Spoils of War - We Live in Dark Times

Biggest X-Men news this week is that Giuseppe Camuncoli will be drawing X Infernus. I don't know much about him, but his work on Ms Marvel looks really good. As do his character sketchesfor X Infernus (seen in this post). So I guess this confirms Pixie will be meeting Darkchylde again. Maybe she can get some payback. Mike Carey confirmed that Sunspot has in fact left the Hellfire Club, opening the way for a power struggle over control of the club. This is not good for the X-Men, no matter who ends up in control. Oh, X-Men Noir? Yeah, they've been hyping it up with the mysterious pictures for a while, but honestly I'm not that impressed. I already get X-Factor. The Daredevil and Spider-Man Noir books seem more interesting.
Speaking of Spidey, everyone seems to be enjoying his current storyarc, New Ways to Die. The name seems ironic to me, because its actually about the return of old Spidey villains, rather than the new ones. One can argue about whether Anti-Venom is a new or old villain, but his emergence has elevated Mr Negative to a new level of interesting. Mr Negative always struck me as the only one of the new crop who had much staying power. By the way, Dan Slott has confirmed that the phrase 'everything we did is still up and running' does not refer to Mephisto. I've never been much of a Spidey fan anyway - but I'm excited about the possibility of the Lizard being in the Spider-Man 4 movie.

I was pretty certain Mighty Avengers was going to be cancelled after Secret Invasion, and Newsarama confirmed my suspicions - only to quickly apologise and clarify that although Brian Bendis is leaving the book, its not being cancelled. There's still gonna be a new (fourth!) avengers book, Dark Avengers, which will tie into Dark Reign. Dark Reign itself appears to be one of these aftermath 'events' which are not really crossovers and not really events, but rather a label slapped on a whole lot of books that says 'in this book the Marvel Universe has changed, just like we said it would'. We've seen them before: Decimation, the Initiative Divided We Stand. I'm not saying they're a bad thing, just that you don't need to go out and buy every single one of them. I'm sure this Dark stuff has been in the works for a while, but its still interesting in light of DC's comments about making their movies darker. Seems everyone likes their heroes dark and their villains darker.

And why on earth does Doom have the Infinity Gauntlet? And what does it have to do with the Eternals? I have no idea, but it is interesting that he's granted asylum to Namor, who knows who has each gem, and that Namor and Doom are both in the 'evil illuminati' picture. Oh, also keep in mind that Magneto and the High Evolutionary have been messing around with the Dreaming Celestial, who is linked to the Eternals, and happens to be in San Francisco. Yeah, ok, maybe I'm paranoid. But I still think it would be cool if Doom, Magneto and Namor started a Dark Avengers team to protect the earth from god-like beings, however unlikely it is.

If any of you are getting fed up with the Marvel universe - now's your chance. Abandon ship and jump on board Mark Millar's Ultimate Avengers which will be the core of a five-book (no more, no less) Ultimate Universe. Plus, they'll have two Big Events every year, with the Ultimate Avengers series taking the place of an event mini-series. The Marvel U only has one Big Event every year. You only have to buy five books every month, and you're guaranteed to have all the tie ins. Plus, they're aiming for all of the Ultimate titles to do batter than every other Marvel title every month. It sounds too good to be true.