Also this week:

NEW X-MEN #17 - Part two of the four-part House of M crossover.  The most interesting thing about this arc is its willingness to make all the regular characters look bad.  Of course, a fundamental problem with the whole House of M set-up is that a lot of the heroes really ought to be rebelling against Magneto's rule on principle, and plainly aren't.  Most of the other books have got round that by playing their characters as people who have got what they wanted from life and are keeping their head down in a world that they recognise as flawed. New X-Men isn't even doing that, instead presenting a bunch of starry-eyed Magneto-worshippers.  Even the nicer ones have bought wholesale into the idea that they're living in utopia.  David and Noriko are the heroes by default, but even they don't actually seem to question any of this.  Dani, on the other hand, seems to have joined the Nazis.  It's an odd balance between keeping everyone in character while having them working under completely different values, and it brightens up what would otherwise be a fairly pedestrian conspiracy storyline.  B+

NIGHTCRAWLER #9 - Meh.  This is "The Winding Way", part 3 of 5, and I'm increasingly becoming convinced again that the whole book is on the wrong track.  I can see that there's a need to come up with some sort of angle to justify a Nightcrawler solo series (once the ill-advised decision has been taken to launch one in the first place), but having Nightcrawler appear in stories about magic seems to miss the point of the character by a mile.  At the very least, it misses the character's appeal.  But here we are again, with unknown magical forces attacking Kurt's old circuses in search of the Soulsword.  God only knows who did the continuity research here, because the established history is that Amos Jardine was a Texan millionaire who bought the German circus outright - those are the only things you need to know about the character, and somehow Aguirre-Sacasa contrives to bring him back while getting both of them wrong.  Either the research here is dreadful, or it's messing about with perfectly good continuity for no particular reason.  Darick Robertson's art is always capable of raising the grade by a couple of notches, but the rest really does nothing for me.  C+

SPELLBINDERS #6 - Mikes Carey and Perkins wrap up their school magic miniseries, for the benefit of whoever might still be reading.  This is one of those mystifying books which Marvel persist in launching and yet giving no publicity to whatsoever.  In this case, since it's some way off the superhero beaten track, Marvel might be hoping for it to make some headway in digest format.  But to be honest, the premise of teenage magicians has been done better elsewhere.  The element that ought to make this version distinctive is the idea that the whole town apparently know about magic, but the series never really did anything with that idea.  Instead, we've had a fairly pedestrian story about rather too many characters teaming up to fight a bad guy.  It's difficult to imagine this making much of a breakthrough in a competitive market.  B-

If Destroyed has several new reviews added since last week, so you might want to pop over there and have a look.  And there's a new Article 10 on Monday at Ninth Art.

Next week, the much-delayed Astonishing X-Men #12 finally wraps up "Dangerous"; and X-Men: The End finishes off its second volume.  There's also the third issue of Kitty Pryde - Shadow & Flame, and a variant cover of New X-Men #16, if such things excite you.  Plus, a sixth volume of Essential X-Men.

NYX #7 was meant to be out next week as well, but remarkably enough, it's been pushed back at the last moment.  By three more weeks.  Who'd have thought it?

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