Death of Doctor Strange: X-Men / Black Knight
THE DEATH OF DOCTOR STRANGE: X-MEN / BLACK KNIGHT #1
by Si Spurrier, Bob Quinn & Israel Silva
So here’s an early entry for 2022’s most “technically” technically-an-X-book. Tie-in to a wider event that doesn’t affect the X-Men in the slightest? Check! Co-starring with a character the X-Men have nothing to do with? Check! Written by that character’s regular writer? Well… as much as Black Knight has a regular writer. Spurrier wrote the recent Black Knight: Curse of the Ebony Blade miniseries, after all. So sure! Check!
Don’t worry if you haven’t been following Death of Doctor Strange, because it’s one of those stories that’s set up to have a bunch of tie-ins around the margins. All you really need to know about the main story is that with Strange dead, his barrier spell is fading and Earth’s dimension is being invaded by weird stuff. That’s literally it.
So… it’s a team-up between the X-Men and the Black Knight, is it? Well… depends how generous you’re feeling, to be honest.
X Lives of Wolverine #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X LIVES OF WOLVERINE #1
by Benjamin Percy, Joshua Cassara & Frank Martin
X LIVES OF WOLVERINE is one of two linked miniseries running over the next ten weeks, the other being X Deaths of Wolverine. It replaces most of the regular X-books during this period (but not all) and effectively serves as a season break before the next relaunch. This issue has been made available on Marvel Unlimited on its release date. I can’t imagine direct market retailers are going to be very happy about that, but that – and the reasons why Marvel might have done it – are a matter for another day. At any rate, if you have a Marvel Unlimited subscription, there is no need to buy this.
COVER / PAGE 1. Ten incarnations of Wolverine, all entwined in Omega Red’s tentacles. Specifically, the ten incarnations are:
- At the top, present-day Wolverine.
- Row 2, on the left, Wolverine as Weapon X.
- Row 2, on the right, Wolverine as he appeared in his debut in Incredible Hulk vol 2 #181.
- Between them, Wolverine as Patch, in the white dinner jacket from the early issues of his solo series.
- Row 4, on the left, a soldier Wolverine – I think this is Wolverine as shown in flashbacks to World War I.
- Row 4, on the right, Wolverine as a member of Team X.
- Between them, a Logan with no shirt and ragged trousers – probably Logan as a wilderness dweller after Origin.
- Row 6, on the left, what seems to be a cowboy Logan, presumably from his early post-Origin days.
- Row 6, on the right, Logan in the clothes from this issue, when he shows up at the Xavier Mansion.
- Right at the bottom, a Wolverine in a light grey version of his costume, probably from X-Force vol 3 (the Craig Kyle, Christopher Yost & Clayton Crain run).
S.W.O.R.D. #7-11
S.W.O.R.D. #7-11
by Al Ewing, Stefano Caselli, Guiu Vilanova, Jacopo Camagni & Fernando Sifuentes
The period between “Hellfire Gala” and “Inferno” has been a mixed bag for the X-books. Several books feel like they’ve lost their way, or are marking time waiting for the new season to start. S.W.O.R.D. is the one that goes the other way, with its own stories and its future direction coming to the fore.
Up to this point, S.W.O.R.D. has been remarkably heavy on the crossovers. Its first seven issues include three tie-ins to King in Black, one to “Hellfire Gala”, and one to “Last Annihilation”. That’s over 70% crossover, which is a bit much. But with these five issues – yes, we’ve got a “Last Annihilation” tie-in in issue #7, okay. After that, though, the focus is squarely on Storm establishing her authority on Arakko, Abigail Brand’s inveterate scheming, and Henry Gyrich’s hamfisted attempts to outwit her. The direction of the book becomes clear, and it’s set up for next season’s X-Men Red.
Issue #7, admittedly, devotes a lot of time to “Last Annihilation” material that, with hindsight, isn’t all that important to the book. I do get the desire to ground S.W.O.R.D. in the Marvel Universe, and in particular in the cosmic events that Abigail wants to interact with – in a sense, her priorities lead S.W.O.R.D. to get involved in this stuff – but there’s a lot of Hulkling in that issue, and relatively little of Abigail’s manipulations at the end. Still, Al Ewing is really good at sketching out some of these characters we’ve never seen (in this book) before, and getting the point of someone like Captain Glory across quickly.
Charts – 14 January 2022
Well, here we go. Now we’re getting back to regular business.
1. Gayle – “ABCDEFU”
This is one of the handful of non-Christmas songs that hung in there during the Christmas period when everything was swamped with Christmas records. As a result, it reaches number one on its ninth week, with the improbable track record of 40-14-2-5-5-6-14-2-1. Rather depressingly, this is the first number one not to feature any of Ed Sheeran, Elton John or Adele since last July (when Olivia Rodrigo was number 1).
X-Men Legends #10
X-MEN LEGENDS #10
“…The Eighth Circle!”
by Fabian Nicieza, Dan Jurgens, Scott Hanna & Alex Sinclair
X-Men Legends seems to be tweaking the format. It started with had short arcs by bygone writers (and occasionally writer/artist teams), designed to fit into their original runs and do a bit of gap-plugging. Then it shifted to something more like “fill-in arcs we could have done”. Legends #10 is a little different – a one-issue story written in the margins of an earlier story.
Well, kind of. The story in question is X-Men vol 2 #34 (July 1994), which isn’t exactly in the top tier of memorable issues. It’s the one where Gambit and Psylocke explore Mr Sinister’s old Nebraska base, fight off some wonky Marauders clones, rescue Threnody, and escape before the place blows up. (No, don’t ask me how that fits with the first arc of Hellions. That’s a whole other question.)
But Legends #10 isn’t especially closely tied to X-Men #34 – it’s a story about what Mr Sinister was up to while his base was getting destroyed. And the base getting destroyed does tie to the plot, but not all that centrally. The real high concept of this story is something else entirely, and you could have done it at pretty much any point in X-Men history before Krakoa.
Marauders #27 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
MARAUDERS #27
“Bon Voyage”
by Gerry Duggan, Matteo Lolli, Phil Noto & Rain Beredo
This is the final issue of Marauders vol 1; a new series with a different creative team launches in the spring. It’s the season finale, then.
PAGE 1. The cast pose on the cover. It’s a homage to the cover of issue #1. The inclusion among the cast of Tempo is interesting, since her only major appearance was in issue #23. Apparently she’s in the new volume, but her appearance on this cover has a distinct whiff of “plans changed”.
PAGES 2-4. Kate Pryde talks to Forge.
“You didn’t forget about my little problem, did you?” Kate’s inability to use the Krakoan gates was a major plot point in early issues, contributing to her depression, but it’s been largely downplayed since her resurrection. Kate is nodding to the fact that the plot has fallen by the wayside, as well as reintroducing it so as to set up the epilogue.
Forge’s “mission for the Quiet Council” doesn’t seem to be anything in particular.
“[Y]ou’ve disrupted every technology you’ve encountered…” Kate disrupts any electrical systems that she phases through. That’s been the case since day one.
X-Force #21-26
X-FORCE #21-26
by Benjamin Percy, Joshua Cassara, Robert Gill, Martin Coccolo and Guru-eFX
Looking back over the last few months, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that some of the X-books have been spinning their wheels after Hellfire Gala, waiting for Inferno to come along and advance the status quo. Marauders is the biggest example of that, but X-Force is in that category too. What we have in these six issues is a bunch of unrelated stories that seem to be marking time, and don’t feel like a coherent overall series.
It doesn’t greatly help that the series’ most common penciller Joshua Cassara is missing for almost all of this run. He does some of issue #21 and that’s it. Cassara’s art is one of the more memorable features of X-Force; it’s a book unusually preoccupied with the concept of organic technology and weird plant-based things. Under Cassara, it generally manages to make all of that look rather seedy, grotesque and ominous in a way that then infects even the more conventional shots of Krakoa as an island paradise. And since most people are going to be reading this book as part of the wider X-lineup, that’s fine; the utopian setting is being established somewhere else, X-Force is free to get on with undercutting it.
The art in these issues isn’t bad at all, it just feels a little blander to me. Sometimes that works. The scenes of a dispassionate mind-controlled Colossus actually work well in that register, and it’s maybe better able to play Quentin and Phoebe’s relationship straight. But it’s less distinctive.
Excalibur #22-26
EXCALIBUR #22-26
by Tini Howard, Marcus To & Erick Arciniega
(Deep sigh.)
I mean, you can’t say it’s phoned in. It’s an elaborate thing, Excalibur. It’s going for a complex mythology of Otherworld, it’s clearly trying to be a big epic that repays effort. It’s done a reasonable job of extricating Betsy Braddock from a decades-long cul de sac, and that’s undeniably a positive. It’s not lazy. You don’t produce a book as odd as this by going the obvious route.
But does it actually work? Um.
Um.
Look, I’m willing to grant Excalibur a couple of things. It’s a fantasy book, which is not really what interests me about the X-books, and it’s fair to say that no matter how well this was done, there’s a pretty good chance it really wouldn’t be my thing. And it’s a UK book written by an American, which gives it a wonderful range of opportunities to irritate me that won’t apply to most readers. So I’m probably not the ideal market even for the book that Excalibur is trying to be. I’ll give you that. I’m trying to make full allowance for it.
Charts – 7 January 2022
The first post-Christmas chart is always… weird. Last week the chart was dominated by Christmas records, based on streams over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. This week… all gone. The number one, Ed Sheeran and Elton John’s Christmas record, drops straight out of the top 100, and a veritable horde of songs flood in from the lower reaches to fill the space. Most of them are tracks that had been around before Christmas. But there are some genuine new entries here too – some new releases, some tracks that couldn’t make any headway until the holidays were over.
After a four week gap, “Easy On Me” returns to number one for its eighth week. To give you an idea of how insane this week’s chart is, it’s climbing from number 38. Anyway, time for our first new entry of 2022! Normal service is resumed!
4. Carolina Gaitán, Mauro Castillo, Adassa, Rhenzy Feliz, Diane Guerrero & Stephanie Beatriz – “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”
Ah.
Inferno #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
INFERNO vol 2 #4
“The Death of Moira X”
by Jonathan Hickman, Valerio Schiti, Stefano Caselli & David Curiel
COVER / PAGE 1. Mystique, changing into Destiny, stands over a gravestone. Nothing very much like this happens in the issue itself – it seems to be teasing that Destiny could die again, or perhaps that they both kill Moira. (It may be worth noting here that issue #3 had a cover of Professor X and Magneto fighting Nimrod, which doesn’t actually happen until this issue. That might suggest a bit of rewriting on the fly.)
PAGE 2. Opening quote from Omega Sentinel. This line comes from page 6, where it’s directed at Orchis. It could of course be read as a self-deprecating meta nod to this being Jonathan Hickman’s final issue, and the Krakoa status quo sailing on without him.
PAGE 3. Recap and credits. There’s so much to cover in this issue that it only gets one page!
PAGES 4-11. Nimrod and Omega Sentinel turn on Orchis, then fight Professor X and Magneto.
We’re picking up from the end of the previous issue, where Professor X and Magneto had been lured into a trap by following a tracker embedded in Moira’s arm, only to find that the arm had been cut off. At this point, Omega Sentinel and Nimrod show their hand. As foreshadowed in many previous issues of Hickman’s run, going back to House of X and Powers of X, this is a three-way conflict between humans, mutants and post-humans. Omega and Nimrod are post-humans – a cyborg and a robot animated by fragments of the personality of a human – so ultimately, their agenda does not align with Orchis.
