Also this week...

MIKE CAREY'S ONE-SIDED BARGAINS - Following his recent high-profile assignments, Mike Carey raids his archive of creator-owned material for this Image one-shot.  Actually, most of the issue is a fairly straight adaptation of Dr Faustus that Carey produced with Mike Perkins for Caliber back in the mid-nineties.  It's a very good adaptation, though, and worth the price of admission alone.  There are some beautifully inspired scenes with Mephistopheles tormenting poor, thirteenth-century Faustus by providing entirely accurate scientific "knowledge" that he can't actually comprehend.  "Suicide Kings", a short from Negative Burn #47, is rather more forgettable.  And the package is rounded off with a prose short story, "Auszug" - in a slightly questionable move, Michael Gaydos is given a cover credit on the strength of a single spot illustration.  Still, it's a very funny story about a demented novelist stalking a reviewer.  Overall, a great package, though probably more of interest to those who read Carey's Vertigo work.  A

SILENT WAR #1 - Thanks to the wonder of publication schedules, the Inhumans finally get around to starting that war they declared back in Son of M #6.  It's a bit lacklustre, to be honest.  Hine and Irving don't strike me as a natural creative team for interplanetary warfare, and the Inhumans come off as a bit clueless, since the plot requires them to blunder into committing a terrorist attack by accident.  And then the Fantastic Four show up with no explanation, which is odd, since this story presumably has to follow New Avengers #24, and therefore it must be deep into Civil War.  This, unfortunately, is pretty typical of Marvel's pick-and-mix attitude to continuity.  They want us to remember about a plot started in Son of M, and they want us to remember that the Fantastic Four have a history with the Inhumans, but they don't want us to remember about the Fantastic Four's status quo in their own book, because that bit's inconvenient.  Well, sorry, but you can't have it both ways.  C+

There's more from me at If Destroyed - now updating daily, you know - and if you're desperate for more Article 10 columns, you can always hunt through the archives on Ninth Art.

Next week, X-Men #195.  And that's it.  In fact, even X-Men #195 is running late - the only X-book solicited for next week was X-Men Annual #1, but it's been delayed.  Is there any logic at all to Marvel's stop-start shipping schedule?

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