Episode 6

Brian Clevinger joins us tonight via unlock time capsule from the distant future of 8:00 EST. Which will be broadcasted at 1:00 EST, at whcih point, that time capsule will be from the past and this cant be any worse than the convoluted past/present/future of Heroes.

Dark X-Men #4

No news today, except the news that Dark X-Men is pure fun. It is not surprising since this is the same creative team that gave us Captain Britain and MI-13. It may be because I can identify with the characters of this book, on some level. The gist of the series is "let's do a wacky adventure with the remainder of Norman Osborn's Dark X-Men team from the Utopia crossover." The team is completely dysfunctional. With no true purpose or direction, they need to justify their existence before their boss, who seems like he'd rather give up on them. Whose soul-crushing job does this NOT sound like?

The fun is in the dialogue, because if you can't write dysfunction between 4 socio/psychopaths, what kind of writer are you? Mystique's straight person routine is the perfect figure to bounce Dark Beast's amoral regard for life, Mimic's channeling of Shinji from Evangelion, and Omega's meth addict tendencies off of. Plus, you can't go wrong with the line "What, his strategy against us is slight frustration?"

The big knock on the series is that we know Osborn is going to be fine in the end. We know who will ultimately be in charge of Osborn's body, even after being possessed by the psychic spirit of a dimension hopping test tube baby from the genes of Scott Summers and Jean Grey from an alternate world. What's great, though, is that this may be the in continuity tale of how Osborn starts to fully revert back into being the Green Goblin.

Was the book light on action? Yes. But with great/entertaining conversation, a lack of action is excuseable. Dark X-Men is probably one of the best comics I'm buying now on the stands every month and I am sad to see it go away with issue 5.