Less than a month to go before Christmas!\u00a0 I really must get a tree.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Beasts of Burden<\/em> #3<\/strong> – 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).\u00a0 And naturally, that means rats.\u00a0 Hordes of them.\u00a0 What’s really impressive about this series is the way that it’s taken a potentially cutesy concept and made it work.\u00a0 On paper, a comic about talking pets fighting mystic evil in smalltown America sounds awfully twee.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The result is a truly charming modern fairy tale.<\/p>\n Chew<\/em> #6<\/strong> – The start of a second arc.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The gross-out stuff is teased, only for the book to head off in a different direction.\u00a0 Instead, this story sees Chu reunited with his former partner John Colby, the guy who took a knife to the head in issue #1.\u00a0 Now he’s a mad cyborg.\u00a0 Well, a cyborg, at any rate.\u00a0 He might be joking about the mad bit.\u00a0 Or he might not.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Dark Avengers: Ares<\/em> #2<\/strong> – In which Ares goes looking for his missing son Phobos, which is a plot from his other books.\u00a0 But he ends up finding his other son Kyknos, the one you’ve probably never heard of.\u00a0 This is a wonderfully over-the-top romp.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.”\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Fun.<\/p>\n Dark Wolverine<\/em> #80<\/strong> – Concluding a three-parter, which I’ll try and do a full review for in due course.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And by Z-list, we’re talking Emmy Doolin<\/em>, of all people.\u00a0 (She’s an obscure Larry Hama character from Wolverine<\/em> #45-46, back in 1991.)\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 If the idea is supposed to be that Emmy shot herself then they could hardly have done a worse job of making that clear.\u00a0 If the idea is supposed to be anything else, then it didn’t even get within a mile of making the point.<\/p>\n Gotham City Sirens<\/em> #6<\/strong> – Hmm, I’m starting to lose patience with this book.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But the story feels a bit mechanical – trap, escape, trap, escape – and the rest of the cast don’t get much to do.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So really, it comes down to making a point about the character<\/em>, without that point actually having much wider interest…<\/p>\n New Mutants<\/em> #7<\/strong> – Because you demanded it – the return of Bevatron!\u00a0 Yes, the X-Necrosha<\/em> crossover continues as the New Mutants gets to fight the zombie Hellions.\u00a0 Younger readers may not recall that the Hellions were the New Mutants’ opposite numbers back in the 1980s.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And they had great team uniforms.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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<\/em> stories from a quarter century ago?\u00a0 And is that really enough to justify a whole ongoing series?<\/p>\n Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #517<\/strong> – It’s a fight scene.\u00a0 Everyone fights Predator Xs for a whole issue.\u00a0 Oh, and then, after a whole issue of telling us how awesomely powerful they are, it turns out that you can just shoot them.\u00a0 In fact, the Atlanteans seem to be holding up perfectly well against one with spears…\u00a0 So, it’s the sort of issue where the pay-off needs to be the heroes coming up with a really clever<\/em> way of beating the invincible monsters.\u00a0 And while we do get that with Rogue’s scene, generally it turns out that conventional weaponry does the job quite passably.\u00a0\u00a0We have a problem here.\u00a0 There’s also a subplot about the Phoenix force which comes\u00a0completely out of the blue\u00a0and leads to people standing around telling us how important this is, without\u00a0really showing us why.\u00a0 Not one of\u00a0Matt Fraction’s better\u00a0weeks.<\/p>\n Wolverine: First Class<\/em> #21 <\/strong>– Once again, this is more of a Kitty Pryde story than a\u00a0Wolverine one.\u00a0\u00a0Wolverine’s gone mad and\u00a0chases Kitty through the\u00a0mansion, and if you can’t figure out where this one is heading, then you haven’t been reading comics\u00a0very long.\u00a0 Of course, in theory at least, the First Class<\/em> books are aimed precisely at people who haven’t been reading comics very long, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing.\u00a0 It’s a story you’ve probably seen many times before, but \u00a0Peter David and Scott Koblish do a solid rendition of it here.<\/p>\n X-Men Forever<\/em> #12<\/strong> – You know the deal by now – it’s good old fashioned Chris Claremont, with a main story interspersed with cutaways to the subplots.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Solid work, and it certainly benefits from the pace of a fortnightly schedule.\u00a0 Artist Tom Grummett is on particularly good form this issue.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Less than a month to go before Christmas!\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=107"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions\/109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}