X-MEN #30. (Annotations here.) This is the fifth and final part of “Danger Room”. Why five issues? Well, it seems to be Marvel’s current standard length for trade paperback collections, up from four. And those four issue collections did look kind of flimsy. It’s under 100 pages, you know? But Jed MacKay’s X-Men tends to be at its best doing short and focussed stories, and “Danger Room” – which is fundamentally a romp in which some psychos try to take down the X-Men and fail because the X-Men show more heart than them – didn’t need to be five issues. It’s certainly good in parts. It’s nice to see Kid Omega’s radical side get an outing again; Greycrow is worth bringing into the regular cast now that the Psylocke solo title is over; I liked the idea of the two Danger Room members who think they’re Skrulls trapped in human form. (Or maybe they even are?) Still, it feels like less than the sum of its parts. The Beyond Corporation are kind of arbitrary as villains; the Danger Room members got big individual introductions but only one of them even gets any meaningful dialogue in the final chapter; the town-and-factory tension gets the mindwipe reset button. It’s fine, but it’s not a 5-issue premise, I think.

GENERATION X-23 #4. (Annotations here.) I have a few reservations about the pace of this opening arc as well – it’s another five-parter, naturally – but on the whole I think it’s working. The plot isn’t exactly breakneck, but there are a lot of new characters being introduced, and it’s giving them room to breathe. Okay, yes, X-73 and X-66 remain in the background relative to the others (that’s the two older girls), but X-92 is charming and Infinite is a good villain. Aside from the fact that he puts Laura in the position of defending a version of the Facility, Jody Houser has set up the reveal quite nicely – first you practically telegraph the bad guy, then you start trying to convince us that we’re jumping to conclusions and he’s just doing his best. So it’s a twist in plain sight, and it pulls that off. Marco Renna’s art is giving a ton of personality to Scout and X-92 in particular (and X-92 really needs it, since they’re the silent character and depends entirely on the art to sell their persona). That scorpion robot cyborg thing still makes for confusing fight scenes – I guess you could say that at least sells the chaos – but it’s a nice looking book all round. I’m enjoying this.

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X-MEN UNITED #3. (Annotations here.) Well, this isn’t working. There’s a whole load of problems here. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with retconning a mutant into Truth: Red, White and Blue – well, aside from the question of what mutants add to that story, I guess. I mean, it was about racism to start with, and making one of the victims randomly a mutant doesn’t actually add to that, and this doesn’t seem to be a story about intersectionality, and… actually, come to think of it, maybe it is just a dud idea even on that level. But it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with the supposed premise of X-Men United, so at the very least, it’s a mystifying choice for issues #2-3. If this is meant to be a rotating-cast team-up book with guests from across the line, it doesn’t work on that level; this is a Captain America story with the mutants who accompany him playing a mostly generic role. The plot mechanics are mystifying, which is starting to feel like a recurring problem in Eve Ewing’s stories – the first chunk of the issue is taken up with the away team being split into different time periods. But Vernon Weaver seems to perceive it as all part of the same scene even though he sees them separately – why, if he’s in different time periods? – and in the end none of it seems to matter. It’s just something to spin the story out a bit before everyone sits down for a conversation. And that story seems to be trying to go for a resolution of Weaver forgiving himself for killing someone in self-defence during the Truth experiments, but for that story to work we need some idea of what he’s actually been doing for the last eighty years – he can’t have spend the whole time moping in the family home, can he? Weaver’s emotional swings are so rapid that it’s hard to get any grip on him as a character, and… yeah, sorry, it’s a train wreck.

INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #5. (Annotations here.) There are a few odd calls in this book – I don’t know why Sinister is suddenly so worried about a villain who isn’t even on the planet and shows no signs of coming back, and a relationship between Warren and Tabitha seems a little questionable given that she started as one of the X-Factor students. But I quite like Tim Seeley’s attempt to redefine how the Archangel split personality thing works, presenting it as something akin to a possession, with Warren tending to take a back seat. There’s some thought here going into how the characters work. What’s more, it’s burning through its first storyline at a refreshing pace – the format of this book is that Cable thinks he’s identified the four mutants who’ll kill Kamala Khan in the future, and wants to rule them out in turn, but we’ve got through that entire exercise and it’s only issue #5. It is, admittedly, a rather vibes-based approach to detective work, but I’ll let that slide. I’m not sure how much this book is really about anything, and the art feels a bit rushed in the first half – Sinister’s headquarters is a very bland room – but it’s got energy and it has some interesting takes on its cast.

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