Also this week:

EMO BOY #1 - A new bi-monthly series from Slave Labor, although it might have been a good idea to actually use the words "bi-monthly" in the issue, since anyone who just bought it off the shelf will be left with a joke announcement that issue #2 is shipping in 2007.  Nothing like autosabotage, is there?  But strangely appropriate, since the book tells stories of Emo Boy, the superhumanly sensitive adolescent whose angst is special and unique, and who has written large amounts of poetry to explain it all to you.  With his gloriously arbitrary emo powers, Emo Boy channels his personal angst for... well, no real gain.  It's very funny, but it also comes across as a one-joke comic, and I'm not entirely sure I need to see another issue of it.  It's a good joke, though.  A-

MARVEL TEAM-UP #9 - Wow, a third consecutive issue of two unrelated characters teaming up to fight random villains only for the same explosion to come up at the end.  Not exactly well paced, is it?  Still, if you have a desperate hankering to see Daredevil and Luke Cage in a random fight against the new Stilt-Man, or if you're excited by the prospect of Sleepwalker teaming with the Black Cat (no, really), then you're right in the target market for this.  The rest of us can just wonder when something's going to actually happen.  C+

MATADOR #2 - Second issue of Devin Grayson and Brian Stelfreeze's collaboration, and thus far it's living up to the promise of the debut.  Stelfreeze has the visual style to carry any old rubbish - he almost made that Domino miniseries worth reading - and this time he's actually got an interestingly enigmatic story to work with.  The plot veers a little towards the contrived, but the book has the panache to get away with that.  A-

There's a new Article 10 on Monday at Ninth Art.

Next week, District X bites the dust with issue #14.  X-Men #171 begins "Bizarre Love Triangle."  (You can tell it's a Peter Milligan story, realy, can't you?)  And X-Men: The End reaches volume 2, issue #4.  And that's your lot - the X-books are actually thinning out enormously over the next couple of months, although something tells me that that's just a temporary thing until House of M finishes and the next wave of launches comes along.

If you have more money than sense, there's also a variant cover of Astonishing X-Men #10 - something to tide you over, because issue #11 has just been postponed until the second half of July.  And if you have more money than taste, you can buy a hardback edition of the recent X-Men/Fantastic Four miniseries.  Ideal for whacking yourself over the head with once you realise how bad it is!

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