Also this week...

CIVIL WAR: YOUNG AVENGERS & RUNAWAYS #4 - Not quite as detached from the crossover as Civil War: X-Men was, but it's getting there.  The crossover is really just an excuse to get the two teams together, to keep Young Avengers on the shelves in some form, and to bring back, of all people, Marvel Boy.  Not bad as these things go, but I'd expected better from the creators.  Zeb Wells is a quirky and imaginative writer, but here he's just playing it straight, and it doesn't bring out the best in him.  Artist Stefano Caselli has some major lapses of clarity and a big problem with making the characters too similar to each other, which is a shame, since there's a certain rubbery charm to his figures.  Overall, it's adequate but not much more.  B-

ULTIMATE X-MEN #76 - Hot on the heels of Ultimate Cable, it's Ultimate Bishop.  Yes, this arc has two simultaneously time-travel paradoxes for the price of one!  Still, Robert Kirkman is building up the plot nicely, focussing on the action rather than overloading us with baffling time-travel problems.  Ben Oliver is proving to be an impressive artist for the action sequences, and while the underlying "I have come back from the future to change history" stuff is old hat, it's still an energetic take.  B+

WOLVERINE: ORIGINS #8 - I have to admit, the pacing on this book has improved tremendously.  It's shaken off the extreme sluggishness of Daniel Way's early stories, and this arc seems to be a lot tighter.  On the downside, it's still just an okay arc at best; no matter how you spin it, it's still just Wolverine fighting Omega Red over a macguffin from 1991, which wasn't that interesting the first time.  But we're definitely moving in the right direction here, and the book no longer seems self-indulgent.  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, Astonishing X-Men #18 sneaks out a month late.  Cable & Deadpool #34 gets back to normal business after the crossover season.  And there's X-Men: First Class #3 - somewhat to my surprise, since I have no recollection of issue #2.  It must have slipped by me, but normally people e-mail when that sort of thing happens, so apparently I'm not alone.

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