X-Men #14 annotations
X-MEN vol 7 #14
“Search and Rescue”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Ryan Stegman
Inkers: Ryan Stegman & JP Mayer
Colourist: Marte Gracia
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE X-MEN
Cyclops. As in issue #1, he’s keen to have good relations with the town, and seems to trust Chief Robbins anyway – he offers the X-Men’s help to her before she’s explained what the issue is. He asks her to call him Scott.
Kid Omega. He doesn’t seem terribly worked up about Piper going missing, though he takes the task of searching for her seriously enough. He’s more concerned about Idie’s reaction and tries to make supportive noises about how it’ll all be fine, though he acknowledges that he isn’t good at this. Then he gets shot out of the sky and presumably spends the rest of the issue unconscious.
Charts – 28 March 2025
After a busy chart last week, we’re back to another virtually dead week for new entries – though some of last week’s newcomers are heading up the chart.
Two weeks. Streaming is up by about a quarter from last week, and it has a massive 80% lead over the number two single (the previous number one, “Pink Pony Club”), so this is a big hit. There’s spillover interest in his other singles too: “Carry You Home” and “Burning Down” reached new peaks last week at 20 and 28, but now climb to 10 and 23 respectively.
“Ordinary” is still making slow headway in Warren’s native USA, but it’s reached number one in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and the Netherlands.
26. Leon Thomas – “Mutt”
Debut hit. This is the title track from his second album, and it’s been out for six months. It’s been climbing from the lower reaches for a month, but a remix with Chris Brown seems to be responsible for kicking it into the top 40.
The X-Axis – w/c 24 March 2025
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #15. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. For the most part I’ve liked Paknadel and Sevy’s Infinity Comics stories, but this arc feels like it’s going back over the same territory as their previous arc. I can kind of see the appeal right now of having Americans cast the mutants returning from Krakoa as immigrants – yes, it undercuts X-Men #35 for there to be that many of them, but okay, we’ll run with it for the purposes of the current stories. This sort of believable grassroots bigotry was the subject of the first arc and worked pretty well there. But it feels like we’re just repeating that idea rather than developing the theme here.
X-MANHUNT OMEGA. (Annotations here.) Well, that’s two crossovers under the current editorial office, and neither of them has exactly been great. They’re not catastrophic or anything, but at best they feel like a distraction that doesn’t play to the books’ strengths. Part of that is simply that the post-Krakoa X-books have opted to avoid a unifying theme in favour of going for a diaspora with a wide range of approaches, and that results in a bunch of comics that don’t particularly want to be yoked together into a single plot. Part of it’s just an inherent feature of old-school crossovers – Marvel do them because they move the needle, not because they make the books better.
Laura Kinney: Wolverine #4 annotations
LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #4
“Brother in Arms, part 1”
Writer: Erica Schultz
Artist: Giada Belviso
Colour artist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
This one won’t take us long.
WOLVERINE
Bucky claims to be enlisting her help because he needs an “old-school tracker” to locate Henrick Schneider. She doesn’t believe this is the whole story but doesn’t seem to press him on it. She seems to be happy enough to go along for the sake of the road trip and the chance to go after a Nazi mad scientist. Bucky specifically sells to her the fact that Schneider tortured mutants.
Naturally enough, she sees Bucky as “not so different from me”, as they’re both would-be heroes trying to escape a past when they were used as weapons. This was also the theme with Elektra, the guest star in the previous arc.
She’s surprised to find that the unnamed mutant they rescue in Red Oak wanted to keep it secret that he was a mutant, and has to remind herself that not all mutants are “ready to be out” (to be fair, there weren’t many closeted mutants on Krakoa, nor is she meeting many in NYX).
Uncanny X-Men #12 annotations
UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #12
“Some Kinda Way”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Gavin Guidry
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE X-MEN
Gambit. This is a self-contained spotlight issue for him.
The flashbacks to his childhood take place, according to him, at a time when he “wasn’t quite wild yet, not quite feral”. He’s been adopted by Jean-Luc LeBeau at this point, but hasn’t yet been fully accepted into the Thieves Guild. If we’re going by the account of his early life in Gambit #1 (1999), this almost certainly means that he’s ten. According to that story, Remy was always seen as significant in New Orleans Guilds circles because of his strange eyes, and Jean-Luc had been keeping an eye on him throughout his life, but wasn’t able to take him in earlier due to guild politics. In the years running up to this, he’s been a member of a street gang called Fagan’s Mob, learned to fight and pick pockets, and already befriended Bella Donna Boudreaux. Everything here is basically consistent with that.
Remy’s powers are apparently starting to manifest at this point. He’s promised to stay out of trouble but winds up getting into a fight with some other Assassins Guild family members, which the Vig gets him out of, leaving him in debt. (See below.) These events also lead to him meeting Marcus St Juniors for the first time, while in hiding from the Assassins Guild. It turns out that the whole thing was engineered by the Vig, and this story is basically Gambit standing up to him when he tries to get back into Gambit’s life.
X-Manhunt Omega annotations
X-MANHUNT OMEGA
“X-Manhunt Finale: Dreams End”
Writers: Murewa Ayodele & Gail Simone
Artists: Gleb Melnikov, Federica Mancin & Edni Balám
Colour artist: Brian Reber
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
This double-sized one-shot is the final part of the “X-Manhunt” crossover. For annotation purposes, I’m going to treat it as an X-Men special.
X-MEN
Cyclops. When trying to reconcile with Rogue in a flashback set after “Raid on Graymalkin”, he makes an optimistic case for the post-Krakoan diaspora as offering a range of different mutant dreams; he seems to be rationalising Krakoa as a dream that went wrong because it was one-size-fits-all.
Nonetheless, he insists that Professor X has to be kept in prison. His official argument is that Xavier is worth sacrificing to preserve deals with the US government (which, to be fair, was Professor X’s stated reason for handing himself in to the authorities in the first place), but he seems to believe that Professor X deserves to be there for the atrocities he committed in House of X, and he resents the trauma that Professor X has inflicted on him over the years. He doesn’t know that the crew of the Agnew were simulacra, something which seems to surprise Professor X (who, on one reading of the original scene, was trying to heavily hint to Scott that all was not as it seemed). Professor X suggests that Cyclops is caught between hating him and not wanting him to leave.
Charts – 21 March 2025
It’s a busy week for once! And this wasn’t in the script…
1. Alex Warren – “Ordinary”
This entered at number 7 five weeks ago, dropped out of the top 10 in its second week, and has been climbing ever since. It’s his first UK number 1; the track has also been a number 1 in several European countries. He has two other tracks on the chart: “Carry You Home”, which enters the top 20 for the first time (having first charted last September, though it went away for a while); and “Burning Down”, which climbs to a new peak of 28 (it first charted briefly in October and re-entered in February).
The X-Axis – w/c 17 March 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #14. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Well, this is pretty much a second chapter hitting much the same beats as the first. Paige is staying with Sean in Ireland but she can’t get away from anti-mutant sentiment; Angelo is working on a construction site and outclassed human workers are annoyed. It moves things on a little bit, by trying to make Sean simultaneously a protective father to Paige and a badass to the villagers, and by having Paige try to use her powers to live as a different person at the end, but to be honest most of the issue feels like it’s covering quite familiar ground.
X-FORCE #9. (Annotations here.) So the June solicitations are out and X-Factor is indeed finished. Which means that this seven-part crossover runs through the penultimate issues of three cancelled books. It’s hard to believe that this was the best way of doing things, though admittedly X-Factor and NYX more or less made it work. X-Force, though, finds itself having to interrupt a fight scene in progress so that a character who isn’t technically on the team can help Professor X borrow a spaceship. As an issue of X-Force it’s a distraction, which could have been used to resolve the book’s actual story.
Magik #3 annotations
MAGIK vol 3 #3
“Pacts”
Writer: Ashley Allen
Artist: Germán Peralta
Colour artist: Arthur Hesli
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Darren Shan
MAGIK
While in Liminal’s domain, she can’t teleport and can only use simple magic. This seems to still be enough for her to put up a fight against him, but he gets back in control quickly enough that he may just be stringing her along. Liminal claims her magic is impaired in his domain because it’s so closely linked with him (and that he’d be in the same position in Limbo, which is equally closely tied to her) – but he also suggests that her bigger issue is a refusal to access Darkchild’s power.
She hates being trapped in Liminal’s domain, evidently because it reminds her of her origin story – something that Liminal goes out of his way to play up with “constructs” of characters from the first Magik miniseries. Belasco seems to particularly disturb her.
Psylocke #5 annotations
PSYLOCKE vol 2 #5
“Hostile Hospitality”
Writer: Alyssa Wong
Artists: Vincenzo Carratù with Moisés Hidalgo
Colour artist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Darren Shan
PSYLOCKE
She takes particular exception to being treated as an object to be preserved, which brings to mind her upbringing with the Hand. She thinks that the Hand regarded her not merely as a weapon but as “something to be discarded when it’s outlived its use” – the accompanying flashback in fact shows childhood friend Mitsuki being murdered in order to motivate Kwannon, but evidently she sees no real difference between the two. At least in the flashback, she feels guilty for failing to protect her best friend.
She declares that she’s spent too long hiding from her past and trying to “bury” what happened to her in order to build a new future. There’s at least a suggestion that this is why she’s chosen to take on Betsy’s Psylocke name and role instead of focussing on her own identity. The other moral that she draws from the story is that the Taxonomist’s traumatic past is not an excuse for his current behaviour, with obvious parallels to herself.
