Since I skipped last week’s column due to, well, not having any time to write it, there’s a bit of a backlog to get through.  So I’m going to focus on the X-books and chuck in a couple of other books that seem worth a mention.

No X-Axis for the next two weeks either, because I’m off on holiday.  I’ll probably do some sort of midweek round-up when I get back.  In the meantime, don’t forget that there’s a new episode of the podcast, waiting for you just one post down.

And now, the reviews!

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We’ve reached another of those weeks which the X-schedule virtually skips altogether – the sum total of this week’s X-Men related output being New Mutants Forever #1.  It’s a quiet week for new launches as well.  Which is fine by me, since the Edinburgh Fringe is under way and I have lots of other things to see.

But here’s some stuff which did come out this week…

Amazing Spider-Man #639 – Part two of “One Moment In Time”, the story that isn’t so much “because you demanded it” as “because it was an unavoidable necessity which we’ve put off for as long as we could.”  There’s no more interpolated reprint material this time – part one already explained where the wedding story got changed, and this issue has the tougher job of explaining why Peter and Mary Jane ended up living together regardless.  (Incidentally, while I can understand the desire to preserve as many stories in continuity as possible, was it really necessary to have them go on the honeymoon anyway, simply to preserve the canonicity of Spectacular Spider-Man Annual #7 in modified form?)  The argument goes something like this: Mary Jane realises that something Spider-Man-related stopped Peter from showing up at the church, and forgives that, but decides that she doesn’t want to have children with Peter if their life is going to be like this, and therefore she doesn’t need to marry him.  You can practically hear the plot creak under the weight of accommodating an enormous retcon with minimal disturbance to history, and there’s simply no way of taking this story as anything other than an exercise in remedial continuity.  You can of course make a case for this story as a sacrifice to the greater good of the series – but wouldn’t it have been simpler just to declare that they never decided to get married in the first place, particularly given that it was a last-minute development shoehorned into the series to achieve consistency with the newspaper strip?  Granted, that wouldn’t make for a dramatic story… but with the strings so clearly visible, neither does this.

Casanova #2 – We’re still in the reprints of the original series here, which the Icon book is covering two to an issue.  Having originally been intended for reading in smaller chunks, it’s incredibly dense, to the point of sometimes seeming a bit rushed, but with a healthy sense of deadpan lunacy to it.  My reservation about the first issue was whether there was actually much of a story behind it all, but issue #2 goes a long way to answering that point; the emotional core of the thing is evidently about Casanova being yanked to a parallel timeline and having the opportunity to revisit family relationships that he screwed up the first time round.  I still suspect it would be a stronger book for slowing up just a little bit, but that’s a hangover of the format of the original series.

Murderland #1 – One of those books that leaves you mainly thinking “What the hell was that?”  Fortunately, I suspect that’s largely what Stephen Scot and David Hahn were going for.  As I recall, I ordered this book on the strength of Hahn’s name.  The solicitation is a bit murky as to what the book’s about, and frankly, even after reading the thing, I’m not quite sure how to describe it.  There’s a guy calling himself Arabber who’s got some sort of unspecified mission.  There’s a woman called Method who seems to play roles for nefarious reasons.  There’s a general sense that the ground rules aren’t being explained to us and the series isn’t waiting for us to catch up.  There’s plenty of nonchalant violence and deadpan black comedy.  There’s a flip back cover that seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the comic inside.  And I honestly still haven’t got much of a clue about what it’s about.  But, unlike a lot of mystifying first issues, it does make sure that the actual events are clear enough – it’s the explanation for them that’s hard to make sense of.  Thoroughly odd and partially impenetrable, but intriguing nonetheless.

New Mutants Forever #1 – The expansion of the Insert Name Here Forever franchise continues, with Chris Claremont telling a story that he might have done in the eighties had he not left New Mutants with issue #52 or so.  Just to be clear, this has no story connection whatsoever with Claremont’s X-Men Forever (because he left New Mutants several years earlier, and so the deviation point is different).  As New Mutants was a smoother handover, there’s perhaps less interest in this one as a premise – and it’s not altogether encouraging when the first page, which seems to have a different letterer from the rest of the book, manages to mis-spell the names of two of the main characters.

Anyway, Claremont has chosen to go back to the old and abandoned storyline of Selene having plans for Nova Roma, which somehow or other involved her granddaughter Amara.  This subplot had been drifting around for a while, and survived a couple of years into the Louise Simonson run, before being utterly forgotten about by everyone.  Any hope of it being resolved hit the buffers when the whole concept of Nova Roma was dismantled in an offhand retcon in an issue of New Warriors.  So at least this is a story with potential for exhuming.

What we get in the first issue… is the New Mutants being taken by Magneto to visit their new allies in the Hellfire Club.  Sunspot, Warlock and Karma are all gone, for reasons that aren’t really explained clearly.  (If you don’t know, Karma was written out around this time, and Sunspot and Warlock are off appearing in the Fallen Angels miniseries – but the story seems to assume you know all this.)  A bunch of mysterious baddies attack who have their own interest in Nova Roma and, yes, the fight ensues.

It does give some indication of what New Mutants might have done if Claremont had followed up on the direction he was pursuing when he left, an alliance between the X-Men and the Hellfire Club that never really got off the ground.  And Claremont does slip neatly enough back into writing the characters.  In many ways it feels truer to the concept than X-Men Forever, which takes advantage of being in its own universe to tell stories that Claremont would never have been allowed to do in 1991, no matter how sympathetic his editor.  On the other hand, it’s Nova Roma, which was never one of the more successful New Mutants concepts; and so far it’s basically a lot of unexplained fighting.  Mind you, since the Hellfire Club are in it, presumably we get to see the Hellions later on, and Claremont was always great with them…

Rage of Thor – A one-shot by Peter Milligan and Mico Suayan, set way back when in the middle ages, from the look of it.  I forget whether this is a sequel to another one-shot, but the basic idea is that Thor has stormed out of Asgard after yet another argument with dad, and has set up a life as a Norse farmer.  Needless to say, that isn’t going to last.  There’s quite an interesting idea here about the essential shallowness of the “Drink!  Fight!  Girls!” aspect of Asgard’s paradise, and how Thor’s stuck with it because he doesn’t really have anywhere else to go.  But it’s more a comment on the mythological version of Asgard than Marvel’s sanitised version, which is a glitch; and the character arc is rather familiar, which is more of a problem.

Shadowland #2 – So it’s the street level heroes (er, plus Spider-Man) versus Daredevil and his supporting cast, and clearly the idea is that Daredevil is going mad.  Fine as far as it goes, and it’s quite nice to see these characters get a story that’s more or less on their level (though the Ghost Rider seems decidedly out of place here).  I can’t help feeling, though, that the story is being done more effectively in Daredevil’s own title, where there’s a bit more ambiguity about how clearly Daredevil understands that he’s being manipulated.  Here, it seems pretty clear that he’s just lost it, and that a bunch of characters from outside the book are going to have to take him down… and I can’t help thinking I’d rather have seen this story stay within Daredevil‘s own cast.  Mind you, by the standards of crossover minis it’s perfectly decent, not least because it’s got a character-driven story at its core.

Spitfire #1 – Another of the “Women of Marvel” one-shots, but this one has the advantage of giving Paul Cornell an opportunity to pick up on the story he was doing with Spitfire in the cancelled MI-13 series.  Spitfire and Blade get sent to New York to go after a vampire who seems to be causing trouble largely because she’s very old and has nothing better to do.  It’s trying to set up the idea that Spitfire’s troubled by the thought that she might go the same way over time, even though she’s in control of her vampirism right now.  Fair enough as a way of explaining why it’s still a concern to her and not just a generic background angst point, I guess.  I quite like the relationship Cornell has set up between Spitfire and Blade, who seems willing to overlook the fact that Spitfire’s a vampire; but I can’t help feeling Blade’s character needed a bit more work to get to this point, and we’ve ended up skipping to the relationship before it was really plausible.