This came out two weeks ago.  It’s labelled as “Kitty Goes To Washington, Part 1”, which I figured meant there would be a part two.  But X-Men Gold #10 turns out to be “En’Kane, Part 1”.  So apparently issue #9 was “Kitty Goes To Washington, Part 1 of 1”.  So… okay then.  Let’s run through it.

In fact, these divisions aren’t as hard and fast as they once were.  Despite the story titles, Marc Guggenheim is writing X-Men Gold much more in the style of an 80s or 90s team book, with subplots fading in and out as they take their turn to come to the foreground.  So “Kitty Goes To Washington” actually starts and finishes with subplot pages setting up the return of Omega Red, which is the next arc.  Let’s leave them aside and worry about this one.

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We should be grateful for small mercies, I suppose.  One such is that the X-books have largely managed to dodge the Secret Empire crossover – and X-Men Gold, which did a tie-in, largely ducked the event by using the side plot of Manhattan in the Dark Dimension (which it proceeded to largely ignore anyway).  X-Men Blue, in contrast, knuckles down to the difficult business of doing three issues engaging with the meat of Secret Empire.  It shouldn’t have bothered.

As we’ve discussed many times on the podcast, I have no particular issue with the premise of Captain America being remade as a Hydra spy by using a Cosmic Cube to retroactively change his upbringing.  The underlying ideas seem to be that fascism’s appeal lies in a twisted version of conventionally heroic notions (patriotism, sacrifice for the group and so on) and, to a lesser extent, the danger of abandoning checks and balances with anyone, no matter how seemingly infallible.  But those are ideas that seem like they want to play out on a smaller and more character-driven scale.

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Or Generations: The Best, if you prefer.  Which is a better title, and kind of sort of what it says on the cover, but I’ll go with the solicitations and the digital listings.

So, just like last week’s Phoenix one-shot, this is a story in which a legacy character from the present goes back in time for no adequately (or even inadequately) explained reason, and meets the original.  Sort of.  I guess Phoenix wasn’t really the original Jean Grey.  An earlier version, anyway.  If there’s an explanation for any of this time travel stuff, it’s presumably going to show up somewhere else, and (plot mechanics aside) it’s of no relevance to this story, so let’s set it to one side.

This is effectively an extra issue of All-New Wolverine, by regular writer Tom Taylor.  So that’s a good start.  At first glance, though, All-New Wolverine doesn’t lend itself to this format, because Laura has met the original Wolverine plenty of times.  They starred in X-Force together, for one thing.  What can you do with them?

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What is Generations?   I partly know the answer, I guess.  It’s a series of one-shots in which “legacy” versions of characters meet earlier versions of themselves, and it’s meant to set up new directions, or something along those lines.  But as a story, what is it?  Does it even have a plot?

If you’re not following the wider series (I’m not), and you’re buying this simply because it’s effectively a Jean Grey special (I am), then the set-up here is curious to say the least.  The recap page has some cryptic stuff about “the Vanishing Point”, but what actually happens is that the present-day Jean Grey (the time travelling teenager) randomly finds herself in Claremont/Byrne X-Men during the period when Jean Grey was holidaying in Europe while she thought the X-Men were dead.  And then at the end of the issue she goes home.

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