Once again, after a busy weekend, I reach Sunday evening and find myself with a pile of books I haven’t read yet.  (And as will be fairly obvious, they include most of the non-Marvel books I bought this week.)  But such is life.  Let’s bash through the X-books and a couple of others regardless…

Amazing Spider-Man #618 – Is there actually any unifying theme to this “Gauntlet” stuff other than doing a string of stories in a row featuring old Spider-Man villains?  Not that I’m complaining, mind you.  This is the start of a Mysterio story by Dan Slott and Marcos Martin, so you know it’s going to be well written and beautifully drawn.  Martin in particular is doing really exceptional work on this series.  Now, Mysterio was originally a gimmick villain based on sixties-era special effects, and given the march of CGI, he can easily come across as terribly dated, much like the Circus of Crime.  But Slott’s found a decent angle for him here: Mysterio helping mobsters to fake their own deaths (or, possibly, faking their return from the grave).  It may not be a revelatory comic, but it’s precisely what I’m looking for in a Spider-Man book, and extremely well done.

Dark Avengers #13 – Notionally a “Siege” crossover, but it’s actually an issue banging on about the Sentry’s back story.  Apparently he might be Jesus or something.  Or maybe not.  Um.  It’s really a bit of a mess.  But to be honest, the real problem here is that it’s trying to delve into the psyche of the Sentry, and the Sentry’s psyche isn’t very convincing, and never has been.  It’s just too contrived.

Dark Wolverine #82 – Another “Siege” crossover, and this one actually does cover the Siege story from Daken’s perspective.  The story seems to be pushing the idea that this is the big pay-off where everything is going to go wrong for Norman Osborn, and Daken is waiting to take advantage of it all.  Fair enough – for a while now, the book’s been pushing the idea that Daken’s got longer-range plans in mind.  And this is a pretty enjoyable issue.  There’s not much plot to it – it’s just the Siege from Daken’s point of view – but the interaction among Norman’s oddball band is entertaining, and I like Giuseppe Camuncoli’s art a lot.  The ending is certainly a surprise, but maybe too much of a surprise – it defies belief that such a major plot point would happen in a minor tie-in book, so it’s almost too obvious that it’s going to be an illusion or something.  But yeah, good issue.

Joe the Barbarian #1 – Grant Morrison returns to Vertigo with a new eight-issue miniseries.  This is a set-up issue, and to be honest, it’s all pretty familiar stuff – kid is bullied in real world, escapes from real world problems with toys, toys come to life, adventure.  You know the schtick.  Actually, at times the story openly acknowledges that these are stock elements, so there may be more to it when we get further into the series.  But for the moment, it’s basically one of those stories.  The real selling point on this first issue is Sean Murphy’s art.  Not only does he have a wonderful eye for detail and an ability to set a scene in a single panel, but for the most part Morrison gets out of the way and lets him do it.  Even with the standard Vertigo palate of orange and beige – and to be fair, the scenes with the toys are more colourful than that – this is worth getting just to gaze at.

Thunderbolts #140 – One half suspects that Jeff Parker may be treading water here waiting for “Dark Reign” to end so that the title can move into its next phase.  For the last couple of issues, he’s been using his favourite guest stars the Agents of Atlas so that the two teams can fight, as is traditional in these circumstances.  So, yes, perfectly okay.  But the book really comes together in the last couple pages, which are just a brilliantly executed sequence.  I’d explain it further, but that’d be a bit too spoiler-y.  Suffice to say the book sets up something earlier in the issue and then casually pays it off in a really clever way when you’re not expecting it.  It’s my favourite scene of the week by a mile.

Uncanny X-Men #520 – “Nation X” continues, as three of the X-Men team up with Fantomex to fight a monster in the sewers, while Magneto somehow manages to get a great big pillar built under the X-Men’s island without anybody noticing.  Not really sure how that works.   Since Scott’s now saying that they can’t go back to San Francisco while Norman Osborn is still around, I think it’s pretty safe to say they’ll be back there in the spring, so this whole island thing is looking like a bit of a detour.  (Then again, perhaps the idea is that Magneto sets up shop on the island.  Or maybe it’s going to be the new Atlantis.)  It’s an okay issue; there’s quite a good scene with Scott and Magneto, and otherwise there’s some acceptable fighting, even if Wolverine’s sense of smell is being pushed in a way that would have seemed stupidly over the top during the Silver Age.  Art is from Greg Land, but it’s actually one of his better efforts – though he still seems utterly flummoxed by the idea that women can have facial expressions beyond “grinning” and “sultry.”

Wolverine: Weapon X #9 – The concluding part of “Insane in the Brain”, although as it turns out the story sets up Dr Rottwell as a recurring villain.  I’m not sure I’d want to see him that often – this storyline has been a great change of pace, but it would get wearing after a while.  That said, there’s certainly something compelling about Rot as a sort of low-rent maniac whose powers happen to let him punch above his weight.  And the whole thing is so cheerfully absurd that the over-the-top hyperviolence comes across as black comedy rather than as outright silliness.  Even so, Aaron’s managed to keep that balanced with a really firm grip on writing a famliar Wolverine.  It’s been a strange storyline, but I think it’s worked well.

Look below, loyal readers, for this week’s podcast, and also for Al’s appeal to save S.W.O.R.D..  Well, Al’s appeal for you to help somebody else’s appeal to save S.W.O.R.D..  Good book.

Anyway, I may have some unread books still in my pile, but it’s Sunday night and time to run through the books I have read…

Amazing Spider-Man #617 – We talked about this on the podcast.  It’s a self-contained issue written by Joe Kelly, focussing on the Rhino.  It’s also part of this “Gauntlet” storyline, although so far that’s really just a slow build in the background.  The basic idea is that there’s a new cyborg Rhino around, and for some reason he wants to fight the original Rhino to earn the name.  But the original Rhino has retired and just wants to be left in peace.  It’s flawed – the new Rhino is a sketchy character whose motivations might politely be described as arbitary – but nonetheless it works, because Kelly has a great take on the original Rhino as a peaceful retired villain who just wants to be left alone.  Good art by Max Fiumara, and there’s also a nice back-up strip fleshing out the Rhino’s reformation.

Black Widow: Deadly Origin #3 – This may be a Paul Cornell miniseries, but it’s very much one for the continuity freaks.  To be fair, he’s trying to sort out Natasha’s convoluted continuity by drawing all the disparate strands together into a single coherent interpretation of the character, and that’s fair enough in theory.  But it makes for a rather haphazard story, and the central nanotech plot device is terribly implausible.  I’m not wild about Tom Raney’s art on this issue either, though the flashback scenes by John Paul Leon are great.  I have to wonder whether there’s much point in doing this sort of story in modern Marvel.  Ten to twenty years ago, if they’d done a series like this, it would at least have redefined the character in a way that would have been applied by other writers going forward.  In 2010, I work on the assumption that most stories will just be ignored by the next writer, which makes continuity unscrambling a thankless task at best.  Besides, I’m frankly not that interested in the minutiae of the Black Widow’s back story; wouldn’t it have been quicker just to sweep most of it under the carpet, rather than sift through it on the page?

Dark X-Men #3 – This week’s other, much better Paul Cornell book.  Despite the name, this is basically a Nate Grey miniseries, and it’s turning out to be surprisingly good.  Like every other Marvel hero these days, Nate fights the Dark Avengers, and amazingly, it turns out to be quite entertaining.  Meanwhile, Norman Osborn’s reluctant ersatz X-Men try to figure out whether they can really be bothered getting involved.  Unlike the overly fussy Black Widow story, this is just a high-energy romp taking advantage of the characters’ over-the-top nature.  And there’s great work on the art by Leonrard Kirk, who goes for the big, bold approach that something like this requires.

Nation X #2 – Another anthology of short stories with peripheral X-Men characters.  Theoretically the linking theme is meant to be the X-Men’s relocation to the island “nation” of Utopia, but actually, only one of the stories is really interested in that – a Jubilee story by C B Cebulski, Jim McCann, Mike Choi and Sonia Oback, which gets some decent material out of the depowered mutant watching from the shore and feeling isolated.  John Barber and David Lopez do a fun piece with Martha Johanssen, of all people – yes, the brain in the jar – which could have been set anywhere, but bounces along nicely.  Tim Fish’s Northstar story is a visit from his boyfriend, but it’s really just the old “we live in different worlds” schtick – done well enough, but nothing new.  And Becky Cloonan turns in a Gambit short which is surprisingly keen to tie in to the character’s current continuity.  It’s really the familiar idea of Gambit brooding over whether he deserves to be with the X-Men, but hey, he’s Gambit, and that’s what he does.  An above average issue, and if Marvel are going to keep churning out these X-Men anthologies, it’s good to see that at least they’re being used as a vehicle to include stories with more of an indie sensibility.

Psylocke #3 – This is another of those “re-stating the character” minis.  And to be fair, Psylocke probably needs one.  She’s become hopelessly confused over the years, and to his credit, Chris Yost is trying to cut through the morass of continuity to focus on what defines her now.  Actually, this series is doing a lot of the right things in theory.  It’s zeroed in on a relatively simple villain from her back story in Matsu’o Tsurayaba, the crimelord who was involved in screwing up her identity in the first place.  And it’s got a story which is actually about Psylocke’s character: she goes after him for revenge because she’s looking for closure, she ends up playing the hero and protecting him from somebody else, and she wonders why she’s doing all this.  All fundamentally sound, albeit that the plot’s a bit contrived.  The big problem so far is that Psylocke herself is a character badly damaged by years of chronic misuse, and thus far she remains rather hard to get a grip on.  It’s tough to identify with her.  Mind you, her ill-defined character is precisely what Yost is writing about, so perhaps everything will fall into place with next month’s concluding chapter.  The other problem is the art, which is way too busy and confused.  In fairness, it’s got a lot of energy, but it doesn’t read very well.

S.W.O.R.D. #3 – Henry Gyrich has seized control of the organisation, Abigail Brand is on her way out, and it’s up to the Beast to sort things out.  And dare I say it, there are plot problems here – if Beast’s a guest of Abigail, and Abigail’s out of power, why is he being allowed to wander around unsupervised?  But leaving that aside, it’s another good issue.  Unit gives us his origin story, which is interesting; Death’s Head is in it again; and the art is growing on me, though Hank still looks like a donkey.  Unfortunately, the series looks like it may not be long for this world.

Uncanny X-Men: First Class #7 – The conclusion of the “Knights of Hykon” storyline, and by this point I’m really confused about who the audience are meant to be.  The Knights themselves are a good solid story for new readers – credible bad guys, with a decent motivation, and they get beaten in a reasonably clever way.  But then there’s also an attempt to tie the whole thing into the Phoenix storyline, and I’d have thought that if you were aiming for new readers, you’d want to steer well clear of that whole quagmire.  The basic idea is that the Knights are peripherally responsible for the sun flares in Phoenix’s origin story, and so they’re indirectly to blame for Jean becoming Phoenix.  Scott blames them for messing up his beloved; Jean is a bit put out that he thinks about it that way.  Now, this isn’t a bad idea in theory.  But First Class is a continuity-implant series set somewhere among the late-70s Uncanny X-Men stories.  And this doesn’t feel like the sort of story you can do as a continuity implant, because the tensions in question were eventually dealt with properly in Uncanny itself, so First Class is setting up a storyline that it logically can’t finish.  I’m a bit confused about that.  Still, leaving that aside, this is a basic but enjoyable piece of traditional superheroics.

Unwritten #9 – The concluding part of “Inside Man”, as everything in the jail builds to the obligatory climax.  In some ways Unwritten is the sort of book that’s most interesting when it’s dealing slowly with its ideas rather than doing the big plot resolutions, but it also knows better than to become a purely cerebral and theoretical exercise in metafiction.  This is a good read, and Carey’s done a good job making the pay-off unexpected.  Tommy Taylor is a fairly transparent Harry Potter stand-in; the story plays off the tension of taking the elements of his mythos and putting them in a plot for which they’re wholly unsuited.  But Unwritten makes that tension dramatic rather than merely gimmicky, and that’s what makes it a superior comic.

X-Men Forever #15 – This issue, we catch up with Storm, who you might recall turned out to be a baddie a few months ago.  Since we last saw her, she’s usurped the throne of Wakanda.  X-Men Forever is theoretically meant to be the stories that Chris Claremont would have told if he hadn’t left the X-Men in 1991, but I seriously doubt that he’d have taken the character in this direction.  For all that Marvel protested otherwise, the short-lived childhood romance between Storm and the Black Panther was an obscure footnote in X-Men history until a couple of years back when Marvel decided to retroactively declare them lifelong lovers, but it’s a central element of this story.  Still, the quality of the stories is more important than whether the book strictly adheres to its gimmick, and Claremont is back on form here after the rather shaky “Black Magik” arc, while Tom Grummett’s artwork is excellent throughout.

X-Men Origins: Cyclops – One of those odd stories that’s kind of following continuity and kind of isn’t.  So we’ve got the bit where Scott and Alex parachute from the burning plane, but not the bit where he uses his powers to break their fall.  We’ve got a framing scene lifted from an early issue of X-Men (the one where Xavier shows Cerebro to Scott for the first time), but a complete dumping of Mr Sinister and the Living Diamond.  And we’ve got a re-write of Scott’s first meeting with Magneto, designed to let him confront Magneto alone.  The object of all this seems to be to strip out irrelevant junk from Scott’s history, and retroactively position him as the future leader who’ll take his own line rather than meekly following Xavier.  If you don’t mind the total disregard for established continuity – and to be honest, many of the changes are for the better, at least if you have Scott’s current role in mind – it’s actually not bad, and Jesse Delperdang’s art is good, clear, strong work.  But readers who know Scott’s background already are unlikely to find anything particularly revelatory here.

As it turns out, my comics did eventually show up this week, though not in time to record the podcast on Saturday.  For those who may have forgotten, Al and I both get our comics by mail order, and while we could go and buy comics from Edinburgh’s bricks-and-mortar stores, that would mean buying extra copies of things we’ve already ordered.  So, we’ll be doing the podcast next week, when to be honest there will be more to talk about anyway.

But in the meantime…

Cable #22 – At long last, the end appears to be in sight – after all, the big crossover kicks off at the end of March, and we know Hope gets back to the present then.  And for once, this book does have a bit of momentum as it enters the home stretch.  It’s actually quite a neat gimmick: for admittedly contrived reasons, Cable and Hope are bouncing back and forth in time, with Bishop dragged along in their wake, as they steadily get closer to the present day.  So on the one hand they’re starting at the dawn of Manhattan and moving forward, and on the other they’re working backwards through the storylines we’ve seen over the last couple of years, and eventually they should zero in somewhere in the middle.  That’s quite cute.  But within that framework, we’re stuck with the same old same old – Bishop having One Last Go at killing Hope before the story ends.  It’s the sort of story that works well enough once or twice, but it’s been repeated too often by now.  Without any sense of progression, you can make Bishop a functional character like the army guys who used to chase the A-Team around when an episode needed a nudge, but you can’t build a story around him in his own right.  As for Gabriel Guzman’s art, there are a couple of awkward figures, but he does a good job of establishing the setting for each new location.

Doom Patrol #6 – After the tiresome Blackest Night crossover, this is a decided improvement.  Okay, it’s not really a story.  Instead, it’s one of those issues where a character – Negative Man, to be precise – recaps his entire history, partly for the benefit of new readers, and partly so that Keith Giffen can set out his own take on the character.  Since DC continuity is a notorious quagmire, and the Doom Patrol more than most, it’s actually quite helpful to spell out clearly which bits are meant to count this year.  (Answer: all of it except the John Byrne reboot, as near as I can make out.)  There are some promising ideas in here about mind and body, the issue adds some depth to a character who’s so far been written as sort of cynically flippant, and it generally rekindles my interest in a series which I was on the verge of dropping after the last couple of issues.  Good work in the Metal Men back-up strip as well, which continues to cram more content into ten pages than most books manage in two months.

Great Ten #3 – This is a ten-issue mini about the Chinese government superheroes Grant Morrison introduced in… 52, was it?  There’s an overall storyline about China being attacked by people who claim to be old Chinese gods appalled by what’s happened to their nation, but each issue is also focussed on a different character.  This time it’s Thundermind, a sort of Buddhist Superman.  He’s not technically superhuman, just very enlightened.  To be honest, though, I’m not sure writer Tony Bedard has found the best angle on this character.  He’s opted to make him literally a Chinese version of the Silver Age Superman, complete with mild-mannered secret identity and a Chinese Lois Lane love interest who only has eyes for Thundermind.  Oh, and he became enlightened by finding a magic thingy.  Yes, it’s a classic story set-up, but it’s also so hoary that it makes the character into an automatic pastiche, and I can’t help thinking there must have been more interesting approaches to take here.

New Mutants #9 – In this issue – you will thrill to exposition!  Illyana Rasputin will explain at length her outrageously convoluted continuity!  And Cypher will be reintroduced into the cast, because apparently he’s not dead any more for some reason!  There are so many things about this issue that ought to annoy me, not least the fact that there’s still no obvious reason for the book to exist besides nostalgia.  But Zeb Wells does have lots of ideas about these characters and how they relate to one another.  One thing New Mutants does have going for it is a cast who actually feel like they have a group dynamic.  Last issue’s crossover was rather underwhelming, but this issue is a definite return to form, and I’m particularly glad to see Wells pursuing the idea that a powered-up Cypher is potentially a bit creepy.  Paul Davidson’s art has an appealing icy feel to it, which really works for Illyana’s scenes – and he does rather good robots, too.  None of this entirely gets away from the fact that New Mutants is a book which lacks a compelling reason to exist, but at least it has plenty of other point in its favour.  (And given that Emma Frost has started questioning why the team exists, I wonder whether Wells has something up his sleeve after all… though if he does, and he’s been holding it back for this long, he’s a braver man than me.)

Siege #1 – I’m sure we’ll be talking about this on next week’s podcast, but basically: it’s a Brian Bendis crossover, with all that implies.  It’s not the sort of story that plays to his strengths – even after all this time writing the Avengers, he still seems to do his best work on solo books where he can really get into his characters.  This strikes me as another of those stories where he’s got a few big moments in mind, and then constructed a ramshackle story around them.  So obviously the plot is that Loki is manipulating Norman Osborn into going to war with Asgard, but the story never actually follows this up long enough to explain why Norman wants to do that, at the cost of risking his position and picking a fight with gods, for no apparent upside at all.  You’d expect some sort of scenario where Osborn’s hubris leads him to try and impose his authority on Asgard, but… no.  Instead, they seem to be going for the idea that Osborn has somehow been convinced that Asgard’s a threat, which I suppose has the advantage of dramatic irony; his empire falls apart because, for once, he actually tried to do what he thought was the right thing.  The problem is that Asgard’s been around for years and there’s no adequate reason why he suddenly cares about it now, so it all seems clumsy and forced.  But the bottom line is that it’s got the same problems as House of M and Secret Invasion before them; there’s an idea in here somewhere, but not much of a story.

X-Factor: Nation X – Since X-Factor have relocated from Detroit to New York, this one-shot is basically an explanation of why they’re not involved in Nation X.  At Scott’s request, X-Factor pop over to Utopia, to say hi to old friends, and politely explain why they’re not interested.  There’s a story in there as well – specifically, something about a kind of spirit of ghettos who shows up on Utopia – but basically it’s a debate between Madrox and Scott about the direction of the X-books.  Naturally I’m largely on Madrox’s side – this whole thing seems like a bit of a wrong turn to me – but Peter David does a better job of making Utopia work than the regular X-Men titles have.  Admittedly, he does that mainly by portraying it as a heroically doomed enterprise, which can’t possibly work but is worth a go because nobody can think of any better ideas.  But at least it’s an angle.

X-Men: Legacy #231 – We’ve belatedly reached the “Necrosha X” crossover.  In this issue, a bunch of X-Men go to Muir Isle to investigate one of Blindfold’s prophecies, and end up with… well, something that doesn’t seem to be much connected to the rest of the crossover at all, but I’m not complaining there.  That said, what we end up with is an average X-Men story; Mike Carey’s got a firm enough grasp of the characters to make it readable enough, and it’s nice to see underused characters like Nightcrawler and Colossus getting used, but it doesn’t feel like there’s any particular point to this story beyond tying into a crossover.  Mind you, the last few pages are pretty well executed; it’s a relatively understated take on this particular villain, but probably more effective for it.