Pull-List for September 4, 2013

This week is a fairly big week in terms of events for Marvel Comics .

INFINITY # 2

(written by Jonathan Hickman, art by Jerome Opena & Dustin Weaver)

With its multiple tie-ins within all the Avengers titles, the much-hyped event Infinity launches its second chapter today. Last issue had the Avengers going off-world to face off against The Builders, leaving Earth ripe for the picking for nihilistic, death obssessed Thanos (you know, the guy at in the middle of the credits of Marvel's Avengers .) While the first issue kicked off the event to a promising start (if not a bit confusing), I remain wary of this six-issue event. Marvel is famous for its crossover events, with the galvonizing Civil War and Secret Invasion being a couple of my favorites. But after 2011's sprawling and convuluted Fear Itself , I'm wary of these "huge, epic events" with a check-list of subpar tie-ins whose only goal is to get me to spend more on books. I'm going to give Infinity one more issue, but if it becomes too reliant on its tie-ins for me to even make sense of the main six-issue series, I think I'll wait for it to come out in trade.

X-MEN: BATTLE OF THE ATOM (PARTS 1 & 2)

PART 1: X-Men: Battle of the Atom # 1 (written by Brian Michael Bendis, art by Frank Cho)

PART 2: All New X-Men #16 (written by Brian Michael Bendis, art by Stuart Immomen.)

One Marvel franchise that has consistently gotten the multi-title crossover right is the X-Men franchise. Events like Messiah Complex and Second Coming were told concisely across multiple titles that you were reading anyway while the status-quo changing Schism was self-contained within its own title series. The repercussions of each event helped propel the franchise into a new and interesting direction. A 10-issue story where past, present, and future X-Men clash, I've been excited about this event since it was announced at this year's C2E2 and with the developments announced at Comic-Con a two months ago, I'm hopeful that this will be one of the best Marvel events yet!

X-Factor #262

(written by Peter David, art by Neil Edwards)

Sadly today, one of my favorite series will be ending today. The third volume of X-Factor launched in 2005 and focused on Jamie Madrox a.k.a. Multiple Man starting a detective agency in the section of Manhattan known as Mutant Town. The noir-flavored series which gave us the long-awaited coupling of Rictor and Shatterstar has always been on my pull-list for the amazing way it had of maintaining its own unique identity which never depended on what was happening elsewhere in the Marvel Universe to tell its story. With the tone drastically changing in the vein of the new status quo The Heroic Age , X-Factor definitely lost that which made it unique. With the team disbanding one by one after the events of Hell On Earth , the only remaining team members are central couple Madrox and Layla Miller . It will definitely be the first book I read today and I sincerely hope that (as was promised at Comic Con) many of these characters will live on in other books.

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