Also this week...

EXILES #81 - The World Tour storyline nears its conclusion as we reach the Heroes Reborn world.  Surprisingly, unlike the earlier stops, we're not visiting the Heroes Reborn world as it used to be.  It's the Heroes Reborn world as it is now, which means that Tony Bedard is picking up plot threads from the original run of Thunderbolts.  This may not be quite what people were expecting from the solicitation, but there you go.  At this stage, I really think we've taken this as far as it goes, and I can't honestly say I'm especially excited by the prospect of seeing the Young Allies again.  Time to draw a line under it, I think.  B-

FANTASTIC FOUR: A DEATH IN THE FAMILY - Baffling one-shot which Marvel seemed to be hinting was some kind of event, but actually turns out to be a Karl Kesel fill-in issue of Fantastic Four with a reprint nailed on.  It's a good enough story for what it is, with the "how are they going to get out that?" opening and a cleverly constructed time travel story.  But at the end of the day it's a fill-in story, and again, perhaps not what people were led to expect.  Obviously nobody really thought that they were going to kill Sue Richards, but Marvel did make it sound like more than just another fill-in story, and frankly, that wasn't true.  It's a dangerous business when people start suspecting that the solicitations are deliberately deceptive, because what happens when you've really got something that you want to promote and nobody believes you?  Anyway, ignoring the dodgy promotion and focussing solely on the story itself, it's an entertaining slice of retro superheroics.  B+

LOADED BIBLE - Curious 48-page one-shot from writer Tim Seeley, acting as a pilot for possible future stories.  The story features Jesus fighting vampires in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and baits the controversy even further with a cover showing a neck-bitten Jesus on the cross and the caption "48 Christ-tacular pages!!"  In fact, it's a little saner, and significantly less offensive, than you might expect.  The idea is that it's a post-nuclear world and only the American evangelicals survived.  Somewhere along the line, vampires turn up.  Our hero, who's apparently the second coming of Jesus, heroically battles vampires while the evangelical authorities exploit his image to further their own agenda.  That clunking noise you can hear is a less than subtle satirical anvil.  It's a frustrating comic that can't quite work out what it wants to be - a satirical fable about evil churchmen twisting the words of Jesus, or a religion-baiting wind-up about Captain Jesus battling vampires.  And I'm not sure that doing both at once really works.  Nonetheless, it's somewhat successful on both levels, and the religious among you can be reassured that the creators absolutely love Jesus and think he's great.  They portray him as a genuine, unequivocal hero, sincerely troubled by the exploitation of his iconography.  It's just the Christians who come out of it badly.  B

SECRET SIX #1 - Good lord, a DC book which actually bothers to make me care about the characters.  I thought they'd lost the knack.  Of course, Gail Simone's always been good at bringing characters to life, and there's a solid central plot here with supervillain factions scheming among themselves.  They're a dodgy selection of C-list characters (Catman, for heaven's sake), but unlike many of DC's recent efforts, this one makes me like them enough to care what happens to them - a crucial step that a lot of recent DC books have taken for granted.  I rather enjoyed this one.  A-

WOLVERINE #42 - Civil War arrives, together with our new creative team Marc Guggenheim and Humberto Ramos.  And there's a big difference visible immediately - things happen!  Action occurs!  Even though Guggenheim is a screenwriter new to comics, this is a crossover storyline of the old school, complete with scenes repeated from Civil War #1.  That's not a criticism, by the way - if the scene's genuinely relevant to both books, as it is here, I have no problem whatsoever with duplicating it.  Anyhow, the plot is that Wolverine is going to hunt down Nitro, and that's basically your tie-in.  This is Wolverine as a shiny happy superhero book where people in costume fight one another, and I don't have a problem with that.  It won't win any awards, but I enjoyed it.  B+

Last week's Article 10 is still up at Ninth Art, and there's more from me at If Destroyed.

Next week, Storm #3 continues the wedding build-up, and Son of M #6 concludes the final Decimation tie-in.  Meanwhile, there's also a digest of the recent Sentinel miniseries, and a trade paperback collecting the second half of Wolverine's "Enemy of the State" arc.

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