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Captain America 3 is a bit more reflective than the previous two issues, though there’s still plenty of forward motion in the plot. Cap, Agent 13 (Sharon Carter), and a group of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents track bombs in London and Paris while searching for leads on the Cosmic Cube. It’s solid super-hero/espionage stuff, but the centerpiece of the issue is a quieter exchange between Cap and Sharon set in Paris. Writer Ed Brubaker finds nice ways to base Cap’s tendency to speechify in terms of character. The character is much less of a shiny icon than he has been in the past, and his musings are more personal. Art by Steve Epting on the contemporary sequences and Michael Lark on flashbacks to Cap’s World War II career are distinct but consistent, and both do fine work. This is really solid stuff.
District X is losing me. In #10, Bishop and Ortega track Winston Hobbes, an extremely alienated and angry mutant, before he can find the parents who abandoned him. They also try and defuse a conflict between the latest batch of sewer-dwelling mutants and the government officials who want to drive them above ground. Writer David Hine doesn’t get much mileage out of either story, though he tries to add a level of ambiguity to the sewer dwellers and their leader, Melek. I can’t quite get behind the direction Hine is taking with Ortega, either, as his downward spiral seems abrupt and insufficiently motivated. The character made a strong impression in the first arc as a decent, grounded cop doing his best in bizarre circumstances. Now, one arc later, he’s running through the cop-on-the-edge checklist with blinding speed. The book has put a lot on its plate, and it doesn’t seem to have a very solid idea of what to do with it.
A new story arc begins in Fables 34, as Jack of Tales heads off to Hollywood with a truck full of Fabletown loot and a scheme. Writer Bill Willingham almost keeps Jack in the background, using various movie-industry players to narrate the story. This is pretty effective, as I’ve always thought Jack was kind of dull, and Willingham creates a fairly vivid supporting cast. Out of the Fabletown setting, Jack seems more confident and focused, though what readers see of his scheme so far isn’t particularly surprising. Jack, under the alias “Mister Trick,” is using his loot to fund an ego-driven trilogy of blockbuster films about himself. Still, this is Jack, so one can reasonably expect everything to go horribly wrong in the arc’s conclusion next issue. I can see the logic in using a different artist (David Hahn in this case) for the arc, as it’s a significant departure in terms of setting and style. Hahn does a nice job with the shallow-pond Hollywood culture, but Willingham’s script doesn’t give him much to work with beyond talking heads. I can’t help but miss Mark Buckingham and Steve Leialoha, though.
Gotham Central 28 starts a new arc that launches out of Detective Montoya’s old neighborhood. Beat cops rescue two teen-agers from the abandoned hideout of a super-villain; one of the officers is badly injured and strangely changed by the experience. It’s not bad by any means, but writer Greg Rucka is giving in to his tendency to make everything about Montoya. She inserts herself in the case for a variety of reasons, and her fellow cops seem to recede as a result. I like Montoya and the way Rucka portrays her, but I also like the book best when it makes balanced use of its ensemble cast. There are nice moments for some of the other squad members, but it’s still Montoya’s world. Art by Stefano Gaudiano is very much in the vein of Michael Lark, and that’s certainly a good thing. If anything, Gaudiano seems to lend a bit more detail to facial expressions than Lark, which is a nice fit for Gotham Central’s character-based noir.
Nothing against Tom Fowler, artist for Green Arrow 47, but now that artist Phil Hester has left the book, there doesn’t seem to be much reason for me to keep picking it up. Writer Judd Winick does competent work with the ever-growing legion of archers, but the absence of Hester’s distinctive visuals highlights how average the stories are.
Winick devotes Outsiders 20 to the relationship between Indigo and Shift. After an incident of coitus interruptus, they plan for a night on the town. This is sidetracked by another interruption from Z-grade Flash villain Shrapnel. It’s hard to figure out precisely what Winick has on his mind in this issue. I’m sure there’s something I’m supposed to find shocking or thematically resonant about Indigo’s actions, but the construction and pacing of her fight with Shrapnel is muddled. Shrapnel, never even close to a marquee villain, shows up for no readily apparent reason, readers don’t learn anything particularly defining about him, and the big reveal at the end makes the previous events seem like even more of an empty plot device. I liked the early sequence between Jade and Starfire, though.
I like the work of writer Brian K. Vaughan, and Stuart Immonen is one of my favorite artists, so why don’t I like Ultimate X-Men? “The Most Dangerous Game” continues in #56, welding Longshot, Spiral and Mojo onto insidiously anti-mutant nation Genosha. It makes for a story arc that’s at once cluttered and kind of boring, in my opinion. As one team of X-Men tries to figure out whether Longshot is guilty of the murder that consigned him to Mojo’s deadly reality show, another group sneaks in the back door to try and rescue the lucky mutant. The pacing seems odd; plenty of character bits and action sequences are strung together without much connection, biding time until the cliffhanger. I would love to know what a reader who’s totally unfamiliar with these concepts (Longshot and company and Genosha) thinks of this story; maybe it works better through fresh eyes. Knowing what I do about them, I felt like I was spending too much energy trying to figure out the logic of fusing them.
Young Avengers 1 arrives under the weight of some fairly mixed expectations. With a frankly bizarre marketing roll-out that only seemed to gel at the end, one could be excused for having no idea what the point is. The book itself is perfectly entertaining, though. Writer Allan Heinberg does a fine job with some staples of the Marvel Universe. J. Jonah Jameson is a suitably gruff old bastard; Captain America is an impeccably stand-up guy; and Jessica Jones is much more like the character I liked initially than the Mary Sue she seems to be becoming. Heinberg also makes a strong start with the title characters; they’re a nice blend of enthusiasm and inexperience, unsure of precisely what they’re doing but with just enough adolescent hubris to keep them from caring. Awful names aside (Iron Lad? Hulkling?), there are some fun dynamics to their interactions, and Heinberg wisely seems to have made the distinction that they’re fans of super-heroes rather than super-hero comics. The twist at the end isn’t particularly Earth-shattering for anyone unfamiliar with Avengers history, but it’s promising enough. I’ll be sticking around, as Henberg and artist Jim Cheung have made a very solid beginning.