Sometimes I regret that Marvel doesn’t just run a single weekly X-Men title and cycle in different creative teams for each arc.  It seems like a better vehicle for something like Rogue & Gambit, which deserves more than to be dismissed as a side miniseries.  (Also, between Gold, Blue, Red and Astonishing, two of which are biweekly, Marvel currently produces more than one X-Men title a week, so combining them into a single book would require some welcome restraint.)

This five-issue miniseries is written by Kelly Thompson, which is something of a catch for the X-office.  I’m less familiar with artist Pere Pérez; judging from his bibliography, he’s been around forever without making a huge impact on me.  But teamed with Frank D’Armata on colours, he’s done some very good work here; classic-looking superhero stuff, but with strong character beats and an ability to keep hordes of Rogues and Gambits from different points in their histories distinct.

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Wolverine’s return was the great climax of the Marvel Legacy one-shot.  And that was last September.

Now, over six months later, Marvel finally gets around to the follow-up.  Yes, I gather there’s been some “where’s Wolverine” pages at the back of various comics, but they don’t make it into any of the digital editions, presumably because Marvel are classing them as glorified house ads.  Rightly so, by all accounts.  But with Hunt for Wolverine, Charles Soule – who killed off Wolverine in the first place – does the set-up work for a bunch of parallel miniseries that are going to bring him back again.

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Have I mentioned – I think I may have done once or twice – that I didn’t greatly care for Axis?  You remember Axis.  It was the crossover back in 2014 where people had their moral compass “inverted” so goodies became baddies and vice versa.  And that’s fine as a bit of short-term gimmickry, but Marvel decided to leave some of the characters like that permanently.

So four years later, Havok and Sabretooth are still kind-of-sort-of inverted.  They had a go at an ongoing series with an inverted Iron man too, but unless I’m very much mistaken, that one just kind of petered out without a proper resolution.

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I’m late with this one, but that’s what I get for trusting the solicitations, which insist that “Cruel & Unusual” is a three-parter.  It certainly seemed to have finished with issue #25, but you never know, do you?

So this is the prison story, which is a somewhat interesting idea.  If you’re going to plonk the X-Men in Central Park then one side effect of that should be that the team get to deal with the authorities a lot more directly than when they just hid out in upstate New York and tried not to get noticed.  So there’s some mileage in a story about the X-Men knowing they’re innocent, but recognising that the police have sensible reasons for arresting them, and deciding that they’d better play by the rules.  It’s not how the X-Men are used to working.

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