Also among this week's comics...

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #501 - A single issue story?  From Marvel, in 2003?  Actually, it's sub-titled "Intermezzo Number One", so I assume there's more to come.  A trade paperback full of short stories, then, I suppose.  Well, it'll make a change.  The actual story is one of those pieces where Spider-Man fights a villain for half the issue, intercut with Aunt May reflecting on how she deals with the stress of knowing Peter is Spider-Man.  It's a nice enough little story, though I find Straczynski's style leans a bit far towards schmaltz for my tastes.  ("I try to honour and respect him by looking for my own victories every day...")  Oh, and while I'm writing about Spider-Man, I gather the final issue of Trouble did indeed try to introduce the idea that May is really Peter's mother.  By my estimates, that would involve her in a thirty-year pregnancy, so I suspect this one will be quietly swept under the table and forgotten about.  Anyhow, Amazing - nice little story, if you don't mind Straczynski's Chicken Soup for the Supporting Character routines.  B+

BURGLAR BILL #3 - Christ, is this only up to issue #3?  I thought Paul Grist said he'd already finished it all, and it had been on a shelf for years.  Yet issue #4 apparently won't be coming out until next April.  Isn't a five-monthly schedule a bit relaxed for something that's already done?  Anyway, this is a largely self-contained issue, which is mostly about the supporting characters, so pick it up anyway.  PC Kelvin Flats has been shamelessly re-enacting an old Not the Nine O'Clock News sketch, and as a result he's been warned to stop arresting people for no reason.  Which is of course desperately unfair, since that's half the fun of the job, I'd have thought.  It's undoubtedly corny at times, but it's good fun.  B+

CAPER #2 - The second part of Judd Winick's historical crime story seems at first to be getting caught up in a subplot about a girl gang, but soon gets back to the much more important subject of who gets to sleep with the late Myron's wife.  The wife is a bit of a non-character, to be honest, but otherwise this is good, entertaining storytelling, and way ahead of a lot of the work Winick's been doing of late.  Good stuff.  A-

EMPIRE #5 - Penultimate issue, and Waid goes to town on the unexpected twists.  This is some of the best work he's done in years (and yes, I realise it was originally written for the ill-fated Gorilla imprint quite some time ago).  It's got the style of a classic superhero story, but because of the starting point of the plot, it avoids being quite so generic as that.  A really well-paced story; this miniseries has turned out much better than I'd anticipated.  A+

INHUMANS #7 - Now Marvel's second-lowest selling title that hasn't been cancelled yet!  (The lowest being Human Torch, which my store didn't even bother putting on the shelves this week.)  This is a shame, because Inhumans is one of their better books.  McKeever shifts point of view to give us a story about a girl who asks San out on a date for dare, and then (in the manner of such stories) decides she likes him after all.  San comes across as a rather less sympathetic and more enigmatic character in this story, but then it's being written from Stacey's perspective, and works in that light.  Fabulous art from Robert Teranishi.  It's a single issue story, by the way, so worth picking up if you haven't tried the book yet.  A+

QUEEN & COUNTRY #21 - Into a new storyline, and another change of artist.  This time it's Mike Hawthorne, the artist from Three Days In Europe.  Hawthorne goes for a less exaggerated style on this title, with more shadow.  But it's still attractive, clean work, and he gets the most out of a very talky issue, almost entirely concerned with political manoeuvring.  (And, uh, isn't the identity of C's successor blown on the inside back cover...?  Aren't you supposed to read that bit first?)  You could make a case that Rucka is writing a novel here - it's not very visual - but it's a great story, so I don't really mind.  A-

THOR: VIKINGS #5 - The final issue of Garth Ennis' Max miniseries about zombie vikings invading New York.  You probably don't need me to tell you that this was not one of Ennis' more thoughtful pieces.  Perhaps surprisingly, Ennis has kept the anti-superhero stuff to a relatively low level in this story - Thor only looks like slightly stupid, and gets his own back in the end.  Meanwhile, the part of Dr Strange is played tonight by Noel Coward, who ends up as the mouthpiece for Ennis' sarcasm.  It's nothing like Dr Strange, but it works in the story.  Ennis is really just having fun with this story, and throwing in some of his usual obsessions.  (The Luftwaffe!  Lunatic christians!)  It'll make a fun, throwaway trade paperback.  B 

VENOM #8 - After bitching about the pacing for the last seven issues, I feel morally obliged to point out that the speed has finally picked up, and a fair amount actually happens this issue.  It's still not a plot that I find terribly thrilling, but at least it's going somewhere.  Visually, there's a real problem with Venom in the Arctic as a gigantic, deformed Spider-Man, when the story is trying to sell us on him as scary rather than funny.  Keep him in the night and the shadows if that's the direction you want to go.  Regardless, it's going somewhere at last, so it deserves some credit for that.  C+

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

Next week, Exiles #38 features the return of Chuck Austen.  God help us.  Sentinel #10 begins the third and final story arc, and X-Treme X-Men ties up "Intifada."

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