Also this week:

CRIMINAL #2 - Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are beginning their relaunched series with a smart move: a series of self-contained standalone stories, which happen to tie in to the characters we've met already.  This issue, for example, Teeg Lawless returns from his military service to find that, thanks to the miracle of compound interest, he's in even worse debt than he thought.  Done right, this should satisfy everyone, not so much by providing a jumping-on point, as by giving new readers the clearest possible opportunity to see what Criminal has to offer them.  Non-superhero genre comics are a tough sell, and Criminal's characters tend to hover on the verge of being unsympathetic (to put it mildly, in some cases), but nobody does this sort of story better than Brubaker and Phillips.  It takes skill to make these convoluted noir double-crosses seem believable, and not just a homage to earlier crime novelists.  Criminal always manages to make it work.  If you haven't tried it before, and you have even the remotest interest in the genre, you really should give it a look.  A-

ECHO #2 - Terry Moore picks up the pace considerably after the relatively laid-back first issue.  On the one hand, that reassures me that the series is going to work in serial form; on the other, it does mean that we're now in rather more conventional storytelling territory.  But this is still excellent work, taking a plot that could easily have been bog-standard sci-fi thriller territory, and bringing it to life through the little human details.  An excellent series.  A

THE LAST DEFENDERS #2 - Well, this is weird.  The first issue seems to have been a feint, teasing a Defenders team that implodes almost immediately under the weight of its own artificiality.  Really, this isn't a Defenders story so much as a story about poor Nighthawk trying to put together a new Defenders team in the face of general indifference.  On that level, it's quite successful; Casey and Giffen generate a lot of sympathy for the poor guy.  On the other hand, I'm a bit confused as to where the rest of the plot is heading, and the whole thing has a general air (perhaps deliberately) of splattering the page with concepts drawn at random from the Official Handbook.  Beneath the conventional superhero veneer, this is actually a thoroughly odd comic, but in quite an interesting way.  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, X-Men: Divided We Stand #1 is the first of two anthologies about former X-Men.  Wolverine: Origins #24 guest stars Deadpool again.  And X-Factor fight Arcade.

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