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

UNCANNY SPIDER-MAN #5
“Fade to Blue”
Writer: Si Spurrier
Artists: Lee Garbett & Simone Buonfantino
Colour artist: Matt Milla
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad

COVER / PAGE 1. Nightcrawler with techno-organic stuff rounding on him.

PAGES 2-7. Nightcrawler and Silver Sable reveal their ruse.

Okay, now on one level, this is quite clever. Issue #4 went out of its way to verify that they’d checked Nightcrawler’s DNA and it definitely wasn’t Mystique. But since then, X-Men Blue: Origins has established that Mystique does change her DNA when she copies someone, in order to rationalise the Azazel/Nightcrawler connection (as shown in flashback on page 6). So when this issue does the reveal that the scan was just wrong, it’s not just a cheap retraction of the cliffhanger.

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

ASTONISHING ICEMAN #5
“Out Cold, part 5”
Writer: Steve Orlando
Artist: Vincenzo Carratù
Colour artist: Java Tartaglia
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER / PAGE 1. A shattered Iceman.

PAGE 2. Flashback: Mr Clean defeats Romeo.

This takes place before page 23 of the previous issue, and shows Mr Clean defeating Romeo while Iceman was off in New York. Clyde, the guard drone was seen in issue #1, and mentioned again by Iceman as one of his security measures last iissue.

Romeo actually puts up more of a fight against Mr Clean than you might expect from him, because it turns out that his empathic powers also extend to imposing painful emotions on people when he hits them. I’m pretty sure that’s new. I’m not entirely sure it makes sense – his powers don’t normally depend on touch – but it’s a nice idea, so what the heck.

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

WOLVERINE vol 7 #40
“Last Mutant Standing, part 4”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Ibrahim Moustafa
Colour artist: Frank D’Armata
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER / PAGE 1: Wolverine and Spider-Man in action against Stark Sentinels.

PAGE 2. Tribute to Alison Gill.

PAGES 3-7. Wolverine enlists Spider-Man to help him enter the Orchis space station.

Oscorp. Peter is leaving the Oscorp building, where he currently works in Amazing Spider-Man. (Norman Osborn is good right now, if you haven’t been following it.) Spider-Man is wearing the Oscorp hi-tech version of his costume here, hence the little glowing bits.

“You’ve alive?” Peter knows perfectly well that some mutants are still on Earth – aside from anything else, he’s appeared over in Uncanny Spider-Man – but presumably this is the first time anyone’s mentioned to him that Logan wasn’t among the mutants who went through the gates in X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023.

The Orchis jet was stolen by Logan in Wakanda last issue, as the footnote says. If its rightful owner Jun Wei is “expected back at her post in less than an hour”, Wolverine apparently came straight to New York in the hope of getting Spider-Man to help. Seems a bit ambitious, but who knows, maybe he wasn’t specifically looking for Spider-Man. Maybe he just figured that the best way to round up some allies at short notice was to head to Marvel Manhattan, swing a cat, and see who he hit.

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

DARK X-MEN vol 2 #5
“The Mercy Seat”
Writer: Steve Foxe
Artist: Jonas Scharf
Colour artist: Frank Martin
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White

COVER / PAGE 1: The two Madelyne Pryors fight.

PAGES 2-5. The Goblin Queen tries to persuade Madelyne Pryor to join forces.

“Carmen Cruz wanted nothing more than to be part of the X-Men.” Referring back to her origins in the cast of Children of the Atom, basically about a group of human fans cosplaying as mutants. Carmen, the one actual mutant in the group, made it to Krakoa with her heroes but has only come to the foreground in the context of this very questionable iteration of the X-Men.

“You let them neuter your mutant abilities?” We were told in issue #2 that Orchis had used Blightswill to remove the Goblin Queen’s mutant powers, and that she didn’t care, claiming to have long since outgrown them. She claims here that she was also lulling Orchis into a false sense of security.

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

X-MEN RED vol 2 #18
“The Mended Land”
Writer: Al Ewing
Artist: Yildiray Çinar
Colour artist: Federico Blee
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White

COVER / PAGE 1. A group shot of the cast, for the final issue.

PAGES 2-3. Genesis raises Arakko Prime from the sea to fight Kaorak.

“Autumn Island.” In other words, what’s left of the Autumn Lands now that most of it has got up and walked across the planet. The rebels shown in page 2 panel 2 include Kobak, Khora, Zsen and Sunspot, as well as a bunch of background characters.

“Nine left, eight, seven.” When we left Jon Ironfire last issue, he was singlehandedly fighting his way through the White Sword’s champions – already reduced from 100 to 99 by his own departure. Evidently he’s been doing well.

Genesis is carrying both the Annihilation Staff and Purity (the sword); she still has Sobunar by her side, even though we’ve repeatedly been told that he wasn’t entirely thrilled with some of her choices. Storm challenged Genesis to “raise your island and fight” at the end of the last issue, and she takes up the challenge.

Arakko Prime is the part of Arakko that was the original counterpart of Krakoa on Earth – in other words, Arakko the island, rather than Arakko the planet. The narrator calls it “the living island”, mirroring how Krakoa was billed back in Giant-Size X-Men #1.

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

X-MEN vol 6 #29
“House of Doom”
Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artist: Joshua Cassara
Colour artist: Marte Gracia
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White

COVER / PAGE 1. The X-Men fight the Daggers of Latveria.

PAGES 2-4. Flashback: Dr Doom intervenes as Professor X is about to announce Krakoa to the human race.

This is an insertion into the flashback that opens House of X #6. The opening dialogue and Xavier’s Magneto’s speech about ending all the disagreements between them is from the original, as the opening line that Professor X delivers before Doom answers him back. The rest of the scene is original material that takes place between pages 4 and 5 of House of X #6, boldly shoehorned into the middle of Professor X’s speech.

It doesn’t entirely make sense that Doom has a V-for-Victor style Cerebro helmet of his own, before Professor X has even publicly debuted with this design, though he does suggest later in the issue that he is relying on some sort of actual foreknowledge of events, rather than simply correctly predicting that Krakoa’s collapse. And the design is wonderful.

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

X-MEN BLUE: ORIGINS #1
Writer: Si Spurrier
Artists: Wilton Santos (with Oren Junior) & Marcus To
Colour artist: Ceci De La Cruz
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad

COVER / PAGE 1: Mystique and Nightcrawler (in his Spider-Man costume) in action together. I think the thing in the background is meant to be the Stark Sentinel from Uncanny Spider-Man #4.

X-Men Blue: Origins. The title is a play on the ongoing series X-Men Blue that ran for 36 issues in 2017-2018.

PAGES 2-5. Flashback: Mystique resists Professor X’s mental control and falls off a cliff.

This is a straight recap of a scene in X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023 #1. We were told in that issue that her body was taken away by the sea, and naturally she showed up again in New York in Uncanny Spider-Man #1.

The recap narrator is the mysterious Bamf that hangs around talking to Nightcrawler, invisible to everyone else, in Uncanny Spider-Man; for present purposes, though, he just gives us a bare-bones recap of Hellfire Gala.

PAGE 6. Flashback: Mystique escapes the Hellfire Gala.

Basically, Mystique picks herself up pretty much immediately, already obsessing about “my baby” (as she has been in Uncanny Spider-Man). She kills and replaces a random Orchis soldier and escapes that way.

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

REALM OF X #4
“The Promised Day”
Writer: Torunn Grønbekk
Artists: Diógenes Neves & Rafael Pimentel
Colour artists: Rain Beredo & Dono Sánchez-Almara
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Lauren Amaro

COVER / PAGE 1: Saturnyne watches as the cast are trapped in an hourglass. This doesn’t really have much to do with the story.

PAGE 2. Sif learns what’s happening in Vanaheim.

Sif took over as guardian of the Bifrost in King Thor #4 (2019) following the death of her brother Heimdall, and now has the same all-seeing powers that he used to. The Bifrost itself has actually been destroyed for most of her tenure, but it was recently restored in Immortal Thor #1. Although we don’t see the Bifrost in this issue, it’s mentioned twice as something that exists, so evidently we’re after that issue. That also means that Thor is wrongly drawn in the costume from his previous series throughout this issue, though that’s a minor error; he’s allowed to have more than one set of clothes.

Saturnyne has been magically preventing communication between Asgard and Vanaheim throughout this series, which we’ve seen mainly in the form of the prayers and messages from Vanaheim failing to generate a response from Thor. Curse used her powers to shut down that effect at the end of issue #3; Saturnyne’s “What did you do?” line is repeated from that issue.

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

UNCANNY SPIDER-MAN #4
“Slice and Dice”
Writer: Si Spurrier
Artist: Lee Garbett
Colour artist: Matt Milla
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad

COVER / PAGE 1. Nightcrawler and Spider-Man fighting a Stark Sentinel.

PAGES 2-5. Nightcrawler watches Spider-Man deal with an anti-mutant mob.

Nightcrawler decides to leave it to Peter to deal with this – and he’s probably right that Peter’s better placed to try and calm the mob than he is. But the little ghost Bamf clearly sees this as another example of Kurt hiding from his problems. And he’s probably right too.

The Bamf also tells us directly that he isn’t an illusion. Admittedly, he would, wouldn’t he? But that’s consistent with issue #1, where he seemed to be able to shield Kurt from the Stark Sentinel’s detection.

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

WOLVERINE vol 7 #39
“Last Mutant Standing, part 3”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Juan José Ryp
Colour artist: Frank D’Armata
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER / PAGE 1. Wolverine and the Black Panther fight Orchis.

This should be a fairly short one, because it’s simply another one-shot story with a guest star. Nothing wrong with that, mind you.

PAGES 2-4. Jun Wei is rejected by the Wakandan Prime Minister.

Wakanda. The current status quo in Black Panther is that T’Challa has been exiled, and the country is currently supposed to be undergoing a transition to democracy under the leadership of Prime Minister Folasade.

Jun Wei is the same Orchis officer who was kidnapped and briefly controlled by Chronicler over in X-Force.

“As you know, we are responsible for the exile of the mutants from Earth…” This is Orchis’s standard explanation of what happened in Hellfire Gala.

“Wakanda was wise not to sign the treaty with Krakoa.” Wakanda has indeed always been listed as refusing to enter into a treaty with Krakoa, on a list otherwise populated mainly by dodgy regimes. The official reason given was that the Wakandans simply didn’t need Krakoan drugs, and so Krakoa had no leverage with them. Black Panther has become rather more equivocal in its depiction of Wakanda over the last few years, but it’s still positioned here very clearly as taking the moral high ground. (Though not, apparently to the extent of actually offering mutants asylum.)

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