Your Friends and Neighbors

Reading: an oddly disappointing crop of Marvel titles from the pull list
X-Men: Second Coming 1 - apart from Wolverine, who I quite wanted to read more of but couldn't get my head around most of his own series as it just seemed to be this ongoing retcon clusterfuck about him finding out stuff about his past that wasn't true two pages later, I didn't care for the X-books much as I didn't care for most of the Marvel stuff that trickled over to the UK in the 1980s/1990s, barring Power Pack, which was reprinted in the back of Return of the Jedi and Thundercats in little four-page chapters chopped from giant-sized debut issues appearing in the states, so it was actually two months into the story before I realised it was a fucking superhero comic and until then I'd been enjoying what seemed like an adaptation of a mid-80s kids' movie about aliens - hey, I was a 2000ad fan and that kind of thing appealed to me. Anyway, for the most part I didn't think much of the Marvel stuff and X-Men's impenetrable, overly-complicated interconnected plotting and dull characters (seriously, has Cyclops had a single defining character moment ever?) seemed a macrocosm of my issues with Marvel's output. It was just this dull, money-chomping franchise that seemed to dominate the superhero market, intermittently throwing out these densely-worded crossovers where nothing much happened except someone shouted, the X-Men talked about teaming up to fight some menace, Cyclops shot his eyebeams at something that was usually off-panel and then at the end some villain I'd never heard of got a splash page to himself so he could tell his minions or the empty room that something bad were about to 'appen, and lordy, but Second Coming is exactly that all over again.
Basically, The X-Men are sitting around talking about how the mutants are in trouble as a race (which they've been doing not only for the last few years since most mutants lost their powers in a magical deus ex status quo changer, but since the mid-80s), then Cyclops shoots his eyebeams, the X-Men team up, they fight some people with guns, then there's a splash page reveal of a guy who's telling his minions something bad is going to 'appen. That is literally everything that happens, and unsurprisingly it's pretty dull, which is not something you should be saying about a story where people fight across the rooftops of moving traffic. I suppose it services those who want nothing more than just this, but as with anything X-Men related that isn't Grant Morrison's run on the title, I'm not sure what's here for non-fans.
Fantastic Four 274 - I literally read this only because the horse aliens from Power Pack had a cameo - I'm not joking - as the title has gone off the boil for me in the last few issues after a decent start to John Hickman's run, but it's perfectly serviceable fantasy adventure if you don't mind stuff that's long on talk and short on action or character development that'll be retconned in a year's time anyway. It's high concept stuff, certainly, but there's only so long you can present high concepts one after another without it coming across as dry (though as with anything, there are exceptions) or unrelatable, and that's the wall Hickman's hitting here. It's a pity, as going by his opening story he has the potential to top John Byrne's defining run on the title, but he's taking his time getting anywhere at all.

Watching: WWE RAW (goodbye, Shawn! ), Bones, The Middle, Modern Family