A+X 17, Night of the Living Deadpool 3, Marvel Knights Hulk 3

A+X 17
Iron Man and Broo: Loveness (w) and P. Diaz (a) and Mossa (c)
Captain America and Cyclops: Duggan (w) and Yardin, C. Smith, and Pallot (a) and Mossa (c)

Story one of this somehow still going series finds Iron Man unwillingly taking on Broo for a day, having allegedly agreed with Beast to some sort of job-for-a-day intern program. Tony is, of course, not thrilled to find Broo tagging along with him but Broo grows on him as he helps him solve a couple of science problems before going on to help him defeat the Chessmen, old enemies who have a chess-theme to their get-ups and quips and who shouldn't be a match for Tony but manage to interfere with his suit. When Broo comes in to save him and help him save himself, Tony takes to the alien and decides to give him the day he wants, showing him all around his labs, space, other heroes, etc. It's a sweet little story, one whose highlight is certainly in the banter with the chessmen, and one that altogether probably won't be remembered much past this very day, as is the theme of A+X.

Story two, of course, continues the Captain America/Cyclops team-up, though the two aren't together for most of this issue. They still work together, though, as they attempt to save the Skrulls from Cadre K from Doctor Doom, who has more experiments to run and more Skrulls to probably kill. They fool him momentarily as he comes in, as Cap sticks him with a micro-EMP and the psychic Skrull implants dreams of him beating the Avengers, but Doom figures it out and comes to, though he's still unable to move. Cap informs him, for some reason, that Cyclops and the other Skrulls and Avengers and X-Men previously gathered there are trashing Doom's lab and Doom teleports himself back to his craft from out of his armor, leaving the armor to self-destruct next to Cap and the other Skrull. Before they can head off after him, SHIELD shows up, possibly Agent Adsit, to take the Skrull away. When Cap defends the Skrull, Adsit(?) attacks him, thinking him to be a Skrull. Another piece of the long ongoing story that very nearly makes you care about the Skrulls but can't quite, just from size limitation and the fact that this is a story about Cap and Cyclops, so this story has very little stakes.

Night of the Living Deadpool 3
Bunn (w) and Rosanas (a and c)

Deadpool quickly kills the would-be invaders of the small community and goes to join up with them himself. He discovers that there's a former AIM scientist living among them and interrogates him to make sure he's not trying something evil, only to learn that this scientist's division of AIM, called AIR for Advanced Ideas in Regeneration, inadvertently created this apocalypse. As Deadpool begins to fit into the community, he wonders why his healing factor hasn't erased the scar on his arm from when one of his old fellow-survivors-turned-zombie bit him, even though it clearly flushed out the zombie bit. It turns out, of course, that it simply hadn't flushed out the zombie bit and he wakes in the middle of the night as a walker and turns nearly the entire community before his healing factor does kick in and reverts him back to Deadpool so he can see what he's done.

There's a neat little guilt-based story that's fairly original in here about a man who was a zombie killing his fellow survivors before turning back and realizing what's happened. It's particularly efficient with this type of zombie, which has some semblance of consciousness and doesn't want to be doing what it's doing. Of course, it's coming in the midst of a DEADPOOL book so it can be a little bit harder to see the deeper story through the lighter tone. It's still a decent story and it's stopped being so concerned with making every other zombie reference, giving it room to actually tell its own story. The coloring, black and white for everything except Deadpool and what Deadpool's dealing with, continues to be aesthetically pleasing but it does start to get a little hard to follow the theme of it when Deadpool turns and goes black and white, eventually returning to color when he changes back. Still an interesting book and it's giving Deadpool a few nice little introspective moments.

Marvel Knights Hulk 3
Keatinge (w) and Kowalski (a) and Filardi (c)

A little bit of Nikoleta Harrow's history as we learn that AIM had created (or at least imbued with powers) Nikoleta and she had broken out to ensure that she wasn't held back or destroyed by AIM. Now she's figured out how to successfully separate Banner from Hulk and how, in turn, to control Hulk. As a result of this separation, history has changed and Banner survived the gamma bomb as just himself, getting into the bunker with Rick Jones, though it led to a life with Betty Ross kept under quarantine while the army monitored his home and his health. Eventually Betty dies of exposure to gamma radiation and Bruce tries to run out from his quarantine only to be shot by the army, returning him to this timeline and putting him back in the Hulk's body, reverting down to Banner form and talking with Nikoleta, who is flying their rig right to where the gamma bomb first went off.

This is an incredibly weird story, and not in the sort of good way you'd want it to be. It seems like a whole lot of somewhat interesting ideas stuck together into a narrative that doesn't totally work for it. I'm reading a nonfiction collection by author and one-time comic writer Jonathan Lethem right now and he prefaces one of his essays by saying it's not one of his favorites, that it's included only because he liked the slice of life and character it builds, but that it's not favorite of his because it's a lot of journey with no destination. That's what this feels like. Granted, MARVEL KNIGHTS HULK still has one more issue to go so maybe everything will be wrapped up in a beautiful and thoughtful bow in the fourth issue but it's hard to imagine. It's harder because comic books and comic fans all really tend to like alternate-history things and "what if" ideas (hence why Marvel has their "what if" line) so seeing this alternate-Hulk story not only isn't the first time it's been done, it's not the best it's been done out there. Personally I'm still a sucker for the change we saw in Jeff Parker's RED SHE-HULK last year but there are definitely others and better ones out there. Whether it's fair or not, bringing up these sorts of ideas puts MK HULK in competition with all of these other stories and it comes up on the losing end, particularly sad since MK SPIDER-MAN and MK X-MEN have at least given us something new worth seeing.