X-MEN UNITED #4
“Ancient Orc Oaken Arclight”
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Tiago Palma
Colour artist: Brian Reber
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: Cyclops and Deathdream under attack from some sort of frost monster. Not a scene from the issue.

THE X-MEN:

Iceman. His solution to the tension between Scott and Emma in issues #1-2 is to get them to play what he describes as a specially tailored version of Ancient Orc Oaken Arclight. From the sound of it this would normally be a standard issue Dungeons & Dragons style RPG, but for this purpose. Iceman seems to be a fan, though god knows who he’s been playing it with in the past. Maybe there was a regular game on Krakoa.

Somehow, he’s actually convinced Scott and Emma to play along with this, and he’s roped in Rogue and Ben Liu to help out. Nobody else seems to be quite as keen on the actual game as him, but they do seem to be on board with it as a team building exercise, with varying degrees of reluctance. The game he’s designed seems pretty generic, but then he is doing it with rookie players. It’s clearly intended as a scenario to force Scott and Emma to work together, but it doesn’t get anywhere near his intended plot points before actual monsters show up to derail things.

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UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #30
“Mars Needs Mutants”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Rogê Antônio
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: Jubilee, Wolverine and Nightcrawler react to a B-movie-style alien invasion. The story title is presumably a reference to the 1968 TV movie Mars Needs Women.

THE X-MEN. 

The previous issue ended with Rogue saying that she was planning to go on a journey to see someone who could help Gambit, and asking Monet and Quicksilver to run the X-Men in her absence. In fact, in this issue, Monet and Quicksilver are still sorting out the mess at Greymalkin Prison, so apparently not enough time has passed for anything to happen about this. Nonetheless, Rogue doesn’t appear in this issue.

Gambit. He takes Calico to the collectible store to buy a present for Jitter. It’s not spelled out here, but the pairings with the individual Outliers match the mentoring assignments from issue #9 (other than Nightcrawler, who ought to be with Jitter – he’s otherwise engaged, and she doesn’t appear much in this story). In this issue, Gambit seems to be behaving relatively normally – he argues with the store owner when he’s mean to Calico, but only goes beyond that when the man overreacts by threatening him with a baseball bat. He shows up at the dance in chaperone role, again seeming fairly normal.

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WOLVERINE vol 8 #21
“Broken”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Julius Ohta
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER: Wolverine and Nightcrawler. Wolverine still has all his claws, presumably to avoid spoilers for the previous issue in the solicitations.

WOLVERINE:

In issue #19, he lost the adamantium on his right-hand claws and broke the claws themselves while fighting the Adamantine. As the issue starts, he’s back at home – Haven House from Uncanny X-Men, which hasn’t been mentioned up to this point – and still recuperating. He’s having nightmares about events from the series to date: Mastermind posing as his mother in issues #11-12, and losing Silver Sable after being rejected by the New Morlocks last issue. He’s moping about how he breaks nice things by being around them, and misses Sable more than he expected.

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X-MEN vol 7 #31
“Anomaly”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Tony S Daniel
Inker: Mark Morales
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: The X-Men’s Science Team in action. The cover gives the story title as “Anomaly, part 1”, but the credits page just has it as “Anomaly”.

THE X-MEN:

Aside from Kid Omega, the regular field team don’t appear in this issue – instead, it’s a story about the Science Team, comprising Beast, Magneto, Xorn, Animalia, Ben Liu and the aforementioned Kid Omega. For most purposes I class these guys as the supporting cast, but they’re clearly the stars of this issue.

The Beast. He describes himself as the team’s “provisional field leader”, so apparently they’re a new thing. We’re not told exactly what’s prompted that, but the previous arc saw Beast going on a rare field mission and saving the day by being the one person who tried to deal with Leviathan in a non-violent way. Possibly this has encouraged him to take a more active role generally in offering an alternative version of the X-Men. If so, he seems rather defensive about it, reminding his team of (mostly) non-combatants that they’re not a “paramilitary strike force”.

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STORM: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST MUTANT #5
“Reunited”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Federica Mancin
Colour artist: Java Tartaglia
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: That’s Storm in a swamp going to commune with “the ageless one”, in the opening scene.

This is the final issue of Storm: Earth’s Mighiest Mutant, though the complete run is 17 issues, as it’s essentially the same series as Storm vol 5. If you count the “Age of Revelation” tie-in Rogue Storm, it’s a 20-issue run.

I’m not going to do conventional annotations for this, since it shows every signs of being a guillotine cancellation where writer Murewa Ayodele has chosen to focus on resolving one key theme and leaving it at that.

In the previous issue, an alternate version of N’Daré banished Ororo to Earth-61391. That issue ends with a very abbreviated scene of Storm being rescued from local Sentinels by Furana, her daughter from that timeline. By the start of this issue, Storm is off in a swamp somewhere, hoping to commune with “the ageless one” in the hope of finding a way back home. This is presumably the same swamp where Storm landed in the previous issue; perhaps it’s the local version of the Nexus of All Realities (which is in a Florida swamp in the main Marvel Universe).

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UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #29
“Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed, part four: A Prison and a Pyre”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Luciano Vecchio
Colour artist: Mattherw Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

THE X-MEN:

Rogue. She seems remarkably unfazed to learn that Gambit has grown dragon wings, and even continues to accept his (correct) assurances that the “Cannonball” she’s fighting is a fake and can safely be killed. Nonetheless, once the crisis is over, her top priority is to focus on helping him, and she plans to take a leave of absence from the team to get help for him.

Her plan for dealing with Greymalkin was to send in M undercover as a prisoner to gather evidence, which would be more effective at bringing down the operation in the long run than simply smashing up the building. Quicksilver has been acting as a courier to relay M’s messages. That goes some way to explaining how M was in better health than she ought to have been given the prison food, though it’s not really made clear how Quicksilver was getting in and out.

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GENERATION X-23 #4
“A Numbers Game, part 4”
Writer: Jody Houser
Artist: Marco Renna
Colour artist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER: Laura, with one of the Unit 23 droid heads impaled on her claws.

WOLVERINE (Laura):

She seems blindsided by X-Infinite’s betrayal – she doesn’t even pick up on the obvious red flag that he already knows where the Facility building’s control centre is. Possibly she’s thrown off by the fact that his story is at least partially true, and by her assumption that he just doesn’t like her. She draws the line at gratuitously killing the Facility’s non-combatant staff.

SUPPORTING CAST:

X-92. The silent teleporter one, if you’re (understandably) having trouble keeping the numbers straight. X-92 insists on accompanying Laura and X-Infinite on their raid of the Facility building, by simply teleporting into the back seat of their car and refusing to leave. They seem willing to stand up to X-Infinite with a bit more assertiveness than we’ve seen before. However, after helping to disable the security systems and teleporting Laura and X-Infinite inside, they’re willing to hide out and stay out of the way (as per instructions.)

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X-MEN vol 7 #30
“Danger Room, part 5”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inker: Sean Parsons
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Colourist: Arthur Hesli
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: Simply the X-Men charging into battle.

THE X-MEN:

The Beast. He gives Beyond’s techno-organic creature a pep talk about personhood, empathy, and rejecting the roles that have been imposed on them, all of which wins it round to their side. This fits with the broad theme of the story: the plans of the Danger Room psychopaths fail because the X-Men are more reasonable and empathic than they expect. Not all of them, admittedly, but enough of them.

His justification for codenames is that mutants “take on new names of our own choosing to better reflect our ongoing relationships with the genetic expression of our species”. Something broadly similar was put forward in the Krakoan era, with a suggestion that mutants who kept using their birth names, like Fabian Cortez, were seen as vaguely disreputable. (Ben Liu still hasn’t got a codename, which is all the more noticeable because Animalia has.)

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INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #5
“Death War – part 2”
Writer: Tim Seeley
Artists: Roi Mercado & Michael Sta. Maria
Colour artist: Romulo Fajardo Jr
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER: Archangel, with the Death mask he wore as one of Apocalypse’s Horseman, perches on his teammates’ gravestones.

X-FORCE: 

Archangel. According to Mr Sinister (who’s probably telling the truth about this), he experimented on Archangel at the tail end of the Krakoan era, surreptitiously giving him the life-giving powers that he demonstrated in issue #4. He calls Warren’s new persona “Blood Angel” and claims that when fully activated, he’ll be able to bring about “true, everlasting resurrection”. For some reason, to activate this power, Warren needs to take Sinister’s hand. We’re not told directly why Sinister needed to involve Warren in this, but it’s probably reasonable to assume that Sinister is tapping the power of Apocalypse’s Death Seed in some way.

The Blood Angel persona seems to be something of a puritan – he calls Hellverine a “demon” and “unclean”, then shoots him out of the sky with some sort of eye beam. The beams actually extinguish Hellverine’s flame and knock him out for a while. Sinister claims that Blood Angel could cure Cable of the techno-organic virus.

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X-MEN UNITED #3
“The Loneliest Ghost”
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Tiago Palma
Colour artist: Brian Reber
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: Emma Frost intervenes in an argument between Beast and Magneto. Charitably, something approaching this does happen in a subplot.

THE X-MEN:

Emma Frost. She’s unhappy with Beast’s time-travel glitches. At the end of the issue, she has a missed call from Lourdes Chantel; we haven’t seen Lourdes since she was killed by Orchis in the 2023 Hellfire Gala one-shot, though she was presumably among the many mutants resurrected in X-Men Forever #2 at the tail end of the Krakoan era.

Magneto. He grumbles that the mission was doomed from the start – although the actual problem that’s emerged is a technical time travel issue that has nothing to do with his argument in the previous issue that Captain America is only trying to assuage his own guilt. That said, his views from that scene are essentially echoed by Vernon Weaver in this story (see below).

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