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

WOLVERINE vol 7 #14
“The Unusual Suspects”
by Benjamin Percy, Adam Kubert & Frank Martin

COVER / PAGE 1. Um. Well, it’s a landscape of two tiny figures looking at a giant Wolverine head which is being shattered from the inside by Solem, and which seems to have some sort of circuitry on it. The connection between this image and anything in the actual issue is obscure, beyond the general fact that Solem is manipulating everyone. Maybe it’ll make more sense as a cover for the trade paperback.

PAGES 2-4. How the Marauder ended up in Madripoor.

The footnote to X-Force #20 is an oversimplification. The Shi’ar showed up at the Hellfire Gala with their logic diamonds in Marauders #21. They were loaded onto the Marauder in X-Force #20. Christian was attacked and left floating in the North Atlantic in Wolverine #13, and the Marauder showed up on fire in Madripoor in the same issue. Apparently, the Marauder sailed through a “sea gate” to get it to Madripoor. This is the first mention we’ve had of sea gates, but sure, why not? It helps explain how the Marauder gets everywhere so quickly.

The significance of logic diamonds, as I’ve mentioned before, is that they’re used to provide the memory for Cerebro and its backups of memories and personalities. (It’s maybe time to spell that out explicitly for those readers who don’t remember them getting a passing mention back in Powers of X, though Wolverine does at least mention here that they’re something to do with Cerebro.)

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

S.W.O.R.D. vol 2 #7
“Full Spectrum Diplomacy”
by Al Ewing, Stefano Caselli & Fer Sifuentes-Sujo

COVER / PAGE 1. Frenzy, Abigail Brand, Hulkling and Manifold ready themselves for action, while an image of Dr Doom at his diplomatic dinner with Storm looms over them.

Last Annihilation. This is a tie-in to “Last Annihilation”, which is basically a Guardians of the Galaxy storyline that has some tie-in one-shots and also crosses over into this issue of S.W.O.R.D. Of this book’s seven issues to date, five have been crossovers, which seems a bit much.

PAGE 2. This is the Utopian Kree’s We-Plex Supreme Intelligence System recapping the plot of Last Annihilation in rather disjointed fashion – we saw one of these pages in issue #5. For present purposes, all you really need to know about Last Annihilation is that Dr Strange villain Dormammu has possessed Ego the Living Planet and he’s invading our dimension again, this time by attacking in outer space, with his usual Mindless Ones army from the Dark Dimension.

PAGE 3. Captain Glory arrives to join the fight.

Captain Glory was called up to help at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy #16. He debuted in Avengers #676 (part of the “No Surrender” storyline), where he was leading the Lethal Legion. He’s basically a Kree super-soldier. He was jailed in Empyre for attempting to sabotage the Kree/Skrull alliance and prolong the war, but it’s perfectly reasonable to trust him in a situation like this.

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

CABLE vol 4 #12
“Shakespeare in the Zark”
by Gerry Duggan & Phil Noto

COVER / PAGE 1. A close up of the older Cable’s face. This is a companion piece to the cover of the previous issue, which features the other half of the young Cable.

PAGE 2. The opening quote – “Cable, you’re relieved of your duty” – is what the younger Cable said when he killed his older self in Extermination #1. This issue completes the exercise of reversing all that, as the young Cable goes back to his own time to pick up his life as it ought to have proceeded, while the older Cable resumes his place as… well, Cable.

This is the final issue of Cable, though there’s a “Last Annihilation” tie-in oneshot to follow.

PAGE 3. Recap and credits.

PAGE 4. Cable Classic and Stryfe fight.

“Maybe I’ll keep you alive until Krakoa burns.” Stryfe might be anticipating that he’s going to burn down Krakoa, or he might be aware of how Krakoa turns out. Certainly Destiny’s instructions to Mystique in X-Men #6 were to “burn that place to the ground”, hence the title of the upcoming Inferno miniseries.

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

NEW MUTANTS #20
“Secrets & Lies”
by Vita Ayala, Alex Lins & Matt Milla

COVER / PAGE 1: The Shadow King looms over Scout. Seems like a cover that would have fit better an issue or two back.

PAGES 2-4. Anole, Cosmar, Rain Boy and No-Girl decide what to do with Scout.

The previous issue ended with them finding Scout’s body. The strong implication was that Scout had been killed by the Shadow King, after she confronted him in issue #18 about her concerns over his influence over these four.

The group is named later in the issue as “Lost Club”.

“Cosmar asked for their help, and they gave her platitudes.” Issue #15. Cosmar, who believes that her distorted appearance is not a feature of her powers but merely a self-inflicted injury when her powers were out of control, asked Dani to kill her in the Crucible so that she could be resurrected in her original form. Dani refused and gave her a mutant-pride speech, which went down very badly.

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

MARAUDERS #22
“The Morning After”
by Gerry Duggan, Matteo Lolli, Klaus Janson & Rain Beredo

COVER / PAGE 1: Lourdes Chantel and Emma Frost stand over a chessboard, with Emma laying a figure of the Black King (Sebastian Shaw) on his side. Normally in chess you’d put your own king on its side as a way of resigning, but okay. The other identifiable chess piece represents former Black Bishop, Harry Leland.

This is a callback to the cover of issue #2, in which Sebastian and Emma are shown in the same poses, with Emma using the same… whatever you call it, the shoving thing… to move a figure of Kitty and Lockheed over a map.

PAGE 2. News coverage of the aftermath of the Hellfire Gala.

“I’m glad I never wanted to visit the fifth planet in our solar system.” Referring to the terraforming of Mars in Planet-Sized X-Men #1. Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun (the fifth is Jupiter), so it’s a Fox News joke.

“Feilong Industries.” Referencing a storyline from Duggan’s own X-Men #1.

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

X-CORP #3
“The Madrox Workflow”
by Tini Howard, Valentine de Landro & Sunny Gho

COVER / PAGE 1. Corporate Madrox, with a bunch of dupes tessellated behind him.

PAGES 2-3. Who is Dr Jamie Madrox?

This is a more or less straight recap of Madrox’s back story. Madrox’s family tie to Los Alamos, and his powers emerging at birth, both come from his debut in Giant-Size Fantastic Four #4, as does the panel of him with Professor X and Mr Fantastic. I’m pretty sure the bit about his childhood interest in science is new. When first introduced, Madrox’s gimmick was that he was a naive farmboy (his parents moved to Kansas soon after he was born) whose parents had died and who was living alone on the farm as a community of one.

The idea that some Madrox duplicates were going out to learn about entire skills and then return with what they had learned, contributing to the skills of the whole, comes from Peter David’s X-Factor. Howard entirely ignores the usual depiction of Madrox as a bit of a comedy figure or (at the very least) everyman, which admittedly wouldn’t make much sense for something written in the tone of X-Corp pseudo-advertising. The idea that Madrox is “brilliant” is, um, novel. Still, the idea that his accumulated skills would allow him to work efficiently by churning out the duplicates and then reabsorbing them periodically to work as a one-man team… that makes sense.

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

WAY OF X #4
“Heirs and Graces”
by Si Spurrier, Bob Quinn & Java Tartaglia

COVER / PAGE 1. Nightcrawler keeps Professor X and Legion separated, while Onslaught’s face looms in the background.

PAGE 2. Data page – a detail of the map of Arakko previously seen in Planet-Size X-Men #1. “Tharsis” is a volcanic plateau on Mars.

Beneath it, a quote from Nightcrawler’s book of philosophy (the title of which continues to be redacted for some reason). As so often in this book, Way of X offers a rather more sceptical view of the grand achievements which Planet-Size X-Men was praising.

PAGES 3-4. Lost’s story.

A fairly straightforward parable about a wronged girl whose demands for revenge are rejected by elders who want an amnesty for the greater good. Nightcrawler draws the fairly obvious conclusion that the girl is Lost herself, the bad guy is Fabian Cortez (given her reaction to him last issue), and the amnesty is the general amnesty that Krakoa extends to all ex-villains.

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

EXCALIBUR vol 4 #22
“Treasures of Britain”
by Tini Howard, Marcus To & Erick Arciniega

COVER / PAGE 1. Excalibur as prisoners of Merlyn.

PAGES 2-5. Excalibur and the Beast visit Blightspoke.

Blightspoke. This is one of the various Otherworld realms that we saw during the “X of Swords” crossover. Generally, it’s been depicted as a sort of dumping ground for things from failed realities, with plenty of useful stuff there if you can get at it safely. The suggestion that the land is actively poisonous comes from a data page in Cable #5, though this is the first time it’s really come up.

The Beast is taking scientific measurements of samples from Blightspoke, which in itself seems like a perfectly innocuous thing to do. But over in X-Force, the Beast is mainly being written these days as a dangerously overconfident amoral schemer, so god only knows what he wants with this stuff, but it can’t be good.

“Logan says this place can be unwelcoming in more ways than one.” Wolverine fought Summoner in Blightspoke in Wolverine #7.

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

X-MEN vol 6 #1
“Fearless, Chapter One: In Threes”
by Gerry Duggan, Pepe Larraz & Marte Gracia

COVER / PAGES 1-2. The new X-Men team in battle in New York. That’s the main cover, obviously. There are tons of variants.

PAGES 3-5. The back story of Feilong.

This is the first appearance of Kelvin Heng, a self-made scientific genius who was on the verge of beginning his own project to terraform Mars when the Krakoans marched in and took the place over in Planet-Size X-Men #1. Though we didn’t see Feilong himself in that issue, we did see the probe sent by the company that shares his name. The word “feilong” refers to a flying dragon and isn’t particularly unusual as a name for a Chinese company. We establish here that Feilong went to the trouble of altering his own body so that he could live on Mars – an effort now entirely redundant following the Krakoan terraforming.

Nikola Tesla. We’re told that Feilong is a descendent of Nikola Tesla via his mother, described as “a Nobel Prize winner from Serbia”. Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was indeed ethnically Serbian (though he was born in modern-day Croatia), but he emigrated to the United States in 1884 and had no children – indeed, no known relationships. However, Tesla’s name should be ringing alarm bells in a Hickman-adjacent comic, since he was a major character in Hickman’s much-delayed S.H.I.E.L.D.. In that series, he has super powers and goes by the name “Night Machine”. And he does have an adoptive son, Leonid.

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

X-FORCE vol 6 #21
“Fear of a Green Planet”
by Benjamin Percy, Joshua Cassara, Robert Gill & Guru-eFX

COVER / PAGE 1. X-Force fight Man-Slaughter.

PAGES 2-9. Flashback: X-Force encounter a Man-Thing.

More fully: Sage despatches X-Force to the Warroad site on the coast of Washington, which is spilling chemical and nuclear waste into the sea. Their job is to clean up the spill because, apparently, it could somehow threaten Krakoa. (It’s not really made clear why this is any more of a concern for Krakoa than any other global environmental issue, but perhaps X-Force are just feeling especially heroic today.) They encounter a Man-Thing-type creature, which they mistake for a bad guy, but which is actually trying to save the locals from mutated sea creaturs.

As usual, there’s an obvious parallel between the visuals for Krakoa (complete with red spherical things in the plantlife) and the long-established design for Man-Thing, particularly in the grimier style which this book tends to favour, and which plays down Krakoa’s island-paradise tropes.

Warroad is not, as far as I can tell, a real facility in Washington. There’s a town called Warroad in Minnesota, which doesn’t seem to have any particular significance here. Washington State does have a significance, because it was the setting for various scenes in Weapon Plus: World War IV – more on which below.

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