Also among this week's comics...

ALIAS #28 - The final issue, and the Purple Man continues to cover everything in a fog of metafiction.  I admit to being a bit confused by the sudden breaking of the fourth wall in this last arc; I'm not entirely clear what it adds, although I have a sinking feeling that it may be the "point of the book" which Bendis mentions in his editorial.  Or maybe he just means Jessica's trauma, which has indeed been resolved, with a suitable degree of superhero team-up at the end.  (Completists may wish to note that Jean Grey is in this issue, by the way.)  It does read rather oddly as the final issue of this series, but then it wouldn't really have been in character for the book to opt for a clean resolution.  Not least because it's being relaunched next year as Pulse.  B+

CRIMSON DYNAMO #3 - Over at Epic, you get the feeling they're already nailing the windows shut.  This issue, for example, gives us a tremendously awkward change of art style halfway through the issue (not least because Steve Ellis ends with an establishing shot for the next scene, and Joe Corroney picks up by ignoring it entirely).  There's some questionable laying out of the dialogue, as well, with a few scenes that I had to re-read several times to work out what order the dialogue was meant to be in.  On the other hand, there's actually a reasonably decent book in here somewhere; the story isn't without possibilities.  Presumably Miller will end up picking up the threads in his other title, Iron Man (which would at least make sense, since the Crimson Dynamo was an Iron Man villain); this book is going on "hiatus" with issue #6, and I'd be very surprised if that hiatus was anything other than permanent.  B-

POWERS #35 - After several issues retracing Christian Walker's history over many centuries (most of which he's forgotten), Powers finally gets up to his superhero career and 1986.  That was the year Watchmen came out.  I suspect it's no coincidence, since this story deals with Christian trying to find a way out of his life as an immortal; it's about disillusionment with the superhero lifestyle.  It's a typically good issue, but it's nice to finally get back to the modern day after what's been a fairly lengthy trawl through history.  B+

SEAMONSTERS & SUPERHEROES #1 - An anthology title from Scott Mills, published through Slave Labor Graphics.  The title isn't entirely misleading; Mills' idea here seems to be to use the genre conventions of superhero, monster and sci-fi comics in ways that are totally at odds with what's actually going on around them.  Sometimes these are just cute humour strips where the joke is that characters flagrantly fail to do what the genre expects of them.  At the other end of the spectrum are pieces like "Not A Fairy Tale", a strip in which all the dialogue has been replaced by a monologue about somebody's radiography career (arbitrarily broken up and shoved into speech balloons).  Much more enjoyable than I'm making it sound, although some of the strips have fairly predictable jokes that probably won't stand up to re-reading.  B+

There's a new Article 10 at Ninth Art on Monday.

Next week, New Mutants #7 begins the second trade paperback; the second issue of NYX; more of "Blockbuster" in Ultimate X-Men; the long overdue finale of Wolverine: Snikt!; and X-Treme X-Men continues "Intifada."

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