Swain earns a D-minus in monster-fighting in Italy. This is an embarrassing effort for the creators as well as the character. I have a soft spot for Swain; to see her fail relentlessly for 20 pages is extra painful to me. This could just barely be justified if it were the start of an intense redemption story arc, but it's a one-off story whose protagonist isn't even part of an active team right now - effectively an issue-long essay on how much Swain sucks. Mean.

Chad Bowers saves us from having to read a Liefeld script and the colorists do a heroic job lipsticking the art-pig. Those are the only silver linings; this comic is otherwise a dumpster fire in both concept and execution.

Poorly-written Hulk and Wolverine continue their monster hunt with very vestigial involvement from Ghost Rider. Silk is added to the lineup; this twist is spoiled by the cover's corner box. Though it's clear this book is aimed at a younger audience, this does not in any way excuse the terrible writing and lazy art featured throughout. Biggest question: why is "Totally Awesome Hulk and All-New Wolverine Team-Up Featuring Special Guest Stars Silk And Maybe Ghost Rider" being published under the title "Ghost Rider?"

Robbie *actively refuses* to get involved with the stupid guest-star plot that's monopolizing his title. Pity his own concerns aren't any more interesting. We are four issues in and much like its protagonist, this title shuns the call to adventure. The art is satisfactory for a bottom-shelf book (that's Danilo Beyruth's beat, apparently) and some of the dialogue is okay; plot, pacing, and characterization are all still terrible.

Ghost Rider finally deigns to blast the purple space monster with generic shut-you-up hellfire for several pages. The guest stars are utterly useless, Ghost Rider wastes a lot of time, and readers are left without any engaging character or story hooks whatsoever. Artist Danilo Beyruth seems to be just as tired of this story as I am, contributing some lackluster art that really seals in the "blah" feeling of the series as a whole. Even the fan letters at the end illustrate the problem of this series: Fans love Robbie Reyes but have only the most generic of compliments for this particular story. Robbie is a great *concept*, but concepts don't generate entertaining comics by themselves.

Eight pages of new content wrapped around a pair of nigh-meaningless Wolverine issues from 2000. Direct comparison just shows that Mr. Liefeld's storytelling skills have stagnated or even regressed in 19 years.

This story could be satirical comedy gold if it was being told by creators who were willing to acknowledge/celebrate its stupidity. But I'd as soon take a blood transfusion from a turnip as I would expect self-aware irony from a Rob Liefeld comic. He seems like a nice guy in interviews and even willing to joke about his various infamies. But on the comics page, he's all deadly seriousness and earnest naivete and "what do you mean attacking Wolverine with a future sword forged out of his own bones isn't the coolest thing ever? Did I mention it's FROM THE FUTURE?!"

I like the part in the middle where Jordan White and Annalise Bissa ran out of time to edit (or #@$%s to give) and let some painful 9th-grade vocabulary mistakes slip through. "Convoy" instead of "envoy," "procured" instead of "explored," and "atmospheric beauty."

A few nice character renderings by Whilce Portacio are the only parts of this comic that can be appreciated earnestly; all else is fodder for MST3K-type mockery or "what the hell is wrong with this guy?" psychoanalysis.

Major X winds up with the young X-Ential in his custody, and I think both he and his author miss the fact that that makes his mission a win. The art's dull, the writing is actively terrible. Another interminable serving of gunplay and badly-fumbled action movie one-liners nudges me closer to certain that there's not going to be an ironic twist to any of this.

That is one pathetically passive protagonist.

These characters talk like Siri reading a plot synopsis. Even with access to Marvel Unlimited -- 30,000 comics across 8 decades -- I don't think I can find a comic with dialogue worse than Major X #6.

America tackles big life changes and the tension between being a superhero and a fallible human. Those bones could serve as the foundation for a good comic. Instead, author Gabby Rivera designed this book as an internet controversy generator first and a compelling story second - if at all. When it comes to provoking thought or entertaining or empowering readers, this comic fails utterly. America fans who enjoy this are putting in way more work than the author is. They deserve so much better. So does artist Joe Quinones; he's wasted on this title.

America learns tiny lessons from Peggy Carter and Moon Girl and completely misses more important hints about the value of family. This issue chiseled some ratings points out of me through sheer volume of content. It smooshes two terrible comics' worth of ideas into one, which makes it efficient if not well-paced. There's interesting plot development; it's a pity Gabby Rivera flubs a lot of individual scenes. On the characterization front, I'm asking myself an interesting question: Rivera's America is a jerk, but would I think she was so much of a jerk if she was a white dude behaving the exact same way? This issue had me questioning my privilege, so I think it accomplished at least one of its goals. It's still failing abysmally in the "tell me an entertaining story" department, though.

America's mystery abuela/ancestor/future self/whatever, Madrimar, guides her through a meditation session with Storm to unlock subtler aspects of her dimension-hopping powers. While it's cool to see America discovering her capacity and need for growth, I had better not hold my breath waiting for someone to point out the potential drawbacks of America's "stay the ☠☠☠ out my way unless you're a badass brown bitch like me" attitude. Her growth is happening mainly in a "you're so awesome, be even awesomer!" fashion. Sigh. Storm is ridiculously out of character, but she's being steered by Madrimar. Weird observation: Gabby Rivera's scripting improves when she's *not* working with Joe Quinones. Guest artist Stacey Lee's Storm section is by a wide margin the strongest part of the issue, but it's due to better writing rather than any major improvement in art quality.

America uses the lessons Madrimar has taught her to revisit issue #1 and save Maltixa properly. No, she doesn't see any wider applications or express any gratitude. She also causes an unresolved time-travel paradox that everybody ignores. This comic fails on so many levels that it gets hard to critique. You can't tell which ideas are inherently bad and which are just poorly executed. Despite being America's greatest advocate, Gabby Rivera has managed to craft an outcome for America that the character herself finds confusing and irritating. Far be it from us readers to feel differently. The artist pool, despite being crowded (five people total handling pencils, inks, and colors), manages to produce some impressively consistent mediocrity.

America calls on Kate Bishop to roadtrip to an ex-girlfriend with her. The foreshadowing on America's next antagonist goes from "fairly subtle" to "screamingly obvious" over the course of the issue. I can see the aim of the dialogue and characterization was some sort of Tom Robbins/Diablo Cody modern-day Age of Aquarius feel, but it turns out sad and try-hard. Like Tom and Diablo were whacked up on prescription tranquilizers and only allowed one slow, low-energy, no-editing pass at their collaborative script. Ramon Villalobos's art flirts occasionally with the memorable, but his refusal to be consistent even with himself when it comes to character designs is off-putting.

Madrimar says the One Thing that can short-circuit America's "get out of my life already" refrain while they team up to save the day. Also, it's driven home to us readers that the Big Bad here is the Exterminatrix, but the actual characters in the comic are still running behind on working that out. Solid intentions meet inept execution all over the book, with Ramon Villalobos getting closer to "acceptably professional" work than Gabby Rivera. Her plotting is almost tolerable, but the nuts-and-bolts dialogue-wrangling is still loathsome.

America's abuela Madrimar gifts her with a double-secret double-latina double-lesbian origin that drapes around her existing backstory like a pointless onion layer. To me the best part of this title is the fact that *America herself* finds this new granny and her crazy Gabby Rivera wish-fulfillment ret-cons irritating, but that's surely unintentional. The vast art team covers the bases from "nearly competent" to "not even close," rendering the visuals just as appealing as the story here. This is about as close as this title can get to entertaining and it's woefully far from the mark. At least the Exterminatrix is sneering around the last page promising something resembling actual conflict in the coming issues.

The Exterminatrix throws on a platinum blonde wig and goes undercover as Sotomayor University's new Dolores Umbridge-type dean. SU's supposed to be a school for the multidimensional best and brightest, but since Gabby Rivera's actually peopled it with notably dumb versions of America and Prodigy, a painful self-insert character (X'Andria), a single professor without real characterization, and a faceless herd of non-entities, the Exterminatrix's dictatorial upheaval and persecution of America go practically unopposed. A functional plot and some excellent art by Joe Quinones are the silver linings; against them, you've got some eyeball-searing costume choices and some of the dumbest dialogue ever published in Marvel Comics. There's dense, multi-layered stupidity packed into every ☠☠☠☠ line uttered by America and her pals; this script is truly a blooming onion of dumb. Hilarious bonus: This issue has Legacy pages by Robbie Thompson and David Lopez that function *perfectly* with the assumption that America's solo series does not and never did exist.

As the Exterminatrix goes overt with her plans to weaponize America and ruin Sotomayor U, the supporting cast goes to war with her. And America? Here's a comprehensive list of what she does in issue #9 of the comic named after her: 1. Fails to escape from the Exterminatrix. 2. Runs away after getting freed by her witchy professor. 3. Curls up in a fetal ball while her supporting cast (AKA the characters we *really* don't care about) starts saving the day. Heroism! Flaviano's earnest but not wholly successful artwork and the fundamental strength of the Exterminatrix as a classic scenery-chewing baddy save this from being a total trainwreck. Wow, is it ever not a good comic, though.

America deigns to do a little heroing in order to ensure the Exterminatrix is defeated and the forces of groovy diversity and ancestral goodness win the Battle of Sotomayor U. ("Ancestral" is one of Gabby Rivera's favorite words; weird.) There's still a ridiculously overblown role for X'Andria to play, of course. Gotta keep plenty of spotlight on the Mary Sue. Some strong artistic efforts by Flaviano and Jen Bartel are positives; their benefits are wiped out (and then some) by shameful first-draft Valley Girl dialogue and an embarrassingly inept swipe at the tiki-torch-waving alt-right.

After Prodigy and X'Andria make a very muddled victory speech, America blasts off to save Planeta Fuertona from the generic alien parasite-bugs of La Legion. This new story launches with some superb character design work courtesy of Stacey Lee and some slightly promising mythology, but cramming all of this into the series' last two issues is a serious mistake. It feels like Gabby Rivera is at last arriving at the story she *wants* to tell. Unfortunately, Marvel let her get here by publishing 10 spastic issues of unappealing groundwork instead of working it all out in a few hours of brainstorming and editorial conferencing. The page where America actually leaves Sotomayor U is paradigmatic of the whole series and its problems: America delivers trite "honor your unique story" narration while her supporting cast looks up at her adoringly and thinks "take care of yourself" thoughts. They don't actually *talk* to each other. Are these characters admirable? Of course they are! Just look at their good intentions! What do you want, for them to *demonstrate* their virtue? Ugh, how bourgeoisie.

America saves the day by being her extra-special extra-wonderful self. Normally you'd need to delve into the darkest depths of fanfiction to find wish-fulfillment this embarrassingly shameless. Why Marvel's editors chose to ennoble this silliness with 12 issues of good-to-great art is one of the biggest comics mysteries of 2017-2018. This final issue delivers a fair crop of individual panels that are pretty. There are even some nice bits of dialogue. Progressing through the story from idea to idea is torturous, though. It's like wading through a gauntlet of naive kiddos pummelling you with glitter-soaked wiffle bats. To tell a story, you have to show your protagonist making decisions. If your protagonist's key decision amounts to, "You're right, adoring fans, I WOULD make a good messiah," your story is probably not good.

As a rule of thumb, I have a 4/10 floor for rating comics as long as I can believe the creators were making an earnest attempt to entertain. A *lot* of the content in this dumpster fire fails to give me that impression. I think most of the artists were trying, at least.

An all-female crew of Logan's mutant pals goes hunting for Magneto in Madripoor, but instead they "just happen" to run into an all-female baddie squad. This is a strong contender for the least enjoyable comic I've read in years. The all-X-chromosome gimmick is unjustified, the flashback characterization of Logan and his ladies is pond-shallow, and then there's the art. It's not just me disliking Thony Silas's shovel-faced Nagel-ripoff style - though I certainly do dislike it. No, what really arouses my ire is the fundamental and, I contend, objective incompetence shown in anatomy, blocking, and visual storytelling. Logan's double-barrel chest on the very first page, the inept and confusing portrayal of Mindblast's airport disguise, the way Storm's keepsake is almost-but-not-quite-perfectly hidden from view ... There is no end to the artistic missteps. This comic is a failure even on the basest level of juvenile titillation. T&A were definitely in the cards - look not just at the rosters but also at the X-Women LITERALLY and EXPLICITLY dressing in stripper clothes for their Magneto meeting. But sexy, too, falls outside Mr. Silas's wheelhouse today.

Kitty takes the POV, the villain squad gets a little too much panel space, and the art plunges into new depths of embarrassment. The costumes, proportions, and breasts are all ridiculous, but you know what I'm really gonna have nightmares about? Viper drinking booze out of what looks like an ashtray. The artist couldn't draw a convincing GLASS. How the editors (and this comic had FOUR) gave that a thumbs up is beyond me.

Domino has the POV and she uses it to flash back to having had a "sport#$%@" relationship with Logan back in the day. Yick. In the present, the heroes race to stop the baddies' satellite launch, Magneto gets loose, and Psylocke clobbers Sapphire Styx from inside her own head. It's all illustrated with art that would put you into a genuine "Lordy how do I say anything nice about this" quandary if the artist showed you his DeviantArt gallery. Its presence in a Marvel comic sold for money is a mystery. And now the script, with far too much wingding cursing and direct-to-video action movie "tough girl" characterization, races the art down to the bottom of the barrel. In the wider "Hunt for Wolverine," I'm dismayed that storytelling quality and plot relevance seem to be inversely proportional. This title and "Claws of a Killer" are the ones dropping constructive hints about the Soteira organization; "Weapon Lost" and "Adamantium Agenda" are the ones I can read without groaning.

The core Mystery in Madripoor story ends with futility, pointlessness, and more embarrassing art. But the good news is, a healthy chunk of #4 is devoted to Psylocke Development Theater, complete with actually competent guest art. It doesn't redeem the series or even the issue, but it does pin this closer to "average entertainment" than any of the previous numbers. This is just good enough (barely) to satisfy the inevitable, curious Psylocke fans who drop in for her status quo updates.

Tony saves Pepper from a vengeance-minded mecha-piloting employee. This prequel offers a complete absence of zombies, a decent manga impression of Iron Man, C-minus interpretations of the MCU Avengers in One Piece style, a sad attempt at romance, sadder attempts at humor, and the unwelcome suggestion that Tony's purpose in designing Ultron was to replace Iron Man so that he and Pepper could retire and have a million babies together. (I said it was unwelcome, not necessarily inaccurate.) Why Marvel thought this deserved to be raised out doujinshi obscurity is utterly beyond me.

The Mangavengers face off against a weirdly low-energy zombie outbreak that starts by claiming Thor and Black Widow. A huge part of this title's potential appeal is in seeing the MCU Avengers translated into manga form, and the job's done so underwhelmingly that it's hard to imagine this book satisfying anybody. The zombie threat has some slightly interesting twists. The characterization is almost nonsensical , and the plodding, tension-free way our heroes dawdle into action is another big strike against it.

Bruce Banner (now apparently a geneticist, whatever) succumbs to the zombie virus while Cap, Tony, and Clint get saved by a Mysterious Benefactor. Whoever could it … yeah, it's just Jasper, the mad scientist who's going to be the Designated Villain of the piece. The best bits of this issue are the Cap flashbacks that are just manga-style recreations of scenes from the First Avenger; the zombie story remains fundamentally unsatisfying.

One sliver of plot development - the "zombies" are Chitauri - is married to the very unwelcome introduction of a hopeless Mary Sue protagonist. Translator Jim Zub gives the game away in the post-comic notes when he admits that ZA reads a lot like Avengers fanfic - that's exactly right and exactly the problem. Creator Yusaku Komiyama raced home after seeing Age of Ultron and knocked together a cheesy next chapter out of wall-to-wall clichés. The art is pretty polished; the storytelling is tragically inept.

Dr. Amano and Dr. Jasper are half-siblings, and now they race to cure/create new strains of zombie virus as the Avengers stand around and whistle. Bargain basement soap opera character contrivances and a slow plot are significant drags on some decent manga visuals. Jim Zub's exceptionally lazy translation also goes firmly into the minus column, as does the sidelining of the Avengers, aka "the stars we're reading this book for."

Dr. Mary Sue Amano continues to play a disgustingly central role, the zombies evolve, Rhodey goes MIA, and a bonafide villain peeps into the story at last. There's no transformative change that magically turns this into a satisfying read, but this feels like an incremental improvement over the previous issues. Some basic characterization and attention paid to the Avengers' relationships certainly help. The pacing is still fundamentally broken, though, and the odds of the plot turning interesting look increasingly slim.

Mad Scientist Jasper Scott deals out two crappy justifications for kick-starting a zombie apocalypse, hoping that some additive magic will make two terrible plots work in place of one decent one. Stories do not work this way, and "work" is just what this issue doesn't do. There are a few sparks of visual passion that speak to the mangaka's ongoing dedication, but the story and its "meh" translation utterly fail to make that passion resonate with readers. And nobody bothers to explain why the stupidly-attired Dr. Amano is suddenly charging around with some sort of junkyard zap gun.

It's a big, brash, save-the-world fight, with some cheap motivational nonsense about Jasper Scott and Dr. Amano salted across the action. Rhodey returns to do a little War-Machining before the big win. While the plot strengthens up here at the end, as if in compensation the art starts slacking off, ending the series in a particularly unmemorable place.

Gamora ignores an offer to get off Earth and instead gets imprisoned by Captain Marvel. This is some medium-to-heavy character assassination of Carol Danvers. She's weepy and contradictory and she chunks Gamora in prison to await trial for "crimes against the United States government." Didn't Gamora come to Earth *at Carol's request* to help her fight a war? Other "attractions" in this comic are a few over-complex breadcrumbs you can use to chart out Thanos's story arc from CW2 through Unworthy Thor and over to his solo series.

Angela gets all of three pages to reflect on non-Guardians business (like the fact that *the love of her life is MIA*) before she gets mistaken for Gamora and swallowed up by "here comes Thanos a-bloody-gain" foreshadowing. It's surprising to find out this arc and this title are going to wrap up with a Thanos fight. Not a good surprise. It was at least nice to see an acknowledgment - however brief - that Angela was torn straight out of a "happily ever after" situation for this volume of Guardians nonsense.

Brian Michael Bendis's farewell to the Guardians is monstrously self-indulgent in many different ways. The good side: This double-sized issue features some superb art by Valerio Schiti and a cavalcade of A-list guest artists. The bad side: All that brilliance is enslaved by a script so aggressively terrible that I half suspect it's a put-on. Like Mr. Bendis is saying, "See, you complain about my Guardians being slow and directionless, but a fast, driven Guardians book stinks!" No, Mr. Bendis, *your* fast, driven Guardians book stinks. I recommend reading Mr. Bendis's self-indulgent two-page farewell letter at the end. He comes within an inch of admitting that he glommed onto the Guardians in order to hog as much MCU spotlight as possible.

I could almost believe Mr. Liefeld's modern comics are self-parody; this issue could be an intentional attempt to confirm the "Rob Liefeld can't draw feet" meme. But I just can't credit him with the intellect or talent necessary for self-parody.

This is remarkably good for a Liefeld comic. It's still below average by the standards of the day, but I was surprised and then double-surprised that the surprise was pleasant. The story's actually pretty focused and there's a touch of insight in the characterization. The jokes are even (mostly) funny. The pencils are still Liefeld pencils, with all that that implies. His artistic collaborators went an extra mile or two to make them look as nice as possible, though.

This issue has 29 pages of art. Only 14 of those pages have any background elements whatsoever. Only *2* pages have background elements that can be described as more than "random crates and bits of concrete."

It's been six months, so it's time for another painfully-antiquated Ralph Macchio one-shot starring the MCU's hero du jour. I think of these things as an exotic pension scheme for Mr. Macchio rather than as readable comics. This one's a particularly weak example: Besides its pretentious and dated language, it's tackling subjects far outside the creators' wheelhouses. The artist isn't much better at drawing magic than the author is at writing psychological torment.

It's as fun as a pop quiz in Marvel History 101. I've got the knowledge to ace the test, but that doesn't mean that taking it is at all enjoyable. Also, this comic is going to go down in art history as the prime cautionary example of why making your go-to layout the 25-panel grid (!) is a bad idea.

The 4 Fs of FF Grand Design: Fails as a history because it makes too many pointless story changes. Fails as a character analysis because it changes the characters drastically. Fails as an independent, "reimagined" story because it's chaotic and ugly. Fails as parody -- a role it otherwise fits perfectly -- because it's not funny.

David Haller and his nemesis personality Lord Trauma race each other to New York and celebrity psychologist Hannah Jones. This issue is plagued by a shortage of passion and creativity. It feels like a B-minus performance from a pair of 19-year-olds with a "tell a story about multiple personalities" assignment early on in a freshman-level creative class. The technical skills are decent, but the material is devoid of interest. The thing of which I am most certain is that Wilfredo Torres's flat no-shadow visual style is an absolutely TERRIBLE choice for a tense psychodrama-slash-horror story. This is close to a 5/10. If it had had ONE engaging character, ONE compelling mystery, ONE little hint that it was more than a crass "we can earn some bucks slapping any old thing onto the LCS shelves with a Legion title thanks to that new TV show" exercise …

David Haller dumps Hannah the psychologist into his mindscape with zero preparation. Therein she encounters Tami and tons of yippee-skippy symbology, like a super-low-rent imitation of Alan Moore at his most whimsically magical. Though the script is far from flawless, I can just believe that the writer is earnestly trying to tell a good story. I do not get a similarly earnest impression from the art, and the contrast leaves this issue doubly disappointing.

Psychologist Hannah tries to rally David's alters against Lord Trauma. I could just about make peace with the plot; it's pond-shallow but functional. But the art remains far too rough-draft-y. It makes it impossible to contend that this is a professionally-finished comic. The human characters are terribly sketchy, and the visuals blatantly refuse to deliver the wild dreamscape that the script calls for inside David's mind.

Dr. Hannah wins a skirmish against Lord Trauma, but that just focuses the baddy's attention on her. The script is mechanically sound, but the inescapable realization that David Haller is merely the supporting character/setting in his own title is incredibly disappointing. The fill-in art also proves that "different" doesn't mean "better." It's still terrible at settings, plus it fumbles the portrayal of action so badly that the characters have to narrate everything in Silver Age Stan Lee style.

Dr. Whozits defeats Lord Trauma while David looks on with vague approval. It's approaching a decent story, but fundamental problems strategic (why is this Dr. Whozits' story instead of Legion's?), tactical (ugh, that twist ending), and visual (what was the art budget? Tree fiddy?) drag it down into thorough disappointment.

The Black Panther saves Dubai (mmm, political rumbles, mmm) from Klaw. It's a cash-in for the MCU film and clearly a book targeted at youngsters. These facts do not excuse its shabbiness. The decision to bundle it with the awesomer-in-every-way Fantastic Four #53 ends up being a mistake. Yes, you get a GOOD comic in the mix, but it's also the perfect comparison to show how hollow and dull the modern strip is. The modern story shamelessly cribs the original's ending, too.

If you wanna read a cheap James Bond knock-off featuring prose that's two generations out of date, here ya go. Marvel, why would you bother publishing this when you've just launched a new Black Widow solo title that's nearly as accessible and 1000% better?

I'll admit there were a surprising number of decently-drawn feet.

A poorly-connected episode sees DeadDuck headed to a secret Roxxon lab in Dubai. Some tasty art and a bit of funny dialogue do not plaster over the huge cracks in this title's plot. At the end of the day I think all that can be said about this title was that an effort was made to deliver on the premise, and that effort isn't worth a reader's time by itself.

Howard gets control of the DeadDuck body just in time to get stuck in a SHIELD/Roxxon crossfire. Some decent plot twists, added focus on Howard, and the still-great art all collude to drag this title up into respectable entertainment. Don't get me wrong, I still wouldn't recommend the title as a whole, but this is probably the high water mark.

Wade and Howard get separated, Dr. Bong is foiled, and puke-eating is given way too much attention. Just because Deadpool notes that the finale is revolting and anticlimactic doesn't make it any less so. A good miniseries should be like a killer bar story: It's awesome or hilarious or hair-raising; definitely worth sharing. The story of Deadpool the Duck is none of these things. It's embarrassing and tedious and tiresome. It's something all the participants - readers very much included - would like to put behind themselves as quickly as possible.

The Guardians are trapped in a lotus-eater machine and escape by turning it around on their captor, Death's Head. Quietly decent art can't rescue a script full of tired jokes and weak characterization that's terrified of doing a single thing that might confuse MCU fans. The plot is also nothing special, featuring a telegraphed twist that is at least executed at a good pace. This has *got* to be a cash-in for the second Guardians film. The fact that it's bundled with a reprint of Guardians (1990) #1 which introduces Taserface supports this. Overall, terrifically skippable.

A talkative version of the Man-Thing squares off against the classic mindless beast version. So existential! Kiddie horror megastar RL Stine tries his hand at comics. He's undeniably a big fan of the Silver Age; besides overblown dialogue and narration, this issue features a bonafide four-page weirdie as a backup story. The curious thing is that Mr. Stine is throwing Man-Thing back about a decade past his origins and heaving overboard all of the mature cynicism that made Steve Gerber's original a formative influence on the gritty Bronze Age. Overall quality-wise, I'm not sure if this experiment is a success. It was probably a blast for the creators, but so far this feels like too much of a departure from the established character and the norms of contemporary comics.

Ted "Man-Thing" Sallis stumbles around his swamp making terrible dad jokes. At the end there's a faint glimmer of an actual plot starting up. Writer RL Stine builds his script with a "comics are for 10-year-olds" attitude that I thought was safely extinct these days. It's a shame Steve Gerber isn't with us any more, because I would love to hear what he thinks of this version of the character.

An endless recap, a single new plot point about an evil queen forcing Man-Thing into a gladiatorial battle, and a terrible B-story. In case you haven't had the pleasure of reading Marvel's shoddier comics from the early Silver Age, RL Stine is on a mission to recreate their shortcomings down to the last detail. Plotted not with creativity or passion but with laziness and an endless supply of dad jokes. The art is nice, but it can't distract you from the constant (and astute!) suspicion that this title will become an obscure footnote of crappiness ("Didn't RL Stine write a Man-Thing comic? Oh yeah, it totally sucked.") in a few year's time.

Man-Thing is forced to kill the Oldfather. Sure he's been hypnotized and jerked through a bunch of hallucinatory craziness, but this murder *definitely* happened for real. RL Stine has mistaken Man-Thing for Hulk, dream sequences for plot development, and his readers for idiots. The plot is virtually random, and the only bright spot is that it gives German Peralta plenty of opportunities for great art. The natural takeaway from this issue and the series as a whole is "why can't Mr. Peralta get put on a *good* title?"

Man-Thing saves the Oldfather but ends up losing himself in a trite alternate-reality "surprise" ending. The series concludes with a twist that matches the Twilight Zone in tone but falls far, far short of that standard in terms of quality. This issue and the title as a whole prioritized cringe-y dad jokes over character or plot and put the Man-Thing through a bunch of sooner-forgotten-the-better nonsense adventures. RL Stine half-resolves his plot with a pair of MacGuffins, driving home the point that this story is first and foremost a vehicle for delivering lame jokes. Let us never speak of it again.

In her last freelance witching gig, Wanda exorcises the Emerald Warlock from a young boy, and then it's back to the Avengers. There are decent bones to this story, but the words and art used to flesh them out are distinctly non-enjoyable. To call it a trainwreck would be spiteful (I've developed a general antipathy to both James Robinson and Vanesa del Rey), but to call it satisfying would be way too charitable.

Solo finishes off the Zoo Crew all by himself before discovering Egghead was a Red Herring - who's the Big Bad here? The answer to that question will surely be underwhelming. After three nicely-drawn but puddle-shallow issues, here's how Solo finally explains his antipathy to terrorists: "It's not really like a job for me. More like a vocation. Because, reasons." And then he shoots a bad lady in the head. This is appallingly bland, and anybody with a high school-level capacity for critical reading should be able to recognize that. Sound and fury without even the fury. Commando on Xanax.

Yondu guest-stars in the denouement of Solo's pointless freelance SHIELD adventure. This is a comic imbued with plenty of talent but it's relentlessly failed to forge a personal connection. The art is fairly brilliant, the story is compelling if a bit over-stretched (these five issues could be done as two busy issues in a less-decompressed title), and Solo's character has plenty of potential. The creators should have painted a more compelling picture of Solo instead of adding needless complexity to his adversaries and detouring into SHIELD office politics. Phone calls with his girlfriend talking about his motivations are a shabby substitute for actually illustrating what drives Solo.

Spidey gets a bronze medal for day-saving behind Anna Maria and Doc Ock. The art is very nice, but the writing is an absolute mess. It feels like Mr. Slott badly needed more time to neaten up the dangling plot threads and de-hacknify the dialogue, but he just didn't get it. There are a number of logical inconsistencies in both Spidey and the Jackal's plans, and the issue ends with several embarrassing saving throws (Oh, X isn't dead! How fortunate/convenient!) to make last minute tweaks to the status quo. It's no wonder this event gets a surprise Omega issue to wrap things up better.

Nobody ever created a good piece of children's entertainment after deciding (consciously or subconsciously) that children will tolerate mediocre storytelling.

The relentless drumbeat of "yay, teamwork" leads the whole team to defeat the Green Goblin together, and a little twist makes Peter Parker rather than Spider-Man the hero of the hour. It's still clumsy and hokey, but the mission-oriented plot pulls this issue up a little higher than the last one.

The WEB team is attacked by the Goblin on their way to France, forcing them to spend nearly the whole issue averting a plane crash. Bad pacing piles on top of the title's existing "not ready for primetime storytelling" problems. Here, the teamwork theme becomes a drawback; letting everybody contribute triples the length of what should be a one-scene challenge. Still, there's some charm on display with these characters, and those Spider-Bots are mighty cute.

When I review an underwhelming "all ages" comic, I often offer the olive branch that if it has little to offer adult readers, it is at least harmless entertainment for kids. I can't even go that far with this issue. Bad science, bad Marvel continuity, bad storytelling -- I wouldn't let a child read this.

The proofreader gave up in disgust on P18; smart readers should have given up long before that.

Dr. Eve and shapeshifter Mim return to drag Carol into some cross-dimensional shenanigans. That's a wonderfully promising story; unfortunately, it occupies at most a third of this book. The rest is filled up with painfully flawed attempts at humor and characterization. Michele Bandini's art is as ever a bright spot. We don't need to touch the visuals or the main plot; they just deserve a script that displays a better (i.e. basically functional) sense of what is and isn't interesting to the reader. I would love to see Margaret Stohl explain why she thinks "Brand wants to go to a spa" is inherently hilarious. I think exploring just how divorced from reality she is on that point could produce a rich vein of Ricky Gervais-type cringe-humor.

While Captain Marvel grapples with a mark-1 Evil Mirror Universe, her antagonists are on an Indiana Jones trip designed to drag the Reality Stone into the story in preparation for the next Infinity Whatever. Margaret Stohl accidentally demonstrates how shabby Captain Marvel's post-CW2 status quo is by transreversing her supporting cast's personality traits; it turns out Evil Wendy, Puck, and Sasquatch are just as bland and uninteresting as their normal versions. Add in some remarkably terrible names for EM characters and some art that feels like Michele Bandini is losing his enthusiasm for the title and we've got a regrettable reading experience. "Evil Mirror Universe" is an evergreen premise for just about any hero, but this lackluster execution wastes it utterly. On the devil's advocate side, looking at the solicit reveals that this story must have taken a pretty large swerve away from Ms. Stohl's original intentions, and it must have done so late in the production process. Though that doesn't excuse the hard-to-follow nature of the plot, it does explain it. And another silver lining: Natasha Romanoff as a criminal superspy named "the Widower" is a pretty cool idea. I normally go with a 4/10 rating for "bless 'em they're trying their best" efforts, but there were a *lot* of extra negatives dragging this issue down. It has many dreadful moments with the potential to come back to you weeks or months later and remind you of what a bad read it was: "Lord Starkill" is a strong contender, "extra-orbital remote Quinjets" is another, and so is Ms. Stohl's belief that the moral inverse of "Captain" is "Corporal."

Carol and her Zetas go up against the Ravagers, the eeeeevil mirror universe equivalents of the Guardians of the Galaxy. Swapping Groot for a giant walking carrot called Root is, sadly, this issue's high-water mark. The fight goes sour because Carol loses her ability to take any of this nonsense seriously and goes into a giggle fit. Which is a pretty reasonable reaction, except for the fact that it's all being orchestrated by Margaret Stohl. It's dangerously close to her outright saying, "Can you believe Marvel pays me to write this crap? Why on earth do you pay to read it?" With forensic care, you could piece together a rational plot buried under this issue's cringe-provoking attempts at comedy. It's clear that the Infinity Stone content was wedged in sideways, but Ms. Stohl didn't put a lot of overtime into the effort to smooth out the joints and make the finished product easy to read. You know what this reminds me of? Carol's had plenty of sassy "Sex in the Super-City" conversations where she does funny banter with a pal like Spider-Woman or Jessica Jones. This arc would make a *perfect* crazy anecdote for Carol to tell in a situation like that: "He had a talking carrot named Root backing him, swear to God!" A few hundred words, tops, across two-three pages. It'd be perfect. Seeing it stretched across five issues by an author who doesn't really understand Carol or Marvel or comics or comedy is just bloody torture.

The Ravagers and Zetas run a poorly-conveyed scam on Thanos the Just. The implication, barely explored at all, that the 616 is considered a hell-dimension by AU folks like Good Thanos, is intriguing. The lesser plot threads - Thanos and Eve's mysterious quest for the Reality Stone - are much more promising than the main space pirate story. Can we hold the creators responsible for failing to recognize that? Hooo, yes. As usual, stellar art by Michele Bandini bravely hoists this issue out of trainwreck territory.

Carol hears and then thwarts Dr. Eve's plan in double quick time. The net effect is squirting her back into the 616 with a Reality Stone and a free (though still incorporeal) Bean. Here in the last lap, the script reveals a fair-ish skeleton shaping the action. Both plot and structure are sound. The tone is still woefully discordant. Scenes that are structured to be gut-bustingly funny end up pulling winces rather than laughs. There's also a dismal failure to understand which subjects will resonate with readers; this issue gives a full page of spotlight to a fight between AU Puck and AU Rocket over updating spaceship computers while far more promising topics, dramatic and comedic, remain under-explored. As has become this title's unfortunate SOP, superb artwork rescues a tremendously flawed script and keeps this final issue from being an all-out trainwreck.

This issue's art isn't going to get Szymon Kudranski off my @#$%-list, but it's not a trainwreck. Definitely the bottom of the barrel, but it still has a healthy whiff of that "everything is new again DoX" smell.

Psylocke relives her morally-shady past and accepts that she needs to learn heroism from her partners as much as instruct them in badassery. First up: Following Cable's lead on a nasty Overclock cartel. I respect the shape of the morality play the creators are laying out. But the pace is slow and the storytelling (words and art both) is painfully pretentious.

In my dream world, any Marvel editor who wanted to hire Szymon Kudranski would have to sign an affidavit to that effect on a copy of the "Cabbage Patch Kid Psylocke" page.

Now this series stands revealed as what it is: Poor portrayals (in words and art) of three mutants that deserve far better, shoehorned around the edges of a clichéd "rampant AI" cyberpunk story. It's all been done before, even the Oedipal connection. Apoth's plan to cyber-evolve humanity is familiar from -- among many other stories -- past Hickman comics, including Powers of X. The difference is, Mr. Hickman can tell these stories with compelling wonder and without (much) character assassination.

Laura expands the team while Psylocke does some soul-searching and evolves a little bit. The character work on Psylocke has value; that value is not nearly high enough to excuse the horrors of the art and the way the other characters are wasted or outright character-assassinated. (Yes, I'm still salty about the author wiping out Laura Kinney's development from ANW. I always will be.)

Her team faffs around fighting goons while Psylocke defeats Apoth in a weakly-conceived, poorly-rendered showdown. She wins, of course, and learns a thing, of course, and surrenders leadership duties to X-23. This series may have had some decent ideas to play with, but it's the rare case where verbal and visual storytelling were so thoroughly incompetent that it's hard to even see what the creators were aiming for. The one trait that shines through clearly -- pretension -- is not a good one.

Albert carves his way through Madripoor in search of his little pal Elsie Dee. He finds her, but unfortunately, they'll have to live through a whole other issue of meaningless, poorly-illustrated gang violence. It's a dull story on its own; its connection to the event is a wisp of general thematic philosophy -- Albert and Pierce clash over the idea of owning AIs.

This comic used the phrase "jewwied gasowine" twice, which is two more times than I ever wanted to read it.

Patsy has a mystical head cold that makes something stupid happen every time she sneezes. Sharon's property gets demolished. Ha ha? Sometimes I'm tempted to cut this title some slack because it's so whimsical, but then I remember that *every other* whimsical title Marvel publishes (Squirrel Girl, Gwenpool, Moon Girl, Howard, Wasp, etc etc) shows way more effort and talent than this one. The art is so simplistic that a page with more than one panel background is exceptional, and the dialogue is strictly "Buffy fan fiction by a sophomore who's never read her writing out loud" quality.

Patsy ties up her traumatic problems with the help of a suspiciously friendly Belial in this penultimate issue. Though this title has repeatedly failed to make me a fan, I admire the plan to wrap up the main story here and then use the final issue as a celebratory bonus. This issue gives Patsy a little closure for her adventures, but it does also make her look a bit weak. The art remains too shoddy to call this a satisfying read.

Patsy and friends get their happily-ever-after mall outing spoiled by a pair of wannabe villains who really just want Patsy's attention. Turns out their Patsy fandom is a cover for a big gay crush on each other and our heroes react, of course, by being super supportive. What an appropriate way to close out the series. The finale brings plenty of heartwarming. Many of the congratulatory goodbye letters filling the last three pages mention PWAH as the correspondents' first comic book. If these folks like Leth & Williams' PWAH, I can only imagine that giving them something like Gillen & McKelvie's Young Avengers will make them lose their damn minds. The "cute, queer-friendly, fun" combination is not as rare as they think and most other examples of it are better-crafted (especially better-drawn) than this.

Without the context provided by Non-Stop Spider-Man, this is a total garbage fire. With the context, well … it's not on fire.

I thoroughly dislike the way the story's told in words and art, but I think that's subjective. The story itself, though … I believe the story is dull and dumb in a way that goes beyond personal taste.

Were I stranded on a desert island with 1 comic for entertainment, I'd pick a Liefeld book over this.

Peter's transformation into Spock-Spidey gives this story some of the clarity it sorely lacked in past issues. The basic premises of the Immaculatum are still mighty dumb, but the latest plot twists are smarter. The art remains decent but frustrating. Gerardo Sandoval has a well-defined personal style and he executes it with great confidence. But his art isn't the best visual storytelling tool, and visual clarity is vital in a story like this where the writer tends to wander off into the tall grass. I still wouldn't call this good, but this issue is much better than the last few.

The final conflict is nice and cerebral, albeit not exactly novel. And it in no way justifies the *heaps* of weak storytelling that led to it.

Writer Fred Van Lente guarantees this is gonna be "the greatest comic book based on a video game based on a movie based on a comic book in Marvel history." I wish anything that happened in this issue was as clever as that sentence. Some half-hearted attempts to replicate the decision-making process of a point-and-click video game fail to add novelty to the cut-and-dried story. Salva Espin's art looks shockingly effort-free, and he distinguishes himself negatively by drawing the worst Rocket Raccoon I've ever seen in a professionally-illustrated comic. A few glimmers of genuine humor avert total trainwreck catastrophe, but this is a terribly inauspicious start to a series.

A trip to Sakaar devolves into a lot of absurd sub-plots, and some of them get pretty enjoyable. The revelation of the Guardians' target is quite welcome, and Fred Van Lente manages to sock Rocket and Drax into an impressively silly gladiatorial scheme. Salva Espin's art is decent, with the continued exception of his woeful Rocket. While this book is still definitely flawed and assembled with a minimum of effort, it has some rewards to offer up to readers who grace it with their attention.

Even with a cute backstory for Cosmo, this story dragging the Guardians to Titan struggles to justify the time it takes to read it. Salva Espin's cruise-control art is the stand-out shortcoming, but Fred Van Lente's plotting isn't all that memorable either. The character work is the silver lining, and even that is uneven.

Prior to a Blood Brothers showdown, Groot hilariously short-circuits a heist plan to retrieve Cosmo's "treasure." It's fun, but it's also a very over-elaborated riff on Groot's prison break gag in the first movie. Salva Espin's art is particularly nice this time around, but it doesn't do quite enough to elevate the lazy script all the way up to roundly entertaining. The "quasi-MCU" setting suffers badly in a post-Infinity-War world, as the creators could draw freely from already-released films but had to guess at how Thanos and Titan should be portrayed. Their take on the Black Order - a nihilistic death-cult worshipping Thanos but flying totally below his radar - is kind of too good for a crass tie-in miniseries.

Thanos and the Eternity Forge (the Telltale game's MacGuffin) put in brief appearances as the Guardians extricate themselves from Titan and discover their adventures have basically brought them through a dangerous loop right back to where they started. Cosmo does at least imply that this has all been pointless, but a hint of abashed self-awareness is not nearly enough to mollify readers (like me!) who feel like their time has been wasted. This series definitely isn't worth paying for, and I would debate the wisdom of even reading it for free on Marvel Unlimited. The time it takes is not rewarded all that well by the feeble humor, shaggy dog plot, and lazy art.

Well, damn. This is an interesting story. I want to read what happens next. And it's great to finally have Cassandra Nova back on the game board. But it's written by Steve Orlando. There's just something about the way he structures a comic and writes dialogue that drives me up the wall. He raises my hackles, he rustles my jimmies, he scratches my chalkboard. One specific point: I like character-driven plots; Mr. Orlando likes plot-driven characters. He'll turn his characters into *absolute morons* if that's what it takes to get to the next plot point or "cool" idea. And I hate that. One specific example: Cassandra is introduced while vivisecting Krakoa -- surely a violation of the "respect this sacred land" law. But the other characters ignore that angle, turning a little bit stupider to get that "cool" visual onto the page. (Cf. Sabretooth -- Melter's been thrown in the Pit for doing essentially the same thing.) The art's not to my taste, either, but I can admit it's objectively well done. The polish is far more impressive than the bones, though.

OK, so I hate this. And a big part of that is subjective, personal loathing for the author -- I have a low opinion of Mr. Orlando's storytelling skills, and I don't think we could even agree on what constitutes a "good" story. (See my comment on #1.) But I firmly believe this is also *objectively* bad. The art neither helps nor hurts. It's an acquired taste for sure, and I don't like how generic and inconsistent the characters are (e.g. Daken can apparently gain or lose 50 pounds of muscle at will). But there's tremendous energy within the panels, and some of them are formidable. The more the author vaguely, repetitively foreshadows this "First Blood Spilled" secret, the less faith I have in his ability to make it pay off. The Kin Crimson and their many secrets are dull and over-complicated. The established characters are handled little better, given a feeble illusion of depth mostly through corny, poorly-placed comic relief lines. Cassandra Nova is the only part of this I come even close to enjoying, and the author's helped there by the fact that irredeemable villains are a lot easier to write than heroes or shades-of-gray characters.

Although we *still* haven't gotten to the First Blood secret, at least there are enough plot-cards on the table now to grasp the scope of the story. I say it's a sound premise. I also say it's very stupid and tangled by too many superfluous sub-plots, but it's a workable skeleton. That skeleton supports some journeyman storytelling in words and art here. Not terrible, but not in any way exceptional. And this is a notably bad installment in terms of characterization. Cassandra sits on a mountain of smug, but otherwise, instead of character insights, all we get are lame continuity nods.

Maybe the artist is a bad influence on the writer. She's telling this story with frantic dynamism and the result is busy, but comprehensible. The author is frantic, too, but the script is much less coherent or enjoyable. He manages to make a total hash out of his big First Blood reveal and his dive into Tempo's powers, squandering what little potential those ideas had.

As usual, I have a ton of reservations about the way this is written (but a more positive response to the way it's drawn). But I gotta give the Marauders (and their creators) credit for ambition. This deep dive into the psychology of the Progenitor situation is unique in the event. Though I think it could have been carried out with a little more insight and clarity, I like the themes and emotions that come through in this issue.

It's a very expository issue where little happens, plot or character-wise. A few nice phrases and a big wad of world-building make up for the overall didactic tone -- barely. The story of Threshold is new. Not great, but at least new. I particularly liked the art this time around. Taking a couple of issues off gave Eleonora Carlini a big boost. Or maybe I'm just getting used to her style.

The best thing about Marauders #12 is that there won't be a #13.

Criminy, what comic were *y'all* reading?

I feel like I'm through the looking glass here. Am I the only one that sees the emperor's nudity? I simply cannot find anything positive to say about the storytelling, neither the words nor the art. Even calling it "competent" feels too charitable. There are a few potentially-workable mysteries floating in the plot, but the structure and pace of the script erode tension and discourage reader engagement. As for the political ramifications of an African-American alternate universe, well, I'll reserve judgment until the story lumbers onward and explains Earth-63 a bit more. But the level of storytelling talent shown so far doesn't fill me with confidence. I better prepare the ten-foot pole.

Focusing mainly on physical punchy-zappy conflict plays to the creators' strengths--or at least leans away from their weaknesses. This is nearly tolerable, but subjectively I still call it sub-average.

Aside from the pinups and cross-sections, the point is to pitch a new volume of Monsters Unleashed. Cullen Bunn is the only person who really wants that series; I think the sales figures on this one-shot will probably back that up.

The monster war accelerates as Elsa Bloodstone tracks down Kei Kawade. The real plot inches forward in the shadows around another monster-bashing extravaganza issue. The best parts are the cool Kirby references. Kei Kawade's Orrgo hoodie is amazing. We learn something interesting about Greg Land's curious artistic style here: If you want him to draw a realistic teenage girl, hand him a nine-year-old character. His Lunella looks excellent except for looking twice as old as she should. Alas, she's the only character in the book that escapes the Generic Land Female Face.

Kei Kawade's role is explained - he's a bloody Inhuman, sigh. According to Karnak, it is his destiny to stand against the "Leviathon Mother" and her kaiju hordes by summoning Kirby monsters from the 50s. Stiff dialogue, lazy art, and poor structure spoil some good plot twists here. Leinil Francis Yu is a great artist, but this issue is miles away from his best work. I dunno whether his deadline was too short, or he wasn't getting paid properly, or he just thinks Monsters Unleashed is stupid, but every page of art radiates a palpable aura of "I barely give a half a ☠☠☠☠."

Half of Marvel's heroes protect/cheerlead Kid Kaiju while the other half punch monsters. This event has a nice premise, but the main title has barely any more narrative backbone than Marvel's 90s swimsuit specials. Salvador Larroca's art is great but his talents are spread too thin; every panel is a completely separate monster fight. Random heroes shouting out the names of random Kirby monsters does not equal a thrilling global catastrophe story.

The Leviathon Mother is defeated by Kei's five all-new monsters in a transparent pitch into the subsequent ongoing. A ton of clumsy, easily-fixed missteps in both the writing and the art make it clear that the creators mistook "aimed at a young audience" with "A-game effort not required." This event could have been an awesome celebration of King Kirby's birthday; instead, it was a crass extrusion of minimum-effort comics entertainment product by creators who were palpably uninvested in the story.

A faustian team-up with Mr. Hyde leads Morbius to some fresh tragedy that matches his (fully recapped) origin. Faustian bargains and regret thereof are Morbius's jam. This extremely retro-written one-shot will give the reader Morbius 101. But a wikipedia page could do that, too. And since this could be somebody's first comic, it risks giving a terribly mistaken impression -- most modern comics aren't this dull and clichéd. So it's a bad thing that this exists. The clean art is far better than this script deserves.

Frankly, It offends me that Marvel is rolling out a full slate of a-listers to shill for this dumb-ass Vampire: the Masquerade fan-fiction. A sufficiently intriguing story told with considerable talent could get past my inherent distaste. This story? With these words, with this art? Not a chance.

I'm rating this slightly higher than the last issue because something like a plot is developing and the X-Men are not quite as useless as Spidey was. But it's still terrible. I should follow the example of the editors and not waste too much brain bandwidth on this. "Do I really want to waste my time explaining to Tim Seeley that he's deeply misunderstood how Krakoan gates work? Nah."

The conflict of the moment is resolved and, as intended, the Forgiven go back onto a limbo-shelf where they'll be accessible should another author ever want to use them. It's been a god-awful mixed up ride to get here, though! This last chapter is the strongest, for all the wrong reasons. Some of the key elements here, like a good guest star (in Cap) and clear introductions to each of the Forgiven, should have been deployed much earlier. Taken as a whole, this series feels like a potentially-decent story that's been run through a blender. And it never--not even here--gets nearly the storytelling talent it needs to make its mismatched parts compelling. A little Internet study reveals that there are a lot more deep cuts in this series than I thought. The Forgiven aren't original, neither is Zawadi, and there are lots more. The author wasted a lot of time researching this stuff. I have a mean-spirited feeling that that wasted time is a fitting punishment for unleashing this series on the world.

Well, the title's not kidding. The creators put on an authoritative but dusty-dry voice. Like an obituary, but in a tiny small-town paper where storytelling talent's in short supply. (And characterization talent left this town years back.) The visuals, like the words, are stiff and dull. They do a poor job of conveying emotion, narrative flow, and action, and that doesn't leave a lot of room for artistic positives. I detest the plot choices - not just the characters and races eliminated but also the decision to ignore so much of Royals. Vox is a mighty contender for the worst villain. His look is stupid and his description is juvenile. A Super-Inhuman? Really? I'd be less disappointed if they went full Silver Age and called him Grim Reaperon. Yeah, the Inhumans have been over-exposed in the past 5 years. Yeah, a lot of their stories in those years stank. That should earn them a healthy stretch in comicbook limbo, not this vindictive and, again, juvenile murderfest.

Black Bolt strikes back against Vox and the Kree before things inevitably take a turn for the even worse. The storytelling, visual and narrative, comes close to basic satisfaction, but the plot it serves remains punishingly stupid. The Boss Kree lays out notably problematic reasoning for this series. It's a classic "1) Murder a bunch of Inhumans 2) ???? 3) Kree Empire is strong again" plan and this issue is flagrant in its refusal to fill in step 2. Add on Vox chewing through scenery like a runaway buzzsaw and you've got another thoroughly unenjoyable comic.

While Black Bolt breaks himself out of prison - getting to be a habit with him - Medusa and pals waste A LOT of pages to go find an ally out on the very edge of left field. I like the ally in general, in principal; nothing in this issue suggests that I'll like how he's used in the next 2. Heaving Ronan onto this series' corpse-pile is yet another bit of short-sighted over-the-top-ery that honks me off. The art is bland and functional; this series would be a lot better - possibly even satisfying - with Ariel Olivetti's old painterly style. I do like almost-dead vengeful Black Bolt a lot, even if he is cribbing his new Death Litany attack from Arya Stark. You know what would be way more entertaining than this series? A video of Donny Cates and Charles Soule (possibly boozed up) debating which Inhumans live and which ones die. Is there any space left in the Daredevil lifeboat?

Intrigue intrigue intrigue! Conveyed through cliche cliche cliche! With barely a scrap of meaning meaning meaning! This comic is just a heap of random characters and organizations, and all it establishes is that they exist in proximity to each other. There is no plot defining the relationships. One would assume that a plot would be an absolute necessity in a tale told by professionals. And one might appear in future issues. But let me assure you: There's no damn plot in THIS comic. At least the art's solid.

A few merciful scraps of plot development make this issue less of a mess than the last one. And the story's still told decently in the art (though I think #1 looked a little better). I can't say the same about the script. The structure is messy. The frequent cutaways are annoying, not exciting. And the prose is still pretty dreadful (though perhaps better than #1), with honest-to-God grammar mistakes piling on top of the cliche and expository problems.

The prose is less cliched this time around, but even more expository, messing up the pace. The art is decent; nothing to complain about, but also nothing to really praise. The plot is functional, but it's so simplistic that it shouldn't have so many moving parts. I get where the author is coming from with his "Russians are totally anti-Semitic" idea, but he executes it ham-handedly, like the worst sort of Cold War propaganda.

This issue is 80% snikty-snikt, and if that's all you're looking for, this might satisfy. The big-picture plot remains over-complicated, though, and time grows short to tie all the threads into a neat knot.

Nostalgia is no excuse.

Maximum Carnage is practically required reading to understand this, and that sits poorly with me. It does have a nice creepy mood, though.

A good example of "conditionally acceptable" plotting: "Let's team up again because we teamed up in the last event" would be acceptable if the story was generally enjoyable. But here ...

I'll be honest, I'm relieved this series didn't identify the shadowy organization Misty is working for these days. That makes it that much easier to leave it off any "essential Misty Knight reading" list.

Feels like both strips are treading too-similar "origin story" ground.

The art's not bad, but it doesn't deliver the spectacle that would justify the glacial pace of the script.

Lin Lie is portrayed as clueless and incompetent. Between the glacial pace of the A strip and the fact that those same traits show up in the B strip, I'm afraid this is going to be chronic and it's going to make it awfully hard for me to ever fall in love with the character.

B strip: Surprisingly funny and satisfying conclusion. A strip: Since that one-shot where the Avengers team up with cologne-themed teen heroes to sell Axe Body Spray exists (and so does Major X, of course), this can't be the worst Marvel comic of the year. But WOW, is it not much of a step up.

Demons ambush the impending Lie/Shuangshuang fight, reducing them instead to snarking at each other as they clumsily (particularly in Lie's case) combat the baddies. It's a decent little serving of plot development, but it's terribly decompressed, the characters are unlikable, and the art's a hot lot of nothing special.

Lie vaguely clobbers the demons chasing him and begins to exert some slight control over his sword. These are solid developments, and they convince Shuangshuang to recruit him, but lordy, they're far too late. It's still glacial, and the little sparks of brightness are spaced too far apart, lost in a sea of thoroughly "blah" storytelling.

Lin Lie and Shuangshuang hook up with street rat Cheng, but as usual, the scenes are too bloated to get them all teamed up on their road trip to Shuangshuang's base. Some nice background art in crowded downtown Shanghai is the issue's primary selling point. Lin Lie remains a lovable jackass with the "lovable" part being very debatable.

This loses some points for "cowabunga" and "get off my lawn" -- and it didn't have a lot to spare.

Far past its welcome. It's been over a year and we're taking the, what, 3rd? 4th? stab at the hero's backstory? Clumsy writing and shabby art just intensify the pain.

Lin Lie FINALLY gets nudged toward his second plot point: He needs to train with Shuangshuang before he's ready to face the god of war/find his father and brother. But handily, his brother -- his obviously, cartoonishly evil brother -- is about to arrive at the mansion! Except whoops, the series is over. I have zero regrets about this story going unfinished.

Let's just cut the event tie-in foreplay and get to the part where they meet Captain Britain, yeah? Actually, scratch that, the creators need to go back and take a second pass at making us give a ☠☠☠☠ about these new characters because wow, mission not accomplished.

Union Jack rallies the heroes (and their supporting cast) to fight off the initial Knull infection. It's drawn pretty well and the prose is decent, but it's still struggling greatly with the core mission of making me care about these folks. There's a little satire/criticism of modern British society that's so mild it doesn't move the quality needle either way for me. And I have misgivings about how easily Knull's minions are dealt with here. This doesn't fit the event very well -- reasonable, I guess, since it was originally intended to latch onto an entirely different event (Empyre).

Woah woah woah, don't go chucking a bunch of new characters at us; you ain't made the first batch interesting yet. I agree the art is pretty good. The script's just dreadful, though.

The Union recovers, slightly, but not fast enough to stop Doc Croc (and betrayal from their own supporters). A decent plot strives to hold up solid art, but it's undercut by aggressively crappy scripting, a mish-mash of recycled action movie cliches, and the world's feeblest political satire. I really thought Marvel quit publishing scripts this weak when Mr. Cebulski took over. But no.

It's all too appropriate that this series ends with a "doo-doo" joke.

Oh, good, we're *still* sticking with the "fill 75% of each issue with a one-off nonsense conflict" model. That'll string this story out as long as possible before getting to anything even a tiny bit conclusive. *Sarcasm mode off* Though it's a stupid format and it's still illustrated by one of my least-favorite artists, I'll admit: By this point the creators know what they're doing. It helps a lot that we know about the Beyonder's scheme now; that makes the pret-a-porter action seem less pointless. The best part is probably the way the Beyonder starts to crack as the story goes; he's the very definition of an unreliable narrator. On the other hand, all that narration leaves a lot of the storytelling responsibility on the artist, and Mr. "I can draw 6 fight poses and 1 female face" Land doesn't have the broadest shoulders for carrying that burden.

Though there's a little meta commentary about racism within the issue, leaving Black Panther off the cover feels genuinely racist.

Deadpool is getting mind-controlled into quite a lot of hero murders. Can an all-star detective squad take him down? The most promising part of this story is the least-expected one: The detective squad is surprisingly well-written and their chemistry is fascinating. The "Deadpool killing heroes" content, though, leaves a lot to be desired. We've got a shockingly high body count but the number of *memorable* deaths is low. And for an AU Deadpool book, the fourth wall is remarkably solid so far. The "From Zagreb With Love" art team (Dalibor Talajic and Goran Sudzuka) plays some nice stylistic tricks to distinguish Deadpool's POV from our view of the "real" world, but they are a little too successful at making that real world look ugly and grim. I can see this book disappointing a *lot* of different expectations, but there just might be an interesting story in it anyway.

Deadpool lays waste to a lot of spider-people while the detective squad chasing him gains an interesting operative. There are little twists to this story of Wade getting OML'ed that make it interesting, but each positive is counterbalanced by some bit of weakness. Cool guest star and intriguing plot? Aha, but the dialogue's dreadful. Awesome fantasy scenes featuring Babysitter-Pool and a fruit pie eating contest? Aha, but many of the character designs are horrible and the fight scenes are woefully stiff. Like a lot of Marvel's less-enjoyable current series, this feels like a first draft effort fast-tracked into the market by an uncaring editorial team.

Deadpool's killing spree starts to whittle down the detective squad tracking him, but the violence is starting to lose what little shreds of novelty it had. Ugly art and a dull script that requires liberal application of the idiot stick to the heroes' heads to make the plot work. It's an awful lot of "meh" to wade through for a payoff that's leaning too far toward "this is what Deadpool did at the start of the OML timeline."

Deadpool unceremoniously caps the Detective Squad chasing him along with a lot of heavy hitters. Gwenpool provides a vital twist that turns Wade against his puppet-masters. This issue features some more threadbare stylistic allusions in the art, many of which are used to conceal the deaths of underage heroes - a smart decision but not a brave one. Forgettable execution of a threadbare premise leaves us wondering yet again what the point of this exercise is.

Deadpool turns on the badguys up to and including the Red Skull. The end of this miniseries lands him in some very Logan-esque territory, and while there's a certain conclusiveness to the way the plot wraps up, the payoff is by no means big enough to justify all the pages spent in the journey. Not only is it the capstone to a profoundly unnecessary series, but it's a *generic* one that has minimal bearing on the past four issues of hero-killing. The Talajic/Sudzuka/Mrva art closes on a realistic, gory indie note. There's nothing wrong with it, but it doesn't have a hope of elevating Cullen Bunn's forgettable script.

An attempt to relaunch Frank as a vengeful super-spy has its tendons slashed by a slow-starting script and 30 pages of PROFOUNDLY ugly art. The last act delivers some interesting plot development, but it's preceded by long stretches of hopelessly muddled storytelling. This art does not convey motion or emotion well. It has no narrative flow. It doesn't make characters or settings look good; more often, it does the exact opposite. It is contrived and "artful" in all the wrong ways. For me, it slaps down a supremely discouraging unwelcome mat in front of this new volume. Szymon Kudranski joins Matteo Buffagni on my roster of "jerk artists who think it's cool to bust out the Nazi reference material when the script says 'draw a tank.'" I don't object to Frank somehow acquiring a tank to breach the Roxxon compound in the 2nd act. I very much object to him acquiring a King Tiger, a Nazi tank of which there is ONE drivable example left in the world.

Punisher's return to New York starts unfolding much to my liking: He's conducting a dirty gutter-level war against Hydra stragglers while Zemo and Fisk combine to launch supervillains and military troops against him. There's still plenty of storytelling here that I find fault with, but the plot is holding my interest much better than the last arc. Plus, that scolding of pro-Punisher cops is very welcome.

I think the Punisher/Zemo conflict has gone on so long (and the baddie has received so much jackass characterization) that the continued lack of a decisive conclusion reflects poorly on both characters.

The Major Spoilers review isn't wrong about the sexism.

I know I'm alone in the ratings basement, but I'm playing this volume off with one last smack on the "dull story, terrible art" drum.

Dr. Strange's sad Infinity Watch is assembled. (Ugh, Bullseye. Really?) Towards the end, plot developments develop dramatically and the forward progress is blissfully welcome. Requiem's identity is revealed and that's just the first of the climax's double-barreled surprises. The script drops signals suggesting that this ridiculous plot was once supposed to be EVEN MORE labyrinthine: When did Thor meet "King Thor"? When did Iron Lad sub in for Kang? What's the Kree trouble Carol is supposedly dealing with? Life of Captain Marvel, which just started? I feel again like the kid pointing out the naked emperor when it comes to the art. From the first scene inexplicably taking place in an Old West saloon to the last scene relying on random doll heads to try (unsuccessfully) to portray an emotional Gamora, I hate these visuals. And the script for this issue is busy enough to expose a brand-new fault in the "fractal" panel layouts: While the smaller boxes are usually just arbitrary divisions of a bigger scene, SOMETIMES they're separate, all-new panels. There's no way to tell the difference, and it makes the story that much harder to follow.

Infinity Stone powers make the battle for possessing them tricky, but Gamora's the big winner. This issue seems to be an abrupt end to the Stones' Earth connections and a launching pad for all-new cosmic weirdness. That suits me just fine. I appreciate the good work that went into scripting this big fight; I wish it was supported by stronger visuals. The character portrayals are OK, but the art fails to illustrate the use of the Stones well. Us clever readers are left to puzzle it out from the words. Credit to the colorist - he does help. But with better art, we wouldn't NEED clues like "green wash = active Time Stone."

After Gamora squishes all her potential opposition into a ridiculous mashup pocket universe (i.e. a holding pattern), she focuses on the one mysterious place hidden from her nigh-omnipotent sight. This issue auditions several different partnerships that could be used to exposit the main event's plot: Gamora/Loki, Gamora/Thanos's Ghost, Loki/Flowa, Gamora/Flowa. I think it's unfortunate that the author settles on the last one; it seems less interesting than the others. While neither the script nor the art strike me as criminally bad, my reaction to both settles firmly on "blah." This is a banal slab of doughy comics product with snarky dialogue and random character mashups sprinkled through it like chocolate chips, or raisins, or both. It just manages to spark a little interest in the mashups; it's utterly unable to paint them as anything more than shameless time/money wasters. If some of them embrace their absurdity and aim for sheer awesomeness, they might turn out great. I feel similarly about the main event. Though they're faint, there ARE signs of a Master Plan threaded through this issue. I think this story, even more than most Big Dumb Events™, is gonna make a lot more sense in a collection than it does issue-to-issue.

This comic has a ton of problems, but drawing Kamala Khan's costume bodypaint tight is a special kind of Wrong.

Loki's new set of Stones is half 616 and half Warp World. His pickpocketing gets him the 3 616 stones taken from Gamora and the 2 WW Stones he gave to Ms. Marvel and Ant-Man, and with his WW Soul Stone, they make a no-duplicates set. (And Gamora still has 3?) Considering how much sweat went into setting that up, I'm amazed that this issue's script is so subtle about it. Perhaps it'll become crucial in #6? I'm thinking his multiversal mix of Stones might be how he broke through the Quarry where Gamora could not.

Mark my reaction to "Dark Reign 1.5" down as a thorough "meh." There are promising pieces on the board (though familiar ones), but little of note is being done with them so far. Some of the art is notably good, but an equal amount is flawed.

Fisk's historical link to Ravencroft is revealed -- he used to feed corpses to the Unwanted during his early gangster days. Now they threaten his new version of the asylum, and the staff and inmates are prosecuting their own schemes. It's the barest bones of a mediocre story, fleshed out with the sort of creative work that should give editors buyer's remorse when they cut paychecks.

Ravencroft is a disaster for most of the villains and all of the heroes featured therein.

"Die Hard in a supervillain prison" is such a good (albeit not novel) premise that it can get this comic close to average, even with such deeply flawed storytelling.

Would I like to learn more about this sinister new organization? Of course. But if the only way to do so is to slog through more of this shoddy bottom-shelf storytelling, it's going to take me a long time to get around to it.

The Poisons unleash their assault on Earth. Tons of new designs, a Sinister Plan, a key role for Cletus Kasady, gorgeous art - and it's all virtually impossible to care about, thanks to cover-to-cover cardboard characterization. A huge cast of heroes show up at their flattest and most action-figure-y; individual takes range from the heinous (Hercules getting drunk? Oh, f!@#% you, Venomized!) to the forgettable (Kitty Pryde, Spidey, Cletus, everybody else). I'm rating this above average because the art is stellar, particularly in the front half, but it's a punishingly dull read.

Things get grimmer as the Poisons convert their first 616 heroes and the good guys come up with a whole lot of nothing in the way of good news. I have a tiny sliver of admiration for the way Cullen Bunn has harnessed ALL of his Marvel work in the past three years for this event. (This issue is where Kid Kaiju enters play.) That admiration is completely counterbalanced by how tiresome I find the grinding of the event's plot gears. The heroes are making terribly slow progress uncovering a villainous scheme us readers already know too much about. The charm is wearing off the art, too; I'm no longer impressed by the same spiky Poison design cues repeated ad nauseam with different paint schemes.

The Poisons lose a hero and gain a villain; Flash Thompson and friends start experimenting with Anti-Venom's effect on the Poisons. That latter point is the event's slender thread of promise; if only the script RECOGNIZED its importance and took steps to distinguish it from the background noise of "Marvel Super Hero Fantasy Baseball." I'm inordinately proud of that aspersion. I think it captures this title's hollow off-brand relationship to real storytelling. At least the art is passionate; it feels like Iban Coello might be the only person on Earth who's genuinely excited about this story.

This issue hurls the Poisons and the heroes into combat with all the nuance of a kiddo tipping one bucket of action figures into another. The script adds some extremely questionable nuts-and-bolts writing to the banal simplicity of the plot. The art has a decent level of polish, but it's also stiff and sterile. Together, the creative work dives down past forgettable to deliver one of the most thoroughly unenjoyable reads I've experienced in recent memory.

The Poison threat is shut down with a thoroughly predictable deus ex Jean Grey. Epic battles are shortchanged left and right, and the whole thing is wrapped up with a brief epilogue that perfectly encapsulates "minimum effort." I'm thankful that it's over, but not in the way the creators would hope.

Pretty good character work, but the premise is thin and it seems like the characters know it. Also, unfortunately, it's got that sort of bottom-shelf art that just drains the reader's enthusiasm.

Everything about this comic screams, "I should be a digital original priced under $3."

The ANX team beats up a crawfish monster in New Orleans. Yes, during Mardi Gras. Since I lived in New Orleans for a decade, let me assure you that yes, the city receives the same erratic "who's that supposed to be?" mis-characterization in this comic as the X-Men do. Warren and Bobby are drawn interchangeably and I have no idea who the green-eyed chubster standing in for Hank is. The gents are just background padding, really, since this story is primarily about Wolverine and Gambit exulting over how awesome Wolverine is. Jeremy Whitley slavering over the chance to write a "strong" female character, what a surprise. It's a decent story but the countless erroneous details make it aggressively forgettable - even if you're not nitpicking the Carnival celebrations.

Scott Lang slides into Hank Pym's shoes to sequelize a Silver Age story about parallel-dimension rebels. It's a tale told with serviceable art and a tiny, encouraging sliver of modern characterization. For the most part, though, it dives a bit too gleefully into aping the simplistic storytelling of Stan Lee in cruise-control mode 55 years ago.

A rather promising new world domination group is wasted in this incredibly simplistic "Avengers save the world" one-shot. The target audience is surely young; that does not excuse the 40-year throwback to "let us narrate all our heroics" dialogue. Very fine art does elevate the proceedings. This isn't something an adult fan would feel satisfied paying for. If you happen to have a young kiddo who loves the MCU movies and wants to dip her feet in comics for the first time, though, load this on MU and hand your tablet over.

Deadpool gets bamboozled into a time-traveling "creepy male stalker" story and Cable drops in once the mess starts damaging the timestream. This is a moron's idea of a smart time-travel script. (I don't mean too much offense to David F. Walker; I think this is a good writer being lazy rather than real incompetence.) 7th-grade jokes, labored Dr. Who references, a Terminator 2 frame, and Baby's First Summary of "Understanding Comics" thrown in for no good reason. A carousel of artists delivers pointless visual variety; nine different takes on "meh" visuals are exponentially "meh" when combined. Nick Bradshaw's "Pirates vs. mechano-Krakens" scene does look nice, though.

It's a Catch-22 of an anthology, where obscure characters who aren't popular enough to float long stories get clumsy, too-short strips that won't win them any new fans. (Plus some Elsa Bloodstone and some of Adam Warren being his creepy self with Laura Kinney.) There's some nice art along the way, but this is thoroughly unengaging.

There's not much I like reading less than a writer with a thesaurus trying to sound smarter than he is.

The pretentious vocabulary is still like nails on a chalkboard to me, and I think the pace is messed up (too slow). But I do think the core plot is fundamentally sound. The art's pretty fun. This series' protagonist is hardly related to the Otto in the main Devil's Reign series, and in general, this is about 20% more megalomaniacal than I like my Ock.

I think there's a workable conclusion buried under all that pretentious language. Otto learns a good lesson. I like the art. The flow from panel to panel is stiff, but many of the individual panels are great. I contend that the overblown vocabulary isn't just subjectively bad; I think it has a negative impact on the story. It makes it less clear. And part of what it's concealing is weak logic; there are a couple of key decisions by Otto-616 and the Supreme Ock that don't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.

Nothing in the strips gets me half as excited as the editor's page news that Jed MacKay gets another Black Cat series.

It's not terrible, but neither is it good in any sense. It does nothing to alter the exceedingly modest expectations I have when I see "written by Ralph Macchio" on a 21st-century comic. As usual, the great sin here is that the script gives a deeply mistaken impression about how Marvel comics in general and these characters in particular are currently written. That makes it bad at the main job of a standalone one-shot like this: drawing in new readers. The art's pretty nice, though.

At least this comic proves (by negative counter-example, unfortunately) that it's harder than it looks to make Gabby endearing the way Tom Taylor and Mariko Tamaki do.

A very MCU-ish Stark Expo in Hong Kong is attacked by Arnim Zola, Baron Mordo, and a bunch of magic Hydra-bots. Tony will need the help of a full Avengers roster and new local heroes Arwyn and Wendy Wong to save the day. I like the basic concept of the Wong sisters and the SERE-X suit Arwyn wears. I look forward to seeing them in a quality story. This doesn't quite qualify; there are a LOT of problematic storytelling glitches.

Comics characters failing to use contractions in their dialogue is a bugaboo of mine. So, *good lord*, I just found the bottom of the barrel on that score. I don't think I'd need 2 hands to count the total number of contractions in this issue. I like the art and I think the premise of the plot is sound. But the stilted dialogue (some of it would be clumsy even with contractions) ruins the pace and characterization for me. It's a shame because this issue features a lot of characters who *should* be terrific wise crackers.

"The Avengers" is a damned strange way of saying "Captain Marvel with brief assists from Iron Man and Shuri."

This is by far the strongest, most appealing chapter of the story. I can finally see some cool wit and imagination beyond the stilted language -- but the prose is still a problem.

Silk watches clone-Mattie sacrifice herself in what feels a lot like an appendix to the Clone Conspiracy. By straddling the line between telling its own story and addressing the event, this issue manages to fail at both jobs. Also, while I've fallen in love with Irene Strychalski's art, I have to admit she does a sub-par job of drawing a zombie apocalypse here.

Cindy confers with friends and family after the Clone Conspiracy makes her question her heroic motivation (again). She decides to accept Mockingbird's offer to join SHIELD. The fact this series ends next issue makes it strong evidence in favor of my theory that "joined up with SHIELD" is the Marvel hero version of "moved to a nice farm upstate." This issue's touchy-feely hug-heavy agenda is nicely suited to Tana Ford's expressive art, but this is a book where the closest we get to an action scene is Cindy fetching a kite out of a tree. Good grief.

Silk races through a confrontation with Fang that could/should have been a lengthy story arc. Then it's on to the happily ever after. Fang was supposed to be Silk's long-term nemesis, and it feels like a waste to dispatch her in 12 pages before pivoting to self-congratulation. Tana Ford's art offers no shortage of cringe-worthy moments. Action has always been her Kryptonite, but here she even flubs the happy emotional moments in the conclusion. Even if this issue had a better artist, it would take a lot of preexisting love for the character to say this was anywhere close to a satisfying ending. Satisfying or not, it feels very permanent; I'm afraid it'll be a long time before anybody puts Cindy Moon in the protagonist slot again.

Teenage Peter Parker blows an ESU internship interview because the Lizard needs Spider-attention. That's the way the "great responsibility" cookie crumbles. This is a very simple comic, verging dangerously into simplistic. Part of that is due to the light continuity and the conscious effort to cater to younger readers. But a larger part of it is due to Ralph Macchio's prose style being dated if not obsolete.

It's a slow, simplistic tour around Thor's Silver Age status quo. The art's a little dated, but very detailed. The writing's verbose and there's no tension -- never a doubt that the good guys will get their happily ever after -- but it's less nerve-wracking than some of Mr. Macchio's other contemporary work. If you're going to read a clunky, problematic version of Silver Age Thor, though, why not just read Lee and Kirby's originals? They're no more obsolete than this, no more challenging for a young reader, and they have historical cachet (as well as daring inventiveness) that this will never have.

Songbird gets the nickel tour of the all-new, all-different Thunderbolts and decides to stick around. The art is still painfully inept. There are about three panels that suggest this whole thing is supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek parody of 90s xtreem comics; they're surrounded by dozens of panels that suggest Jon Malin couldn't draw anything better if his life depended on it. The best part of the entire book is the teaser at the end suggesting the next issue will be an anniversary special done by Busiek and Bagley.

Zemo and the Masters of Evil attack. They're after Kobik, and their arrival breaks the team. Plus Kobik decides Bucky could use a blast from the past. This book has exciting plot twists, great pacing, and serviceable dialogue. The anniversary introduction - a dozen pages created by Busiek and Bagley - is also very welcome. I would almost certainly rate this issue higher if the balance of the pages didn't feature Jon Malin's art, which is, frankly, unacceptable.

Kobik is Very Disappointed with Bucky when he relives her revised WWII timeline and turns down the new "join Hydra" option. Jim Zub has put together an impressive script. While I still feel that Jon Malin's art is holding it back, it looks like his style's evolving. This issue's art is kind of hollow, but that's because Mr. Malin is purging some bad Liefeld-esque habits.

Kobik breaks along with the team, and Zemo is there to pick up some traitorous pieces. It's a strong, dramatic script undercut by relentlessly inept art. Am I talking about issue #12 or the title as a whole? Yes. The important takeaway for Secret Empire is that Kobik is splintered into fragments, and they're doubtless gonna turn into MacGuffins. Bucky is Zemo's captive, Songbird, Jolt, and Ghost survive, Mach X is MIA, and the rest of the T-Bolts have thrown in with Zemo with varying degrees of enthusiasm. When I downrate a comic this severely for its art - and make no mistake, this would be an above-average showing with a different artist - it's because art as bad as Jon Malin's actively impedes my investment in the story and sympathy with the characters. It makes the finished comic worse than the script, which is the opposite of the artist's job.

A Venom crossover set in space wasn't on my X-Men Christmas list, and the creative performance in this first issue didn't win me over. Cullen Bunn's script is close to average on technical merits, but his upcoming subject matter pushes a lot of my personal "nope" buttons. I'm cold on Poisons and positively arctic on Killer Thrill. Edgar Salazar's art doesn't do anything to raise my temperature, either. If he was the permanent artist for a crop of unique characters, his style could work. You can't swing a cat without hitting better renditions of the O5 team, Venom, and even the Starjammers, though.

Kitty dreams of the men she's lost and what they'd say about her marriage, and then we get the bachelor and bachelorette parties. This issue has three separate strips. Unfortunately, only one writer and one artist did worthwhile work, and they're not even on the same strip. (Kelly Thompson and Todd Nauck are the book's superstars of readability.) The low average quality of storytelling and the undeniably skippable nature of the stories makes this a pretty hard pass.

Danny's excursion to all the heavenly cities turns into a fight when he finds ninja-zombies hunting the cities' dragons under the leadership of some appropriately martial-arts-themed villains. It's a simple, workable story. The art is 90s retro, but it handles action well. The dialogue, though! Are the villains suffering some magic curse that makes them all talk like 80s Skeletor? The writing's too much of a throwback for my taste -- but even if I can't enjoy it sincerely, I do see a little cornball charm to it.

Mother of Mercy charts out a nice apocalyptic scope for the story ahead; Danny leads his pals (with more Immortal Weapons) straight into the Hidden City. I like the dynamic strength of the art, and this issue's script doesn't feel as pretentious as the last one. It's got an enjoyable fast pace, too, but the abrupt way it cuts off is a bit disappointing.

Iron Fist and friends split up for some nifty team-ups as zombie-filled floating cities appear all over Earth. Dave Wachter does some cool stuff with the fight scenes. The dialogue is disappointingly stiff, though, and most of the plot progression comes from various characters passing around the "exposit what happens next" ball. I do like the guest star selection, though.

While the main hero-team flails about dropping ninja-zombie bodies by the cartload, the story sets up a d-list Iron Fist supporting cast member and Okoye, of all people, as the prime combatants. The art looks pretty good in a messy, vibrant way, but I'm not loving the script at either the big or the small scale. Besides the looming irrelevance of Iron Fist in his own miniseries, I'm also troubled by the fact this issue seems to be at least 1/4 filler.

Iron Fist and pals team up with Okoye to fight Evil Abe Sapien, but only after Quan Yin vouches for the Wakandan's character and lays out the next plot point in laborious hand-holding exposition. Plus there's a cliffhanger in the final pages that I find more annoying than intriguing. My dissatisfaction with this script extends well beyond disliking the prose, though I certainly also do that. The art's pretty sweet, though. And I do like the absurdity of an all-powerful demon lord baddie referring to his sidekick as "Brenda."

Oh no, there might be editors' notes in the near future that say "Danny Rand no longer has the Iron Fist! See IF: Heart of the Dragon!" The damage done to Danny's character is bad enough; what's truly tragic is that notes like that might encourage more people to read this miniseries. I should really stop being surprised by this; Marvel loves to hide big status quo changes in terrible titles. cf. Betsy Braddock and Kwannon getting split in the execrable "Hunt for Wolverine: Mystery in Madripoor" series.

Marvel has once again taken something that should be packaged with an action figure (à la 80s He-Man) and inexplicably published it like a real comic book.

Don't get me wrong, the plot is still incredibly stupid. And not the fun kind of stupid. But the artist's loving mech renderings and the author's full-bore comic relief? Those *are* the fun kind of stupid. The creators enjoy those parts enough to get me enjoying them, too. (It also helps that the jokes heavily outnumber the stupid plot developments in this issue.)

The mechs continue to look pretty, the heroes get in a few wisecracks, and the plot rolls forward with a distinct lack of originality. This could be boring if it weren't so brisk, and it would definitely be disappointing if you're expecting more than "smack the action figures together" conflict. But accept it for what it is, and it's an adequate comic.

A troubling panic attack in the middle of an Avengers fight sends Carol home to her family's summer home in Maine. Generally-uncomfortable family history segues into actual tragedy, and the final scene drops extra melodrama on both the superhero and family burners. A few artistic flourishes (particularly in the flashbacks) and an "exceeds expectations" script bump this up a little above average. There's considerable space between my expectations and "good comic." My expectation is an instantaneous "that's dumb" reaction to a lot of lines; here, I have to think about it for a moment to detect the dumb. It's damn sure there, though.

Carol picks through her family history threads while Space Nonsense - now in the form of a Terminator-esque Kree Glamazon - stalks ever closer. Art and prose reach a noteworthy high point in the flashback to Joe Danvers' funeral, and they're not too shabby elsewhere. It's the sheer volume of plot threads that make the issue stumble. It feels like two subordinate plots - Carol's brother and her long-term relationship with Lou the Donut Dude - are advanced at the expense of the main plot about her parents. The plot balance in the last two scenes is particularly bad - major developments with Joe Jr are sidelined in favor of derivative nonsense with the Glamazon. Dang, that cover is brilliant, though!

Super-conflict comes to Podunk, Maine as Carol and the Kree Glamazon square off. The final page drops a mother of a curveball into the Danvers family story. Visual and narrative storytelling fell a bit short of "good" for me this month. WHY would Carol babble a bunch of inner monologue lines out loud during the romantic scene? WHY was it so gat-danged difficult for the present-day artist to stage a "Cap'n Marvel vs. softball-sized space-drones" fight clearly? But the biggest question of all (I hope I'm not spoiling future issues raising it here) is: How stupid/crazy were both Carol and her mother to let this secret legacy lie buried for so long? Perhaps Margaret Stohl's YA novelist experience is at fault, because this sort of "you have a secret heritage" storyline would be perfectly cromulent for a young protagonist on her first adventure. It defies belief that Carol and Marie would leave this sleeping dog alone through DECADES (both in and out-of-continuity) of superhero adventures, though. Just imagine how many times Marie would have to consciously choose not to reveal it: "Oh, your powers came from the … Gree, was it? Who are they? Aliens? From space? Golly!"

Carol is plagued with nightmares after CW2, but Earth needs a mighty defender STAT to deal with an alien refugee crisis. Two thumbs up for this solid re-introduction to Carol Danvers and the problems she's facing. The depredations of CW2 are handled in a brisk but not dismissive way and it's clear that the new direction is aiming to get back to the glory days of Kelly Sue DeConnick's tenure with the character. Here's hoping they get over that rather modest bar with room to spare!

Carol has a refugee crisis, a sinister bounty hunter, and a stupid TV show to deal with. I can't put thumbs up for this hot mess of a title yet. It'll be quite welcome to die-hard Carol Corps members, although I hope nobody gets so blinded with Carol love that they overlook the significant problems with this issue. I have a sliver of hope that it will shape up and get better.

Cap'n Marvel's powers are on the fritz, and it might be due to her new Kree orphan. Plus the bounty hunter Carol saved her from isn't done by a long shot. I truly want to like this title but Margaret Stohl is making it challenging. Maybe I'm reading too critically because I'm emotionally invested, but there are a lot of narrative choices here I disagree with. The biggest one remains Ms. Stohl's dedication to the "Captain Marvel has a TV series" subplot. It's definitely stupid, but not the sort of ha-ha stupid the author is aiming for.

Some bit of genetic nonsensium in alien kids like the orphan Bean is messing with Carol's Kree super-biology. The shapeshifting bounty hunter who's still after Bean reveals there's some as-yet-undefined nemesis waiting for Carol once she gets her ☠☠☠☠ together. This book is a hot, disjointed mess of sub-Star-Trek caliber technobabble being poorly held together by sub-sub-sub-Buffy caliber dialogue and plotting that's equal parts nonsensical and disappointing.

Carol foils Dr. Eve's plan (Who? Exactly.) to turn her into a mind-controlled person of mass destruction. Both the plan and the foiling are conveyed with dreadful ineptitude. This is an unacceptable comic on every level. From how much sense the overall plot makes (none) to the inter-character relationships (forced) to the quality of the "clever" zingers Margaret Stohl tucks into the dialogue (cringe-worthy), this script is a junker. The tag-team art lives down to the potential of the words. One of the artists arbitrarily decided to put Carol into her red-and-blue costume instead of her newer red-and-black one. This is *supposed* to be the same outfit throughout (it shows consistent damage), but it just isn't, and the implication that readers should ignore the discrepancy is offensive. Marvel doesn't give a ☠☠☠☠ about the people reading this title, so I advise you not to be one of them.

Carol enlists three cadets just in time to get swept up in the Secret Empire mess. The good news about adding teen characters is that it plays hard to Margaret Stohl's writing strengths. The Alpha Cadets form a terrific emotional core that should make this new arc a lot more relatable and interesting than the last one. Bad news? Ms. Stohl's still not so hot at writing Carol Danvers or snappy one-liners. Michele Bandini's art is generally pretty good, although the Chitauri attack taxes his crowd-drawing skills. This issue had two colorists and they couldn't even agree on which parts of Cap'n M's uniform are what colors; it's a problem that marginally competent editorial oversight could/should have fixed. It's another point in favor of my theory that Marvel doesn't give a ☠☠☠☠ about the quality of the finished product on this title. At least there's more creative talent on display here than there was in the last arc.

The Teen Alpha Flight squad establishes contact with Wendy on Earth. Also, they get Carol knocked out, oops. There's a perfectly fine plot at the core of this story, and the outside looks pretty gorgeous thanks to Michele Bandini's excellent art. All the bits between the surface and the skeleton - characterization, pacing, motivation, technobabble - are made of suspicious-smelling cheese. I was hoping that Margaret Stohl's YA novelist chops would synergize with this arc's plucky teen protagonists, but so far these kids are hard to sympathize with or even really remember. In the background of their story, Carol is still stomping around as a mercurial, not-very-military, not-very-clever, not-fun-to-read-about drama queen. The space station might be running out of supplies; fortunately, this version of Carol Danvers can subsist entirely on a diet of scenery.

Carol is so impressed by her cadets' pointless scheme from last month that she invites them along on her own pointless scheme this month. Alpha Flight's situation is unchanged and the Carol/Cadets relationship is evolved by all of two lines. This feels like the best, least error-prone work the creative team can put out and it's a real shame it's so mediocre. This arc is set up like a season finale from an ensemble TV drama, but we haven't had the chance to get to know 80% of the cast. Margaret Stohl's dialogue is also woefully stiff; we could really use an emotive actor to step between the page and the audience to bring these cardboard characters to life.

Cap'n Marvel rehashes her part in the end of Secret Empire at greater length than SE #8, but somehow provides *less* depth. Cliched dialogue, repetitive plot points, and continuity clashes aplenty. The artwork is still decently finished, but now I'm finally putting two and two together: Margaret Stohl's scripts are lifeless and need help connecting with the reader? That's a job the art *should* be doing, but isn't.

This breather/soul-searching episode features some pretty solid humor and superb cartoony art by Ro Stein & Ted Brandt. The first four pages are tainted with an absurdly tone-deaf "616 Jessica Jones is exactly the same as Netflix Jessica Jones, right?" assumption. What in the *world* are editors for if they don't nip ☠☠☠☠ like that in the bud? But that stupid misstep doesn't spoil the whole issue; the other jokes, the art, and the character work are refreshingly well-done.

I know virtually nothing about Donna Diego or Patricia Robinson, but I think the more I did know, the less I'd like these feeble revivals.

If the art were done by a single artist -- or a pair that matched up better than these two -- that might have done just enough to boost this up out of mediocrity.

Per his standard MO, Cullen Bunn crafts a story that will be satisfying if you're already a fan of the characters and stultifying if you're not. Gerardo Sandoval's art is impressive if you accept the "awesome x-treme" premises of his style -- but that's a big "if."

This issue introduces Apocalypse and his merry band of revolutionaries and puts them on a collision course with Omega Red. The tone of the book is an interesting mystical hodge-podge that combines beatniks, psychedelic hippies, and even a little slice of Sufism. Apocalypse stands apart from most other AoX mutants. He doesn't just get a mindwipe and a change of clothes; he appears to have been merged with Professor X. I hope that point's expanded on in future issues.

This series wants to be AoX: The Invisibles in a very serious way. But it also wants to be "Jim Henson's Invisibles Babies" in some mad parallel reality where the Invisibles is appropriate for Saturday morning cartoons.

The amount of teleporting in this book is too damn high.

It's a bag of solid premises that deserve far better storytelling in words and art.

Like the miniseries as a whole, this finale has some smart ideas sticking out of a storytelling matrix that consistently comes across as a little sub-par.

The Avengers struggle against a blatant Poison Ivy expy who's magically turned Man-Thing into an apocalyptic weapon. I like the art and I think the story's workable in a basic, non-spectacular way. But the characters don't feel right. The fundamental differences between the DC and Marvel storytelling styles are brought into sharp contrast by letting Steve Orlando plug the Avengers into a Justice League story.

Motivational chats with Curt Connors and Spider-Man convince Ted Sallis/Man-Thing to take some action. Unfortunately, doing so involves a very hinky magical retcon of the character's origin; I don't like that. Meanwhile, the Avengers and the Order of the Web are clobbering bugs all over New York and trying (unsuccessfully) to seem relevant. There's the germ of a workable story in here -- setting aside the retcon issue -- but the storytelling, in words and art, is terribly weak. This is the sort of bottom-shelf execution you'd expect from an out-of-continuity MCU cash-in comic.

Man-Thing saves the world by sucking Harriet into his mind-swamp, now christened the "Dreadscape." Magik and a squad of d-list monster mutants give him a little assist. The art is pretty nice and the story is structured in a workable manner. The prose is often clumsy, though, and I absolutely loathe the changes made to Man-Thing's origin and status quo.

Taking a lame bodyguard gig to satisfy their debts, the Guardians fall afoul of a horrible pan-dimensional space-plague. And Pip the Troll. I think grandmaster Jim Starlin is way more interested in his villain than his heroes, which makes this introductory adventure a little dull. It reads like a very lazily-run D&D session: "You're drinking in the local tavern and you review your debts. You're terribly broke. The local guard says you must complete the quest he offers." Alan Davis's art doesn't delight me, either, but this miniseries has plenty of potential.

Mother Entropy starts testing the Guardians (and Pip the Troll!) to find her new avatar. Dream sequences are inconclusive; next up is bodyswapping. This title just isn't connecting with me. There's plenty of potential left, but so far it feels stuck in neutral. I still think Jim Starlin is more interested in Mother Entropy than his heroes, but this little psychodrama provided frustratingly few insights into her character and I wasn't really feeling the funny in the dream sequences. Alan Davis's art is a little stronger this time around and his Gamora is looking less hydrocephalic. I am optimistic about the comedy potential of the body swaps.

A blasé bar fight crowns Pip the Troll as the new Mother Entropy; next, the Guardians have to save the Shi'ar from him or visa-versa. The body-swapped fight could have been great. Unfortunately, crafting distinctive character voices is not one of Jim Starlin's strengths. After this desultory kickoff, the whole Mother Entropy plot is looking underwhelming; it's extremely easy to predict what plot points the last two issues will be hitting. Whether it's intentional or accidental, Mr. Starlin is writing Pip and the Guardians as morons, and that's not a lot of fun to read. Alan Davis's art commits no sins, but neither does it step up to provide any of the excitement that this script sorely lacks.

The Guardians' fight against Mother Entropy goes very wrong very fast. Can Quill and Groot save the day? You can't ever fault Jim Starlin for lacking scope and ambition; this story turned into a universe-spanning version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" with impressive quickness. Trimming the team down to the under-utilized pairing of Groot and Peter is an interesting choice; between their lack of a common language and the huge scope of their enemy, their future looks mighty grim. It's a welcome bit of tension after the last issue, but it doesn't look like this title is going to end up being particularly memorable.

Groot saves the day by manifesting never-before-seen abilities and the creators point us ham-handedly toward a "let's all forget this ever happened" ending. Did you know Groot is the *only* sentient being in the known Marvel universe who doesn't breathe oxygen? That's the biggest of the bitter assumption pills Jim Starlin would like you to swallow but by no means the only one. Granted, this series is clearly intended for a young, non-critical, MCU-loving audience, but that in no way excuses the feeble storytelling on display here. Kiddies (and grown-ups and just generally everybody who picks up a comic) deserve better than this.

Well, I can't say there's anything fundamentally wrong with it. There are a lot of storytelling tricks (mainly in the script) that just drive me nuts, though. Mainly the heroes being a little too passive and the author's hand being a little too obvious while it's concealing plot details. I won't penalize the creators for my subjective distaste -- but I won't be calling this better than average, either.

I'm a "takes notes on comics" sorta nerd. You wouldn't believe how many times I wrote "(somehow)" while summarizing this comic's plot.

Logan wakes up in the middle of chaos; he has to grapple simultaneously with amnesia and murderous Soteira goons tearing up a lot of innocent-looking people. It's a fun story and the visuals are pretty strong, but it defeats its own efforts to be a super-great epic by trying a little too hard. The slow pace and the overabundance of structure - amnesiac Logan is offered, like, THREE paths to recover his sense of self - end up doing as much harm as good to the story.

I have an idea. When a writer submits the fourth of five scripts for "Return of Wolverine" and it calls for Wolverine to be pinned to a wall while the antagonist narrates his fights to him in the past tense, a good editor should arrange a face-to-face meeting so that she can physically pop the writer's knuckles with a ruler and say, "No!"

So this WHOLE STORY happened because this Persephone chick got inspired by a late-night rerun of Moonraker? I can see why they waited until the last possible moment to let THAT cat out of the bag.

For something so hyped, there's a shocking lack of storytelling polish when you open the comic. Sara Pichelli is a superstar, and there are some powerful bones visible in the artwork. But most pages look unfinished, like a couple hours of tightening and polishing work were skipped. The script, too, has a second-draft feel. The story's straight and the pacing is worked out well, but the detail and distinctiveness that would make you really care about the characters and events are missing. What you get is a generic AU story told generically. Not a tragic disappointment in itself, but miles away from the "important blockbuster" the editors and marketers promised you.

The script reads like what it is: Bare-bones dialogue written by guys who expect to fill in the balance of their world and story by directing actors and DPs and special effects teams to deliver details. The sketchy art tells me they didn't figure out that they could/should collaborate with their artist in the same way. I can't help but like Faye, though.

I wonder if this story would get better or worse if they just went all in and made the bad guy Peter's dad.

A villain upgrade fails to increase the tension as our "heroes" stumble blindly through a poorly-conceived plot and spout unfunny comic relief lines. The characters and the challenges facing them are exactly stupid enough to encourage reader contempt instead of engagement. Sara Pichelli is a good artist, but she can obviously tell she's on a sinking ship and she's not over-exerting herself as it goes down. I don't hold it against her, though; she's made the right choice.

Ben is saved by an unwelcome surprise and a poorly-conveyed sacrifice. The supporting cast is careful to kill any sense of tension dead with badly-timed comic relief, and the whole thing gurgles down the drain with a sad fart of a sequel hook cribbed from the MCU. The art is decent, which is actually a step down from Sara Pichelli's usual quality level -- but as with the previous issue, I don't fault her for rightly sensing that she's stuck on a project that doesn't deserve her best efforts.

Miguel's nemesis/father hijacks his girlfriend while Man-Mountain Marko beats on Miguel. It's an interesting chunk of plot, but it's wrapped in some dreadfully off-putting art. Will Sliney is good at drawing three-dimensional volumes and hopeless at assembling those volumes into living, breathing people. The results vary between stiff and frightening, and the faces in this issue are particularly nightmarish.

Pivoting from his dad/girlfriend crisis, Spidey captures Electro 2099. I'm not sure about the long-term plotting, but the action in this issue is nicely conveyed. I somehow suspect looking at this issue through "They Live" glasses would reveal a blank book stamped ENJOY COMICS. Will Sliney's scrupulously detailed but stiff and sterile art probably has something to do with it.

Miguel bamboozles key information out of Electro with the help of Lyla, his AI Gal Friday. This issue has a lot of questionable plotting and dialogue choices, but they're mostly redeemed by an excellent twist that I hope I'm not giving away. This ends up being a perfectly serviceable story, and if I had experienced a Fall-In-Love Moment with this title I'd probably have another rating point or two to award this issue. It doesn't contain its own FILM moment, though, so it wound up providing me with nothing beyond solid entertainment.

Miguel's jump to 2019 to stop the Fist devolves into a 12 Monkeys situation. Peter David engineered the fast pace of the fight by stuffing the first half of this issue with total nonsense. The stupid Pokemon Go knockoff has a slightly-subtle role to play, but it's introduced in a terribly ham-handed fashion. On the art side, I've figured out my antipathy to Will Sliney's work. He follows a very 90s value system that deifies the killer character-centric splash page at the expense of dynamic motion, natural blocking, and realism. I can respect the effort he lavishes on detail but I'm never gonna go ga-ga for the stiff, artificial results.

The full scope of the Fist is finally revealed and Miguel learns a lot of disturbing stuff about 2019. Writer Peter David drops a lot of answers here, which is much appreciated. Aisa, the mysterious lady running the Fist, gets de-mystified. There's some last-minute time travel family complications slapped onto the "to do" list along with the matter of saving the day; the big conclusion next month should be momentous. Will Sliney's art is what it is: detailed, scrupulous, and polished, but also soulless and sterile. It's like robot sculpture.

Miguel saves the day mostly via his friends telling him the day is saved. Man Mountain ☠☠☠☠ Marko is brought back to create a cheap imitation of a climactic fight scene. A few questions get answered, Mr. Sliney gets to burn up some bonus pages with stiff mannequin-looking splashes, and Peter David would really *really* like you to write in and pester Marvel to give him a "Defenders 2100" title. This lackluster finale for a lackluster series doesn't have me raring to sign that petition.

This comic is paced like it has an infinite number of pages to waste on nonsense.

This two-shot was at best methadone for Ironheart junkies.

The premises for each strip aren't spectacular, but they could work. And the art is sound middle-of-the-road stuff. But the words! I expected clunky retro cheese from Tom DeFalco, but Christos Gage drops down to the same level, which is a disappointing surprise.

Machine Man resists temptation and makes off with Jocasta's head (including a copy of the Obedience Virus). In the B Strip, the Wreckers and Aaron's old pals … exist. They win a pointless fight against some Bain robots and earn some highly-qualified respect from the rebel bots who helped them. This issue is par for the course for this event: Put together with sound storytelling skill, but fundamentally forgettable in a way that makes it hard to care about.

Seems like both strips have pacing problems. Even with an above-average share of pages, this feels like less than an issue's worth of story.

The B strip suddenly has to carry the A strip and it ain't really up to the task.

Somebody oughtta tell Zhou Liefen that "withhold anything interesting from your story until the climax" is not how you build tension. But then, I've seen readers of the Chinese version suggest that Greg Pak should get a large share of the blame for the disappointing pace of this translation. Apparently, the original didn't put the contemporary story on hold for these jarring flashbacks.

In this installment, in both strips, the storytelling tightens up a bit. I still think this title's short of compelling reasons to read, but if you can find that motivation somewhere else, this comic won't disappoint.

The letters page reveals that the fans are still all agog over representation. That casts the series' storytelling foibles in a different light. These strips might be nothing special to majority readers who've seen these beats done better elsewhere, but they're hugely important to readers who rarely -- maybe never -- see protagonist superheroes who look and talk like them.

There are solid nuggets of intelligence and charm scattered through the slow-moving story. Keng's art puts a noteworthy polish on top of straightforward manga-style lines.

Ling gets some prehistoric backstory from Madame Huang and completes a nifty "air-golem" training session with her. There are compelling ideas in here and the art is good, but the words are pretty clumsy. This title's timeline remains completely ☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️, too. Making those first three issues a flash-forward and then framing everything that's come since as a flashback was a big mistake.

Aero uses her new wind-doppelganger powers to win a crystal monster fight without leaving her boyfriend's side. There's some nice heart in the relationship, both in the present and in their meet-cute flashback. But the contemporary story remains tremendously drawn out, and the plot isn't engaging enough to justify the slow pace.

Ling and Tony Stark meet, but we'll have to wait another issue to see Aero and Iron Man. Ugh. Madame Huang provides intriguing backstory tidbits that finally start to stitch together the title's mythology. It's still an annoying maze of different timelines, all unfolding too slow and too distant from each other. At least the visuals are still pretty.

"That's right, Iron Man! The secret to beating the tower monsters is a vital detail my creators never thought to show or mention until now!" Ugggh.

Out with a whimper, not a bang. The storytelling was nice in this issue and I even felt that Aero got some good characterization -- but as throughout the series, pacing and plotting are fundamentally flawed. This isn't a Western superhero comic, and chopping it into 20-page chunks didn't fix that.

Great, what I didn't like about Jason Aaron's Avengers was that it was too quiet and it made too much sense. /s

This issue goes down a lot smoother than the last one for me. There are several reasons for that. Mainly it's a relief that the author isn't dragging any more pet characters out of comics limbo. Stronger hints about an overarching plot help, too. And the art is even close to tolerable (subjectively speaking). The fewer Greg Land faces I see, the less irritated I get, and there were plenty of masks in play here.

It's nice that, 3 issues in, the protagonists are finally starting to get a feel for the bigger story. Unfortunately, the single-issue adventures remain dull and unengaging. A lot of that is down to the sterile art -- but the author certainly isn't helping by lining up 2 "we have to team up with a villain" stories in a row. (That choice will probably turn out to have some bigger meaning, but still.)

I get that the "in media res" start is half the premise here, but this issue really shows its limitations. The other half of the premise is non-stop action at a breakneck pace, and that's really hampered when the script is larded down with pointless exposition detailing a status quo that has zero import outside the issue itself.

While the "Spidey vs. Avengers" set-piece is pretty nicely scripted, on balance, I don't appreciate going through 5 issues of Greg Land to reach an "I told you that story to set up this other story" payoff. Subjectively, the twist is unengaging, unbelievable, and doesn't have a prayer of justifying what's come before.

A "greatest hits" Avengers team just barely manages to clobber a biomechanical kaiju. Tony preps them for the next round with big Vibranium robot-suits. I respect the creative work that went into this, particularly the scrupulous art. But it's *such* a loser of a premise. "Mecha fighting kaiju" feels fundamentally un-Marvel. The mech designs are mighty clunky, and the kaiju antagonists aren't that exciting, either. The fact that each Avenger gets an action figure accessory to go along with their robot feels very toyetic, very 80s. And those are not, unfortunately, good feelings.

It's not bad per se, it's just dishwater dull.

As Kang plunges Earth into cross-time chaos, the Avengers battle and regroup and find themselves in the dubious care of a dubious ally. I feel bad for Carlos Magno. This is obviously a passion project for him. He pours scads of effort into his mecha-battle scenes. Jed MacKay adjusts the script accordingly, moving slow and leaving plenty of space for visual spectacle. But the finished results just. Aren't. Interesting. At all.

The Avengers' Hail Mary against Kang doesn't go well, costing them their unseemly ally Thanos. Look, Carlos Magno just wants to draw giant robots fighting monsters. And Jed MacKay just wants to write Avengers sassing each other. They do these things well enough to make up for the book's deficiencies -- barely -- and hold overall quality at average.

Black Panther uses cosmic Eternity power to pull off the most cliched of all time travel victories while his teammates have a filler-fight with their deadly-dull monster doppelgangers. I expected very little from this finale but *wow* was this still a huge disappointment. I wonder if there was a little creator friction at work here. Dialogue at the start and finish suggests the Avengers need to destroy Kang's tech while he's distracted. But in the middle, all they actually get to do is beat on those bland, ugly monster-vengers. Almost like *somebody* insisted on drawing that stupid fight. And this comic does a perfect job of rendering Black Panther's final assertion -- that the day was saved by Avengers bravery, not cosmic power -- entirely false. Ugh.

Aneka commits the righteous killing that got her locked up at the start of the main Black Panther series. There's some exciting stuff going on here, but it's over-written to the point of melodrama, robbing it of its impact. The art is generally solid but bad at portraying action, which holds the story up at a few critical points.

Ayo and Aneka go rogue as the Midnight Angels; we get a slightly deeper telling of the tale than we did at the start of the current BP volume. Nemesis Folami and supporter Zola are left in open-ended situations that feel like lame sequel hooks. It would have been better to give them real closure. My chief disappointment is still the dialogue. In an effort to make her characters sound exotic and non-American, Roxane Gay has again stuffed their mouths with an overdose of clumsy, stilted half-poetry.

Kasper Cole gets a mission from T'Challa and a pretty swank update. This "put it all on the field" one-shot is a great introduction, standard adventure, and overhaul for the oft-forgotten White Tiger (no, not that White Tiger, the other one). Solid plotting and great art are let down only by somewhat forgettable dialogue and extremely forgettable villains. This is a perfect kickoff for a solo Kasper Cole series, and the fact that one wasn't greenlit is disappointing. Greg "Foolkiller" Salinger can get a five-issue stealth mini but Kasper can't? What the ☠☠☠☠, Marvel?

Inferno and Iso save the day and rally the NuHumans to oppose the X-Men where their royals failed. It's still paint-by-numbers Big Dumb Event plotting, with the added irritation of inserting parallel scenes so that both sides can agree that the authors' chosen plot railroad is the Only Possible Way to proceed. The characters are nicely done (both in writing and art), which just makes it that much more disappointing to see them stuck in this meatgrinder of an event.

Medusa starts busting out of Limbo; Mosaic trawls through Magneto's head and brings some shocking news to his NuHuman pals. Discount the unwelcome comedy routine in the middle of this book where a bug-eyed Mosaic-in-Magneto runs around looking for the bathroom; that's unquestionably embarrassing. The ending twist, which casts the allegiance of the NuHumans into question, is danged exciting.

Karnak's got it right: "This conflict … was inherently flawed from the beginning. I suspect events may have begun to fracture." The key fracture in this issue is that the NuHumans have sided with the X-Men and Moon Girl is helping Forge rebuild his Terrigen-killing machine. That doesn't stop Emma Frost from attacking them when they show up in Iceland. Even though their goals are highly compatible with hers, nope, we gotta fight. After more than 50 years, the Misunderstanding Brawl is still Marvel's go-to meat-and-potatoes conflict. Javier Garron's art remains decent but distinctly underpowered for a big splashy event.

The entire war was Emma Frost's breakdown, and fortunately, that message gets out during the final battle. I'm mostly in favor of the status quo this event leaves behind, but the rigamarole required to get us to here was *epically* dumb. Medusa punched a literal "save the X-Men" button at the climax of the event. And what are the odds that Storm's going to face any negative consequences for *launching a war* when the right solution was a two-minute phone call to New Attilan?

A symbiote event throws a lifeline to some symbiote-adjacent titles that couldn't make it on their own. I'm more interested in seeing Chapman's Scream continue than Tieri's Ravencroft, but unfortunately, neither of these strips do a good job of justifying the time it takes to read them. The Scream strip features better storytelling while the Ravencroft strip has better development -- if you're in the market for yet another new gimmick-symbiote, which I am not.

American Kaiju and Hobie Brown (once Prowler, now Hornet): These are characters that exist in the Marvel universe. Their event strips are satisfying reads, but they offer little incentive toward giving these characters more pages.

Cloak and Dagger go through their umpteenth estrangement plot and Toxin, with a cool new host, finds himself fighting Alchemax rather than Knull. The Toxin strip is a little promising; the C&D, not so much. The art is nothing special and the prose is notably bad. Things are different for Toxin; the plot of the moment is so-so but the creators invest some worthwhile effort in giving the symbiote a status quo that's worth a further look.

"Written by Ann Nocenti" has become a synonym for "acquired taste." "Retro throwback comic" is another audience-narrowing term. And the wild art doesn't help. I'm using "wild" in a mostly-negative sense; the artist hits some bullseyes--but just as often, they miss the target entirely. This book has a very niche audience that'll find it delightful. I'm not in the niche, and I think for the rest of us, this struggles to reach average.

The characters speak and act in ways that make a sort of basic sense, but the script doesn't convince me that they're motivated by anything beyond the author's will. The art is similarly effective but unengaging. It clearly communicates motion and feeling, but there are many moments of anatomical weirdness that break me out of the story.

The editor and writer agonize in the backmatter over how brave and controversial it is to use the WTC as "this story takes place in the 20th century" set dressing. Who do they think they're fooling?

Peter fights against a shadow-force (Knull, duh) possessing his old foe Alistair Smythe. He gets the Black Knight to assist, at random, and space cutaways show us we can expect Kang and Rocket Raccoon (?!) and maybe Uatu to tie in later on. It's a fair premise, but the storytelling so far inspires little confidence. The script is slow and indulgent. And the art? Some artists struggle with drawing space battles or magic powers or scary monsters. Greg Land? He meets his Waterloo trying to leap more prosaic hurdles. Like drawing a child that looks human, or convincing readers that his Alistair Smythe is a whole different person rather than "Peter Parker + wig and goatee."

Spidey and the Black Knight let themselves get split up, and the wall-crawler does better with his personal shadow-monster fight. Kang and Rocket stop by in a frustrating final scene; I hope they get properly engaged in the story soon. If they don't, they're just going to be a deus ex machina and these little foreshadow-y previews won't convince me otherwise. Greg Land remains Greg Land. He's not the only comics artist who goes into meltdown when he has to draw "people on stairs," but he might be the highest (most-over) -paid.

Kang, against all odds, becomes the driving force of the hero team. Plenty of laughs come as he and his compatriots head to Knowhere behind Mister E. This isn't a story I care about and I'm still opposed in principle to Greg Land art. But this is a very funny issue.

The heroes whip Mister E and also deal with Ulik, but their quest to secure the Ebony Blade isn't quite finished. I'm never gonna like the art, but the simple action story is fast-paced and it's got some good gags. This'll do just fine for a popcorn comic.

Knull unleashes Mr. E for a doomed rematch. The heroes defeat him through relentless contrivance (MacGuffin + energy powers = instant win) and entirely too much Watcher-meddling. If my rating looks unkind, please know that this comic hit multiple subjective hate-buttons for me harder than I thought a modern Marvel comic could. The characterization, the humor, the plot development, the art, the resolution -- over and over again, this issue is executed exactly contrary to my tastes.

The finale does some interesting things with Typhoid Mary, but it's kinda silly to suggest that Iron Fist - characterized here as "Spider-Man on costume swap day" - is an important part of the story.

WW2 Cap, Silver Age Spidey, and teen Red Room Black Widow all get yoinked into a generic (but engaging!) fantasyland. The story has promise and succeeds in sinking some "what happens next?" hooks in me. The art is good, but I confess I like the origin segments (particularly Black Widow's) even more than the unified "fantasyland" style. And I'm a little worried by the focus; Cap gets twice as many pages as the other heroes and he is, in my opinion, the least interesting of them. Plus his initial scenes feature some atrocious writing.

Pete earns a smooch by manfully lassoing a dragon, Steve starts teaching the lost art of manliness to a tribe that's shamefully purged its men, and Natasha, after kicking a little ass, settles into a love triangle between a pretty-boy king and a rugged centaur. Good art. Clunky prose, clumsy plotting. Painful characterization, world-building, and gender roles -- this replicates some of the worst aspects of the early 20th-century pulp fantasy it's emulating, without irony or self-awareness. Devil's Advocate: It is just possible that the creator intends to subvert the cliches that so riled me. But this comic doesn't do much to raise my hopes on that score.

I feel like the kid pointing out the nakedness of the emperor. This story is blah characters being flung into conflict for unexplained reasons, illustrated in a sketchy "not bad but nothing special" style. What am I missing? I'm sure there's some cryptic big-picture plot that will eventually explain everything, and doubtless some big dumb villain the heroes will have to team up against. But I'm starving for hints of it. Kaare Andrews is stingier with plot clarifications than Tini Howard, and I didn't think that was possible.

I found the journey to this point a torturous slog, but now the destination is in sight. And dammit, I think the destination looks pretty good. I refuse to overlook the many continuing lapses in storytelling, particularly in the writing, but teaming the heroes up against a recognizable villain to foil makes a world of difference.

I found it a decent ending and the shape of the whole story is at least potentially workable. Subjectively, though, this just wasn't executed well enough -- in this last chapter or at any other point -- to make me call it great, good, or even average. The art has some nice cartoony dynamism, but it doesn't handle visual storytelling well. The script isn't such a hot storytelling tool either, delivering a lot of clunky and/or cliched lines. No matter how much melodrama goes down, a "reset button" ending isn't all that satisfying. It does show some nice respect for the title's history to make it all about Peter Parker in the end, though.

The FF engage in their usual antics, saving Manhattan from Annihilus and then an ominous meteor. The final scene gives the plot a cosmic twist for future issues, but it just didn't excite me. Neither did the writing; Mark Waid's "how do you do, fellow kids" touches are cringeworthy as ever. Neal Adams's art IS exciting, but in a distinctly retro way. Looks like this is going to be a decent nostalgia series, but not of much interest to anyone except die-hard FF fans.

The dialogue is a textbook example of "retro in a wholly bad way." The third-act fight (Annihilus, again) is pure filler. The now-revealed premise -- "We have to team up with Galactus to defeat super-Galactus!" -- feels painfully stale. I'm downgrading this from "for die-hard FF fans only" to "for die-hard Neal Adams fans only."

The team gets a Power Cosmic boost and some fancy new uniforms. They go suck up Galactus's stolen energy and Reed SCIENCES it into a win over Antithesis. Oh, but we've got an issue left; cue the twist. I'm cautiously optimistic about the twist, but I think the desperate way the story NEEDS it just demonstrates how weak the original "we have to fight Super-Galactus" premise was.

Reed tries to take down Galactus as part of a suicide plan. The simplicity and fatuity of the arguments his family uses to talk him out of it are borderline offensive to both the readers and the characters. Nice art, though.

The thorny Quake characterization suggests Ms. Magruder would really rather be writing a new volume of Secret Warriors for an older audience.

A fine example of what "going through the motions" looks like in both art and scripting.

The heroes overcome Morgan when their empathic approach sways her followers, including the river monster. Some cute, solid character art and nicely-done narration from Squirrel Girl's point of view end this series on a (modest) uptick. We took a meandering path to get here, but it's a nice destination.

I'd be down in general for a "retro Spidey thrown into an alternate universe" story. But the storytelling used in this example, in words and art, is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. Peter David's script is full of dad jokes and lazy plotting and the latter is supposed to be okay because it's all oh-so-waaaacky. Seriously, a @#$% open-topped mattress truck? And Greg Land is still Greg Land. I guarantee he'd draw the redhead in the Black Cat costume exactly the same whether it was supposed to be Natasha or MJ. And without Frank D'Armata's hair-coloring, it could be literally any sexy superheroine.

Yeah, that's a mighty inventive (and cruel, but good cruel) twist to throw in Spidey's origin. But the prose is "meh" and Greg Land's art is, as ever, worth penalizing.

It's like lower-tier fast food: You know it's bad for you, and it doesn't even taste particularly good.

To me, this is essentially a best-case outcome with this creative team.

The coronavirus spoiled this issue's best joke: Black Widow gets magicked into a movie theater.

Oh, thank goodness. It had been several months since a Greg Pak comic assured me Amadeus Cho is a headstrong know-it-all who needs to learn how to play with others. I was in danger of forgetting.

The Agents of Atlas bond with a big dinner and then team up with another Asian hero. Shocking.

The Agents take down Sindr thanks to vague fighting and, mainly, a giant tricksy twist by Jimmy Woo. This finale and the series as a whole have been mighty weak as an ensemble story; it's not the launching pad that its new Asian heroes need. But if you're in the market for yet another "Amadeus Cho grows up" story (I am not), this is serviceable.

Welcome to Recap: The Comic!

There's nothing wrong with the plot or the character work--but nothing particularly notable, either. Of course the storytelling is consciously retro, in words and art, but it works better on the visual front. There's a certain campy, cheesy fun in winding the art-clock back 20 years. There's no such joy in the language, though.

The haphazard way the villains keep switching targets really undercuts their menace. At least the plot is racing along--but the fast pace isn't entirely a good thing.

It's either a decent story poorly told, or a poor story decently told. Either way you slice it, it's a weak start to the climax of a years-long saga.

The action is utterly ridiculous. Juvenile, really, in the way it tries to raise the stakes by amplifying and multiplying standard Marvel tropes. Multi-Mjolnirs, plural Phoenixes, variants galore, etc. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the complete lack of sympathetic characters (subjectively speaking) makes it hard for me to approach it with the proper, silly attitude. The prose and structure are decent, and the art looks as good as can be expected for a collaborative carousel job. There's a fair amount of humor and (hypothetically) heartwarming character work. But because the past issues haven't made me care about any of these characters (or, worse, made me care and then made me not care), my rating's stranded on the high end of "average."

If you have a yen to see every last character in the Osborn family symbiotized, this will fit the bill. Personally, I don't find the idea at all appealing. While the storytellers execute on their premise with perfectly adequate skill, I wouldn't say they went beyond adequacy at any point. Good writing and/or good art can often win me over to a subjectively unappealing premise--that didn't happen here.

This is an entirely plot-driven story. And the plot is decent, in a simple "conflict-oriented thriller" way. The author hasn't convinced me that there's anything more to Liz Allan here than being the heroic Player 1 in a symbiote fighting game, though. Similarly, on the art side, despite polished designs and carefully-chosen details, the artist lets me down at crucial points in the action. The most dramatic moments aren't nearly as clear as they could be. I contend that this isn't quite worth the time it takes to read it if the premise hasn't hooked you. Which is why I'm hanging out here in the ratings basement, I guess.

This big grab-bag of Deadpool birthday strips runs a gamut from satisfying to regrettable, with none of it coming off particularly memorable. There are little bright spots worth appreciating, like Paco Medina's art and Kelly Thompson's dialogue. But on the whole, this is an easy skip for even the die-hard-est of Deadpool fans if they're pressed for time or money.

The target audience here consists solely of completionists who are committed to getting every Elektra and/or Ann Nocenti comic ever published. A strip: Words, art, and concept are all pretty decent, but it's a Typhoid Mary story, not an Elektra story. It's cute the way the author nods 2 or 3 times at current continuity before launching into a psychological study of her personal, not-really-in-continuity Mary variant. B strip: A well-executed example of the achingly clichéd "Daredevil and Elektra fight and it's sensual" scene. Yawn. Sunday funnies backups: Perfectly cromulent gag strips that would be welcome in a good Elektra anthology. They haven't a prayer of elevating this one.

I'm ignoring the reprints (you get what you pay for, eh?) and just rating the new Moon Girl strip. I … guess the prospect of new Moon Girl is, hypothetically, a good thing? This example is pretty saccharine and corny. Nice art, though.

Deadpool spirit-guides Foolkiller through a meta-fictional, self-referential wank of middling quality. Meta-fictional wankery is author Max Bemis's wheelhouse, so there's a healthy load of humorous "comics about comics" material here. This feels like the place this title should have started, and it makes the previous three issues look that much worse in comparison.

A few swerves lead us to more meta-wankery with a side of very generic-feeling daddy issues. The point of the issue and the series appears to be "villains are people too - but, like, murderous deadly people who can't be trusted." No amount of self-aware introspection is gonna make me forget that this series introduced a poop-themed villain named ☠☠☠☠ King, though.

This dense introduction to the villainous Logan-hunting party delivers some welcome attention to the Soteira Group, the bigger bads who have possession of Logan right now. While the nasty characterization of the protagonists is refreshing, it clashes with the "dirty-faced angels" treatment they're getting in other titles (Daken in X-Men Blue and Deathstrike and Sabretooth in Weapon X). The darker take shown here isn't deep enough to override the goodguy treatment; this just muddies the waters. This issue also has some visual problems: the marvelously real faces are great in individual panels but the progression from picture to picture is disjointed. This only gets worse as the story moves away from talking and toward fighting.

Deathstrike and Sabretooth catch up to the "☠☠☠☠! Zombies!" point, and Daken earns one tiny further development: "This town has commando dudes in it, too." That is NOT a lot of plot progress for the characters, and us readers get none at all. The dialogue is pretty good, but the art has weaknesses aplenty to balance out the slight value of the words. All of the Hunt For Wolverine serieses suffer from a shortage of content, but this one takes an early and impressive lead in dealing with its shortage via blatant decompression.

Daken, Deathstrike, and Sabretooth have a surprising amount of trouble surviving Zombietown USA. The plot is fundamentally sound but the storytelling skills used to flesh it out are sorely lacking. The stiff, disjointed visuals make a hash of the action scenes. They're matched by dialogue with a lot of logical gaps; the words take the promise of the plot and render it confusing in all the wrong ways. This is profoundly unsatisfying both as a standalone comic and as a chapter in the miniseries.

Sabretooth and Deathstrike just barely escape, leaving behind a dead Daken and drawing some strongly mistaken conclusions about the Soteira organization. This was a very subtle comic in both words and art, and that's a poor tonal fit for an "antiheroes versus zombietown" premise. I have great respect for the creators but I feel their talents were mostly wasted on this particular story.

This is a 7.5 horror flashback wrapped in a 4.0 expository frame story. The differential in the art -- Angel Unzueta draws Marvel characters like he's working from second-hand police reports -- illuminates the divide in the writing, too. The more Frank Tieri uses original characters and the less he saddles known characters with his idiosyncratic prose, the better he does.

The story's sound, but the words and art used to convey it are aggressively non-memorable.

"Maybe if I throw a lame Cap vs. Dracula flashback in the middle, nobody'll notice that I completely failed to conclude the 'Ruins' story before moving on to the 'Reborn' story."

Sinister War kicks off with a surprisingly tight connection to the Amazing Mary Jane miniseries. Mark Bagley contributes solid (albeit not spectacular) villain-on-villain combat art with a suitably enormous roster. Spidey risks getting sidelined yet again; fortunately, this issue ends with him in the clutches of his obsessive anti-bro Kindred. That ensures plenty of torment for Peter as the story continues to unfold, and it's told with enough storytelling skill to get me interested in the unfolding.

3 of the villain teams play keep-away with Spider-Man (who could be/practically is played by a football) while Nick Spencer does a C-minus job revealing how Kindred recruited them. This volume's established tragedies -- Passive Pete and artist roulette -- are in full effect, and in this issue, they drag an average-at-best premise down into the depths of mediocrity. Perhaps the one silver lining to the way this volume is ending is that it demonstrates, in excruciating clarity, why Marvel shouldn't publish ASM (or any title) so quickly.

The villain-on-villain game of Spidey keep-away continues interminably. New plot developments: A handful of the baddies are having second thoughts, keeping Spidey alive. And the Sin-Eater has risen from his grave, collecting yet another villain squad to menace Spider-Man. I see a slight uptick in the art here; Mark Bagley gets enough pages to set the tone and his collaborators do a decent job, for once, of trying to match him. I am past done with the keep-away angle and passive Spidey, but I'm cautiously optimistic about the new developments.

Sinister War comes to an abrupt end. Spidey survives and Kindred is foiled when the most and least noble of the villains turn against him. The art suffers from the usual "too many cooks" problem. The script is pretty impressive, though, which I credit to Ed Brisson. This must have been hellishly difficult to write, and he did formidable yeoman work. More Spidey narration than Nick Spencer would have used, which is a treat. The resolution makes sense, but it feels too small for the buildup. It's certainly too small for the fatality incurred at the end of the fight. As to Kindred's interminable narration, I quote the great Star Trek VI: "I'd give real money if he'd shut up."

It's a direct sequel to the author's Exodus miniseries. While it's more promising than Exodus (so far), I can't go so far as to call it "good." It's not as scattershot as the previous series, but I wouldn't say it's really focused. It doesn't rely on continuity links to decades-old comics I haven't read, which is a plus. And it handles the world-building job of defining class conflict in 2099 pretty well. But it *does* demand that the reader is familiar with Exodus. While Dark Genesis hasn't jumped the rails, it's not yet engaging enough to justify trundling through the often-disappointing prequel. Justin Mason's chunky, dynamic art is a big positive, though. The clarity of the visuals frees the reader up to concentrate on parsing the just-a-little-too-busy script.

Though I'm not opposed to the story, the way it's being told disappoints me. Characterization is handled entirely via quips and "cool" lines. Rapid plot development leads to too-short scenes and arbitrary character decisions. The focus is entirely on plot and…I hesitate to call it world-building, because it's not that deep. Let's say "scenario-building" instead. The author has a clear vision of where he wants his characters/game-pieces and how they should relate to each other, and he'll shove them there regardless of how stupid they seem or how little sense their moves make. And he doesn't care if some pieces (like Venom and Moon Knight) seem pointless while they're still in transit to their destination. The art is cartoony and a little short of detail, but I will say it's a good match for the script. It supports the breathless skipping from character to character and clarifies the point of each little scene.

There are too many characters/pieces on the board, and I find the game over-complicated, confusing, and dull.

Steve Orlando keeps pouring his quart bottle of reconstituted 2099-juice into the half-pint glass of this "stop Carnage" story. It's sloppy and it's silly, but if you *really* love that 2099-juice it'll satisfy.

…And only now at the end do I realize "Dark Genesis" implies they're not done beating this dead horse. Argh.

Would make a better Instagram feed than a comic. Lots of cute/clever moments, but the off-putting narrative makes it tiresome to read all the way through. Jason Latour writes as though he's afraid it would literally kill him to produce a comic that didn't get called "clever."

A mindscape quest to rid Johnny Blaze of a new demon allows Kushala to explore her own relationship with vengeance. She masters her unique vengeance-spirit and navigates to an interesting new status quo. I do like the outcome. The expansion of her backstory is a bit grandiose, but it works. The visual style isn't my favorite, but Paul Davidson obviously put in a strong effort. My God, though, this gets off to a rough start. That diner scene is *painful*. These authors could really use some guidance on how to write casual, conversational dialogue.

Spidey puts in a busy day defeating Chameleon and d-list evil wizard Moondark before the final scene launches the story proper: He's dumped into a weirdo magic dimension with an angry Hulk. Although this issue is merely a prologue, it's an entertaining prologue with a lot of clever twists. The storytelling, as usual, rubs me the wrong way and keeps me from fully investing. This comic takes a lot of shortcuts both visually and verbally: cruise-control dialogue and art that stays locked inside Greg Land's none-too-spacious wheelhouse.

After a long, splashy Hulk-fight, Spidey finds himself in prehistoric days. This is a breezy read and for once the humor tickled my fancy -- not necessarily the jokes in the dialogue, but the sheer absurdity of the situations. The art is still by Greg Land, though. Spidey vs. Hulk could be a real barn-burner, but here it's just 8 pages of Land.

Spidey continues to hop from one alternate-reality frying pan to another, with his course dictated by external forces both friendly (Dr. Strange) and not (Karnilla and more). This is where the series really clicked for me, but not in a good way. It's "Spider-Man gets to quip and fight with every character on Peter David's 'want to visit/revisit' wishlist." Which is cool. For Peter David. Me, not so much. And looking at Greg Land art still makes me itch.

Spidey confusedly picks up fresh allies as the plot spirals to its conclusion. And surprise surprise, that plot is "stop the evil sorceress from using the magic space rock" -- not the most inventive premise of the year. It's still workable. But the humor didn't charm me this time around and I found some of the lazy, cliched dialogue choices downright anti-charming. And Greg Land's art is still Greg Land's art.

This comic makes it clear early on that having a Big Dumb Fight™ isn't the way for the good guys to win. It then presents a Big Dumb Fight™ of interminable length anyway. The resolution is the worst sort of unsatisfying deus ex machina. I did like the running gag about naming the Hulk, but there's also a lot of dreadful cliches in the dialog. On the visual front, Greg Land demonstrates that "clarify the difference between regular and giant-sized characters" is yet another skill he never bothered to master.

It's a solid story, but a simple one. Like it's built of Duplo blocks when the modern audience is used to at least Lego complexity. I really like the art. It's quite retro in its layouts, but the character designs are modern and most panels get an admirable level of polish. The script is decent. Maybe even good. But the prose features a host of my unfavorite 90s writing tactics: tell-don't-show characterization, melodrama, repetition, inconsistent character voices, and a pathological interest in dad jokes and lame wordplay. I wouldn't call David Michelinie a bad writer. But I would argue -- strenuously -- that he's a DATED writer. "I don't believe nothin's broke so I ain't a-gonna fix it," that's him.

I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would. I still like the art and I still don't like the dated, expository prose. But language aside, I really admire this script. It's well-structured and very dense (one of the advantages of all that exposition). Characterization is a lot more consistent this time around, and there are even some nice themes stretching through multiple scenes.

Well, at least the art is consistently strong. I wish I could say the same of the script. The author returns to clumsy prose and inconsistent character voices (Venom sounds like a Harvard professor in one panel and Rodney Dangerfield in the next). This issue includes relevant plot points, but they're mixed in a blender, with no real narrative structure. If my rating looks harsh, it's because #2 was scripted so much better. Besides primary disappointment with the material between the covers, I'm also getting a secondary sting from dashed expectations.

It feels like this is genuinely struggling to reach the 30-page mark; that's not a good sign for a story with a bunch more parts planned, is it?

It's exactly what it looks like, a big anthology of little strips featuring female leads and female creators. Nothing is particularly great, but nothing is particularly terrible -- except perhaps Mariko Tamaki's one-page strips, which deliver the "Cathy Guisewite meets Marvel" jokes that nobody on Earth was asking for. Also, I detect a little less character love than usual for an anthology. It's easy to believe creators and characters were matched by editorial fiat rather than personal preference. (Also, great job going one-for-five on "cover characters who actually appear in the comic".)

Though it doesn't say "Voices" on the cover, it's set up like one of those. And par for the Voices course, this anthology offers good and bad ideas and good and bad storytelling, balancing out close to average. The Black Cat mini-strips are more miss than hit. Things are a bit better in the longer strips. The Jessica Jones strip and the Squirrel Girl/Black Widow team-up are both pretty good, though vastly different in tone. My love for the latter might be subjective. I think it's a perfect fusion of the tones of the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl and (the lighter moments of) the current Black Widow series. I'd like it more with different art, though.

The silver lining is (for NOLA residents) Monica Rambeau taking Kamala Khan to Hansen's. Adorable. But that's one panel in a 50-page book. I like the *idea* of tying an anthology together with a common theme, but the frame story here leaves a lot to be desired. The individual strips are weak even by anthology standards. America Chavez and Ms. Marvel retread some of their lamest bits of backstory drama for cheap sympathy. And the karaoke strip has a bad case of random casting; literally anybody could be swapped in for Black Cat and Mysterio. Even if you stipulate that the host has to be a female Korean hero, you have alternatives--this could star Luna Snow with zero alterations.

Somebody's sending horrific cyborgs after Weapon X's survivors. OML ropes Sabretooth into a team-up with a beautiful deception. Greg Pak delivers a delightful script that provides textbook twists and a flawless inner voice for Logan. Greg Land's art is at its most polished and tolerable, although a brief glimpse of Lady Deathstrike reveals that the Generic Land Female Face is still alive and well, alas. Beyond that sour note, this debut is full of promise and payoffs.

Warpath gets captured while OML and Creed spend another month battling cyborg monsters. This title is unfolding like an action movie in both good and bad ways. Cool action scenes, clever but shallow characterization, villains assembled entirely out of and motivated solely by cliches. I understand that Greg Pak is playing fast and loose with the established characterization and abilities of his stars (Warpath has a healing factor now?) , but nothing in these initial issues suggests that this series is intended to do introspective character studies. Yet for all its cinematic speed, this title hasn't covered a lot of ground so far.

OML and Creed recruit Domino while the still-underdeveloped baddies set their sights on the Totally Awesome Hulk. The fact that Creed walks into a Podunk gun store with a very anemic fistfull of $100 bills and walks out with a rocket launcher tells you exactly how intelligent this story is. (Namely, right on par with lower-budget 80s action movies.) Combine the aggressively dumb story with art that splits the difference between "unremarkable Greg Land" and "heartfelt Greg Land imitation" and you've got a mighty forgettable outing. Silver Lining? If you put money on "Greg Pak makes this a Hulk title within 4 issues" you just won *big*.

Hulk and his mutant buddies rescue Warpath and Deathstrike, completing the action figure set and setting us up for the next round. It's a noisy, explodey action-fest. Greg Pak turns in a cheesy, cliche-riddled script that perfectly matches Greg Land's cut-and-paste art. In both its loving attention to violence and its aggressive contempt for actual creative effort, this is the perfect comics equivalent of a Michael Bay movie. It's briefly, shallowly entertaining, but it really doesn't satisfy under close examination.

Weapon X is super-duper evil but our hero squad is closing in on them. Again. The sounds-great-in-theory decision to make each title in this crossover stand on its own has done mortal damage to the pacing - of both the bigger story and each individual issue. Every installment requires recapping, and in this case it's not done well. Add on some distressing art from Marc Borstel and you've got a very blah issue. Attempting to tell a nuanced story about a Weapon X lab jockey experiencing second thoughts is a big mistake when your artist doesn't do well with non-verbal feelings and emotions.

Badly-timed dissension between the Hulk and the mutants allows Weapon X to finish off its deadly Hulkverine project. Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write: I wish this issue were drawn by Greg Land. Greg Pak's script is action-movie dumb in a way that would only really work with scrupulously finished big-budget visuals. Marc Borstel and Ibraim Roberson are clearly trying hard, but they're also clearly not succeeding. The art for this story needs to make you go "holy ☠☠☠☠!" not "oh, bless them, they're doing their best."

OML and his Weapon X pals conduct the world's most generic Hulk-hunt for the world's most generic substitute Hulk. The inevitable dissension in the bad-guy ranks caused by Dr. Alba's window-licking craziness is the closest this issue got to interesting me; I found the glimpses of Weapon H's generic atrocity-committing soldier/survivalist hermit backstory to be total non-starters. I've used the word "generic" three times already; it's not an accident and I'll need it once again to describe the art: The generic Greg Land knockoff visuals are a perfect fit for the quality of the script. Did that sound like it insulted both the artists and the writers? Because that was definitely the intention.

Hulkverine embarasses the hero squad by steamrollering them thoroughly. Logan is still thinking "reason with him," Sabretooth bucks, we get two drips of backstory for Weapon H (including a name, Clayton), Dr. Alba hangs in there, and a surprise guest star promises fun next month. I'm very pleased to see Domino get some solid jokes in; on the other hand, Deathstrike got knocked out so rapidly and thoroughly I could almost believe Mr. Pak is intentionally trying to flunk the Bechdel Test. And come to think, snarking on the edges while big gristlebody boys slam into each other like rutting moose … Domino ain't come all that far since her Liefeldian origins, has she? The art is mostly decent with occasional disappointments, but this issue's script is a notable improvement over previous issues.

While the "stabby mutie brigade" squabbles pointlessly, Dr. Alba takes great leaps in clarifying Hulkverine's backstory and moving the plot forward. The mechanics of the plot are sound, but All-New Wolverine is wasted and the visuals are relentlessly underwhelming. If either Hulkverine or the SMB ever end up in an interesting story, this issue (like most of the title so far) is destined to be glossed over in a super-speedy recap. Covering this ground in a sentence or two rather than 20 pages sounds like a good deal at this point.

The Stabbie Mutie Brigade catches up to Dr. Alba and her Hulkverine, but the only question is whether they're even going to have time to stop her before she metaphorically shoots her own feet off. The writing partnership of Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente produces consistently lackluster results. My hypothesis? They're both expecting their partner to provide the polish the script desperately needs, but their raw, clunky words are rubber-stamped through to the finished page by uncaring editors. Marc Borstel and Ibraim Roberson have a consistent but also fundamentally dull art style. Their linework is scrupulously polished but their posing veers much closer to "lifeless ragdolls" than "living people." It's a promising story told with a palpable lack of investment by its creators. If they can't be bothered to care, why should we?

The Stabby Mutie Brigade liberates Weapon H and arrests Dr. Alba. It's a story that's run from start to finish according to "stupid action movie" logic, but it's stranded in a valley where it's not fun enough to appreciate in earnest and not bad enough to be worth mocking. The visuals remain hopelessly stiff and non-memorable, half of the "heroes" are fighting Dr. Alba for the right to chow down on the scenery, and Hulkverine makes a thoroughly uninteresting, unneeded addition to the Marvel universe. Now that his origin is complete, he slots neatly onto a "Wotif a soldier received X-23's backstory plus Hulk powers" shelf that I don't feel particularly interested in ever revisiting.

The Stabby Mutie Brigade is on the verge of splitting up when Warpath gets an urgent distress call: The banana republic of Santo Marco is getting into mutant cleansing in a big nasty way, and their play is backed by super-soldiers with the US flag on their face. That's right, Jerk Squad is going after Nuke, an underdog contender for Greatest Marvel Jerk Of All Time! It's a decent setup. Greg Pak's script goes after it in a by-the-numbers way. Warpath actually gets a slightly interesting role to play, but Domino is still making "let's get paid" jokes, Sabretooth prefers "let's kill suckers" jokes, and Deathstrike is superfluous yet again. Yildiray Cinar redeems the weakness of the script with some outstanding art, keeping this issue just inside the bounds of satisfying entertainment. Robbie Thompson's attached Legacy pages are the first time anybody's implied in-panel that Stabby Mutie Brigade/Jerk Squad is actually calling itself Weapon X. On the one hand, I'd *love* to see the argument that convinced, well, any of these characters that that was a good idea. On the other hand, I know Greg Pak would soft-shoe it in his current mood, so maybe it's better we haven't seen that scene.

Before diving into a huge shooty fight in which Nuke switches sides to fight against the mutants - big surprise - the team takes a desperately-needed strategy break where they consider what their endgame in Santo Marco should be. The appearance of actual thoughtfulness is balm in Gilead to me, and it makes the subsequent bloodbath & wisecrack-fest go down a lot easier. Yildiray Cinar is still putting in overtime to make the visuals both dynamic and detailed; his artistic effort is another flotation device keeping me from drowning in the sea of brainless "brakka brakka brakka."

The heroes save the day with some of the title's trademark over-the-top blammy-slashy action. Smooth, clear visuals roll the story right along and the script delivers a solid blend of audacious combat situations and cheesy character interactions. There's still a wide streak of superficiality to the story (What was up with Warpath's glitched healing factor? Who cares! EXPLOSIONS!) that keeps it from sticking in one's memory. For the brief span of time it takes to read it, though, it's noisy silly stupid in a very fun way.

While the rest of the team takes a night off, Sabretooth springs his traditional birthday ass-whupping on Logan. But he's never actually tackled the Old Man version this way. Will that make a difference? Some of the dialogue says, "yes." The majority of the book says, "don't hold your breath." The writing is nothing special and the art is a major misfire. It's not irredeemable, it's just way too stylized to slide into an established title as a fill-in. Weapon X is always dumb and loud, but #15 shows off the drawbacks of stupidity and volume without any silver-lining cleverness.

Logan vs. Sabretooth XLIV wraps up quickly. Some fundamentally valid character insights and a brief but blissful serving of Andrea Sorrentino's Wasteland art raise this issue up a little bit. It still has the core flaws established in the last one, though: Deeply regrettable art and an embarrassing tendency to let the main characters deliver the themes and insights in lecture format. Better than #15 - but most comics are. This one's still below average.

Sabretooth is put in charge of the hunt for Omega Red. Everybody agrees this is a terrible idea, yet the plot pushes on. Art with considerable storytelling talent helps tremendously to make this a barely-satisfying read. Standard Weapon X rules apply - the problematic characterization encourages you to consider this as a juvenile, continuity-light bit of hearsay. Like a not-at-all believable yarn Old Man Logan would tell after a LOT of beers.

Circumstances in Siberia produce roster turnover - Warpath ditches the team and Omega Red looks poised to join. It's an issue for remarkably good character work; the prospect of death makes Sabretooth set aside some of his jackass ways. The plot is still amply stocked with lazy gimmicks - tigers outta nowhere! - and the visuals do basic storytelling without adding much to the reading experience.

The process of on-boarding Omega Red is complicated by some more Russian-fighting plot twists. Otherwise, this issue is a welcome elaboration on the developments of the last one. It's elevated by some wonderfully clear art. But it's also dragged down by Sabretooth (of all people) doing a very shabby comedy routine on "Grumpy Cat" and "haz cheezburger" during his big fight scene. This title still wants to split the difference between earnest big-budget action adventure and parodying its own over-the-top-ness. The ambivalence still does more harm than good.

Sabretooth leads Weapon X against SICKLE in a way-too-public fight. A fight with Warpath is queued up for the immediate future, too. The plot is simple, the jokes are solid. But the art's a tragedy. This wildly sketchy, exaggerated style would work if it was the title's core tone - and if the artist were significantly more engaged. As a two-issue tip-in crafted by someone whose interest in the characters is clearly lacking … tragic.

The heroes resolve their business in Russia AND NOTHING ELSE. Is Warpath quitting or not? What's up with OML? Who knows?! At least the visuals are painfully ugly. This title has been always been hit or miss, but this combination of inconsequential plotting and unattractive art sets a record for missing by a mile.

Sabretooth's new, more mercenary Weapon X-Force makes it debut by caper-ing its way through a cult to rescue Monet St. Croix. Rock-solid art and snappy, salty irreverence in the dialogue make this a successful and enjoyable comic. It's still miles away from depicting any of its characters with "must-read" depth, but it's re-snared the feeling of popcorn fun that this title has at its best. It flirts with brainless stupidity, but there's a sound core of thoughtful characterization that reassures me the creators aren't just on cruise control.

Deadpool's presence turns this issue into a nonstop slapstick fight. Yeah, he's disrespectful to the Weapon X team, but hey, the creators are acknowledging that their series isn't really respectable. Fortunately, the humor is outstanding and the characters are splendidly drawn. The same can't be said for the settings; this whole issue takes place in a featureless void. The plot also crosses well over the line between "absurd but logical" and "sheer nonsense," and that (even more than the missing backgrounds) keeps me from calling this issue good.

It's counter-productive to introduce a guest star in a way that makes his story look 10x more inventive and interesting than your protagonists'.

"Sabretooth's personal hell" is almost certainly this volume's high-water mark in both premise and execution.

The only problem I have with undoing Sabretooth's Axis inversion here is that future readers might be tempted to answer the question "how'd that happen?" by reading this series. That would be a poor use of one's time and/or money.

Welcome to X-Corp, the bold new Krakoan business venture, where mutants will contend with boardroom intrigue, corporate espionage, hacking exploits, and … Ha ha, no, before the issue's done, we're back to good old anti-mutant prejudice and the usual explodey-shooty-stabby sort of antagonism. This premise is exciting in theory but a lot less so in execution. The chief problem is the author's trademark obfuscated plotting, which leaves readers asking "Why'd that happen?" at all the wrong moments. The art looks nice, though, and there's some cracking good dialogue. It's not bad, but it's hardly as daring as it wants to be. Also, I have to point out, no matter how much this issue WANTS a flying corporate HQ to be revolutionary, Roxxon had that exact thing nearly 10 years ago in Thor: God of Thunder.

Monet and Warren scramble to interview prospective board members while also keeping the Fenris twins off their flying island HQ. A haute couture party is the perfect setting and it turns out to be right up Alberto Foche's alley; he makes these clothes work better than almost every other artist. This issue also properly delivers, in my opinion, on the corporate intrigue premise; backstabbing and double-dealing galore!

X-Corp junks its jeans on a big tech demonstration. Warren is merely embarrassed; Monet and Madrox experience more significant consequences. Okay, first, the art. It's not good. I'm sure this was nobody's ideal choice (not even the artist's), though. There's probably a fairly tragic behind-the-scenes reason for this outcome. Second, the pacing. It's problematic. This issue takes two swings at a cliffhanger and only one of them is even close to successful. Silver linings? I really like the character work and the dialogue; I just wish the individual lines were stitched into a more cohesive whole. The backup cartoon is cute. And how about that Madrox family drama? The author gets some quick pathos out of it as written. But it raises (without answering) a bigger question: Why doesn't Jamie have a dupe on round-the-clock Dad duty?

This issue starts with "how Mastermind and Selene saved the tech demo," i.e., taking a mulligan on the last issue. Then it commits all the same sins in its next plot-holey installment. I said at #1 that this book starts its conflicts with corporate intrigue but ends them with boring punchy-shooty-zappy combat; #4's an even better example of that. That pattern is applied to both internal and external conflicts, with Angel picking a fight with Monet (?!) and JP Kol turning into a frigging mercenary after losing his corporate power. Dumb. I really like the art style, but the visuals don't handle the "intrigue/action" combination well, and polish/detail levels vary wildly from page to page. On the scripting side, way too many scenes are left open-ended. Attempting to go back and to tie off loose plot threads turns out disastrous. Look at the way Monet's story is retconned after just one issue: Instead of going MIA through a hole in the roof, she's rescued by Selene. This is pure seat-of-the-pants plotting, and this title hasn't given me any confidence in this author's ability to wing it.

There's a big dumb fight, everything explodes, and when the dust clears, Angel explains, with some unconvincing corporate talk, how this is a big mutant win. It's a fitting capstone that demonstrates all the weaknesses of the title. High time to pull the plug.

Kitty Pride's Central-Park-based mutant team looks to be headed for very familiar storytelling ground. Anti-Mutant organizations, Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, yadda yadda yadda. This story arc is called "back to basics" and this issue is the introduction that any good X-Men fan could write given that title and this roster. The quest for a "classic" approach to the X-Men is looking a bit boring so far, unfortunately. I feel like a more daring, more talented writer than Marc Guggenheim could have delivered more than just potential. The story of artist Ardian Syaf getting canned for tucking prejudiced references to Indonesian politics into this issue's art is way more interesting than anything the script has to offer.

The Gold team gets flat-footed by the new Brotherhood and OML has to save the day. For a story called "Back to Basics," this sure is forbidding to new readers. Though the main plot is a simple (possibly simplistic) "anti-mutant prejudice stirred by good mutants fighting evil mutants" story, the cast is packed with deep cuts, lengthy backstories, and complicated relationships. Magma! Mesmero! X-Cutioner! This issue is so lore-heavy that they should have just plopped Wikipedia links right into the captions. A whirlwind pace with shoddy scene transitions just increases the confusion. Ardian Syaf's art lays superfluous Liefeld-style hash-lines over some workmanlike anatomy; his imminent departure from Marvel is cause for celebration.

Turns out the Brotherhood was a false flag operation orchestrated by Evil Pundit Lady; Kitty and company save the mayor but fail to bring in EPL. Normally I like an arc that wraps up fast, but in this case the story ends abruptly because there's no more "smart" left in the script. EPL's scheme was unbelievably stupid, and having Kitty inexplicably sink down to her level of action-movie stupidity made for a hugely unsatisfying conclusion. This shoddy finale casts a shadow over the last two issues. Marc Guggenheim was trying to paint the world around the X-Men as an unforgiving place but it just didn't work, and I'm left wondering if he really has any insights worth sharing about these heroes.

Gambit arrives bringing a classic "Trask Sentinels run amok" plot with him. Even though I lack a deep appreciation of "classic" X-Men, this plot feels pretty stale. (It doesn't help that Blue did "mutant Sentinels" in their last issue and put a more interesting spin on it.) Dialogue and character interactions are nice, but not to an "OMG you can't miss this buy it right now" extent. R.B. Silva provides some decent art, but as others have pointed out, it's definitely pressed from the Stuart Immonen mold and also pretty clearly an inferior imitation.

Kitty's X-Men struggle to keep up with the rapidly-evolving Sentinel threat. The lack of impression this comic leaves on the reader is the only impressive thing about it; it's a remarkably blasé bag of blah. True, it makes no mistakes and offers no offense, but it makes it clear through its forgettability just how modest those achievements are. The conversation I'm imagining between inker Andriano Di Benedetto and colorist Frank Martin - where they each simultaneously say "I thought *you* were taking care of the shadows" - is more entertaining than the story itself.

Rachel saves the day after some soul-searching, and the nano-sentinel crisis leaves behind a frustrating mess of poorly-explained consequences. The art team led by RB Silva does heroic work to make this look big. Visually, this is a spectacular crossover-event-level fight with oodles of guest stars and lots of "wow" moments. Marc Guggenheim's script just doesn't live up to the spectacle, and the writhing mass of loose plot threads left behind at the end is unappetizing. There are a lot of questions, but the tone veers more toward "WTF are you trying to say, Mr. Guggenheim" rather than "Oooh, I wonder what that means?"

Secret Empire gives the Gold team a perfect excuse to do a "trapped in the mansion with a serial killer" story starring the new X-Cutioner. Marc Guggenheim's script makes an excellent tie to the bigger event: Secret Empire kicks this plot off but it is in no way required reading. The story that unfolds is a long way from flawless, but it is engaging. I've got tons of nitpicks, but that in itself is a sign of a compelling story. Ken Lashley's visuals suggest their creator learned everything (or certainly way too much) about anatomy from 90s comics. It works great when Old Man Logan is slashing up demons; for idyllic baseball games and people having conversations and Rachel smooching Kurt (!) it's not so hot.

Kitty takes down the knockoff X-Cutioner with a little help, and new plot threads get tangled Three Stooges style as Marc Guggenheim rushes to set up not just the next story but the story after the next story. Unfortunately, none of the current threads receive satisfying depth and the narrative tries to skate past Secret Empire a little too casually. Ken Lashley's art is uneven as well, with some pages looking dramatically unfinished. This is yet another Marvel issue with a "rough draft" feel, but in this case I'm entirely unconvinced that more polish could have yielded a great story. Here the creative team slid into neutral before even reaching "meh, it's so okay it's average" territory.

Relationship upgrades are pondered and Kitty's Congressional testimony gets sidetracked by a pointless fight with Whiplash. There are a few good lines here and the relationship stuff is interesting, but this title's main plot is lost at sea. The future direction of the congressional plot thread is opaque, as is the connection, if any, to the resurrection of Omega Red in Russia. And Whiplash's attack was so pointless that I really feel like using the word pointless even more. Pointless pointless pointless. Ken Lashley's art suffers a serious shortage of effort in panels that stray too far from "hoo-rah muscle dudes flexing amidst flying debris" territory. Kitty, Rachel, and Stevie Hunter all had a serious case of sameface going on.

Marc Guggenheim pulls the trigger on his Omega Red story, tying it to the Rasputin family with a questionable gangster uncle outta nowhere. In most cases, I hate fans who second-guess creators by saying, "[my favorite hero] would never lose that fight!" But this issue … On one page, the *entire* team is bustin' on what pushovers the gangster mooks du jour are; on the next page, the baddies have effortlessly kidnapped Illyana. The capture isn't even shown on-panel; you don't need to be a graduate continuity scholar to call bull☠☠☠☠ on *that*. The wider plot shows some promise, but the questionable pacing and some aggressively forgettable art keeps this issue from being anything special.

"Underwhelming" is the word of the day as the Omega Red story shuts down fast and pointless after OML snikts him. Colossus got his steel back by wishing really hard, apparently. Lan Medina and Craig Yeung contribute some notably generic visuals ("Yep, that there looks like superheroes fighting") and Marc Guggenheim's script is depressingly weak. This issue is a fine example of Gold's chronic problems: Things happen at a too-rapid clip and there's nothing in the dialogue or the actions to invest the developments with real weight. This comic is its own summary, just an illustrated first draft for a story that could have been fleshed out into a *real* comic but wasn't. Real bad issue for the women. Kitty's "awesome plan" amounts to letting her beefiest dudes punch ☠☠☠☠ until they win, Prestige gets drawn like a 90s pinup girl, we get no explanation for why Magik got damseled harder than 1964-vintage Sue Storm last issue, and Storm's *entire* role in this issue is to get knocked out by Omega Red between panels. She doesn't get a single word of dialogue. EDIT NOTE: I originally rendered Lan Medina's last name as "Median." I swear this was a simple typo and not a derogatory comment on his artistic skills. At least not a conscious one.

It's an entire issue of backstory for Kologoth, the "Creepy New Guy" reptile monster who's cameoed several times since #1. It is a mashup of villain tropes that becomes absurd in its comprehensiveness: He's a Negative Zone mutant exile parent-killer who became a demagogue/prophet/dictator-in-waiting with *way too many* Nazi parallels. I feel like I just won at villainous origin bingo. (He's also running around naked on Earth while his flashbacks make it crystal clear that his people *do* believe in clothes. Anybody remember Killface from Frisky Dingo?) I question the timing of this issue. *Why* was it important to squeeze this clown's backstory in right now when the final scene reveals the next arc will be devoted to Mojo, not Kologoth? Luke Ross contributes pro forma visuals snatched right from Mike Deodato's wheelhouse. Hilariously, Marc Guggenheim calls this Mr. Ross's "unique voice" on the letters page.

Mojo strikes just as the Blue team drops by to visit the Gold team. His meta-aware blathering about Legacy *should* have been the cringiest thing in the issue, but Marc Guggenheim mangled the entire script with formidable ineptitude. Both character interactions and the basic air traffic control matters of "X-Men X, Y, and Z respond to crises A, B, and C" are hopelessly muddled. Mike Mayhew's art has a little nice polish to it, but the sterile bones of 3D modeling show through both his architecture and his characters. With charity I can just about believe the creators were earnestly trying to tell a good story; I cannot say they came anywhere close to succeeding.

Gratuitous deaths and arbitrary scene shifts really hammer home how meaningless Mojo's challenges are, but poor Teenclops gets suckered into spilling some important beans to his teammates. Marc Laming offers detailed but hopelessly stiff drawings, and Marc Guggenheim's script notably fails at engaging the reader. Characters and settings are all hopelessly arbitrary and fictional; this is a story that you slog through as quick as you can, grabbing the tiny little bits - like Teenclops's confession - that are going to matter after the crossover is done.

The united X-team plods inevitably into position for a showdown with Mojo. Some quips are attempted, some effort is wasted pretending the stakes are really really for-sure high, and Magneto's backup team is a few steps behind the main heroes. Diego Bernard and JP Mayer turn in some notably polished art, but it's terribly generic stuff. It ends up reinforcing the dullness of the script instead of counteracting it. The prospect of one more issue of Mojo hurling kitchen-sink villainy at a team that's already proven unhurtable is an ear-to-ear yawn for me.

A spaceship comes to fetch Space Hitler Kologoth home, and if it hadn't landed on top of the Xavier Institute and then blasted off carrying Kitty and Kurt with it - unintentionally - this story could have ended in this issue. But it doesn't, more's the pity. Lan Medina's art is serviceable but forgettable, and Marc Guggenheim's script is, as usual for him, more of a promising rough draft than a finished comic story.

The X-Men ramble into the middle of a civil war on Kologoth's homeworld. There's some basic promise to the plot, but Marc Guggenheim's script is clumsy about some of the mechanics - Rachel is critically injured and Mr. Guggenheim comes within inches of flat-out admitting, "I need her off the board because a powerful psychic could resolve the N-Zone intrigues too easily." Though I'm reasonably satisfied with the writing in this issue, I can't say the same about Ken Lashley's art. He fills up the pages with enormous, confusing slabs of muscles that are shaded as though he has some kind of kickback arrangement with an India ink supplier. It's not stylistically or anatomically impressive, and it clashes with many of the other artists who've rotated through this title.

The team reunites for a by-the-numbers fight with Space Lizard Hitler, but Kurt's MIA. I thought way too hard about how to comment on the appalling mediocrity of this comic. Make anti-flattering comparisons to Gabby Rivera's America? Call out Mr. Guggenheim for crassly using "broad strokes" depictions of popular mutants to distract from an epically disappointing plot? Speculate slanderously on what drugs the editors must have been smoking when they approved the trilingual "hope you survive the experience" joke? Ultimately, I think there are only 2 things that *must* be said about X-Men: Gold #18: 1) Arif Prianto's colors are terrific; light-years ahead of what this comic deserves. 2) Marc Guggenheim scripts are the methadone of X-Men stories.

OML snikts Space Lizard Hitler to death in an anticlimactic blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment and Kitty beats his kaiju god with a scheme that absolutely fails to be tense and suspenseful. Marc Guggenheim demonstrates his talent for cramming a promising story that might float a decent three-issue arc into one epically unsatisfying issue. This comic is a masterclass in how not to build tension. The art by Diego Bernard and JP Mayer is good in itself; it has a bright, cartoony, Mark Bagley-ish feel to it. The only problem is that it clashes intensely with every one of this title's previous looks, especially Ken Lashley's gritty, shadow-soaked work from #18. The most interesting thing about this issue is that, based on his goofy hat, Kologoth's lackey/mentor/lover guy is a member of the Flintstones' Loyal Order of the Water Buffalos. How spectacularly depressing. This title is truly Shur-Fine X-Men; its lack of quality is so consistent and thorough that Marvel should just slash the price in recognition of its store-brand cheapness.

The Gold team has to suffer through 20 pages of desert shipwreck yadda yadda before they can go home. Marc Guggenheim's script is average and Diego Bernard's art is slightly above average. I have to question the strategic wisdom of wrapping up the Space Lizard Hitler/Lizard God Kaiju fight early to make room for this shipwreck nonsense, though. I GUARANTEE we're all gonna forget this within a week's time. Kitty and Piotr have an Important Relationship Moment at the end, but it absolutely fails to render the rest of the issue meaningful.

Evil Pundit Lady's mutants (with Mesmero in the lead) bust out of prison to get revenge on her. The Gold team intercepts them and gets its collective ass handed to it. Kitty believes it's her fault because of special circumstances, which is damned bad characterization. Kitty SHOULD be a good enough leader to blame herself for her team's failure no matter WHAT the situation. The real blame for this pathetic combat showing lies with the writer, though. Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Storm have to be incapacitated off-panel, for God's sake. The plot might be disappointing, but the art is excellent. Diego Bernard and JP Mayer deliver impeccable top-shelf visuals.

Mesmero hoodwinks the X-Men thoroughly, but at least his victory isn't quite as quick as the last issue suggested. I credit the writer for redeeming a low point there. The art continues to deliver smooth top-shelf storytelling. For one issue, at least, this title's got all its plates spinning smoothly. This would be really good if the plates (i.e. plot threads) were more engaging. Even though the plots leave me saying "meh," I can respect that they're manipulated in an above-average fashion here.

The X-Men go to prison. Whole acres of potential (world-building, social commentary, etc) are ignored in favor of sketching the most superficial yard fight nonsense for them to contend with. Two big villains are foreshadowed in a "meh" way, and Iceman and Rogue start up a backup team at the Xavier Institute. The art style is inherently distasteful - I don't like Thony Silas's character designs. But he does do excellent work on dynamic action poses, visual storytelling, and finish. While the art isn't up to the highest standards, it's a bit above average. I wish I could say the same of the script.

The prison fight for the female X-Men results in solitary time which is, of course, trouble for badly-written Storm. In Manhattan, the B-team beats the Shredded Man in an epically unsatisfying fight. Beyond the general aimlessness of both storylines, the writing and the art throw up a half-dozen points each where the sheer lack of quality makes my eyeballs roll. A thoroughly unenjoyable read.

Scythian stomps on Paris and all this title's on-call mutants unite to dispatch him in an exceptionally vague way. This issue starts off by explicitly stating its villain is a mindless force-of-nature, singularly unaware of how dull that makes him. What a surprise, the Gold team's master strategy is, once again, "everybody punch/blast as hard as you can! We'll either win or get knocked out by a cliffhanger ending!" The finale glories in assembling a dozen X-Men like that's some kind of special achievement instead of one line of script direction. The creators are batting frantically at the toilet paper roll of plot, flushing down another clutch of potentially-cool ideas without half the attention they deserve. The huge art team produces some pretty panels (especially when Storm gets Asgarded up), but the overall effect is thoroughly generic. The visuals abjectly fail to convey the details of Scythian's defeat; that's the sign of unfocused art struggling with a shallow script.

Pete develops cold feet as he and Kitty death-march their way to the altar. This title's bad penny plot points - Evil Pundit Lady Lydia Nance and Mesmero's increasingly-gross obsession with Rachel - turn up with impeccable timing to save the script from the possibility of deep characterization. My distaste for the writing is counterbalanced by my enthusiasm for the art. It's strictly the linework that I like; there's some notably bad coloring in here. So many sooty faces - did the X-Men spend the night in front of a campfire before this issue? I'm disappointed by Colossus's performance in the final fight scene, but I shouldn't be surprised. I've read every issue of Gold. I should know by now that no force in the multiverse is so pathetically weak as a mutant in the final act of a Marc Guggenheim script. If my niece Bethany threw down with the Gold team and the fight took place at the end of a Guggenheim book, I wouldn't hesitate to bet my life savings on the kindergarten girl.

The X-Men slog into a swampy stew of stale X-plot leftovers: anti-mutant politician, gimmicky Sentinel, mutant biowarfare, yadda yadda yadda. Along the way, Kitty engages in a cold feet conversation with Rogue. I'm convinced Mr. Guggenheim scribbled "include two pages of cold feet" at the top of his outline months before he wrote anything else for this issue. The art is a pleasant novelty, full of brushed linework that lingers lovingly on highly expressive faces.

The X-Men chase their kidnapped Colossus into space. The raw plot is full of potential, so it takes a special sort of magic writing to sand it down into this thoroughly "meh" adventure. The art works hard to elevate the best moments, but it doesn't get a lot of script support. The Evil Pundit Lady falls into the absolute depth of cliched villain behavior - "So confident am I of my victory, I shall stop fighting and gloat."

"They swiped Deep Space 9 for their Roxxon space station!" is exactly the sort of nitpick I could set aside if this issue's script were even SLIGHTLY skillful in contriving its last-second all-hands save-the-world climax. Nice art - aside from the swipe - and a sprinkle or two of good characterization don't do enough to elevate a by-the-numbers plot whose only hope of creating tension is asking the reader to do it a favor and play along.

Kitty calls off her wedding at the literal last minute and a surprise replacement couple steps in. I like the plot and romantic developments, and the script does a good job of setting up enjoyable scenes. It avoids the key discussion of WHY the Kitty/Colossus match was a bad one, though. And that's not a particularly hard discussion; just about every X-Fan can write a dissertation on how those two had outgrown their relationship prior to this series. The art is also less than it could be. It's certainly above average, but it's also certainly not the artist's best. That's where the whole issue lands; good but not great.

Colossus bails. Mesmero strikes at Rachel with a twisty plot relying on a nice, meaty DoFP story. I think the script lands in Catch-22 territory. Unfolding the plot this way causes some problems, but I can't see a way to solve them that wouldn't open up other, equal problems. The art has a more straightforward shortcoming. The characters are gorgeous. The settings around them are sterile and dull. It feels like a community theater production mounted on an echoing metropolitan stage that's far too large for it.

Because the solution to "rampaging mind-controlled Rachel" turns out to be "let Teenclops deliver a standard-issue 'you're better than this' Cyclops speech" and that's not enough to fill a whole issue, this one rewinds to show some pre-rampage details. Lots of the details are cool and the art is really outstanding, but the trite resolution of the main conflict keeps this title, yet again, from becoming really good. Storm even has dialogue; I about died of shock.

Ominous plot stormclouds build over Ororo's old village, and Rachel handles the b-story by facing a tumultuous aftermath to her possession. The plot developments are promising, but the characterization leaves an awful lot to be desired. The art has very strong foundations but the finish is challenging the limits of "cleanliness" as a positive trait.

Storm starts the inevitable conflict with her village's new evil god and the first rounds go hard against her. This is a brisk story with a solid pace and some fundamentally sound ideas. Those ideas are under- or un-developed, leaving the reading experience far less satisfying than it could be. Wonderfully clean art does put a slightly positive spin on things, but it can't do much to compensate for the shallowness of the script.

Storm's Asgardian hammer fetches her teammates and then burns itself out helping her defeat her increasingly-generic nemesis. Rather than emphasizing the strength of the villain, Storm requiring her team's assistance and a magic god-hammer to beat him just makes her look weak. There's a nicely-paced plot driving this issue, but it refuses to slow down to make anything consequential or engaging. The brief snippets of action-movie dialogue tied onto it don't get the job done. The art is excellent, hauling my rating for the issue up into the "satisfying" range by sheer force of visual appeal. But the arrival of the title's umpteenth art team reminds me again that the constant visual shifts are, in their own way, just as bad as the consistently mediocre scripting.

The whole Gold team congas through the regrets they've accumulated in this series, then everybody hits the field to deal with an emergent omega mutant. The script concocts a decent scenario around that, but it fails to provide a satisfactory resolution - which makes it a match to the regret conga that precedes it. Top it with another serving of fundamentally sound but dispassionate art and you have the perfectly mediocre capstone for X-Men Gold. The dedication to Chris Claremont at the end is, of course, haplessly tone-deaf. It reads so much like a memorial that you'll probably want to double-check Mr. Claremont's continued aliveness. Newsarama's Matthew Sibley points out the coffin-nail stuck in Mr. Guggenheim's farewell letter: By its author's own admission, this series at its best wasn't as good as Claremont at his worst. I find the accuracy amusing, but not nearly as much as the unintentionality. Marc Guggenheim accidentally deprecating himself harder than he intended is another brilliant bit of last-gasp irony.

This comic spends so much time winking at the camera that "plot" becomes an afterthought. I'm coming to believe that that's Leah Williams' signature shtick, and I don't care for it. You can't do a meaningful deconstruction of a story if you're too preoccupied to tell a story in the first place.

I still think this series is caught between trying to do a sincere melodrama and trying to satirize one at the same time. It doesn't help that the "Hollywood backlot intrigue" genre is way, WAY harder than it looks. And I think the key criticism raised in the Weird Science review deserves more attention: After MJ complained last issue about her movie character being a mere satellite to the male protagonist, she spends this entire issue orbiting Mysterio. While it might be possible to earn some irony points off the juxtaposition, I don't think this script actually does anything along those lines.

This issue is a solid "silly movie set shenanigans" montage, and it mercifully restores agency to MJ and gets her a little further out of Mysterio's orbit. But nothing in this or the prior issues gives me much confidence in the second half's ability to deliver a cohesive, satisfying conclusion.

This comic's art is nicely refined, but it's a bit too much of a throwback to the "pose every woman in every panel in a cheesecake-y way; it's not like we've got female readers" days.

Mary Jane defeats the Savage Six in hand-to-hand combat, practically by herself, which is fundamentally unbelievable. The writing's decent and the art is pretty good, but they can't overcome the overreach of the core concept. I'm all for girl power, but not when it's demonstrated in such simplistic terms that it's essentially "she has two X chromosomes therefore she wins." Also, separate from any gender issues, the dialogue gets TERRIBLY didactic when it lays out exactly how the characters have developed. And that cover. Yikes.

Mary Jane's publicity work for the movie is complicated by the arrival of the real Cage McKnight -- and an assassin who appears to be targeting her. There's a decent slate of artists on board (though the stylistic differences are distracting) and there's a solid plot-skeleton in the script. The pace is disjointed, though, and the dialogue tends to take wrong turns.

For a good 3-strip anthology, you need 9 good things: 3 good ideas, 3 good scripts, and 3 good art performances. By my count, this issue is 7 good things short. There's 1 good idea and 1 good art performance and, tragically, they're not on the same strip.

The Wolverine strip takes a nice uptick. The Rien character is a purpose-built parenting challenge, though; contrived like a five-course molecular gastronomy meal.

I loved the White Fox strip. TBH, she seems so much more promising than any of the "Lin-come-lately" Asian heroes Greg Pak et al are connecting to the Agents of Atlas.

I found both strips mediocre -- not in the exaggerated, pejorative sense, but in a technical "this is neither objectionable nor noteworthy" sense. The B strip features good storytelling, but like the last stab at the EXE_Men (What If? X-Men #1 2018), it pretends that stale cyberpunk tropes are fresh. The "badass in cyberspace, Walter Mitty in meatspace" idea is very old -- I think it might predate William Gibson.

Art and prose are of similar character here: At first glance, the visuals are flashy and impressive and the prose is intriguing and fast-paced. But it's all incredibly delicate; looking even a little closer reveals serious flaws in both visuals and words. What ties it all together is a plot that doesn't seem to have much potential; a hopelessly cliched Spidey grudge-match dressed up in some sci-fi tinsel.

Pretend this comment is just a link to "Eight Deadly Words" on tvtropes.

Though I usually moan at length when I'm rating a Steve Orlando comic, this one really agreed with me. Here the author's "plot first" approach works well; character and story are scaled to each other and prop each other up. The Winter Soldier's mission makes just enough room for a petite character study, and there's some cool world-building going on too. Top it off with some solid, gritty art that's perfect for a dystopian future story and you've got something that even I will admit is a pretty good comic.

It's a good premise executed with journeyman storytelling skill all around. Neither the artist nor the author commit any major sins, but they also don't evoke any real thrills.

The basic idea of the plot is sound, but this script doesn't elaborate on it much past the basic elevator pitch. The pace is uneven and there are some lazy/repetitive vocabulary choices. All these characters make for a nice chunk of world-building (albeit pretty fast, shallow work) and the art is done better than the writing. Add it all up and I call it a nearly-average comic.

My reaction to this comic is to frown my eyes shut and pinch the bridge of my nose. Exasperation, in other words. The art's okay. So's the dialogue, in a "minimum expectations met" kind of way. But when it comes to basic cause-and-effect in developing the plot and explaining the characters, this comic is *broken*. Stuff just happens, and it seems like how and why it happens is none of the reader's business. I'm overstating things. There are a few explanations. Not enough, though, and the ones that do slip through are punishingly stupid.

The history lessons at the back are fun, and the art's solid all the way through. The script for the A story was hard for me to swallow, though. I know I'm over-sensitive to stilted dialogue, but I'm pretty sure there's an objective problem with this prose that goes beyond personal taste.

The creators attempt to pack an arc's worth of plot into a single issue. It's an admirable goal, and structurally, they do a good job. But the breakneck pace just emphasizes the relative weakness of the story. It is nice to see somebody doing something with the IGEW, though!

There's some solid character work toward the end. It's not great, it's not terrible, it's not essential.

It's a decently put together book, and the art's nice. But I'm split on the Okoye character work. Her relationship with Natima, I like; her ruthlessness, not so much. But the book's good enough to get me questioning how much of that is my own sexist bias; would it bug me if a male Black Panther did those things?

It's drawn nicely, but Deadpool is written in maximum "LOL memes" mode and his laborious comedy slows everything down. The tone doesn't really fit with any of the other Absolute Carnage titles, but it's not really memorable enough to stand out as the event's designated parody volume.

This one worked a lot better for me than #1. I think it's because the not-so-serious tone and the plot were already dialed in and ready to go -- maybe set-up just isn't this creative team's strong suit.

The sudden realization that this story is practically an AU -- contradicting the main event and Spidey's ASM tie-in -- strikes like an ice-cold douche. Mediocre "LOL Memes" Deadpool action doesn't do nearly enough to compensate. At least the art is nice.

Red Skull uses Infinity MacGuffins to de-power all the world's superheroes. The solution is (eventually) sentai-style Stark power armor for everybody. The cynical reaction is to say that the artist is 200-300% more invested in this than the author. But a more charitable take is that this simplistic script makes a perfectly adequate vehicle for delivering some gorgeous visuals. Personal anecdote digression: Whenever a comics writer unironically puts "I think not!" in their dialogue, I remember an ancient Dave Barry column about his son playing Masters of the Universe. Every fight ended with the boy declaring, "I think not!" in his deepest 6-year-old He-Man voice and then using the He-Man figure to knock the Skeletor figure across the room.

Red Skull keeps the Avengers hopping by dropping a giant Venom on Yokohama. Tony has to reveal the new armor's powerful but risky turbo mode ("Do Hatsu") to defeat it. This is a perfectly adequate execution of a very silly premise. I have no problem with silly premises, but every time I started to really enjoy myself here, there was some storytelling fumble -- a lazily-written line, a badly-blocked panel -- to smack my wrist and say, "no no, just adequate." (Blocking issues aside, the character/armor/mech art remains fantastic.)

Mecha-Loki menaces the Avengers, Tony Stark pulls out an unlikely counter, the day is saved, Red Skull lines up the next threat. This is developing into a real "lather rinse repeat" comic, and the novelty of exquisitely-designed mecha is starting to wear thin.

It's another WYSIWYG episode of this series, where lazy plotting is balanced out by intricate art to produce a perfectly average result.

As the plot bends toward a climax, the real limitation of this series' "good enough" storytelling becomes clear. There's no tension and no investment in what happens -- at least, these comics haven't gotten *me* invested. Even the artwork is slightly disappointing this time around. There's still lots of talent and hard work on display, but the action scenes aren't as clear and powerful as they could be.

While the art continues to impress -- some -- with its intricate character designs, the script sinks to the bottom of the barrel, rolling out a by-the-numbers plot with incredibly cliched dialogue. The kids playing with the toys will come up with more inventive plots and characterization than this.

A continuity-fudging romp through the history of the Fantastic Four becomes engagingly funny after a shaky start. The creators take a little time to warm up, but once they hit the idea of casting CGR as a storyteller himself, things get golden. I was pleasantly surprised by the visual clarity, and the wisecracking script was (by the end) a delight.

I appear to be the sole occupant of the bit of the Venn diagram where "Cosmic Ghost Rider irreverence" meets "obsessive 20th-century Marvel continuity wanking." I'm a fan of Todd Nauck's art, too. But even I can see the premises beginning to fall apart here; the writers have spun up too many plates and the ones further away from the core "CGR cracks wise in historical flashbacks" mission are wobbling in a way that probably can't be fixed.

Even though I myself don't have a whole lot of respect for the Punisher's origin story, I realize (pretty late, but still) that this is an outrageously disrespectful way to play with it.

This is a knockoff of Lee/Kirby Howling Commandos gussied up with a few streaks of Inglorious Basterds. Pretty solid on its own, but it doesn't do a thing to fix this aimless series' steering problem.

I picked up on the fact that CGR actually CAUSED the Castles' deaths by getting pre-Punisher Frank all family-minded and inspiring him to take them to the park. I just wish I was more confident -- at all confident -- that the AUTHORS were aware of that irony and planning to do something with it.

This issue jams the story into full-blown shaggy dog territory by the halfway point and ends by converting it into an honest-to-Glob bad bar story. It looks decent in a cartoony way and it has some cute jokes, but it concludes with a profound feeling that the time required to read it was wasted.

Greg Pak and Greg Land spew up *just so many* words and pictures to say "Sakaar turned into Fury Road after Banner Hulk left." (Which I think contradicts a *bunch* of follow-up development *done by Greg Pak* but whatever.) Hair-Gel Hulk settles into protecting innocents and fighting gladiator fights, and Mr. Pak's script offers the raw materials for a nice "Cho's Trunk Monster = the Worldbreaker" comparison. There are sharp limits to how much credit I'll extend an author for giving me a Character Development Kit rather than actual character development, though. Mr. Land's art is polished, as ever, and thoroughly generic, as ever.

The Hulk clears one gladiatorial hurdle and waits patiently for the next one. Meanwhile, serious realpolitik is going on right under his nose and he remains oblivious. For the Marvel universe's eighth-smartest hero, Hairgel Hulk sure does act like a knob most of the time. Greg Land's art has polish, but there's a credible fault against it: It's already *hard as heck* to care about Sakaar's population of random red muppets; Mr. Land isn't helping by making them difficult/impossible to tell apart. The sheer squandering of potential here does disappoint me. Why even bother going back to Planet Hulk if this is all we're doing with it?

The Hulk's interminable Gauntlet battle against the Generic Sakaar Warlord drags on, with this issue's final-page surprise promising us a no-doubt lazy script-flip of Thor: Ragnarok in the near future. The general quality of storytelling in this arc (both words and art) remains close to average. (Greg Pak shamelessly stealing the best line from the Ragnarok trailer is a notable low, though.) This is my third serving of oatmeal in a row and the consistent blandness is pushing my rating down even if the gruel is otherwise inoffensive. Cho-Hulk buying into the Warlord's obviously-rigged "rule by gladiatorial combat" system is profoundly disappointing. I think it's my dissatisfaction with that lazy, non-heroic decision that drives my fundamental dislike for this arc. *Some* heroes can descend into gladiating (not a word, I know) and find compelling stories on the bloody sand. Hairgel Hulk is not one of them. The entire point of him is tempering strength with intellect, but his behavior from page one of this arc has been childishly stupid. On the ripoff front, check out the masks Greg Land puts on the Warlord's bodyguards. They're psychos from the Borderlands games, and this iteration of Sakaar does look a lot like Pandora. While the games' makers were keenly aware of the absurdity of their setting and mined it for both humor and drama, Greg Pak and Greg Land expect readers to take their flimsy imitation far too seriously.

Over the backdrop of a by-the-numbers Hulk vs. Odinson arena fight, Amadeus Cho retreats inside himself to have Baby's First Utilitarian Morality Debate with his Trunkmonster. He defeats the monster's simplistic "needs of the many/ends justify the means" argument and manages to win the day without killing his Asgardian pal. The issue closes with an exceptionally dumb cliffhanger, promising us that the next and final dose of Planet Fury Road will be just as frustrating as the previous ones. Greg Land has one unique talent: He has an unerring nose for picking out scripts so shabby that his shortcut-riddled art won't look like the weak link in the creative lineup. If this issue's story were at all compelling, you might work up the interest/outrage needed to figure out if Mr. Land flat-out swiped his Odinson from Leinil Francis Yu and/or Olivier Coipel or if he was just "heavily inspired." But it's just blah pictures beneath blah words and the stakes are too low to get really incensed about some derivative art.

Hulk Saves the Day. Inside Amadeus's Hulkmobile metaphor, the kid falls to the Trunkmonster. While that's hypothetically ominous as all get-out, it has approximately zero effect on the pro forma conclusion of the Sakaar story. The Warlord, leading contender for "most generic nemesis 2018," is killed after being beaten by the Hulk. Amadeus doesn't even get to worry about the ethical implications of the killing; one of his random bug-people followers handles the shanking. The rest of this comic's storytelling sins are minor, but the Hulk dodging that killing is a huge mistake. In fact, the story would work so much better with the Trunkmonster forcing Amadeus to kill that I wonder if that wasn't the direction Greg Pak wanted to go before being editorially vetoed.

The Trunkmonster Hulk returns to Earth, and his supporting cast begins to realize something is wrong after he administers a vicious beating to an old foe. It's satisfying to FINALLY fire the Chekov's gun that was set up two years ago with the Trunkmonster personality split. Replacing random Sakaar mooks with the book's established supporting cast is good, too. The pace is a little slow and the Sherlock Holmes fight mechanic ripoff is disappointing. Some top-shelf art compensates for the script's weaknesses; this is exactly the way Cho-Hulk should look.

The struggle between Amadeus and the Hulk develops internally and externally. There's solid character work going on and a fair slice of action, too. I'd agree that the biggest problem with this story arc is its title; nothing except the protagonist's travel itinerary links this to the original World War Hulk. This issue features more art at a very nicely refined level, virtually every panel is clean and clear and attractive. I think the script also deserves some credit for convincing me to re-engage with the Trunkmonster conflict despite how old it is at this point. Some astute handling of the supporting cast - Greg Pak writes a great Kamala - bolsters the issue further and puts it solidly into "good" territory.

A powerful roster of friends and peers turns up to fight the rogue Hulk, but the outer struggle is secondary to the metaphorical fight between the Hulk and Cho. The script digs profitably into the meaty, satisfying center of that inner conflict. Unfortunately, some artistic weakness holds my rating in the realm of average. The pencils handle blocking and anatomy well, but the faces and linework are problematic. I'm unpleasantly surprised by the inking; I think better work there could have solved a lot of the visual problems.