At this point, it’s not really much of a spoiler to say that this book focuses on the philosophical divide (with punches!) between Cyclops and Wolverine over the fate of the mutant race.  While the two have always had a prickly history due to their frequent personality clashes, they’ve developed a real mutual respect over the years which has served them well in these trying times.  So what could possibly drive a wedge between these two and fracture the diminished group of mutants on Utopia?  The task of finding out falls to writer Jason Aaron; and, as you’d expect from the writer of “Scalped,” and the man who has given us some great runs on “Wolverine,” “Punisher MAX” and “Ghost Rider,” he delivers.

It all starts with the two leaders attending an arms conference in Switzerland, which is subsequently crashed by the long-missing Quentin Quire.  While he’s there mainly to cause chaos, a contingent of Sentinels outside of the conference only adds fuel to the fire.  Though this causes most of the nations of the world to re-activate their long dormant Sentinels, of which all turn out to be defective and start wreaking havoc across the globe.  Naturally, it falls on the X-Men to stop this rampage of mutant-killing machines themselves.  If you thought that this sounds like a huge diversion so that someone can attack Utopia directly, then you thought right.  The Hellfire Club is back and being led by five very ambitious children with an aim to make themselves a lot more money and power at the mutants’ expense.

It may seem ridiculous to have a bunch of kids as the main villains for such an important story, but this is the Marvel Universe after all.  I think we can all agree that this isn’t the most ridiculous thing we’ve seen there, or even in the X-Men’s corner of the universe, so let’s just shrug collectively and move on.  Though they’re clearly in the antagonist role here, the story isn’t really about the Hellfire Kids since their purpose here is to serve as instigators and to re-introduce the club itself as a viable threat for future stories.  In that sense, their debut is successful since they come across as insufferable little geniuses and psychopaths who I want to see again if only so that they can have their assess handed to them.  Now, I don’t know if this was intentional on Aaron’s part, but writing them with an intelligence beyond their years also gives them quite an attitude as well, which makes them feel as if they walked out of the pages of a Mark Millar comic.  As a result, I wound up hating them a lot more than he probably intended, but they still represent a credible threat to the team if only for the fact that the kids represent a threat that can’t simply be beaten into submission.

Of course, having kids serve as the villains in this story nicely mirrors the reason behind the title event as it comes down to the future of the youngest mutants.  With their species’ numbers at their lowest ever, Cyclops doesn’t think that anyone has the luxury of sitting on the sidelines and being a non-combatant.  Wolverine, on the other hand, has been killing threats both visible, as part of the team, and not, as leader of X-Force, so that other people, the kids in particular, don’t have to.  I didn’t put a spoiler warning in front of this because you can’t really talk about the plot otherwise, and there’s a lot more to both sides of their arguments.

Cyclops may have let his militant stance on mutants’ future go to his head over the years, but when a giant Sentinel is bearing down on your home what other options do you have?  Even if Wolverine thinks that deserting your home in the face of a threat is the answer, is it really worth it if you have to call on kids to be your footsoldiers?  Neither viewpoint is wrong and both have merit, which gives the ensuing fistfight much deeper resonance than it would’ve had otherwise.  Well, that and the “I can’t believe they just went there!” exchange between the two that kicks things off.  When you’re dragging HER memory into things, reconciliation is no longer an option.  Also, for all of the talk about how superhero comics are about the “the illusion of change” it’s worth noting that if you had told me when I started reading “X-Men” back in the 90’s that one day Cyclops would be telling people to stay and fight and Wolverine would be advocating that they run away, I wouldn’t have believed you.  At all.

Though Aaron does a great job with the conflict at the core of this mini-series, along with Kieron Gillen who expertly handles the “Whose side are YOU on?” fallout of the “Regenesis” one-shot which is also collected here, he gets mostly excellent help from the five artists individually handling each issue.  Carlos Pacheco leads things off, and he’s pretty OK — it’s competent superhero art that gets the job done, though the blah color palette from Frank D’Armata doesn’t do him any favors.  Frank Cho does more lively work showing the entire cast and then some fighting Sentinels across the world while the Utopians cope with the drama at home.  The only real issue is that his Cyclops is distractingly off model as he looks about ten years older than he usually does, with a receding hairline to boot.  Daniel Acuna is the most divergent of the bunch, but I’ve always found its retro look appealing and it suits the explosive drama and dialogue of the third issue well.  Alan Davis is from an entirely different generation of creators than everyone else in the book, but he nails the action in every scene he’s given and probably gives us the most memorable moments in the book as Cyclops and Wolverine lay into each other.  Adam Kubert finishes off the main story, and while his style has always been more suited to action scenes like the one that starts his issue off, he also proves adept at handling the quieter moments as the group splits and goes their separate ways.  Not to be forgotten, Billy Tan is given a lot of character moments to illustrate in “Regenesis” as the cast decides which leader they want to follow.  He sells them all, and the primal fight scenes which are unavoidably on-the-nose, but still an effective distillation of the conflicts in the issue.

So even though this story started off as an editorial edict, Aaron and everyone else have turned it into a memorable X-event.  It has a strong idea at its center, and clearly sets out the purposes and directions of “Uncanny” and “Wolverine/X-Men” while providing a lot of great character moments, both humorous and dramatic.  I’m sure the ensuing stories will be great, but I hope we see a greater sense of direction with these titles.  With the board cleared, I hope that Aaron and Gillen will be able to craft great runs on their respective titles rather than mark time while sales slip away.

Correction to the Podcast:  According to Wikipedia, artist Jan Duursema is NOT married to Ostrander, but actually to his frequent collaborator Tom Mandrake.  Which probably explains how they got to know each other in the first place.

Avengers vs. X-Men:  It’s Coming: While we’re on the subject, this is apparently intended as some kind of lead-in to the event featuring stories that are supposedly of particular relevance to it.  What the reader is actually getting is a grab-bag of issues including “Avengers:  The Children’s Crusade #7,” “House of M #8,” “X-Men:  Schism #5,” and more.  It’s hard to imagine anyone feeling enthusiastic after reading all of these issues out of context and the whole thing looks more like an attempt to squeeze a few more dollars out of the existing readership.  Avoid like the plague.

Astonishing X-Men:  Exiled HC: I didn’t really have any interest in picking up Greg Pak and Mike McKone’s story about Cyclops leading a team made up of alternate reality X-Men, until I saw Warrent Ellis and Adi Granov listed as contributors to the collection.  Apparently this volume will also reprint the 8-page short they did for the horribly overpriced “Ghost Boxes” mini a few years back.  Though Elllis wrote all four shorts, Granov illustrated the adventures of the steampunk team.  It certainly makes me curious to see how the short is supposed to tie in here, but I also realize that’s probably the Ellis completist in me talking.

Wolverine and the X-Men by Jason Aaron vol. 1 HC: I realize that I use some variation on the phrase, “I’ll wait and buy it at Comic-Con (for half-price of course)” but it’s $20 for four issues!  I wouldn’t even have bought “Nextwave” if it had been packaged as cheaply as that!

Ultimate Comics Spider-Man vol. 4:  Death of Spider-Man: All I can hope is that it brings enough closure to Peter Parker’s story that I can enjoy the adventures of Miles Morales without reservation.

Wolverine:  Wolverine’s Revenge, Punisher MAX:  Frank, X-Factor vol. 13:  Hard Labor, X-Men:  Legacy — Lost Legions: All of these are on the “to get” list.  There’s not really anything else to say beyond that.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Extreme Studios “soft” relaunch which kicked off last week with the arrival of new issues of “Prophet” and “Glory” after an almost decade-long hiatus.  The completion of Alan Moore’s “Supreme” run is also a part of this, but the early word on the two aforementioned titles was good, and the buzz has only gotten louder now that they’ve arrived.  Unless something goes horribly wrong, I’ll be picking up both once they’re collected.  What’s interesting to note is that these two titles have been relaunched with the aim of letting indie creators Brandon Graham and Joe Keatinge do whatever they want with the characters.  It’s essentially the same tact that Liefeld took when he got Alan Moore to write “Supreme” back in the 90’s.  I don’t know what took him so long to realize that the same approach could be applied to other characters he has created, but I’m glad he finally did.

This volume also marks the end of Brubaker’s run on the title.  It’s interesting to note that he apparently didn’t come onboard with the plan to tell one over-arching story through these twelve issues.  His remit was apparently to show that the team could work together and introduce the Shadow Council as a recurring antagonist.  While the was successful in the former, the Council still feels a bit too generic to be an actual threat.  Evil organizations with lots of secrets are a dime a dozen in the Marvel Universe and at this point, the most interesting thing about them is Max Fury, the sentient life-model decoy of Nick Fury that’s working for them.  So even though Brubaker is leaving, it’s not a bad thing for the title by any means.

Batman:  Detective Comics vol. 1 — Faces of Death, and Batwoman vol. 1:  Hydrology: Both are getting the hardcover treatment, and I’ll probably wait until both are in softcover before picking them up.  I’ve never read any of Tony Daniel’s “Batman” prior to the relaunch, but everything I’ve heard about his work on “Detective” indicates that he’s struck some kind of nerve with his audience (in a good way).  I’ve heard next to nothing about the story, beyond the fact that the first issue apparently had an AWESOME cliffhanger, so I’m not about to buy it without “minimizing my financial risk” first.  Same with “Batwoman,” though the vibe there is that the brilliant art justifies the “merely okay” story.

Animal Man vol. 1:  The Hunt: I guess it’s fitting that a kind of “pack mentality” is getting me to pick this up.  As one of the two critical breakouts of the relaunch, “Swamp Thing” being the other, picking this up based on word-of-mouth alone feels like a no-brainer.  It’ll also be the first collection featuring the character that I’ve bought where he wasn’t written by a certain demented Scottish counter-culture shaman.

Stormwatch vol. 1:  The Dark Side: I was sold on picking this up even before I saw Paul Cornell talk about the title at the “New 52 Edge & Dark” panel at Comic-Con.  The man is just as clever and witty in person as his writing would indicate with the high point coming as he addressed Apollo and The Midnighter’s relationship.  Cornell said that he’d be approaching it not as an established relationship, but as two men finding each other, and that he had no intention of straightening them up.  He then mentioned how the “Gays in Comics” panel he’d be attending later on wouldn’t let him leave alive if he had said something like, “Well, we’re taking a new direction with those two…”  Good for him, though this will be his only volume as Paul Jenkins will be writing this as of issue #7.

Batman:  Prey: Another collection being released with a tenuous tie in to “The Dark Knight Rises” based on the rumored/presumed/confirmed appearance of Hugo Strange in the movie.  I actually read the original story while I was a student at the University of California, Riverside, since they had a lot of “Legends of the Dark Knight” issues as part of the Eaton Collection.  My memory of it is fuzzy, but I remember liking it well enough, though I have no idea what the other arc they’ll be collecting here is about.  Did Moench and Gulacy actually do a sequel?  We shall see.

Legion Lost: I’ve never read a “Legion of Superheroes” story, but I’m tempted to pick this one up as it garnered a fair amount of acclaim at the time of its release and was successful enough to get writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning the job of writing a new ongoing featuring the team.  My main fear is the series’ legendary reader-unfriendliness, but it can’t be as bad as say, starting to read any of the “X-titles” without any prior knowledge of the story or the characters.  Right?

Starman Omnibus vol. 1: Now available in a more affordable softcover.  This is the edition I’ll probably be picking up at some point since the original collected editions didn’t collect everything.  So if you haven’t started reading this classic series yet, you now have no excuse and will have the chance to look considerably smarter than people like me.

Get Jiro!: Not sure what to think of this since the solicitation text makes it sound like a distaff “Vertigo Crime” book, only fun, and it has that eye-catching cover.  On the other, it’s one of those books written by a semi-famous person, Anthony Bourdain (writer of “Kitchen Confidential,” star of “No Reservations”), with a co-writer I’ve never heard of and an artist who — well, he did that cover so it’s a point in his favor.  If there’s a dearth of interesting product in the week it comes out, I might pick it up.  Or I’ll wait until softcover or later.

Deadenders: Ed Brubaker, before he was famous, wrote this mod-influenced sci-fi series.  A collection of the first four issues was released years ago and it was great.  Not quite as good as “Scene of the Crime,” but proof that Brubaker has been writing excellent comics ever since he broke into the industry.  My only concern is that since this was intended to be an ongoing series, will the ending feel rushed to the point of tarnishing the whole endeavor.  It’s a real possibility, but I’ll be picking it up anyway.

Years ago, Tony Stark, Charles Xavier, Reed Richards, Stephen Strange, Namor and Black Bolt came together to form the “Illuminati,” a secret brain trust of the most prominent figures of their respective corners of the Marvel Universe with the goal of proactively averting catastrophes.  This included making sure the Infinity Gems remained separated and never came together to allow someone like Thanos to take control of all reality.  Though the location of these gems was supposed to be a secret to everyone but the Illuminati themselves, Parker Robbins (a.k.a. The Hood) has found out where Black Bolt’s gem is and now has his sights set on obtaining the entire set.  Standing in his way are all three Avengers teams and… the Red Hulk.

Though the threat of The Hood in control of the Infinity Gems is made out to be a really big deal, it ultimately comes down to an excuse for a lot of big fights.  Now Romita Jr. does that stuff REALLY well, but the idea of a cosmic-level threat isn’t sold very well here.  Even when The Watcher shows up, it feels more like a cheap attempt to add some gravitas to the story.  Regrettably, part of the problem is that the real conflict and interest comes from Steve Rogers and the rest of the Avengers finding out about the Illuminati and the verbal sparring that comes from that.  It’s not handled badly by any means, but it feels like that was the main story Bendis wanted to tell and having The Hood gain control of all reality is just a sideshow to it.

Well, that and getting the Red Hulk on the team.  This is the first time I’ve read a story featuring the character and he just comes off as a more “normalized” version of the classic green incarnation.  Even though there’s a good idea behind his character — he’s the Hulk’s longtime foe General Ross, turned into what he hates most — it’s only invoked in the most direct, on-the-nose matter possible.

I do have to give Bendis credit for his use of Thanos in the story.  When I first heard that the character would be making an appearance here, my first thought was, “You’re undoing the end of ‘The Thanos Imperative’ for this!”  All I can say is that the man anticipated this and Thanos’ role turned out to be more of a welcome surprise than anything else.

So while the fighting and the talking bits are good by themselves, they don’t come together as well as they did in the first volume.  In the main story, that is.  This volume also features a Bryan Hitch-illustrated one-off where Spider-Woman is kidnapped by the Intelligencia and the team goes in to rescue her and finds a lead-in to what will likely be Bendis’ last major story with the team.  It’s an issue jam-packed with action that also tells a fairly complete story as well.  In all honesty, I would’ve liked to have had six stories like this than the one epic six-issue arc we got here.

Even though this volume is a mixed bag, the art, characterization, and setup for future stories is keeping me interested in seeing what happens next.  That would be a tie-in to the “Fear Itself” event where the collected edition also includes the “New Avengers” issues as well.  It sounds like two volumes in one, so we’ll see if that’s as good as it sounds.

America’s Got Powers #1 & #2: Bryan Hitch recently ended his longtime partnership with Marvel to go do more creator-owned work and this series with British TV personality Jonathan Ross, also the writer of the prohibition-era gangsters and vampires series “Turf,” is his first such project.  The solicitation text is fairly uninspiring as the plot sounds like “American Idol” for superheroes, but with a dark catch.  More interesting is the fact that TWO issues of this series are shipping in the same month.  Now, as great an artist as Hitch is, his work at Marvel was riddled with ridiculous delays with his work   on “The Ultimates” being a prime example.  After I bought the first series in single issue form, I felt I’d be better off waiting for the inevitable trade paperback than suffer through those kinds of delays again.  So unless this series is already in the can, it’s doubtful that we’ll see this reach completion in the calendar year.

Secret #1: After launching a new ongoing last month with “The Manhattan Projects,” Jonathan Hickman returns this month with another one.  It’s being called an “espionage thriller that takes a deep look into the shadow world existing between the government and private security firms” which makes it sound like the first series Hickman has done that it set in the present since his breakthrough “The Nightly News.”  No idea if he’s going to expand upon the ideas present there, but his name is enough to get me onboard when the collection comes out.

Supreme #63: Now this is something that I’ll have to pick up because the inevitable trade paperback will collect a lot of the issues that I already own.  To recap:  about a decade ago, Checker Publishing got the rights to Alan Moore’s “Supreme” comics, along with a lot of other work he did for Rob Liefeld’s “Awesome” comics line, and reprinted it in two collections.  However, the entirety of Moore’s run was never published because “Awesome” went belly-up before his final two scripts were illustrated.  With Liefeld doing a “soft relaunch” of the “Awesome” titles through Image we’re now seeing those final two issues completed with art from Erik Larsen.  While I’d like to see a mini-collection of the final two issues, it’d make more sense to reprint the entire second arc as one collection.  So for me, it’s either re-buy the inevitable collection or have two issues bagged next to the old one on my shelf.  In this case, those two issues will be on my shelf eventually.

Chew vol. 5:  Major League Chew: Nothing to say here except that its inclusion should be obvious.  And that I’ll be looking forward to seeing the cliffhanger from the previous volume resolved here.

Severed HC: Yes, it’s only co-written by Scott Snyder, but I’ve heard enough good things about it that I’ll be picking it up when it comes out in hardcover.  However, I am hoping that the promised “bonus material” includes commentary by the authors regarding the story’s origin and development and not just the usual collection of sketches and “work in progress” pages from the artist that we see in just about EVERY collection.  In other words, I shouldn’t get my hopes up.

Despite the ending, this is still another solid volume of “B.P.R.D.” as the organization continues to navigate the treacherous post-cataclysm world that has been thrust upon them.  Two mini-series are collected here with the first, “Gods,” focusing on a pre-cognitive homeless girl and the following that springs up around her.  The decaying relationship between Abe Sapien and Agent Devon also gets a spotlight as well (more on that later).  It’s a good story, striking a nice balance between character and weird violence but it’s mainly notable for being the last full one that’ll be illustrated by Guy Davis.  Davis has been the regular artist for this “series of mini-series” since the beginning and his loose, sketchy style has been perfectly suited to drawing all of the unearthly monstrosities and strange allies that the B.P.R.D. has encountered over the years.  He will be missed, but the main reason the man is leaving is so that he can focus on his creator-owned “Marquis” series instead, and trust me — that’s a good thing.

With Davis’ departure, newcomer Tyler Crook has been tapped to take his place.  “Monsters” is his first arc and it shows us what Liz Sherman has been up to since her disappearance at the end of the “King of Fear” mini-series.  As it turns out, she’s been holed up in a trailer park inwardly moping about her life’s current lack of purpose while outwardly beating down any of the trash who gives her lip.  Fortunately the moping doesn’t last long once she finds out that the majority of the park’s residents are part of a cult and has to rely on her training in order to make it out of there alive.  The story picks up immensely whenever Liz is on the page and taking charge, which is most of the time (thankfully), and Crook acquits himself well as an artist here.  Looking at his style, it appears that the main reason he was chosen was for reasons of “artistic consistency” as he has some of the same looseness that Davis had, though his pencils are much tighter.  Crook isn’t really called upon to draw any really crazy stuff here so I’ll be interested in seeing what he’s really capable of in the next arc.

Even with all this, the thing about “Gods and Monsters” that sticks in my mind is the conflict between Abe and Devon.  On the surface, it seems like a giant red herring because who could really believe that Abe of all people would turn on the B.P.R.D. and all of humanity to be king of the new world order.  Then when I started to think about it, an intriguing possibility presented itself.  What if Devon is right?

In “Hellboy,” the title character has always struggled with his destiny to be the “Beast of the Apocalypse,” and has fought it in just about every way he can.  Repeating that struggle over here in its sister title strikes me as being just a little bit redundant.  However, if they’re going to show the flip side of that struggle — and events in this volume would appear to push Abe in that direction — then that seems like a much more interesting path.  Having one of their best go over to the dark side and then being forced to stop him, now that’s a “B.P.R.D.” story that I’d like to read.  It gets even better when you consider how Hellboy’s return to the organization has been teased for quite some time now.  Calling in Abe’s oldest and best friend to put him down, it gets downright biblical when you think about it.

Good volume overall, with some electrifying potential.  In my mind at least.

(Before this volume came out, I was of the opinion that while the teacher killed Chizuru’s sister to keep her quiet, he was eventually tracked down, arrested and “spirited away” by the older military man from the earlier volumes who decided that he couldn’t live with what had been done to one of the kids under his watch.  But I digress…)

Gears were then shifted down for Kunihiko’s arc as we find out that he’s involved in a junior-high love triangle of sorts which he plans to resolve through the magic of posthumous organ donation.  His story is wrapped up with a minimum of fuss here as his last-ditch-strategy winds up needing a little nudge in order to work.  Then the focus shifts to Maki, the tomboyish girl with the short hair, as we find out that she’s adopted and that her foster parents are expecting their first biological child.  Though the girl’s story is effectively grounded in her concerns over her heritage and relationship with her parents, longtime readers will probably find the revelations about the nature of the conflicts the kids have faced up to this point to be of greatest interest here.  Unless you’re like me and have already seen the anime and the revelation comes off as largely redundant.  That said, I did find the “ordinariness” of Maki’s otaku father to be quite refreshing in the way that his hobbies aren’t glorified or held up for derision.

Then we get to the final chapter which kicks off Yosuke’s arc.  Yosuke has a face that indicates his lot in life is to be bullied by pretty much everyone.  He also has a sister whose life has been in an agonizing limbo since a failed double suicide attempt in high school.  The reason this chapter doesn’t come off as a pointless exercise in miserablism is because Yosuke’s inner monologue about what to do in his upcoming battle plays very well off the big revelation in this volume.  Then there’s the two-page cliffhanger that leads into the next one.

…

God damn it was good.

I’ve read a lot of series that have ended their volumes with cliffhangers, and this was one of the best.  That’s because there’s a genuine sense of uncertainty to the events teased at the end.  Mangaka Mohiro Kitoh achieves this by putting the “shock” on the next to the last page, leaving a quiet bit of contemplation for the final one.  Reading it the first time actually made me flip back and forth between those pages going, “What did I just read!?”  Did that event already happen?  Is it only occurring in the character’s mind?  Could it be a “flash forward?”  Will it be the biggest failure in Yosuke’s life or his greatest triumph?  The fact that I can’t even hazard a guess as to the exact nature of what’s going to happen, but that I know how it’ll involve an incident I have a vested interest in, have me EAGERLY ANTICIPATING the release of the next volume.  After this, June can’t come soon enough.

Angel & Faith vol. 1:  Live Through This: I’ve generally liked writer Christos Gage’s superhero work and artist Rebekah Isaacs did some awesome work on the “DV8” series that was collected last year.  The only  problem is that I’ve only seen the first three seasons of “Buffy” and when I read through the first two volumes of “Season Eight,” I just felt lost.  I get the feeling it’d be more of the same if I tried to read this, but it sounds like something I’d like.

Conan vol. 11:  Road of Kings: This collects the first half of the Roy Thomas-written  maxi-series which I thought was the last we’d see of new “Conan” comics from Dark Horse — until they announced that Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan would be launching a new series this year.  Wood seems like an odd choice for the title when you consider that most of his work has been of the non-mainstream creator-owned variety.  Though I’m sure that “Northlanders” is what got him the job, I imagine it woudn’t be a simple transition from doing whatever he wanted in the Viking world he created to playing nice with “Conan’s” corporate owners and the established continuity of the series.  Still, I’d like to think Wood has a good idea of what he’s getting into, so I’ll be picking up the inevitable collections.  As for “Road of Kings” itself, Thomas may be an old-school Marvel and DC veteran, but the man has also written more “Conan” comics than anyone alive (and the earliest ones have actually held up pretty well over the years).  I’m looking forward to seeing what he does with the character here.

Gantz vol. 23: This series almost, ALMOST, made my list of the “Best of 2011” but its failure to properly follow up on some its more shocking developments held it back in the end.  That said, vol. 20 delivered some brutal surprises and twists so maybe this year will be the one where it finally makes the cut.

Gate 7 vol. 3: For all of the (good) craziness with the New York Times’ manga bestseller list last year, I was actually surprised that the debut volume of this series didn’t make an appearance on it.  I’m not a big fan of CLAMP as I can certainly respect their talent as artists and storytellers, but they’ve never made a series that has really grabbed me as a reader.  (Probably because I’m not a twelve-year-old girl! *rimshot* Oh, I kid because I love.  Moving on…)  A new series from them should’ve been a license to print money, but apparently diminishing returns have set in with their style with the online reaction being that it’s just “more of the same” from the creators.  It’s not that I want to see them fail, but after their monstrous successes of the past I just never thought we’d reach the point where it looked like their best work was behind them.

The Goon vol. 11:  Deformed of Body and Devious of Mind: The last collection of this series was easily the weakest thanks the bleak pointlessness of “The Buzzard” mini-series collected in its pages.  This one, however, has no such diversions and should be a welcome return to form.  Plus I hear that writer/artist Eric Powell offers his take on the “sparkly vampires” of “Twilight” in a story here.  If that isn’t enough “Goon” for you, then issue #39 also comes out this month where Powell looks to give the current “relaunching from a new #1” craze in comics the thrashing it so desereves.

Grendel Omnibus vol. 1:  Hunter Rose: Much as I’d like to say, “If you’ve never read Matt Wagner’s legendary series then YOU NEED THIS VOLUME!” something holds me back.  That something is the “Behold the Devil” series collected here, which was excellent but not something that you’d want to foist upon readers new to the world of “Grendel.”  Mainly because the climax of that series works best only for those who are aware of the other series and characters that have come after Hunter Rose’s time.  It’s great stuff to be sure, but readers would be better served tracking down the original stories and reading them in order.

Groo vs. Conan #1: Does one need to know anything else about this series after reading the title?  How about this:  At the Sergio Aragones/Mark Evarnier panel at Comic-Con last year, they talked a bit about how this series was finally going to see the light of day.  One of the sticking points for the plot was that the owners of “Conan” didn’t want to see their character beaten while Sergio and Mark didn’t want to have theirs lose.  So the compromise, as they put it, was to have a “Rashomon”-style tale where the truth of the events is left up for the reader to decide.  So really, this series is all Akira Kurosawa’s fault.

Neon Genesis Evangelion:  The Shinji Ikari Raising Project vol. 11: What’s the only thing worse than the guilt I feel from enjoying this licensed spin-off?  The fact that it likely sells a lot better than the other ongoing Dark Horse manga with a Carl Horn adaptation, “The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.”

Star Wars:  Knight Errant vol. 2 — Deluge: I enjoyed the first volume a lot more than I was expecting to so I’ll be picking this up when it comes out.  As opposed to getting it at half price from Comic-Con.

From there, things progress as a learning experience for both Daikichi and the reader as we’re shown the struggles of being a single parent in modern Japan.  First he has to buy clothes and a futon, enroll her in pre-school, and change his work situation to accommodate his new charge.  It’s not quite a “crisis of the week” situation, but it comes pretty close when you have chapters like Daikichi dealing with Rin’s bedwetting, her first illness and his cousin’s flight from her home situation.

Still, the overall story does have a very episodic feel to it and I’m sure that made the anime adaptation that much easier to produe.  Though its down-to-earth tone suggests that it would work just as well in live action.  Beyond Daikichi’s struggles with single parenthood, the only other ongoing plot thread involves his interactions with Rin’s birth mother, a mangaka who initially wanted nothing to do with motherhood but may be having the tiniest bit of second thoughts now.  This lack of a strong narrative combined with its episodic nature makes “Bunny Drop” feel more like a “how to” for single parents in Japan than an actual story.

The best comparison here is with Keiko Tobe’s “With the Light” which details a couple’s struggle to raise an autistic child.  Its narrative is comprised almost entirely of cliches and stock characters but remains interesting in the way it dramatizes the struggles inherent in dealing and coping with the disorder.  Though its characters struggle, there’s really no doubt that things will turn out all right because the narrative is secondary to educating the reader as well as reassuring them that their efforts will be rewarded.  I get a lot of this same feeling from “Bunny Drop” but it suffers in comparison because learning about the difficulties of single parenting just isn’t as interesting as coping with autism.

However, the characters are better defined here as Daikichi emerges as a likeable spaz and Rin is just adorable.  Really, there’s no other way to put it.  Seeing the girl cute her way across the four volumes released so far is likely to melt most people’s hearts, except for the cynics who will note that she tends to come across as remarkably capable and observant for a six-year-old.  It’s not superior fluff, but it’s good fluff nonetheless.

The concept of superheroes is not an alien one to this title.  It has been noted in the past that some of the cast, Pinocchio in particular, are avid readers of such comics and one of the “Burning Questions” even showed us how they were made.  What leads to an entire arc about the “Fables” cast assuming their roles is more desperation on their part than anything else.  After the events of the previous volume, the former inhabitants of Fabletown have decamped to Flycatcher’s kingdom, but Mr. Dark has not given up pursuit.  As he lurks around the borders of the kingdom, weakening the wards that keep him out, the Fables inside ready their team for one last stand against him.

Though it might look like a tactic to grab some sales from superhero fans, the logic behind the assemblage of this Fables “super team” is actually remarkably sound.  Seeing as how they can’t match Mr. Dark in terms of raw power, they’re going to fight him with an idea backed by magic.  By tapping into the conventional narrative of superheroes dictates that they will ultimately triumph over evil, they believe that they can craft a story where Mr. Dark is defeated.  Somewhere, Grant Morrison is reading this and smiling.  The core concept of this arc is actually remarkably close to Morrison’s own thoughts on the genre and many of his own stories (see “Superman:  Beyond” from the “Final Crisis” collection for the closest analogue) and that’s what allowed me to buy into the idea behind this arc.

However, as I stated above, the story is not ultimately about superheroes.  Describing it in practical terms here might make that seem like a bait-and-switch on Willingham’s part, but the turn the arc takes is actually tied in very closely to a long-running subplot that sees its resolution here.  The very fact that I’ve said this will probably make the swerve in the narrative that much more apparent, but at the same time you’ll also be able to see how well it’s set up and how natural it comes across in the course of the narrative.

In addition to the main arc, with strong art by Mark Buckingham as always, this collection also features two stories with art by Eric Shanower and Terry Moore, respectively.  Both pick up on threads not related to the main story, with Shanower depicting Bufkin’s ascent into Oz and Moore showing us what’s been happening with Sleeping Beauty, and the various efforts to wake her up with “true love’s kiss.”  Bufkin’s story is good fun as always, with the former flying monkey now convinced he needs to perform thirteen heroic actions before he can be considered a true hero.  The Moore-illustrated tale is also satisfying, as it works as a story in its own right and as a lead-in to the upcoming “Fairest” spin-off which will feature a rotating cast of creators on stories relating to “Fables” (Willingham is set to write the first arc, with Phil Jimenez illustrating).  Though the artist is best known for stories set in the “real” world (“Strangers in Paradise,” “Echo”) Moore shows that he has a real knack for fantasy as well.  From the medieval look of the castle and the humans around it, to the stealth-team of goblins who steal Sleeping Beauty away, it’s miles away from what I’ve seen him draw in the past.  Much like Mike Allred, Moore’s is a style that I wouldn’t have imagined working well in “Fables,” but it does so beautifully.

That said, though the wrap-up of “Super Team” does seem to indicate that the worst is over for our heroes there are a number of threads left dangling that are begging to be resolved.  The thrust of the next volume is clear, however, and after the continuing excellence of the work on display here picking that volume up is a no-brainer.

I’m not sure if the central idea for this series has been done before, but this is the first I’ve seen of it.  The idea is that once time travel was discovered, humanity immediately started using it for war by going back and changing history to suit the needs of the winner.  There’s a very insightful monologue about how in order to win a war, one must convince his enemy that they were wrong and make them ashamed of what they once were.  To me, that sounds like a great way to lead off a series about using time travel as warfare.

The problem is that this isn’t what “The Red Wing” is ultimately about.  Though his previous Image work has been fairly light on character, Hickman’s focus here is on Dominic Dorne a young recruit into the title group whose “father” Robert was a pilot that was lost on a mission.  Only Robert didn’t die, he just found himself lost in another era and eventually rescued by the enemy.  Regrettably, the main characters, the supporting cast, and their struggles are fairly one-dimensional and overly familiar.  If they were more interesting then  the book could’ve thrived on the transition from the “time travel as warfare” concept, but they aren’t and it doesn’t.  Not helping matters either is that the paradoxes of “who became who” are never made as clear as they should be, which leads to a final page that’s more of a “Huh?” than an “Oh!  I get it!”  I will certainly concede that the idea of using time travel to explore the idea of a parent having to cope with the world he leaves his kid is a good one, but it feels like a step down from the title’s initial aims.

Nick Pitarra provides the art and as this appears to be his first professional work, it’s not bad.  The man is clearly inspired by Frank Quitely in terms of his characters, level of detail and inventive panel structure.  He still has quite a ways to go as there’s still an awkwardness to his characters’ expressions and how a lot of the sequences are framed.

So “The Red Wing” is more of a “noble failure” than a flat-out fiasco.  It has a lot of good ideas here, but I think that, aside from the flat characterization, its biggest issue is that the Hickman tried to cram too much into too little space.  If this had been an eight-issue series, instead of a four-issue one, then maybe he would’ve found room to give all of the concepts here the development they deserved.

Helping my impression in no small part is the English adaptation from Carl Horn.  Easily the best there is at what he does in this business, it’s been a long dry spell from him in my household over the past year due to the delays of the latest volume of “The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service” (currently set to arrive in April).  Though he did do the adaptation for “Campus Apocalypse,” it really felt that he was limited by the story in terms of what he could do with the script.  That’s not the case here as the comedy allows him to really cut loose here.  Though I really can’t compare this to the Japanese version, I’m willing to bet that Misato’s one-panel pirate accent, Shinji’s “Dad, I’m too young to even smell your breath,” and pretty much EVERYTHING that comes out of Gendo’s mouth isn’t a strict interpretation of the source material.  No matter.  I can’t remember the last time I laughed this much at a translation, so I’m all for letting him take as many liberties as he wants when the results are this good.

This was originally published here back in 1990 and I’m willing to bet it seemed really cool to comic shop audiences at the time, but the truth is that everything here has been done better by Shirow in his later works.  “Ghost in the Shell” and “Appleseed” contained more thoughtful analyses on the effects of technology on the human condition, while “Dominion” and “Orion” have much better examples of his anarchic/sociopathic sense of humor.  For my money, “Dominion:  Conflict 1 — No More Noise” is his best work, maintaining action, character, and humor in a delicate balance of terror while not being weighed down in technical jargon.  Yes, “Black Magic” has a little of everything that made him great, and while some of the individual sequences aren’t bad, this is a case where the parts are definitely less than the sum of the whole.  Not worth your money (even four dollars of it) unless you’re a Shirow completist.

Seeing as how we’re already five issues into the tenure of Miles Morales, the new “Ultimate Spider-Man,” it’s not really much of a spoiler to say that writer Brian Michael Bendis actually did make good on the event teased in the title.  I remember reading an interview with him over a year ago where the man stated that he and Mark Millar had made plans to do something with the character that had never been done in a mainstream comic before.  Though killing the title character and replacing him with a complete unknown is not exactly a new thing in comics, doing it for an A-list hero is.

That being said, if this volume was actually intended to be a buildup to that event it fails pretty hard.  With Peter Parker set to die in the next volume, you’d think that events would start conspiring to make that idea a reality.  It could be something explicit like the return of a villain like the Green Goblin, Venom, or the complete “Ultimate Sinister Six,” or something more nebulous like a feeling of dread at the idea that the character’s time was running out.  Fractured as it was, Grant Morrison did this well in the first third of his “Batman” run with the build up for The Black Glove as an organization that had spent decades planning the hero’s downfall.  While we knew that Batman wasn’t going to die, the constant attacks on the character’s mind and his family history were a new threat for the character and at least allowed the audience to suspend disbelief and embrace the idea that maybe the hero was out of his depth in this situation.

There’s nothing of the sort here aside from the title.  If it wasn’t for that clunky bit of hype, the fact that the character dies in the next volume would’ve seemed like a spur-of-the-moment decision to boost sales and re-ignite interest in the character.  And let’s face it, regardless of what kind of spin Bendis an company try to put on this, that’s exactly what this event was designed to do.  Rather than the culmination of over a decade’s worth of stories, the whole reason we’re getting this story is because sales on “Ultimate Comics Spider-Man” were at historically low levels before the “Death of Spider-Man” arc started.  If sales hadn’t cratered after the most recent relaunch, then this storyline wouldn’t have been necessary at all.

But what about the contents of this particular collection?  In spite of all the bitching contained in these last few paragraphs, this volume is just as good as you’d expect from this series.  The fallout from the “Chamelons” arc is handled extremely well as we get to see the personal toll it takes on Peter, his friends, and the smoldering emotional wreckage of his relationships.  It also has Carol Danvers discussing the matter of what to do with the teen superhero with Iron Man, Captain America and Thor, who each have their own opinions on Peter’s usefulness and capability.  The short version is that they decide that Peter needs some tutelage on how to be a proper superhero and that his idol, Tony Stark/Iron Man is just the man to give it to him.  Fortunately, they’ve got just the situation to test the waters with when the Black Cat gets her hands on an object of immense power that used to belong to the Kingpin, and is now sought by Mysterio.

The writing is top-notch here, which elevates what is essentially a formulaic plot.  While the Black Cat/Mysterio clash provides the setup for most of the action, it’s the character arcs that prove to be most interesting here.  Seeing Peter try to work things through with Mary Jane and Gwen Stacy provides a compelling look at how they relate to one another and where they factor into his life.  Best of all are the all-too-brief moments with the now pro-Spider-Man J. Jonah Jameson.  His utterly believable change-of-heart towards the character has been one of the highlights of the entire series and the follow-through on his discovery of the character’s real identity in the previous volume is handled masterfully here.  The conversation he has with Peter in the final issue collected here is a joy to read as it’s not only something that could never be done in the regular Marvel universe, but still feels completely true to the character that has been established here.

Really, the worst thing I can say about this volume is that it’s the most artistically chaotic one in the series to date.  I’ll admit that after many volumes where Mark Bagley was the sole artist, followed by Stuart Immonen, and then David Lafuente in the previous two, seeing SEVEN artists here doesn’t feel right.  Granted, they’re all quite good, and some of the sequences were clearly intended for separate artists, seeing all of the different styles clash here flies in the face of a series known for its artistic consistency.

Issues with the art, the title, the whole “Death of Spider-Man” event aside, I guess the worst thing about this volume is that it’s still at the top of its game, creatively speaking.  After reading this, it still feels like the idea of Peter as Spider-Man still had lots of mileage left in it and that there were plenty of great stories left to be told with him.  I am looking forward to reading about the adventures of Miles Morales, because it’s still Bendis at the helm, but I doubt that they’ll make me forget the fact that this series was cut down in its prime.

(Well, until the bring back Peter as part of the “New Clone Saga,” or something.  Come on, you know that’s a storyline Bendis has to be considering.)