X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #123. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy & Yen Nitro. Another relatively quiet week, then. And this is a pace of X-output that I’d be very happy with. Anyway, over at X-Men Unlimited, the plot moves beyond simple punching into… well, um, stuff. We’re told that Orchis aren’t just kidnapping mutants on the reservation. They’re doing it everywhere. Well… yes, isn’t that the whole premise of Fall of X? Aren’t Orchis meant to be arresting every mutant in sight? I guess it’s the involvement of the Externals that’s supposed to be a hook, but the story never actually explains why we should care about them. They don’t seem to be doing anything materially different from what Orchis was doing anyway. It’s not like anyone’s been holding their breath all these years for a Crule and Gideon story. The reservation setting previously gave this some sort of focus, but now we’ve got Shatterstar, and El Aguila (a Spanish mutant superhero from Power Man and Iron Fist), and … Betsy is still active as Captain Britain, despite Orchis? What? And she’s doing media interviews? At this point, I’m just lost – I don’t understand at all what this story is trying to do.

X-FORCE #48. (Annotations here.) The Beast storyline kicks up a gear, and not in the way I expected. When they mentioned that Beast had erased all his back-ups after the period when he was a shiny happy bouncing character, it seemed pretty obvious that the end game was to resurrect him with the older personality. Then the next writer could do a story where Hank comes to terms with what he did, but no longer remembers and can’t even understand wanting to do. But instead, the bouncing Beast is brought back as a clone, and that’s a much more interesting way of doing it. I still suspect we’re going to wind up killing them both off and resurrecting them in one body, or something of that sort, but the idea of leaving Hank Classic as a copy actually feels like a better way of getting a viable Beast back into circulation – it’s less of a reset button because this Beast genuinely didn’t do anything from the last few years. I kind of hope they just stick with that. After all, they replaced Kraven the Hunter with a clone, didn’t they?

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X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #122. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche & Yen Nitro. Well, this is certainly a slimmed-down phase for the core X-titles, which is no bad thing in itself. This is the second part of the Thunderbird arc and… well, it’s mostly just random fighting, honestly. The Proudstar brothers assume that Crule is working with Orchis so they attack him. Crule is apparently there for his own reasons, which is something to do with stealing the refugee mutants himself, but there’s nothing to flesh that out. And if you want people to take Crule seriously, that does need some legwork, because nobody cared about this bozo even back in the early 90s. Nick Roche draws some nice punching, but it really is one-dimensional as a story.

X-MEN #30. (Annotations here.) Oh boy.

So issue #29 ends with a cliffhanger where the other X-Men get back from Latveria, find the base trashed and covered in blood, and Synch and Talon missing. The next issue caption says we’ll find out in this issue where they are. And… this issue has nothing to do with that at all, unless I’m missing something fundamental. After an opening scene with Scott (which is pretty good, and the best thing in the issue) it shifts to a completely unrelated story about how to distribute the cure to the killswitch that Orchis placed in Krakoan medicines… which I don’t think has been mentioned at all until now, but somehow involves Spider-Man and Norman Osborn. Aside from a couple of pages of subplot with Firestar, what we then get is Synch and Talon visiting the High Evolutionary – and the exercise of getting to him is compressed to a single page – to recover a device last mentioned in issue #3. The entire confrontation lasts four pages, and at the end it turns out that Talon died and Synch is keeping her alive in his mind.

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X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #121. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. Another quiet week, as Marvel are sensibly giving Fall and Rise a clear run with their first issues. But X-Men Unlimited moves ever onwards, and so this is the start of a new arc joining the Proudstar brothers on their reservation. Apparently, they’ve been taking in mutants all this time and nothing has come of it until now. Hmm. Okay, this is one of the books that’s running with the idea that Orchis are reasonably easy to avoid. I can’t help thinking this hasn’t been played very consistently between books, though.

Anyhow, this first issue is really just setting up the cast on the reservation and having a fight with some random Orchis guys who finally show up, until the actual plot gets going in the final panel. I’m glad of that last panel, because on a first read through it’s very much the stock Fall of X story, and there’s only so many times you can read it. What we’re actually getting, it seems, is something to do with the resurrection of the Externals after Selene got her hands on the External Gate over in Immortal X-Men. The story doesn’t really do anything by way of a hook for that beyond having one fairly obscure External show up in the last panel, though, so we’ll just have to see what happens when it gets going properly next issue.

RISE OF THE POWERS OF X #1. (Annotations here – revised now that the data pages in the digital edition have been fixed.) While Fall of the House of X is clearly meant to be the straightforward action book, Rise of the Powers of X is a more eccentric outing, continuing the Dominion storyline from Immortal X-Men. I have no idea how much of this would have been in Jonathan Hickman’s final act, but he spent enough time setting up the Dominion stuff in Powers of X that you figure it was surely meant to go somewhere; it makes sense as a way to keep raising the scale beyond Krakoa and Orchis, and there’s something kind of interesting in the way the machinations of one man wind up overshadowing everything else.

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