Oh yes, I haven’t forgotten about these.

Looking back, we can see where the problems lie with a crossover like Age of X-Man: the various minis wind up falling into a pattern where the characters start off immersed in Nate’s world, and slowly recover their memories over the course of a series.  There’s only so many variations you can do on that theme, and not all of them make for minis that are ultimately satisfying in their own right.

But on that score, Vita Ayala and Germán Peralta’s Prisoner X is one of the most successful.  Sure, in a broad sense, it’s the same plot as the others.  Bishop starts off believing himself to be a prisoner in the “Danger Room” complex, where he’s been sent after his third-strike for unacceptable relationships and crimes against “autonomy”.  And over the course of the series, he and some of the other prisoners figure out who they really are.  Prisoner X has some advantages over the others, though.

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No, I’m not quite sure why this exists either.  It’s a one-shot anthology with three Wolverine stories, which would normally scream “completist fodder”.  But it’s an unusually high end one, since at least it’s using creators who are strongly associated with Wolverine: Larry Hama, Chris Claremont, and (admittedly more of a stretch) Sam Kieth.  Apparently it’s something to do with Marvel’s 80th birthday celebrations, so I guess the idea is to let these guys play to the nostalgia.

It’s still a book that’s unlikely to trouble the attention of anyone other than completists and big fans of the creators, though.  Larry Hama leads off with “Red in Tooth and Claw”, illustrated by Scot Eaton and Sean Parsons, which is a flashback to the old memory-implant idea that he made so much of during his early 90s Wolverine run.  Hama always enjoyed the potential for surrealism in Wolverine’s altered memories, particularly when he had Mark Texeira on art.

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(Imagine here the sound of deep sighing.)

So.  These three issues aren’t technically part of Uncanny X-Men.  But they are written by Matthew Rosenberg, and they carry “legacy” numbers #635-637, which would place them between Uncanny X-Men #15-16 – just before Rahne leaves, in other words.  They also smooth over the plot a little bit, in terms of things like Hope becoming a member of the team.  So imagine if Rosenberg’s main story had been interrupted by a three-issue crossover arc between chapters five and six, basically.

War of the Realms grows out of a long-running Thor storyline, and basically involves a whole load of Asgardian baddies invading Earth and having a great big war.  And that’s not the best set-up for a tie-in with Rosenberg’s Uncanny X-Men.

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Gosh, the backlog is starting to look a bit terrifying.  That’ll happen when everything ends at once, I guess – including a bunch of prologue one-shots sneaking in under the wire.  But we’ll come to those.  First up, the closing two issues of Mr & Mrs X, a book which has in fact achieved something (hopefully) lasting and solid.  Before Kelly Thompson got hold of Rogue and Gambit, their on-again-off-again relationship had drifted into that grey territory somewhere between “nineties nostalgia” and “not this again.”  Despite the initial wrench it took to get them there, Mr & Mrs X ends with them as a solid couple who seem, once again, like they belong together.

Publishers can be understandably nervous about marrying off characters, because of the fear that it marks the end of their story.  It depends on the story, of course.  Moonlighting was notoriously considered to have lost its way after it paired up the lead characters, but the core of their appeal was the will-they-won’t-they schtick.  With Rogue and Gambit, any mileage in that routine was exhausted years ago, and besides, their appeal has long been more in the way they play off each other when they’re together.  They work as a double act; marrying them makes it stronger.

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