You don’t get much further into completist-only territory than an X-Men Christmas special.  Sometimes that can lead to issues with a distinct “that’ll do” feel to them.  Not so here – whatever else you might say about the Merry X-Men Holiday Special, it’s certainly trying something different, with contributors ranging from the usual suspects to the unexpected.

It’s part jam issue, part advent calendar, with each day featuring a single page by a different creative team.  Jam issues are often a frustrating mess, but this one avoids that problem by not even pretending to have a single story continuing between the pages.  For the most part, it’s just a range of creative teams, asked to pick an X-Man and do a one-page, December-themed vignette.

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That’s really the title of the book, then?  Because Rogue & Gambit was a perfectly serviceable title, and Mr & Mrs X sounds like a regional quiz show from 1982.  Maybe that’s just a British thing.

Effectively, this is the second arc of a series that began with the Rogue & Gambit mini – which re-established them as a couple – and which now continues following their impromptu wedding in X-Men Gold (which is rightly expanded on in issue #1).  It’s not a bad idea for a series, at least once you’ve got people to care about the couple again.  There haven’t been all that many superhero books based on a married couple with equal billing – on their own, rather than as part of a wider team – so the dynamic is relatively fresh.

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We’ve just had a relaunch of Uncanny X-Men last week, positioned back in its flagship role, and clearly the title that we’re meant to look at and go “ah, there is the direction for the line”.  But there are some signs of incoherence in here as well – not least that Astonishing X-Men and X-Men Red are both running “gathering the team” arcs which wind up being overtaken by the next relaunch before they’ve even finished.

So Matthew Rosenberg’s first arc on Astonishing X-Men – solicited with “A new era begins now!” – is also the last, even though he’s going to be writing Uncanny X-Men going forward.  It has the distinct look of things being made up on the fly.

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Matthew Rosenberg and Andy MacDonald’s Multiple Man miniseries sounds like a bit of a sideshow.  It’s Madrox, after all, a character who’s only ever been important in the context of X-Factor, which was cancelled years ago.  But Rosenberg is also writing Astonishing X-Men, and the new Uncanny X-Men, in which Madrox turns out to have a big role.  So maybe this will turn out to be a bigger deal than you’d think.

Plus, Rosenberg’s recent New Mutants series didn’t convince me on the first read through, but turned out to be much more interesting on a re-read.  And – cards on the table – I really didn’t care for this at all on the first read.  It’s a time travel paradox story with a whole bunch of Madroxes going round in circles, some of whom have gone on to become versions of other Marvel characters.  And it seemed to have remarkably little interest in Madrox himself, except inasmuch as his powers lent themselves to making the plot even harder to follow.  It was a grind, frankly.

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After the opening arc, time for a palate cleanser.  “Operation Kindergarten Clone” is a single issue story in which Laura and Gabby go undercover in a high school, and hijinks ensue.  Who doesn’t love a good hijink?

If there’s any connection here to the bigger picture, it seems to lie in the fact that Laura is now specialising in hunting down dodgy scientist who are experimenting with mutant clones.  For some reason, somebody at the school has been ordering in genetic research equipment, and the working assumption is that it’s a science teacher trying to get a foothold in the world of supervillainy.  So Gabby is posing as a student and Laura is a track and field coach, and how they managed to get into those positions, look, don’t ask.

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Technically, this is the final arc of Old Man Logan; in practice, that means it’s renaming itself as Dead Man Logan for a lengthy concluding storyline.  Even so, here we are – fifty issues of a stand-in Wolverine title.  Not something you’d have been likely to predict, and probably not something that was a very good idea from the standpoint of the wider Marvel Universe, since viewed from that perspective, the book’s main contribution has been to undermine the idea that Wolverine ever went away.

Still, Ed Brisson and Ibraim Roberson’s story here is pretty successful on its own terms.  It’s a very, very simple plot: the Maestro has taken over a remote town in Canada, and Logan arrives to stop him and rescue the town.  It’s entirely straightforward, but it works on the strength of the setting and the parallels which it sets up with the book’s wider storyline.

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It’s the week of another X-Men relaunch, so naturally the question on everyone’s lips is: what did I think of the middle chapter of a Typhoid Mary miniseries that nobody is paying any attention to?

Because yes, this is another of those weird minis with different guest stars in every issue so that you can bill all three chapters as an issue #1.  That way, people like me will buy the middle chapter and then go off and buy the others!  Or that’s the theory.  Obviously, from the fact that I’m reviewing this as a one-shot, it didn’t work.

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