STORM vol 5 #8
“Sinister Schemes of the Stars and Stripes, part one”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artists: Lucas Werneck & Mario Santoro
Colour artist: Alex Guimarães
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort

STORM

The issue opens with Storm, in some sort of armour, addressing some sort of … glowing red cloud thing. Judging from the dialogue (“ever since I was a child, you have spoken to me like a mother…”) and the mention that it’s been hurt by the storm gods, this is apparently a manifestation of nature, though not one resembling Gaea’s normal appearance in Marvel. This seems to be Storm somehow sorting out the weather crisis from Brazil from the previous issue.

According to the narrator, Storm is more bothered by having to deal with the FBI than the cosmic threats of Oblivion or the “Thunder War” – presumably because it’s on a scale that she’s more invested in.

The Storm Sanctuary turns out to have been built for her by Iron Man, Moon Girl and Shuri. It emits solar rays so that it doesn’t cast a shadow, which is nice. Storm sees this as evidence of how well she treats the masses, though “not building a giant floating castle over their heads” might have been even nicer. She claims to have “the certifications issued by SHIELD” for its environmental credentials, though quite why they’re doing emissions testing is beyond me. Maybe they have some sort of role for highly sensitive superhero-type stuff.

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X-MEN vol 7 #16
“X-Men”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inkers: Sean Parsons, JP Mayer & Livesay
Colourist: Fer Sifuents-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

THE X-MEN

Cyclops. He immediately recognises the “X-Men” as the Santo Marco Six from issue #1, presumably going by their powers and the fact that there’s six of them.

Magik. On learning that these are the group she fought in issue #10, she attacks without instructions and declares that she’s going to cut off Schwarzchild’s other arm. In issue #1, she somehow managed to lop it off with the Soulsword (which isn’t really meant to affect non-magical things). Schwartzchild was trying to pin her down using his gravity powers, and she teleported behind him. It was still a surprisingly violent move, and to be honest, you can see why Schwartzchild isn’t happy about it. It also plays into 3K’s efforts to tell the Santo Marco Six that the X-Men have turned on their fellow mutants.

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NYX vol 2 #10
Writers: Jackson Lanzing & Collin Kelly
Artist: Francesco Mortarino
Colour artist: Raúl Angulo
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Annalise Bissa

This is the final issue of NYX. The Laura Kinney: Wolverine ongoing series continues, and Ms Marvel’s storyline will be picked up in the upcoming Giant-Size X-Men one-shots.

THE CORE CAST

Ms Marvel. She’s preoccupied about cousin Bilal hunting down Ms Marvel and trying to find out her true identity, back in issue #7. As the only cast member with a dual identity, she offers a traditional superhero argument for keeping a secret identity, i.e. to prevent her family being used against her. But David seems to read her as being at least as concerned about what her family will think, and he seems to be right. He also argues that she’s been too concerned about protecting her family, and not enough about the impact on herself of living a dual life.

Ultimately, she reveals her true identity to Bilal (see below). Later, she tells her family that she’s heard that Ms Marvel is taking a break for a while because she “doesn’t want to live as a mutant”, though she seems to be fishing for them to agree with her that this would be “sad”. In fact, they don’t seem to have very strong feelings on it at all, beyond her father Yusuf musing that Ms Marvel’s parents would probably be relieved if she quit.

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MAGIK vol 3 #4
“Reunion”
Writer: Ashley Allen
Artist: Germán Peralta
Colour artist: Arthur Hesli
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Darren Shan

MAGIK

She said in narration at the end of last issue that Dani was the last person she wanted to see. That seems to be because she’s defensive about her deal with Liminal and doesn’t want to be judged by one of her oldest friends when she knows it’s a mistake. She tries to push back by complaining that Dani doesn’t trust her, but ultimately suggests that she accepted the deal mainly because she was desperate to escape his domain – after all, being trapped in someone else’s magical realm is a traumatic part of her origin story. Dani essentially suggests that Illyana let that sucker her into a bad deal and she should have looked for a better option; Illyana argues that it’s unfair to expect that of her, but privately seems to agree.

The idea seems to be that, as a result of Liminal’s deal, Darkchild is no longer suppressed by outright psychic or magical blocks, but nor is she in control. Instead Illyana has to actively resist the temptation. She initially talks about feeling Darkchild’s anger, and then immediately ascribes the anger to herself. Darkchild seems to be tied to her negative emotions, or perhaps her self-loathing generally – she starts to turn into Darkchild after feeling that Liminal has defeated her, and then gets talked down by Dani. At the end of the story, when she gets upset after overhearing Dani and Cal talking about her, her silhouette has Darkchilde horns.

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X-FORCE vol 7 #10
“The X-Equation”
Writer: Geoffrey Thorne
Artist: Marcus To
Colour artist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Joe Caramanga
Editor: Mark Basso

This is the final issue of the series, and as you might expect, it feels like a desperate rush to the finish line. It’s also legacy issue #300, so the main story gets thirty pages, which helps a bit. There’s also a ten page back-up strip (which we’ll come to) and a three-page cover gallery.

X-FORCE

Forge. According to Sage – who’s apparently right – his powers instinctively directed him to stop Moses Magnum’s scheme, without him ever actually understanding on a conscious level what he was doing. (Yes, Moses Magnum. I know. We’ll come to him.) It turns out that this is not a story about the dangers of blind faith as I’d been thinking – Forge was just right all along to trust in his intuition. Sage claims that Forge was deliberately drip-feeding information to the team (in the sense of it being what his powers told him to do) at the point when it would be most effective to make them stick to the plan. The idea seems to be that Forge knew that he was manipulating everyone to do whatever was required for the plan, even if he didn’t know precisely why it was all meant to work.

Forge is apparently just playing along with Magnum’s attempts to recruit him. Despite Diabla’s clear warnings that she never got the chance to finish testing and preparing Forge, Moses falls for it entirely.

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X-MEN vol 7 #15
“Twin”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Pencillers, co-inkers: Ryan Stegman & CF Villa
Co-inkers: JP Mayer & Livesay
Colourist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

THE X-MEN

Cyclops does his usual team leader routine, and Temper spends the issue trying to save Piper from her twin.

Magik summons up demons from Limbo to help the search operation. We’ve seen her randomly call up demons in the past, despite the fact that Madelyne Pryor is meant to be running Limbo now. On this occasion, she makes the demons an “offer of minionship, short-term”, and lets them drink her blood as the price; she doesn’t seem to have any particular concerns about consequences for this. Perhaps she has to make a more explicit deal if she wants the demons to do something actually useful, instead of just turning them loose and hoping that they cause chaos.

Xorn describes these creatures as “imps”, and there’s nothing to suggest that they aren’t making a sincere effort to carry out their instructions. The imps call Magik “dread mistress”, but it’s not clear whether that’s because of the deal or because of her former status in Limbo. In addressing her demons, she refers to mutants as “witchbreed”, consistently with how they were described in Otherworld during the Krakoan era.

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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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