Also this week:

GENEXT #3 - The first half of a No-Name story.  Or rather, a story where she runs away.  She's an odd character; the narrator persists in calling her "mysterious" and she's never been properly identified, but the rest of the cast presumably know who she is.  This seems to be an odd example of Claremont writing a story where the characters all know what's going on but deliberately don't explain it to the readers.  Curious, and I'm keeping an open mind about this.  So far, I've enjoyed the series more than I expected to.  The back-up reprint this month is an old What The--?! story by Kurt Busiek and Kyle Baker, but be warned that it depends on you having a reasonable familiarity with the X-books circa the late 1980s.  It's patchy at best, but there's some cute parodying of the likes of the Morlock Massacre.  ("127 muties dead... all complete nobodies, as far as I can tell.")  B

NEW EXILES #8 - Chris Claremont's other title sets one of my concerns about this story to rest, by confirming that, yes, there is a reason why the level of technology on this particular Earth is so wildly inconsistent.  In fact, it's all quite readable so long as it sticks to the basic story.  A lengthy subplot about Psylocke and Slaymaster doesn't do much for me, though - for heaven's sake, that story was two decades ago, and it had a perfectly acceptable ending already.  It drags the book down a few notches.  Overall, though, New Exiles is a book which delivers what it promises: Chris Claremont doing alternate-reality stories, with everything that implies.  It's too busy, but at least the creators seem to be having fun.  C+

There's more from me at If Destroyed, and apparently the Ninth Art archive is going to back online at some point...

Next week, X-Factor #33 crosses over with Secret Invasion and She-Hulk all at the same time, and X-Force #5 continues to rack up the body count.

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