Also among this week's comics...

BATGIRL #47 - Hey, old school Batman villainy!  A nutter called the Doll Man captures fashion models and dresses them up as dolls.  You see, that's a villain.  Back in the sixties, they'd have got a whole decade of stories out of that idea.  And pretended it didn't have any weird overtones.  I generally run a mile from the Batman books, but for some reason I've stuck with this one.  B+

DAREDEVIL #55 - Thank christ that's finished.  Look, I know we're all meant to admire David Mack for making really beautiful artwork, but let's be honest: this was a painfully boring storyline.  Five bloody issues of "Echo was a bit sad but she's alright now."  The same old stuff about Wolverine's anger issues doesn't miraculously become any clever just because it's illustrated in collage.  More to the point, however, this isn't a bloody story.  Gorgeous to look at, but really extremely boring to read.  Please don't repeat it.  C-

HATE ANNUAL #4 - Yes, it's that time of year again.  Peter Bagge long since shifted to telling Buddy Bradley's stories at the unusual rate of 12 pages a year, real time.  Strangely enough, it actually works, as Buddy gets older and drifts further from his original concept every year.  As usual, there's also a lot of Bagge's journalism here, much of which is excellent - albeit that the topicality of a four-year-old article about the Reform Party convention may be open to question.  There's also a dodgy piece of music journalism as Bagge seriously argues that late-nineties bubblegum pop music was fantastic.  With B*Witched, he has a point.  But when he tries to tell us that "Aaron Carter actually has a very good singing voice", it suggests he needs his ears syringed.  Anyhow, it's the usual excellent package.  A

LUCIFER #45 - Ah, a self-contained story.  This provides me with an excellent opportunity to remind you all that Lucifer is very good indeed, and you should all be buying it.  A nondescript human is hijacked as a venue for a demon convention, and the organiser decides to enjoy the opportunity.  Carey is doing fantastic work on this series, and guest artist Ted Naifeh does some great work with his unconventional demon designs.  A

RED #3 - The somewhat belated conclusion of Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner's miniseries.  It's a little unfortunate that Ellis has taken to producing stories in a format which is less than ideally suited for trade paperback collection, since it means that if you want to buy the collected edition of this, you'll get it in a double-pack with something that frankly isn't as good.  (Tokyo Storm Warning, I think.  But Red is far and away the best of his recent minis, anyway.)  It's a nice, simple, direct idea with fantastic visuals from Hamner, who does a fabulous job on the slowed-time sequences.  Probably the best thing Ellis has done in the last few years.  A-

On Monday, the Article 10 review of the year goes up at Ninth Art.

Next week will be the X-Axis Review of the Year.  However, if you're wondering what's going to be on sale, the Juggernaut two-parter concludes in Uncanny X-Men #436; more of "Henrietta" in X-Statix #17; and the Storm miniseries continues in X-Treme X-Men #38.

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