X-MEN #29. (Annotations here.) Part 4 of “Danger Room”, and naturally it’s the turning point where the X-Men start fighting back. On the whole, I prefer this book when it’s doing shorter stories – this arc has most in common with the 3K attack on the Factory in issues #14-18, which also felt like it dragged on a bit. Five issues for what in plot terms is an extended fight seems a bit much. But there’s still plenty to like in here – Jed MacKay picks up the Psylocke/Greycrow relationship well, and Netho Diaz does a lovely splash page of the laser being bent around the Marauder. Quentin and Idie screwing up the X-Men’s relationship with the town because they can’t resist walking into a trap even when it’s been pointed out to them is a nice bit too. But I’m not sure Beyond themselves are interesting enough to merit five issues of this.

STORM: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST MUTANT #4. (Annotations here.) Well, this is as berserk as ever. But for the life of me I don’t see how this is going to get to any sort of satisfying resolution with one issue to go. The actual invasion of Earth hasn’t happened yet, and much of the issue is devoted to Bogey negotiating with Hela to even try to be in a position to make the invasion happen. I’m also completely lost about who she’s supposed to be working for – wasn’t the plot that she was trying to free Susanoo? Isn’t he a thunder god? So why is she now saying that her people are older than the gods? Meanwhile, Storm seems to have been dragged away from the main storyline entirely by a weird meta subplot – or to be fair, perhaps that’s the point, and the whole idea is to find a solution that bodyswerves the apparent plot even happening. But… is that interesting? Is it a Storm story, really? Ostensibly the big event in this issue is meant to be the appearance of Storm’s daughter, but as it turns out to be just another alternate reality character who barely interacts with Storm before sending her home, I’m genuinely baffled as to why Ayodele thinks this is a big deal – at least in the story as published, as opposed to however many issues this was meant to take in his original pitch. It does have some very good art, and it would be no bad thing if more Marvel books swung for the fences like this, but it’s ultimately a bit of a mess.

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UNCANNY X-MEN #27. (Annotations here.) Well, this is a weird storyline. The Outliers are off in a version of early New Mutants, and a bunch of supposed New Mutants have shown up in their place. The first part had me a little worried that this story might be overestimating how much readers actually remember about the details of those early New Mutants stories, but this second part doesn’t really turn on any of that – which is for the best. It’s more of a loose parallel between the Outliers and the original rookie class, with increasingly surreal dream-like elements creeping in along the edges. The organic Sentinels are particularly nightmarish, and a great riff on the original design. Luciano Vecchio’s art really captures the feel of how the original New Mutants looked in their early issues, too. I’m not quite so sure what Devil Dinosaur and Moon Boy robots are doing in here – the Rawhide Kid stuff didn’t really come to anything, after all – but for the moment I’m assuming that all of this is somehow to do with Inmate X trying to escape Graymalkin as the ailing Scurvy is no longer able to contain him. Presumably that’s why the story opens with Corina and Scurvy’s otherwise unrelated scene. I’m not a huge fan of the Graymalkin plot in general, but I do like their relationship as a low-key background development, and it’s nicely handled here to play into the general sense of Ellis trying to hold on to her persona with disaster looming for her on the horizon.

GENERATION X-23 #3. (Annotations here.) You can’t look past the fact that this is a book which opens with an obituary for its own artist, or at least the artist of the first third of the story. Jacopo Camagni does get to go out on a high, though, with his last pages including a striking sequence in X-80’s bedroom, minimally furnished, but covered in Post-it notes swirling to the ceiling. The framing of X-92 as they gently draw Laura’s attention to the things she’s missing is really nice, as if the character fades into the background so much that the panels don’t even keep them in shot. The rest of the issue is completed by Marco Renna, and the transition is actually pretty smooth – he does a rather good X-Infinite in particular, switching from passive-aggressive casualness to fighting back.

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WOLVERINE #19. (Annotations here.) The Adamantine storyline, which has been going since issue #1, seems to be building to some sort of a conclusion. I certainly hope it is, because at this point it’s taxing my patience. When it started, I figured that Saladin Ahmed was doing something about how adamantium was a human imitation of the mythical adamantine, and perhaps some kind of Tower of Babel angle, which felt like it might work. But by this point we’re being told that the Adamantine is “the very idea of the Earth’s metal made alive and aware”, which has some sort of objection to “man’s creation, adamantium, which it calls false metal”. And, erm… what? What does any of that mean, and more importantly, what is any of it about?

What even is “the very idea of the Earth’s metal”? Metal as a naturally occurring phenomenon? Which is… what, ore? Meteorites? But it can’t be that, because the adamantine keeps going on about how it was used to forge weapons in the past – there’s meant to be some angle where this personification of weaponry has discovered from seeing Wolverine that a weapon can be self-animating. So the Adamantine is about war and weapons, then? But that’s not the same thing as metal. If the Adamantine is meant to personify “metal”, why is it so interested specifically in war? Why not farming tools and jewellery? And if it’s okay with metal as forged by humans, what’s its problem with adamantium? If the objection is simply that it’s a man-made metal, what makes adamantium different from steel? It just doesn’t hold together, either in terms of plot logic or in terms of theme. Again, what’s this story supposed to be about?

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