Shape changing is one of those relatively low key powers that often gets taken for granted by writers.  We know what Mystique can do, it’s a handy plot device sometimes, on with the show.

This is Seanan McGuire’s second story for Marvel – the first was the X-Men Gold Annual with the holiday camp – and since any wider plotlines are at best marginal, it’s free to spend its time re-stating the premise, and reminding us of why Mystique runs rings around everyone.  So whether it’s in the real world or a superhero setting, Mystique is happily bouncing around unnoticed as a background character.

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There are certainly some interesting creator choices for the X-Men: Black one-shots.  Mojo gets artist Nick Bradshaw (always welcome, and his detailed cartooning is a good fit for the character), and comedian Scott Aukerman.  I’m… vaguely familiar with Aukerman’s name?  I see there’s three seasons of Comedy Bang Bang on UK Netflix, but yeah, never watched them.

But Mojo’s a comic relief villain, so a comedy writer makes sense.  And this is indeed… well, wacky.  Much depends here on how much tolerance you have for wacky, and how relaxed you are about people being wildly out of character for wackiness’ sake.

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X-Men: Black is… a series of random one-shots about villains, I guess?  There’s a serialised back-up strip, “Degeneration”, but the lead stories seem to have no connection with it, or to one another.  So I’ll take that at face value.

“The Stars, Our Destination?” is a Magneto story written by Chris Claremont and pencilled by Dalibor Talajić.  And it’s always a slightly strange feeling when Chris Claremont makes one of his occasional reprise visits to the X-Men.  He wrote the team for sixteen years; his take on the X-Men is the one that elevated them to A-list status.  But you can’t really emulate the strengths of that run in a story like this, because so much of it was about building characters and storylines over time.

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Another year, another batch of What If? one-shots. So welcome to Completist Corner: It’s Technically An X-Book.

The original What If? series specialised in alternate endings to published stories, which usually turned out to be that a lot of people died and the world was changed forever or something.  More recently, though, the What If? branding has been applied to some ground-up alternate-reality takes on main characters, which is what we have here.  It’s a cyberspace X-Men, because somebody has spotted that X and *.exe are kind of a bit similar?  If you squint?  That somebody, presumably, is writer Bryan Edward Hill, who’s doing a Batman and the Outsiders series for DC.

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Annuals are always off to the side somewhere, and if they’re not going to be important to the plot, they have to find some other way of standing out.  The first Domino annual is certainly different: it’s a four-story anthology with four different writers (plus a framing sequence by Leah Williams and Michael Shelfer).  So we’re getting a bunch of different perspectives on Domino, a character who’s been written in wildly divergent ways over the years.  Does it add up to something coherent?

First up is “Dead Drunk in Dry Gulch”, by regular writer Gail Simone, with art by Victor Ibáñez and Jay David Ramos.  This one ties in directly to the regular title, since it’s a flashback to Domino’s first encounter with Outlaw, forming the posse from the regular title.  It’s a blatant retcon, equipping Domino with two best friends who she’s never previously been associated with, so a bit of back story probably helps lend it weight.

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