Also this week:

GENEXT #2 - Chris Claremont and Patrick Scherberger's miniseries about a third-generation X-Men team is turning out to be surprisingly readable stuff.  Despite the cumbersome premise and the ties to X-Men: The End continuity, Claremont has kept the focus squarely on the characters, and the series is recapturing some of the appeal of early New Mutants.  I'm concerned to see Claremont dusting off the Shockwave Riders, of all the obscure villains, especially as there still doesn't seem to be much of a concept behind them.  But that aside, this series has been enjoyable so far.  B+

NEW EXILES #7 - The start of a new storyline, and this time we're visiting an alternate world where the British Empire is being run from New York.  Claremont seems to be settling down into a format of bouncing through rather complicated parallel worlds, and simultaneously developing his character subplots just as he would with any other team book (but which previous Exiles writers have tended to skip).  There might be a shade too much going on, but it's basically a decent book.  B

SKAAR: SON OF HULK #1 - Mystifying ongoing series spinning off from the "Planet Hulk" storyline.  The basic idea is that when the Hulk's pregnant wife died, the kiddie survived after all and grew up on Sakaar.  Apparently Hulkspawn are resilient beasties.  The first issue, frankly, is a bit of a mess - it races through events at breakneck pace, and most of what it presents is a garbled selection of fantasy elements which worked surprisingly well in "Planet Hulk" but just seem laboured here.  It seems to be simply a generic barbarian comic, and I don't quite understand what (if anything) writer Greg Pak is trying to do beyond that.  Considering that Pak's original storyline worked quite well, this is rather disappointing.  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, Wolverine takes a detour from regular continuity to begin "Old Man Logan", the new Mark Millar/Steve McNiven arc.  X-Factor reaches a turning point.  And Ultimate X-Men has more of the Ultimate Alpha Flight.

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