Also this week:

APOCALYPSE NERD #2 - And I thought Joe Quesada was bad.  The first issue of Peter Bagge's six-issue miniseries shipped back in April, since when progress has ground to a shuddering halt.  Heaven only knows what the future scheduling plans for this book are, which rather puts me off trying to follow it.  But then again, it's Peter Bagge, and his work is consistently entertaining enough that I'm prepared to stick with him.  Six weeks after the cities got nuked, Perry and Gordo are still hiding out in their cabin without much real clue about what they're going to do next.  Bagge gets plenty of mileage out of their seeming inability to prioritise, in a world where most of their concerns are completely irrelevant.  Oh, and there's also a back-up strip - a biography of Tom Paine.  No, really.  Funnier than it sounds.  A-

CABLE & DEADPOOL #21 - Fabian Nicieza's tendency to create needlessly incomprehensible macguffins rears its head again, as Cable and Deadpool fight Power Man and Iron Fist while everyone tries to get their hands on the Dominus Objective.  And what is the Dominus Objective?  Well... god knows, really.  Some of the explanations seem to be intentionally impenetrable jargon, but even Cable's supposedly plain English version is less than entirely clear.  It seems to be some sort of glorified listening device which monitors data, which would make sense if somebody was using it as a bug.  But instead it's being used by a villain who already has access to all the data he wants and is just trying to process it. Where does processing come into things?  I'm utterly lost.  There are plenty of good gags and character moments in here, but the actual plot is crazily difficult to follow.  C+

MUTOPIA X #4 - Well, this is unusual.  Everything duly builds to the big climax, deliberately echoing things we've already seen in District X... and then Wanda revises reality again, and everything gets cut off in midstream.  Except this isn't the last issue.  There's another one still to go, presumably trying to wrap up all the outstanding District X storylines, deal with some of the Decimation fallout, and give some sort of thematic resolution to what's been going on over the last few issues.  Interesting decision, but it inevitably begs the same question as so many of these House of M crossover stories: why does any of this matter?  A closing cliffhanger tries to suggest, for the first time, that some of what's happening in House of M might indeed carry over to the real world (specifically that dead characters might well stay that way), but much depends on whether the final issue can convince us that there was some consequence to the story we've just read.  A curious enough approach to be intriguing, though.  B

ULTIMATE X-MEN #64 - The penultimate part of "Magnetic North", and as you'd expect, it's the issue where everything builds towards a climax, with lots of fighting involved.  Brian K Vaughan is pulling out the stops as we head towards the end of his run next month, and the result is a straight-down-the-line superhero story that works perfectly on those terms.  Lots of action, nice build, does the job just right.  God, I'm going to miss Vaughan on this book.  A

WOLVERINE #34 - More thrilling conversational action as Mystique and Sebastian Shaw continue to discuss events from House of M history that didn't really happen.  It's the sort of House of M story that doesn't really work because it's trying to ignore the ground rules - that is, the nature of this alternate reality as something temporary.  Against that background, you can't expect the readership to get too worked up about Wolverine's possible links with Nick Fury when none of it really happened anyway (even within the story's own logic), and we already know it has zero impact on House of M itself.  The way to make these stories work is to play with the way the characters act in their new circumstances.  Daniel Way's Wolverine is basically unchanged, and his Shaw and Mystique are different in largely irrelevant ways.  There's some interest, though, in his take on Nick Fury as an increasingly bitter soldier stuck in an institutionally racist army which seems to be undergoing a version of the Cultural Revolution.  Overall, though, this is an issue trying to set up a mystery to which the answer is of no conceivable significance.  B-

Last week's Article 10 is still up at Ninth Art, and there's other stuff from me at If Destroyed.

Next week, the "Wild Kingdom" crossover continues in X-Men #176.  X-Men: Colossus - Bloodline #2 continues the solo series, Weapon X: Days of Future Now #4 is way off into alternate timelines, and X-Men & Power Pack #1 is probably off to the side of continuity altogether.  Meanwhile, Cable & Deadpool gets a third trade paperback, and manic collectors will be thrilled to hear that there's a second printing of a variant cover of House of M #4.

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