Also among this week's comics...

AVENGERS #77 - Only 50 cents!  Roughly value for money for this week's third Chuck Austen comic.  I gather this arc is going to involve Austen doing something with Captain Britain, a thought which has me reaching for the anti-depressants already.  This particular issue isn't too bad, although it does feature a woman who takes her kids to the pub to buy ice cream (WHAT?!), utterly inane sexual politics, and some rather patchy art.  Still, it aspires to blandness and comes close.  C+

ELEKTRA #31 - End of the "Prophet & Loss" storyline, which frankly hasn't been one of Rodi's better ones.  There's certainly some amusing ideas in here, but you'll forgive me if I don't quite identify with Elektra's ethical dilemma.  "You're a hired killer?  You've taken the assignment?  But the victim's a CHILD?"  Gee, why not just not be a hired killer if you're such an ethicist?  More to the point, though, there's a lot of rather boring stuff in this storyline with minor characters muttering about things that don't particularly matter.  Not bad by any means, but definitely substandard.  C+

Y: THE LAST MAN #18 - Uh... right.  Well, that's certainly... yes.  I realise we've got to get around to the vexed question of sex in a one-man universe at some point, but leaping directly to bondage seems a touch drastic, to put it mildly.  Any time you deal with this kind of thing, you run the risk of appearing gratuitous.  Given the tone of this series, it's probably not - but I'm damned if I can work out why it's going in this rather unusual direction.  B

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

Next week is another quiet one - "New Mutants" continues in Ultimate X-Men #41, and the defection storyline continues in Weapon X #17.  If you're buying the trades, there's also the Ultimate X-Men "Blockbuster" collection.  New Mutants #8 has been rescheduled for next week, but doesn't actually appear on the shipping list - so who knows what's going on with that one.

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