To be honest, it's an extremely quiet week for new releases, and there are other things taking up my time this weekend, which is why you're only getting two reviews.  But for the sake of completeness:

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS #8 - This is an odd story for First Class.  For starters, there's the anachronism of the Silver Age X-Men appearing alongside the Man-Thing, who wasn't created until 1971.  Then there's a string of scenes of the X-Men visiting dystopian futures, one of which assumes that we all know about Dark Phoenix.  I wouldn't have expected the target audience to get that reference.  To be honest, the story's a bit incoherent generally, with the young X-Men blundering through assorted weird stuff in the swamp before it all comes right in the end.  But Ed Nguyen's art is lovely, with some pleasingly delicate colouring.  It's certainly the best-looking issue of First Class to date, which makes up for many of its faults.  B

YOUNG AVENGERS PRESENTS #1 - The first issue in a long-delayed follow-up miniseries, as Marvel finally resign themselves to the fact that they've got to do something with these characters, or give up.  The series appears to be built around a series of spotlight stories for the individual members, rather than a wider plot, and we start off with Ed Brubaker doing Patriot.  Patriot's always struck me as a character who doesn't quite work.  I can see what they were going for.  He's wearing the costume because he's a legacy hero, but he's actually quite ambivalent about America.  In principle, I quite like the idea, but in practice they've stressed his bitterness so much that it's hard to imagine why he's calling himself "Patriot" at all, given that he seems to identify more as a victim and outsider.  Brubaker bravely tries to wrestle the character back towards general confusion, using the death of Captain America as a token justification, and wheeling out the Winter Soldier to embody a much more uncertain American self-image that Patriot can just about identify with.  It's a step in the right direction for the character, probably defining him more clearly in the way his creator always intended.  It's not a particularly strong story in its own right, but it's a worthwhile piece of remedial work for the character which makes a reasonably convincing case for his untapped potential.  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, X-Men: Emperor Vulcan #5 completes the miniseries.  Robert Kirkman's run enters the home straight with Ultimate X-Men #90.  And, in a strange choice of starting point, the What If? one-shots offer a riff on Spider-Man vs Wolverine.

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