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For anyone who's wondering, no, I'm not going to review Gambit #20 because I haven't read it yet. I'm waiting until the previous part of the story in Gambit 2000 comes out.

Anyhow, BEFORE THE FANTASTIC FOUR: BEN GRIMM & LOGAN... Marvel should have this damn thing framed in their offices as a warning to future generations of what happens if you commission high-concept miniseries just for the hell of it. Was the world crying out for a miniseries about Ben Grimm in the army? Not really. Did Larry Hama have anything in the slightest to say about Ben Grimm in the army? Not remotely. Was this basically just a bad Wolverine story with Grimm hanging around in the background? Oh, absolutely.

So why is it being published? Because somebody thought this "before the four" miniseries concept would be great. Nobody would have commissioned this on its merits; nobody would have written it without such a bizarre commission. And why they chose to lead the line off with this, as opposed to the Reed Richards series (which is at least entertaining, even if it's still pointless) is beyond me.

The best hope for this series had been that Hama might key into the sort of thing that had made his GI Joe series fun, but this issue is mainly devoted to one of the most excessively contrived aerial stunt sequences I've seen in ages. It's just too much for its own good. Kaare Andrews does some perfectly competent artwork given that he's not got much to work with, but the book is still a washout.

Thanks to this sterling performance from the Fantastic Four office, Rob Liefeld's debut on WOLVERINE is not the worst X-book of the week.

The real surprise, however, is that Liefeld's Wolverine really isn't all that bad. It's not great by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly not the atrocity people tend to expect from Liefeld. "Slightly below average" would catch it right.

In terms of plot, this is actually pretty coherent. A bunch of villains want to capture Wolverine so they can exploit his healing factor. Okay, with you so far. They hire Deadpool to do it; he accepts so that he can get them to help the injured Siryn. Okay, it's a continuity error, since Siryn was last seen possessed by some nasty mystical thingy and seemed to have healed from her injuries, but hell, I'll be charitable and chalk it up to the six month gap. If nothing else, at least everyone seems to have a sane motivation and it makes reasonable sense. The only really obvious problem is, given that the villains have already got a healing factor superpower to hand in Deadpool, why bother going after Wolverine's?

Liefeld does fall into the same problem that Claremont's recent stories have had by creating a small horde of henchmen who serve no particular purpose in the story. While Deadpool could use a Watchtower representative to talk to, he doesn't need six villains of negligible importance wandering around with him at the beginning of the story when the scene would have worked much better if it was just him going after Wolverine. And while I'm at it, Liefeld could also have done a better job of signalling the end of the flashback in the middle of the story - the cut back to the main narrative is pretty jarring. But overall, there's nothing too bad here.

Even Liefeld's art is surprisingly acceptable. Of course, he's still got a tiny range of facial expressions and he's still using many of the same basic poses he's been doing to death since 1989, but at least the characters are looking basically human - helped, admittedly, by a colourist who has piled on the highlights to give them more solidity. He's still a pretty weak storyteller, with fight scenes that flow as if there was a dam between the panels, but at least he's telling the story rather than lapsing into blatant pin-up territory.

It's really not that bad. It's really not that good either, but this being a Liefeld book, the angle has to be that it's better than expected.

X-FORCE's first Counter-X storyline finally lumbers to a close, so late that they've actually had to skip a month in the indicia to catch up.

Nothing here to turn around the decidedly flawed opening story arc. Our heroes run around trying to smash up a nasty plot device, while the baddies sneak in and kill Pete Wisdom. Simple, rather vacant, and with really ugly art - there's not much to say about this that I haven't said about previous chapters, because there's not much to say about this, period.

X-Force is the least inspiring Counter-X title thus far by a long way. It's not that the other opening storylines were better (Generation X's was much worse), but at least they kicked their respective books into new directions. X-Force hasn't noticeably done anything other than pointlessly change some characters' powers and go back to the original concept. That doesn't mean that something decent can't be done from here, and hopefully - like Brian Wood and Steven Grant - Ian Edginton will do something better once he has more creative freedom. But this Counter-X storyline doesn't even point the way to an interesting new idea, making it something of a waste.

X-MEN UNLIMITED leads on the X-Men and Darkstar teaming up to beat up a mad scientist. Other than the oddity of giving Darkstar such a big role when she's always been something of a third-rater, it's pretty much the usual. There's some questionable plot elements (I really have trouble with an inexperienced telepath taking over both Phoenix and Cable simultaneously), but nothing very distinctive one way or the other.

Surprisingly, despite the fact that he's only got to draw twenty-six pages in three months, Brett Booth doesn't make it through the issue and the story ends with a hasty fill-in job by Ron Lim. Both are acceptable enough in their own way, but the style shift from Booth's heavy Jim Lee influence to Lim's house style is pretty jarring. On the whole, though, this is just another inconsequential X-Men Unlimited story - once again, precisely the sort of thing they told us they weren't going to do any more.

More interesting is the Deadpool back-up strip, a trailer for Jimmy Palmiotti's upcoming "film noir" run on his book, which starts in September. That storyline is going to be drawn by Paul Chadwick, but this story gives us the surprising (for an X-book, anyway) choice of Liam Sharp. Sharp's come a long way since the days when he was piling stupidly intricate panel designs onto all his pages and doing most of his art with the aid of a lightbox. While his art here is so dark as to make early Jae Lee look positively white, it works perfectly for the mood.

Seeing Deadpool doing film noir is rather odd. While Palmiotti hasn't erased the character's tendency to crack jokes, the dialogue here runs much more towards low-key, dark humour, when the character has always worked best in the past by using his deranged dialogue to lighten up stories. It's a much more sober version of the character than Christopher Priest has been writing, although to me that at least partly reflects how Priest has missed the mark on the character altogether.

The plot is serviceable noir stuff. Desperate for money, Deadpool remembers rescuing a femme fatale type who had stolen some money, and was subsequently buried with the money after she topped herself - so he goes to dig up her grave to take the money. Well enough handled, and since it's only an 11 page trailer, you have to expect something pretty generic. It's certainly a very aggressive statement of an entirely new direction for the book, and one that could work if Palmiotti has an original story to go with the style.

An oddity, but an intriguing one. The X-Men story gets a C+, the Deadpool story a B+ - but the X-Men get more pages, so let's call it...

Does the idea of a series of Avalon-style counterparts of Marvel superheroes make you go "Hey, that sounds really good"? If so, you are the target market for AVATAARS: COVENANT OF THE SHIELD. I am not in the target market - on the contrary, my immediate reaction was that this was one of the most horribly contrived ideas I'd heard in years.

Rather than going for a straightforward Elseworlds format, Len Kaminski opens with an explanation of how the world was formed as a deliberate duplicate of Earth by various cosmic entities as some kind of experiment. This at least makes a token sort of sense by way of explaining why there's a duplicate Earth out there, but unless this is going to be a focal point of the story, I'm not convinced that it wouldn't have been better just to go with the Elseworlds route. Admittedly, the Stranger does get to show up hovering in the background ominously, so maybe there really is a good reason for this.

Nonetheless... sword and sorcery versions of superheroes? Why? It's a classic example of falling between two stools - the superhero crowd don't particularly like fantasy stuff, and vice versa. Add the two genres together, and you probably get something rather less than the sum of its parts. Certainly that seems to be the case here, with a serviceable if unexciting fantasy story (who stole the king's child) forcibly welded onto a cosmic powers scenario that doesn't fit very well at all, and with the characters replaced by sketchily drawn superhero analogues that are too obviously in-jokes to generate any real drama. Does Kaminski really expect me to feel any sympathy for a Hulk analogue called Greenskyn Smashtroll?

It does, on the plus side, have some strong artwork from Oscar Jimenez, who comes up with some nice character designs for the heroes - influenced by the originals rather than just tweaking them. His Captain America counterpart (yes, Captain Avalon, that's right) echoes the original character design while avoiding any blatant Americana. Even though Kaminski has lumbered the character with an origin involving a visionquest and the Statue of Liberty. Jimenez also does some amusing mock scrolls for the origin flashback sequences.

When Kaminski isn't piling on the in-jokes - and yes, he does briefly let up - at least there are reasonable concessions made to the culture. None of the heroes show the slightest concern about killing their opponents in battle, which is exactly how it should be.

But this is another high concept miniseries which doesn't leave me at all convinced that it has any real point to it beyond being an idea that sounded good in the pub. It's far too in love with its cutesy central idea to work as a dramatic story.