As always, page numbers are from the digital edition, and this post contains spoilers.

COVER / PAGE 1. Captain Britain, Rogue, Gambit, Jubilee and the Villain Formerly Known as Apocalypse battling Silkies outside the Excalibur lighthouse. Basically in the issue, except for the bit where Rogue’s awake.

PAGE 2. Flashback to the fourth century BCE. Apocalypse watches as two outcast mutant twins with navigation powers set sail on a makeshift raft.

And they drown, because navigation powers don’t help you build ships. Obviously, these two have some sort of significance, and we’ll come back to them on page 13. Judging from their clothes, they’re presumably druids – in which case they got kicked out of the druid tribe for being mutants.

I don’t plan to do every issue of the satellite books – certainly not in weeks when more than one book is coming out. But let’s stick with the core title. As always, page numbers are from the digital edition, and this post contains spoilers.

COVER / PAGE 1. Cyclops, Prestige and Cable fighting horrible monsters. A scene which actually takes place in the issue!

PAGE 2. Cyclops enlists Prestige and Cable to investigate a mysterious new island full of monsters which is heading towards Krakoa.

“Kids.” As you almost certainly know, Cable is Cyclops’s actual son, who grew up in the far future and returned as… well, it used to be an adult, but now it’s a teenager. Prestige (Rachel Summers) is the daughter of Cyclops and Phoenix from the Days of Futures Past timeline, so her father is a Cyclops, but not actually this Cyclops. She’s never been all that close to Scott in this timeline, and fell out with him rather badly at one point over his relationship with Emma Frost. But evidently she’s up for being a member of the Summers family these days.

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers are for the digital edition.

FALLEN ANGELS. The original Fallen Angels was a much-liked eight-issue miniseries from 1987-88, in which Sunspot and Warlock run away from the New Mutants and wind up on a team of misfits under the charge of the Vanisher, including Siryn, Madrox, and a bunch of characters rarely seen since. This was back in the days when X-minis were still uncommon enough to be a big deal. This series has no obvious connection with the original, beyond reusing a nice name.

COVER / PAGE 1. The cast in Tokyo.

PAGES 2-5. A young Apoth user seizes control of a Tokyo underground train and crashes it.

We’ll learn more about Apoth later in the issue – including its name – but it’s pretty clear that it’s the device which the girl places on her head, and which apparently gives her powers. We’ll also find out at the end of the issue that the girl seen here is Kwannon’s long-lost daughter. Again, more of that later.

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers are from the digital edition. And really, this does contain spoilers.

X-FORCE: This is the sixth volume of X-Force. The first ran from 1991 to 2002 and covered the adventures of the New Mutants after Cable restructured them into a more paramilitary group (and then turned into X-Statix near the end). The second was a six-issue reunion mini from 2004-5. The third is the Kyle/Yost run from 2008-10, where X-Force was reused as the name for the X-Men’s black ops unit during the Utopia era; it was followed by another 35 issues as Uncanny X-Force. Volume 4 was the Marvel Now version from 2014-15 (the Si Spurrier book with Cable, Psylocke, Fantomex and the like). And the fifth volume is the run with the teen Cable that came immediately before House of X.

The running theme in all this is that “X-Force” tends to be attached to an X-Men spin-off team which is either a black ops unit or takes a more paramilitary approach to matters than the regular X-Men. This first issue, however, doesn’t actually feature an X-Force team at all, or even many characters doing anything particularly X-Force-like. Presumably all that emerges over the course of the first arc. But it does take a much grimmer tone than any of the other Krakoa-era books.