Also this week...

ALL NEW ATOM #1 - Yes, that's the official title.  And what a bizarre creative team we have here - written by Gail Simone, based on an outline by Grant Morrison, and pencilled by John Byrne.  It sounds like a train wreck in the making, but actually works out rather nicely.  The tone of the writing is far more Morrison than Simone, but then to be fair, it's the origin story.  Byrne's art gives it a more traditional superhero feel, and it's actually some of his best recent work.  It meshes far better than you'd expect.  Oh, and mercifully, it's a new DC series that doesn't want you to care about recent big events (despite the intimidating Brave New World logo on the cover).  It'd be nice to see a bit more of Gail Simone's identity coming through, but no doubt that will come in time.  Surprisingly good, all told.  A-

BATTLER BRITTON #1 - Another WildStorm revival of an obscure British children's character nobody under the age of 40 has heard of.  Battler Britton is your traditional square-jawed heroic RAF pilot from World War II, so naturally they've given him to Garth Ennis.  But Ennis has a lot more respect for this genre than he does for superheroes, and he does it straight.  Unlike most of Ennis' war comics, you could probably give this to kids.  For the regular comics audience, whether this book adds anything to the many, many war stories Ennis has written in the past is highly debatable.  Britton isn't really a very interesting character.  Rather, he's the stock lead for the dormant genre of children's war stories.  As an attempt to bring some life into that genre, this works out pretty well.  B+

BEYOND! #1 - Because you demanded it: a direct sequel to Secret Wars, only with a bunch of minor characters like Gravity, the Hood and Firebird.  Oh, and Spider-Man.  And it does it exactly what it says on the tin, re-enacting the opening of Secret Wars and throwing a bunch of random characters together.  I'm still not sure I understand why they're doing this book at all, and the cliffhanger doesn't work because it telegraphs a cosmic reset button.  But it's still quite amusing, in the way that you'd expect a C-list Secret Wars to be.  File under "guilty pleasure."  B

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, Mike Carey and Chris Bachalo take over X-Men with issue #188, while Captain America guest stars in Wolverine: Origins #4.

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