This is timely.  Not because issue #32 came out today, but because Marvel announced today that we’re coming to the end of Tom Taylor’s run as writer.  Mariko Tamaki is next in line, and in July, you guessed it, it’s issue #1… of X-23.

X-23.  I am sighing deeply.  Pause here and imagine the sigh.  Of course, it was entirely obvious that the original Wolverine would show up at some point and reclaim the name, because that’s what always happens.  Fair enough.  In fact, it always struck me that one of the problems with Marvel simultaneously replacing Captain America, Wolverine, Thor, Iron Man and so forth was that, in the way of these things, the reset button was also going to come about pretty much simultaneously for all of them and, well, that was maybe not going to be such a good look.  But so be it.

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So here’s one that could easily slip under the radar – a five-issue Deadpool / Old Man Logan miniseries written by Declan Shalvey, with art by Mike Henderson.  Shalvey is better known as an artist, though he did write a graphic novel last year, Savage Town.  Still, this seems to be the first time he’s written a miniseries.  Henderson’s main claim to fame is the Image series Nailbiter, which wrapped up last year.

The recap page gives us the current status quo for both characters, but in fact this is evergreen.  Deadpool still feels the urge to help people, but is hugely annoying while doing so, while Logan could largely be regular Wolverine, despite all the mentions that he’s getting on in years.  Which is fine – it’s a mini off to the side somewhere and it has no need to yoke itself to continuity.

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Or, if you prefer, issues #10-12.  In typical Marvel fashion, twelve issues is your lot with this series – we discussed this on the last podcast, but broadly speaking, Marvel seem to be minded to announce something as an ongoing series when what they really mean is “it’ll probably last twelve issues but we want to leave our options open for a miracle”.  On the plus side, this means that mayfly titles tend to reach some sort of proper resolution because the writer never seriously expected to get past this point either.  But that would be true if they just marketed them as minis to start with.

Renumbering for three issues only to get cancelled is silly, but that’s Legacy for you.  The Legacy connection in this arc is, um, tenuous.  It has to be, because Generation X has a twelve issue storyline and a bunch of threads to draw together, all with a view to bringing its cast together as some sort of family who can stick together as friends going forward.  And this doesn’t leave a ton of space to start shoehorning in retro elements.  Fortunately, the main villain for this series was always M/Emplate, and some of the original Generation X cast members are already in the book, so you can give them a bit more prominence, get Terry Dodson to do some covers, and call the box ticked.  But to all intents and purposes, this is the story they were going to do anyway, and thank heavens for that.

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We can take this one quickly, because although X-Men Gold #21-22 are billed as a two-part story, they’re really not.  That’s not to say that bracketing them together is completely random – there’s certainly a story unit here, for want of a better word – but X-Men Gold is written more as a throwback to the open-ended storylines of the 80s and 90s, before things came in defined arcs.  So “Brotherhood” is really two issues of set-up – or, if you prefer, it’s not so much a story as a first act.

From the X-Men’s point of view, the story is very simple.  Mesmero’s Brotherhood show up again, attacking a Heritage Initiative fundraising event.  The X-Men dutifully go to save the day.  But Mesmero is an illusionist, so he tricks them into fighting the police and runs away.  Kitty decides they should probably play along with the authorities, since they did beat up some cops and all, so the team are carted off to jail, which is where we can presumably expect to find them in issue #23’s “Cruel & Unusual, Part 1”.

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Wordplay isn’t what it used to be.  Still, with this arc, Weapon X finally leaves the Weapon X Project behind and turns its attention to something else: Nuke.

Weapon X doesn’t exist to be a subtle comic, and Nuke is not a subtle character.  He’s a pill-popping patriotic maniac with the US flag tattooed on his face who runs around killing everything in a patriotic frenzy.  His tenuous connection with the X-books comes from the Grant Morrison era, which decided that his version of the Super-Soldier Programme was actually the Weapon VII Program, forerunner of Weapon X.

But when he debuted in Daredevil #232, he was presented as a debased Reaganite version of Captain America, an easily manipulated hyper-patriot, struggling to grasp simple facts like “this isn’t Vietnam”, who would be a total buffoon if he wasn’t also a dangerous lunatic.  He represents a toxic version of patriotism open to taking orders from anyone with the right flag, and he’s a ludicrous parody of Rambo.

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Oh god.  Where do we start with this?

The Cable ongoing series got off to a shaky start with James Robinson’s Conquest arc.  Now, it proceeds to jettison the creative team in favour of writer Ed Brisson and penciller Jon Malin, change the numbering to #150, and cast around in Cable’s back catalogue for something that might make a Marvel Legacy arc.  Since the Legacy remit can be amply satisfied by “dig up something we haven’t mentioned in a while”, and Cable has had an assortment of dead ends over his thirty years in print, there’s no shortage of ammunition.

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In theory, the idea of the Legacy arcs is supposed to be to do something calling back to past continuity.  In practice, some books do that so often anyway, that it’s not obvious how to make Legacy any different from normal.  Clearly, that’s a challenge for Ed Brisson on Old Man Logan, writing a series which is about as legacy-driven by default as you could possibly imagine.  Some writers, in this situation, have just responded by shrugging their shoulders and doing a regular story.  Brisson, to his credit, decides to dig up a major element of Wolverine’s mythos that’s been left undisturbed for a very long time.

For some reason these five issues are bannered as two different stories – Mike Deodato draws the first, Ibraim Roberson the second – but by any reasonable standard, this is actually a single five-parter, and sensibly paced at that.

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