Also this week...

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #45 - Spider-Man digs himself out of the rubble to help Aunt May and Mary Jane, in what I take to be a deliberate homage to the old Ditko sequence.  Perfectly acceptable superheroics, although I'm still confused as to what it is about Straczynski's run which has sent the sales through the roof.  B+

AVENGERS #58 - The Avengers are invited to take over the world, due to all the world's governments being teleported away by vortexes.  This is one of those faintly ridiculous high concept stories that just about works in JLA, but straight on the heels of the Kang War I'm not convinced it was the best choice of plot for Avengers.  Not bad if you like that sort of thing, and Kieron Dwyer is finally finding his feet on art.  However, any Europeans will probably struggle to suppress laughter at dialogue such as "Take away the Maastricht Treaty and you're giving up every economic and personal freedom the European Union has struggled for!"  Ah, Americans.  Bless 'em.  B

CALL OF DUTY: THE BROTHERHOOD #4 - Burning people, wandering around, bizarre origin flashback of little girl involving Heath Robinson time travel technology.  Boring.  C

CATWOMAN #11 - Fill-in issue, of the old school.  By which I mean, Catwoman gets to spend an issue demonstrating her skills against a generic villain and generally showing off how cool she is.  Nothing wrong with feeding the heroine some easy wins once in a while, and fortunately, this issue really does make her look cool.  Great fun.  A-

ELEKTRA: GLIMPSE & ECHO #3 - For some reason, I can't quite get past the bit where the cat kills the monkey.  Bastards.  You can't kill the monkey.  It's cute.  Anyhow, Elektra begins to fight back against the Hand, and the art remains better than the story.  Aside from that bit with the monkey, which really got to me.  Damn.  B+

FANTASTIC FOUR #61 - Mark Waid's second issue, and the Thing and the Human Torch fight just as they always have.  This is old territory, of course, but it's needed as a set-up in order to kick off Waid's subplot for the Torch, which is much less established territory.  For the moment, fairly traditional but well-executed Fantastic Four material, although the purists will doubtless be outraged by Waid retconning, of all things, the Yancy Street Gang.  B

HELLBLAZER #176 - The concluding half of Mike Carey's first arc, which certainly gets the job done in re-establishing the English setting and laying the groundwork for some upcoming storylines.  It's still arguable that this has swung the pendulum a little too far back in favour of classic Hellblazer and that Carey has yet to bring anything terribly new to the character, but given that Lucifer took a while to get going, I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on a slow burn.  B

JLA #72 - The historical half of the plot, and I honestly can't get all that worked up about this.  There's quite a nice idea at the heart of the story, that the Atlanteans travelled back in time thinking this was a utopian period of their history, only to find that the historical records had been faked to lead them into a trap.  But at the end of the day this is a lengthy exercise to bring back Aquaman, and I'm infinitely more interested in the present day half of the story, which seems to have more point to it.  C+

SPIDER-MAN'S TANGLED WEB #18 - Ted McKeever introduces Spellcheck, a vigilante so low-grade that he actually admires Typeface.  This is a gloriously ridiculous affair, not so much a story as an excuse to take the deadpan joke about a syntactically obsessive vigilante and hammer it until it bleeds.  23 pages will do the gag nicely.  We do, indeed, ask too much of the hyphen.  A

TRANSMETROPOLITAN #60 - I haven't been wild about the last act of the Spider vs the government plot, but there's none of that in this final issue.  This is the epilogue, with some closure on all the character arcs.  And while my head says the last page is a cop-out, my heart disagrees.  Deeply satisfying.  A+

WILDCATS v3.0 #2 - I'm still a little unconvinced by Casey's grasp of the realities of commerce.  You can't go around buying people out unless they're willing to sell to you, which makes all of these "I've just bought your company and you didn't know" scenes implausible.  The idea of an accountant not wanting to perform consultancy work because it's outside his area of business is also pretty ludicrous - I can't think of an accountancy firm of any significant size that doesn't.  It's their main money-earner, for heaven's sake.  So I'm torn here - I quite like the book, and the points it raises are interesting ones, but I have a nasty feeling it's going to keep undermining itself by messing up the details.  B

On Monday, another Article 10 at Ninth Art.  This time, some thoughts on DC's decision to abolish letters columns altogether.  Did you even notice?

Next week is pretty busy, and bring the X-books back on schedule again.  Exiles begins another storyline.  Ultimate X-Men #22 ships (late), as does X-Statix #3.  Uncanny X-Men #414 continues the biweekly run for Chuck Austen.  And from the miniseries, Wolverine: Netsuke #2 and Chamber #3.  Not a bad selection, actually.

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