challa more or less wrecking Wakanda’s economy in order to defeat Dr Doom, and being kicked out.  So they’re going the back-to-basic redemption route with T’Challa; fair enough, so far as it goes.  Strictly speaking he’s not even calling himself the Black Panther any more, since that’s meant to be his ritual title.  He’s just a guy in a mask, with a civilian identity as a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo.  (If you’re not familiar with the place, just bear in mind the useful rule of thumb: any country that claims to be a Democratic Republic almost invariably isn’t.)

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As I mentioned in the post below, we’re horribly off schedule here at House to Astonish.  And to make matters worse, there’s no new comics this week, because apparently Diamond UK can’t deliver in snow.  (Normally at this point I’d complain about the ineptitude of Diamond UK.  But to be honest, since the M8 was closed for two days this week and the Transport Minister has just resigned over it, I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt for a change.)

Fortunately, I still haven’t got around to reviewing last week’s books – which include the first issues of Wolverine: The Best There Is and Heroes for Hire, plus the second issue of Generation Hope – so I’m going to write about those instead.  Still remember what happened in them?  No?  Well, rack your brains now…

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8 #39 – I’ve complained from time to time about the shortcomings of Marvel’s recap pages (which are often considerable, though it varies).  So it’s only fair to point out that Buffy the Vampire Slayer has the most useless recaps in Christendom.  Now, granted, not many people are going to be picking up this issue – “Last Gleaming”, part four – as their jumping on point.  The series is building to its climax.  But even then, while the creators may think about this stuff on a full time basis, chances are that even the regular reader probably hasn’t thought about the book for at least three weeks, and the story itself isn’t going to screw up the collected edition by explaining the plot, and so that’s why we need recap pages.

Here is the recap from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8 #39:

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