Been on a roll with comics the last few days, read 16 since Monday, including five consecutive issues of New X-Men and five of Peter Parker Spiderman. I only started reading New X-Men last year when I picked up an issue by mistake, thinking it was Uncanny X-Men, and it turned out it was pretty good, so I kept buying it. This recent storyline with the riot at the X-men school and Kid Omega going all mutant neo-nazi was actually very compelling. Pretty much all the Grant Morrison I've read up to this point was the second and third series of Invisibles, which I found to be almost completely incomprehensible. You kept buying it just hoping the next one would be the one that made it all make sense, but it never happened. Sometimes I think, maybe if I went back and got the first Invisibles series in trade and read it from the beginning, >then< it would all make sense, but so far I've always managed to come to my senses in time. So New X-Men is surprising for Morrison in that not only is it understandable, but you actually want to keep reading it, as the write-up on the most recent issue on fourthrail.com said he's somehow writing for fans and doing his own thing and satisfying both camps, which has got to be something of an accomplishment in the wacky world of X-Men fans.



Peter Parker's most recent five issues were entertaining, but certainly more lightweight. They try to throw in some weighty issues about whether all these long-standing vendettas by two-bit supervillains are actually self-perpetuating the chaos that seems to follow Spiderman around. But for the most part they're also kind of poking fun at some of the '70's Spidey bad guys like Shocker (or is it "The" Shocker?) and Rocket Racer (whom I sure would have few defenders amongst Spider-fans). The general tone then becomes that most of Spider-man's lesser nemeses are really kind of a joke, and while they may put him in some difficulty for a minute or two, the outcome is never really in doubt, and they're all portrayed as being rather pathetic. In twenty years they'll be doing the same thing to the villains they're coming up with in this decade, too, I'm sure, but Spider-Man will still be going strong. Personally I preferred Paul Jenkins recent run on the title, a little bit of this current self-parody goes a long way.