Inglorious X-Force #2 annotations
INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #2
“Hunter of Lost Souls”
Writer: Tim Seeley
Artist: Michael Sta. Maria
Colour artist: Romulo Fajardo Jr
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: X-Force (minus Ms Marvel) square off against… well, a thing in shadow with claws and stuff.
X-FORCE:
Cable. As explained last issue, he’s convinced that one of Archangel, Hellverine or Boom-Boom killed Kamala in last issue’s future timeline (though quite why he’s so convinced still isn’t clear). He’s certain that Kamala is the “last best hope for mutantkind” and is hoping to find a solution that doesn’t involve killing any of them. He seems to be hoping to find out not just who kills Kamala but why, and to be trying to influence the team to steer all three of them away from killing her.
He claims that Cyclops and Rogue don’t know about the Blasphemy Cartel’s anti-mutant weapon and that even if they did, they’d dither instead of doing anything about it. That seems a questionable claim for Cyclops in particular, but that’s what Cable claims. However, Cable also seems to know that if he frees Anielle from the Cartel (see below) then she’ll answer a question for him as a favour.
The X-Axis – 22 February 2026
Well, it’s late, and I’m behind schedule, so we’ll see if we can take these fairly quickly.
X-MEN #25. (Annotations here.) Ostensibly this is the X-Men hunting for Revelation, but they don’t really get far with it. So in practice it’s an issue of the X-Men beating up Fenris and their white supremacist pals, plus the reveal of O*N*E’s new leader and a back-up strip with Beast making contact with 3K. I’ve never found Fenris especially interesting – they basically exist to look smug and get beaten up – but hey, maybe in 2026 that’s a worthwhile role. It does ring a little odd, though, to bring in the Crimson Commando as the jingoistic new O*N*E commander and have him publicly condemn Nazis, even for show. Is this guy a Democrat? That aside, though, I don’t mind the idea of retooling the Crimson Commando into this role, even if it rather ignores the fact that he mellowed quickly from his first appearance. I have no basic problem with the idea of a mutant who thinks of himself as American first and foremost and sees everyone who decamped for Krakoa as a traitor to the nation; that seems like something you can do with. For the Beast back-up… well, the 3K/MMM wordplay isn’t really strong enough to work as a reveal, but I’m glad we’re getting to the point of having the two Beasts interact, and I’m pleased we’re not just doing it behind the team’s back.
UNCANNY X-MEN #24. (Annotations here.) What a weird arc. We’re doing fifties throwback with Marvel’s monster movie character and, quite separately, the Rawhide Kid, and what he’s doing in this story is anyone’s guess. It’s presumably tying together somehow, but I don’t find the Legion of Monsters particularly intriguing in themselves, and for the moment this feels more like a bunch of imported concepts that have no apparent connection to the X-Men. Since it’s Gail Simone, she gets the benefit of the doubt that it’ll come together in the end, but I’m kind of puzzled by it right now. Lovely art from David Marquez, of course, who seems to be enjoying the guests; any issue he’s drawing is always going to look good.
Wolverine #16 annotations
WOLVERINE vol 8 #16
“Cardiac Arrest”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Mike Henderson
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: Alpha Flight stand over a defeated Wolverine.
WOLVERINE: Department H’s device, designed to give him a heart attack when remotely activated, actually works. Quite why they needed biodata to create it isn’t clear – don’t Department H already have records of him? Maybe it got conveniently wiped somewhere along the line. Wolverine believes that this device can actually kill him, but the control unit gets destroyed before he finds out.
Mehta mentions a “special detention order” for Logan, and implies that she expects him to serve Canada. He still sees her as a basically decent person who’s too willing to follow orders; his instinct that she has reservations about them seems to be correct.
SUPPORTING CAST:
Silver Sable. She escapes when Alpha Flight have to break off to keep Vindicator in line. In the way of these things, she does much better against her more powerful opponent when she has time to prepare.
Uncanny X-Men #24 annotations
UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #24
“Where Monsters Dwell, part two”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: David Marquez
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Morbius, about to bite Jubilee.
THE X-MEN:
Rogue. We get a flashback to her watching old monster movies on TV as a kid; she says she finds the Legion of Monsters scary as a result, but also recognises that the X-Men are acting weirdly in this issue – Jubilee isn’t fighting back properly, at least at first, and the group allow themselves to fight separately instead of working as a team. So everyone’s behaviour (in the core team) should be taken with a degree of caution. Their opponents in the Legion of Monsters are out of character to carying degrees as well.
Wolverine. Rogue thinks he’s a bit more violent than usual here, though it’s not really outside normal parameters for him – more a slight throwback to earlier days. An attack on his carotid artery can cause him to bleed out enough to remove him from the fight temporarily. Somehow – presumably because of the bite – he apparently gets turned into a werewolf.
X-Men vol 7 #25
X-MEN vol 7 #25
“Involved Again”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Tony Daniel
Inker: Mark Morales
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: The new leader of O*N*E in silhouette, with the X-Men viewed through sniper scopes behind him.
This is an anniversary issue (aside from the current numbering, it also has legacy number #325), which means we get a normal length story plus a five-page back-up strip.
THE X-MEN:
As usual, our field team is Cyclops, Kid Omega, Juggernaut, Psylocke, Temper and Magik. Cyclops’ top priority is for them to find Revelation and make sure that the “Age of Revelation” timeline is averted. (Beast points out that driving Revelation away from the X-Men may have made this more difficult, but on the other hand, it also creates a deviation from the history of the “Age of Revelation” timeline.)
In practice, they don’t get very far with their mission this time – on their way to Rio Verde, they run into Fenris and their white supremacist followers and have a fight with them instead. As you might expect, the X-Men take particular pleasure in defeating and humiliating these guys.
Daredevil Villains #72: Nuke
DAREDEVIL #232-233 (July & August 1986)
“God and Country” / “Armageddon”
Writer: Frank Miller
Artist: David Mazzuchelli
Colourist: Max Scheele
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Ralph Macchio
We’ve skipped a few more issues here, including the tail end of Denny O’Neil’s run. The villain in issue #225 is the Vulture, on loan from Amazing Spider-Man. Issue #226, O’Neil’s final issue, is a Gladiator story. And that brings us to issues #227-233: a seven-issue return for Frank Miller as writer, and the end of David Mazzuchelli’s run as artist. This is “Born Again”, one of the best known stories in Daredevil‘s history. The main villain is the Kingpin, and we’ve covered him before. But he brings in a hired gun for the final two issues, and Nuke is absolutely within our remit.
Before we get to Nuke, though, we need to take a look at what’s already happened. In part, that’s because “Born Again” is important – not just in the sense that it’s an acknowledged classic, but because it makes sweeping changes to the character and to the book’s status quo that will be important going forward. But we also need to look at it simply to figure out what Nuke is doing in this story at all.
The basic idea of “Born Again” is very simple. Although it’s only seven issues long, the story covers an unusually long time frame. By modern standards it’s extremely compressed, but it’s for the best, since the plot calls for long stretches of Matt doing very little and being wholly ineffective – told at a modern pace, it would be glacially depressing.
The X-Axis – 11 February 2026
Last week, five books. Next week, five books (including both X-Men titles and two Wolverine books). This week… well, Marvel would say two, but I don’t count Deadpool as an X-book for the same reason that I don’t count Alpha Flight. He’s his own thing, and there’s no reason to think that’s changing. So, no, I still don’t count Deadpool.
So.
CYCLOPS #1. By Alex Paknadel, Rogê Antônio, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo & Joe Caramagna. Always nice to see Alex Paknadel getting an outing beyond the Infinity Comics. Antônio did a few issues of Hellions back in the Krakoan era, and he worked on the previous Deadpool run. I like his work – it’s shiny and dynamic but also makes things like the Reavers’ assembly lab suitably bleak. And he gives Scott an impassive self-control that contrasts with everyone else.
There are good reasons why we don’t get many Cyclops solo stories – his defining characteristic is team leadership, and by definition a solo story takes him away from that. But it can work occasionally, as something that forces the character out of his comfort zone.
The X-Axis – 4 February 2026
UNCANNY X-MEN #23. (Annotations here.) The first part of “Where Monsters Dwell”, and it’s an odd thing. We’ve got an apparently-possessed Legion of Monsters showing up to claim New Orleans for monster-kind, which… hmm. I’ve never liked the Legion of Monsters. It’s not so much that magic doesn’t fit in the X-Men – the Dark Artery is already an established element of this book – I just find them a bit wacky. Not my thing. Maybe it plays off the subplot of Gambit’s corruption coming to a head? We’ll see. Alongside that, though, we’ve got a parallel bedtime story about the Rawhide Kid, of all characters. And he’s a different genre entirely. So are we doing something meta about pre-FF #1 Marvel? At this stage, I’m just kind of puzzled about where this is going, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing at the end of chapter 1. And it’s David Marquez on art, so it looks fantastic. A weird enough mishmash of disparate elements to make me curious, at least.
WOLVERINE #15. (Annotations here.) Wolverine and Silver Sable train the Morlocks and fight a bit, and then Department H show up with Alpha Flight in tow for the fight. As you might have picked up, I have a problem with this. Partly, it feels as if Agent Mehta has lurched far too quickly into being a stock hostile government agent, despite the way she was introduced – and she’s a vastly less interesting character as a result. But the whole current set-up of Alpha Flight is a problem.
Storm: Earth’s Mightiest Mutant #1 annotations
STORM: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST MUTANT #1
“Tea Ceremonies, Masquerades and Funerals”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Federica Mancin
Colour artist: Java Tartaglia
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Storm carrying two swords of lightning.
This is a five-issue miniseries, but it’s explicitly the final part of the story from the previous Storm ongoing, so I’m going to treat it as the last part of that.
STORM:
I don’t normally do plot synopses in these posts. But, like the previous volume, this issue jumps about in time quite a bit, and it isn’t especially easy to follow as a result. A lot of that, I think, is actually an art or colouring problem. There’s a basically straightforward narrative here, and the later scenes have flashbacks that fill in the earlier scenes. But the art doesn’t adequately signal a distinction between the main scene and the flashbacks – sometimes the flashbacks have different colour panel borders than the rest of the page, but it’s not especially noticeable and it isn’t even consistent from scene to scene.
So, with that in mind, here’s what actually happened. I’ll use the story page numbers for this purpose.
Wolverine #15 annotations
WOLVERINE vol 8 #15
“Alpha Flight”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Mike Henderson
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: Wolverine, surrounded by headshots of the members of Alpha Flight. Given the signature (“Panosian with respect to Byrne”), I assume it’s a homage, but I can’t place it. (As pointed out in the comments, it’s Alpha Flight vol 1 #12.)
WOLVERINE:
He’s continuing to train the Morlocks and bond/flirt with Silver Sable. The main difference between the two seems to be that she has a “life’s too short” worldview; his extended lifespan doesn’t fit that approach, but she may not be picking up on that. Sable claims to be impressed by his training techniques, saying that he’s done much better with the Morlocks than she ever did – of course, he has much more experience in training complete rookies who’d rather be noncombatants.
SUPPORTING CAST:
Silver Sable. She’s also stuck around to train the Morlocks (which is what she’s being paid for, after all), and seems keen to liven things by sparring and flirting with Wolverine.
