X-FACTOR vol 5 #9
“Lost Causes”
Writer: Mark Russell
Artist: Bob Quinn
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Darren Shan

X-FACTOR

Archangel. He’s now being pushed as the star of the team. Back in issue #1, Broderick seemed to think that the whole point of X-Factor was to build around Archangel’s popularity, and told Warren that “they are your supporting cast. You don’t need competition.” Since he returned from hospital, Warren (and X-Factor’s military backers) seem to be acting according to that agenda. Obviously, Warren’s behaviour remains out of character.

He seems to be regarded as the most truly loyal team member, and is sent to personally deal with Polaris while most of X-Factor are packed off on a nicer mission to keep them out of the way.

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WOLVERINE vol 8 #8
“Adamantine Unleashed” / “This is Your Life”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Martín Cóccolo
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso

This issue is legacy number #400. The numbering ignores the original miniseries because the legacy numbers are supposed to represent the number that the ongoing title would have reached if it had never been rebooted.

To celebrate, we get a very odd issue which opens with a ten page story resolving the Adamantine storyline (or at least ending its first act), followed by a 30 page story resolving the Wendigo storyline and setting up the next arc. Since both of those stories are by the same regular creative team, I’m treating them here together.

There’s a break in the action of “a few days” before the end of the second story, but it seems we still haven’t reached a point where Wolverine can go off and appear in any other X-books – and so this whole series is still apparently set back before X-Men #1.

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LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #5
“Brother in Arms, part 2”
Writer: Erica Shultz
Artist: Giada Belviso
Colour artist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso

WOLVERINE

After telling us last issue that she enjoyed fighting robots because she didn’t have to hold back, she seems to be losing patience with them. (“Robots, automatons, whatever! They’re all dead to me.”)

She dissuades the Revolution from killing Schneider on a fairly standard speech that he doesn’t have to be a killer any more – and then kills Schneider herself. This is a fairly standard Logan trope, where he regards himself as the X-Man who’s already corrupted and keeps doing these things in order to let his teammates stay heroic; Laura seems to be extending it to other characters who are also already corrupted. She tells Revolution that she’s “trying to be better, but some people need to be stopped permanently”. There’s no suggestion, however, that Schneider couldn’t be stopped by simply arresting him; she means simply that he deserved to die.

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STORM vol 5 #7
“Serpents, Salamanders and Storm Gods”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Luciano Vecchio
Colourists: Alex Guimarães & Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort

STORM

Iron Man enlists her to help out with an issue in Brazil – this is presented as the first time they’ve worked together since issue #1, but that must be disregarding missions as members of the Avengers. Basically, a sample of an attempt to recreate the Super-Soldier Serum has been lost in a helicopter crash caused by a “weather anomaly”, which has plagued Brazil more generally. Storm takes the mission in order to retrieve the body of the pilot of a crashed plane, despite Iron Man’s distinct lack of explanaion of what’s going on here.

It’s downright odd that calling in a fellow Avengers is presented as a last resort, particular when it’s Storm and the crisis involves weather. Presumably this is tied in somehow with Iron Man’s secrecy about the mission.

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PHOENIX #10
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Alessandro Miracolo
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Annalise Bissa

PHOENIX

She sees parallels between Adani’s back story and the way her own life changed when her powers traumatically emerged on the death of her best friend Annie Richardson. This origin comes from the Phoenix story in Bizarre Adventures #27, and involves Jean withdrawing from the world until Professor X comes along to help her out. In this issue, Jean presents it as a turning point that caused her to lose her childhood – not merely because of the immediate period that followed, but by setting her on a path to meet Professor X, join the X-Men and ultimately become Phoenix. (Some stories maintain that she was always destined to become Phoenix, but that’s arguably a chicken-and-egg matter, given the Phoenix’s confusing relationship to linear cause and effect.)

The Dark Gods assume that Phoenix has the power to destroy Adani, but won’t use it because her sense of empathy holds her back. This is correct as far as it goes, but Jean stops Adani anyway by showing empathy to her and persuading her to reject her power and become an innocent child again. The clear implication is that Jean would rather have remained normal and not become Phoenix (or even an X-Man) too.

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UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #13
“The Dark Artery, part 1: Machinations of Dread”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: David Marquez
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

THE X-MEN

Gambit. Sadurang claims that the Left Eye of Agamotto will corrupt him over time, eventually leading him to kill his family and friends. We don’t know whether that’s true or not, but it’s at least consistent with what we’ve seen so far – Rogue was claiming as early as issue #2 that the Eye was “affecting him somehow”.

In narration, he says that he had a “hard time growing up” as a visible mutant due to his eyes. He says that the nurse cried at his birth when she saw him; I’m not sure that’s been said before, but Gambit #1 (1999) does say that the Thieves Guild “cursed the babe as an abomination” because of his eyes. He’s privately hurt by people’s reactions to his eyes, but feels that if he hadn’t been a mutant he would have been a nobody – maybe a low-level criminal enforcer.

Rogue. Appears in two panels. She is cold.

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HELLVERINE #5
“The Mephisto Conspiracy”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Raffaele Ienco
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Mark Basso

HELLVERINE

This one won’t take long.

After being drowned by Mephisto’s water demon last issue, Akihiro is transported to Hell. Since Akihiro never actually made a deal with the devil, Mephisto separates him from Bagra-Ghul and tortures him, before trying to get him to sign up.

However, Akihiro has been studying the Book of Lamentation that Dr Strange gave him in issue #3, and we saw in issue #4 that he could work magic by using his claws to carve symbols into his own chest. Once separated from Bagra-Ghul, he’s able to claw a symbol into the demon’s chest – a “possession cipher”, apparently – that lets him reclaim the demon under his control. So Bagra-Ghul is now under Akihiro’s control and Mephisto’s plan to use him as a conduit has been thwarted, at least for now.

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PSYLOCKE vol 2 #6
“House of Ghosts”
Writer: Alyssa Wong
Artists: Vincenzo Caratù & Moisés Hidalgo
Colour artist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Darren Shan

PSYLOCKE

The last issue ended with her seeing a monstrous ghostly image of herself and Betsy merged, which she chose to ignore. As this issue starts, she’s still experiencing these hallucinations, but she’s chosen not to tell the other X-Men. Since nobody’s noticed her being distracted up to now, it’s probably not long after issue #5.

Her rationale for not telling the other X-Men is partly that she assumed it was an after-effect of the Taxonomist’s hallucinogenics from the previous issue, which would wear off in time. Her narration says that “With the tensions between Rogue’s X-Men and ours, the last thing we need is any sign of instability.” Her paranoia about letting the team down makes sense; the bit about the two X-Men teams feuding is probably there mainly as foreshadowing for later in the issue. Given what we saw about the relations between the teams in “X-Manhunt”, this probably has to go very shortly after “Raid on Graymalkin”.

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X-MEN vol 7 #14
“Search and Rescue”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Ryan Stegman
Inkers: Ryan Stegman & JP Mayer
Colourist: Marte Gracia
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

THE X-MEN

Cyclops. As in issue #1, he’s keen to have good relations with the town, and seems to trust Chief Robbins anyway – he offers the X-Men’s help to her before she’s explained what the issue is. He asks her to call him Scott.

Kid Omega. He doesn’t seem terribly worked up about Piper going missing, though he takes the task of searching for her seriously enough. He’s more concerned about Idie’s reaction and tries to make supportive noises about how it’ll all be fine, though he acknowledges that he isn’t good at this. Then he gets shot out of the sky and presumably spends the rest of the issue unconscious.

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LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #4
“Brother in Arms, part 1”
Writer: Erica Schultz
Artist: Giada Belviso
Colour artist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso

This one won’t take us long.

WOLVERINE

Bucky claims to be enlisting her help because he needs an “old-school tracker” to locate Henrick Schneider. She doesn’t believe this is the whole story but doesn’t seem to press him on it. She seems to be happy enough to go along for the sake of the road trip and the chance to go after a Nazi mad scientist. Bucky specifically sells to her the fact that Schneider tortured mutants.

Naturally enough, she sees Bucky as “not so different from me”, as they’re both would-be heroes trying to escape a past when they were used as weapons. This was also the theme with Elektra, the guest star in the previous arc.

She’s surprised to find that the unnamed mutant they rescue in Red Oak wanted to keep it secret that he was a mutant, and has to remind herself that not all mutants are “ready to be out” (to be fair, there weren’t many closeted mutants on Krakoa, nor is she meeting many in NYX).

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