Also among this week's comics...

ARROWSMITH #1 - Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco's series from Cliffhanger, DC's imprint of indeterminate purpose.  In this case, the high concept is a world where magic actually exists, and how it might affect the world.  It's an interesting enough starting point, and Busiek has some promising ideas about the concept of industrialised magic.  Of course, by setting it during World War I, he does set the question of whether a world that different would end up that similar.  But the book isn't entirely oblivious to that; completely different national borders suggest that things have been different for a good long while, and it doesn't take too much of a stretch to imagine World War I as a similar explosion of ill-advised "we'll help you if you're invaded" treaties.  Evidently Bismarck cocked up just as badly in this universe.  Visually, of course, it's great; you can't go that far wrong with Pacheco on art.  Meanwhile, young Fletcher Arrowsmith (now there's a strained name) decides to join the army so that he can learn to fly and fight evil in Europe.  Not quite sure I buy into the character yet, but the idea's decent enough.  B+

CALL #4 - Let us pay homage to the final issue of one Marvel's least successful titles in years.  Or, alternatively, let's not.  I have a feeling this storyline was orginally supposed to last six issues.  Certainly it feels a bit rushed at four, but then it's hard to imagine that it was ever going to really work.  God alone knows what Marvel were thinking with this book - it seems to have started out as a well-intentioned (and highly topical) attempt to pay tribute to the New York emergency services, but eighteen months after the fact, Marvel find themselves saddled with a book nobody's interested in, and a ludicrous storyline about cult leaders and burning drug addicts which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with anything relevant to the emergency services in New York.  Painfully misconceived, this book thoroughly deserves its four-issue cancellation.  And it's not like the disastrous reception of this book wasn't obviously forseeable; the final issues of the Call of Duty miniseries performed abysmally.  Anyone with a passing interest in the comics industry and an IQ in double figures could tell this series was going to bomb.  Personally, I subscribe to the theory that Marvel only published the book at all in order to comply with the video game license.  If only because I can't think of any other conceivable reason why they'd have wasted money on it.  D

GLOBAL FREQUENCY #9 - Global Frequency calls up a retired agent for a truly nasty job involving weird experiments in a lunatic asylum.  I've never actually heard of artist Lee Bermejo, and a Google search doesn't greatly enlighten me.  However, he turns in a very good piece of work here, helped tremendously by a suitably subdued and colour-coded job from colourist David Baron.  The story itself is pretty much what we've come to expect from Global Frequency - weird catastrophe, hard-ass but troubled man comes to sort it out.  With this series, I can't quite shake the feeling that Warren Ellis is indulging in a set of writing exercises; nonetheless, he does deliver consistent single-issue stories, albeit in bizarre contrast to the trade paperback orthodoxy.  It seems strange that as that format - something Ellis pushed for years - takes off, his actual work in comics seems more and more divorced from it.  A-

RUNAWAYS #4 - Utterly formulaic and yet it still works.  By this point, after three straight issues, it's painfully clear that we're doing a "visit everyone's houses and reveal their personal gimmick" routine.  All logic says that this is grindingly obvious and should never work.  And yet Brian Vaughan and Adrian Alphona are managing to pull it off.  It's all about making the audience buy into the characters and pushing that at all costs.  Okay, on one level you can see it coming a mile off, but on another I've got to respect the creative team for having a story that predictable and still making it work.  B+

TERMINATOR 3: BEFORE THE RISE #2 - The publishers very generously sent me a copy of this; unfortunately for me, it turns out that the film doesn't actually open in the UK for another month.  One day they'll get rid of this absurd delay before UK openings.  Perhaps one of the few things that I'll positively thank internet piracy for.  (Mind you, we did get 28 Days Later months before you did.)  Anyhow, this is a story about the reprogramming of the Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator, presumably taking place somewhere prior to the second film, so I'm assuming this is an original story rather than an adaptation of the film itself.  And it's actually perfectly good; I'm not quite sure how it fits into the third film, but it's really a story about the human resistance trying to work out why their great reprogramming scheme doesn't sodding work.  I get the feeling there's a subplot here involving somebody who died in issue #1, but, you know, it's hard to tell.  Regardless, as film adaptations go, perfectly sound.  B+

THUNDERBOLTS #81 - And another Marvel cancellation.  The moral of this story is: completely changing the entire concept of a series does not work unless the new creative team are Peter Milligan and Mike Allred, and their new series is a bizarre satire which actually stands to gain from being perceived as a ludicrous interloper.  John Arcudi and Francisco Ruiz Velasco's story about out-of-work supervillains earning a living at underground fighting was actually pretty good, but it was left stillborn as a result of the utterly misconceived decision to promote it as a continuation of the completely unrelated Thunderbolts book.  Let all involved that note that this was every bit as stupid an idea as everybody said it was.  But we shouldn't forget the overlooked casualty here: this was a good book which has, to all intents and purposes, got itself cancelled after issue #6 thanks to a horribly misguided promotional campaign.  It could have worked.  It deserved to work.  Instead, it's doing an awkward wrap-up issue when there was far more potential than it ever got to touch.  What a mess.  B

On Monday, a new Article 10 at Ninth Art.  No, not the Greg Horn one - that's in another two weeks time.

Next week, Mystique #4, X-Men Unlimited #50 and X-Statix #11.

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