Also this week...

ASTONISHING X-MEN #22 - Considering that this book is now on a quarterly schedule, shouldn't it be more of an event?  That's the frustrating thing about Astonishing - it's not a bad book by any means.  It's clearly a good book, even if the plot seems to skip a track here by reuniting the X-Men between scenes.  Whedon even explains away Danger's ludicrous behaviour in the previous arc, although not in a way that hugely improves the arc in question - after all, even Emma talks about Danger's "B-villain crap" when discussing the plot.  Nonetheless, it's a good book, but it's not good enough to come out on a glacial schedule like this and still hold my attention.  It's now clear that the rest of the X-books have got bored waiting and have decided to move on without Astonishing, and given the sales figures over the last year, who can blame them for deciding that action needs to be taken?  Astonishing has become a pretty, but ultimately immaterial, sideshow.  B

X-MEN #202 - Goodness, Mike Carey really is trying to bring back the sense of a unified X-Men canon, isn't he?  We've got team members from other books, we've got the other X-Men, we've got mentions of forgotten oddities like Vargas and the Witness, we've even got a plot that hinges on Destiny's diaries.  It's the closest you're going to get at the moment to a good old-school X-Men title.  I wish they'd pair Carey with a better artist - Ramos is a vast improvement on Bachalo, because at least he's immediately readable, but he doesn't do subtlety, and some of the panels here are all over the place.  (Not counting the adverts, for example, take page 8 panel 2.  What the hell is going on there?  If Sunfire is punching towards us, why is his opponent ten feet behind him?)  But at least X-Men gives me hope that they have a half-decent plan.  God knows they need one.  B

There's more from me at If Destroyed, and if you're desperate for more Article 10 columns, you can always hunt through the archives on Ninth Art.

Next week, World War Hulk: X-Men #3 completes the X-books' token contribution to the World War Hulk crossover.

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