Also this week...

ASTRO CITY: LOCAL HEROES #2 - The source material for this one's pretty clear.  It's a riff on the Superman and Lois Lane relationship - all those stories where she would nearly expose his true identity and they'd play bizarre Silver Age tricks on one another.  To modern eyes those stories read as weird and occasionally rather cruel, and Busiek takes that as the starting for point for a similar relationship which actually is as warped as the Superman stories seem.  Perhaps it wears its influences a little too obviously on its sleeve, but it's still a fun inversion of the established set-up.  A-

BLACK PANTHER #57 - J Torres and Ryan Bodenheim with a two-part fill-in story set in past continuity, which is normally code for "we commissioned this ages ago and never found a gap to run it".  Bodenheim was the guy who won that Wizard World artist contest and got to draw a back-up strip in Wolverine; teamed here with an experienced inker (Walden Wong), the results are perfectly acceptable, especially from a relative novice.  The actual story perhaps spends a bit too much time trying to mimic the tone of earlier Christopher Priest stories, not to mention shamelessly recycling the plot of Hamlet.  But there are worse stories to recycle, and it holds together more or less.  B

BLOOD & WATER #2 - Basically more of the same from issue #1 - extended exposition about why it's great to be a vampire, although livened up with a suitably nightmarish hallucination sequence at the end.  Still, Winick seems almost more concerned to remind us how cool his concept of vampirism is, as opposed to telling any particular story with it.  A bit more plot needed.  B

CAPTAIN AMERICA #12 - Remember when Captain America turned into a wolf?  Ah, happy days.  This is the beginning of "Ice", which started off as a miniseries by John Ney Reiber and Jae Lee and now finds itself as part of the regular series and with the main writing credit given to Chuck Austen.  The political agenda is becoming a little clearer - the idea is supposed to be that Captain America is just so darned idealistic and great that the US government was concerned that he might turn on them rather than allow Hiroshima.  It's not an idea that I buy for a second - Hiroshima differed from, say, Dresden in scale rather than ideological objectionability, and he didn't do anything about that.  Anyhow, the story suggests radical retcons of Captain America's history in order to turn his absence after World War II into a conspiracy story.  Despite some attractive individual panels from Jae Lee, characters are hard to tell apart and exposition is virtually nonexistent.  Very, very bad indeed.  D

HUMAN TORCH #1 - Another Tsunami book, taking us back to Johnny Storm as a schoolboy.  I'm starting to see the approach here - while this is nominally a superhero title, to all intents and purposes it's nothing of the sort.  It's a high school comedy drama.  There are no supervillains present, and the only antagonist is Mike Snow, Storm's rival for the school's alpha male status.  In a refreshing change from the cliches, Karl Kesel doesn't write Snow as a bullying jock; he's written as a basically quiet and likeable chap until Storm goes out of his way to challenge for the role, and Storm seems at least as much to blame for the feud that follows.  Skottie Young's exaggerated figures seem at home with this material.  Pleasantly readable stuff.  B

STORMWATCH: TEAM ACHILLES #10 - Tefibi is arrested by the corrupt US government.  Oh hold on, sorry, he's not.  He's indefinitely detained without trial under anti-terrorist legislation.  What nonsense.  We all know that doesn't work unless you hold the prisoners offshore.  Dearie me, these left-wing writers with their slipshod research and their fundamentally accurate points.  Anyhow, it's basically a one-act story of Tefibi's escape, played in large part for laughs.  While Portacio's work is easier on the eye than in previous issues, he's not really a comedy artist, and the jokes don't entirely work.  B

ULTIMATE ADVENTURES #3 - Holy shit, issue #3?  What is this, four months late?  Anyhow, for anyone who can still remember the plot, this is about Jack trying to build a relationship with Hank.  I can see what Zimmerman's trying to do here, but it isn't quite working - the characters are a little too contrived to really care about their relationship, and Zimmerman's tiresome layer of protective irony is too prominent.  C+

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

I remind you once again that you can vote in the UK National Comics Awards at their website.  The X-Axis and Ninth Art are both eligible for the website awards.

Next week, Wolverine: X-Isle continues; New X-Men begins a new storyline; another issue of X-Men Unlimited (which has become badly backlogged while waiting for this week's issue to be ready - there's another one due the week after next as well!); and more fill-ins in Wolverine and Soldier X.

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