Also this week...

HEROES FOR HIRE #4 - The first issue not to be bannered as a Civil War crossover, so this ought to be the point where the series stands on its own two feet.  Wisely, they're continuing with the existing storyline, so if they managed to hook anyone with the early issues, they'll still be around.  I'm torn with this series - it's close to being an enjoyable romp, but keeps getting it wrong.  The absurd levels of T&A in the art aren't so much of a problem this issue, as guest artist Francis Portela takes over after the first few pages and promptly scales it back drastically.  (Notably, he dumps the absurd arrows on Misty's chest, almost as if he put his foot down when it came to drawing such an inane costume.)  But there are still major inconsistencies in tone.  This book wants us to care about the murder of Tarantula's father on one page, and then launch at a bunch of diaper fetishists almost immediately after.  To pull off that sort of gear change takes more talent than the creators have, and ends up just making the attempts at drama seem insincere.  Mind you, credit for dredging up the spectacularly obscure villain Shadow-Stalker, who fought Shang-Chi back in Master of Kung Fu #28, and who has two bloody great spiked maces chained to his head.  Er, what happens when he stops moving?  C+

NEW EXCALIBUR #13 - Frank Tieri begins his final fill-in storyline, focussing on the Juggernaut.  Leaving aside Tieri's bizarre misuse of Pete Wisdom, this actually isn't bad at all, with other villains mocking the Juggernaut for his attempt to reform, and an attempt to rehabilitate Black Tom Cassidy after Chuck Austen made him into a child-killer.  Even though the Juggernaut's reformation is generally regarded as one of the better points of Austen's run, there's actually a need for a story like this, where the Juggernaut sits down and works out what on earth he's actually doing here.  I'll be very surprised if Tieri really changes anything, other than having Cain properly come to terms with his new status quo.  But frankly, even that would be a worthwhile function, so fair play for identifying a story that somebody needed to do.  Absolutely fine, although the adverts don't do it any favours.  B

Dave Cockrum, who co-created the new X-Men back in 1975 and worked on Uncanny for several years, died this morning at the age of 63.  As the co-creator of characters like Colossus, Nightcrawler and Storm, he's one of the creators who undeniably left his mark on the series for decades to come, even though he's often been overlooked in favour of bigger names who came after.  He's given us some classic characters, and his stories were the ones that finally helped the X-Men take flight as a major league comic.  It's those mid-seventies issues that really laid the groundwork for the X-Men's success, and without Cockrum... well, we'd all be reading something very, very different right now.

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, a very quiet week indeed - X-Men #193 has the penultimate chapter of "Supernovas", and there's a What If? one-shot based on Mark Millar's "Enemy of the State" storyline from Wolverine.  And that's it, unless you choose to count Onslaught Reborn #1 - but it's really an Avengers/Fantastic Four miniseries, so I don't.

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