There's a whole load of X-books out this week, but luckily for me, almost all of them are bogged down in the middle of storylines.  That leaves just the one book - the frankly bizarre I Heart Marvel: My Mutant Heart.

Marvel seem to have settled into a routine of releasing a raft of themed one-shots each month.  It's February, so that means we're getting a load of romance stories to tie in with Valentine's Day.  And once again the X-books have been sucked into the whole thing, resulting in this curious anthology book.

The lead slot goes to a Wolverine story by Daniel Way.  I've read enough decent stories by Way to dissuade me from writing anything too hyperbolic about him, but good god, he's an exasperatingly inconsistent writer.  And bluntly, the bad and dull far outweighs the good and interesting.  What we have here is an eight-page story where, very loosely, Wolverine swears revenge on a Nazi scientist and then, in the present day, stands around next to his grave.

Way seems to be assuming that if you write a slightly ponderous story with mildly unconventional art and a partially unresolved ending, it must be clever.  In fact, this is sub-Marvel Comics Presents nonsense - a half-developed idea with pretensions.  Way does have talent, but it isn't on display here.  He's also completely missed the point of the whole exercise.  You'll note that I managed to summarise the plot without actually mentioning anything to do with love or romance.  In fairness, a relationship is included, but more out of a grudging concession to the remit than anything else. 

Peter Milligan, as you'd expect, does considerably better with his Doop story.  It's night and day, really.  Not only does he know how to tell a proper story in eight pages, but it's genuinely about love, it's legitimately funny, and it echoes the style of the romance comics that the whole exercise is supposed to be homaging.  Artist Marcos Martin has also grasped the point, giving the strip a slightly timeless quality that makes it feel of an updated romance comic.

Obviously the story's a bit twisted, as you'd expect from a Doop strip.  And clearly you can't just do a straight old-style romance comic in this day and age.  But instead of just parodying them, Milligan and Martin take the higher ground and use those stories as a familiar starting point - which is how they manage to get something decent out of an eight-page short.

Finally, Tim Fish has a go at the Cannonball/Lila Cheney relationship.  I've never been an enormous fan of this concept, which was okay as a wish-fulfilment exercise, but doesn't have the underlying credibility to justify sticking with it twenty years down the line.  At the very least, it's never been developed in a way that makes me believe in these guys as a couple.  Still, Fish does a decent enough job with what he's got here, and finds a solid angle for his story, but a lot depends on how much tolerance you've got for Lila Cheney, interstellar pop star who now plays indie clubs.

One good story, one average, one bloody awful.  It goes without saying that this is a completely missable issue, but the Doop story really is a great little piece.

Rating: B

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