WOLVERINE vol 8 #20
“The Savage Champions”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Martín Cóccolo
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER: Wolverine in action, with an image of the Adamantine behind him.

WOLVERINE:

Apparently, Wolverine’s role as “Savage Champion” involves enacting a routine narrative repeated in multiple timelines, in which he has to heroically stand alone against the Adamantine to save the world in a seemingly hopeless battle, thereby earning the right to be aided by other “Savage Champions” who have defeated the Adamantine in a previous timeline. (How did the first one beat the Adamantine? To be fair, they seem to come from different time periods, so maybe there wasn’t a “first one” in that sense.)

The other Savage Champions all appear to be vaguely alternate Wolverines, and address him as a “brother”. Wolverine reacts to them with a degree of confusion before saying that it feels like speaking to his reflection; he comes across here as unfamiliar with the idea of Wolverines from other timelines, though to be fair, these guys are not particularly close counterparts. Although the Savage Champions can assist him after this point, the narrative still requires Wolverine to deliver the “killing blow” to the Adamantine, which he does with his remaining adamantium claws. (However, Athena tells us that the Adamantine isn’t permanently dead, but merely returned to dormancy.)

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UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #28
“Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed?, part three: And It Shall Come To Pass”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Luciano Vecchio
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: Gambit, holding the Left Eye of Agamotto, and with dragon wings growing from him.

THE X-MEN

Gambit‘s own search for the Outliers goes nowhere, though he seems genuinely grateful to the Vig for making the effort. When the fake “Cannonball” flies off with Rogue, he suddenly reveals that he can use the Left Eye of Agamotto to grow dragon wings, and gives chase.

Rogue, Wolverine, Nightcrawler and Jubilee deal with the weird fake “New Mutants”, but otherwise don’t do a great deal. The X-Men themselves are only in about four pages of the issue.

SUPPORTING CAST

Jitter. She’s the first to clearly point out that the Outliers are in a fake world, since although she can’t remember her history with any of her teammates, she still feels an emotional connection to them – specifically, that she reacts to Ransom as a leader and that she’s in love with Calico. She doesn’t say anything in particular about Deathdream. Deathdream also pointed out last issue that he still had emotional connections with the others, but nobody really paid attention to him.

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STORM: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST MUTANTS #4
“Mama”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Federica Mancin
Colour artist: Java Tartaglia
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort

STORM:

We’re still “two days before Akujin’s invasion of Earth”, as in the previous issue. Storm is still outside the Marvel Universe proper at “the Wall” (the edge of the DC Universe), though in this issue it seems more like an area of metafictional swirl, complete with fan mail floating  around. Storm seems to disregard all of the explicitly meta elements.

The alt-N’Daré’s basic pitch to Storm is that she should let Death destroy the Multiverse and then they can go back and restart it. Not surprisingly, Storm isn’t on board with this idea, not least because she’s working from an in-universe perspective and isn’t remotely convinced superhero universes work this way. However, we also get a flashback to the Krakoan era to remind us that, when she was infected by a techno-organic virus, she chose to fight it rather than just take the easy option of resurrection. This was Giant-Size X-Men: Fantomex and Giant-Size X-Men: Storm. The latter issue does indeed have a speech from Storm implying that she thought Krakoan resurrection undermined the value of life.

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X-MEN vol 7 #29
“Danger Room, part 4”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inker: Sean Parsons
Colourist: Arthur Hesli
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: A collective gravestone for the X-Men, with a gloating Frank Bohannan and Maxine Danger reflected in a puddle. Neither of them actually appears in the issue. Shouldn’t it be “Here Lie The X-Men”?

THE X-MEN: 

Psylocke. The opening flashback explains how she and Xorn survived the attack from Beyond’s men at the start of last issue: Xorn used his gravity powers to bend Beyond’s laser away from the Marauder, and then Psylocke blasted the Beyond vehicle with the Marauder’s missiles. This fits well enough with the previous issue, though issue #27 had the Marauder dodging hails of attacks as opposed to the single major assault shown here.

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GENERATION X-23 #3
“A Numbers Game, part 3”
Writer: Jody Houser
Artists: Jacopo Camagni & Marco Renna
Colour artist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER: Laura lies seemingly dead on the floor, and Gabby is held back by two of the Generated. The one on the right is X-66; the one on the left is closest to X-92 but far too tall. This scene doesn’t happen in the issue.

The issue opens with an obituary for artist Jacopo Camagni, who died in March; he drew the first seven pages of this story.

WOLVERINE:

Laura is still bedridden at the start of the issue, so she must have taken a remarkable amount of damage when X-73 blew up last issue. That said, she doesn’t seem to have any significant injuries by the start of the issue – perhaps once she gets back to a certain level of recovery, her healing returns to normal speed.

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UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #27
“Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed?, part 2”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Luciano Vecchio
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: White silhouettes of the Outliers, with a montage in the background of the X-Men hunting for them.

THE X-MEN: 

Gambit. Following on from last issue, when he attempted to persuade Rogue that they should adopt the Outliers, Gambit is desperate to find the missing group. He offers to restore his deal with the Vig if the Vig can find them – this might seem a bit random, but then Gambit has no real leads to go on and it’s not unreasonable for him to assume that they at least might have been taken by someone that the Vig knows. Gambit doesn’t seem to suspect that the Vig is actually responsible – he talks as if the Vig simply might be well connected enough to find out.

Rogue, Nightcrawler, Jubilee and Wolverine hunt for the missing Outliers, and instead find a version of the early New Mutants at Haven House.

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WOLVERINE vol 7 #19
“Wisdom and War”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Martín Cóccolo
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso

Once again, Martín Cóccolo’s name appears in the credits as “MART N C CCOLO”. This also happened in (at least) issues #14 and #17. Has anyone thought of putting in a call to IT? It feels like the sort of thing that shouldn’t be giving a professional publishing company this much trouble.

COVER: Wolverine fights Hercules. This happened, uh, last issue.

WOLVERINE: 

The previous issue ended with Athena intervening in the fight between Wolverine and Hercules. This one opens with her magically calming them both down. Although it was only Hercules who was directly under the Adamantine’s influence in the previous issue, Athena talks as if it had been influencing Wolverine too. (“My magic has banished the Adamantine’s cruel influence long enough for you to remember yourselves… You have let yourselves be used by ancient evil.”) It’s possible that she simply assumes the Adamantine was influencing them both, but more likely she means that the Adamantine manipulating Wolverine by goading him into a fight. He was uncharacteristically berserker for 2026 last issue, so it might be a bit of both.

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STORM: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST MUTANT #3
“War of the Realms”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Federica Mancin
Colour artist: Java Tartaglia
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: Storm steps out of a comic book panel. Nothing quite so explicitly meta actually happens in the book itself but… well, you’ll see.

STORM:

A flashback reveals that during the break between Storm vol 5 #12 and issue #1 of this series, Storm visited assorted afterlife realms in search of the missing Dr Voodoo. (He was captured by Death at the end of Storm #12, and turned into her servant, for reasons we’ll come back to below.) Her alliance with Sugaar seems to have started around this time, with him providing her with access to these realms.

Storm lists the following realms that she’s visited as part of this exercise:

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INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #4
“Death War, part 1”
Writer: Tim Seeley
Artist: Philip Tan
Colour artist: Romulo Fajardo Jr
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER: The caption reads “Cable – felled by the Angel of Death, or his mysterious pursuer?” The “mysterious pursuer” is the person obscured behind Archangel’s left wing. Their costume doesn’t really resemble anything in the issue, but the monochrome clothing and the gun suggest it’s probably meant to be Domino. The fight is taking place in a scrapyard and doesn’t have much to do with anything that happens in the issue.

X-FORCE:

Cable. Last issue, X-Force fought the Beyond Corporation and Cable eliminated Boom-Boom as a suspect for murdering Kamala Khan in a future timeline. At the end of the issue, Boom-Boom found Cable slumped unconscious in his chair with some sort of mark on his chest, and Domino standing over him; the story ended with Boom-Boom attacking while Domino attempted to explain herself. (Akihiro helpfully explains that the art was supposed to show Cable “bleeding from a wound in his chest”, which it didn’t really convey.)

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X-MEN UNITED #2
“Open Wounds”
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Tiago Palma
Colour artist: Brian Reber
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: Captain America, Melée, Wolverine (Laura), Beast and Kitty Pryde in a World War II setting. Not a scene from the issue.

THE X-MEN:

This issue is no clearer about the nature of Graymatter Lane than the previous one was. Once again, it’s reiterated that Graymatter Lane is on the psychic plane and that if you die there then you die “in real life”, which makes it sound like it’s a projection; and once again, people seem to be able to travel from there directly to places in the real world. There’s a dining pavilion – does it serve real food or just illusions? On balance Graymatter Lane seems to be a pocket of the psychic plane that people physically travel to, even though most of the environment being a psychic projection… but I’m honestly unsure what the intention is.

Cyclops. His plan was apparently to get Kid Omega to fake an attack on the school in the expectation that it wouldn’t be able to cope, thus proving his point that it was a bad idea. This plan fails spectacularly, but Scott refuses to concede that this has gone badly, or that he ought to have warned Ben, and simply acts as if things had gone to plan. Iceman seems to regard this refusal to apologise as entirely in character.

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