Welcome to another Sunday evening round-up of the week’s comics.  Of course, the big news in comics this week is apparently that DC has given some people new job descriptions, but we’ll leave that for the podcast.  Just two X-books this week – Uncanny X-Men and the final issue of the Psylocke miniseries.  Why, it’s almost within reason.  Don’t worry, though, because it’ll be back to normal next week, with a thoroughly excessive quantity.  Meanwhile…

Battlefields: Happy Valley #3 – The concluding part of Garth Ennis and PJ Holden’s story about an Australian air crew in World War II.  The basic plot is pretty obvious – the crew are on their last mission before completing their tour of duty, except for the new, idealistic, wide-eyed pilot, and you can probably figure out from that where this is heading.  The big set piece, unfortunately, isn’t conveyed as clearly as it might have been, and the plot is fairly predictable.  But Ennis raises his game with the coda, where any sense of heroism is undercut as the story ends up going unrecognised by an impersonal wartime bureaucracy.

Black Widow: Deadly Origin #4 – Paul Cornell wraps up this rather ornate miniseries.  The title might lead you to expect a re-telling of the Black Widow’s back story – which would make sense, since Marvel will presumably want some sort of introduction to the character on the shelves in time for the upcoming Iron Man movie.  But rather than explaining her history, Cornell seems moe interested in deconstructing the various scattered interpretations of the character over the decades, and seems to take a working knowledge of her background for granted.  The common thread ends up being a rather hazy idea about Natasha escaping the shadow of her occasional supporting character Ivan, and a claim that her recent actions have been driven by a common theme of, um, doing good.   It’s all terribly confused and convoluted, and Ivan’s actions seem terribly contrived.  More to the point, it never really manages to get across a coherent vision of the character, which seems to have been the aim.  This seems to be more a case of overambition, with the story struggling to digest and present a horde of scattered continuity references, but it never comes together.

Chase Variant One Shot (Is All I Need)  – Rich Johnston writes a one-shot for Image, with various artists contributing.  The high concept is that Chase Variant thinks she’s a genetically engineered assassin who was different from the rest of the batch.  In fact, she’s a character in a trading card game, which is why her life consists of seemingly random fighting.  So the “story” is accompanied by the card-playing running along the bottom of every page.   It’s a clever conceit, but it’s a single joke which, by its nature, resists being turned into a story – the very plotlessness and defiance of narrative logic being sort of the point.  These three stories seem to have started life as contributions to an anthology, and they’d probably have worked better in that format, where the concept wouldn’t have had to carry a whole issue on its own.  It’s weirdly amusing, though.

Dark Avengers #14 – Okay, seriously, in what sense is this a Siege tie-in?  It’s a flashback story taking place before Siege, in which the Sentry goes nuts again and Norman Osborn has to talk him down.  And it’s well enough written, but how is this any more of a Siege tie-in than any other Sentry story published in the last two years?  Victoria Hand gets a nice scene at the beginning, Moonstone gets a truly dreadful one later on, and overall it’s okay if you don’t mind the pop psychology of Sentry stories… but so far, there’s no discernible link between any of this and the crossover which it claims to be part of.

Devil #1 – Manga creator Torajiro Kishi does an original four-issue miniseries for Dark Horse, intended for the American format.  It’s basically a vampire story, although it’s the modern version where there’s a disease going round which turns people into “bloodsucking superhumans.”  Takimoto is a police officer who goes around killing the resulting “devils”, while Migiwa is the liberal one who wants to treat it as a public health issue.  From the look of it, she will be learning an important lesson about life: some vampires just need shooting.    The art’s great, and the glowing white “devils” are a lovely visual.  The story is quite familiar, though, and the mismatched partners are distinctly off-the-peg.  It also chews up pages on action sequences, but the art’s good enough that I can let that slide.  Interesting, and it certainly looks good, yet the story doesn’t really hook me.

Joe the Barbarian #2 – Okay, then.  Joe is having a diabetes-related hallucination, and the idea is that he sees himself on some sort of fantasy quest while trying to get downstairs.  The way that the story throws in moments of lucidity gives the whole thing a nicely trippy quality.  The star of the show, once again, is Sean Murphy’s art, which builds a beautiful fantasy world from a mixture of common genre tropes and incongruous elements from Joe’s room.  It’s basically the idea of presenting an everyday challenge as an epic quest, quite literally so.  The concept isn’t entirely original, but the execution is brilliant.

Psylocke #4 – Chris Yost clearly understood the need to refocus and redefine Psylocke, a character who’s become hopelessly confused over the years, and so I was hoping that this miniseries would achieve some much-needed remedial work.  In the end, the series never quite gets that far.  Picking up on a long-forgotten Wolverine subplot from the last decade, Psylocke finds out that the guy she’s trying to kill is actually being kept alive so that Wolverine can torment him.  So she ends up killing Matsu’o in order to release him, rather than to take revenge on him.  And that’s fine – she achieves what she set out to do, but in a way that theoretically gives her some closure and symbolically puts that chapter of her life behind her.  The thing is, having done so, she doesn’t seem to be moving on to anywhere in particular, and that’s the missing element that stops it from quite completing the job.  That said, it does set the character on the right track, and if Uncanny chooses to pick up on this material, it may prove to have done her good.  As for the art, it’s decidedly patchy – sometimes it’s fine, if a bit nineties, but sometimes everything’s over-rendered to the point of ugliness, and many of the action sequences are just plain confusing.

Uncanny X-Men #521 – Magneto goes up a hill to meditate, while some of the X-Men team up with Fantomex to beat up baddies.  Oh, and it looks like Kitty Pryde is coming back.  Greg Land’s artwork has certainly been made more palatable by toning down the overly polished and airbrushed feel and making it a bit rougher around the edges.  The problem here lies with the villains.  Their schtick seems to be that they want to copy mutant powers and make them available to everyone.  This idea of democratising superpowers is a reasonably interesting one.  Fraction did something vaguely similar in the opening issues of Invincible Iron Man, and here he’s basically recasting Grant Morrison’s cultish U-Men as a supervillain team.  But they’re a supervillain team without much in the way of personality or presence – the leaders a rather bland smartass, and the rest are pretty much a blank.  There’s a decent idea here, and I’m all for Fraction doing more stories along this theme, but these guys just need a bit more charisma.

It’s a podcast weekend, so be sure to check one post down for the latest House to Astonish, which includes reviews of Pixie Strikes Back #1 (on which, more below), Human Target #1 and The Muppet Show#1.   But without further ado…

Amazing Spider-Man #620 – Notionally part of “The Gauntlet”, this is actually the concluding part of a Mysterio story by Dan Slott and Marcos Martin.  (Those “Gauntlet” tags really don’t seem to signify anything beyond the inclusion of a classic villain.)  I really liked the set-up for this story, with Mysterio inveigling his way into control of a Maggia family by simulating the return of the boss.  And there’s a rather good set piece in this issue with Spider-Man fighting baddies while holding his breath.  But the climax does turn out to be basically a big fight, which is a little disappointing, and I’m also not sure about the wisdom of demystifying Mysterio in the way that the issue does at the end.  All that said, it’s still a solid piece of writing, and the art from Martin (and colourist Javier Rodriguez) is truly excellent.  Visually, this is some of the best work being done in the superhero genre right now, and worth getting for that alone.

Batman & Robin #8 – As with the previous issue, this is a truly odd mix.  On the one hand, it’s a story with a major plot point about the body of Bruce Wayne.  On the other, it’s a tongue-in-cheek affair with Cockney and Geordie gimmick villains in a mock-Silver Age style.  Obviously Grant Morrison thinks that they blend just fine, and to be fair, it’s not as if anyone seriously thought that there wouldn’t be a plot about Bruce Wayne’s body at some point.  Still, it comes across as self-parodying rather than dramatic, and I’m not sure that was the idea.  It’s not that I have a problem with stories that I can’t take seriously – it’s that this issue has stuff which you’d have thought the creators would want me to take seriously, and that’s where it kind of loses me.

Dark X-Men #4 – The penultimate issue of Paul Cornell and Leonard Kirk’s increasingly thinly disguised Nate Grey relaunch.  And if you’d told me a few months ago that Paul Cornell would persuade me that I actually wanted to read a Nate Grey comic, I would have been sceptical.  To be fair, his version of Nate Grey doesn’t bear an enormous resemblance to the original, beyond the powers – he’s drawing more on the shortlived “mutant shaman” stuff from the very tail end of the series.  But even on that standard, this version of Nate is generally rather more likeable and rather more effective; an issue of him and Norman Osborn trying to outwit one another comes across pretty well.  Considering Norman’s chronic overexposure right now, I’m surprised at how effectively this is working.  As for the Dark X-Men, well, they’re rather getting marginalised in their own series at this point, but they’re still well-defined characters when they’re on the page.  So far, a better series than the premise might suggest.

Daytripper #3 – Curses, I seem to have missed issue #2 somewhere along the line.  I’ll have to order it up.  This is Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba’s series where each issue visits the lead character at a different point in his life.  I vaguely remember reading somewhere that each issue was supposed to be a specific day, although maybe I just got that from the title.  Regardless, this issue is a bit more flexible about its time frame.  Recently dumped after a seven-year relationship, Bras drifts around wondering how he’s going to start over, all of which builds to a brilliantly executed “seize the moment” sequence that wrongfoots the reader perfectly.  So far, a very impressive piece of work.

New Mutants #10 – Well, as promised, this issue does kind-of-sort-of reveal why Cyclops is keeping the New Mutants together as a team.  Now, the problem with this book is that so far it doesn’t really seem to be about anything in particular, other than reviving a 1980s comic for the sake of doing so.  Ten issues in, we finally get something more than that, but it’s not exactly a grand central theme.  Putting it very broadly, Wells is trying to re-connect to the idea that the New Mutants are the next generation of X-Men, but instead of being the trainee squad, this time they’re going to be groomed as the next generation of leaders.  This makes reasonable sense, and it’s fine as far as it goes, but I’m not sure it’s really a strong enough idea to build a series around.  But having said that, if you’re not too bothered about the lack of a big central theme, then this issue does have some nice character moments, and generally decent art.  It’s trying to make use of the broader X-books continuity to give itself a context.  And it’s got a thoroughly obscure villain from the late 1980s, which is always nice.  What’s here is perfectly good, it’s just missing a strong hook to make it a great story.

Phonogram: The Singles Club #7 – The final issue of the series is Kid With Knife’s story, and, well, he doesn’t intellectualise things.  Most of this is dialogue-free, as KWK gets high on listening to TV On The Radio, and then goes out on the town.  Really excellent work, this – rather than trying to explain the effect of music, it just shows it, dispensing with the dialogue because this isn’t an issue for smart one-liners.  And it goes without saying that McKelvie is able to carry off a silent issue admirably.  As for the back-up strips… well, more hit and miss than usual, to be honest.  But the Vikings are good.

S.W.O.R.D. #4 – Kieron Gillen’s other book of the week reaches its penultimate issue, as Abigail Brand sorts out some very confused alien invaders, and naturally Henry Gyrich screws everything up.  It’s a shame that this series hasn’t sold better (though a de facto Abigail Brand solo title was always going to be a tough sell), but at least it’s looking set to deliver a nice satisfying wrap-up with the next issue.   And it’s fun.  And it’s got stupid rocks in it.  That’ s enough to entertain me.

Uncanny X-Men: First Class #8 – Final issue of the miniseries, and it looks like the concept is being put to bed for a while after this – though I’m sure it’ll be back when the movie comes out.  The series has just completed a multiparter, but for some reason it’s rounding off by tacking on a single-issue Banshee story.  And of all the things to focus on, Scott Gray has decided to do a story about the leprechauns of Cassidy Keep.  Now, those leprechauns did indeed appear in a late-70s X-Men story… and yes, I suppose technically there is a gap in there to tell a story about how the leprechauns lived when their castle wasn’t being invaded by supervillains (which is effectively what this issue is doing, under the guise of a murder mystery).  It’s competently written, and the art’s quite decent.  But come on.  They’re the leprechauns of Cassidy Keep.  Does anyone really want to read a whole issue about them?

Unwritten #10 – Mike Carey and Peter Gross begin a new arc, “Jud Suss”.  It goes without saying that this series, about fictional characters crossing over into the real world, is largely interested in the power of fiction to influence reality.  The topic of propaganda has been touched on in an earlier issue about Rudyard Kipling, but here the book goes straight to the heart of the matter with the titular film, a Nazi-sponsored film version of a Lion Feuchtwanger novel which was, shall we, not altogether faithful to the source material.  There’s always a risk in using the Nazis, never exactly the most nuanced way of making a point, but Unwritten is the sort of genuinely cerebral series that can certainly avoid any impression of seeming gratuitous.  I’m still slightly unsure whether this was the best example Carey could have chosen, but I’ll see where he’s going with it.

X-Men Forever #17 – Now, I liked last issue’s cliffhanger, but I’m not so sure about this issue’s follow-up.  It seems to take the better part of an isue just to make the point that Something’s Gone Wrong Here, which was surely implicit in the previous issue’s cliffhanger.  I don’t think we really needed an extended “rescue people from a burning building” sequence to hammer it home further, and if anything, having Kurt still scaling walls without his powers just confuses it.  Unfortunately, I feel a bit like I’ve spent 22 pages watching Claremont undermining the effectiveness of the previous issue.

X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back #1 – Kathryn Immonen and Sara Pichelli, formerly of Runaways, are reunited on this Pixie miniseries.  Pixie’s one of those generic X-students who started off as a background character in New X-Men and has slowly ended up getting more and more screen time.  I’m still not quite sure she’s got the fanbase to justify a solo miniseries, but she’s a likeable enough character and serves the “girl next door” role plausibly enough.  The plot: Pixie, Blindfold, X-23, Armor and Mercury are inexplicably all normal schoolgirls in a normal school, and obviously that’s not right.  Cue weirdness, and what looks like an attempt to complicate Pixie’s back story.  The plot gimmick is nothing new, but it’s done well, and the art is gorgeous.  Most importantly, though, it’s an X-Men spin-off mini that feels like it has its own voice (or at least, like its creators do).  It’s different, and that stops it feeling like just another schedule-filler.

It’s a quiet week for the X-books, for a change.  Just the three of them – Cable, Wolverine: Weapon X and one of those inexplicable Wolverine one-shots that keeps on coming for some reason.  (And seriously, what’s the deal with those things?  How many Wolverine fill-ins could anyone actually want in their collection?)  Fortunately, there’s a fair amount of other stuff out too, so…

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Eight #32 – This is the first part of “Twilight”, the storyline where we find out who the eponymous villain actually is.  Or at least, that’s the theory.  This is clearly meant to be a major storyline for the series, and they’ve brought in a big name writer accordingly, in Brad Meltzer.  A weirder aspect is Dark Horse’s promotional campaign, which has already given away the ending – something that would have been a major surprise for a number of reasons.  I suppose the idea was that lapsed readers would go out and buy the arc to find out how said revelation could possibly work.  Anyway, after the last arc, Buffy has got full-blown superpowers, and Twilight is her arch-enemy in a supervillain mask.  The Buffy cast being basically geeks, much of this first issue is given over to them testing her powers against Superman cliches, which is actually quite funny.  More generally, I’m not entirely sold on the direction here.  It certainly looks as if we’re going to get some sort of riff on superhero cliches, but I don’t quite see why that fits in this particular series.  I admit that I’m curious to see where all this can be heading, but I suspect that’s more to do with the spoilers than with in this issue (which, by the way, still hasn’t actually reached the big revelation).  As an issue in its own right, it’s fine – Meltzer has the voices of the characters down, and there’s a cute Kitty Pryde gag – but the “comic book” stuff can’t help but feel a little out of place and forced.

Cable #23 – Well, we’re in the home straight now.  Just two issues to go before Cable and Hope get back to the present and the book ends.  The set-up of this arc is that they’ve finally got hold of a time machine that can go backwards, but it’s a bit erratic and they’re bouncing back and forth either side of the present as they try and zero in on it.  So we get scenes of them in the increasing recent past, interspersed with scenes in the decreasingly distant future as they make their way back through the last two years of stories, culminating this issue with a coda to the first arc.  Structurally, it’s quite clever – while it’s been a bit of a slog to get to this point, I do like the way that the pace has picked up, and the past/future stuff gives the feel of a series collapsing in on itself.  And there’s a lovely scene based on the idea that Hope has literally no clue how to drive.  (“Straight?  What’s straight on this circle thing?”)  On the other hand, the New York of 2044 was a fairly generic dystopia the first time round, and that hasn’t really changed; that’s fine so long as it’s just a backdrop for Cable and Hope, but bringing back Sophie Pettit from the first arc doesn’t really have the weight it should.  The art’s a bit bland too, though it gets the point across, and there are some nicely atmospheric panels during the car chase.  Still, this arc has some momentum, which is the main thing that Cable has been missing over the last couple of years.

Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love #4 – Much as I love Shawn McManus’ art, and it’s excellent here, this series isn’t really clicking for me.  The basic gimmick – Cinderella as a Fabletown secret agent – kind of gets lost, because the character really doesn’t have that much in common with the fairytale Cinderella, or at least that all gets overshadowed by the James Bond riff.  Then we have a plot based on the harem members from the Arab fables spontaneously developing radical feminism after a brief trip to New York.  There’s an interesting idea in there somewhere; you could do something about cross-cultural influences and so forth.  But it’s played on such a simplistic level that it really falls flat; it comes across as one of those clumsy stories where everyone deep down really wants to be American and realises it when they set foot in Manhattan, and that doesn’t work.

Criminal: The Sinners #4 – Criminal is one of those books which is terribly difficult to review because it’s consistently excellent, but it’s consistently excellent in the same way that all the previous issues were consistently excellent.  And that makes it hard to find anything in particular to seize on in an individual issue, which in turn means that you end up giving the same list of the book’s good qualities every month – that it’s a superlative noir book told with great economy and style from two creators who know how to make every element count.

Doom Patrol #7 – Um… well, this is a story where a bunch of characters from previous incarnations of the Doom Patrol, some of them completely unrelated, show up in subplots, apparently because Keith Giffen is about to embark on some grand project to try and tie together all the versions of the Doom Patrol.  Which is fine if you’re a Doom Patrol continuity wonk, and, like I said last month, to some extent the team’s history is such a mess that it really needs a bit of explaining.  But actually trying to make that the centre of your book and lay claim to all the conflicting Doom Patrols as a single heritage is tricky; there’s a risk of trying to find a common thread that simply isn’t there, or complicating the premise unnecessarily.  It’s not like there was ever a grand plan behind the disparate versions of the Doom Patrol, beyond keeping a trademarked name alive, and this issue doesn’t really convince me that the subject offers fertile ground.  This issue also has the final Metal Men back-up strip, which seems to be racing to reach some sort of conclusion, and isn’t entirely satisfactory.  A sixteen-panel opening page is a bit of a giveaway, though in fairness they’re buying space for a couple of splash pages later on, and the creators are good enough to pull off this sort of highly condensed grid page.  It’s fine as a story in its own right, but it’s not a finale (and, to be honest, doesn’t really read like it was intended to be – why introduce a new supporting character now?).

Echo #19 – In this issue, guns.  Also, rainfall.  After the big infodump a couple of issues back, the series has returned its focus to the cast being hunted down by mad and dangerous people, and also by slightly less mad but still quite dangerous people.  But scenes like this show why Terry Moore is a cut above most storytellers; he has the subtlety of body language and pacing to make almost anything visually interesting, even if it’s just four silent panels of somebody drawing a gun and then walking into a convenience store.  It’s the mastery of detail that makes this sort of sequence feel like a good use of space; lesser artists can’t pull this stuff off.  And this is one of the reasons why I like Echo despite its admittedly rather daft conspiracy plot; it’s a monthly reminder of what can be done in an 18-page monthly thriller comic.

The Great Ten #4 – Tony Bedard and Scott McDaniel have set themselves a difficult task with the format for this series about the DC Universe’s official Chinese superheroes.  There’s an over-reaching storyline about China coming under attack from guys claiming to be Chinese gods, and the Great Ten being sent to stop them.  But each issue is also meant to be focussed on a seperate member of the team – some of them loyal party functionaries, some of them basically decent types trying to do their job and keep out of politics, a couple of potential dissidents.  Presumably the idea is that the series should give us a whole range of modern Chinese characters and (like its villains) explore the variety that exists below the Communist veneer.  But it also means that you get issues like this, where the Immortal Man-in-Darkness relates his origin story – or, really, just explains his gimmick – and then fires a few missiles at a baddie.  Mind you, it does look beautiful.

Siege #2 – There are all sorts of problems with this comic.  Norman Osborn is hopelessly undermotivated.  The plot point about him invading Asgard without authority seems to have been completely dropped, so apparently we’re meant to believe that everybody was too embarrassed to try and countermand his orders.  And while the Dark Avengers managed to take out Thor last issue, this time they are sorely vexed by Maria Hill, because this time the plot requires them to lose.  Actually, that pretty much sums up my problem with Brian Bendis’ plotting; he needs the plot to get from A to B, and that’s fine, but he tends to gloss over the internal logic needed to get there.  (For example, if the plot calls for Maria to rescue Thor from the Dark Avengers, at least have her outwit them or take advantage of their internal squabbling or something.  Don’t just have her charge them with a bazooka.) That said, though, this is something of a guilty pleasure.  The art’s great.  Writing Asgardians keeps Bendis away from his usual dialogue tics.  I’m glad that the story seems to be focussing on the (real) Avengers and Nick Fury rather than bringing in the entire Marvel Universe.  And the bit with Sentry and Ares is certainly unexpected, even if it’s one of the less successful moments art-wise, and even if I hope it doesn’t stick.  There are some really good moments in this book; I just wish the structure holding them together was a bit stronger.

Sweet Tooth #6 – Beginning a second storyline, as Gus settles in to his new “home”, and flashbacks finally fill us in on the background of Tommy Jeppard – a washed-up ice hockey player who finds himself cast in the role of antihero in Sweet Tooth‘s post-apocalypse because there’s literally nobody else left.  There’s a fairly obvious direction for this character to go in (especially since it’s a pretty safe bet that he has to be reunited with Gus at some point), but that’s fine; this book works on atmosphere and on having believable characters in extraordinary circumstances, not because it’s particularly unpredictable.  Jeff Lemire’s sketchy, slightly twisted artwork seems a little less at home in the pre-apocalypse flashback sequences, but it’s perfect for the main story with its battered and damaged characters.

Wolverine: Savage – This would be the random Wolverine one-shot I mentioned at the start.  Just in case anyone hasn’t figured out yet that these are essentially Generic Wolverine, the thoroughly generic cover should help to bring the point home.  It’s by J Scott Campbell, but in fairness to him, I’d guess this is probably what Marvel asked for.  The actual story is an all-ages piece by Ryan Dunlavey and Richard Elson, in which Wolverine fights giant monsters to help rescue a missing sushi chef.  Which is certainly different.  And actually, it makes a pleasant change for one of these stories to just be a tongue-in-cheek superhero piece, since most of them seem to go for noir.  Perhaps because it isn’t trying to hard to fit an established genre, this has a lot more individuality.  Elson does a rather hefty Wolverine, but there’s some nice detail in there, and a particularly nice fish-chopping sequence.  Colourist Veronica Gandini gives the book a nice, bright look too.  It’s still ultimately a Wolverine fill-in story, but anyone mourning the demise of Wolverine: First Class might enjoy this.

Wolverine: Weapon X #10 – A self-contained issue, as Wolverine tries to figure out whether Melita Garner is technically his girlfriend or not, and gets advice from the likes of Jubilee and Rogue on the issue.  It’s a fun story, simply because it gets to spend an issue having Wolverine try to dodge the topic.  I’m not so sold on CP Smith’s art.  This guy’s been around for a while, and his sickly colours and stylised panels are certainly inventive.  I’m just not altogether sure they add to the story.  His characters are rather stiff, and some of his tricksier panels are just distracting.  It’s most notable with the scene at Mariko’s memorial, which suddenly throws in a panel of Melita looking sultry in extreme mock-Warhol close-up, completely at odds with the rest of the scene and with her dialogue in that panel.  To be fair, a scene with Melita and Emma Frost meeting in a corridor at night is better (and it’s the only version of Utopia I’ve seen that actually makes it feel like something recently unearthed from the bottom of the ocean).  But I still find his art more intriguing than enjoyable.

It’s another of those weeks when Marvel flood the shelves with X-books.  There are no fewer than seven of them this week, which is surely excessive by any standards.  I really don’t understand why after all these years Marvel seem to find it so difficult to ship things on a sensible schedule.  But there you go.

Check out this week’s podcast, a couple of posts down, to hear Al and me discussing Joe the Barbarian, New Avengers and the Blackest Night issue of Starman.  But in the meantime, here’s a ton of X-books and a few other titles that I’ve got around to reading so far.

Batman & Robin #7 – Cameron Stewart takes over on art, as Batman comes to London looking for… well, that’s a plot twist in the final pages.  But Grant Morrison isn’t writing London at all, so much as an imagined Silver Age version of London full of localised gimmick villains – evil pearly kings at war with coal-themed baddies from the North and so forth.  It could easily be excruciating, but Morrison and Cameron Stewart are the sort of people who can carry this off, and make it feel like a sort of quirky extension of Silver Age logic.  That said, it’s still a bit of a jarring gear shift when we reach the final pages and it becomes apparent that this is actually important to Morrison’s wider storyline; there’s an awkward change of tone and a confusing segment with Batwoman that leaves me wondering whether this is a reference to some story I haven’t read, or an intentional piece of obscurity, or just a mess.  A fun read, but mainly on the strength of the first half before it starts trying to tell a story.

Chew #8 – Ah, nested prologues.  There’s nothing like a needlessly convoluted structure.  This is another clever issue with the usual mix of absurdity with genuine plot tension (and the obligatory dash of gross-out humour which isn’t allowed to overwhelm the story).  Now, that said… is it just me, or is it straining credibility that Chow made it all the way to the island without knowing about something that was (a) a major news story, and (b) directly relevant to the reason he was going there in the first place?  I know it’s Chew and it’s not exactly social realism, but it gets away with that sort of thing because it sticks to a coherent if warped internal logic.  So plot holes like that still cause me a bit of difficulty.  It’s a minor point, though; and how can you not like a comic with a story built around a chicken in a helmet?

Unknown: The Devil Made Flesh #4 – The conclusion of Mark Waid and Minck Oosterveer’s second miniseries about Catherine Allingham, the metaphysical detective trying to solve the mystery of what happens when we die.  Presumably some of you will be getting the trade, so I won’t spoil the premise of this series (revealed in issue #3).  Suffice to say it’s outlandishly convoluted and audaciously weird.  I’m also not altogether sure it makes sense – if I’m understanding it right, it seemed to involve some sort of time loop, and I don’t quite see how that squares with this issue.   But in a strange way, it’s the sort of concept that actually benefits from not entirely making sense.  Since Unknown is all about things on the verge of the characters’ understanding, it actually works to have stories that you can’t quite get a grip on.  It’s the sort of thing that could backfire spectacularly, but by keeping a firm grip on the lead characters and anchoring everything to that, the series holds it together.

Wolverine: Origins #44 – Wolverine and Cloak try to break obscure Defenders villain Ruby Thursday out of prison for a whole issue.  As I often say about this title, it’s at its weakest when it gets hung up on the clumsy arc plot, and so it’s usually more entertaining when it turns its attention to something relatively straightforward like a jailbreak.  Doug Braithwaite is doing great art on this series, with a lovely solid feel to it.  And there are moments in this story that I quite liked – such as the governor’s sinking feeling when he realises that he’s cornered Wolverine and now he’s actually going to have to do someting about it.  On the other hand, the stuff with Romulus is stupid as ever, and I’m really not sure that this book (or Matt Fraction, for that matter) gets Cloak as a character at all.

Wolverine: Wendigo – This is actually a reprint from the Monsters, Myths and Marvels digital comic.  And billing it a Wolverine comic is contentious to say the least.  It’s actually a story by Frank Tieri and Paul Gulacy about the Quebecois cops interviewing the survivors after a bunch of documentary makers get ripped apart by the Wendigo.  Wolverine does indeed appear in the story, but for a grand total of four panels out of 22 pages.  To be fair, the back-up story, also reprinted from the digital service, is of almost equal length and does feature Wolverine heavily.  But still, this is dodgy advertising.  (I note, by the way, that Marvel have solicited a Hope one-shot which, given the story description, certainly sounds like it’s a reprint of the recent “Hope” back-up strips – but without mentioning that anywhere in the solicitation at all.  This strikes me as extremely dubious practice, though I suppose it might be argued that if you own the stories already, you’ll recognise it as a reprint from the solicitation text.)  Anyhow… the lead story is a perfectly acceptable monster strip, and the art’s quite good, but it doesn’t go anywhere you wouldn’t expect.  The back-up is one of those “villain hypnotises hero so he fights another hero” stories, guest starring Thor, and again, it’s perfectly okay without really offering anything you haven’t seen before.

X-Babies #4 – Isn’t that cover just adorable?  Anyway, this is the final part of the four-issue miniseries dusting off the old Star characters, and I remain thoroughly confused by what it was trying to say about them.  The basic idea is that the X-Babies have been “replaced” by infuriatingly cutesy, adorable versions, and so have the Star characters.  Which is fine, except… it’s the cutesy, hateable version of the Star characters that actually resembles the original comics, and not the “real” versions that the X-Babies rescue.  Granted, the Star comics weren’t very good – many of them were shameless knock-offs of existing all-ages titles from other publishers – but I don’t quite understand why you’d want to spend an entire miniseries telling us that, over twenty years after the line was cancelled.  I just don’t get it.

X-Factor #201 – The best X-book of the week by a mile.  The over-long time travel storyline is behind us, but this is effectively a continuation, picking up on Layla’s remaining subplots and on the previous appearance of a future Dr Doom.  Granted, it’s not Peter David’s subtlest work – the previous issue did a better job of making Reed’s motivations obscure, and this time he just comes across as a villainous impostor.  But with the cast reunited, we’ve got a great team dynamic here.  Bing Cansino’s art is perhaps a little bland at times, but his characters have expression and he gets the story across, which are the key things.  A quality team book.

X-Force #23 – The Necrosha crossover rumbles onwards.  This issue, X-Force fight people in conditions of low light.  There’s a subplot with Hela that I quite liked, but other than that, it’s just a bit formulaic.  It’s perhaps the same problem that I’ve had with some other stories by Kyle and Yost.  They’ve gone so over the top with the threat that I just don’t care any more.  Clayton Crain, to give him his due, does some rather nice atmospheric pictures of gothic buildings in Genosha – I don’t remember that being a particular style for Genosha, but they’re nice pictures, at least.  But mainly, it’s just ugly, emaciated-looking characters in boring murk.  Mostly rubbish.

X-Men Forever #16 – Nightcrawler and Rogue head south to Mississippi, and it looks like we’re going to get Chris Claremont’s version of the “What’s the link between Nightcrawler and Mystique?” story.  Or at least, something like it.  The plotting’s a bit ropey – if it’s Rogue you’re worried about, why set out to lure a different member of the team entirely?  But I like Graham Nolan’s art, which fits the style set for the book by Tom Grummett, albeit that his characters look a little overdramatic when they’re arguing.  And the story is solid Claremont, with an effective cliffhanger.

X-Men Legacy #232 – Officially another Necrosha tie-in, but this story about Proteus returning on Muir Isle looks suspiciously as though it’s a completely freestanding idea which Carey has hitched to the crossover by using Destiny in a role that could have been filled adequately by Blindfold alone.  Actually, if that is what happened, it was probably a smart move to chuck in the tie-in – if you’re going to do two “back from the dead” stories, hey, link them.  Now, the continuity here is a bit of a mess.  The recap page says Proteus reappeared on Muir Isle because he was “extinguished there” – but he wasn’t, he was killed in Edinburgh at the other end of the country.  Besides which, Proteus was already brought back to live during “House of M”, and went off to join the Exiles.  I suppose you could say that’s not the real Proteus, but wouldn’t that open a can of worms for Clint Barton, who was reanimated in the same way?  Leave that aside, though, and this is a perfectly acceptable story of a bunch of X-Men – in fact, a very trad-feeling X-Men team – fighting a rarely seen baddie.  Carey’s done better, but this is fine for what it is.