Also this week:

INCREDIBLE HULK #81 - Oh god, it's the dreaded "Everybody else's stories didn't happen" retcon.  I thought Peter David was above that sort of thing?  I'm also underwhelmed by the presentation of 9/11 as an event so shockingly unique in human history that it allows Nightmare to get a foothold in the real world for the first time.  Don't get me wrong - 9/11 is horrible, of course, but it's scarcely unique.  It just happens to be an atrocity which has particular emotional resonance for Americans.  And that's fair enough, but let's keep it in perspective.  Are we really saying it came as more of a shock to the Americans than Hiroshima did to the Japanese (to pick the first example that springs to mind)?  Because in order for the story to work, you kind of have to say that.  Which is irritatingly parochial, to be frank.  It's an attitude of "This happened to us, so it counts more".  Perhaps it works for Americans, but it certainly doesn't work for me.  Oh, and it's a crap story, to boot - the "it was all a dream" ending nailed onto some unimpressive philosophising.  Awful.  D+

MACHINE TEEN #1 - Marvel's latest lamb to the slaughter.  The formula is well established by now - little known writer plus little known artist plus new character plus no publicity equals seventeen copies sold, most of them to the writer's mum.  It's about a teenage schoolboy who, apparently, doesn't know he's actually a robot.  You'd probably guessed that from the cover, and the rest isn't likely to come as a huge surprise to you either - although it's a little noteworthy that, for once, our hero is the quarterback and he's already got the cheerleader girlfriend.  (They're probably going for the "perfect life destroyed" angle.)  It's a mistake to spend the first issue building up to the big reveal that the lead character's a robot.  We know he's a robot, there's a picture of him on the front cover and a big logo saying Machine Teen.  Might as well get that bit out of the way quickly and focus on the bits that the readers don't know about.  ("Is he a robot?" is not a revelation.  "When will he find out that he's a robot?" is a source of tension, on the other hand.)  But it's a perfectly okay comic - slightly better than you're probably expecting, nothing that you should be desperate to read, and it'll sink like a stone just like every other minor Marvel launch these days.  B

SLEEPER SEASON TWO #12 - Sleeper has been the archetypal critically acclaimed cult hit - everyone who reads it seems to love it, but unfortunately we only number in the four digits.  For two years we've followed Holden as he's tried to extricate himself from Tao's criminal organisation.  Technically he succeeds, but it would be a cop-out if things were that easy.  It's not perhaps the ending some people would have been looking for, but killing Tao or Lynch wouldn't have done the job even if it had been viable to dispose of such major WildStorm characters.  Ever since the series began, Holden was a doomed pawn trying to get out of a seemingly impossible situation.  And the book has followed that through to its bleakly logical conclusion.  It's grim, but it's the right finish for the book.  A

Last week's Article 10 is still up at Ninth Art.

Next week, House of M finally gets underway, kicking off an eight-issue miniseries which is supposedly going to change everything.  Honest!  Meanwhile, off in the backwaters of continuity, Ororo: Before the Storm #1 begins a four-issue miniseries about Storm's childhood in Cairo.  Uncanny X-Men #460 is the first half of a Mojo story.  Exiles #65 finishes up the "Timebreakers" arc.  And X-Men Unlimited #9 stars Iceman and - well, who'd have thought it? - Wolverine.  Gambit reaches its penultimate issue, and X-Force: Shatterstar has the common decency to end.

There's also a Marvel Must Haves collection of NYX #4-5, on the grounds that issue #6 is due out in July.  Of course, NYX and "due out" are only tenuously connected concepts...

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