Now this is a packed week, and no mistake.  Only three X-books, but they’re pretty important ones, and there’s a whole bunch of new titles as well.  Let’s get to it…

Avengers: The Children’s Crusade #1 – Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung are reunited for a nine-issue miniseries which, essentially, seems to be the long-delayed Young Avengers #13-21.  Young Avengers was a good team book that got off to a strong start and then disappeared off into scheduling hell while Marvel waited for Heinberg to become available for a second year… and waited… and waited.  Creatively this would usually be the right call, but with hindsight, Marvel would probably have been better cutting their losses and bringing on another writer to try and keep up the momentum.

Heaven only knows how long this one’s been in the pipeline.  There’s even an editorial note on the credits page explaining that some of the characters are in the wrong costumes “because work began on this series many months ago”.  In fact, the Avengers in this issue include Captain America, Iron Man and Ms Marvel, which I believe takes us back to the pre-Civil War status quo.  Come to think of it, this might explain why nobody in the X-books has had the obvious thought of hunting down the Scarlet Witch and persuading her to change things back: it’s the plot of this series, which presumably means it’s been off limits to other writers for years, no matter how pressing the need for somebody to do the story.

Anyway.  What’s it like?  Well, it’s like Young Avengers, obviously.  Not much has changed.  But I liked Young Avengers, when it came out.  It’s a fun, traditional superhero team book, with strongly defined characters, and making good use of Marvel history without degenerating into a flurry of continuity references.  It’s a nice little team book.  The story here is that the Avengers have figured out that Wiccan, the sorcerer who might or might not be linked to the Scarlet Witch, might also share her propensity to go mad, kill everything in sight, and screw up the world.  So, um, how would he feel about some particularly close mentoring?  Well, he’s not too enthusiastic, and he’s especially annoyed about the fact that everyone thinks his mother’s a deranged supervillain.

It’s a good story idea – there’s a good human angle in there, among all the epic stuff.  And the art’s excellent.  It’s just a shame it’s taken so long to appear, since as I say, the X-books really needed to close off this idea a couple of years ago for the sake of their own stories.

Casanova #1 – Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba’s breakout series, now being reprinted under Marvel’s Icon series.  Actually, they’re doing more than just reprinting it – the colouring and lettering have been redone, and they’ve dumped the “slimline” format (best known from Fell) as well.  Oh, and they’ve thrown in a back-up strip too.

Now, Casanova was very much an internet favourite, but I’ve never actually read it before.  It certainly hits the ground running, starting off as if it was joining an established series in progress.  Casanova Quinn is a professional dashing criminal; his dad is the director of EMPIRE, a SHIELD-type organisation; and his twin sister is their star agent.  From there, move quickly on to outrageously convoluted stories about parallel worlds.  And I can see why it’s so popular – it’s got a sort of freewheeling Silver Age lunacy without being an outright pastiche, the dialogue is often hilarious, the art is excellent.

Does it work as a story, as opposed to a string of cool ideas?  Well, mmm.  The hectic pace doesn’t give the characters much room to breathe, but that might be a hangover of the original 16-page format as much as anything else.  And it’s probably a smart move to kick off by hurling ideas at the reader and leave anything more reflective for down the line.  You certainly couldn’t accuse this one of lacking content.  Besides, what’s wrong with a string of cool ideas?

The Great Ten #9 – The final issue of the truncated miniseries, which is a bit of a problem for Tony Bedard and Scott McDaniel, since the structure of the story is to focus on a different team member every issue.  And, um, there are ten of them.  Socialist Red Guardsman draws the short straw, relegated to a supporting role in an issue dedicated to Mother of Champions.  Somewhere near the end, you can pretty much see the point where all involved threw up their hands in despair and reached for the Big Book of How To Wrap Up A Series in Three Pages – Bedard takes it up to the big character beat where the Great Ten and the Taiwanese team agree to work together, and then just stops, apparently on the basis that we can take the ensuing fight scene as read.  It’s, um, not an altogether satisfactory solution, but probably the best one in the circumstances, preserving as much of the content as possible and jettisoning the formula stuff that we all knew was coming.  Even in this heavily compromised form, it’s still actually quite good stuff, but it’s a shame DC wasn’t willing to give it one more issue to complete.

Scarlet #1 – The new Icon series from Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev.  Odd one, this.  Scarlet is a woman who’s, well, disillusioned with the state of the world, I guess, and she’s a vigilante.  She seems to be slightly mad, and she’s got an origin story (which I won’t spoil since it makes up most of this issue’s plot) which isn’t altogether plausible, but then it might well turn out not to be altogether true.  The gimmick is that she breaks the fourth wall, and most of this first issue is given over to Scarlet delivering an extended monologue to the readers.  There’s clearly more to it than that, since Scarlet makes it abundantly clear that she’s not just addressing the readers, she intends to enlist them for something or other.  It looks fantastic, and Maleev is a subtle enough artist to pull off an issue which requires some acting if it’s going to work.  The first issue is ultimately a fairly standard urban vigilante set-up with a first person narrator (albeit with a slight twist of being in vision), but there are hints of something more unusual, and a more drastic use of the fourth-wall device, to come.  Too early to tell, really, but there’s certainly some promise here.

Shadowland #1 – This is the lynchpin miniseries for a crossover spinning out of the current Daredevil storyline, and using some of Marvel’s street level heroes.  If you haven’t been reading Daredevil, well, the idea is that Matt has finally given up on trying to have a normal life, and instead he’s taken up an offer to lead the Hand, hoping that he can turn the lunatic ninja death cult into a sort of Neighbourhood Watch programme with swords.  (They should have signs: “This neighbourhood is patrolled by ninjas.”)  Now – and I may have missed this issue – he’s set up a bloody great prison in Hell’s Kitchen, and the other superheroes are looking at him nervously, because heaven knows it wouldn’t be the first time he’s gone off the deep end.  Needless to say, the idea is that forces within the Hand are trying to corrupt him, so it’s basically a battle for Daredevil’s soul.  Considering that most recent issues of Daredevil have had a fairly muted tone, it’s a bit jarring to see the story suddenly sprout guest appearances by the Avengers and art by Billy Tan, none of which quite seems to fit.  (Besides which, Tan’s Avengers pages aren’t that good, even though they were chosen for the preview – lots of static characters in empty rooms.)  Still, the issue does get across the key idea here, that either Daredevil has a fiendishly clever plan, or he’s completely lost his mind, and we’re honestly not sure which.  I’m enjoying that story, and Daredevil’s scenes are the best part of this issue.  Expanding it to a wider set of characters without damaging the atmosphere may prove to be more of a challenge.

X-Force #13 – This is the penultimate chapter of “Second Coming”, but it’s really the end of the Bastion storyline.  With his big, needless complicated, Sentinels-from-the-future plan foiled, Bastion tries to kill off the X-Men in person.  And, having caused all manner of chaos that the X-Men cleared up for her, Hope finally gets to step forward and use those powers we’ve been waiting for.  I was wondering whether the second half of this storyline gave Hope enough to do, but on balance, I think they probably got it right – if this is heading where it seems to be heading, then Hope’s importance doesn’t lie in defeating the villains of the week, but in setting up the next batch of storylines.  So by all means, let’s have the X-Men be the main heroes and stave off annihilation one last time, instead of having Hope wave her hands and cosmic it all away.  The stimulus for all this, by the way, is that the issue kills off Cable, who sacrifices himself to get X-Force back from the future – and unlike the death of Nightcrawler earlier in the arc, which I still think was a bit cheap, this actually does feel earned, because Cable’s a character who’s completed his mission and is now ready to be removed from the board with dignity.  And the scene is well drawn by Choi and Oback, too.  The second half of the book largely consists of extremely strong hints that she’s Phoenix, and slightly subtler hints that she’s a reincarnation of Jean Grey (there’s a very nice moment where, without spelling it out, we can see the penny dropping for Emma that her position with Scott is under threat).  That leaves the closing chapter to deal with the big question of What Now?  And yes, they’ve kind of slightly given that away in the teasers at the end of X-Men #1 this week, but not really.  I liked this issue – it needed to get across the sense that things are finally turning around and looking up, and it did that.

X-Men #1 – Meanwhile, without waiting for the end of “Second Coming”, here’s the new ongoing X-Men title, and the second part of “Curse of the Mutants”, something which still sounds like it was conjured up by a merchandising guy who’d read a report about Twilight.  Now, as I said last week, I quite liked Victor Gischler’s prologue story in the Death of Dracula one-shot.  The undead politicking was a good read.  I’m less enthused about this issue, in which vampire suicide bombers start showing up in San Francisco and it looks like we’re doing some sort of undead plague angle (which, I guess, allows you to vamp some of the X-Men without it being permanent, but kind of gives the game away too).  The vampire leaders who were interesting characters in the one-shot are barely in this one, which instead does everything from the X-Men’s perspective, the idea being that they assume Dracula must be behind it all.  Which makes sense, but I’m not sure I see how getting the wrong vampire leader would actually make much of a difference to them.

So, not much in the way of scheming villains.  What we do get is an entirely solid superhero story where the X-Men go after some baddies.  Gischler’s got the characters’ voices down, and Paco Medina’s art is quite attractive (though his girls  still look terribly similar).  I quite enjoyed it.  But is it strong enough to stand up to the hype Marvel have thrown at it?  I have my doubts.  It doesn’t have any obvious concept of its own to make it stand out from the other X-Men books, and it doesn’t really have a very strong authorial voice either, so much as a sound rendition of Marvel house style.  Of course, it’s unfair to judge a comic by its hype – if this was the first issue of a six-issue mini, I’d be telling you that it was far better than the usual standard for X-Men spinoffs.  But by hyping it as a landmark event, Marvel may have written cheques that the book can’t cash.

X-Women – A one-shot by Chris Claremont and Milo Manara featuring some of the female X-Men, and if you don’t know why, you evidently haven’t seen any Milo Minara comics.  But in fact, this is remarkably restrained by Minara’s standards.  Outright T&A is largely confined to a couple of pages of beach party – and even that’s pretty mild.  What marks Minara out from your generic superhero artist is that he can do this stuff without having everything degenerate into pin-ups – his characters still act like characters, instead of posing for the reader.  Basically, he doesn’t lose sight of subtlety.  The story… well, nobody’s pretending that the story is the selling point here.  Wisely, Claremont delivers one of his caper stories, and goes for a nice breezy tone with plenty of interesting opportunities for his star artist to show off.  It’s no classic as a story, and it’s unlikely to be remembered as anything more than a curio, but it may well bring Minara to the attention of a new audience, which is no bad thing.

Young Allies #2 – Well, goodness, I’m not quite sure what I make of this series.  You might think that with villains called the Bastards of Evil, it’d be completely off the wall.  But it’s not; it really takes itself fairly seriously.  Which leads us to a downright odd sequence where said Bastards, er, blow up Ground Zero.  And boy, I don’t know what I feel about that.  It’s meant to be offensive – in the sense that everyone in the book, including other villains, regards it as staggeringly tasteless-  and I’ve no doubt it’s written with good intentions, but I can’t help feeling that the book just hasn’t done enough dramatically to go there.  It just feels a bit clumsy, as if a largely innocuous teen book was being crushed under the weight of a reference that’s way out of its league.  It also seems to distract attention from the stars of the book, at a point when you’d have thought the focus ought to be on them and how the team gets formed.  Then again, the bad guys’ plot here is all about getting attention for reasons that remain obscure, and Sean McKeever’s got a good enough track record as a writer that he presumably knows what he’s doing here.  But… yeah, either there’s something quite audacious going on here which will become apparent when we get the whole plot, or it’s misfiring.  I wonder.

It’s a podcast weekend, so don’t forget to check out the show.  The thread is a couple of posts down, and this week’s reviews are Sea Bear & Grizzly Shark, Wonder Woman #600, and the Iron Man Annual.

Those aside, it’s a quiet week.  No issue of “Second Coming” this week – it’s running late.  Incidentally, the schedule now has the new X-Men series launching next week before “Second Coming” is over.  And boy, does that set my alarm bells ringing.  Because from the look of it, either they’re about to spoil the ending of “Second Coming” in a pretty spectacular fashion… or there’s simply nothing to spoil.

Now, “Second Coming” has been doing a good job of giving the impression that it’s heading somewhere.  But to be honest, so did “Messiah Complex” and “Messiah War”.  Then again, this is the concluding part of the trilogy… and surely they’re not crazy enough to spend three years building to a non-event.  So I’ve kind of been giving them the benefit of the doubt on that one.  But I’m wondering now, I really am.

Actually, there is a middle ground – the big pay-off could happen in next week’s X-Force #28, which is the penultimate chapter of “Second Coming”, leaving the final chapter for a wrap-up and epilogue.  Maybe.  Let’s hope.

Meanwhile, some of this week’s comics:

Astonishing X-Men #34 – No, not Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis.  This is the long-delayed continuation of the Warren Ellis/Phil Jimenez storyline.  In continuity terms, it’s painfully dated – it opens with the Beast arguing with Cyclops about the direction of the X-Men, a storyline which was already resolved in Uncanny about six months ago when Beast quit the team.  To give it credit, though, Ellis does gives us one of the more plausible attempts to explain Cyclops’ behaviour over the last couple of years.  Anyhow, once they’ve had that argument, they fight a giant clone of Sauron and follow the baddie to his base, and that’s literally about it. For all that Astonishing usually has a couple of decent ideas per issue, it’s so light on plot that it can’t seriously be recommended for the story.  What it does have is Jimenez’ artwork, and at least the inordinate gaps between issues have been put to work on making something pretty – the Sauron/Brood hybrid makes a great splash page, for instance.  So if you’re a Phil Jimenez fan or an X-Men completist, then yes, buy it.  If you’re an Ellis fan, hell, wait for the trade, when the glacial serialised pace will be less of an issue.

The Death of Dracula #1 – This one-shot is a lead-in to the “Curse of the Mutants” storyline which kicks off the new X-Men series.  And god, I wish they’d call titles something a bit more distinctive than that.  Do they not know any adjectives beyond New, Young, Secret and Ultimate?

As you can imagine, I’m sceptical about the demand, let alone the creative need, for another monthly X-Men title.  And I’ve been even more sceptical about the point of a mutants versus vampires storyline, which sounds worryingly like an exercise in throwing two random elements at one another and hoping the result will fill some pages.

But this prologue does a lot to win me round.  The X-Men aren’t in it at all.  Nor, for that matter, is there much of Dracula – perhaps recognising that the title kind of gives it away, the story despatches him on page 8, and moves on to the much more interesting business of his sons manoeuvring to replace him.  The actual lead character here is, of all people, Janus, a character from Marv Wolfman’s Tomb of Dracula run in the seventies.  His rival brother, Xarus, is new.  It’s, well, it’s basically the annual vampire convention, and Xarus is trying to seize power.

Fortunately, Gischler isn’t giving us a faceless horde of generic vampires.  He’s doing a story about sects manoeuvring for power, and he’s gone out of his way to make them diverse.  So we’ve got the traditional vampires, the lunatic warrior types, the Twilight-style pacifists, and so forth, together with a bunch of oddball interpretations that I suspect have been dredged up from the darkest recesses of continuity to round out the numbers. Artist Giuseppe Camuncoli does a solid job of keeping them distinctive and getting the general idea across with costuming – and he’s good with conversations, too. And do you know, it’s all rather good fun, in the way that villains squabbling can sometimes be.  You can see the ending of the storyline lumbering towards you a mile off, but that’s not a problem, because it feels like it’s going to be enjoyable getting there.

More to the point, Gischler manages to convince me that there may in fact be an X-Men story in here.  Xarus’ big pitch to the vampire hordes is basically that Dracula, representing the forces of tradition, has been too willing to accept that vampires are inferior and wrong, and too willing to hide away from (yes, you guessed it) a world that fears and hates them.  Aren’t they natural too?  Isn’t it right and normal for them to go out and kill people?  All of which rather conjures up the image of the vampires invading San Francisco in order to hold an Undead Pride rally… but yes, if we’ve got a bunch of vampires who are justifying themselves using the X-Men’s stock arguments, then there is an X-Men story in here.

Reservations: the only female vampires in this story are in an all-seductress sect.  The sect itself isn’t a problem (vampires are all about seduction), but the absence of women from all the other sects is maybe a little worrying.  Mind you, most of the other vampires in this story are official delegations from traditionalist groups, or meatheaded warriors, so I’ll reserve judgment on that one just yet.  Oh, and since Dracula is being used in this story as a symbol of vampiric tradition, I really wouldn’t have given him a primary-colours redesign.  That’s a mistake, I think.

But on the whole, this is really quite promising.  It’s persuaded me that there could be something in this story, and that’s a good start.

Chronicles of Wormwood: The Last Battle #4 – Garth Ennis and Oscar Jiminez’ miniseries has sailed completely off any sort of schedule, but that doesn’t seem to be as much of a problem – perhaps because there’s enough content to make each issue worthwhile on its own, and perhaps because Ennis is such a strong storyteller that he quickly draws you back into the story.  This issue is much as we’ve come to expect from Wormwood – a mixture of eccentric theology, with Jesus and the Antichrist trying to escape their pre-ordained roles so that they can rail at the evils of organised religion, and some decidedly adolescent comedy.  It really shouldn’t work, but Ennis has such a firm grasp of structure that he can hold it all together, and Jimenez is doing some gorgeous work here.

Flash #3 – Goodness, we’re three issues in to a Flash series and I’m still enjoying it.  It’s a very traditional, Silver Agey superhero series, but without being particularly heavy on continuity – and for a character like the Flash, that seems precisely the right approach.  It remains true that the Flash himself is more memorable for his powers than his personality, but the book as a whole has enough identity to carry it through – and I love Francis Manapul’s art, which is nice and clean while remaining loose enough to sell the action.

Secret Avengers #2 – This, on the other hand, is in real danger of coming across as a generic superhero team featuring characters drawn at random from a hat.  I can’t quite figure out what they’re going for here.  If these guys are supposed to be the Avengers’ black ops team, then you’d think the first arc should be doing something with that theme.  That doesn’t have to mean “grim and gritty” – by all means, try to cross it with the Avengers’ usual stomping grounds.  But this seems to be an “Avengers investigate mysterious goings on on Mars” story which any team could have done with cosmetic changes.  Not doing it for me.

X-Men Forever 2 #2 – Last issue, the X-Men blew themselves up, in what’s pretty obviously a feint.  This issue, Rogue shows up on a couple of pages hiding in the shadows, but basically it’s a story about the government spinning the event, and Peter Parker trying to investigate it for the Daily Bugle.  The story never quite makes this explicit, but the idea seems to be that even though the X-Men’s base is supposed to be an official secret, word has got round that they’ve been blown up, and the public isn’t entirely thrilled about it.  It looks like we’re getting the story where baddies take control of the security forces, and I can’t say I’m particularly interested to see that again.  But I am interested to know where Claremont’s heading with the X-Men-faking-their-deaths thing.  Of course, this is basically the set-up he was working with during the Australia stories of the late 80s, a period which was cut short on editorial insistence – so perhaps we really are getting back to an idea that he never really got to explore as fully as he wanted.

As I’ve been writing this, the England/Germany match has been under way.  Will England still be in the competition by the time I finish writing this?  No.  No, they won’t.   Still, at least the BBC will have got all the weeping and flagwaving out of its system for another couple of years.  It’s all a terrible injustice.  I blame God, who stubbornly refuses to make the English better at football.

We’ll get to the comics in a second, but first, a couple of items of prior business.

First, if you live in Britain and you haven’t seen Anvil: The Story of Anvil, then you really should.  Luckily for you, BBC4 are showing it on Monday at 10pm.

Second, a word about Crimefighters, which I saw at the Edinburgh Film Festival on Friday.  It’s a superhero comedy from the makers of the web serial Zomblogalypse, shot in York on a microscopic budget of £7,000.  (No, not New York.  York.)  The “three friends become superheroes to battle mysterious crimewave” pitch makes it sound like Kick-Ass, but it’s more a sort of superhero B-movie with mock-noir overtones.

And it’s very entertaining.  The acting, admittedly, is a bit patchy.  On the other hand, though, it’s got a genuinely good script, heavy on the Joss Whedon influence but carefully plotted.  And it’s rather well filmed too.  It earns the goodwill to get away with the moments when it looks a bit DIY – something which fits the concept anyway, in small doses.  Plainly a bit more money wouldn’t have gone amiss, but the bottom line is, I laughed.

The reason why it’s worth mentioning is that the Picturehouse chain – that’s the Cameo, if you live in Edinburgh – are actually screening it over the course of July, so Britain readers have a rare chance to see it in the cinema.  The dates and participating cinemas are on their website.  (There’s an official trailer there too, though for what it’s worth, I don’t think it really gets across what works about the film – partly because it takes longer than 2.5 minutes to tune into its wavelength, but partly because it doesn’t use the best bits anyway.)

And now, on to this week’s comics.

Amazing Spider-Man #635 – Part two of “Grim Hunt” and… yeah, after all that build-up, this really isn’t doing it for me.  At this point it’s looking worryingly like an attempt to feed J Michael Straczynski’s ill-conceived “spider-totem” idea into a blender with “Kraven’s Last Hunt”, the end result being a story which features a ton of uninspiring D-list characters but doesn’t seem to be about anything in particular.  Lovely art by Michael Lark, a nice feint with Ezekiel.  So there’s a few good moments.  But really, it just feels like the trappings of a decent story applied to the plot of a mid-nineties crossover.

Avengers #2 – You know, the more I think about it, these new Avengers team line-ups are downright weird.  If the idea of New Avengers is to have Luke Cage’s renegade Avengers team work independently because they don’t want to be under the thumb of the regular Avengers, why are half of them on both teams?  And why is Spider-Woman on this team rather than Luke’s?  Anyway… this issue brings Noh-Varr into the cast, mainly so that he can share his alien super-tech with our heroes.  If nothing else, this does explain why Bendis brought Noh-Varr into the cast of Dark Avengers only to write him out almost immediately – at least it raised the guy’s profile a bit.  That said, while Grant Morrison’s original conception of Noh-Varr as a sort of cosmic brat was always going to wear thin after a while, he’s ended up being mellowed into a rather bland character, so there’s a bit of work still to be done.  The story isn’t exactly racing forward – it’s sort of a lurch form one exposition scene to another – but Romita’s finding some fun stuff to draw in there, and the time-warp stuff looks great.

Green Arrow #1 – Another “Brightest Day” tie-in book, the justification this time being that whopping great forest that was dumped in the middle of Green Arrow’s city in Brightest Day #1.  It turns out that there’s a point to this, and the forest is actually central to the set-up for this new series.  Writer JT Krul  certainly has the right idea – de-emphasise all the continuity baggage and get back to the central idea of the character.  So now he’s Robin Hood, hiding out in a magic forest in the centre of a corrupt modern city, and venturing out from time to time to take on The Man.  In theory, that’s actually quite a good idea for the character.  Even the fact that he used to be an industrialist fits with the version of the Robin Hood myth where he’s a nobleman.  The problem with this book lies more in the one-dimensional execution, where everyone in power is relentless and unambiguously evil, and all the homeless people are magnificently loveable.  To be fair, the story of Robin Hood isn’t exactly noted for its political nuance either, and if they’re aiming for a slightly younger audience, then you can’t really criticise it too much for being superficial.  After all, nobody really wants to read the Sheriff of Nottingham as a troubled family man.  So, yes, I get what they’re going for here… but it’s still a bit simplistic to hook me.

Sea Bear & Grizzly Shark #1 – A classic example of something that seemed like a good idea over a few drinks, being worked up into an actual one-shot.  Ryan Ottley and Jason Howard split the book, Howard taking the mysterious Sea Bear, while Ottley takes on the terrifying Grizzly Shark.  The risk with these things is that sometimes the idea is funnier than the comic, and to be honest, there’s a bit of that here.  The Sea Bear story is pretty much a straightforward monster-hunting-revenge pastiche which happens to plug the eponymous Bear into the monster role.  It’s okay, but it doesn’t really take the joke much further.  Grizzly Shark works better, though – partly because of the beautifully ludicrous visual of a shark swimming through the trees, and partly because it gets plenty of material out of the Shark biting people (and, in some cases, their beautifully incongruous reactions).  The package doesn’t quite live up to the promise of that title (how could it?), but it’s still pretty enjoyable.

Thunderbolts #145 – The second issue of the book’s new direction, and it turns out that last issue’s cliffhanger was a feint.  Which is a bit disappointing, to be honest, but maybe it’s laying the ground to do something more with Zemo in due course.  This issue, the team go on their first proper mission, which is a nice basic one – it’s not really about the story, it’s about setting up the team dynamic (or lack thereof).  Not quite sure about Parker’s take on the Juggernaut – I know it was a Chuck Austen story, but he did reform pretty emphatically, didn’t he?  And to be honest, I could have used a little more plot in this issue, given that we’re two chapters in.  But I’m still interested to see where Parker’s going with his cast, and  I like the rough energy of Kev Walker’s art.

Wolverine Origins #49 – This would be the first half of a two-part epilogue, which looks as though it’s mainly going to be Wolverine musing about how he needs to move on from the cycle of tedium in which he’s been trapped for the past four years.  I’m with you there, mate.  Second half of the issue is a tedious dream sequence, so presumably he’ll be coming to terms with things next issue in symbolic fashion.  Nice cliffhanger, though, unless the resolution is “it’s only a dream”, in which case it’s a lousy cliffhanger.  But hey, it’s the epilogue to a four-year story I didn’t much like, so it’d be surprising if I changed my mind now.  Will Conrad’s art is pretty good.

Wolverine: Weapon X #14 – In this month’s exciting issue of Avengers vs Deathlok, we get the origin of one of the many, many Deathlok cyborgs who’ve travelled back from the future, and we get a lot of fighting with the Avengers.  Wolverine’s barely in it, which wouldn’t be a big deal if it seemed to be in any way a Wolverine story.  But it doesn’t, to be honest; if anything, it seems like Jason Aaron has a Deathlok story he’s keen to do, and he’s going to shoehorn it into this title for no better reason than that he happens to be its regular writer.  Judged as a Deathlok mini, it’s not bad – I like the idea of inverting the concept by making this one a maniac who’s broadly happy with his new life as a murderous cyborg – and Ron Garney’s action sequences always have plenty of energy.  It just doesn’t seem to belong in this book.

X-Factor #206 – In which the team finally get back together and beat the baddies.  Yeah… I can see why they wanted to do a peripheral Second Coming tie-in, because X-Factor could use the sales.  But in practice it ends up as a bunch of random baddies attacking X-Factor for no particular reason, and if anything it draws attention to a flaw in Bastion’s scheme: the mutants aren’t all trapped in his magic dome in San Francisco, because some of them weren’t there to start with.  Mind you, it’s better than it has any right to be, because Peter David uses the essentially random attack as a backdrop to have fun with his characters and, for once, to give them a good clean win.  Still feels like a bit of a diversion, though.

X-Men Legacy #237 – Part 12 of Second Coming proper.  And since there are only 14 parts, we finally reach the point where the X-Men win something: X-Force get to shut down the nasty robots from the future.  Unfortunately, they get to do it in an issue drawn by Greg Land, and the art is decidedly hit and miss.  There’s quite a nice page with Cypher talking to a computer, but a central double-page spread which is supposed to be a montage of three different concurrent fight scenes is just shapeless and awful.  And Mike Carey seems to be struggling to find opportunities to be smart with this issue – dialogue like “Scott, that was… that was Hope” is surely beneath him.  Good closing scene with Cable, though, and they’re still keeping up the idea that this is, presumably, heading to something big and some sort of turning point.

Zatanna #2 – Not as strong as the first issue, perhaps because it doesn’t have quite such strong set-pieces.  It’s also an early lurch into a plot device I’ve never liked – the one where a demon makes somebody have an angst-ridden dream so that the story can spell out their character issues for the slow members of the class.  Lovely art, though, and Brother Night is a solid villain.  I’ll give it a little more time.

The Film Festival is on at the moment, on top of which it’s a podcast week, so it’s been a busy weekend.  Which means we’ve reached Sunday night, and I’ve read the X-books and a not a huge amount else.

Check a couple of posts down for this week’s House to Astonish, with reviews of Young Allies, Meta 4 and the Joker’s Asylum: Mad Hatter one-shot.  And otherwise…

Amazing Spider-Man #633-634 – Yes, two issues in the same week.  That’s what happens when a book scheduled for ship three times a month falls behind schedule.

Issue #633 is the final part of “Shed”, Zeb Wells and Chris Bachalo’s revamp of the Lizard.  Now at first glance, killing off the Lizard’s son looks like it could be cheap shock tactics.  But then again, Lizard stories have fallen into a well-worn formula, and maybe the character could do with a wrench to move him on to something else.  Wells is still interested in the core ideas of the character – intellect versus buried instinct – he just wants to cut away some of the clutter, and he does that pretty effectively here.  As for Chris Bachalo, he gets to draw lizard people, and he’s good at that.

The long-trailed “Grim Hunt” story begins in issue #634.  This is supposed to be the plot that all those “Gauntlet” arcs were building to.  Supposedly the point of the Gauntlet was that the Kravinoffs were throwing major villains at Spider-Man in order to wear him down, although to be honest, most of the stories actually seemed to involve them showing up in a plot that was happening without them anyway.  Regardless, this arc is by Joe Kelly and Michael Lark, and it sees the Kravinoffs going after anyone vaguely spider-related in an attempt to revive Kraven the Hunter.  Of course, once you’ve committed to using all of the spider-related characters, you’re stuck with a bunch of guys like Kaine and Arachne who aren’t especially interesting in their own right, and kind of feel like they’re clogging up the story here.  I’m not quite sure about this one yet – Lark’s art is great, but it all feels a bit bogged down in continuity and people I’m not desperately interested in, and I really hope it’s heading somewhere more interesting than just the return of an old villain.

Black Cat #1 – Or Amazing Spider-Man Presents Black Cat, to give it the full official title.  But they’re not using his name on the cover.  This is a vague Grim Hunt tie-in, which is to say that the Kravinoffs are in this one too.  The Black Cat steals something which seems to be an ancestral heirloom.  And at the same time, somebody’s trying to frame her for some badly botched thefts.  Which wouldn’t be a problem but… well, she’s got her reputation to think of.  It’s by Jen van Meter and Javier Pulido, and it’s actually quite good – it’s got the right tone for a Spider-Man project, inverting things so that she’s the lead and he’s the supporting character, but with the sort of good clear storytelling that Amazing has been delivering lately.  This would be perfectly at home on the main title, but for the understandably low Spider-Man content.

Dark Wolverine #87 – This is a filler issue between the Wolverine: Origins crossover and the Frankencastle crossover.  Daken’s sad about having those claws cut out of him last issue – the point, by the way, being that those were the claws that he’d coated with the Muramata blade so that they could be used to kill Wolverine.  Which I completely missed, but then I don’t recall anyone mentioning that plot point in months.  Perhaps they raised it in passing during the crossover, I don’t know.

Anyway… this issue, Daken wanders around Rome, meets a couple of petty criminals and mostly gazes at them.  Also, he delivers cryptic moral homilies.  It’s the sort of story that devotes a splash page to the title character looking moody in front of a landmark.  Somewhere in here, there’s a vaguely interesting idea about Daken’s attitude to these people.  He looks down on them on grounds of power, but not morality.  But it’s terribly, terribly laboured, and comes off as thuddingly “meaningful”.  Not great.

New Avengers #1 – The relaunched New Avengers turns out to be basically West Coast Avengers, only on the east coast.  It’s a second Avengers team, for those heroes of a stubbornly individualist bent, who stuck out the last few years as a renegade Avengers team, and aren’t too keen about meekly going back to hook up with Steve and Tony again.  So it’s basically most of the cast of New Avengers – Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Wolverine, Spider-Man, Hawkeye and Mockingbird – plus Ms Marvel and, weirdly, the Thing.  And they’re back in Avengers Mansion, which has apparently been rebuilt between issues or something.

The set-up is odd – two more or less separate Avengers teams in the same city? – but you can see the publishing logic in keeping together the majority of a successful team.  Plus, after all those years of hiding in warehouses and the like, they do actually deserve a run as a “proper” Avengers team.  The first storyline takes us back to magic, as Bendis evidently isn’t finished yet with Dr Voodoo.  It’s a serviceable enough plot, and at least it means that Stuart Immonen gets to draw fun stuff.  (And there’s some great unconvincing dialogue from a possessed character near the end.)  Basically it’s the sort of thing Bendis was doing in this book already, but without the “heroes on the run” element overshadowing things.  I thought Avengers #1 was stronger, but an okay story and good art means this isn’t bad either.

New Mutants #11 – Well, officially it’s an issue of New Mutants.  In fact it’s chapter 11 of “Second Coming”, and the New Mutants don’t put in much of an appearance.  What does happen: Legion is enlisted to help out; the X-Men and co fight off the Sentinels in San Francisco; Hope decides it’s time she did something constructive; and in the future, X-Force attack an end of level boss.  As I said last week, “Second Coming” is all about ratcheting up the tension from week to week.  As long as it still feels like it’s building to something big, it’s working.   This sort of story doesn’t really play to Zeb Wells’ strengths (on top of which he’s working with a horde of fill-in artists), but at least he gets to make something of Legion’s oddball assault.  Not a classic issue in its own right, but it’s not really meant to be, and the overall story is ticking over nicely.

X-Factor Forever #4 – Still something of a guilty pleasure for me.  It’s very eighties indeed – Louise Simonson really wants to explain a big idea about the origin of the mutant race and whether they’re the future of humanity at all, but in true period style, she’s arranged matters so that the exposition takes place in the course of a lot of running around and fighting.  I do like her take on Apocalypse – the mainstream version of the character ended up as a sort of all-purpose nihilist dictator, while her interpretation is more of an “ends justify the means” type reverting back to the original idea of somebody who thought he was improving matters in the long run.  Dan Panosian’s art doesn’t have much in common with the original series, but it’s genuinely striking, not to mention endearingly over the top at times, and I wouldn’t mind seeing more of this on the right project.

Regular readers will be thrilled to learn that I finally got the printer working.  Just a simple matter of taking it back to the shop and getting one that wasn’t broken.  Shame it took two tries.  I could have sworn Hewlett Packard used to be good for reliability.  Still, their customer service helpline’s very good, so I’ll give them credit for that.

Anyway… it’s the first weekend of the World Cup, but for those of you who might not be interested, such as the North American readership – oh, some of you might think you care, but you should see the English – let’s run through this week’s comics.

Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis #2 – Have we just given up on completing that last Astonishing X-Men arc, then?  Apparently we have.  Oh well.  In this issue, after getting rid of some local soldiers, the X-Men investigate the weird births in Karere, and then at the end of the issue a bad guy shows up to explain the plot to them.  And that’s pretty much it.  You know a book’s going to be light on plot when it opens with six straight splash pages, but this one really is a throwback to the days before the backlash against decompression.

As tends to be the case with this sort of comic, it’s a book with some very good bits in it.  I like the central idea of digging up another reason for weird births to take place and using that as the springboard for an X-Men story.  The dialogue’s punchy.  The art’s gorgeous, though it’s clear that Kaare Andrews doesn’t get Emma Frost at all (or regards the character as so stupid that he refuses to pretend to take her seriously, which is understandable, but doesn’t do the story any favours).  Frank D’Armata’s colouring is beautiful.  But there’s just not enough story to make it a satisfying comic – the pace would be languid even in a collected edition, and it’s way too slow to work in serial format.

Avengers Academy #1 – With this and Young Allies, Marvel are shipping the debut issues of two new teen team books in the same week.  Doesn’t seem like the smartest move in the world to me, but Marvel’s scheduling decisions have always tended towards the mysterious.  This is the “Heroic Age” replacement for Avengers: The Initiative, with the Avengers training a bunch of rookie superhumans as future superheroes.  Much like the original set-up of Avengers: The Initiative, in other words, except that the people in charge are benign.

It’s written by Christos Gage, who has a good track record with off-kilter team books from his days at WildStorm.  Artist Mike McKone’s clean superhero look works well for Marvel’s new direction, and strikes a good balance between giving the book a retro feel without making the new characters look generic.  The first issue is your classic team book intro – it introduces the cast and sets up the big idea, with a twist on the premise at the end.  To be honest, it’s a twist you’ll probably see coming a good twelve pages off, but that doesn’t matter, because it works as a shock for the characters.  Juggling the cast of a team book is always tricky, but Gage solves that problem neatly by using the likeable Veil as his main character and giving the others enough panel time to interest us in how they’ll develop.  A strong debut.

Daytripper #7 – It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned this one, but Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba’s Vertigo series is one of the strongest books running at the moment.  The high concept is that every issue is about a seminal moment in the life of lead character Bras de Oliva Domingos… and they all end with him dying.  The stories are out of order, they’re slowly building up a picture of the guy’s life, and the unusual concept turns out to work remarkably well.  It’s not so much about the shock value – by this point, there is no shock value.  It’s more about “What would this man’s life mean if it stopped right there?”  It’s a very clever way of making you look at each story both in isolation and as part of a whole, and the awkwardness of trying to sum up somebody’s life.  This particular issue is almost more concerned with the subplot about Bras’ lifelong friend Jorge, but even the fact that the events in this issue aren’t altogether about him contributes to the book’s clever use of multiple perspectives.  It veers towards sentimentality at times, but has the quality to pull it off.

Hellbound #2 – This is the Second Coming spin-off miniseries where Cannonball and co go to Limbo to try and rescue Magik.  I liked the first issue of this, largely because of the way it used the newer, younger X-characters, who implicitly resented the way they were being pressganged into rescuing a more “important” character from a previous generation.  This second issue doesn’t really follow through on that as well as I’d hoped.  To be fair, the theme is still there – the “adult” members of the team are duly sidelined as the book picks up on the largely-forgotten Gambit-as-Death subplot from Peter Milligan’s X-Men run, leaving the kids to be our de facto protagonists.  And Christopher Yost seems to be trying for a story in which those characters have to decide how hard they’re willing to try and help a character they neither like nor especially care about.  The thing is, this second issue gets bogged down in characters wandering around Limbo fighting hordes of demons, and while the story is trying for a “reality shifting around us” horror vibe, the art just gives us a load of generic scenes of superheroes fighting demons.  The overuse of letterbox panels doesn’t help either – I guess it might be a deliberate style choice to break up the flow of the action, but this story really does need some sort of flow.

Meta 4 #1 – Ted McKeever’s new book, cheerfully billing itself as “A 5-issue Allegorical Series in Black & White.”  And he’s not kidding.  In this issue, a man dressed as an astronaut wakes up at an abandoned funfair and wanders around encountering strange people.  Taken literally, it’s completely off the deep end; taken metaphorically, it’s hard to know at this stage quite what McKeever’s getting at, other than a vague sense of alienation.  But it does have plenty of unsettling atmosphere, and the art is consistently excellent.  The device of having characters speak in symbols to reflect the lead character vaguely understanding what they mean is a brilliantly effective one.  The ultimate question, though, is whether you have faith that it’ll fall into some sort of shape by the end of the five issues (as it’s presumably meant to) or whether it’ll end up as effectively an extended dream scene.  A lot of McKeever’s stories end up falling into the latter category for me, but there’s indisputably something memorable about this issue.

S.H.I.E.L.D. #2 – This year’s internet darling, it seems.  Leonardo da Vinci shows up with Renaissance Kirbytech to confront the people now running his Illuminati-themed SHIELD organisation, who are apparently not futurist enough for his tastes.  Looks like there’s something about Kaballah in there as well.  It’s…  If I’m being honest, it’s a book I respect rather than actually enjoy.  It’s ambitious, it’s boldly oblivious to commercial considerations, and it’s seemingly trying to combine the Illuminati conspiracy with the mind-expanding weirdness of Silver Age superhero comics.  If I’m pushed as to why it doesn’t particularly grab me, I suppose it comes down to a lack of clearly defined characters; it’s a book of ideas rather than people, which would normally be fine for me, except that they’re rather New Age-y ideas.  It’s certainly not a bad comic and I’m glad to see something like this getting a shot from Marvel at all, but it doesn’t actually entertain me very much.

Uncanny X-Men #525 – Chapter 10 of “Second Coming” follows the established pattern: rack up the tension a bit more, and chuck in one or two extra plot points.  So this issue, something odd happens with Hope’s eyes, X-Force actually arrive in the future, and Legion and Rogue are given roles near the end… and otherwise, it reiterates what we already knew and gives us more fighting.  All of which is fine.  On a weekly schedule, I think this is working very well, carefully boxing the characters into a corner and doing everything possible to build the sense of “How do they get out of that”? On a monthly schedule this would drag intolerably, but shipping weekly, it’s got real momentum and building the sense that something big must, surely, be coming.

X-Men Forever 2 #1 – Chris Claremont’s X-Men Forever enters its second year proper – and yes, the title is officially X-Men Forever 2, it’s in the logo and everything.  Back in 1991, by all accounts, Claremont never particularly wanted to hit the reset button and get the X-Men back to the Mansion.  It’s often forgotten these days that the previous couple of years had seen some of his most freeform X-Men stories, disbanding the team entirely and more or less reinventing the series as an anthology title.  And it looks as though, having served out a year at the Mansion, Claremont is setting out to dismantle that set-up and do something else with the characters instead.  The springboard for that, unfortunately, is a rather undermotivated fight with the 1991 line-up of the Avengers, who seem to have been wheeled out mainly so that their battle can provide cover for a necessary plot point at the end of the issue.  Still, if Claremont is going off in some completely different direction with his version of the X-Men, and that’s how it looks, then that’s certainly of interest.

Young Allies #1 – Marvel’s other team book launch, by Sean McKeever and David Baldeon, seems to be a sort of twenty-first century New Warriors – a team made up of (mostly) established characters with nothing much in common other than age and relatively obscurity.  True, Nomad’s got a back-up strip in Captain America, but the likes of Firestar, Gravity and Arana have been languishing for a while now.  Come to think of it, Firestar and Gravity are in the particularly odd position of having respectable in-continuity CVs, which aren’t matched by their following in the real world.

This is, of course, another introducing-the-cast issue.  McKeever’s always been a good character writer, and the individual cast members are set up well.  What doesn’t come across so strongly is a premise for the book itself, as the first issue basically falls back on the “they team up because they all happened to be passing” schtick.  Perhaps we’ll get something stronger next issue.  Balancing that, though, is McKeever’s gloriously named villains – a group claiming to be children of established Marvel villains, and billing themselves as the Bastards of Evil.  And these guys do seem to have something interesting in their agenda; they seem to be just nihilist wreckers, but the story goes out of its way to give the impression that there’s more to them.  That’s a good hook, and I’ll stick around to see where McKeever’s going with that.  Plus, they’re called the Bastards of Evil, and how can you not love a team called that?