New comics 6/2

House of M #1 (Brian Michael Bendis/Olivier Coipel, Marvel)
Yeah, I'm a sucker. Despite the rapidly declining quality of Bendis's still not finished crossover mini-series Secret War, I have a weakness for big epic crossovers and I even was a little excited about picking this up. Sadly, it's as mediocre as you might imagine, and the first issue accomplishes nothing that you didn't already know was going to happen from the advance interviews. The X-Men and the Avengers get together to decide what to do with the Scarlet Witch, she thinks they plan to kill her and she alters reality to make everything different. This is all set-up, but since it's eight issues I hope that some interesting stuff will happen in the future, and I am enough of a Marvel fan that I want to read this to know what important changes are happening in the Marvel universe. If this were the first issue of Infinite Crisis and were this underwhelming, I probably wouldn't read the rest, since I'm not as dedicated to DC continuity. But it's not, so I'll keep spending the money, and hope that Coipel's appropriately grandiose art and Bendis's certain continuity nods (including, apparently, to the conclusion of the current Astonishing X-Men storyline which hasn't, um, concluded yet) and sharp dialogue are enough to make it worthwhile.

Noble Causes #10 (Jay Faerber/Fran Bueno, Image)
Thank goodness the horrible back-up strip is concluding next issue and Faerber is bringing back the NC flashbacks to replace it. I like how he takes the body-switch plot and resolves it while opening a whole other can of worms; he really is getting to the point where subplots can gestate for a long time and then birth other plots. That said, the space expedition storyline has gone on way too long and really needs to reach some sort of point before I completely lose interest.

Y The Last Man #34 (Brian K. Vaughan/Goran Sudzuka, DC/Vertigo)
I like that after last issue's twist ending, Vaughan goes on and complicates things even more, to the point at which you're not really sure who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in this issue. This storyline doesn't have the urgency of the last one, but it's an interesting and suspenseful tale that's obviously taking us into a whole new world (that is, Australia) for the main cast.