This week's comic review:

Super-Skrull #4
The Annihilation mini-series have been majorly disappointing. There's been some good character moments, but they've moved at a ponderous pace and have done nothing to advance the story i read in the Annihilation Prologue. The Super-Skrull is one of my favorite characters from a pure "his powers are cool" perspective, and i've always liked examples of him using the FF's powers (he has the powers of all the members of the Fantastic Four) in "evil" ways that the FF never would (like using the Invisible Woman's forcefields to suffocate people). But like any villain that's been around for years, i guess people felt he started to become a joke, because villains can never actually win in comic books. So after a constant string of losses, the character looks like a loser. This book looked like it was going to address that and at the same time advance the main Annihilation plot by having the Super-Skrull weaken a key piece of Annihilus' weaponry too.

So how to address the "loser villain" issue? One option is to let the bad guys actually win every once in a while. The problem with this is it can distrupt the comic book's status quo in a big way, killing off heroes or conquering a planet or whatever. Unless you're prepared for the villain's win to be a major event, instead of the "villain of the month" story, you can't do that too often.

Another option is to let the villain be successful elsewhere - just not when the heroes are around. There's been some evidence that for low level earthbound villains, they generally make a good life for themselves robbing banks and whatnot in the parts of the US where the heroes don't congregate. With a character like the Super-Skrull, who acts mainly off planet, this could have been even easier. He could be a prominent general of the Skrull army who just can't handle Earth's super-heroes (which is no shame - even Galactus, Thanos, etc., get beaten by Earth's heroes). But the writer of the Super-Skrull mini (Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the writer of the TV show Lost, which, for some unfathomable reason, isn't a sequel to The Land of the Lost) decided to not go this route, i guess because he wanted to explore the idea of a loser super-villain who has to now prove himself a hero.

It's an ok theme to explore, i guess, and it starts off ok, except for being very, very slow. The problem is, after establishing the Super-Skrull as a ruthless and efficient strategist, it turned things around with a really cliched betrayal plot twist. The betrayal doesn't even make sense from a character perspective - when you have a character speaking to the audience in the first person in issue #2, you can't turn it around and pretend it was all a ruse in issue #4. This issue, showing Super-Skrull developing feelings for the pawns he's been using and then trying to sacrifice himself to save them (i think? I got bored and stopped reading so closely and the art was annoyingly unclear), was just sappy and out of place in a story about one of Marvel's great villains. All in all, some decent moments but ultimately not worth it. As far as advancing the overall Annihilation plot, Annihilus doesn't even appear in this story. The Silver-Skrull managed to destroy the Harvester of Sorrow weapon, but we don't even get Annihilus' reaction to that, so it doesn't feel like it was that important.

Silver Surfer #4
Another concluding Annihilation mini. This one took a surprising turn for the better in issue #3, in revealing some interesting peers of Galactus, and then in making the Silver Surfer return to his original role as Galactus' herald. Some very neat ideas that i was looking forward to seeing developed here. Well, this issue took about a minute and a half to read. It was all very cool... Thanos talking to the new cosmic beings (even his little pixie thing got more interesting) and Silver Surfer being all cold and distant and super-badassed. But the whole book was a fight scene, and it didn't feel like there was much of a resolution. If you can take the end of the fight to mean that Annihilus' super-powered general is now out of the picture, i guess that's as much of a set-back as the Silver Surfer's destruction of the Harvester of Sorrow, but it looked to me like the guy was just kind of resting on a bit of planetary debris - not dead, not banished back to the Negative Zone, not restrained in any way, not even unconscious. I guess since the writer - Keith Giffen - will also be writing the main Annihilation story after the 4 mini-series(es) conclude, he felt that he could just pick up on the story from there, but it's a pretty unsatisfying conclusion to the Silver Surfer story, especially after the great set-up last issue. Again, no real advancement of the larger plot - Thanos had been hanging out with Annihilus but he left to talk with the Galactus peers, and you don't see the conclusion of his conversation with them, either. It's all been set-up, which isn't a good way to conclude a mini-series.

X-Men #188
A new creative team takes over the X-Men, and since the writer is Mike Carey, the guy who's been writing the excellent Lucifer, i thought i'd give it a go. Well, the story seems like it might be interesting, but the art is atrocious. Not from a "the characters don't look good" perspective. They do. But from a "i can't tell what the heck is going on from scene to scene" persepective, it's really, really bad. One example: Sabretooth is holding a hostage. A Sentinel approaches, ready to fry both Sabretooth and the hostage. Cannonball steps up, tells the Sentinel to back off. Rogue says "Sam, you know you'll just bounce off the Sentinel's armor", Cannonball says "Did you ever see me play pool?". In the next panel, Iceman is holding the hostage.

As far as the story goes, the idea is that this team is going to be the "rapid response team," and it's going to be lead by Rogue. Isn't every super hero team a rapid response team? I mean, the idea is that they sit around their headquarters and when they're trouble they quickly mobilize and respond. The other option is the pro-active team that hunts down the bad guys before they do anything, which is a concept i love in theory but which has never really been executed well. I guess you also have super-heroes who patrol, actively looking for bad guys doing bad things, like Spider-Man, and explorers like the Fantastic Four who go to bizarre places and run into trouble with the locals, but i think "rapid response team" is actually the norm. But i think the idea is that this team might be the ones to do the dirty sort of black-ops work that the regular X-Teams might not want to get their hands dirty with. Which is a good way to distinguish them from the other X-Books, and could be a good idea. And it's an interesting group of team members: Rogue, Cannonball, Iceman, and Mystique so far. The little corner box (yay! the return of the corner box!) also shows Cable and Sabertooth. The cover art also shows Aurora (from Alpha Flight) and Lady Mastermind (who i think is a character Claremont created because they killed off the original Mastermind with the Legacy virus). So there should be some interesting dynamics between Cable and former pupil Cannonball, and Mystique and foster daughter Rogue. Also interesting that on a team of 3 former team leaders (Cable, Mystique, Cannonball), Rogue, typically a loner, will be leading the group. Yep, it all could be quite interesting, if only the art wouldn't suck. As it is, i'll pass on this series, unless the artist changes.