Also this week..

ASTRO CITY: THE DARK AGES, BOOK TWO #1 - This is another book where progress has slowed to a crawl - book one of this storyline started last June.  Still, Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson can always be relied on to produce a strong story, and this series plays to the strengths of Astro City by focussing on the normal people in the shadow of all the superheroes.  It's perhaps interesting that Busiek is using The Dark Ages to explore the mid-70s, which doesn't exactly show the superhero genre at its grimmest.  But then again, it's the era where characters like the Punisher and Wolverine first showed up, so perhaps he has a point.  I'd rather lost track of this story, but the creators easily draw me back in.  Good solid craftsmanship, that's what this is.  A-

BIRDS OF PREY #100 - A rare example, in this day and age, of a book actually making it to issue #100 without weird numbering stunts, relaunches, massive over-reliance on crossovers and so forth.  Good for Birds of Prey.  Okay, so there's been an annoying degree of cheesecake at times, but for the most part it's a fun little book.  This issue exists to shake up the cast and bring in the new format with Oracle running a team with loads of female superheroes.  This needs to be played carefully, and I'm not entirely convinced by the idea.  If you have a bunch of female characters who already know one another and who form a team, well, that makes sense.  If you have Oracle recruiting virtual strangers on the grounds that they have breasts, and she doesn't seem to intend it as any kind of statement... well, isn't that just a gimmick?  It certainly feels like a fairly random assemblage of DC B-listers in this issue, and I'm honestly not persuaded that it works.  But Gail Simone has earned enough goodwill on this title that I'll see where she's going with it.  B

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS #2-3 - I completely missed issue #2 when it came out, and none of you e-mailed me about it, which kind of suggests to me that you're not reading it either.  So I bought the last two issues together and, you know what?  This is actually quite good.  It's a dead straight, totally unpretentious superhero book with the original X-Men fighting bad guys, and the stories wouldn't seem out of place in an animated series.  Well, that's fine by me.  Not every story has to reinvent the wheel.  Issue #2 (where they go hunting for the Lizard in Florida) is stronger than issue #3 (one of those "why has reality altered?" stories), but they're both fun reads.  And before you ask, First Class #3 is another of the lucky bullet-dodgers which isn't drowning in adverts.  I genuinely enjoyed these two books - they're not terribly ambitious, but what they do, they do well.  A-

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

Next week, X-Factor #13 is a reprise of the classic early 90s psychotherapy issue.  Wolverine #48 is an epilogue to the Civil War crossover arc, exploring how Wolverine's been surviving some suspiciously nasty injuries of late.  New Excalibur #13 begins the final Frank Tieri arc, focussing on the Juggernaut.  And Exiles #88 puts the team up against Galactus.  Plus: Adverts!  Adverts!  Adverts!

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