Also this week...

ANNIHILATION: RONAN #1 - Another Annihilation miniseries, although this one seems to have little or no interest in the wider story.  Ronan has been kicked out of office by corrupt factions who are trying to seize power.  The storyline has him siding with rebel Kree against the government.  No insects to be seen.  Ronan is an odd choice for a miniseries and I can only assume he's been selected as a natural counterpart for the Super-Skrull.  Writer Simon Furman's approach is to play him as a sort of Kree Judge Dredd - heroic by his own values, slightly mad by anyone else's - which is as good an approach as any.  Adequate, but I'm not honestly sure I understand what the book is for.  B-

ASTONISHING X-MEN #14 - Emma Frost psychoanalyses Scott for an issue.  I'm really not at all keen on where Whedon's going with Emma, since making her into a villain is the single dullest thing you could do with her (and even if it's a feint, it means he's teasing a story I find completely boring).  But he does have some great ideas for Cyclops, who gets ripped apart in this issue.  Emma's complaints about him are pretty much valid.  Everyone else gets a properly inspiring leader like Captain America or Reed Richards, but the X-Men are stuck with Cyclops.  He's a character who made reasonable sense when he was merely the field leader and Professor X was there to set the direction.  But without him, poor Scott is just a competent, decent tactician who keeps the show on the road but has no big ideas of his own.  He's an honest, hardworking middle manager.  It's a view of the character I basically agree with - I actually think it makes him more interesting - and I'm all for exploring that side further.  A-

BLACK PANTHER #15 - Continuing the countdown to "I Married A Pod Person."  Reginald Hudlin is still trying to persuade us that we believe in this relationship and, unless you're a newcomer to the characters, he's probably failing.  There are two big problems here.  For one thing, he's trying to justify the relationship on the grounds that T'Challa's only just become an adult.  That appears to match a throwaway comment in the Storm miniseries that suggests they're going with a "year one" approach, deleting everything prior to the last year or so and reassigning all previous Black Panther appearances to T'Challa's father.  Except if that's the idea, why is T'Challa still the Black Panther in flashback sequences in New Avengers: Illuminati, published a fortnight ago and set back around the Kree-Skrull War?  Marvel really need to pick a clear continuity line here and stick to it; the fact that they don't even seem to recognise a problem, even though this has been dragging out for over a year, suggests a worrying degree of cluelessness in the heart of editorial.  The second problem is that Hudlin's take on Storm misses any known version of the character by a million miles, both in speech and action.  The whole thing comes across as horrendously forced and contrived which, of course, is precisely what it is.  Technically acceptable if judged completely within its own boundaries, but that's not an appropriate test for a storyline of this sort.  C-

BLUE BEETLE #2 - Reassuringly, the quality stays high for the second issue.  I'd been wondering how this series was going to do the "One Year Later" gimmick, and now we get our answer.  Jumping past the first year of the new Blue Beetle's career didn't seem a very advisable move, but Giffen and Rogers neatly sidestep that problem with a nice cliffhanger that lets them do everything at once.  Once again, there are strong scenes with the supporting cast and the rookie hero is perfectly pitched for maximum likeability.  An unexpected pleasure, so far.  A

SEVEN SOLDIERS: FRANKENSTEIN #4 - Hmm.  A lot of people seem to adore this particular Seven Soldiers series, but I'm not seeing it myself.  It's much better than the garbled Mr Miracle, but otherwise not in the league of the other books.  There are strong ideas here, and the explanation of the Sheeda seems an excellent concept - people from the far future farming their own ancestors.  But this never translates into much of a story and I don't feel Morrison has managed to do anything particularly interesting with Frankenstein's cultural baggage.  He's being played against type as a sort of action hero, but that's as far as it goes, really.  Okay, and therefore disappointing.  C+

STORM #3 - In contrast to the absurd Black Panther storyline, this miniseries is turning out to be actually rather acceptable.  Once again, there are two reasons for that: Eric Jerome Dickey has a solid grasp on Storm's character and writes her convincingly, for one.  And for another, he's actually making the effort to sell us this relationship, instead of baldly announcing it as a fact and expecting us to buy it.  Quite honestly, I think this whole wedding storyline is one of the most inane things Marvel have done in years - not to mention rather patronising, given that it's quite obvious what the happy couple are supposed to have in common - and yet I'm still enjoying this book on its own merits.  If the creators can sell me on this, they really must be doing something right.  B+

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

Next week, Civil War begins, but the X-books won't be concerning themselves with that just yet.  Exiles #80 is this week's only ongoing title, continuing its visit to the Future Imperfect world.  Sentinel Squad O*N*E and X-Men: Apocalypse vs Dracula both wrap up.  And X-Men: The End nears completion with Book Three, volume 5 - the only Chris Claremont book still written entirely by him, so presumably he finished the scripts a while back.

Over in reprints, there's a second volume of Silver Age Essential X-Men.  For maximum confusion, they're titling it Essential Classic X-Men, thus distinguishing it from Essential X-Men (the title they use for the Claremont era), Essential Uncanny X-Men (the title they used for volume 1, even though it wasn't the title of the book during the Silver Age) and Classic X-Men (which was a different book entirely).  Still, I suppose that's another trademark renewed.  There's also a trade paperback collecting Ultimate X-Men/Fantastic Four, with the rest of the space padded out with Handbook reprints.

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