Also this week...

CABLE & DEADPOOL #49 - With two issues to go, Fabian Nicieza has apparently thrown in the towel on the thankless job of writing the plots, and artist Reilly Brown has taken over, with Nicieza contributing the script.  Inevitably, this is filler, as Deadpool visits the Savage Land and hooks up with Ka-Zar.  But it's funny stuff - despite the circumstances, Nicieza seems to be having fun with the dialogue, and Brown throws in some genuinely clever touches (such as a gloriously stupid way of making Deadpool immune to Lorelei's siren song).  And the cliffhanger on the closing page is one of those fantastically absurd images that would actually have worked in Mighty Avengers as well.  This is really surprisingly good, and perhaps somebody should look at having Brown write some more.  A

NEW WARRIORS #8 - People occasionally ask me why I don't cover New Warriors, a book replete with Z-list X-castoffs.  One answer is that Marvel don't regard it as an X-book, and god knows I've got enough to write about already.  But this issue brought the real problem with New Warriors crashing home to me - a singular failure to define the characters properly, or indeed at all.  Half the issue is about Night Thrasher, and depends on a working knowledge of old stories from twenty years ago if you're going to care.  The rest consists of the team sitting around discussing whether they're terrorists in a badly thought-out scene.  (They're clearly not; and if the concern is that they're criminals, surely they knew that all along.  The whole point of the group is that they're defying the Registration Act.)  Reading this scene, I realised the grim and depressing truth: eight issues in, I couldn't tell you the names of any of these characters.  I don't know which civilian matches up with which costume.  I don't know what their powers are.  I can't tell them apart in conversation.  They are just an interchangeable mulch of non-personalities.  Artist Jon Malin apparently only knows how to draw one woman, and a scene with the four female members is frankly embarrassing, as they look like identical quadruplets in different clothes.  I can't be bothered memorising their clothes from panel to panel in order to tell them apart, and the dialogue certainly doesn't assist.  There are some half-decent ideas in this book about kids resisting the Registration Act, but as a team book with actual characters, it's a mess. D+ 

WOLVERINE: ORIGINS #21 - Beginning an arc which apparently leads to a Way/Dillon Deadpool series.  It's an odd issue.  What we get here is an action story in which Deadpool tries to take out Wolverine in the style of Looney Tunes.  I certainly laughed a few times, and there are some well-timed sequences.  But this week's Cable & Deadpool is funnier, and also has a more interesting take on the lead character.  I can't imagine this take on Deadpool carrying a series; there's just nothing particularly interesting about him, once you get past the slapstick.  Still, I can't deny that the issue raised a few smiles.  B

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, "Messiah Complex" concludes in X-Men #207.  The Man-Thing guest stars in First Class #8.  And after all this time, we finally reach Astonishing X-Men #24 - which turns out not to be the end after all.

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