Also this week:

AYRE FORCE - One of the strangest things ever to cross my desk.  Calvin Ayre, founder of the Bodog group, has commissioned a comic starring himself as the leader of a covert action team, comprised of people signed to various Bodog companies.  Such as poker player Evelyn Ng, or Canadian singer Bif Naked.  The whole thing is played without a hint of irony, almost like a pitch for a Saturday morning cartoon.  Thanks mainly to artist Shawn Martinbrough, it's actually quite readable.  But the results are quite baffling.  It's too generic to be notable as an action story, but the creators simply blank the incongruity of a cast made up of (let's face it) rather minor celebrities.  Depending on how charitable you're feeling, either it's an amusing exercise in deadpan kitsch, or it breaks new ground in the field of vanity publishing.  I'm inclined to think it's probably the former, but it's so weird that I'm not even going to try and rate it.  Taken at face value, it's not very good, but the sheer audacity of it rather amuses me.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY #1 - Not the old seventies sci-fi superheroes, but a team book launching out of Annihilation: Conquest, with the likes of Adam Warlock, Starlord and Rocket Raccoon.  Writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning are already writing the Nova series, and readers of that book will probably enjoy this one too.  Some of the comic relief segments work very well, such as Gamora's surly feigned enthusiasm.  ("I'm completely committed to this team.  Yaaaay.  Go team.  You see?")  Whether the audience is really there to support another "cosmic" title at the moment - well, I have my doubts about that.  But the book itself is good fun.  B+

X-MEN: LEGACY #211 - Continuing his tour of the backwaters of X-Men continuity, Mike Carey brings back Hazard.  No?  Carter Ryking?  He was in a handful of Fabian Nicieza stories which have been out of print for, ooh, about 16 years.  Either Mike Carey's been reading the X-Men with astonishing devotion for a good long while, or he's put in a remarkable amount of research for this series.  However, my concerns about the book's approachability for new readers are somewhat assuaged this issue, as the book eases off on the convoluted montage sequences, in favour of choosing a particular obscure piece of continuity and building a story around that.  Still, this is very much a book for people interested in fictional history, and while fans were trained to think that way from the seventies to the nineties, I wonder what the current generation of readers will make of this.  It's a great book for hardcore fans like me, mind you.  A-

There's more from me at If Destroyed, and apparently if you haven't read the Ninth Art stuff by now, you're too late.

Next week, Aron Coleite takes over as writer on Ultimate X-Men with issue #94.  Wolverine: Origins celebrates 25 issues, by finishing off the Deadpool arc and reprinting the whole of New Mutants #98.  X-Factor #31 sees riots in Mutant Town.  And X-Men: Divided We Stand #2 is the second of two short story collections.

back | continue