It’s a podcast weekend, and the latest episode of House to Astonish will be up… ooh, any minute now, probably.  We recorded it earlier today.  This week, Al and I talk about Bulletproof Coffin, Hawkeye & Mockingbird and Justice League: Generation Lost.

Also this weekend, I have been wrestling with an HP Photosmart Premium C309g that stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the existence of my wifi network, or indeed any other ones.  This isn’t very interesting, I know, but it has taken up a disproportionate amount of my weekend, so I thought I’d share it with you anyway.

Avengers Prime #1 – Marvel seem to be slipping back into the habit of overexpanding their main franchises.  As if three ongoing titles wasn’t enough, this is a miniseries about the three “prime” Avengers – Iron Man, Thor and the original Captain America.  This one is set in the immediate aftermath of Siege, and I suppose it’s technically an epilogue.  It seems to be basically the story that completes the reconciliation between the three founders, in order to get things in place for the relaunch.  At one point, they’d have done this story as a bridge between Siege and the relaunch of Avengers, but instead it’s been hived off into a separate mini – one that’s shipping on an incredibly slow schedule, by the way.

Basically, our three heroes are helping out in the aftermath of the Siege when they get sucked through a stray portal and stranded in obscure parts of Asgard.  So they’re separated at first, and presumably they’ll end up teaming up and… well, you know the drill.  It’s quite good, actually.  Brian Bendis has seemed a bit uncomfortable writing the Asgardians’ dialogue before – it really doesn’t fit with his naturalist style – but he’s getting the hang of it now, perhaps because he seems willing to let Asgard be somewhere that isn’t particularly realistic at all.  Artist Alan Davis sounds like he ought to be a style clash with Bendis, but he turns out to fit quite well; he gives the story a sort of retro epic feel that balances out Bendis’ style, and he knows how to get the dramatic (and comic) timing right.  Better than I was expecting.

Bulletproof Coffin #1 – See the podcast, but this is a six-issue mini by David Hine and Shaky Kane.  The concept is hard to nail down, but basically, a guy discovers a bunch of Silver Age comics that shouldn’t exist, and which seem to be bleeding through into the real world.  It’s part EC pastiche, part David Lynch framing story, and all thoroughly odd.  Kane’s slightly awkward art isn’t exactly instant, but it builds a good atmosphere of nervy weirdness.  Really odd, and the cover seems almost perversely calculated to drive off casual readers, but well worth your time.

Franken-Castle #17 – The comic formerly known as Punisher.  I haven’t been buying this, but I’ve heard good things about it, and it’s about to do a two-month crossover with Dark Wolverine, so I thought I’d see what it’s up to.  As you may be aware, the Punisher was cut to pieces by Daken a few months ago, and has been resurrected by the Legion of Monsters as, well, Frankenstein.  It’s a gleefully ludicrous change of direction for the book, and naturally Rick Remender and Roland Boschi play it dead straight.  I mean, it’s completely ridiculous, but it’s completely ridiculous in a good way.  The art is fantastic, and there’s something quite endearing about the way the Punisher seems to be treating this as merely a mild inconvenience in his ongoing war against crime.  Obviously there’s a shelf-life on this story (and you’ll note that the Punisher’s looking very healthy in the house ads for Shadowland), but it’s surprisingly fun.

The Great Ten #8 – Originally a ten-issue miniseries, now cut to nine – so either there’s a swerve where one of the characters gets killed, or that “each issue focusses on a different team member” structure is a bit screwed.  It’s a shame that this book hasn’t done better, as Tony Bedard and Scott McDaniel, working within a fairly loose overall story, have basically been fleshing out the team into viable characters, many of whom have neat little origin stories of their own.  This issue, it’s Shaolin Robot, a martial arts robot who speaks in I-Ching hexagrams.  Obviously, as a character, he’s a bit elliptical – but Bedard uses him here as an excuse to do an entertaining short about a clockwork Terracotta Army, an endearingly crazy idea.  I just hope Bedard has some plan to bring this series in at nine issues without compromising the structure too much, because the standard has generally been kept up well.

Hawkeye & Mockingbird #1 – Again, see the podcast, but we liked this.  It’s not perfect, but its problems are largely a function of writer Jim McCann trying to work with the characters’ history, and running up against the fact that, for example, Hawkeye’s villains are a bit rubbish.  But there are big-picture reasons why you might want to cover this territory straight away.  I like McCann’s take on the characters; there’s a good central relationship between the two title characters, and Mockingbird’s defensiveness is being written well.  David and Alvaro Lopez’ art is good, dynamic stuff with a nice clean feel to it.  Oh, and Dominic Fortune’s in it, if you’re a fan.  Goodness, I’m in a positive mood this week.

I, Zombie #2 – I’m still not quite sure what I make of this.  It’s part a black comedy soap opera with “monster” characters who are quite normal really, and part a story about Gwen investigating the murder of the last guy whose brain she ate.  There’s a slightly stilted feel to the whole thing, but there are also some lovely ideas, like the vampire paintballing company.  I hate to say it, but I’m not quite sure Mike Allred is the right artist for this – maybe it’s just me, but while he’s an excellent artist, I find his style gives the story a slightly ironic sheen which it might be better without.  It’s okay, but I’m not gripped.

Sweet Tooth #10 –  Billed as an interlude in the “Captivity” storyline, this is the closest we’ve come yet to finding out where Gus actually came from.  Gus gets hypnotised by the scientist, and tells us all what he remembers about his early life.  This is a lovely series, and I think the reason it works is because, even though we don’t really know what’s going on, we certainly know a lot more than the heartbreakingly naive Gus, who is always one step behind even us, and is frequently doing the equivalent of standing in the path of an ongoing truck while the reader shouts “Move, you fool!”  But at the same time, Gus doesn’t come across as stupid, simply excusably ignorant and out of his depth.  It’s really hard to write a basically ineffective protagonist without the audience losing patience with them, but Jeff Lemire’s pulling it off wonderfully here.

Giant-Size X-Men Forever #1 – The only X-book this week!  This is a sort of transitional issue between the first and second years of Chris Claremont’s X-Men Forever.  It’s priced at four dollars, but that gets you 32 pages of original story, plus a reprint of X-Men #108.  That’s the first Claremont/Byrne issue and, by the way, the one  where Claremont first tries to explain what Phoenix is – with a load of blather about the Kaballah that suggests Grant Morrison’s take on the character isn’t so wide of the original premise.  Anyhow, the purpose of this story is to write out Charles Xavier, who gets hauled off to the Shi’ar Empire again.  I’m fine with getting rid of him – he’s a character who often seems to get in the way of telling stories, partly because he’s so impractically powerful – but this isn’t a particularly good story.  It’s another one where the Shi’ar Empire suddenly get it into their heads that they have to do something wholly unreasonable because the plot demands it.  It’s got art by Mike Grell, but the heavy inking isn’t particularly attractive.  On the other hand, it’s nice to see Claremont bringing in the early nineties X-Men whom he relegated to the background in the first year.  And I’m strangely looking forward to the next story, guest starring the early nineties Avengers – Spider-Woman, Thunderstrike, the albino Vision…

It’s not just Eurovision Song Contest posts this weekend – we have the weekly reviews too!  Am I not good to you?

Oh, and while I remember: next week’s podcast will probably be up on Sunday instead of Saturday.  But don’t worry, we’re not skipping another week.

Lots of X-books this week, but otherwise it’s a pretty quiet week (save for a couple of new launches at Marvel).  So…

Blind Science – Another one of those “Second Coming” tie-ins where Marvel can’t seem to make up their mind what the full title is (the indicia opts for X-Men: Blind Science), so I’ll just go with the short version.  This is an X-Club one-shot, and if you’re not following Uncanny, the current line-up is down to Madison Jefferies who used to be in Alpha Flight, public domain Golden Age hero Dr Nemesis, and Joss Whedon’s character Kavita Rao.  As with the Hellbound miniseries, this isn’t part of the central “Second Coming” storyline, so much as a separate story which springboards from the same events.  They could have run it as a subplot in “Second Coming” and it would have worked, but in the interests of decluttering the main story, it’s probably a smart move to hive it off like this.

The X-Club have been lured off to investigate a complete red herring, and find themselves transported to yet another dystopian alternate future where Bastion turns out to have been basically right.  Mutants have gone crazy, and only Kavita Rao can save the world by re-creating her “cure” for mutant powers from Astonishing X-Men.  Now, this is a pretty solid idea.  Kavita is one of many characters who’s been sucked into the X-Men’s ensemble cast and never seems to get much attention.  But in theory, at least, she’s supposed to be trying to atone for trying to “cure” the mutant race, so putting her in a situation where she ends up atoning by doing exactly the same thing has some nice ironic possibilities.

Writer Si Spurrier has a good handle on Rao.  The other two X-Club members aren’t really so important to the plot, but he uses them pretty well for snappy dialogue and comic relief.  Dr Nemesis is usually written as having better judgment than this, but hey, it’s not his story – and his Batman tendencies are one of the reasons why Rao normally gets overshadowed.  Paul Davidson and Francis Portela’s art is basically solid, though some of the scenes with weird energy creatures are a bit hard to follow on first reading.   I’m not completely convinced about the ending, which teeters on the brink of being a cop-out.  But on balance, I think it works, because it’s a story about Rao not falling into the trap of hearing what she wants to hear, and the ending fits with that.  Pretty good, all told.

Dark Wolverine #86 / Wolverine: Origins #48 – The concluding two parts of “Reckoning”.  There’s still two issues of Origins to go, but this seems to be the end of the Romulus plot – presumably, what remains is just epilogue.  And… well.  On the plus side, some of the stuff with Daken is quite good.  He doesn’t get to switch sides outright, but he does get to reject the idea of following in the footsteps of Romulus, even if only because he doesn’t want his life to be defined by fulfilling a role in somebody else’s conspiracy.  That’s fair enough, and in line with what they’ve been doing with Daken in his own title.  And the final page throws in an interesting idea with Wolverine trying to force Daken to go his own way by removing his claws – presumably to make absolutely sure that he can’t be a second-rate Wolverine any more.

So Daken’s part of the story isn’t fantastic, but it’s solid.  Romulus, on the other hand, remains as big a mess as ever.  As it turns out, Wolverine doesn’t want to expose him after all.  But what we actually get is a story where Cloak dumps Romulus into the Darkforce Dimension.  Granted, at least Daniel Way made a point of using Cloak in earlier stories to set that up.  But really, that’s it? He gets dumped in a prison dimension?  It begs the question of why Cloak didn’t do it earlier in the story.  But more to the point, it shows the weakness of Romulus as a concept.  Way is trying to do a story here where Wolverine comes to terms with his past – but when his past is embodied by a character as feebly conceived as Romulus, it’s just never going to work.

Dazzler #1 – Another of 2010’s “Women of Marvel” one-shots featuring female characters.  Surprisingly, this is also bannered as a “Necrosha-X” crossover.  Yes, you remember how Dazzler’s sister Mortis was used in that story, apparently as the result of a long night trawling through the Official Handbook for characters vaguely related to death, even though she never got to do anything much, and barely interacted with her sister?  Well, this issue is Jim McCann’s attempt to tie up those loose ends.  The “Necrosha” tie-in is… that Mortis is in it.  Mortis hires Arcade to kill Dazzler, and as you can probably imagine, that doesn’t go especially well for her.

McCann clearly loves Dazzler.  Aside from tying up the Mortis threads, he’s also trying to do a story where Dazzler deals with the detritus of her past continuity and asserts herself as a proper, viable character instead of just an anachronistic throwback.  The results are mixed.  The story seems to assume an awful lot of knowledge about Dazzler’s relationship with her family, which comes from comics published over a quarter of a century ago, and really needed to be properly explained in flashback.  And the story makes a bold but doomed attempt to convince us that the X-Men are reluctant to allow a comatose Mortis onto Utopia – even though the place is already swarming with asylum-seeking supervillains, and Mortis is surely too much of a D-lister to warrant an exception.

But on the other hand, McCann’s evident love of the character comes through, and she does come across as an interesting, rounded hero here.  It’s just that the story seems to involve resolving subplots about her family relationships from the backwaters of 1980 continuity.  Still, I wouldn’t mind seeing McCann do more with her.  I like his basic take on her.

Oh, and as for the art, it’s variable.  Kalman Andrasofszky and Ramon Perez, doing the bulk of the story, have a good sense of scale but are rough around the edges at times.  Francesca Ciregia’s work, on the epilogue, is an odd combination of minimalism and melodrama, which more or less works, but really makes Alison look like she needs a hairdresser urgently.

Not a particularly great story in its own right, but there’s something in here.

Secret Avengers #1 – The second Avengers title, by Ed Brubaker and Mike Deodato, is the “shadow ops” squad – although that’s a concept which sits a little uneasily with the inclusion of characters like Valkyrie, Beast and Nova.  But perhaps that’s the point, to do spy stories with superhero characters and play to some extent off the resulting incongruity.  I’m not altogether convinced that it works here?   Why on earth is Steve Rogers sending the Valkyrie on an undercover assignment?  And, having smashed through a window in full costume with his face exposed in full sight of a load of enemy soldiers, none of whom he kills or arrests, why does he think that “we’re getting away with no one knowing who we are”?  These are plot problems that trouble me.

The book might also benefit from explaining the back story.  The plot involves people chasing after an artefact connected to the Serpent Crown.  That’s fine; chasing after Marvel Universe macguffins is precisely the sort of thing this team should be doing.  It’s just that nobody pauses to explain what the Serpent Crown actually is, which is surely an important plot point (particularly as it has past associations with Roxxon, who also feature in this story).

But on the other hand, I like the idea of plugging these characters into a slightly different genre, and I like some of the odder choices of characters.  It’s good to see they’re still using Ant-Man (and I trust Ed Brubaker not to let him degenerate into just a generic character seeking redemption for his criminal past).  Beast is an interesting choice precisely because he doesn’t seem to fit in here at all.  And the closing twist is nicely executed.  Mike Deodato’s art is also well suited for this sort of superhero/spy hybrid.  A few glitches, but plenty of potential here.

Thunderbolts #144 – The first issue of the book’s new direction, with Luke Cage assembling a squad of imprisoned supervillains trying to earn their way out of jail.  It’s the Suicide Squad, in other words, but that’s pretty much in keeping with the premise of the series, and it’s nice to see some of the older characters being brought back into the cast.  Again, some of the new cast members are downright odd choices – you’d have to be very trusting to let the Juggernaut out on missions, for example – but Jeff Parker does a persuasive job of explaining, at least, why somebody might have thought these people were good candidates.  Granted, that takes a lot of explaining, and it’s only really in the last couple of pages that the story gets properly underway.  But it does introduce a potentially interesting team, and follow it up with a strong cliffhanger, so that’s a good first issue for the new direction in my book.

Wolverine: Weapon X #13 – Yes, three Wolverine comics in a single week – it’s another triumph for Marvel’s schedulers.  Much as I like Jason Aaron’s take on Wolverine, I’m starting to wonder about this story, which is so packed with guest stars that it’s turning into Avengers vs Terminator.  It’s a good enough Avengers story, and Aaron writes his guest stars quite well – though his version of the new Captain America has a rather odd passive-aggressive streak.  It just doesn’t feel like a Wolverine story.  Come to think of it, the same can be said of Aaron’s Dark Reign: The List – Wolverine one-shot, which turns out to be connected to the plot here.  It’s enjoyable enough as a superhero action story, I just don’t quite get why it’s appearing in a Wolverine solo title.

X-Force #27 – Part 9 of “Second Coming” opens in curious style with the X-Men fighting the invading Nimrods over the course of nine (nearly ten) silent pages.  It’s an odd device, and actually does lend the scene an air of being more significant than Just Another Fight Scene.  But it isn’t entirely successful; thanks to the usual variations in artistic style, and the lack of a familiar costume, a scene where I’m clearly meant to think “Oh no, they maimed so-and-so!” actually prompted the reaction “Who’s that meant to be?”  I mean, I do like Mike Choi and Sonia Oback’s art, but I really needed some dialogue there to identify the character.

Other than that… well, “Second Coming” is still basically an action story that continues to ratchet up the scale.  But on a weekly schedule, I think it’s working.  For all the running around and hitting things, there are two big ideas they’re trying to get across.  First, Hope’s return from the far future has improved matters in no way whatsoever and is causing all manner of chaos and destruction – so maybe Bishop was right.  And second, the X-Men are getting neatly boxed into a corner issue by issue, building a “last stand” feel.  Those two ideas are coming across pretty strongly, and that’s why I think the story is still basically working.  And it’s been put together better than a lot of recent X-Men stories – for example, they’ve laid the groundwork for Cable’s one last time-jump quite well in the past couple of issues, but they’ve done so by raising the possibility in a completely different context.  If nothing else, it gives the impression that it’s all building to something important.

X-Men Origins: Emma Frost – I really have no idea any more what the official line is on the continuity status of these one-shots.  Valerie d’Orazio’s story, for example, seems to be following the general ideas of the shortlived Emma Frost series rather than the details; but at the same time, the story ends by leading in to a specific scene from Uncanny #131.  As an origin story, it goes up only as far as her villain phase.  Perhaps inevitably, that makes it slightly unsatisfying, since we know the character long since moved on to something else.  To be fair, the story tries to lay the groundwork for that, by playing up the idea that Emma was always genuinely keen on teaching, and giving her a conflicted attitude to her authoritarian father (whose approach to life, by the end of the story, she ends up embracing).  Ultimately, though, as with many of the Origins one-shots that have to impose some sort of narrative structure on fragmented flashback material, it has a few interesting ideas about the character but isn’t really able to make them into a satisfying standalone story.

At last, I am up to date with my deliveries!  And with two especially heavy weeks behind us, there’s an enormous pile of books awaiting my comments.  So, we’re going to catch up with the X-books and the major new releases.  Believe me, it’s going to take us long enough.

First things first, though – if you look down a couple of posts, you’ll find this week’s podcast.  Download, listen, you know the drill.

Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis #1 – The second book from Marvel’s new Astonishing imprint, which seems to be intended for stories that are more or less self-contained, or at least semi-detached from the rest of continuity.  This story is by Warren Ellis and Kaare Andrews, and essentially it’s a rebranding of Ellis’s Astonishing X-Men.  Except that Ellis’ much-delayed Astonishing X-Men arc is some months away from finishing… so effectively, Marvel are following DC’s lead here by shrugging their shoulders and moving on to the next arc anyway.  Mind you, considering that the book is already lagging some way behind X-Men continuity (it’s set before the “Utopia” crossover), you can understand why they want to get it out there.

Basic premise: there’s a small town in Africa where kids are being born with weird powers.  Obviously this is of interest to the X-Men, since these people sound suspiciously like mutants (though for some reason the story goes out of its way to debunk that idea fairly early on, on grounds that don’t really hold up).  So it’s off to Africa we go.  And… um, that’s basically the synopsis of issue #1.  This is certainly a book with a relaxed pace, featuring as it does a double-page spread of an uneventful village, a full-page establishing shot of the X-Men’s headquarters, a full page without dialogue devoted to the X-Men putting on their clothes, and another splash page of some nice wildlife.  Mind you, at least this means artist Kaare Andrews has plenty of space to do his thing – though it has to be said that, even allowing for tongue being firmly in cheek, his petulant Emma Frost kind of misses the point of the character.

On the plus side, it’s nice to look at and at least it’s trying to use a setting that we don’t see much of in superhero comics.  But it’s decidedly slow and talky.

Atlas #1 – Jeff Parker’s Agents of Atlas has always struggled to convert its online fanbase into sales.  So there must have been a temptation to throw in something populist with this latest relaunch.  But thankfully, Atlas sticks to its guns, devoting an issue to introducing the 3D Man to its cast.  Admittedly, he got a major role in Avengers: The Initiative of late, but he’s still the 3D Man.  The main story sees him investigating a mystery that obviously has Atlas connections, while the regular cast remain very much in the shadows – a nice way of playing up their gimmick as a team who keep themselves hidden away.  But there’s also a back-up strip explaining some of the story from the regulars’ point of view, so the title characters do at least appear.  Gabriel Hardman’s an interesting choice of artist – you’d think that Atlas might go for somebody self-consciously retro, but instead they’ve opted for a solid and atmospheric storyteller.  Smart move; Atlas works because it plays its cast of 50s obscurities straight, rather than being self-consciously jokey about them, and makes them quirky outsiders instead of just a nostalgia act.  I doubt this story will change anyone’s mind about the series, but hopefully the relaunch will at least encourage a few more people to try it.

Avengers #1 – See the podcast for plenty on this.  Brian Bendis and John Romita Jr unveil the new core Avengers team, which is more or less the roster from early issues of New Avengers with a couple of swaps.  Which is fine by me.  It’s a Kang story, and what that means is that Kang shows up halfway through the issue to tell us that a bad thing will happen, albeit in a temporally confusing fashion.  Bendis is really more of a character writer than a plot man, and there are other books that would he’d be better suited to.  The frustrating thing about his stories is that he usually has solid ideas but they’re often unnecessarily undermined by ropey plotting.  If you didn’t like his earlier Avengers stories, well, there’s no real reason to think this will be any different.  I do like the basic idea, and I like the art; there’s some decent character work with the main players, as you’d expect.  But something tells me Bendis is also the sort of writer whose tendency to gloss over tedious plot mechanics will make for painful time-travel stories.  It’s a decent enough debut issue, but there’s nothing really to suggest that this series will steer clear of the problems that tend to plague Bendis when he’s writing this sort of thing.

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #1 – God, this really doesn’t interest me at all.  This must be what the X-books look like to normal people.  Having enjoyed the early issues of Batman & Robin, I’m now starting to be reminded of why I dropped Grant Morrison’s Batman run in the first place.  Bruce Wayne isn’t dead, he’s just stranded in the past.  From the look of this, it’s going to be Bruce coming through time and (presumably) fighting Vandal Savage in each era.  Which is fine, I suppose, except that I don’t really care about Vandal Savage and a bunch of cavemen hitting each other kind of leaves me cold.  It’s got art by Chris Sprouse, so it looks the part, and it certainly gets its idea across well enough… I just have the sinking feeling that I’m not very interested.

Birds of Prey #1 – Yes, yes, I know, I always whine when DC revive an old property just for the hell of it.  But I’m playing my Hypocrite Card for this one, because it’s Birds of Prey by Gail Simone and… well, okay, Gail Simone and Ed Benes, whose art was never my favourite feature of the book first time round.  Actually, though, it’s fine here, and relatively light on the eye-rollingly glaring cheesecake stuff that used to interrupt the story from time to time.  Oracle get her old crew back together to deal with a baddie who specifically demands it, and the reunion scene is nicely played in a way that tells us it’s kind of a big deal for the characters without going over the top.  And just to stop you thinking this is going to be a complete retread of the original series, it’s also got Hawk and Dove (hence the Brightest Day crossover tag, as Hawk is one of the characters revived for that storyline – there’s no sign of any other plot tie-in, though).  Once you get past the bird theme, Hawk is of course a singularly unsuitable member of the Birds of Prey, which is precisely why I’m looking forward to seeing Simone write him.

Booster Gold #32 – Along similar lines, Keith Giffen and J M DeMatteis are reunited as co-writers on Booster Gold, who was one of the main comedy figures in their legendary Justice League International run.   It’s not branded on the cover, but to judge from the last page, this is going to tie in with the Justice League: Generation Lost series (also co-written by Giffen).  This first issue basically sees Giffen and DeMatteis picking up the status quo that they inherited from Dan Jurgens – Booster as a deliberately obscure time-travelling hero who goes around sorting out the timeline – and superimposing their style on it.  If you’ve read the earlier stories then you know the schtick, and it’s basically along the familiar lines, but it’s still an amusing read, complete with a supervillain who’s just a little too keen to hammer home her “obsessed with a giant eyeball” routine.  Artist Chris Batista turns out to be a fairly good match for them – it’s bright, happy stuff, maybe more comfortable with the action than the comedy, but still fitting the material.

Dark Avengers #16 – The final issue of the series is basically a Siege epilogue and it’s actually quite satisfying.  Norman Osborn has been defeated, so all that remains is to put an end to his ersatz Avengers – um, except for Daken, who has his own book and has to escape.  With him out of the way, though, this issue makes an effective job of providing a sense of resolution.  One of the things I like about the wrap-up of Siege is that there’s no attempt to segue into the next story – the bad guys are defeated, the good guys won, and that’s an end of it.  I’m not sure Bendis ever quite reached the full potential of his take on Norman Osborn – part sincere hawk, part maniac – but the closing scene with him in jail is lovely.

Frenemy of the State #1 – There being a big pile of these still to go, I’ll refer you to the podcast for proper discussion.  This is Oni’s new ongoing series about, well, a sort of society heiress who’s secretly a spy.  It’s a bit light on rounded characters, but the idea has some potential.

Justice League: Generation Lost #1 – DC’s other biweekly series, written by Keith Giffen and Judd Winick with art by Giffen and Aaron Lopresti, seems like it might be a better read than Brightest Day is turning out to be.  Maxwell Lord is back from the dead, and he has a plan to use his mind-control powers to set the world to rights.  (Which is his scene from Brightest Day #0 – this issue explains what he was after.)  Maxwell Lord is terribly, terribly dangerous, and so all the heroes are desperate to stop him… until everything ends up falling on the second-tier heroes from Justice League International.  This isn’t a semi-comedy book, but it does seem to be making an attempt to rehabilitate Lord as somebody who started off well-intentioned, and I really quite liked the closing twist.  Might stick with this one for a bit.

New Mutants #13 – Chapter 7 of “Second Coming” and, uh, let’s see, what happened in this one again?  Let’s see… plot point, plot point, token scene with the title characters, subplot setting up the X-Club’s tie-in one-shot…  Ah, here’s a rather good scene with Dani and Hope, where Zeb Wells does probably the best job yet of showing us that the X-Men’s extended cast resent the amount of effort that the X-Men are putting into protecting this allegedly vital character.  Yup, liked that bit.  Other than that, it’s one of those crossover stories that has a lot of plot to chew through, and ends up leaving the New Mutants themselves with nothing much to contribute.

Wolverine #900 – The mind boggles, doesn’t it?  A Wolverine #900 one-shot?  Are there really people in Marvel so dumb that they didn’t understand that Deadpool #900 was a joke?  This isn’t a comedy issue at all, in any way shape or form – it’s an anthology of Wolverine shorts, titled by somebody who has heard of humour but never really seen it in action.  It opens with a vignette that’s really little more than an opportunity for David Finch to draw Wolverine (and hey, if you want a few pages of David Finch drawing Wolverine, here they are).  Dean Motter and Greg Scott contribute an atmospheric noir piece, incongruously drawing on the plot of Jason Aaron’s tongue-in-cheek Wolverine: Manifest Destiny miniseries.  It’s not bad at all.  Todd DeZago and Jason Craig’s “Desperate Measures” is a 90s throwback dusting off Marrow, of all people, in order to make a point about the body as a weapon.  Sound idea, art’s a bit rough.  Marc Bernardin and Pow Rodrix’s “One Night Only” is competent anthology-fodder (it’s one of those “character X does this every year even though you’ll never hear it mentioned again” things), while Matt Yocum and Jake Bilbao do a decent strip with Wolverine helping a Delightful Little Girl through the power of violence.  Oh, and there’s a couple of reprints to round off the package – one is the disappointing back-up strip from Wolverine #50 (presumably because it’s by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness, which might interest a few people), but the other is a rather good Spider-Man/Wolverine story by Zeb Wells and Paolo Rivera which probably passed largely unnoticed on its original appearance in Amazing Spider-Man Extra #2, and which genuinely merits another printing.  On the whole, not bad as these anthologies go.

X-Factor #205 – You’ll be shocked to learn that the entire cast are not, in fact, dead.  This is the second part of the “Second Coming” tie-in arc, which interrupted a bunch of storylines in progress.  Peter David makes a reasonable job of turning that to his advantage – so, for example, poor Baron Mordo’s evil scheme was coming along nicely until the anti-mutant maniacs showed up to start shooting everything.  Mind you, it’s still an attempt to accommodate an unnecessary crossover, and one which feels more like a belated hangover from the original Bastion crossover, “Operation: Zero Tolerance”, than anything much to do with “Second Coming”.  It’s not a story that the book really needed, but if you’re going to do this sort of tie-in, at least Peter David and Valentine de Landro are making something of it.

X-Factor Forever #3 – In this issue: fighting!  And exposition!  At the same time!  Yes, it’s authentically late-80s.  If I’m being honest, there’s an element here of a relatively thin plot not advancing all that much, but being fleshed out with fight scenes.  But against my better judgment, I don’t really mind – I liked Louise Simonson’s run on X-Factor, and on a more contemporary level, I’m enjoying Dan Panosian’s energetic, angular artwork.  I can’t honestly say I’d recommend it to people who don’t have affection for the original series, but that’s hardly a major problem for a book which is unashamedly going for the nostalgia market.

X-Men Forever #23-24 – And that wraps up the first year of Chris Claremont’s X-Men Forever. I’ll try to find time to do a full review of the closing arc, but basically this is the pay-off for the Consortium arc, which climaxes in yet more plot twists that Claremont would never have been allowed to do in the regular Marvel Universe.  But that’s fine by me; while X-Men Forever long since diverged from the notional idea of “what Chris Claremont would have written if he hadn’t left in 1991”, it is delivering a series where Claremont doesn’t have to worry about accommodating anyone else’s stories and can cheerfully do his own thing.  And that gives the book a genuine feeling of enthusiasm which overcomes a lot of sins.   It’s not an all-time great story, but it’s told with commitment.  Issue #24 is a funeral story serving an epilogue for the season, and it’s fine as one of those pause-to-reflect issues that a superhero book needs every so often.

X-Men Legacy #236 – “Second Coming” part 8.  Bastion puts a big red globe over San Francisco and traps the X-Men inside.  Along with the population of San Francisco.  But hey, you can’t make an omelette and so forth.  It’s a bouncy little superhero story, but the art’s very much hit and miss.  As so often, Greg Land veers between genuinely effective splash pages and faces that seem to have been pasted in from random sources with awkward expressions.  Colourist Justin Ponsor makes it all pleasantly bright and shiny, though.

X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back #4 – I’ll come back to this miniseries in a later post.  I’m not quite sure what I think of this one, to be honest.  It’s certainly different, and it makes quite good use of the teenage characters.  But I’m not sold on the overhaul of Pixie herself.  Okay, they’ve already linked her to Limbo, so I can see the logic in giving her some other magical connections… but the Mastermind stuff seems a bit unnecessary.  Still, a visually interesting mini with its own voice that actually had a story to tell about its title character, and that’s always a good thing.

Zatanna #1 – And once again, see the podcast.  Zatanna, a retro stage magician who’s also a real sorceress, is a minor-league DC characters who I’ve always quite liked, but giving her an ongoing series seems a bit optimistic in the current climate.  Still, she’s got something different, and Paul Dini and Stephane Roux do a good job here setting up the premise.  It’s not so much that the plot is out of the ordinary.  It’s more that Dini throws random magical elements into the real world to give the murder scenes a darkly absurd quality, and that’s where the book gets to be distinctive.