Also this week:

EX MACHINA #7 - The mayor decides to celebrate a gay wedding, despite the obvious political downside.  You do wonder how the guy got elected in the first place when he has such a tin ear for public opinion as to not understand how controversial it might be.  But then the flashback stories do seem to be heading towards the idea that he was swept into office on a wave of 9/11 goodwill rather than actual political talent, so perhaps that's the idea.  Meanwhile, there's some wonderfully-handled subplot scenes building up zoetropic effects in the subway that drive people mad.  A lovely idea, and one I don't think I've seen before.  The only real glitch with this book is Vaughan's continuing tendency to shoehorn in his favourite plot-related trivia (no Vaughan story would be complete without at least two characters reciting facts from a textbook), but that's minor.  One of the best new titles of 2004 - not, admittedly, the best of years for new titles, but it would have been up there in a better year as well.  A

NEW INVADERS #5 - Good lord, this is awful.  After close and diligent reading in the name of criticism, I have finally extracted the plot, and to be fair, the writing isn't so bad.  It's generic, but there's nothing horrible about it.  But the murky, dismal, confusing art absolutely sinks the book.  It's so hard to follow that even the colourist gets confused, leaving the final scene almost incomprehensible until you realise that the colours of everyone's clothing swap round halfway through.  One wonders why it wasn't sent back to be done properly.  Perhaps the editor couldn't understand it either.  Even the best of scripts wouldn't survive visuals of this quality, and this is not the best of scripts.  D

OCEAN #3 - Warren Ellis' love of decompressed storytelling has led to some of his least interesting work, but Ocean is standing out as an exception.  Sure, you can see the strings - the stock Ellis hero is present and correct, and the corporate personality concept is very much his sort of thing.  (And there's an obvious plot hole  - how come only one guy on the station doesn't have a back-up?  The book tries to gloss over this, but doesn't pull it off.)  Still, the pacing and storytelling is strong, and artist Chris Sprouse is actually doing something with all those slow-moving panels, finding details and allowing them to come to the fore.  Not perfect, but worthwhile.  B+

Article 10 looks back on 2004 on Monday at Ninth Art.

Next week is the X-Axis Review of the Year 2004.  Thanks to a ton of late-running books, there's also an awful lot of X-books scheduled to come out.  Astonishing X-Men #7 starts the book's second arc, only a month late.  Excalibur #8 begins "Saturday Night Fever".  Mystique #22 continues "Quiet."  Nightcrawler #4 and Rogue #6 wrap up the opening storylines for those two titles.  Wolverine #23 continues "Enemy of the State", X-Force #5 guest stars the unfortunate Fantastic Four, and X-Men #165 is a fill-in Christmas story by Chris Claremont.

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