Meru and the Eraser race to recruit ex-Mind Mgmt agents, but Meru's powers are a hindrance and bring about an unwitting disaster when they turn the Magician against them. Brutal battles begin to unfold in which Meru's team are caught off balance and unprepared, and even Duncan's predictive abilities are neutralised. Will any of them survive?

Throughout the series, Kindt has impressed on a sheer technical level, experimenting boldly with his visual storytelling, bending and breaking reality in keeping with the tone of paranoia and fake realities and identities and constructed or erased memories. Brilliantly designed, full of fluid, flowing action scenes and disorienting shifts and turns, this is something of a modern comics masterpiece.

Rasl, scientist turned art-thief is being chased through dimensions as the authorities try to recover the technology he stole. Rough and ready though he might be, he's determined to keep them from getting their hands on potentially catastrophic equipment, and the lost journals of Nicholas Tesla. Such a tonal shift from Bone, but such masterful cartooning and storytelling.

The Fuse huge power station-turned habitat in regressive geostationary orbit over the Earth. Ralph Dietrich arrives, having volunteered as a homicide detective, only for a cabler to die of a gunshot wound at his feet. A second death and a connectio to the office of the mayor opens a can of worms that Dietrich's partner, hard-nosed Klem Ristovych, is all too happy to kick over in order to catch the culprit. A terrifically entertaining detectives in spaaace thriller with a brilliant pair of tough but likeable leads, particularly the irascible Klem.

After the Kapital is bombed in dock (remind you of anything? - foreword of the book is by a Greenpeace activist) Callum and Mag head across the ruins of Eastern Europe to track down an old Blackbell comrade who has been tracking them with an eye to subverting Ninth Wave to his own ends. Along the way, Callum is presented with some disturbing information about the missing Mary, which confirms what has been hinted all along -there is something definitely not normal about her. Meanwhile Mary is in the Sahara, taking part in a massive convoy of water from Saudi Arabia to Morocco, hoping to help the women hired to guard the trucks get there and back safely. Utterly fantastic. Nothing else like it out there, tapping into ecology, ethical philosophy, economics and geopolitics in an epic, grounded narrative, and I really wish there was.

This seems pleasingly old-fashioned colourful pulp fantasy with talking animals and flying cities and mages and warriors, but there's a lot more going on here. The Champion summoned by a secret conclave of magicians to save magic seems to be from a more sci-fi past, and every chapter opens with a double page spread of text and illustration that suggests these stories may be literally pulp. However, these elements are part of the long game, and for now, Learoyd and Dusty must protect the people of the fallen city from enemies without and within and OF COURSE it ends in a cliffhanger dag nabbit. Wonderful art, and some of Busiek's best writing.

Everything's gone horribly wrong for Meru. Her efforts to recruit agents and stop the formation of a new Mind Mgmt has met with disaster, with all her friends dead or missing.. In order to defeat the Eraser she must gain the agent training she missed out on, and in order to do that she must find the First Immortal, one of Mind Mgmt's original founders. Meanwhile the Eraser consolidates her power and closes in on Meru.

Spectacularly good.

A planetary defence system is initiated which can only mean one thing: a new superhero! Who kills thousands by mistake! Understandably upsetting but mere human beings are but grist in the vast grinding mill of whatever crisis is churning towards the Avengers. The bit at the end with AIM and the casino is a lot of fun. I mean I quite like this, overall, but recurring megadeaths in the course of every issue seem like a massive failure on behalf of the superheroes in this superhero comic, and superhero banter on the site of a recent megadeath event seems dickish.

All the paraphernalia of modern intelligence services and the security state in the hands of secret spy organisation that's been infiltrated by enemy agents more often then my dog wees! What thrills! Ales Kot plays a mad game with this - Coulson with PSD, Hawkeye being a slob, Fury being cool, Spiderwoman being mostly sensible and Black Widow being completely in her element. The Fury, a building that isn't there, lost in space, a suicidal bomb and everything gets derailed by a crossover at the end. Also, there is MODOK. This plays funny/serious games with the whole set-up. If Borges wrote Avenger fan-fiction it'd look like this. Presumably.

Another murder on the Fuse, this time of a Gridlocker, a racer of magnetic bikes across the station's solar discs. Gridlocking is dangerous and illegal bit very popular. Murder is also all these things, or so it seems. Ralph and Klem do the necessary and chase down the killer through a maze of television rights, drugs and political terrorism. Solid, fun and engaging with a well-realised setting and great characters.

Not quite the first great modern British superhero, but certainly the combination of Britishness, superheroics, Lovecraftiana all merged with a sneery eighties synth-pop celebrity excess lifestyle sensibility more concerned with fame and TV appearances than getting in fights in Thatcher's UK really shook things up - it certainly shook me up. Of course, Zenith, the shallow and vain young eighties superstar who's mostly irritated to be bothered by dark shadows from forties and lost relics from the sixties come to upset his soaring career by ending the world. This was all before Alan Moore razed London in Miracleman and Kieron Gillen fought WWII with superpowered soldiers - but it's all in here. I loved this when it came out first and like it a lot still.

I'm giving this edition the side-eye, though, for some small subtle discrepancies. Wasn't Book 1 called 'Tygers?' Here it's just 'Phase 1.' Why have some full stops been replaced with exclamation points? I remember being impressed with the way some sentences were printed with full stops where you would normally expect to see an exclamation point, making them quieter, more powerful, sinister or affecting. It seems weird to replace them like this. Not many, just a few here and there that I might not have noticed if they hadn't made such an impression on me. Also I'm certain Maximan didn't use 'bitch' like he does here. Not entirely sure it's an improvement.