Just the four X-books this week, and the mere fact that I can write that with a straight phrase is testament enough to how bloated the line is getting.  After all, is anybody going to keep a straight face while telling me that the world needs over sixteen X-books a month?

In fact, in June I reviewed a total of twenty-two.  There are eighteen solicited for September.  There are seven solicited for next week alone.  This is ludicrous.  I wouldn't mind if the quality level was higher, but how many Chuck Austen comics do they think the world needs, for god's sake?

I'm sorry, I'm rambling.  Austen doesn't even have an X-book out this week.  Instead, we'll start with Domino, which was commissioned ages ago - though the fact that we're now down to only one credited editor may give some indication as to how far the book had got before it was shelved the first time round.

Three issues in, nothing is really changing my initial suspicions about this book.  It's not that it's bad, so much as that it's unncessarily fiddly and complicated.  Pruett and Stelfreeze seem to have started off with a relatively sound premise - Domino goes hunting for her mother and in the course of it stumbles onto one of those evil projects that could destroy the world.  Not spectacular, but enough to be getting on with in terms of constructing an action story.

Unfortunately, in an attempt to give it an espionage angle, the plot has been bogged down in all manner of complications and convolutions.  Key parts of the plot are still missing, to the point where rather than wondering what's really going on, we're left wondering why we're supposed to care.  What do Project Armageddon plan to do with their weapon and why are we supposed to be bothered about it?  What is the weapon, anyway?  What does any of this have to do with Domino looking for her mother - thematically or plotwise?  And why are there a bunch of - ahem - "Armajesuits" wandering around with swords?

Everyone is so busy hinting cryptically at what they're up to that the plot ends up being a logic problem rather a satisfying story.  The final page of this issue finally drops in one extra point of information which sets up some room to speculate on how everything fits together.  It's a nice little closing page, in fact, not least because Stelfreeze's art captures the faintly absurd change of tone that the swerve requires.  But it's a bit late to be dropping in basic plot information on the last page of the penultimate issue; ultimately, there's just not enough here to enable us to care about the characters and what they're up to.  Obscuring the plot through withheld information only works if you really know what you're doing; normally it just destroys dramatic tension by stopping anyone for caring.  And that's pretty much the outcome we've got here.

It certainly looks great, and taken in isolation, some of the set pieces are pretty good.  It's not like this is a horrible book by any stretch of the imaginaton; it's readable enough, and I suspect that somewhere in there, there's a reasonably interesting story.  But the way it's being told mean it just isn't all that engaging.

Rating: B-

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