Also this week...

CIVIL WAR: YOUNG AVENGERS & RUNAWAYS #1 - Yet another Civil War tie-in miniseries, although this one is effectively filling the place of the absent Young Avengers monthly.  Using the crossover to promote Runaways is fine by me, and Zeb Wells writes a perfectly competent "heroes meet and fight because of a misunderstanding" story.  It's nothing spectacular, and nitpickers might note that Flag-Smasher is looking awfully healthy for a guy who was assassinated in another title two months ago, but it does a reasonable job of capturing the spirit of Runaways.  As for the Young Avengers... well, they're in it too.  Not bad.  B

EXILES #84 - With Chris Claremont out of circulation, Tony Bedard finds his stay on this title unexpectedly extended.  So here we go with a new storyline, as the Exiles do the obvious thing and drop in on their homeworlds - while the Timebreakers try to drag the book back to its original format, with or without the title characters.  It's a set-up issue, basically, with a generic superhero story nailed on.  Okay, but the solicitations suggest things should improve next month.  B 

JACK OF FABLES #1 - A spin-off from Fables, and there's a nagging voice that tells me I should have given it a full review.  But to be honest, it's much what you'd expect from a second Fables title, and doesn't head in any dramatically different direction.  In theory it's a solo book for Jack, but in reality it's closer to being West Coast Fables, really - more of the same, on a par with the existing book.  Of course, that's a perfectly decent standard, and there's nothing whatsoever wrong with this comic.  It's quite good, but it doesn't seem to bring anything that Fables wasn't already providing.  B+

WOLVERINE #44 - More hack'n'slash fighting with a vague conspiracy subplot.  You either like this sort of thing or you don't.  It's not big and it's not clever, but it's well paced, amusingly over the top, and the plot twists are nicely done.  At the end of the day it's Wolverine fighting people for 20 pages, but for heaven's sake, what more do you want from a Wolverine crossover issue?  It puts a smile on my face.  B+

X-MEN #189 - Once again, Chris Bachalo is running so late that he has six inkers working with him.  And once again, the faster he's working, the clearer the art gets.  Stop thinking so much, Bachalo.  It does you no good.  Mind you, while it's certainly an improvement on last month (where parts of the story were almost impenetrable), it still doesn't flow particularly well.  Carey is writing a fairly traditional superhero story here, and it really needs an artist who'll support the plot and tell the story, instead of using it as a springboard to draw pretty-but-random pictures.  Still, it's a step in the right direction.  You can read it.  But I just know I'd be enjoying this story more if it was being drawn clearly, by somebody whose focus was on the narrative.  B+

Finally, I'd like you to join me in a moment's silence to contemplate the tragic demise of X-Men Unlimited.  The pointless bimonthly anthology was cancelled back in April, but I didn't mention that when I reviewed the final issue.  There was a simple reason for that: Marvel just stopped soliciting it, without actually announcing that the book was dead, and I just didn't notice that it was the last issue.  I twigged a fortnight ago when I was writing up the Marvel sales column for June - which Heidi MacDonald will presumably be posting on The Beat shortly, now that she's back from San Diego.

Strangely enough, the cancellation of X-Men Unlimited seems to have gone completely unnoticed - or at least, any reaction has slipped beneath Google's radar.  That's remarkable, when you think about it.  Twenty thousand people read X-Men Unlimited.  And that's how much impression it made on them.  They didn't even notice it was gone, let alone care.

There's more from me at If Destroyed, and if you're desperate for more Article 10 columns, you can always hunt through the archives on Ninth Art.

Next week, Ed Brubaker and Billy Tan's "Fall and Rise of the Shi'ar Empire" continues in Uncanny X-Men #477, and Frank Tieri is still filling in with New Excalibur #10.  There's also a New X-Men trade paperback, collecting the most recent four-parter (although it's actually just the middle arc in a twelve-issue storyline).

And that's it for X-books, although I see from the shipping list that there's also yet another Creeper relaunch from DC, the highly-specialist Agents of Atlas miniseries from Marvel, and something called Hi Fructose Toysploitation Magazine Quarterly #3, which disappointingly turns out to be an actual magazine about Japanese toys.  Oh well.

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