Also this week...

FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN #24 - Oh... god... so... slow.  In fairness to J Michael Straczynski, he wrote this as a weekly serial, and if it had come out on that schedule, the pacing would have worked a lot better.  But the fact remains that we are halfway through this allegedly earthshaking story and, to all intents and purposes, nothing happens until the final page.  The inciting event for this plot was Aunt May getting shot, and that was in the previous arc.  Apparently Spider-Man will finally be presented with his Terrible Moral Dilemma in part three, which is leaving it a bit late if you ask me.  The art's very enjoyable, so at least the book is nice to look at, but this really isn't getting to the point quickly enough.  B- 

STORMWATCH #12 - Somewhat annoyingly, Stormwatch goes out with one of its weakest issues.  The team hunt down a cop killer and take their revenge, because they're cops, and that's what cops do.  Or rather, because it's a stock plot from vaguely edgy cop shows.  It's about as well done as you could hope for, but it doesn't play to the strengths of the book, or to the more interesting aspects of the characters.  Still, I've been generally impressed by Christos Gage's writing on this title, and he seems to be a natural for team books.  C+

WOLVERINE #58 - Yikes.  I've quite enjoyed some of Marc Guggenheim's stories, and I don't object to Howard Chaykin's recent art in the way that many reviewers seem to.  But this... this is wildly misconceived.  Apparently the reason why Wolverine can heal from fatal injuries is because whenever he dies, his soul gets to fight Azrael and then return to earth.  Er... no, no, that's a really awful concept, guys.  This is way off into making the same mistakes as Wolverine: Origins - taking a perfectly straightforward, well-conceived character, and then complicating him to the point where nobody could possibly care.  In fairness, Guggenheim may well be using this story to put a stop to such stupidly excessive uses of the healing factor - though my preferred solution would be to just stop writing them.  Fans of "What was the editor thinking?" moments will also admire a flashback to World War I in which the Germans are described as Nazis, and a staggeringly patronising scene in which Dr Strange explains to the readers what an anagram is, as though it were an Alan Moore-style piece of mystic esoterica.  Guggenheim has his moments, and Chaykin is still a striking artist, but this really is completely misguided.  D+

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, through the miracle of dodgy scheduling, the Albion storyline continues in New Excalibur #24.  There are more Sentinels in Ultimate X-Men #87, and the Starjammers star in X-Men: Emperor Vulcan #2.  Plus, Captain America guest stars (in flashback form only, mind you), in Wolverine: Origins #18.

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