If you haven’t listened yet to this week’s podcast, you’ll find it conveniently located one post below.  (Now with revised bitrate!)  On that show, you’ll find reviews of Image United #1, JSA All-Stars #1, and Jonah Hex #50.  One of these comics is good.  You can probably figure out which one for yourself, but go on, listen to the show anyway.

And here’s some other stuff that came out this week:

Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love #2 – In search of a mystical maguffin, Cinderella heads to Dubai and teams up with Aladdin.  Does the world actually need three Fables titles a month?  Probably not, but writer Chris Roberson does a good job of matching the tone of the parent title.  The idea of Cinderella as a spy was set up in the parent title; in practice, she ends up as a relatively straight spy pastiche, perhaps because it’s not that easy to write a cross between Cinderella and James Bond without it becoming hopelessly contrived.  That might explain why they’re using Aladdin, who’s somewhat easier to play with in this context.  It’s not an especially subtle story, but anything with art by Shawn McManus is going to be worth reading.  And they’re right, by the way, that Dubai is a perfect setting for this sort of story in 2009 – it’s exotic, it’s not been done to death, and it’s “a place where billionaires build artificial islands in the shape of things.”

And it’s not the only comic this week that takes place in Dubai.  But we’ll come back to that.

Echo #17 – Behold exposition!  This issue basically amounts to an 18-page explanation of what the Phi Project was actually about.  How much of this is strictly essential to the plot, I have my doubts – in terms purely of the narrative, Terry Moore could probably have pared this down to a fraction of the length and still explained why it matters.  But there’s more than that going on here, because this seems to be Moore spelling out the big idea at the heart of Echo.  It’s a curious mixture of cutting-edge physics, pseudo-science and maths-as-magic… but basically, Moore seems to want to tell us that the Golden Ratio is at the heart of all things.  This idea has been around for centuries, but Moore does a surprisingly effective job of crossing it with experimental physics.  I’m fairly convinced that the plot explanation offered here doesn’t make sense (since most high-level maths and physics is done with variables, surely it doesn’t matter what base you do the maths in?), but it’s nicely pitched as the sort of semi-comprehensible idea that just conceivably might have a glimmer of viability.  And, of course, it’s a testimony to Moore’s ability that he can make 18 pages of exposition into a visually interesting comic.

Jack of Fables #40 – Oh, okay.  I’d kind of been assuming that the two plot threads – our Jack turning into a dragon, and the other Jack trying to be a hero – would tie up by the end of this storyline.  But apparently not.  It seems the dragon stuff is just a sub-plot to build to the next arc.  These last few issues feel like they’ve been something of a necessary exercise to move the characters from A to B – in particular, to make Jack Frost into a proper hero.  The tricky bit is that for Jack to become a traditional fairy tale hero, he has to go through a traditional fairy tale story, which is all a bit predictable.  While it’s entirely readable, the book never quite finds an inventive enough angle to make this material feel fresh.

Pope Hats #1 – New irregular series from one Ethan Rilly, courtesy of a Xeric Foundation grant.  (Here’s his website.)  It’s about a young woman called Frances whose best friend is an alcoholic actress and who is haunted by a vaguely incompetent ghost.  To be honest, this first issue is mainly a scene-setter, introducing the cast and setting up Frances’ problems without really kicking off the story.  But it’s wonderfully observed, beautifully drawn, and frankly good enough to get away with just following the characters around for 32 pages.  I see from Rilly’s website that there’s no actual date scheduled for issue #2 (which means chances are I’ll have completely forgotten about it by the time the next issue comes out), but this is still worth a look.

Psylocke #2 – You know you’re in for a meticulously researched story when the opening caption says “Dubai, Saudi Arabia.”  (It’s one of the United Arab Emirates.)

Fortunately, the rest of the story is so far removed from the real world that research doesn’t much enter into it.  I can see what Chris Yost is trying to do here – he’s trying to do a deck-clearing exercise to clear away a lot of the clutter that Psylocke’s character has picked up over the years, so that she can be used more effectively in future – but the story itself feels mechanical, and Psylocke herself one-dimensional.

Siege: The Cabal – One-shot leading into the Siege storyline.  And, ah, it seems that for the purposes of this series the Asgardians are back in Oklahoma, when over in Thor they’re still camped out in Latveria.  Christ, if they can’t even keep that straight, I don’t hold out much hope for this crossover.  Perhaps this is all perfectly clear if you’ve been reading the regular titles, but since an issue like this is supposed to be the jumping-on point for a major crossover, that’s no excuse.  Anyway, it’s an issue of Exciting Conversation, where the idea is presumably meant to be that the Cabal is falling apart… except that really happened when Namor and Emma left, during the “Utopia” storyline.  On the other hand, Michael Lark gets to draw a very nice double page spread of robot locusts.  Generally, though, I’m just left a bit confused about the state of continuity, and with a nagging feeling that Brian Bendis is trying to force a story beat that actually took place in a different comic three months ago.

Sweet Tooth #4 – Our hero(es?) finally get to talk to some other people who don’t want to kill them, and the story continues to build the big question of just what Jepperd is up to here.  Obviously, the series has been teasing for a while that Jeppard might be up to no good, but Jeff Lemire is building the tension nicely.  Bleak without being unremittingly so, Sweet Tooth has managed to reinvigorate the overused post-apocalyptic setting.

Thor #604 – This is the start of Kieron Gillen’s run, which picks up from J Michael Straczynski’s storyline in progress, and runs through to the Siege crossover.  It’s plainly a transitional story, inheriting a number of plot threads that evidently need to be resolved so that the series is in place for the big crossover in just a few months time.  And inevitably, this book is going to be driven by wider considerations of the Marvel Universe for the next little while.  It’s not an especially enviable remit.  But allowing for those restrictions, it’s a decent issue; Gillen writes good dialogue for the gods, and is clearly having fun with Doom as Frankenstein.  Billy Tan’s not bad on art, though there are a couple of scenes that feel a bit flat (Loki’s address to Balder near the end of the issue needs a bit more spark).

Uncanny X-Men #518 – Hmm, when did it become acceptable again to randomly introduce new mutants for use as cannon fodder?  Wasn’t M-Day supposed to have put a stop to that?  (It happens in this week’s X-Force Annual as well, which suggests a policy change.)  Anyway, this issue the X-Men attempt the incredibly dangerous task of separating Emma Frost from the Void, and… yes, it’s not very well set up, is it?  For one thing, Emma’s been linked to the Void for several issues now, and only with this issue does Matt Fraction really get around to explaining what it actually is.  For another, the plot driver is apparently supposed to be that with the Cuckoos out of action, the X-Men need Emma’s telepathic powers back.  Except… point one, do they?  And point two, what’s wrong with Professor X?  There’s a weak attempt to handwave him away by saying that Cyclops isn’t prepared to put him in the field, but point three, why not?  And point four, since he’s a long-range psychic, why does he even need to be in the field?  This just doesn’t hang together.  Terry Dodson does some good work on the scenes set inside Emma’s mind, but as a story, this has real problems.

X-Babies #3 – Ooookay.  Last month, I wondered why Marvel were promoting their Star Comics collections with a series where the Star characters were portrayed as irritating, punchable and generally crap.  This month sort of answers that question, and in the way I’d sort of expected: just as the X-Babies have been replaced with cutesy versions, so have the Star characters.  Which is sort of fine (though it puts you in the weird position of writing a story where the X-Babies symbolise creative integrity), except that the “real” Star characters turn out to be Marvel-fied versions.  So… the ones who actually looked like the Star Comics characters are still supposed to be cutesy, annoying and rubbish.  I really don’t get what they’re trying to do with this series.

X-Force Annual #1 – A fill-in story with X-Force kidnapping a HYDRA soldier for reasons I won’t explain because they’re part of the plot.  It’s really more of a Wolverine story with added background characters, but whatever.  From a continuity standpoint, this is entirely skippable, but it is by Robert Kirkman and Jason Pearson, and it barrels along quite enjoyably.  As a throwaway over-the-top action story, it’s pretty entertaining.  The back-up strip, strangely, is a “Necrosha-X” crossover featuring Deadpool.  It’s silly, but in the right way; Deadpool can’t keep track of X-Men continuity either, but knows that any story where he can blast his opponents to smithereens with impunity is alright by him.

Less than a month to go before Christmas!  I really must get a tree.

Anyway, it’s been a busy few days, so this is going to be a fairly rushed round-up of the week’s releases – or rather, those of them I’ve actually read so far.

Beasts of Burden #3 – An issue for the cat lovers, as the group’s token feline the Orphan ventures into the sewers in search of the missing Dymphna (from… some earlier story or other).  And naturally, that means rats.  Hordes of them.  What’s really impressive about this series is the way that it’s taken a potentially cutesy concept and made it work.  On paper, a comic about talking pets fighting mystic evil in smalltown America sounds awfully twee.  But the book strikes a perfect balance between anthropomorphising the characters on the one hand, and on the other depicting them as regular animals, and steers clear of the obvious jokes that could be done with the concept – the human owners, for example, are more or less absent from the series.  The result is a truly charming modern fairy tale.

Chew #6 – The start of a second arc.  And now that we’ve firmly established the high concept – every time Tony Chu eats something, he learns about its entire history – the book smartly widens its focus rather than tryint to make that the centrepiece of this story.  The gross-out stuff is teased, only for the book to head off in a different direction.  Instead, this story sees Chu reunited with his former partner John Colby, the guy who took a knife to the head in issue #1.  Now he’s a mad cyborg.  Well, a cyborg, at any rate.  He might be joking about the mad bit.  Or he might not.  This issue is really about introducing Colby to the cast and throwing something new into the mix, with a couple of pages spent on a new long-term plot about very odd fruit.  Good start to the new arc, and it’s reassuring to see that the book isn’t going to be a one-trick pony doing variations on the same gimmick.

Dark Avengers: Ares #2 – In which Ares goes looking for his missing son Phobos, which is a plot from his other books.  But he ends up finding his other son Kyknos, the one you’ve probably never heard of.  This is a wonderfully over-the-top romp.  And it’s nice to see that, aside from acknowledging the fact that Ares works for the government right now, it doesn’t get caught up in all the Dark Reign stuff.  You might even say it’s more of a character piece for Ares, that character being mainly “if it moves, hit it harder until it stops.”  Actually, there’s a couple of nice moments which give him a bit more depth – Ares may be insane and have completely wonky priorities, but he isn’t completely oblivous to the interests of his troops.  Kieron Gillen does a nice job of making Ares as stark raving mad as usual while still allowing him the occasional glimmer of humanity, and Manuel Garcia is just having a great time drawing big mad guys smashing skeletons with axes.  Fun.

Dark Wolverine #80 – Concluding a three-parter, which I’ll try and do a full review for in due course.  Norman Osborn is trying to sort out his image problem by making Daken/Wolverine look appropriately heroic, and so he lines up some Z-list villains to beat.  And by Z-list, we’re talking Emmy Doolin, of all people.  (She’s an obscure Larry Hama character from Wolverine #45-46, back in 1991.)  And as seems to be the norm with this series, Daken ends up doing something which might be genuine heroism, or might just be cynical playing to the cameras.  This isn’t as strong as the previous arc, not least because there’s a major problem at the heart of the story: the supposedly incriminating footage of Daken/Wolverine beating up prisoners is utterly trivial compared to the sort of thing that we have to accept Norman could overcome in order for the “Dark Reign” storyline to happen in the first place.  There’s also a terribly vague ending sequence, which doesn’t work at all, mainly because I honestly can’t figure out what’s happening.  What the hell am I supposed to make of a splash page of a bullet lying in a bloodstained sink that hasn’t even appeared before in the scene?  If the idea is supposed to be that Emmy shot herself then they could hardly have done a worse job of making that clear.  If the idea is supposed to be anything else, then it didn’t even get within a mile of making the point.

Gotham City Sirens #6 – Hmm, I’m starting to lose patience with this book.  There’s a vaguely promising idea in here somewhere – confronting Harley Quinn with another rejected Joker sidekick, albeit one from a staggeringly obscure Silver Age story.  But the story feels a bit mechanical – trap, escape, trap, escape – and the rest of the cast don’t get much to do.  And what we’re left with is a story that’s trying to make some kind of point about the hang-ups of Harley Quinn, which are almost impossible to relate to.  So really, it comes down to making a point about the character, without that point actually having much wider interest…

New Mutants #7 – Because you demanded it – the return of Bevatron!  Yes, the X-Necrosha crossover continues as the New Mutants gets to fight the zombie Hellions.  Younger readers may not recall that the Hellions were the New Mutants’ opposite numbers back in the 1980s.  I always liked them – we never saw that much of them, but they were given enough individual identity to suggest that they would probably have made for a reasonably entertaining series in their own right.  And they had great team uniforms.  So yes, I’m quite happy to spend an issue seeing the New Mutants and the Hellions again – even if the zombie versions don’t seem to have much in the way of personality.  But the whole thing leaves me again with the nagging worry – who is this book actually aimed at, other than readers who well remember the original New Mutants stories from a quarter century ago?  And is that really enough to justify a whole ongoing series?

Uncanny X-Men #517 – It’s a fight scene.  Everyone fights Predator Xs for a whole issue.  Oh, and then, after a whole issue of telling us how awesomely powerful they are, it turns out that you can just shoot them.  In fact, the Atlanteans seem to be holding up perfectly well against one with spears…  So, it’s the sort of issue where the pay-off needs to be the heroes coming up with a really clever way of beating the invincible monsters.  And while we do get that with Rogue’s scene, generally it turns out that conventional weaponry does the job quite passably.  We have a problem here.  There’s also a subplot about the Phoenix force which comes completely out of the blue and leads to people standing around telling us how important this is, without really showing us why.  Not one of Matt Fraction’s better weeks.

Wolverine: First Class #21 – Once again, this is more of a Kitty Pryde story than a Wolverine one.  Wolverine’s gone mad and chases Kitty through the mansion, and if you can’t figure out where this one is heading, then you haven’t been reading comics very long.  Of course, in theory at least, the First Class books are aimed precisely at people who haven’t been reading comics very long, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  It’s a story you’ve probably seen many times before, but  Peter David and Scott Koblish do a solid rendition of it here.

X-Men Forever #12 – You know the deal by now – it’s good old fashioned Chris Claremont, with a main story interspersed with cutaways to the subplots.  The main point of this four-parter is evidently to get Magik back into circulation, as a guy called the Cossack kidnaps little Illyana and… well, turns her back into Magik, basically.  Solid work, and it certainly benefits from the pace of a fortnightly schedule.  Artist Tom Grummett is on particularly good form this issue.  I’m not altogether sold on his new Magik costume (seriously, what’s holding it in place?), but I do like his redesigns for Colossus an Gambit, and the first few pages have some lovely scene-setting.

If you haven’t listened to this week’s podcast, it’s just a couple of posts below.  Go do so.  We talk about the first issues of SWORD, Supergod and Victorian Undead.

This is an unusually quiet week for new releases – everything seems to be in the middle of a storyline right now – but let’s run through the books anyway. 

Dark Avengers #11 – Is it just me, or does Norman Osborn have a tiny itty bitty head on the cover?  Anyway, when I reviewed the “Utopia” crossover, I pointed out that the Dark Avengers didn’t get much to do.  Somebody pointed out that, actually, that’s pretty much par for the course – it’s really a Norman Osborn solo title, with the other guys standing in the background.  And indeed, that’s what we get here.  Since they’re the official government-appointed superheroes, the Avengers have gone off to investigate weird stuff in Colorado, and they’ve blundered into the Molecule Man, one of those virtually-omnipotent characters who’s way out of their league.  Naturally enough, that means the Avengers themselves make cameo appearances, and Norman Osborn has an extended dialogue with the nerdy maniac.  I have no idea why somebody thought it would be a good idea to have a few pages randomly painted by Greg Horn, of all people.  At first it looks as though Horn’s going to do all the pages showing the Avengers trapped in worlds created for them by the Molecule Man… but then they kind of drop that idea and Mike Deodato takes over again.  Besides, Horn is trying for hyper-realism, so he’s a weird artist to be doing surreal dream scenes.  Still, all told, this actually isn’t bad; if you’re going to do a book like this, then it makes sense to do a story where the ersatz Avengers are put in the underdog role and have to actually try and do the job properly.

Echo #16 – Presumably this is going to be the opening chapter of the fourth trade paperback, because it opens with a really blatant piece of recapping.  To be honest, this isn’t the strongest issue of Terry Moore’s series; it’s built around some scenes with Ivy and her Tragically Ill Daughter which end up seeming a bit heavy-handed and sentimental.  (The problem here, I think, is that said Tragically Ill Daughter doesn’t display much of a personality beyond being Tragic and Ill, which makes it all seem a bit disease-of-the-week.)  That said, even when he’s doing material like this, Moore’s storytelling puts most of his contemporaries to shame.  He’s great at the tiny little details of body language which make a character believable.  The odd thing about this series is the combination of those little personal touches with a Hollywood plot and rather one-dimensional villains.  Often it works, when the characters run into the action story elements and play off it; occasionally it feels a bit contrived, and for some reason this issue seemed to be in the latter category.

G-Man: Cape Crisis #4 – Chris Giarrusso’s work on this series has been comfortably up to the standards of his “Mini Marvels” strips, but this issue has some of the best material of the series.  It’s the sequence with G-Man escaping a wood full of… well, I’m guessing it’s a riff on Where the Wild Things Are, but it doesn’t really matter.  There’s just something about vicious monsters with a fully-fledged public transport infrastructure that works for me.  Sure, G-Man‘s story is basically just a framework to hang a load of jokes on, but when they’re funny, I’m fine with that.

Hellblazer #261 – And we’re off to India for a new storyline, so that Peter Milligan can write about gullible western tourists and the heritage of Empire.  Some of this is, well, less than subtle.  (The British nineteenth-century justifications for colonialism were a little more complex than “we’re taught to possess the world,” for example.)  But the basic idea of people trying to exploit a condescending Empire-era ghost is entertaining, if heavy-handed. And Giuseppe Camuncoli is doing great art on this series – good clear storytelling, and he knows how to play up the tongue-in-cheek bits.

Nomad: Girl Without A World #3 – Despite the rather stark covers, the set-up here is almost a throwback to the early years of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Nomad isn’t exactly a character with a built-in fanbase – she’s the “Heroes Reborn” version of Bucky, now stranded in the regular Marvel Universe – but Sean McKeever plays to that by duly positioning her as a Z-list superhero protecting her neighbourhood and her high school.  And the big villainous scheme is… people using mind control to dominate high school politics.  Some of the action scenes are a bit ropey, but I do like the way the book plays the creepily politically-conscious students.  I’m not so sure about the cliffhanger, though – it’s one of those moments where the villain is suddenly revealed to be somebody from another comic entirely who hasn’t been mentioned in years and who would probably have long since been forgotten if they hadn’t managed to scrape an entry in the Official Handbook back in the mid-80s.  Still, it’s something different, this book, and it plays to McKeever’s strengths.

Phonogram: The Singles Club #5 – Ah, the one that got pulped because it had the wrong bar code on it.  They don’t make scandals like they used to.  Each issue of this miniseries is showing us the same club night from the perspective of a different character, and we’ve now reached Laura Heaven, the lyric-quoting girl who hung around with Penny B back in issue #1.  Laura is the pretentious fan looking for identity in the music of her favourite band, and not quite getting it right yet.  It’s the sort of story that, in the past, you’d have done with a fan of the Smiths or the Manic Street Preachers.  But there isn’t really a band like that around at the moment, at least with that sort of profile.  So instead Laura is a fan of the Long Blondes – a risky approach, because frankly, they’re a bit obscure.  (We’re dealing here with a defunct band who never made the top 40 album chart, and who never got a single into the top 20.  Their biggest hit was “Weekend Without Makeup”, if you’re wondering.)  But as usual with Phonogram, it doesn’t really matter whether you know the band or not.  The point is what they mean to Laura, and her love/hate relationship with Penny… and that’s universal.

Thunderbolts #138 – Jeff Parker and Miguel Sepulveda take over as the new creative team.  With storylines already in progress, though, it’s far from a clean break.  To be honest, I haven’t been buying this in a while, and the current line-up really is a motley collection of weirdos.  Nuke wearing a hockey mask and calling himself Scourge?  Mr X, the serial killer from Frank Tieri’s Wolverine run?  The Headsman, from frigging Untold Tales of Spider-Man?  Actually, there’s a nice dynamic here, between the characters who are stark raving mad, and those who are merely mercenaries.  Still, it does feel like a book that’s drifted an awfully long way from its roots – though clearly it’s going to need a new direction in a few months when Dark Reign is over.  In the meantime, Parker tells an enjoyable enough opening story with them, and then sets up, you guessed it, an appearance by the Agents of Atlas.  Let nobody say they haven’t got enough exposure.

Wolverine: Origins #42 – In which Wolverine chats with Bruce Banner for a few pages and then, having apparently exhausted the potential of the mandatory guest appearance, pops off to Japan to speak to the Silver Samurai.  Basically, it’s one of those stories where the bad guy knows how the good guy thinks, and so the good guy has to act out of character to outwit him.  You know the schtick.  It’s always horribly contrived, and this is no exception.  As so often with Wolverine: Origins, it’s got moments where you’re obviously meant to stand back and admire the clever plot twists; naturally, much depends on how clever you think they really are.  Admittedly, it all fits together – the thing is, it fits into a horribly convoluted pretzel.  But Doug Braithwaite’s art is pretty good, and it’s all harmlessly silly.

Wolverine: Weapon X #7 – This is the second part of Jason Aaron’s asylum arc, and evidently he knows better than to drag out the mystery for too long.  This issue doesn’t give us a complete explanation of how Wolverine ended up in the asylum, but it does give us a reasonable idea of what’s going on there: once upon a time it had a sideline in providing mentally unstable but readily deniable hitmen, but now the lunatics are literally running the asylum and the whole operation has gone completely off the rails.  Equally, five issues of Logan shivering in a corner would have been a bit much, but Aaron moves us forward on that one too.  I’m enjoying this one a lot; it’s a weird little story, but with plenty of dark humour, and it knows not to outstay its welcome.

X-Men Legacy #229 – Isn’t this book meant to be part of the “Necrosha-X” crossover?  Oh well, evidently it’s going to join that one late.  In the meantime, we’re still in the middle of a “Nation X” branded arc – which, as you’ve probably guessed by now, simply means it’s the first arc to take place after the move to Utopia, no more, no less.  This issue, Rogue tries to rescue Bling! from Emplate’s clutches.  I realise that’s a bit melodramatic, but Emplate’s a melodramatic kind of guy, and I feel very strongly that he has clutches from which minor characters must be rescued.  Daniel Acuna’s art is perfectly suited to the surreal weirdness of Emplate’s dimension (if slightly less suited to the scenes in the real world), and I really Mike Carey’s take on Emplate, as someone who fancies himself a long-suffering stoic victim of circumstances.