Welcome to British Summer Time! \u00a0I knew if I left that clock long enough it would become right again.<\/p>\n
It’s a podcast weekend, so don’t forget to check the post below, where Al and I are talking about Green Lantern<\/em>, Xombi<\/em> and FF<\/em>, along with the usual rundown of the news and solicitation.<\/p>\n Important housekeeping announcement! \u00a0For those of you who didn’t listen to the end of the podcast, I’m taking a short break, so we’re skipping the next podcast, and it’s probably going to be three to four weeks before the next X-Axis.<\/p>\n Loads of X-books this week, and not a great deal else, so let’s get to it…<\/p>\n Captain America & Batroc the Leaper<\/em><\/strong> – Continuing their intriguing “more is more” marketing strategy, Marvel have a ton of Captain America one-shots out this month, of which this is one. \u00a0Given the volume of Captain America minis already released in anticipation of the upcoming movie, one suspects that these books are doomed to be read by weary completists and devoted fans of the creators. \u00a0But Kieron Gillen and Renato Arlem’s Batroc story is worth your time. \u00a0There’s not much Captain America in it; it’s really an attempt to rehabilitate Batroc, and a very effective one too. \u00a0As a back-up reprint of Tales of Suspense<\/em> #85 shows, when Batroc was first introduced, he may have been ridiculously French \u00a0(“Nom du chein! \u00a0Batroc feels zee terrible anger!”), but he was also played as an \u00a0honourable warrior who was a serious threat to the hero. \u00a0Years of repeated failure have stripped the character of that aura of credibility, leaving him to hang around the fringes of the Marvel Universe as a Silver Age relic. \u00a0Gillen turns that to his advantage, playing up Batroc as an underdog who really just wants to do his best as an ordinary man taking on super-soldiers and cyborgs. \u00a0Even Batroc knows he’s not going to win; but it’s the trying that counts. \u00a0It’s a nice way of giving back some dignity to a Z-list villain, and one of the best single issue stories I’ve read in a while.<\/p>\n Daken: Dark Wolverine<\/em> #7<\/strong> – This is the concluding part of “Empire, Act 2”, though it doubles as a prologue to next month’s crossover with X-23<\/em>. \u00a0Basically, it’s mostly Daken consolidating his hold on Madripoor, by reinstalling Tyger Tiger as a puppet leader who can act as a figurehead while he remains in the shadows. \u00a0Incidentally, once again, the recap page gets the plot wrong, describing Tyger as a “vigilante”. \u00a0In fact, she’s been running the country since\u00a0Iron Man: Director of SHIELD Annual<\/em> #1, when she was installed by Tony Stark after Madame Hydra was overthrown. \u00a0Earlier issues established that clearly enough, so I’m mystified about how the book has twice managed to run a recap page that gets wrong perhaps the single most important plot point in the story.<\/p>\n Anyway, in this issue, Daken manipulates some people and blah blah blah boring. \u00a0I think the problem here is twofold. \u00a0For one thing, the criminals he’s manipulating are sketchy characters whom we have no real reason to care about. \u00a0And for another, there’s nothing particularly clever or interesting in the way he does it. \u00a0Sometimes this book makes Daken genuinely seem a step ahead of the other characters, but sometimes it’s just a bunch of more or less arbitrary stuff happening, before the book declares Daken to be a mastermind for predicting it all. \u00a0Put another way, the other characters haven’t been adequately boxed into a corner, but they act as if they are, because Daken’s a genius and therefore his plans must succeed no matter how sketchy and vague they appear.<\/p>\n I can see what they’re going for, and sometimes the book pulls it off, but this isn’t one of those times.<\/p>\n FF<\/em> #1<\/strong> – See the podcast for plenty of discussion on this one. \u00a0Basically, this is Jonathan Hickman’s Fantastic Four<\/em> run moving on to its next phase. \u00a0The Human Torch is dead, and the remaining three have rebranded themselves as the Future Foundation and enlisted Spider-Man to fill the gap. \u00a0That works better than you might think, as long as you’re prepared to overlook the character’s implausibly packed schedule across the rest of the Marvel Universe. \u00a0He’s a reasonably plausible choice for Johnny to nominate as his successor, but he’s also enough of an outsider to change the dynamic of the book and prevent the FF being merely the Fantastic Three (at least superficially; it’s pretty clear that Peter is in fact tacked on to an existing cast, and that’s kind of the point). \u00a0The new monochrome costumes are very Hickman indeed, and I like them a lot as a break with tradition. \u00a0Not a huge amount of plot here, so much as set up and introduction interspersed with a fight scene, but at least Hickman’s bending over backwards to make this an accessible jumping on point for new readers. \u00a0I wasn’t entirely sold on the first few issues of Hickman’s run, which apparently got off to a relatively slow start. \u00a0But now that he’s got all of his elements in place and has hit his stride, you can see why people are talking about this as a great run on the book.<\/p>\n Justice League: Generation Lost<\/em> #22<\/strong> – Hmm. \u00a0I’m a little dubious about bringing both Batman and Wonder Woman into the book just as it’s building to a conclusion. \u00a0True, the set-up at the start of this series saw the JLI characters being excommunicated by the rest of the superhero community, so there’s got to be the reconciliation with the A-listers at the end. \u00a0And yes, these two do have a logical reason to be here; Batman was a member of the JLI in his own right back in the day, while Wonder Woman at least has the direct connection with the series’ central villain Max Lord. \u00a0But in pacing terms, it seems a mistake to go so heavily on Wonder Woman at this point, when she hasn’t been mentioned before – particularly when her involvement is further complicated by the convolutions in her own book at the moment. \u00a0Still a perfectly solid issue, but I hope this book isn’t going to let the regular cast get shouldered aside in the final act.<\/p>\n New Mutants<\/em> #23<\/strong> – Part four of “Age of X”, the X-Men Legacy<\/em> story which is also appearing in this book for… some reason. \u00a0It’s certainly not because the New Mutants have a particularly prominent role in the story, though Legion’s seemingly central role in the plot might provide some explanation. \u00a0This is the point where the characters start seriously investigating what exactly is going on, and it’s evident that whatever we’re watching, it’s not just a regular alternate reality. \u00a0I’m sticking with my earlier theory – we’re all inside Legion’s mind, and the inhabitants of Fortress X are a mixture of X-Men who were nearby, plus Legion’s own splinter personalities. \u00a0Leaving aside my doubts about quite why this is a crossover rather than a Legacy<\/em> storyline, Mike Carey’s continuing to do a great job here, setting up the mystery of what’s going on beneath the surface, and dropping enough clues to play fair with the reader.<\/p>\n Uncanny X-Force<\/em> #6<\/strong> – Well, it’s an issue of running around and fighting Deathloks, more or less. \u00a0There’s a nice few pages near the start with Psylocke imagining how she’s going to explain things to her brother, but after that it’s full on fighting for most of the issue before we get to the high concept at the end. \u00a0Remender is working with the version of Deathlok recently introduced by Jason Aaron in Wolverine: Weapon X<\/em>, but basically it’s “Marvel superheroes from the future come back as Deathlok cyborgs to protect whatever it is inside the World that Fantomex is trying to get at.” \u00a0And within that loose framework, fighting. \u00a0Not one of my favourite issues, unfortunately. \u00a0In theory it ought to be a decent action issue, but the art just doesn’t have the clarity and immediacy to build momentum.<\/p>\n Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #534<\/strong> – The final part of “Quarantine”, which is also Matt Fraction’s final issue. \u00a0I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that Fraction’s X-Men stories never really clicked in the way that Iron Man<\/em>, Iron Fist<\/em> or Casanova<\/em> did, or even his shortlived Order<\/em>. \u00a0Partly, of course, he had to wrestle with a set-up that’s proved challenging for most writers; and he’s been saddled with some dodgy artists from time to time. \u00a0But looking back, I think the major problem here has been the size of the cast, which has left the book sprawling, unfocussed and lacking an emotional core. \u00a0He doesn’t have that problem with solo titles for obvious reasons, and even Order<\/em> had a clearly-defined central cast (not to mention a tendency to do issues focussing on individual characters). \u00a0Uncanny <\/em>has just been trying to squeeze in too much, and too many of its characters and stories have ended up half-developed as a result.<\/p>\n “Quarantine” illustrates the problem. \u00a0Greg Land’s art isn’t exactly a great starting point, but whoever was drawing this story, it would still be a bunch of disparate ideas that never quite come to fruition and don’t belong in the same story anyway. \u00a0What does the Emma\/Shaw storyline have to do with the rest? \u00a0Essentially nothing, unless you squint a bit and regard the pay-off as a type of “quarantine” in its own right; it would probably have worked better stripped out and done as a single-issue story rather than an overextended subplot. \u00a0What happened to the Collective Man thread from the early issues? \u00a0He pretty much vanishes halfway through the arc. \u00a0The idea of a makeshift team of healthy X-Men trying to keep things going on the mainland ought to work, but having thrown that out there, the story doesn’t really do anything with it. \u00a0And the mutants emerging from quarantine to take on the humans who’ve stolen their powers should be a good confrontation in theory, but founders on the fact that the villains are so utterly one-dimensional. \u00a0The rich kid “new X-Men” should have worked, but with one personality trait shared between them, they barely even qualify as characters at all. There are some good ideas in here, but they’re fighting for space and none of them gets to develop into a decently structured story.<\/p>\n For some reason the issue also features a reprint of Avengers Academy<\/em> #1 – which is a great series, but if they want people to jump aboard, I’d have chosen a more recent issue. \u00a0Still, it’s one of the best books Marvel are putting out at the moment, so I’m glad to see it getting support.<\/p>\n Wolverine & Jubilee<\/em> #3<\/strong> – Hmm. \u00a0So… vampires want Wolverine to recover something from underneath Chernobyl because he’s got a healing factor? \u00a0In 2011? \u00a0I’m really not sure about that at all. \u00a0For one thing, it’s a bizarre plot point to bring in when the story is set in Siberia (Chernobyl is a continent away in the Ukraine), but for another, Chernobyl was 25 years ago, and while you certainly wouldn’t want to live there, I just don’t believe that it’s churning out “lethal amounts of radiation” any more. \u00a0This feels like a bit of a mis-step to me. \u00a0But Rockslide’s scenes are good, and the bizarre cliffhanger is a winner.<\/p>\n X-Men<\/em> #9<\/strong> – Finally for this week, the X-Men and Spider-Man are still taking on the Lizard. \u00a0It turns out the Lizard has a new ally, which is why this is an X-Men story. \u00a0But bringing back a second-tier X-Men villain doesn’t alter the fact that we’re fundamentally doing a sequel to the “Shed” storyline from Amazing Spider-Man<\/em>, in which the X-Men simply go out there and do regular superhero stuff for a change, by fighting some baddies. \u00a0Chris Bachalo is clearly having a great time with the remit of drawing mad scientists and lizard people, and while the story is starting to feel like it might be a little over-extended (taking three issues to get to the point it should probably have reached after two), it’s still a generally well done superhero team-up.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Welcome to British Summer Time! \u00a0I knew if I left that clock long enough it would become right again. It’s a podcast weekend, so don’t forget to check the post below, where Al and I are talking about Green Lantern, Xombi and FF, along with the usual rundown of the news and solicitation. 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