Also this week...

CIVIL WAR #2 - Back in the Silver Age, writers would cheerfully do things like reveal Superman's secret identity, and everyone would just wonder what wacky device would be used to reset the status quo by the end of the storyline.  The tone of Civil War won't allow a reset-button ending to work, so presumably they're serious about unmasking Spider-Man at least for the medium term.  There will, obviously, be two schools of thought on this.  One will say that it's a bold move, thinking beyond the box, and opening up new storyline possibilities while only closing off ones that were long since exhausted anyway.  And there's something to be said for that.  On the other hand, you can see it as a sign that Marvel have finally lost sight of everything that made the character successful, and have crucially missed the key point that Spider-Man isn't a character, he's a formula.  Deviate too far from the formula and you're not really making Spider-Man stories any more; you're inventing something new, which is highly unlikely to be as good as Spider-Man.  Once in a blue moon this sort of thing works; usually it's a disaster, and the recent history of Marvel's Spider-Man stories doesn't exactly fill me with faith, since it hasn't displayed any grasp of the character's core appeal.  It might work, but I'd place money on it failing.  Judged as an issue in its own right, it's a solid event story, and at least they're delivering on the promise that things will actually happen in this book (something that they needed to prove after last year's relentlessly uneventful House of M).  B

FABLES #50 - Fables celebrates its anniversary by bringing Bigby back to the main cast, sending him off a double-sized adventure, and then marrying him off to Snow White at the end of the story.  That marriage seems too rushed for my taste, given that Bigby's only just got back from a lengthy break; ending the story with an engagement would probably have worked better.  Still, it's a happy ending, and that's what fairy tale characters deserve, so fair enough.  A weird out-of-context rant about Israel puts a dent in the ratings - it's faintly ridiculous for Bigby to go on a rant about Middle Eastern politics to a villain from another dimension who hasn't got a clue what he's talking about, and comes across as a piece of gratuitous political tubthumping that wasn't needed to make the scene work.  Good reading, otherwise.  A-

SHRUGGED #1 - A new series from Michael Turner's Aspen Comics, although he's only co-writing this book.  Still, you can tell it's an Aspen book by the way the inside front cover proudly lists all six variant covers, in order of increasing exclusivity.  Mind you, the book itself isn't very Aspen at all, featuring neither superheroes, nor action scenes, nor cleavage of any sort.  If anything, it sounds more like a manga pitch: Theo, a teenage boy, is literally guided through life by a real angel and devil on each shoulder, of whom he's vaguely aware.  Played as light comedy drama, and unusually stressing Theo as an academic achiever without making him into a geek, it's genuinely nice to see Aspen trying something like this, which is way outside their comfort zone.  Unfortunately, while it's a decent enough premise, and Micah Gunnell's pencils are generally sound, the plotting is rather prosaic and the dialogue is downright clunky.  (And they desperately need a proof reader.)  Still, you've got to applaud them trying something like this, and while it's seriously flawed, there's actually a decent idea in there.  C

WOLVERINE: ORIGINS #3 - In which we learn about Wolverine's thrilling history with Nuke.  Frankly, this isn't desperately important to Wolverine, and if you're buying this for some sort of origin story then you're going to be disappointed.  On the other hand, at least it's now clear where Way is headed with all these flashbacks: he's trying to set up the idea that Wolverine was doing some very unpleasant things during his black ops phase.  This pushes the character further than he's been taken in the past, since he's written here as cold bloodedly malicious, but I suppose there's a reasonably basis for in the fact that he was on a team with people like Sabretooth in the first place.  Even so, unless Nuke's sticking around to play a bigger role in future, spending two issues on his origin flashbacks seems a touch excessive.  It's a big improvement on the earlier Way issues, admittedly, but still a little too slow for its own good.  And you've really got to look past the "Origins" tag to accept a story about Wolverine's past interaction with a minor Daredevil villain, which isn't really what readers will necessarily be looking for from this book.  I'll give Way the benefit of the doubt and assume that Nuke's sticking around, which would make it a B.

The final Article 10 column is up on Monday at Ninth Art, and there's more from me at If Destroyed.

Next week, Uncanny X-Men Annual #1 continues the build-up to the, ahem, "wedding of the century."  There's also Uncanny X-Men #474, concluding the Jamie Braddock story, and between them they finish up the outstanding Chris Claremont scripts.  The Hellfire arc continues in Astonishing X-Men #15, and New Excalibur #8 is scheduled to explain why Dazzler isn't dead - although with the writing in flux, you never know.  And X-Men: Fairy Tales #2 retells the origins of Professor X and Magneto in the style of an African folk story.

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