Also this week...

AVENGERS #59 - This storyline is starting to look rather shapeless.  The original premise, you may remember, was "All the capital cities in the world disappear and the Avengers are left in charge of everything."  Which was a bit silly, and really more of a JLA plot idea, but not such a bad starting point.  This issue, the plot takes a bizarre swerve off to the side and focusses instead on the In-Betweener and the Zodiac Key, which really doesn't seem to have much to do with the first half of the plot at all.  Passable superheroics, but it really does read as though they're making up the plot as they go along.  B-

CALL OF DUTY: THE BROTHERHOOD #5 - Wow, the Call books are really imploding in a nasty way.  These books didn't start off too badly, albeit that they were classic examples of the post-September 11 genre derided by one critic as "crying fireman comics."  But the initial issues adopted a generally believable tone and contained emergency services procedural stories that allowed vague hints of mysticism to exist around the edges of the plot.  Now, it's all going terribly wrong.  Chuck Austen seems to want to canonise his protagonists, and Brotherhood's protagonist James McDonald is one of those boringly heroic characters who could really do with some redeeming flaws.  (Over in Wagon, poor Jennifer Montez barely registers as a character at all - she seems marginalised in her own plot.)  This was dragging the books down to mediocrity, but now that the plot has completely departed planet Earth, the series is becoming faintly embarrassing.  Time travelling Kirbytech?  Burning zombies?  What the hell?  This is a mess.  D+

CATWOMAN #12 - Selina Kyle is reunited with a childhood friend, while Slam Bradley (god, what a terrible name) tries to pluck up the courage to ask her out on a date.  Perfectly decent crime story, although this new storyline feels a little less distinctive in tone than some of the earlier issues.  B+

CEREBUS #282 - The astute among you may notice that I reviewed Cerebus #283 last week.  I believe this is the second time Diamond UK has shipped issues of Cerebus to the UK in the wrong order, and the second time that nobody noticed because the stories were so incredibly boring that nobody actually managed to read them and work out the problem.  Certainly I couldn't slug my way through this thing, which contains a grinding thirteen pages of small print dissection of the Book of Genesis.  The general idea - Cerebus attempts to reinterpret the Book of Genesis so that references to "God" and "JHVH" are taken as separate entities with JHVH viewed as a false, flawed and female god - was established several issues ago and while on one level  it's quite a clever piece of reinterpretation, it's also now hammering the idea in a way which is simply incredibly dull.  Not to mention that it's another extension of Sim's demented arguments about the inferior nature of women, of course.  C-

FIGHT FOR TOMORROW #2 - Brian Wood fills in some of the details on Cedric Zhang's background, and gives us more underground fighting.  The plot has some elements that strain credibility a bit, but the characters are thoroughly believable and so the plot carries it off.  And I love the loose, dynamic artwork that Denys Cowan and Kent Williams are providing, particularly their martial arts work.  A-

HELLBLAZER #177 - Mike Carey begins his second story arc, "Red Sepulchre", and we're back in London with the magic at the forefront again.  It's a traditional take on Hellblazer which should appeal to a lot of the people who (like me) thought that the Azzarello run with largely driven by shock value and had missed the point.  On the other hand, it's yet to stand out as a particularly distinctive take on the character in its own right - thus far, the general impression is of Carey and Frusin re-establishing the way things used to be.  B

PARADIGM #2 - Paradigm is a deliberately cryptic comic, although it might be argued that it's going a little further in that direction than it really needs to.  Certainly there's plenty here to get your teeth into, and it's packed solid with ideas in a way that takes quite some digesting.  Not an easy read, and I'm still entirely unclear where any of this is heading, but the density and originality of the book are holding my attention.  B+

PROMETHEA #23 - My god, it's the end of the magical mystery tour.  I thought it would never happen.  This issue, Alan Moore sets himself the rather difficult task of illustrating the concept of god, and for all that I think Promethea contains an incredible amount of mystic nonsense, there's no denying that Moore and Williams demonstrate an incredible mastery of the medium here.  There's some fabulous use of non-sequential panels to break down the sense of the passage of time, and as a piece of storytelling, it's magnificent work.  Of course, it's still devoted largely to lecturing the audience on mysticism, and I still think the blatancy of that is a problem.  Nonetheless, this is the sort of issue that demonstrates why anyone with a serious interest in comics storytelling ought to be reading this book.  A

SPIDER-MAN'S TANGLED WEB #19 - Hey, my copy has three repeated signatures!  It's a rare variant!  Well, whatever.  This is one of those "Seinfeld with supervillains" stories, with beleaguered D-list supervillain the Grizzly attempting to reform himself and generally failing to fit into the real world.  After all, he's a large man dressed as a bear.  Not exactly subtle, but quite amusing.  B

ULTIMATES #7 - The Ultimates deal with the fall-out of the Hulk trashing New York in typical fashion - by pretending it was nothing to do with them.  Meanwhile, the domestic violence plot is pursued in relatively tasteful fashion, certainly by Millar's standards.  Perfectly good superheroics, and the usual excellent artwork from Bryan Hitch.  A-

WILDCATS v3.0 #3 - Well, more of the same, with the same strengths and weaknesses.  Halo appears to have hired the only accountant in the world who's actively opposed to offering business consultancy advice, for example.  Casey suffers from a tendency to make the people arguing the opposite case into straw men, but there are interesting ideas in here, and the art is pretty good, with an excellent colouring job.  B+

I'm still thinking about the Delphi Forum idea.  I'll get back to you.

Last week's Article 10 is still up at Ninth Art.

Next week, Exiles continues the Mojoverse plot, X-Statix will doubtless be wonderful as ever, Uncanny X-Men continues the back-to-basics direction, and Wolverine: Netsuke will be pretty and expensive.

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