Also this week:

AVENGERS #56 - Searingly topical satire, as Kurt Busiek explores how even the most well-intentioned of auditors can find themselves led by client pressure into fudging those all-important accounts. Deeply insightful, brilliantly restrained. I await the inevitable sequel where Tony Stark is forced to write down his profits by 80% after an external investor's auditors explain SSAP 9 to him ("Yes, Tony, but you haven't actually SOLD any of your inventions to anyone, have you?" "Well, I was GOING to...") and the Avengers admit to exaggerating their world-saving statistics by counting the Moon as a world in its own right.  B+

CEREBUS #280 - God bless Dave Sim, who continues to produce issues with plot synopses you'll never see anywhere else. This month, Cerebus attempts to formulate his own religion by spontaneously lecturing Woody Allen about Judaism despite not actually knowing anything about the subject. It's fair to say that most people's patience is going to be taxed by the grinding nine pages of small print in which Cerebus analyses Chapter 1 of Genesis sentence by sentence, but bizarrely it starts to make a perverse sort of sense by the end. Not that I believe a word of it, but if Sim's theme here is the Chinese Whispers nature of organised religion, the point is made quite well.  B+

CLA$$WAR #3 - I reviewed the first issue of this six-issue, monthly miniseries on 24 February. At that point it had already been put back from September 2001. Now, after the artist was poached by Marvel, Com.X announce a revised shipping schedule which will see the series resolve, with issue #6, in May 2003.  Com.X seem to be so consistently plagued with scheduling problems on everything they do that they've either been incredibly unlucky or they desperately need (a) a traffic manager, and/or (b) contracts which compel their artists to finish the damn series before moving elsewhere. And since when does Cary Nord take ten months to produce three issues? Anyhow, the issue is alright, but I really despair of Com.X. The comics are okay, but their inability to actually publish them is verging on farcical.  B

JLA #68 - The beginning of the Obsidian Age storyline, as Joe Kelly looks for an interesting way to hit the reset button. And oddly enough, despite the chronological pretzels which the story has tied itself into by the end of part one, I'm actually quite curious to know where he's heading with this. One of this team's stronger issues so far.  B+

As I'm writing this, it's just been announced that the greatest hits of Scooter has entered the album chart in the Top 10. I wonder if I can emigrate to Canada.

The next Article 10 column will up on Monday at Ninth Art.

Next week, a cripplingly large number of X-books, as Marvel play "how many relaunches requiring publicity can we shove out in the same week so that none of them gets any attention?"  Agent X #1is coming out. So is Soldier X #1. So is Uncanny X-Men #410, Chuck Austen's first issue. So is the first issue of the Chamber miniseries. So are two of the Weapon X one-shots - Sauron and Wild Child. For that matter, so is the Ultimate X-Men hardcover, and the Weapon X TPB.

Oh, and Exiles #16. But that's got no chance of anyone talking about it.

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