All right, then!  We’ve got two weeks worth of X-books to cover – which, in this day and age – is a lot – so let’s run through them.  I’ll try and take some of these quickly but, well, I said that last time and it didn’t seem to work out that way.  Let’s see how we go.

Avengers: X-Sanction #4 – This is the final issue of the miniseries that’s being billed as a lead-in to Avengers vs X-Men (and, incidentally, Marvel are displaying remarkable confidence in product awareness by shipping it with a cover that completely obscures the “X-Sanction” bit of the logo).  A while back, I predicted that the pay-off would be that Cable’s mission ended up tipping off the Avengers to the threat posed by Hope, thus ironically bringing about the very thing he was trying to stop.  Well, that doesn’t happen.

Thing is, nor does much of anything else.  Cable is finally subdued and carted off to the X-Men’s prison; Hope somehow or other cures him of the techno-organic virus; and Cable and Cyclops have a brief conversation in which they acknowledge openly that she’s Phoenix.  Which, from the look of it, is supposed to be the big pay-off.  Except any remotely attentive reader must have figured it out during “Messiah Complex”, which was years ago.  That aside, it’s a load of running around and fighting, with some leaden attempts at emotional melodrama.  Oh, and it has one of the stupidest scenes I’ve read in years, in which we’re asked to believe that Hope understands Cable so well that she can guess correctly which wire to cut to defuse a bomb that he’s set.  It’s the sort of thing that would be charmingly goofy in a Silver Age comic, to be fair, but even if you’re willing to be charitable and take it that way, it still seems absurdly out of place here.

If you decided to skip the prequel and go straight to the regular series – smart choice.  You missed nothing.

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These are going to be fairly brief, but hey, better than waiting for another week…

Age of Apocalypse #1 – To give credit where it’s due, if the X-office are under orders to come up with yet more ways of expanding the franchise, at least this one clearly has its own identity, rather than being yet another X-Men title (of which they shipped three last week).  The original “Age of Apocalypse” alternate-reality crossover was way back in the 90s, but it was recently dusted off in X-Force as part of the “Dark Angel Saga” – no doubt with an eye on promoting this title, though there’s nothing wrong with that.

Despite the title, Apocalypse himself is nowhere to be seen in this new series.  Instead, he’s long dead, and his heir Wolverine is running the world instead.  The humans have largely been wiped out and a handful of guerrilla rebels defending the few survivors form the main cast (joined by the local versions of Jean Grey and Sabretooth, both of whom lost their powers in a Convenient Plot Contrivance in X-Force‘s Point One issue).

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Well, this won’t take long, will it?  After a veritable flood of X-books last week, this time we’ve got just the one – Astonishing X-Men #47.  And since I’m kind of busy this weekend, let’s just do that one and be done with it.

This is the final part of Greg Pak and Mike McKone’s alternate-reality storyline “Exalted”.  Just to bring you back up to speed: Cyclops has been kidnapped by the X-Men of a parallel world, along with a bunch of other Exiles-style X-Men counterparts.  It turns out that this world was permanently damaged in a final battle between the X-Men and Magneto.  In order to keep it going, they have a giant plot device – sorry, very important machine – which powers itself by absorbing the energy of mutants.  In other words, to keep the world going, they have to keep chucking mutants onto the fire.  All of the suitable local mutants having nobly sacrificed themselves already, they’ve started importing from parallel worlds.  Because, after all, the X-Men are, in every world, heroes, and will therefore be thrilled at the opportunity to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.

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