Also among this week's comics...

CAPTAIN AMERICA #15 - Ladies and gentlemen, this week's Chuck Austen book.  According to an orange-lighted rumour in Lying in the Gutters, Jae Lee had in fact drawn the entire book from the uncredited John Ney Reiber's plots.  Austen is dialoguing, not the original story, but a completely new one over the existing art.  (Rich advises readers to look for art showing a mountain hideout with sky in the background, captioned as "an undersea lair.")  Whether or not this is true is ultimately immaterial, save to Reiber who may well be delighted that his name is not on the book.  What is more to the point is that the story is certainly incoherent enough for it to be plausible.  Even as somebody who's never been all that impressed by the character, I'm slackjawed with amazement at the mess Marvel have made of this book over the last year.  On the bright side, there's a Dave Gibbons story round the corner, so maybe he can improve things.  C-

FALLEN ANGEL #1 - Peter David and newcomer David Lopez launch a new ongoing series about a character who may or may not be linked to David's Supergirl, but I'll ignore that since I never read it.  David is toning down his comedy here in favour of a somewhat darker story about the bizarre town of Bete Noir, where the police don't go out at night, Hitler runs a bar, and the local council has presumably dropped the circumflex in Bête as a protest against the French stand on Iraq.  I'm not sure quite what to make of this; it's going for a sort of twisted noir feel that doesn't immediately appeal to me, but that's more a matter of personal taste.  I'll give it a couple of issues to see how it settles.  B

FANTASTIC FOUR #500 - The conclusion of "Unthinkable", and it delivers pretty much the sort of conclusion you'd expect from Mark Waid - a solid one that resolves the story while simultaneously completing Reed's character arc which was the focus of earlier issues.  Eminently competent, in other words, but no real surprises.  Despite a general lack of sympathy to stories about why it's vitally important that we should all believe in magic, I have no real problem with anything here - it's just nothing particularly new.  But then, this is a book that's been going for forty years; is there really anything left to do with it that hasn't been done before?  B

IRON MAN #70 - Robin Laws begins the first storyline that's all his own work, in the same week that Marvel announce his departure from the book.  Well, whatever.  In fact, this issue is perfectly enjoyable; it's a Las Vegas story with some cute gambling scenes and some quite pleasant art from Robert Teranishi.  Mind you, he does seem to have a weakness for odd panel layouts that don't tell the story very well - there's a reason panel borders were invented, you know.  B+

QUEEN AND COUNTRY #17 - Part two?  Christ, I must have missed the last issue.  That's something to do on Monday, then.  Carla Speed McNeill is the artist for this arc, and according to my Big Book of Received Wisdom I should at this point be telling you that she's absolutely fabulous and that Finder is the best comic you're not reading.  I've never read it either, but received wisdom does rate it very highly.  Shifts of art style are one of the features of this book, and this is a particularly drastic one.  To be honest, it's not really to my taste, although admittedly she's not working with the most visually stimulating material in this issue (which includes some nineteen pages of office conversation).  Then again, she doesn't really make it visually interesting.  Still, received wisdom outvotes me 99 to 1, so there you go.  B

SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #1 - Paul Jenkins returns, this time with Humberto Ramos in tow, in what amounts to a continuation of Peter Parker, Spider-Man.  Quite why it's now a new issue #1, I'm not sure, unless it's some sort of hangover from the planned reshuffle involving Kevin Smith that never happened.  Anyway, Venom guest stars, which is unfortunate because it necessarily involves giving away more information about the character's status quo than Venom's own book managed in two issues, while still leaving the whole position a bit confused.  Jenkins continues to have fun with the supporting cast, though.  And while Ramos seems to draw Spider-Man with a lot of weblines that suggest he's about to crash into the ground at high speed (um, shouldn't the weblines be attached to something high?), he does do a wonderful Venom.  I'm not really looking for Venom stories from Paul Jenkins, but at least it should help bring some attention to his book.  B+

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

Next week, X-Men Unlimited hits issue #50; New Mutants and Wolverine both hit issue #3; Uncanny X-Men #428 satisfies the Austen quota; Spider-Man/Wolverine #2 satisfies the Wolverine miniseries quota; and X-Treme X-Men #28 continues God Loves Man Kills II.

Completists may wish to know that X-Men: Phoenix #2 is also out, although I draw the line at actually reviewing it; and there's a reissue of the Marvel Must Have reprint of New X-Men #116-118, though why you'd buy that rather than just getting the first Morrison trade is quite beyond me.

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