Also this week...

HOWARD THE DUCK #1 - Two revivals of old Steve Gerber characters in one week!  Why, he must be thrilled about that.  My own attitude is that, whatever the legal and moral rights and wrongs may be, Howard is so clearly identified with Gerber's voice that there isn't a great deal of point in having anyone else write him.  But Ty Templeton has gamely given it a shot, with Juan Bobillo providing an initially jarring but actually quite successful redesign of the character.  Does it work?  Kind of.  It raises laughs, and Templeton gets the style right.  But it's not so good as to convincingly explain why we're bringing back an old 1970s character, very much a product of the time, instead of creating something new.  Still, it's certainly not bad.  B 

INFINITY INC. #2 - Not unexpectedly, Peter Milligan's new series is starting to head for more conventional territory.  After all, at some point he's got to get a team book out of this.  But it's definitely a book where he's being given a lot of creative freedom - he's putting together a team of mentally ill superheroes, after all - and so far, it's still looking promising.  I'm not quite sold on Max Fiumara's art, which seems a little stiff, but it's good enough to get the job done.  B+

JLA / HITMAN #2 - Garth Ennis may not like superheroes much.  But on the rare occasions when he tries to take them seriously, he's still better than 99% of writers who actually like them.  You'd have been forgiven for expecting that JLA/Hitman would simply involve Ennis's character humiliating the regular superheroes, but he's avoided taking such an obvious route.  Instead, it's a relatively straight team-up book in which some perfectly sincere superheroes can't quite figure out how they ended up relying on a serial killer to save the day.  Ennis obviously has more time for the major iconic characters than the second tier guys, but hey, there's a good reason why Superman and Batman have made the legitimate transition to modern myth.  (And Green Lantern hasn't.)  Unexpectedly, this two-parter works both as a reminder of Hitman and as a proper superhero story.  A

OMEGA THE UNKNOWN #1 - Novelist Jonathan Lethem's revival of the short-lived Omega the Unknown has been in the works for years, but I'm going to reserve judgment for now.  The original series by Steve Gerber, Mary Skrenes and Jim Mooney was left unfinished, but it involved an unusually mature teenage boy who discovers that his parents are robots, and an alien superhero who has some link with him.  In other words, it's pretty much exactly what we see here, which is because Lethem's first issue is basically a straight remake of the original.  Apparently it won't stay like this, so it seems a bit futile to offer any sort of definitive review on the strength of a remake issue.  Art comes from acclaimed indie artist Farel Dalrymple, whose style is intriguingly at odds with the superhero idiom.  With the childlike logo, I'm wondering whether Lethem is planning on taking the line that Omega is simply a dream of Alexander's.  Anyway, it's intriguing, but so was the original.  Too early to call this one.

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, Wolverine #58 has the second chapter of Marc Guggenheim and Howard Chaykin's "Logan Dies" arc.  And in X-Factor #24, the Isolationist storyline wraps up.

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