Also this week:

STORMBREAKER: THE SAGA OF BETA RAY BILL #6 - What a weird issue.  After five months of Beta Ray Bill fighting cosmic stuff in space, we seem to have a tacked-on origin story establishing a completely new and seemingly unrelated status quo for him on earth.  Well, when I say "completely new", what I really mean is "shameless recycling of the Donald Blake set-up."  Not that it's a bad set-up, and if they're taking Thor in a completely different direction, they might as well give this one to another character.  But it just doesn't seem to have anything to do with what came before, and it seems to have forcibly attached with a staple gun.  Rather disappointing.  B-

VIMANARAMA #3 - Grant Morrison and Philip Bond's weird Asian superhero hybrid stumbles to a halt a couple of months late.  I've got mixed feelings about this last issue.  The story doesn't quite come off.  I know Morrison's trying to do the contrast between small-scale concerns and the end of the world, but it just comes off feeling rather small.  And the mechanics aren't very well explained, even by Morrison's standards.  Why is Ali killing himself supposed to help, exactly?  On the other hand, Philip Bond's art is absolutely fantastic, and worth the cover price on its own.  He'd never really struck me as an artist for surreal sequences, but he pulls them off brilliantly here.  B+

There's a new Article 10 on Monday at Ninth Art.

Next week, House of M #2 gives us our first real sighting of the House of M world - and before anyone asks, no, it isn't late.  It was always scheduled to come out three weeks after issue #1.  New X-Men #15 rounds off the school term.  Nightcrawler #7 returns from hiatus with an origin story - will they do us a favour and kick "The Draco" into touch?  Rogue gets cancelled with issue #12.  Ultimate X-Men #60 continues the Lady Deathstrike arc.  Wolverine: Soultaker wraps up with issue #5. 

And if such things interest you, there's also a second New X-Men trade paperback and some sort of X-Men digest reprint book containing god knows what, because they didn't solicit it until very late in the day.

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