Also this week...

ALIAS #19 - "The Underneath" continues, and again ties in with plot elements from Bendis' current Daredevil arc.  Those two must be the most closely tied titles in the Marvel line at the moment, which is a strange thought.  Anyhow, Jessica has tracked down Spider-Woman, and inadvertantly finds out why that drug dealer in Daredevil last week was selling drugs supposedly distilled from Spider-Man.  Thoroughly unpleasant but very effective.  A

FANTASTIC FOUR: UNSTABLE MOLECULES #2 - A focus on Sue Sturm this issue, and it's largely about her struggle for identity as a 25-year-old housewife in the pre-feminist era.  I'm still a little confused as to quite what James Sturm is trying to achieve in this series, although here he seems to be using the Fantastic Four's nuclear family template, and the mother/sister role of Sue, as the starting point for an examination of 1950s family roles.  Whatever it has to do with the Fantastic Four, it's nonetheless an excellent character piece in its own right, holding its own as a story even while the point of the metafiction elements remains obscure.  A

HELLBLAZER #180 - The end of the Red Sepulchre storyline, and as with Mike Carey's previous story, it seems in part to be setting up storylines for further plots.  I get the impression Carey has a pretty clear direction in mind and at the moment we're getting a series of set-up stories.  And it's a perfectly decent set-up, with a resolution that just manages to slide past being a deus ex machina, even if the whole Kali thing comes out of the blue.  Still, this is relatively standard Hellblazer territory - the question is what Carey has waiting at the end of the set-up period.  Based on Lucifer, I'm optimistic  B+

MARVEL DOUBLE-SHOT #4 - Greg Rucka and Klaus Janson take on Iron Man, in what amounts to an extended take on the Edwin Robinson poem Richard Cory.  That's a reference which is expressly drawn to your attention on page one, and the remainder of the story then proceeds to make basically the same point in more detail.  It's a great poem, though, and fairly fitting for Iron Man, so I have no problem.  The other piece is Michael Gilbert doing a retro-sixties styled Dr Strange story.  It's quite good within that style, but the point of pastiching comics from forty years ago isn't entirely clear to me.  B

PUNISHER #21 - The Punisher continues to follow morally questionable police officers Pearse and Seifert.  This storyline is a definite change of tone from most of Ennis' work on this series - the black comedy is shoved to the background, and instead the focus is a relatively serious examination of the pressures of the police job.  Whether the story title, "The Brotherhood", is intended as some kind of answer to the more rosey-eyed Call of Duty is open to question, but it's a good change of pace for the series, and a solid character study.  A-

THOR #59 - Despite brushing with Authority-style themes of heroes dominating global politics, Thor remains one of Marvel's more traditional titles.  So the appearance of a fill-in issue by Christopher Priest and Trent Kaniuga is rather strange.  Thor doesn't (or at least probably doesn't) appear in this issue at all - it's set in 2026, by which time we'll apparently all be using flying cars, and it's about a elderly man who claims to be Thor trapped in human form, and the fate of the lost hammer.  The sci-fi elements seem a little forced, and narration in rhyming couplets is rarely a good move.  Some interesting ideas nonetheless, and generally good artwork from Kaniuga when he steers clear of the B-movie sci-fi, but not wholly successful.  B-

ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #36 - The origin of Venom continues, as Bendis establishes various other key points of Venom's character through the back door.  I'm quite impressed by the way he's managed to get to broadly the same conclusion while completely skipping most of the original nonsense, although the Venom character design remains rather out of place in this series.  The closing twist, while it ought to be blindingly obvious, is a nice piece of misdirection.  A-

VERTIGO POP: LONDON #4 - The end of a series which I was going to describe as vastly underrated before realising that that isn't actually true.  Reaction from those who actually read the damn thing has been universally good, and this final issue holds up the quality perfectly.  It's more accurate to say that it's been vastly underpurchased.  Hopefully Vertigo will put out a trade paperback this side of 2004 so that you can fix that.  Great book, which deserved much better in sales.  A

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

Next week, according to the shipping list, just Mekanix.  But the shipping list is rarely complete these days, so we can also look out for the possible appearance of Uncanny X-Men (already running late) and Ultimate X-Men.

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