It’s a podcast weekend, so don’t forget to check out this week’s show, where Al and I talk about Deadpool Max, Vision Machine and Knight and Squire, as well as rounding up the news and looking at the all-important pricing debate.

I’m a week behind with the reviews, so tons of X-books to write about, plus a couple of other recent releases.  Behind the cut, you’ll find Daken, Deadpool Max, Knight and Squire, the CBLDF Liberty Annual, New Mutants Forever, Superior, X-Force, Wolverine, X-Men and X-Men Forever.

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It’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote one of these.  But fortunately, they’ve been a quiet couple of weeks.  So I’m just going to do the X-books, because to be honest, there isn’t a great deal else going on.  Check the podcast this week – you’ll find it two posts down – for our reviews of Skullkickers (it’s quite good) and Matt Fraction’s first issue of Thor (it’s very good) along with… well, something from the back catalogue.

Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis #3 – In which we get a recap of the origin story of Dr Crocodile (a character from the 1980s Captain Britain series, if you didn’t know), a brief discussion of how cash-strapped African countries might deal with crazy mutant babies, and a wander into the woods where some more weird stuff awaits.  There’s actually an interesting idea at the heart of this story; what do you do with incredibly dangerous mutant kiddies when you really don’t have the resources to do anything but kill them?  Not that there’s any real doubt about the morally approved answer, granted, but Joshua does have an understandable point of view here.

A couple of points come to mind, though.  First, this is another illustration of why M-Day was a bad idea.  The dilemma here is basically “what does the developing world do with mutants?”, with the Warpies serving as a workaround to dodge M-Day.   Frankly, it would be a stronger X-Men story with actual mutants in it.  Ellis has managed to get around that problem.  But it shows, once again, that far from opening up interesting story ideas, M-Day has just created obstacles for writers to clamber over.

Second, there are still real issues with the pacing of this as a monthly series.  It’ll look great in the collected edition, to be fair.  But four splash pages, one of which just shows cast members running into a forest?  It’s fair enough if you regard the selling point as being Kaare Andrews’ art – and it’s certainly beautiful stuff – but it really does feel dragged out in this format.

Namor: The First Mutant #2 – Not that I’m planning to keep buying this series, you understand.  However many logos you stick on it, Namor is not an X-book.  But it’s part of the “Curse of the Mutants” crossover, so I ordered it anyway.  And after I panned the first issue, it’s only fair to say that this is better.  Having got the actual “Curse of the Mutants” tie-in out of the way, Stuart Moore and Ariel Olivetti are moving on to the story they really want to tell, which is about the new Atlantis going to war with a tribe of underwater vampires.  Something which looked like a plot hole in the last issue turns out to be deliberate, and there’s some attempt to build up an idea of Atlantean society.  A scene with an eccentric geriatric soothsayer telling embarrassing stories about Namor’s childhood is very good.

But there are still problems.  Namor says that he killed the vampires’ leader because “I thought it would end the Aqueos’ attacks on us and our colonies” – but didn’t they spend most of last issue telling us that he was breaking a peace treaty?  (The recap page certainly thinks so.)  The opening scene has an interesting idea about Atlanteans using their Atlantis off the coast of San Francisco to break from their cultural past, but it comes off as a clumsy “coming to America” moment.  And Olivetti’s work remains hit and miss, lacking the grace I’d expect in a Namor story.  Still, better than the first issue.

Uncanny X-Men #528 – “The Five Lights” continues, and this time we’re introducing a girl with fire and ice powers in Nigeria.  This is a very episodic arc – the unifying element is actually the subplot with Emma Frost figuring out how to get rid of Sebastian Shaw – and boy, wouldn’t it be nice if the recap page bothered to remind us of why she needs to get rid of him, because I’m certainly struggling to remember.  Something about Namor thinks she killed him already?  I think?  I don’t remember why…  Still, I like the scenes with Emma and Kitty in this issue – there’s a great rapport between these two that Fraction writes rather well.

The introduction of the “five lights” characters isn’t really working for me so far, because we’re not really getting to know them as characters.  The problem, I think, is that since we’re meeting them all in a state of absolute panic, there’s not much room for anything else to come through.  I’m sure once they calm down a bit we’ll see a bit more from them (and it looks as though Idie is being set up for a Wolfsbane-type role in the new group), but for the moment it’s mostly the local colour that makes the characters distinct.

As for the art, while I’ll happily take Whilce Portacio over Greg Land, whose work seems untouched by human hand, I have to admit there are problems here.  Portacio does the Nigerian scenes quite well, perhaps because the setting holds his interest, but from there we go into a scene with Bobby Drake and Kate Kildare which is little short of abysmal – the opening panel makes Bobby look like Charlie Chaplin, and the rest of the scene somehow manages to take place in a completely blank room except for a single prop that was presumably mentioned in the script.  It’s a really bad scene, and the issue as a whole is frustratingly uneven.

X-Men Forever 2 #8 – The Marauders versus the X-Men and the Starjammers, again.  Halfway through this story, I was wondering whether Claremont had botched his cliffhanger last issue – by bringing back Wolverine only to expose him as a clone and kill him immediately.  But no, he’s going to be around for a while, presumably as one of Sinister’s deranged henchmen.  There’s some oddities in Claremont’s attitude to clones (why doesn’t it matter if you kill them, and how the hell can Sabretooth smell the difference between Wolverine and his clone?).  But still, the last couple of issues have been an enjoyable romp of a fight scene, and that’s fine in a book like this.

X-Men Legacy #240 – Continuing the “Children of the Vault” story.  Clay Mann’s art in this story doesn’t seem to be up to the standards of earlier – perhaps the deadlines are catching up with him, but it means that the story launches with a rather confused action sequence.  A splash page unveiling the Children’s big plot-driving machine works quite well, but overall it’s a step down.  Paras’ big act of self-sacrifice is a bit melodramatic too, but there’s a twist near the end that works better.  Still, not the strongest chapter of this storyline, which has generally been pretty good.

X-Men vs Vampires #1 – Frankly mystifying anthology series in which a bunch of writers have been asked to do stories where members of the X-Men fight vampires, and only a couple of them seem to have been told that they should tie in with “Curse of the Mutants” in any way.  James Asmus and Tom Raney’s “From Husk Till Dawn” is a thuddingly uninspired few pages in which Husk is looking for the captured Jubilee, and fights some vampires, and that’s literally it.  Really, truly dreadful.   Christopher Sequeira and Sana Takeda’s story is better, with Dazzler meeting a bunch of blaxploitation vampires, but it really has nothing whatsoever to do with the crossover, and even taken in isolation it’s no more than diverting.  As you can probably imagine, Peter David does better, teaming with Mick Bertilorenzi in a story about a vampire who’s come to San Francisco with his own agenda, though again it doesn’t gain anything from the wider crossover and would be a better story taken completely in isolation.  Rob Williams and Doug Braithwaite go for a similar idea, with Magneto encountering a vampire he knew in life.  Good concept, not really developed into a story, but it looks nice.  And rounding it off, there’s a reprint of the first half of Uncanny X-Men #159, the X-Men/Dracula story (the second half will be in the next issue), where you can see Bill Sienkiewicz back when he did house style.  The Peter David story is worth reading, but as a package, it’s a bit of a dud.