As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

X-MEN vol 6 #11
“A Busted Hand”
Writer: Gerry Duggaan
Artist: Pepe Larraz
Colourist: Marte Gracia
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Jordan D White

COVER / PAGE 1. The female X-Men standing over defeated thugs from Gameworld. They’re wearing their Hellfire Gala costumes from last year.

PAGE 2. Opening quote. At the end of last issue, Gambit put Rogue in touch with Rocket, to get information about Gameworld (where Rocket happened to be anyway). Rocket clearly doesn’t fancy Gameworld’s chances now that the X-Men are coming.

PAGES 3-4. Flashback: Mojo steers Gameworld towards Earth.

Mojo. The last time we saw Mojo was in X-Factor #9, when a group led by Magik forced him to put a stop to slavery and mutant exploitation. That issue left him still notionally in charge, albeit under a forced pact. (“You’re partners with Krakoa now. Sign the #$%& dotted line.”) However, this flashback could easily take place before that, because X-Factor #9 was shortly before the Hellfire Gala, and Mojo is setting in train a plan which will become apparent shortly afterwards (in issue #1).

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As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

MARAUDERS vol 2 #2
“Extinction Agenda, part 2”
Writer: Steve Orlando
Artist: Eleonora Carlini
Colourist: Matt Milla
Letterers: Ariana Maher & Clayton Cowles
Editor: Jordan D White

COVER / PAGE 1: Erik the Red and Cassandra Nova… fighting psychically, I guess? Cassandra is drawn with two superimposed faces.

PAGE 2. Lockheed finds a pile of bodies.

Or rather, what looks to be a single body made up of other bodies.

Lockheed is traditionally Kate’s pet/sidekick, but he didn’t appear in the previous issue and I don’t think he was mentioned.

The Order of X are presumably the owners of the church building that he’s exploring, given the illuminated “X” sign outside and the “X” on display in place of an altar. They’re a mutant-worshipping cult who emerged in the aftermath of Professor X announcing the creation of Krakoa in House of X #1; it’s been suggested in some stories that they may have been damaged in some way by the Professor’s worldwide telepathic message, and at the very least it had a big impact on them.

PAGES 3-4. Delphos briefs Xandra.

Delphos identifies her order as the “Nobles of the Kin Crimson”. Their function is apparently to suppress various events from Shi’ar history which, for one reason or another, are deemed too damaging to become public knowledge; we’ll come back to that. Her claim that the Order have been recognised by previous regimes seems to be confirmed by Gladiator, who’s been there all along; Xandra is a relative newcomer to the Shi’ar, raised elsewhere, which presumably explains why she doesn’t share everyone else’s cultural acceptance of the Kin Crimson. (That raises the question of what Vulcan knows about them from his own time as Shi’ar Emperor, but he wasn’t there long, so maybe it never came up. Then again, Vulcan’s back story involves him being assigned as a slave of Eric the Red before he escaped to Moira, so he might know quite a lot.)

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As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

GIANT-SIZE X-MEN: THUNDERBIRD #1
“And When There Was One”
Writers: Steve Orlando & Nyla Rose
Penciller: David Cutler
Inker: José Marzan Jr & Roberto Poggi
Colourist: Irma Kniivila
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Sarah Brunstad

COVER / PAGE 1: Well, that’s Thunderbird – in his recognisable 1970s costume, rather than the one he debuts in this issue.

That caption in the bottom right hand corner must be gunning for some sort of prize for the least prominent promotion of a celebrity co-writer.

PAGE 2. Flashback: John Proudstar is resurrected.

This is a scene from X-Men: The Trial of Magneto #5. John Proudstar is the first person to be resurrected through the Scarlet Witch’s “Waiting Room”, which magically extended resurrection to mutants who had died before Cerebro started keeping back-up copies.

PAGE 3. John Proudstar walks home.

Nice establishing shot with him dwarfed by the landscape.

PAGE 4. Recap and credits. The small print just says “Thunderbird” and “Krakoa.”

PAGES 5-6. John reflects on his situation.

“I was the first mutant to die for Xavier.” In X-Men vol 1 #95, part of his second published adventure. If you’re being technical about it, he’s not actually the first. The Changeling died in X-Men vol 1 #42 while impersonating Professor X (as revealed in issue #65), though he was terminally ill anyway. And per X-Men: Deadly Genesis, Petra and Sway both died on Krakoa.

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As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

SABRETOOTH vol 4 #3
“Whisper Campaign”
Writer: Victor LaValle
Artist: Leonard Kirk
Colourist: Rain Beredo
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Jordan White

COVER / PAGE 1: Sabretooth stands watch, whiel his fellow Pit inmates are entangled in Krakoan vines. Nekra seems to be miscoloured.

PAGE 2. A quote from Thomas Paine (1737-1809). It’s from The Rights of Man (1791); in the original context, it was one of Paine’s arguments against the House of Lords, but obviously the point is broader than that. In the context of Krakoa, the obvious target would be the Quiet Council.

PAGES 3-5. Melter’s flashback.

Melter kills his parents. This is a scene from Dark Reign: Young Avengers #4; the panel shown here is a direct copy of a panel from the original flashback. In the full version, young Chris’s powers manifest while he’s enthusiastically telling his loving parents about his school day, and it’s very clear that he kills them by accident. They seem like a conventional middle class family.

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As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

KNIGHTS OF X #1
“Hated and Feared”
Writer: Tini Howard
Artist: Bob Quinn
Colourist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Ariana Maher

KNIGHTS OF X. This is the relaunch of Excalibur vol 4; to all intents and purposes, this issue is Excalibur #27. Naturally, it’s meant to be a jumping on point, and this issue puts a lot of effort into catching new readers up on the plot.

COVER / PAGE 1. The eight core members of Captain Britain’s questing party – running clockwise from the Captain herself, the others are Rictor, Shatterstar, Gambit, Shogo, Prestige, Meggan and Bei. The book in front of Betsy is the one that Roma gives her on pages 12-13.

PAGES 2-3. Furies attack the village of Jackdaw’s Nest.

The narrator is dutifully recapping the plot of Excalibur, where Merlyn had seized control of Otherworld and was trying to root out mutants. Note that while we’re in Otherworld, the narrator now has a different font and mock-parchment captions, distancing the book from the look of other X-titles. Page 20 seems to indicate that the narrator is telling the story set out the X-marked book that Roma gives to Betsy later on.

Jackdaw’s Nest. We saw this village previously in Excalibur #19, when Betsy and Kwannon passed through it. It seems to be the home town of Jackdaw, the sidekick from early 80s Captain Britain comics, but nothing really turns on that.

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As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

WOLVERINE vol 7 #20
“Trigger Warning”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Adam Kubert
Colourists: Frank Martin & Dijjo Lima
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mask Basso

COVER / PAGE 1: Wolverine stands over a bunch of destroyed robots, while Deadpool takes a selfie in the background.

PAGES 2-5. Wolverine stops a runaway truck full of explosives.

This opening action scene is here as much as anything to get Wolverine into the book, while Deadpool sets about his narration. I love the ornate page layouts, which are remarkably clear.

Note that the first of Wolverine’s teams that Deadpool mentions is X-Force, which wouldn’t be most people’s choice. But it’s the one Deadpool is preoccupied with since they were teammates on a version of X-Force before. We’ll come back to that.

Deadpool is sort of correct that Wolverine never really seems to want to be on a team – at the very least he regularly affects not to, and feels ambivalent about his position on a superhero type group. Of course, with the X-Men and Alpha Flight that was balanced out by his sense that they were his family. X-Force raise slightly different issues because they were a black ops group. In the earliest stories about Wolverine’s version of X-Force, from 2008, Wolverine very definitely doesn’t want to be in the team – the idea is that he’s always seen himself as the one who does the nasty things so that his more heroic teammates don’t have to, and so bringing other characters into that orbit is something he’s quite unhappy about.

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As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

X-MEN vol 6 #10
“Sisterhood of the Metal Bones”
Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artist: Javier Pina
Colourist: Marte Gracia
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Jordan White

COVER / PAGE 1: Wolverine (Laura) faces off against someone clawed. Anyone who’s been reading the X-books for a while will recognise her as Lady Deathstrike without too much trouble.

PAGE 2. Flashback: Wolverine is resurrected.

This page is plugging what seems likely to be a continuity error in issue #5, where Laura was shown as having a complete metal skeleton (as opposed to just metal claws). In issue #8, she said that this changed “after returning from the Vault”, so this is apparently an expanded version of the resurrection that we saw at the end of X-Men vol 5 #19. If so, Synch and Cyclops should both be here too, but let’s assume they’re out of shot.

The dialogue seems to confirm that Proteus is the member of the Five responsible for resurrecting people complete with their biological implants – which makes sense, since he’s the only one of the group who could logically do that.

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As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

X-FORCE ANNUAL vol 3 #1
“Lab Work”
Writer: Nadia Shammas
Artist: Rafael Pimentel
Colourist: Carlos Lopez
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso

X-FORCE ANNUAL. This is the third X-Force Annual #1. The others were in 1992 and 2010. There was also an unnumbered annual in 1999.

This issue seems to take place between X-Force #26-27.

COVER / PAGE 1. Wolverine, Domino and Kid Omega versus Orchis’s Sentinels.

PAGE 2. Sage has doubts about the Beast, and calls Emma Frost.

As we’ll find out later, the Beast has sent the X-Force field team (Wolverine, Domino and Kid Omega) on a mission to retrieve a shipment stolen by Orchis from Hellfire Trading. For reasons which will become apparent as the story goes on, Sage is rightly sceptical about this whole thing, and suspects a trap, but the Beast is insistent. This story doubtless contributes to the breakdown in Sage and Beast’s relationship seen in X-Force #27.

Erta Ale is a volcano in Ethiopia. It’s a rare example of a volcano which actually has a lake of lava; not only that, it’s had one since 1906.

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As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

X-FORCE vol 6 #26
“From Cradle to Grave”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Robert Gill
Colourist: Guru-eFX
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER / PAGE 1: X-Force battle the possessed Forge.

PAGES 2-3. Wolverine reflects on recent events.

As the footnote says, Wolverine is referring to the X Lives of Wolverine miniseries, in which Professor X and Jean Grey used Cerebro to transport Wolverine’s consciousness back in time so that he could battle Omega Red at various points in history, and prevent him from altering history by either murdering Professor X or preventing him from being born.

Wolverine claims that “I risked everything for Krakoa. Not just my life, but the timeline.” That’s a bit of a stretch, since Wolverine’s life is at risk in almost every story (to the extent that he’s killable at all), and the whole plot was that if he didn’t go back, the timeline was going to be irreparably altered anyway. Perhaps what he means is that the events of X Lives risked his life in the sense of destabilising his own history, but if so, that’s not something that really came across on the page as being at stake.

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