Also this week...

FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST FAMILY #6 - The concluding part of Joe Casey and Chris Weston's miniseries about the FF's early years.  It's beautifully drawn but, viewed as a whole, it doesn't really work.  There are some thoroughly awkward continuity fudges as Casey struggles to find some sort of pay-off, which means that Reed ends up proposing to Sue right at the very outset of the team even though it's several years early.  The treatment of the characters is perfectly fine so far as it goes, but despite the initial promise, it never seems to add up to a coherent bigger picture.  It's beautiful, of course, but I don't honestly know what point it thinks its making about the team.  B-

NEW X-MEN #28 - Duncan Rouleau provides guest art, but he's a lot more subdued than the last time he worked at Marvel, and it looks pretty good.  It helps that he gets to draw Nimrod, a John Romita Jr creation who has the sort of oddball design that plays to the strengths of artists like Rouleau.  As for the story, it's good to see that the book is finally focussing in on its core cast and allowing them to do something - they've been practically marginalised in some of the recent stories.  It's worth mentioning, though, that this is yet another story where a bunch of mutants cheerfully wander out of the Institute without the Sentinel guards noticing.  This time they even make a joke out of how incompetent the Sentinels are, but that only flags up the problem further - what's the point of doing this Sentinel Squad storyline if all the writers are going to ignore them and treat them as an ineffectual joke?  If you're going to do it at all, you have to take them more seriously than this.  Still, overall, not bad at all.  B+

ULTIMATE X-MEN #73 - Well, this is the big payoff where the Magician turns out to be manipulating everyone's minds.  It looks like Kirkman is going for the idea that his character is just an illusionist and isn't really all that powerful after all.  Fair enough, and the build-up to this point has been handled quite well.  It's good to see that Kirkman was indeed shoving his creation down our throats as a set-up rather than because he was doing it sincerely.  But on the downside, there's still not much here to actually make the Magician an interesting character in his own right.  It's a cute idea for a story that needs a better developed central character.  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, Claws #1 begins a three-issue miniseries with Wolverine and the Black Cat, and if you think I can still summon up any enthusiasm for yet another bloody Wolverine miniseries, you're sorely mistaken.  Meanwhile, the Civil War crossover continues (tenuously, if the first issue is anything to go by) in Civil War: X-Men #2.  And over in the trades, Son of M gets collected, while Cable & Deadpool begins a fifth trade paperback.

back | continue