X-Men United #4 annotations
X-MEN UNITED #4
“Ancient Orc Oaken Arclight”
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Tiago Palma
Colour artist: Brian Reber
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Cyclops and Deathdream under attack from some sort of frost monster. Not a scene from the issue.
THE X-MEN:
Iceman. His solution to the tension between Scott and Emma in issues #1-2 is to get them to play what he describes as a specially tailored version of Ancient Orc Oaken Arclight. From the sound of it this would normally be a standard issue Dungeons & Dragons style RPG, but for this purpose. Iceman seems to be a fan, though god knows who he’s been playing it with in the past. Maybe there was a regular game on Krakoa.
Somehow, he’s actually convinced Scott and Emma to play along with this, and he’s roped in Rogue and Ben Liu to help out. Nobody else seems to be quite as keen on the actual game as him, but they do seem to be on board with it as a team building exercise, with varying degrees of reluctance. The game he’s designed seems pretty generic, but then he is doing it with rookie players. It’s clearly intended as a scenario to force Scott and Emma to work together, but it doesn’t get anywhere near his intended plot points before actual monsters show up to derail things.
Uncanny X-Men #30 annotations
UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #30
“Mars Needs Mutants”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Rogê Antônio
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Jubilee, Wolverine and Nightcrawler react to a B-movie-style alien invasion. The story title is presumably a reference to the 1968 TV movie Mars Needs Women.
THE X-MEN.
The previous issue ended with Rogue saying that she was planning to go on a journey to see someone who could help Gambit, and asking Monet and Quicksilver to run the X-Men in her absence. In fact, in this issue, Monet and Quicksilver are still sorting out the mess at Greymalkin Prison, so apparently not enough time has passed for anything to happen about this. Nonetheless, Rogue doesn’t appear in this issue.
Gambit. He takes Calico to the collectible store to buy a present for Jitter. It’s not spelled out here, but the pairings with the individual Outliers match the mentoring assignments from issue #9 (other than Nightcrawler, who ought to be with Jitter – he’s otherwise engaged, and she doesn’t appear much in this story). In this issue, Gambit seems to be behaving relatively normally – he argues with the store owner when he’s mean to Calico, but only goes beyond that when the man overreacts by threatening him with a baseball bat. He shows up at the dance in chaperone role, again seeming fairly normal.
The X-Axis – 10 June 2026
X-MEN #31. (Annotations here.) This is the first part of a new arc, as the X-Men’s Science Team – in other words, the supporting cast plus Kid Omega – investigate a weird gravitational anomaly in Canada, where chunks of mountain are floating around. In other words, we’re picking up on Schwartzchild, who was kicked off the 3K ship back in issue #24 and has apparently been lying unconscious in a ditch ever since. Given that Schwartzchild ends up as an X-Man in “Age of Revelation”, presumably we’re heading towards a face turn here, if the other 3K victims in the cast will tolerate having him around. While the floating chunks of rock make sure that there’s something to look at here, the bottom line is that this is a character issue for the supporting cast – the only villain is Schwartzchild, and he’s out cold. I like the idea of Beast trying to establish a non-combatant wing of the X-Men, particularly as he’s trying to set himself up in opposition to his counterpart from 3K, and it’s good to see the likes of Ben and Xorn get some development. A solid start to the new arc.
WOLVERINE #21. (Annotations here.) Sort of a downtime issue, with Nightcrawler dragging Wolverine to Waikiki for some relaxation. There’s a random fight with Titania and the Absorbing Man, who happen to be passing, and that’s pretty much it in terms of the issue’s plot. More broadly, it seems we’re doing a storyline where Wolverine’s healing factor isn’t working, and it’s hitting the broader theme of Wolverine bringing trouble with him which is sort of his own fault for rising to the bait. But all this feels quite familiar, and it’s a middling issue in terms of plot. Julius Ohta’s art is the strong spot here – he does give us a nice sense of Wolverine starting to relax, and then getting into self-pity at the end. And his fight scenes are pretty energetic. Overall, it’s fine.
Wolverine vol 8 #21
WOLVERINE vol 8 #21
“Broken”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Julius Ohta
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: Wolverine and Nightcrawler. Wolverine still has all his claws, presumably to avoid spoilers for the previous issue in the solicitations.
WOLVERINE:
In issue #19, he lost the adamantium on his right-hand claws and broke the claws themselves while fighting the Adamantine. As the issue starts, he’s back at home – Haven House from Uncanny X-Men, which hasn’t been mentioned up to this point – and still recuperating. He’s having nightmares about events from the series to date: Mastermind posing as his mother in issues #11-12, and losing Silver Sable after being rejected by the New Morlocks last issue. He’s moping about how he breaks nice things by being around them, and misses Sable more than he expected.
X-Men #31 annotations
X-MEN vol 7 #31
“Anomaly”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Tony S Daniel
Inker: Mark Morales
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: The X-Men’s Science Team in action. The cover gives the story title as “Anomaly, part 1”, but the credits page just has it as “Anomaly”.
THE X-MEN:
Aside from Kid Omega, the regular field team don’t appear in this issue – instead, it’s a story about the Science Team, comprising Beast, Magneto, Xorn, Animalia, Ben Liu and the aforementioned Kid Omega. For most purposes I class these guys as the supporting cast, but they’re clearly the stars of this issue.
The Beast. He describes himself as the team’s “provisional field leader”, so apparently they’re a new thing. We’re not told exactly what’s prompted that, but the previous arc saw Beast going on a rare field mission and saving the day by being the one person who tried to deal with Leviathan in a non-violent way. Possibly this has encouraged him to take a more active role generally in offering an alternative version of the X-Men. If so, he seems rather defensive about it, reminding his team of (mostly) non-combatants that they’re not a “paramilitary strike force”.
The X-Axis – 3 June 2026
UNCANNY X-MEN #29. (Annotations here.) The final part of “Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed”, and unless we’re coming back to some of this, I’m mostly confused. The Greymalkin prison storyline has never really worked, and it’s been one of the weakest strands of the post-Krakoan X-books, so I’m at least glad to see the back of it. Nor do I have a problem with Inmate X being a new character with a link to Corina Ellis (the foreshadowing was there), or with Ellis attempting a last minute face turn and being rebuffed. No, the problem with this arc is that about half of it is devoted to the Outliers/New Mutants material which doesn’t seem to tie in to the main plot in any way at all. It advances Mutina’s storyline, to be sure, but what was any of it about? I just don’t get it. Though it pales in comparison to…
STORM: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST MUTANT #5. (Annotations here.) Final issue of the run. It’s a blatant guillotine cancellation, despite having been solicited as a five-issue miniseries from the start, something which Ayodele only seems to have discovered when issue #1 was solicited. I don’t know what the lead-in times for this book are, but the series reads very much as if it reached for the emergency brake somewhere during issue #4, when the build-up to Storm’s “daughter” came to nothing and a scene set in her alternate timeline was compressed to a couple of pages. The final issue opts for attempting a thematic resolution and make a grand show of not resolving any of the actual plot on the grounds that we all know Storm wins somehow or other. To be fair, Ayodele does make an effort to tie his thematic resolution back to things that have happened over the course of the story. Still, the fact remains that it just stops, and with the best will in the world, this is the second time inside a year that I’ve read a guillotine cancellation issue from Marvel that played the meta card to get out of even going through the motions of resolving its storylines. (The other one was Astonishing Spider-Man Infinity Comic #36.) Sudden endings have always been a feature of superhero comics, and they’re never satisfying, but come on. More generally, the book’s ambition is laudable and always has been, and it’s a good thing that something so off kilter was able to exist in the current line, but it always felt like there were far too many ideas fighting for space at the best of times, coupled with frequently bemusing and confusing storytelling choices. But it swung for the fences, and you’ve got to at least respect that.
Storm: Earth’s Mightiest Mutant #5 annotations
STORM: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST MUTANT #5
“Reunited”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Federica Mancin
Colour artist: Java Tartaglia
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: That’s Storm in a swamp going to commune with “the ageless one”, in the opening scene.
This is the final issue of Storm: Earth’s Mighiest Mutant, though the complete run is 17 issues, as it’s essentially the same series as Storm vol 5. If you count the “Age of Revelation” tie-in Rogue Storm, it’s a 20-issue run.
I’m not going to do conventional annotations for this, since it shows every signs of being a guillotine cancellation where writer Murewa Ayodele has chosen to focus on resolving one key theme and leaving it at that.
In the previous issue, an alternate version of N’Daré banished Ororo to Earth-61391. That issue ends with a very abbreviated scene of Storm being rescued from local Sentinels by Furana, her daughter from that timeline. By the start of this issue, Storm is off in a swamp somewhere, hoping to commune with “the ageless one” in the hope of finding a way back home. This is presumably the same swamp where Storm landed in the previous issue; perhaps it’s the local version of the Nexus of All Realities (which is in a Florida swamp in the main Marvel Universe).
Uncanny X-Men #29 annotations
UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #29
“Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed, part four: A Prison and a Pyre”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Luciano Vecchio
Colour artist: Mattherw Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE X-MEN:
Rogue. She seems remarkably unfazed to learn that Gambit has grown dragon wings, and even continues to accept his (correct) assurances that the “Cannonball” she’s fighting is a fake and can safely be killed. Nonetheless, once the crisis is over, her top priority is to focus on helping him, and she plans to take a leave of absence from the team to get help for him.
Her plan for dealing with Greymalkin was to send in M undercover as a prisoner to gather evidence, which would be more effective at bringing down the operation in the long run than simply smashing up the building. Quicksilver has been acting as a courier to relay M’s messages. That goes some way to explaining how M was in better health than she ought to have been given the prison food, though it’s not really made clear how Quicksilver was getting in and out.
Daredevil Villains #80: Bullet
DAREDEVIL #250-251 (January/February 1988)
“Boom!” / “Save the Planet”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciller: John Romita Jr
Inker: Al Williamson
Colourist: Max Scheele
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Ralph Macchio
It’s taken over a year, but at long last Ann Nocenti is joined on the book by a regular penciller. John Romita Jr will be with us until issue #282, and this is where Nocenti’s run really kicks up a gear.
Romita was an established name by this point – he’d already had runs on Iron Man, Amazing Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Men. However, 1987 had seen him take a career detour to draw the first six issues of Star Brand. In a 2017 interview, Romita essentially says that this was an unhappy experience, that he was thinking of quitting comics, and that he was talked into taking the Daredevil assignment by an offer of more creative input. Some of what Romita says in that interview doesn’t seem quite right – he talks as if Ann Nocenti was also new to the book, and says that Al Williamson was hired at his request, when he’d been inking the book on and off for a while already. But Romita’s central point, that his run on Daredevil was where he really had the opportunity to come into his own as a creator, is hard to argue with.
The X-Axis – 29 May 2026
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.
