UNCANNY X-MEN ANNUAL #1. (Annotations here.) We effectively have two issues of Uncanny X-Men this week, as a result of this Annual slipping from its scheduled release date. Although there’s a present day segment with Wolverine and Jubilee, the main point of this story is to show us more of the group who were guarding Haven House in the 1920s (in the flashbacks to Henrietta’s arrival, in issues #15-16). The focus is Slaughter Freedman, the four-armed gunman who was pretty much a background figure in that story – though he seems to have been redesigned somewhat since then, as he’s now rather more heavily built and looks about 20 years older. Even if it doesn’t really fit with traditional continuity, I rather like the idea that there’s always been an underground community of mutants, and Slaughter himself is an engaging fellow. To the extent the design has been tweaked by Francesco Mortarino, I think it’s for the better; it does make the Regulators into a rather middle aged group, but I don’t particularly want them to feel lke proto-superheroes. Working Wolverine into the story feels like a gesture towards commercial reality more than something the story really needed, though – particularly when the story has to explain why we didn’t see him in issues #15-16 – but overall, I quite like this as an addition to the mythos. And hey, now we’ve got things in New Orleans to play with that aren’t the Guilds.

UNCANNY X-MEN #26. (Annotations here.) This is the first part of “Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed”, which takes us back to the Mutina storyline and also puts the focus back on the Outliers. Uncanny often feels like an Outliers title that happens to have some X-Men in the supporting cast, and this is one of those arcs – though that’s not something I have a problem with, as there’s far more territory to explore with the kids. We do have a subplot with Gambit talking about starting a family – and of course the whole premise of the two X-Men titles is that this one inherited the family aspect while Scott gets the militarism – and some progress with Kurt and Mackenzie’s romance, but the main point of this episode is to establish that the Outliers are trapped in some sort of dream where they’ve been cast as the New Mutants. Luciano Vecchio does a pretty solid job of echoing some of the scenes from Marvel Graphic Novel #4 but it does feel like Gail Simone is making some quite ambitious assumptions about how familiar people are with the original story. With Giant-Size X-Men #1 you can probably assume that a large chunk of the audience know that Peter saves Illyana from a runaway tractor and so forth. But Marvel Graphic Novel #4 never had the same iconic status, and I do wonder how many readers over 40 years down the line actually recognise references to Moira rescuing Wolfsbane, or Sunspot playing soccer. (It’s not even easy to find on Marvel Unlimited – for some reason it seems to be unavailable on the app, though you can find it on the desktop version filed under The New Mutants Graphic Novel.) Maybe it still works as long as you get the general idea that they’re being plugged into the New Mutants’ role, and it’ll probably become clearer as it goes on, but I can see a lot of readers being kind of baffled by this one.

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Well, another quiet week. The solicitations had the Uncanny X-Men Annual coming out too, but that’s slipped a week. So just the two books, then.

X-MEN #28. (Annotations here.) Three chapters in, this is feeling a bit less than the sum of its parts, to be honest. There’s plenty to enjoy here in the details. I particularly like the way Jed MacKay writes Quentin and Idie, with Quentin shouting all the rightful indignation, but Idie as the one who actually seems more quietly dangerous. Netho Diaz draws a great Maxine Danger, giving her a fabulously inappropriate cheerfulness – and the book ends with a lovely splash page of Psylocke having already taken out Beyond’s men in time for the inevitable fight back next issue. The Beast’s frustration at being expected to have a magical scientific answer for everything is a nice beat.

But at the same time, it’s a story where a bunch of villains hunt down the X-Men because they’ve been hired to hunt down the X-Men, and aside from the living ship thing, it pretty much boils down to gunmen and conventional weapons and so forth. And… uh… and? It’s a bit par for the course for the X-Men, and while the individual Danger Room members have potentially interesting hooks to them, they don’t actually have any particular connection with this book. It all feels a bit interchangeable at the macro level. Still, the details are good.

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