Also among this week's comics...

ALIAS #24 - Beginning the new storyline Purple, which is essentially the second half of Jessica's origin story, explaining just where it all went wrong for her.  The title is a fairly obvious clue, hampered only by the fact that most readers still probably wouldn't think of that particular character turning up in a Bendis title.  Of course, when you stop to think about it, he fits in rather well.  Bonus marks for a fabulous opening sequence in which Jessica quite rightly refuses to participate in an utterly ludicrous plot.  A-

CEREBUS #291 - The good news is that the last two issues turn out to be all we're getting of the Book of Cerebus, and the series reverts here to (relatively) conventional storytelling.  Taking decompressed storytelling to its logical conclusion, Dave Sim brings you a seven page scene in which Cerebus gets out of bed and walks across the room - and in fairness, it's surprisingly readable.  The politics are still refreshingly insane, of course, and it looks like Sim is steering towards "Cerebus dies alone and unloved because he's the only man in the world who hasn't been corrupted by those nasty feminists".  B-

FORMERLY KNOWN AS THE JUSTICE LEAGUE #1 - I'm not big on DC history, but I really did enjoy what I've read of the Giffen, DeMatteis and Maguire Justice League run.  This six-issue series is a shameless revival of the cast and concept in a light comedy superhero team.  Technically there's a villain, but he's only on page one and you can ignore him.  The rest of the issue is people talking to one another in a "gathering the team" set-up, and it works just fine.  It's clearly aimed at people who are familiar with the original, although it's not as mindnumbingly inaccessible as Giffen's Suicide Squad (perhaps because of better scripting from DeMatteis).  A niche product, but if you're in the niche, you'll probably get a kick out of it.  A-

ULTIMATE ADVENTURES #4 - Yes, that's issue #4.  For comparison purposes, you may wish to note that Captain Marvel is now up to issue #11.  Not surprisingly in the circumstances, Duncan Fegredo has suddenly been joined by an inker, Walden Wong, which takes much of the edge off his art.  Anyhow, this issue the Ultimates come to try and recruit Hawk-Owl, but he tells them to get lost because he's way cool like that.  It's actually not a bad scene, in fairness.  Meanwhile, there's a really silly storyline about the school principal going mad.  Better than people think it is, but not so much better that they ought to actually start buying it or anything.  B

And let's call it a day there, shall we?

On Monday, there's another Article 10 at Ninth Art.  So read that.

Next week, the first issue of Emma Frost, which I can't say I'm all that optimistic about.  Brian Bendis continues his run on Ultimate X-Men, Greg Rucka continues Wolverine, and the stylish but hollow Domino mini reaches issue #3.  Plus, for some reason they're reshipping the Marvel Must Have collection of Ultimate X-Men #1-3 (ideal if you've ever wanted to own the first half of a trade paperback!), and the trade paperback of Wolverine: X-Isle is out (avoid it like the plague).

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