Also this week:

FANTASTIC FOUR: HOUSE OF M #2 - Another pretty decent House of M crossover effort, this time simply by trying to tell a good story within the context of the House of M world.  Where it gets into trouble, of course, is that it's trying to tell a story about Doom overthrowing the government of Magneto, and it's hard to see how it can possibly pay that off considering that he's kind of needed for the core House of M miniseries.  Unless of course next issue isn't an ending at all, but simply tells us to read House of M for the finish - but that would be hugely disappointing, and given the way things have been going, I don't really expect that to happen.  Anyway, if you can take it on its own terms and ignore the megacrossover context, this is rather good fun.  Not quite sure what I make of the reverse psychology of revealing that the It is still Ben Grimm after all, though, since the prospect of him being Reed was surely a bit more interesting.  A-

IRON MAN: HOUSE OF M #2 - This, on the other hand, is thoroughly disappointing.  Greg Pak has written some fairly good stuff for Marvel lately, and the story isn't without its points of interest.  But the art kills it stone dead.  You can normally rely on Pat Lee to draw a decent robot, even if he can't do much with human beings.  Here, though, even the robots here are nothing to write home about.  Ugly, hard to follow, and while the story is fundamentally okay, it's not worth slogging through these visuals to get to it.  C

Y: THE LAST MAN #36 - Basically a whole issue of flashbacks to Yorick and Beth's relationship, so that it actually means something when they finally meet up - which is presumably now on the horizon, since they're finally in the same continent.  I'm not entirely sold on the wisdom of bringing in superhero imagery even as part of Yorick's dreams - it's just so loaded in comics that it imbalances a series like this.  The relationship comes across really well, though, and does the much needed job of reminding us why we should want these two to be together.  A

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

Next week, X-Men #174 wraps up "Bizarre Love Triangle", and that's it as far as mainstream continuity is concerned.  House of M #5 continues the big event, Exiles #68 has more giant monsters, and Ororo: Before the Storm #3 brings us exciting tales of young Storm versus Apocalypse's house.

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