Also among this week's comics...

BORN #4 - The end of Garth Ennis's miniseries about the Punisher in Vietnam, and it's not really going to come as a surprise to anyone.  To be honest, you could see this coming by the end of issue #1, but then the inexorability of it all is part of the point.  If you want to take this literally, Ennis appears to be writing in Death as a player in the Punisher's origin - and this being the Marvel Universe, you really could be that literal about it if you were so minded.  An odd routine about cosmic balance and destiny in the final few pages does seem to suggest that Ennis really is hinting towards a literal interpretation, but it works better if you take it as ambiguous mental illness.  An odd comic, not to say a thoroughly depressing one, but somewhat successful on its own terms.  B+

CATWOMAN #23 - In which Catwoman continues her road trip by going to Opal City and meeting... uh... well, some guy who I assume is a supporting character from Starman, but god alone knows.  Unfortunately, what we have here is a cripplingly inaccessible issue which spends half its time hitting you over the head with the fact that the guest star is some character or other whom you're presumably supposed to have heard of, without ever making it all that clear why.  I have absolutely no clue who Bennett is and why his photo would be on display in a Starman museum. I gather he's a supporting character from James Robinson's run on the book, but I had to look that up for myself, and it doesn't help much.  Not one of the better issues of this series.  C

FABLES: THE LAST CASTLE - This was solicited, and is even billed on the back cover, as the explanation of "why the Fables were forced from their homelands into occupation."  It's nothing of the sort - we already knew that there was a war, their homelands got conquered, and they fled to earth.  And you don't learn anything more about the background to the war here.  What the issue actually contains is a story about the last stand by the people who held the gate open while the last fables escaped to earth.  It's quite good, although the art is disappointingly sketchy considering that it's by P Craig Russell - you only have to compare the framing sequence, where he did full art, to the main story where he did layouts and inks and left the rest to Craig Hamilton.  Not that it's bad, but I have very high expectations for Russell, and this falls short.  All that said, it's still a good little story, but perhaps one worth waiting to pick up in trade format rather than shelling out for the prestige format.  B

There's a new Article 10 up at Ninth Art on Monday.

This is the last column I'm writing in Glasgow, so depending on whether BT show up as promised to install a phone line, you can join me next week for the first X-Axis from Edinburgh.  Well, the first one in three years, anyway.  It's good to go home.  And if I don't post one, blame BT.

Shipping next week, yet another issue of Exiles; New Mutants continues the endless recruitment drive; and New X-Men starts to sift through the fallout.

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