Also this week:

DOC SAMSON #1 - Another product of Marvel's curious policy of commissioning creators you've never heard of to do miniseries about D-list heroes, publishing them with no advance publicity at all, and then watching them sink like lead bricks.  Unusually, this book seems to be planned as a series of single-issue stories, which is probably a good move.  The angle is Doc Samson as paranormal psychologist, which at least gives him a unique selling point.  It's a bit flat, though, feeling like a story that ought to be 35% funnier than it actually is.  I like the general approach, but it isn't quite clicking in the way that it should.  B-

SABLE & FORTUNE #1 - As if one "who's going to buy that?" miniseries wasn't enough for one week, here's Brendan Cahill and the excellent John Burns with, er, a Silver Sable and Dominic Fortune miniseries.  This is pretty good, though - there's some cute comedy based around Sable running the Wild Pack in the tyrannical style of a comic book employer, while her hapless mercenaries politely quote Symkarian employment laws at her.  (And get punched in the face for it.)  The characters are a good match for one another, and they're wisely being pitched in a straightforward ITC action spy story without too many fantasy elements.  Fun stuff.  A-

SENTINEL #3 - The big fight between the two Sentinels is marred by rather unsatisfying art.  Giant robot action sequences don't seem to be Joe Vriens' thing.  Fortunately, despite being a comic about a giant robot, Sentinel doesn't do that kind of thing very often, and things pick up as we get back to the story.  The rest of the time, "big and lumbering" works just fine for the Sentinel.  I'm not really being drawn into the story of this series in the same way as I was the first time round, and I'm not quite sure why that is.  I think the big problem is that the plot has unavoidably dragged Juston away from his supporting cast, and the book needs that interaction to give him another dimension.  B-

X-MEN: THE 198 FILES - Mentioned here more for completeness than anything else, since it's another of those Handbook spin-offs tying in to upcoming stories.  Basically, despite the name, it's actually very brief profiles of 138 characters who are still mutants.  There's a bit of new information included in some of the profiles, and if nothing else, it's nice to get some degree of clarification on the "still a mutant" list, even though massive amounts of room have been left for future manoeuvre.  198, by the way, turns out to be the number of surviving mutants that the government has counted so far.  And yes, Squirrel Girl is still a mutant.  Beyond that, the profiles are unavoidably so short that they're of limited interest in most cases, and the whole thing is marred by a horrific design error that sees key pieces of text printed in dark blue on black, making the book a chore to read unless you have a very bright light handy.  C+

X-MEN: THE END, BOOK THREE #1 - I toyed with giving this a full review.  But it's really just the start of another arc in this eighteen-issue series, which has long since drifted out of all touch with the current direction of the X-books.  The series has improved somewhat as it's gone along, with the vast number of characters and storylines cut down to a manageable core.  But it's the wrong manageable core, as Claremont seems determined to tell a story about the Shi'ar Empire while relegating the core themes of the X-Men to a subplot about the local elections in Chicago.  Evidently there's no prospect of this series turning round to go in the right direction.  So suffice to say that anyone who was enjoying the project already will be happy with this, since it's more of the same.  Nobody else need be concerned with it.  C

Last week's Article 10 is still up at Ninth Art.  And there's more from me at If Destroyed. 

Next week, X-Men: The 198 gets underway, giving us a total of four ongoing X-Men titles and two X-Men miniseries all at the same time.  Marvel really aren't learning the overkill lesson at all, are they?  Decimation continues in Son of M #2.  Robert Kirkman takes over Ultimate X-Men with issue #66, because Bryan Singer still hasn't found time to finish writing that arc they first announced back in 1937.  Exiles #75 takes the team to the 2099 universe.  And it's business as usual in New X-Men #22 and Cable & Deadpool #24.

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