Here you’ll find reviews for this week’s comic book haul. Not a huge week overall but reviews for The Crossed #3, X-Force #11, Avengers: The Initiative #21 and New Avengers #49. The reviews are spoiler-heavy so don’t click “more” if you want to stay spoiler-free!!

X-Force #11: Pretty awesome. Brother Eli has been a mysterious religious villain since the series started and 11 issues in, we finally get his story and his ancient connection with a old X-Men Hellfire Club villain. Eli is becomming a real threat in the X-universe: Not only has he dug up the corpses of Warpath’s tribe, but also beloved dead X-Man/Morlock Caliban!! This book also marks Clayton Crain’s return to pencils (for the sequences set in the present), not that I dislike Mike Choi’s amazing art but I had just started to warm up to Crain’s unusual art right before he left the book.

Crossed #3: One of the most fucked comics I’ve ever read (Can I say fucked?). This book has topped anything in Walking Dead (as far a shock goes) and may be the harshest issue thus far. Garth Ennis delivers pure, shameless, shock and I absolutely love it in contrast to friendlier titles such as The Avengers. We get a tale involving cannibal children and our groups decision whether to take them with them or…(I’ll leave this up to you to determine/find out). I imagine that it must be kind of tough for Jacen Burrows to illustrate some of this stuff, yet he really delivers on the facial expressions of these tortured people.

New Avengers #49: Pretty nice wrap-up for the missing Cage/Jones baby situation if… it really is her-which it likely is but you never know, it just seemed too easy. Clint really stepped up in this issue, I absolutely love it when he gets really emotionally charged and threatens shit. His showdown with Bulls…err Haweye next issue should be awesome! The real highlight of the issue was Luke Cage with the Wrecker’s crowbar!Hopefully this becomes a regular part of Cage’s arsenal.

Avengers: The Initiative “Disassembled” #21: This book had been my favorite Marvel book each month but the art has been getting worse and worse to the point where it’s distracting. I’ve heard people argue that Ramos’ art fits the ‘style’ of the book but I completely disagree. Casselli’s art was as cartoonish as charcters like Constrictor, Taskmaster, Diamondback and even ‘Thor’ should ever appear. It’s tough to see so many awesome characters in one book look so dumbed down. Anyway, the return of the Thor Clone/Ragnarok is a welcome development that will hopefully be done correctly. After 20 issues knowing that his busted corpse was sitting in the Initiative lab, they better do something outstanding with it (like maybe get a new artist?).