Also this week:

DEFENDERS #1 - The classic JLA team of Giffen, DeMatteis and Maguire take a crack at the founding four Defenders.  Actually, Giffen's got a lot of oddball projects coming up from Marvel over the next few months, of which this is only the first.  The tone is slightly straighter than their JLA work, and the threat is much more conventional - Dormammu is invading again.  The entertainment value is in the details, and as a group of characters who exist for the sole purpose of bickering with one another, the Defenders are ideally suited to this approach.  I've never been a big fan of the Defenders as a concept - it's a ludicrously contrived team, which is why writers had to keep coming up with absurd justifications for them to exist at all.  But as a miniseries, done in this style, they work rather nicely.  A-

GLA #4 - Dan Slott concludes his four-issue rant about the excessive darkness in superhero comics.  Fortunately, unlike some of the books he's broadsiding, he actually remembered to make this one entertaining.  Slott's GLA are relics of a more innocent age, utterly adrift in a world where supporting characters get brutally slaughtered in the name of entertainment.  You don't have to be a retro nostalgist to like this series - actually, the book's probably way too self-aware for that audience.  It's more for those of us who find ourselves rolling our eyes in exasperation at the lazy drivel that gets passed off as dark drama in event books these days.  Most of Slott's comics are antidotes to that sort of thing, GLA more explicitly than most.  And god knows we could do with it.  A-

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

Next week, House of M continues in New X-Men #16, Pulse #10 and Pulse: House of M Special (which is a mock-up newspaper, apparently).  Back in the real world, New X-Men: Hellions #3 continues the miniseries, Nightcrawler #8 digs further into Kurt's origin story, and X-Men #173 has more with Mystique.

Over in the reprints, there's a tenth Exiles trade paperback, and a final volume of Excalibur (once again being billed, wholly misleadingly, as a House of M prelude).  And, because Brian Bendis demanded it, there's Giant-Size Spider-Woman #1, which happens to include a reprint of the debut of Siryn.

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