Also this week:

ANNA MERCURY #1 - Another Warren Ellis miniseries for Avatar.  (And you know you're dealing with a classy publisher when their standard copyright warning includes "All characters as depicted in this story are over the age of 18.")  Apparently, this is one of his attempts to revive other pulp genres, and that's certainly how it comes across.  Anna Mercury is a babe in black leather who runs around the retro city of New Ataraxia doing cool stuff and confusing the locals.  Frankly, she's a bit too blatant as a wish-fulfilment character to really make me interested in her, but Ellis's fanbase should love it.  Newcomer artist Facundo Percio does a generally good job, though.  He's gone a bit overboard with Anna's hair, but he's strong on the cityscapes.  B+ 

CABLE #2 - Well, this is slow.  It's basically just a protracted continuation of a single fight scene, interspersed with a Bishop flashback explaining the series from his point of view.  None of the contents are terribly surprising, but there are a few neat details in there, and I like the fact that Bishop clearly still thinks he's the hero.  Still, the main plot consists essentially of Bishop and Cable fighting ve-e-e-e-ery slowly, and there doesn't seem to be much to it.  Ariel Olivetti's art is also hit and miss - for every impressive page, there's a panel where people are standing at 45 degrees to vertical.  B-

LOGAN #2 - Well, at least he didn't turn out to be Sunfire's dad.  It's Hiroshima, it's 1945, Logan fights the racist American soldier from the last issue, and then somebody drops a nuke on them.  It's a strange story, this, and one that could easily come across as a bit tacky.  To Vaughan and Risso's credit, it doesn't, but I'm really not sure at this stage what point they're trying to make with it.  Vaughan seems to be trying to spin this as some sort of turning point in Wolverine's life, but with the best will in the world, I don't really see why.  B

SECRET INVASION #1 - Alien doppelgangers invade the Marvel Universe.  As a concept, I rather like this - it's Invasion of the Body Snatchers with superheroes, and what's wrong with that?  In practice, I'm not so sure they've really managed to make the most of the paranoia angle, and at times Bendis seems unsure of how seriously he wants to take this.  They've got to build up the Skrulls as a semi-credible threat in order for it to work, but come on, it's still basically little green men invading - as the B-movie logo tacitly admits.  Superhero team books generally haven't been Bendis' strength, but this is one of his better efforts, hitting the ground running in the first issue, and with a cute "everything you know is wrong" tease that's surely a misdirection (anything else would be suicidal) but promises to be fun nonetheless.  I enjoyed this more than I was expecting.  A-

There's more from me at If Destroyed, and if you're desperate for more Article 10 columns, you can always hunt through the archives on Ninth Art.

Next week, um, Wolverine #64, which is the third part of the Mystique storyline.  Oddly, everything else has slipped off schedule...

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