Also this week:

BLUE BEETLE #26 - One for the bizarre promotional stunt file: a fill-in issue which is only available in Spanish.  Now, to my mind, if you're going to publish comics in languages that most of the readers don't speak, you've really got to do a story that plays off the fact that the readers can't understand the dialogue.  At first the story seems to be heading that way, with Jaime introducing his Anglophone girlfriend to the wider family, but then it just drifts off into a regular superhero story in Spanish - and one that has to keep it very simple, so that English speakers can follow it without cross-referring to the translation at the back.  There's probably a good story to be told using this device, but it's not this one, I'm afraid.  Still, when you read it with the translation, it's a perfectly decent story - it's just that the gimmick hinders it.  C+

THOR: AGES OF THUNDER - Misleadingly labelled  as a one-shot, this turns out - on the last page - to be a prologue issue for Matt Fraction's Thor: Reign of Blood miniseries.  That's annoying.  But on the bright side, after finishing this, I was quite keen on the idea of reading more Matt Fraction Thor stories.  This is a straight mythical story, with no superhero elements at all, and it's very well done.  Fraction fudges his continuity rather cleverly, by taking advantage of the idea (introduced a while back) that Marvel's Asgard goes round and round in cycles, each one ending with another Ragnarok.  So if you want to do a myth without worrying too much about the details, just set it in an earlier cycle.  Quite where Fraction picked up the idea that the Enchantress is meant to be Idun (she isn't), I'm not sure, but that minor glitch aside, this is an excellent piece of work.  A+

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, hopefully, Ultimate X-Men #93 makes it to my store.  The "Divided We Stand" storylines continue in Cable #3 and Young X-Men #2; Brian Vaughan and Eduardo Risso's Logan miniseries concludes; and supposedly something important happens in a Quicksilver one-shot, X-Factor: The Quick and the Dead.

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