ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #29. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Right, so the story really is just that the island is run by people who hate mutants, and somehow they’ve got their hands on a symbiote? That’s… not very interesting, honestly. There’s the occasional glimmer of a story about how some people might see mutants using their Krakoan drugs for political leverage, but really it’s just the usual in a slightly different location, isn’t it? If it’s doing something more than that, I really don’t get it – and I’m afraid this is a story where I’m getting less interested with each chapter.

EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #11. (Annotations here.) Since the book is set in Chicago, it was only a matter of time before Eve Ewing brought in Ironheart. Here she seems to be picking up on a dropped plot from her Ironheart run six years ago, though it’s simple enough to repeat the set-up for new readers – the original story pretty much just established Tank as a mysterious guy who was interested in small portals for some unclear reason, and then never got back to him before the book was cancelled six issues later. Remarkably, this means we get an actual action sequence for the second story in a row, something that hasn’t exactly been common in this book – much as I like its focus on character scenes, it’s odd to see everyone talking as if the kids have proved themselves on the strength of a single encounter with Mr Sinister and that time they helped to evacuate a shop.

The character work is still the strength here, to be honest – for both writer and artist, since the reveal of Tank isn’t helped by some wonky anatomy. But the dynamic between Ironheart and the kids works, with Ironheart acting as if she’s the star and she’s meeting some mildly annoying bit part characters who won’t go away and let her get on with the plot. And Kitty’s complete inability to comprehend relationships in the real world works nicely for her.

X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION #0. (Annotations here.) Surprise trailer issue for the upcoming event, which in practice means it’s a bonus issue of X-Men. We’re doing the full Age of Apocalypse homage with the line being put on hold and replaced with rebranded issues for the duration of the event, which feels like it risks overkill – the original event only had eight books, and this one is doing 16, so… I mean, if it doesn’t work, it’s going to be a long few months.

Still, I like MacKay’s set-up here. It’s a dystopian alternate future, and in plot terms it’s sort of an inverted “Days of Future Past”, with the X-Men making contact with the past Cyclops to try to stop the mutants taking over the world. This issue is closer to what Heir of Apocalypse seemed to be setting up for Doug Ramsey, but it gains a lot from coming out after X-Men #19, which undercut a lot of that and suggested that Doug was heading somewhere else. And that context makes me a lot more interested to see how we end up here anyway. If you’re coming to this issue without reading X-Men #19 first then it may well land differently. The religion/language stuff seems potentially interesting too, though we’re already in danger of pushing it so far into the territory of de facto magic to be paying lip service to both. Humberto Ramos is in relatively restrained mode here, though he’s also a smart choice of artist in sending the message that we’re not going too grimdark with this dystopia.

I can’t help feeling I’d be keener on this story if it was just an X-Men storyline, though, or at least a smaller crossover. Sixteen tie-ins is the sort of thing that makes my heart sink a bit, no matter who’s announced as working on them.

DEADPOOL / WOLVERINE #7. By Benjamin Percy, Robert Gill, Guru-eFX & Joe Sabino. My god, this storyline is still going… although not very fast. I’m running out of things to say about this series because the issues don’t really change: it’s a glacially paced story filled out with extended action scenes, which is fine up to a point, but we’re now into the second trade and it still doesn’t feel like things are really going anywhere very fast. And for a book seemingly premised on the idea that Deadpool and Wolverine are interesting characters to put together, it has remarkably little interest in actually doing so. Not that I necessarily disagree – I think the pairing is hugely overexposed – but it feels like a book designed to work around its premise, which is just weird.

GIANT-SIZE HOUSE OF M #1. By Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly, Francesco Manna, Edgar Delgado & Tom Brevoort. I hate House of M. I’ve always hated House of M. It’s a decent high concept wasted on plotless filler which just kills time for eight issues until it gets to the “No more mutants” bit. As a place for Kamala to visit, though… this kind of works. Kamala either doesn’t know about this bit of continuity or doesn’t recognise it, and jumps to the conclusion that she must have somehow dreamt up this mutant-supremacist reality. While the plot of House of M (such as it is) tries to play out in the background, we get a bit of discussion of whether this is actually a world worth resetting, given the alternatives – now that it’s here, why should the mutants give up a mutant-supremacist world if the only alternative leads to Orchis? And, in fact, a big chunk of the issue is devoted to Kamala’s reaction to the post-House of M 198 storyline, which is the bit people actually remember, even if they think it was a blunder. (And it was.) I’m actually starting to buy into this as a tour of mutant history for Kamal as a semi-outsider who’s genuinely learning something from the experience, and Manna’s art does a nice job of replicating the House of M vibe, down to the “no more mutants” fadeout.

The back-up strip here, by Saladin Ahmed and Martin Coccolo, seems to be just a set-up for an upcoming Wolverine arc, based on Wolverine’s Chicago gangland connections in decades past. It’s really more of a trailer than anything else, and while I guess it fits the back-ups’ theme of hidden events from the past, it does so in a way that’s a bit routine where Wolverine’s concerned. Ostensibly the link to the main story is that this is one of the memories that Wolverine recovered as a result of House of M but come on, you could say that about vast chunks of mundane history.