Also this week, a ton of books that I don't have time to review in full, so I might give them full reviews with issue #2...

JLA CLASSIFIED #4 - Beginning a six-part arc which was originally going to be the I Can't Believe It's Not The Justice League miniseries until that idea got shelved.  To be honest, this doesn't get off to as good a start as the previous run.  But it's still pretty good, even if it's a little odd to have a story which is still using Sue Dibny, given her subsequent reinvention as a sales-boosting rape puppet - sorry, I mean harrowing victim of crime.  Great returning character at the end, too, which bodes well for the future.  B+

LITTLE STAR #1 - Andi Watson chooses an awfully busy week to launch his new title, but it's worth remembering about.  After Love Fights, we're back in firmly realistic territory here.  Simon Adams is a father.  And... uh, yeah, that's pretty much the concept right there.  The whole thing's not really living up to the hype, and the kid is infuriatingly unappreciative.  And he's not quite sure what he's meant to do.  Nothing really happens, as such, but then that's not really what you buy Andi Watson comics for.  Well, not ones like this.  It's all about Watson's incredible minimal storytelling skills, with his amazing ability to communicate volumes about his characters with just three straight lines.  Understated but typically excellent.  A+

LIVEWIRES #1 - Way off at the other end of the genre spectrum, here's Adam Warren and Rick Mays with Livewires, a rare example of Marvel launching an actual, honest-to-god new set of characters.  Something tells me this might be a bit too warped for the average Marvel reader, but if you enjoyed the sugar-rush lunacy of other Warren stories, you'll be at home here.  Basically, the joke is that the Marvel Universe now has so many corrupt top-secret government projects that there's now a top-secret government project devoted entirely to bringing down other top-secret government projects.  Not only does the left hand not know what the right hand is doing, but it's trying its hardest to blow the right hand off at the wrist.  Enter the Livewires, a bunch of robots with names like Gothic Lolita and Social Butterfly, who merrily hack and slash their way through hi-tech bases.  Utter nonsense, and absolutely fantastic.  A

PROMETHEA #32 - The final issue, which takes the form of a series of pages that you can, if so minded, dismantle and arrange into a poster.  Or you could just buy the poster version.  Really, this pretty much sums up the book.  On the one hand, the sheer technical brilliance of Moore and Williams' work on this book is breathtaking.  For those who are interested in seeing what can be done with the medium, Promethea has been absolutely essential reading.  On the other hand, it's basically a bearded hippy rambling on about his tarot cards for 32 issues, and this is yet another lecture issue - a bombardment of factoids with some questionable logical leaps.  Two examples, one of them from Crowley, is apparently enough to justify the statement "Creative union between animal male forces and lunar female energies seems universal."   And so forth.  The technical skill of this book is breathtaking, but god, it talks a lot of bollocks.  As a result, Promethea manages the impressive trick of being, simultaneously, one of the best comics of the last few years and one of the most overrated.  Now that's magic.  A

QUEEN & COUNTRY: DECLASSIFIED #1 - This would be the second Queen & Country: Declassified series, and this time it's the back story of Wallace.  One of Rucka's strengths is in creating supporting characters who are well enough developed to carry a story in their own right, and these back story miniseries have been a great idea.  It also dovetails neatly with the history of other characters, since some of them have already shown up at SIS by this point.  Good solid spy stories, the way they ought to be.  By the way, if you haven't read the novel, you really should.  It's ace, and besides, you'll need to know what happened when the series starts up again.  A-

RUNAWAYS #1 - Last time round, everyone said it was a great book, and nobody bought it.  It's still a great book.  Don't make the same mistake this time.  From the look of the art, a year or so has passed, and the Runaways are still on the loose, fighting crime (in a slightly hamfisted way) and shacked up in a new base as the de facto superheroes of LA.  With the Pride gone, plenty of supervillains are heading west to fill the void.  Meanwhile, in a gloriously silly idea that actually works much better than you might think, we meet Excelsior - a support group for retired teenage superheroes.  ("To help with every stage of your transition into adulthood and a healthy civilian life.")  It stays just the right side of mocking the characters, but there's something oddly appealing about Lightspeed chirpily announcing that she's in therapy to try and recapture her lost childhood.  Great fun, and it deserves to succeed this time round.  A

SHE-HULK #12 - End of the current run, and the book gets a little bit too self-referential for its own good.  Playing off a continuity error from an earlier issue in order to defeat Titania is cute enough; lecturing the audience for being too critical about continuity is perhaps misjudged.  Look, if readers have got it into their heads that the creators and editors are too lazy to care about continuity, perhaps that's because the creators and editors keep giving interviews saying how little they care about it, hmm?  Don't come whining to us when we take you all at your word.  Anyhow, that aside, it's a nice enough finish to the run, but it does feel a little bit like it's marking time, going through the motions of a big finish but with its eyes already set on the relaunch.  B+ 

Last week's Article 10 is still up at Ninth Art.

Another ludicrously heavy week next time, as the scheduling monkeys dump ten X-books onto the market in a single week.  That's compared to six comics from the rest of the Marvel Universe put together, by the way.  If it seems at times as though I regard Marvel's schedulers with a mixture of irritation and disdain, well, this is why.

Uncanny X-Men #456 continues the Psylocke story, X-Men #167 continues "Golgotha", and X-Men: Phoenix - Endsong #3 has more of, well, Phoenix and her endsong.  Ultimate Nightmare #5 wraps up the series, almost three months late, Mystique gets cancelled with issue #24, and X-Force: Shatterstar #1 launches a new miniseries largely produced by some of Rob Liefeld's protégés, a concept sure to strike fear into even the most hardened heart.

On top of all that, there's also Excalibur #10, Rogue #8 and Nightcrawler #6, plus trade paperbacks for X-Men: The End - Book One, the first six issues of Rogue, the first six issues of New Mutants (yes, New Mutants), and the dreadful Wolverine: The End miniseries.

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