Also this week...

BATMAN #663 - After treating the Joker as a throwaway in his first issue, Grant Morrison returns to the character for a spot of repackaging.  Instead of a comic, this is really an illustrated short story, with whacking great blocks of not-very-readable text.  It's a decent enough story, and I suppose I can see the merit of presenting the Joker's story in a style so far removed from the book's normal appearance.  But with the best will in the world, Grant Morrison has never been famous for his prose, and this is dazzlingly overwritten.  ("He can hear snorting, hysterical bull grunts from the other pall-bearers too, moving in a ring, the way you'd pass a yawn or a precious secret around."  And so on for twenty pages.)  As a result, the story ends up getting smothered, and the point is lost.  Nice idea but, er, no.  C

EXILES #91 - Psylocke meets her new teammates and the obligatory misunderstanding-related fight scene ensues.  Then it's back to the straight Exiles formula.  By giving over so much of this story to Psylocke's introduction, Claremont almost seems to be using her as a vehicle to re-introduce the concept at length, and I wonder whether that's really necessary 81 issues into the series.  This is perfectly alright, if a little formulaic, but it's nothing extraordinary.  B

NEW X-MEN #35 - Well, it's a "running around trying to rescue the captive teammate" story.  Fine for what it is, although given the surfeit of death in this book over the last year, I'd really have preferred to see something lighter as a change of pace before we went back to this sort of thing.  The balance has improved a lot, but it's still not quite there - the characters need to develop more of a life outside the fight scenes, and the series isn't giving them the chance to do that.  Consequently, the book still isn't living up to its potential.  Perfectly readable, mind you, but it could be vastly improved; writers Kyle and Yost are doing much better work on the X-23 miniseries.  B

NEXTWAVE: AGENTS OF H.A.T.E. #12 - The oddball comedy book finishes up after a year-long run.  Despite the rather optimistic predictions when it was launched, Nextwave ended up with a cult audience.  The problem with this book is that it's aimed at the sort of people who enjoy laughing at (or at least with) the excesses of the superhero genre, but also have a thorough enough knowledge to get jokes about Forbush-Man.  That's really quite a narrow audience, and the book's modest sales don't surprise me.  I've enjoyed the book a lot, and the sheer audacity of it provides plenty of laugh-out-loud moments.  But by the same token, twelve issues feels to me like the natural lifespan of the concept.  This would have been a good time to pull the plug anyway.  A

THUNDERBOLTS PRESENTS: ZEMO - BORN BETTER #1 - Another ridiculously over-titled miniseries - I suppose it's understandable that Marvel think Thunderbolts will sell better than Zemo, but if you're going to have both those names in the title, do we really need a tertiary sub-title too?  It's not like there have been a wide range of Thunderbolts Presents Zemo miniseries that might cause confusion.  Anyhow, this is the consolation prize for readers of the previous incarnation of Thunderbolts, effectively cancelled to make way for the cynical nihilism version.  It's about the history of the Zemo dynasty, and Helmut Zemo's mentality as someone raised in that tradition.  It's all historical nonsense, of course, but Nicieza has done great work bringing depth to the character over the last few years, and that continues here.  There's as much depth here, and rather less stupidity, than in many of the more contemporary books Marvel put out.  B+

ULTIMATE X-MEN #79 - It's perhaps a measure of last issue's failure that I picked up this month's story, started reading, and realised for the first time that when Professor X died at the end of last issue, I was supposed to have taken it seriously.  Quite genuinely, the thought had never even crossed my mind.  This issue, a whole load of characters react to Xavier's apparent death.  It goes some way to fix the book's problems, but really the book has lost its way badly over the last year or so, and some major work is neeed.  And while this issue at least persuades me that I'm meant to take Xavier's death seriously, it doesn't actually make me do so.  B-

WOLVERINE: ORIGINS #11 - Introducing Wolverine's son - a heartless killer with a punk hairstyle.  The mind boggles.  The best that can be said for Wolverine: Origins is that at least the pace has picked up from the sluggish early episodes, and that Steve Dillon really can draw any old rubbish and still look good.  Otherwise, this has nothing to recommend it at all.  The very idea of bringing in Wolverine Jr is self-evidently stupid, since X-23 already occupies that role.  And because some actual thought has been put into X-23, she's at least a proper character with an existence of her own.  This character is just a lazy soap opera plot twist, with no personality other than the bare minimum needed to serve as a vehicle for the writer's flip cynicism.  The worst thing of all is that the creators truly seem to have convinced themselves that they're producing some sort of art here.  Dreadful.  D+

Y: THE LAST MAN #54 - The obligatory role-reversal issue, in which a couple of minor characters produce a feminist comic book about the last woman alive.  That allows Brian Vaughan both to skirt around the flipside of his situation, and also to parody his own love of factoids. ("Who knew the world would crumble so quickly just because 98% of the secretaries and kindergarten teachers died?")  Funny, and with at least a couple of ideas about the vexed subject of why people bother telling stories in the first place.  In the back, there's also a preview of Rick Veitch's Army @ Love, which turns out to be a jawdroppingly bizarre series about US soldiers in Afghanistan having sex under fire while calling their husbands on cellphones.  I don't know what I've just read, but the full series is either going to be a surrealist dream-logic classic, or one of the biggest train wrecks in recent history.  A-

There's more from me at If Destroyed - now updating daily, you know - and if you're desperate for more Article 10 columns, you can always hunt through the archives on Ninth Art.

Next week, Deadpool fights the Rhino in Cable & Deadpool #37, while X-Men: First Class #6 reaches for the Random Villain Selector again, and comes up with the Skrulls.

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