EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #7
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Carmen Carnero
Colour artist: Nolan Woodard
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort

This isssue is bannered as an “X-Manhunt” tie in, with the tag “Collateral Damage” instead of a part number. On his Substack, Tom Brevoort described it as a “red skies” crossover and he wasn’t kidding – the “crossover” consists of a two page scene in which the cast learn that “X-Manhunt” is happening, exchange some thoughts on it, and then get back to the plot. That’s literally it.

THE CORE CAST

Emma Frost. The issue opens with a five page monologue by Emma accompanied by a montage of images from her life. The general thrust is that she’s been through a cycle of building safe havens for mutants, trying to escape the human world, and seeing them collapse – hence, she’s experimenting with “something else”. Presumably, by that she means training the mutants within the human world instead of withdrawing from it. (The Massachusetts Academy had mostly human students, but it was still an elite boarding school and so outside the normal world in other ways.) This is more something that Kate insisted upon, but she seems to be coming round to it.

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X-FORCE vol 7 #9
“X-Manhunt, part 6: The Shapley Value”
Writer: Geoffrey Thorne
Artist: Marcus To
Colour artist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso

X-FORCE

This is the penultimate chapter of the “X-Manhunt” crossover. It’s also the penultimate issue of the series, so X-Force can’t break off in mid-storyline to participate; hence, the crossover A-plot actually consists of Sage (not technically on the team right now) helping out Professor X, while X-Force spend the whole issue continuing the fight that started last issue. Forge, Askani, Captain Britain and Tank get to contribute to this vital exercise.

SUPPORTING CAST

Sage. Her real name is Terisia Karišik, as used at the end of the previous issue, which would imply that she’s Bosnian. (She’s been presented as Balkan in the past, but this is more specific.) She claims that she deleted her telepathy in “my last system update”, along with her alcoholism and “some other traits”. This presumably explains her mental recovery between the flashback and main story in issue #1. Professor X doesn’t seem particularly surprised by this notion, and it may be intended to explain the inconsistent portrayal of her psychic powers over the years.

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HELLVERINE vol 2 #4
“The Drowning Man”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Raffaele Ienco
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Mark Basso

HELLVERINE

Even as Hellverine, he doesn’t want to fight either the Mother or her children. But he has another option: from reading the Book of Lamentation, he’s learned some “hell magic” which “conjures horror” and “makes others see me as their worst nightmare”. It even works against the Mother’s enchanted children, who were perfectly willing to attack a burning skeletal Wolverine. That might suggest that it’s also cutting through their enchantment, although it clearly doesn’t free them entirely, since the art still shows them all with yellow eyes.

When Hellverine uses this power, a burning symbol appears on his chest. From the dialogue, I think the idea is that he has to carve the symbol into his chest using his claws in order to activate the spell, but the art struggles to get that idea across. Seems a very specific sort of spell, but I suppose maybe any old knife would do.

I hadn’t noticed this before, but Hellverine’s hands – which are only partially gloved – still have flesh on them even in demonic form. It’s weird.

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PHOENIX #9
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Alessandro Miracolo
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Annalise Bissa

PHOENIX

This version of Phoenix has embraced her cosmic role and describes herself as “the guardian of cosmic balance”. All this somewhat ties back to issue #5, where Eternity gave her a speech about not letting her human side hold her back, and becoming a true cosmic entity. At that point, Jean’s main concern was that she wanted to hold on to her humanity, but in this story her narration is dismissing that sort of concern as compromise and weakness.

While her immediate aims are completely sensible – she wants to stop Adani from using her fraction of the Phoenix power to damage reality – she also casually brushes aside Rocket and Nova’s offer of help. Her plan to defeat the Shadow Realm is to create a “vast” fracture in reality, which doesn’t sound good, and indeed seems to have the sky shattering on random planets. And her narration is talking about how her fear of her own powers has been selfish and help her back from doing everything that she’s capable of. That said, she does get a lot more human when she’s talking to Adani, whom she still seems to regard as a kindred spirit.

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As always, this post contains spoilers and page numbers…

Well, I was going to go with the page numbers in Kindle, but for some reason Kindle is absolutely insistent now that comics start on page 2, which is the cover. So hell, let’s go with the story pages.

X-FACTOR vol 5 #8
“X-Manhunt, part 5: The Summers of Days Past”
Writer: Mark Russell
Artist: Bob Quinn
Colour Artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Darren Shan

In legacy numbering, this is issue #300 – not that the various books called X-Factor have a great deal in common. For the anniversary, we get a larger legacy number on the front cover, and a cover gallery at the end of the issue. Exciting!

X-FACTOR

Angel. He seems to have no problem at all with opposing the X-Men on behalf of the US government and returning Professor X to Graymalkin, despite the X-Men protesting that it’s a “mutant-hating death-trap”. (As mentioned at the end of the last chapter, the X-Men agreed with Storm that Professor X should at least go to a less inhumane prison.) It’s odd behaviour, but to be honest, none of the remaining team seem to have any particular problem with carrying out this mission. Even so, the team’s performance is predictably dismal – the only members to manage any meaningful offence at all are Angel himself and, of all people, ForgetMeNot.

While he was in hospital after issue #1, Angel had “elective procedures” carried out to restore his Archangel powers. This whole thread is a bit odd: he lost that power off panel somewhere between Heir of Apocalypse and X-Factor #1 in what appears to have been a continuity error, and certainly wasn’t explained. The new Archangel also has metal cloaws on his hands and feet (which look like they might be glove-like contraptions) and carries a sword. He also has a weird new move where he folds his metal wings around himself into a sort of buzzsaw.

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

X-MEN vol 7 #13
“X-Manhunt, part 4: Gods and Monsters”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inker: Sean Parsons
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

THE X-MEN

Cyclops. He spends most of the issue unconscious. Despite the recap claiming that Storm “badly injur[ed]” him in the last chapter, the ice on his face doesn’t seem to do any lasting damage.

Psylocke. She takes command when Cyclops is unconscious. She has a grudge against Professor X for possessing her in issue #9 (during “Raid on Graymalkin”), but she’s more aggrieved by Storm for sheltering him. In part, that’s because Professor X is a danger to those around him, something that Storm doesn’t know (more on that below), and she’s brought him into a populated area – but mainly she views Storm as someone who’s bought into her goddess schtick and “can’t imagine being wrong”. This is a dubious reading of Storm’s character, but it’s a plausible view for Psylocke to hold of her.

At any rate, Psylocke certainly isn’t intimidated by Storm’s persona or reputation, and feels entirely comfortable lecturing her. Admittedly, even in taking the moral high ground, she threatens to kill Maggott , and claims that “we are just monsters”; the lecture gets Storm back to her senses, but doesn’t exactly her convince her of Psylocke’s moral standing.

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

WOLVERINE vol 8 #7
“Ancient History”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Martín Cóccolo
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso

WOLVERINE

Not much to say, really. He fights some people, listens to Romulus rant, and vouches for some of what Romulus says so that we know that there’s a core we should take seriously.

GUEST STAR

Wolverine (Laura Kinney). She’s there in the fight scene but doesn’t contribute much to the plot beyond that.

VILLAINS

Romulus. The story cuts through his garbled and confusing history by having Laura describe him as “the guy who claims to have founded Rome” and “to be the origin of our bloodline”, and immediately having Logan say that “Most of it’s lies and head games.” In other words, all that really matters for present purposes is that he makes these grandiose and self-mythologising claims about himself, which are probably (but not definitively) false. The story does seem to want us to accept that he’s been around since the classical era but it doesn’t greatly matter whether we believe his claim to be the mythological Romulus, co-founder and first king of Rome. Wolverine certainly believes that he’s been around since “before Jesus was born”.

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

STORM vol 5 #6
“X-Manhunt, part 3: Thundercloud”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Luciano Vecchio
Colour artists: Alex Guimarães & Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort

This is part 3 of the “X-Manhunt” crossover. We skipped issue #5, because it came out in a massively overloaded week.

STORM

And since we skipped last issue, a recap might be useful. In issue #1, Storm contracted radiation poisoning. In issue #3, she’s cured by the evil spirit Eégún in exchange for her agreeing to refrain from using her powers for a week. In issue #4, she breaks that deal to save an innocent from Dr Doom, and is immediately struck dead. In issue #5, she is resurrected by Eternity, and becomes his host. (It wasn’t actually clearly stated in the previous issue that her cosmic persona was Eternity, but this issue clarifies it by referring in passing to Oblivion as “my brother”.) For most of the previous issue, Eternity speaks through Storm and talks about her as if she’s a host body with some residual influence on what he’s doing. In this issue she’s just back to normal, until page 15 when she starts talking in the white-on-blue speech balloons from the previous issue, for no terribly obvious reason.

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

NYX vol 2 #9
“X-Manhunt, part 2: Charles”
Writers: Jackson Lanzing & Collin Kelly
Artist: Francesco Mortarino
Colour artist: Raúl Angulo
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Annalise Bissa

This issue is part of the “X-Manhunt” crossover, and also a tie-in to One World Under Doom (though that’s not billed on the cover). And it’s also the penultimate issue before cancellation with issue #10. So a lot to do.

THE CORE CAST.

Sophie Cuckoo. Her powers have returned to an extent, but she says they’re “still glitching half the time.”

She’s still playing Summoner, which was previously mentioned in issue #6 as a game that she’d become obsessed with after losing her powers in issue #5; it was indicated that she was spending more time on the chat function than actually playing the game, and we learn here that she’s talking to someone called TarnishedMoodRing who seems to be a boyfriend. The art indicates that the game has Krakoan-era mutant iconography – at least in a meta sense, with the graphics using the font that we as readers recognise from Krakoan-era logos, and what looks to be a version of the Marauders symbol.

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

UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #11
“X-Manhunt, part 1: Echoes of Madness”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Javier Garrón
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

This is part of the “X-Manhunt” crossover, which ships its first three chapters in a single week. It doesn’t come up in this issue, but part two establishes that One World Under Doom is also in full flow at this point. The plot of that series basically involves Doom getting all national governments to pledge allegiance to him, presumably through magical means, which is why the normal day-to-day authorities are continuing to operate.

THE X-MEN:

Rogue. Despite running the cuddly X-Men team, she’s becoming worried that everyone is treating their training exercise as a game, and that it’s actually making people complacent – the Outliers in particular. In classic Claremont fashion, her solution to this problem is to have Gambit chuck an exploding card at one of the group in the middle of a training session which has been specifically described to the kids as a game. Gambit sides with her on this, and doesn’t even seem particularly bothered about it. Wolverine says that he understands but seems a bit less convinced.

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