New X-Men: Riot at Xavier's and Assault on Weapon Plus

Riot at Xavier's and Assault on Weapon Plus are volumes four and five of Grant Morrison's New X-Men.

I really loved Riot at Xavier's. The Stepford Cuckoos are so cool, and Emma Frost is both fabulously cool and very human (in her own delightful way). I wished that there was some more about... well, I'll just say the babies, so as not to spoil the plot for anyone. And the whole mutant gang thing is a really cool plot.

Assault on Weapon Plus is quite different (although it still has the same deft dialogue which I really enjoy). Cyclops, Wolverine and Fantomex go searching for the clues to the latter two's past. It's shorter than Riot, and less full of touching moments - it also leaves us on a pretty intense cliffhanger. Next volume please!

Astonishing X-Men: Dangerous (Joss Whedon)

I read Dangerous a while ago, but for some reason forgot to mention it here. I really enjoyed it - Professor X is portrayed really creepily, I thought, with his own ideas about what constitutes ethical behaviour. The Danger Room comes to life in a storyline that's both an action/adventure, and an exercise in understanding the characters more deeply, and their relationships with each other. Good stuff.

As I can recall, it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger/reveal with Emma Frost. I certainly won't know what's going on for a while, because the library doesn't have the next volume in this series yet. Bah.

Mystique: Unnatural (Sean McKeever)

Different artists for this Mystique volume, as there seem to be for all of them - why wouldn't you keep it consistent? Once again, the covers are all soft porn, which I'm beginning to hate.

Anyway, Mystique is once again boobier and thinner, and therefore less convincing as a kick-ass spy. But she's still suitably conflicted about her motives and so on, and there's a good intrigue going on as well, which is fun. Apparently the next volume reveals some things (finally), so I'm looking forward to reading that one.

New X-Men: Imperial and New Worlds (Grant Morrison)

These X-Men volumes were interesting - a vastly more complicated look at the X-Men than I've had before, what with aliens and heaps of characters I'd never heard of. I think for that reason I found these slower to get into than I have other series, but I enjoyed them enough to persevere. I can follow the stories, even if I'm a little confused half the time.

Wolverine: The Brotherhood (Greg Rucka)

I picked up this Wolverine comic because it was written by Greg Rucka, whom I've discovered I like. It was interesting seeing Wolverine outside the X-Men circle.

In The Brotherhood, Wolverine goes on a mission seeking justice for a young murdered woman, and kills plenty of people along the way. Which is basically why you read a Wolverine comic, I guess - to see plenty of panels of Wolverine going psycho with his claws. Rucka writes Wolverine with a lot of humanity as well, I think, while retaining that very taciturn thing. I like it a lot, but will probably read other things before continuing with the series.

Mystique: Tinker, Tailor, Mutant, Spy (Brian K Vaughan)

The more I read about comics, the more I realise I don't know. Reviews comment on the story, the art and the colouring - I'd assumed that the art and the colour were the one thing, but it seems not.

I enjoyed Tinker, Tailor, Mutant, Spy more than I did the first Mystique volume. There were a couple of really clunky lines that made me wince ("Argh, my face is melting off!"), but overall the story was good, the dialogue was snappy, Mystique is a nicely complex character, and I loved the final frame of this volume. I also really liked the way she was drawn in this one - yeah, she's still got big boobs, but she's also very muscular, big biceps, and so on. She looks strong, as she should. Tinker, Tailor has a different artist to Drop Dead Gorgeous, so perhaps that's why I liked it better.

I think it's kind of hard to do tense storylines with Mystique as the main character, because the shape-changing thing enables her to get out of almost any situation with ease, which tends to spoil the tension a little. The virus storyline in Tinker, Tailor is done well though, and Mystique does actually get hurt, although not for long.

I find it really weird in these collections how they insert the covers of each individual comic when they begin. The covers are inevitably pin-up style stuff, and it's strange to move from Mystique in the middle of a fight to her reclining on a bed in tight black leather. Her face looks very different in the cover drawings, which bothered me - if you're going to do pin-up covers, can't you at least make it look like the character? Also, what's with the little skull on her hairline?

Overall though, despite the odd irritating moment, this was very enjoyable story - I'm looking forward to reading Unnatural, the next in the series.

Mystique: Drop Dead Gorgeous (Brian K Vaughan)

The title probably gives away the fact that Mystique: Drop Dead Gorgeous contains a lot of skimpily dressed Mystique with enormous breasts. In fact, the shape of her breasts in some scenes was so ridiculous as to be rather annoying.

However, this comic is a pretty cool espionage style thing, with Mystique working undercover for Charles Xavier, despite the fact that neither of them trust each other. While it's not ground-breaking stuff (and I enjoyed the Joss Whedon penned series more than this), it's enjoyable enough, and I'm going to be reading the rest of this series. Or whatever the correct term is when it comes to comic books - not series, I think. Story arc? Volumes? Whichever it is, I'll be checking them out.

Superhero Comics

I've recently become interested in the world of comics (beyond Sandman, my only real exposure to this medium), partly due to my discovery of a whole pile of excellent feminist blogs that focus on science fiction and comic fandoms. So last week I plunged into a variety of comics, including Wonder Woman, X-Men and Teen Titans.

Firstly, Wonder Woman: Down to Earth . This is a recent Wonder Woman comic by Greg Rucka, and given that the Booklist review on Amazon describes it as an "inventive attempt to make [Wonder Woman]... relevant to current readers", I imagine that it has departed somewhat from previous storylines. Wonder Woman is an ambassador from Themyscria, which seems to be a planet populated by Amazons. She spreads a message of peace and tolerance and in Down to Earth comes up against a group of people who claim she is destroying "family values". Sound familiar? I really enjoyed this, and it's very suitable for a reader who has no knowledge of the characters or their history. I had a couple of "um, what?" moments, like the appearance of Silver Swan, but overall, it was a very fun read, and I really loved the art.

I went on to read Wonder Woman: The Hiketeia , which was a shorter, self-contained story, and much darker than Down to Earth. The cover has Wonder Woman's booted foot on Batman's head, which looks very cool. (I must say that prior to this comics reading, I had no idea that superheroes had so much to do with each other. They all live in the same cities and everything. I had previously thought that they were all self contained stories.) In The Hiketeia, Wonder Woman is bound to protect a young woman who is accused of murder. It's a very touching story, and I really enjoyed it because Wonder Woman seemed much more human. I could see the difficulties she had. Again, I loved the artwork - the aforementioned stomping on Batman's head scene is especially fabulous.

After Wonder Woman (and I'm definitely going to explore the rest of Greg Rucka's stories with her), I grabbed Emma Frost: Higher Learning from the library. It's an X-Men offshoot, although given that my only contact with the X-Men universe is through the movies, I'd never actually heard of Emma Frost (and this slim book only covers part of her school years, so I'm not entirely sure about the full extent of her powers.) Higher Learning was OK. The story was a bit melodramatic, Emma's crush on her school teacher was offputting (she can hear him thinking things like, "she looks so sexy", which was disturbing), and I hated the way she was drawn - even when she's devastated about something, she looks vulnerable and gorgeous, all lips and eyes. Gah.

Still in the X-verse, I grabbed Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men - Gifted , which I loved. I had high hopes for it, given that I'm a big fan of Whedon's storytelling, and wasn't disappointed. All the characters were great, I loved the banter (even mid-battle) and I even enjoyed Emma Frost's character, despite thinking that I'd hate her after reading Higher Learning. The artwork was excellent - I loved it (and wondered how much it had been influenced by the movie characters, especially Wolverine.) Gifted has the Cure storyline which was used (in part) in the recent X-Men movie, and it does it with much more depth and style than the movie. It ends with some tantilising teasers for the next volume, which I can't wait to read.

I'm not quite sure why I picked up something called Teen Titans: The Future is Now , because it doesn't really seem like my thing at all. It wasn't half-bad, but I don't think picking up something that's Volume 4 in a series is a great idea - I found all the characters a bit hard to keep track of, and there were too many references to past events for me to really get into the storyline.

Runaways: True Believers is also Volume 4 in a series, but from the description on the back it seemed like an easier point to break into a storyline. It was fairly easy to get a handle on what had happened before, and everyone's relationships to each other, and it was a fun, tight story.

I think out of all of these, Astonishing X-Men and Wonder Woman were the ones I enjoyed most, and I'll definitely be getting more volumes of these.