X-MEN #27. (Annotations here.) Part 2 of “Danger Room” is an issue devoted to introducing the members of Maxine Danger’s think tank – the X-Men themselves don’t get that much to do, since a lot of the issue is flashbacks setting up their back story and recruitment. They’re unusual villains to get so much time, since none of them actually has any particular interest in the X-Men or even in mutants in general – they’re just psychos who have been enlisted by Maxine Danger, who herself doesn’t actually have an obvious interest in the X-Men beyond charging for her services. I’m in two minds about this arc, right now – they all get a nice enough introduction, and Diaz’s art gives them a neat contrast with Maxine’s lunatic office manager. Colton and Jackson are rather similar characters, too, though I do like the other two being (likely) delusional killers who are convinced that they’re Skrulls trapped in human form. But as an X-Men story it does feel at the moment like we’re just chucking random stuff at the team for them to fight. Still, Jed MacKay gets the benefit of doubt that this is heading somewhere more than that, since it wouldn’t be his style.

CYCLOPS #2. By Alex Paknadel, Rogê Antônio, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo & Joe Caramagna. Well, this is fun. Sure, having Cyclops lose his visor and have to work around his uncontrollable powers is a well established routine, but it’s one we haven’t done in a good long while, and Paknadel and Antônio do it rather well. The plot may hinge on a massive coincidence of Cyclops stumbling upon the new Reavers’ scheme, but now that we’re here, we’ve got an escaped mutant who was never that keen on Krakoa and isn’t immediately in awe of Scott, which gives him someone to win over. Mostly, though, we’ve got the new Reavers squabbling among themselves as Donald Pierce tries to keep them all in line, and they’re turning out to be quite entertaining. We’re not dealing with professional soldiers any more, just wide-eyed cultists who’ve signed up for dubious cyborg conversion. They’ve got the equipment but they have no real idea what they’re doing, and Pierce seems to be making do with a bunch of underlings who have been powered up to the point where they can at least shove some non-combatants about. Paknadel gives him a sort of weary disdain that somehow feels a bit more developed to me than he has in a while. It’s a good take on the character.

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X-MEN UNITED #1. (Annotations here.) Well. I liked Exceptional X-Men, even if it did have a languid approach to pacing, and even if it did have a rather handwavy approach to the plot making sense. This is obviously the successor to that book, and continues to give prominence to the Exceptional cast, but it’s an odd series. The premise is to set up a school and (perhaps more significantly in the grand scheme of things) a meeting place where the disparate parts of the X-books can interact. But it’s not exactly a school because it’s training grown adults too. And because it has to be the successor to Exceptional, those characters can’t just fade into the background and instead have to be given a senior role… which might make sense if everyone else was a rookie, but seems downright weird when you’re using long running background characters like Dryad and Wolf Cub. Exceptional ran for thirteen issues! Wolf Cub’s a nonentity, but he’s still been around for over twenty years!

The concept of Graymatter Lane doesn’t come across either. It shouldn’t be that hard just to explain directly whether people are physically travelling to this space or whether it’s some sort of psychic conference call. It shouldn’t take me multiple readings to figure out something that basic about the core premise. It seems to be a physical space, but other dialogue doesn’t really fit with that answer, so… how hard would it have been to spend a few panels just explaining the premise directly? It’s needlessly confusing. And the art doesn’t really take advantage of the visual showcase opportunities either. It’s fine but it’s nothing exceptional. If this is some sort of psychic dreamscape then it ought to be possible to go nuts, and this doesn’t.

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X-MEN #26. (Annotations here.) Part 1 of “Danger Room”, which seems to be basically O*N*E sending Beyond after the X-Men. Which isn’t all that interesting as a high concept, but Jed MacKay adds more to it by picking up the thread of Psylocke and Greycrow’s relationship now that Psylocke has been cancelled, and gives us a lovely little subplot of Glob Herman and his fruit stall. The splash page of the sun setting over Merle is beautiful, and much more effective than actually showing the gunman firing on Glob. (It also leaves open the question of whether he missed, though it’d feel a bit anticlimactic if he did.) But Netho Diaz really does do some nice stallholding scenes. For whatever reason, Kid Omega doesn’t go on any of these missions – is this going to be the “Quentin, Ben and Jennifer save the day” arc? I’m still not especially interested in putting the X-Men against the Beyond Corporation, certainly the Amazing Spider-Man version where they’re basically just an evil conglomerate with some weirder than usual technology, but there are a lot of other things here adding to that.

WOLVERINE #17. (Annotations here.) More of the New Morlocks, and this feels a little bit as if we’re marking time until the Adamantine get here. The New Morlocks finally show up in enough numbers to feel like some sort of community, which really should have happened a couple of issues back, but the actual plot here is some sort of insect parasite attacking one of the kids because… well, because he was passing, I guess? I suppose it might play into something later, but it’s not presented that way, and just feels like an arbitrary event to spin things out. I don’t really get the point.

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