Also this week...

AVENGERS #63 - A big fight, and then everyone has a nice chat and calms down, while being slightly saddened that international relations are so gosh darn complex.  Such is the way of the mighty Avengers.  Not terrible - after all, it's got Alan Davis artwork, which is always something.  But it's the sort of story that raises issues but never gets close to tackling them.  B-

CAPTAIN MARVEL #5 - Captain Marvel has a big fight with his father, despite the minor handicap that his father's dead.  Basically, we're doing "issues about father figures" as a theme here, which is a good choice of subject for the title.  And since Captain Marvel's been dead for twenty years now, it's probably worthwhile wheeling him out in this form for the benefit of the vast majority of readers who have not the slightest emotional attachment to the character's heyday in the 1970s.  B+

FILTH #8 - Just when you think you've got a handle on the damn thing, Morrison changes direction again.  Turns out Slade's not insane after all.  Or at least, not quite as insane as he looked to be.  He might still be insane.  Maybe everyone's insane.  Maybe sanity is all subjective.  Meanwhile, the President has huge knockers and is learning to pole dance.  And that's not something we see in nearly enough comics these days.  A

GLOBAL FREQUENCY #4 - A mad religious cult decide to do something bad and Global Frequency agents are sent to stop them.  Another one-act action story, which is the format for this series, but this flounders a bit on the plotting - when you get down to it, it really is just two characters blasting their way past baddies, arcade-style.  Granted that depth is not the point of this series, it still feels superficial.  B- 

GOTHAM CENTRAL #3 - Driver goes back to that kidnapping that he never got around to solving in the first arc due to Mr Freeze showing up.  And this time, he actually makes some headway on it before the Firebug shows up to derail him again.  Order figures on Gotham Central make pretty unpleasant reading, but it deserves better.  On paper it's the same mix of superhero and police procedural as Powers, but here the police genre dominates.  There's got to be room for two good titles in this area, especially when they're so very different.  A

PETER PARKER, SPIDER-MAN #52 - Bit of an anticlimax, this.  I like Zeb Wells' stories for the most part, but here he seems to be struggling to find a resolution and ends up just having a big fight where the villains are too injured to continue.  Shame, since the first half was a good set-up.  By the way, the comedy distortion artwork of Francisco Herrera seems a little at odds with the tone of this book - I can't quite get my head around the fact that he's been assigned a Venom series to draw.  Is that really going to work?  B-

VENTURE #1 - Another book from the Image superhero line, and another character design that's obviously meant to look iconic.  Maybe these guys are all too iconic.  Maybe, unless the character is a genuine icon already, the "iconic" look just ends up seeming too generic.  Perhaps that's part of the problem.  Anyway, this is another perfectly entertaining story from a line that's never fallen short of that standard.  Jay Faerber and Jamal Igle are the creative team, and it's about a journalist with an interest in the paranormal who stumbles upon a genuine superhero who's been trying to keep his activities low key.  No idea how they end up with the iconic costume, which seems rather counter to the character as shown in this issue, but then I expect that's the point.  Good start.  B+

A new Article 10 will be up on Monday at Ninth Art.

Next week, Exiles and X-Men Unlimited.  Uncanny X-Men is meant to be on that list as well, so don't be surprised if it turns up too.

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