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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There’s a temptation to bring out special standards where Rob Liefeld is concerned.  After all, on any conventional basis, he makes awful, incoherent comics.  And yet, and yet…  Liefeld was a star in the nineties, and clearly he was doing something that connected.  His style was one of the dominant features of the period, grudgingly imitated by all manner of artists who wanted to keep getting work.  His stories were incoherent in a way that suggested not so much laziness as naive, stream-of-conscious enthusiasm.  Some of his actual concepts, like Youngblood, turn out to be entirely viable when handled by more conventional talents.  And in a couple of years  he had a hand in creating Cable, Domino, Shatterstar and Deadpool, which is a pretty good track record.

Major X, his latest six-issue mini, fits well into this tradition.  It bounces around with tremendous enthusiasm and no great coherence.  Plot threads are introduced and never paid off (in a way that you’d get away with if these were the first six issues of an ongoing).  Little about it makes sense.  But Liefeld comes across as genuinely enthusiastic about it.  It doesn’t feel phoned in.  It feels mad.

In a good way?  No.  Not in a good way.  It’s awful.  But at least it’s idiosyncratically awful.  And some Liefeld concepts turned out to work when other people communicated them more effectively.  Might this be one?

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Leah Williams and Georges Jeanty’s X-Tremists takes on one of the trickier tasks of the Age of X-Man crossover: writing a bunch of characters as a secret police force who mindwipe, and ultimately disappear, inconvenient people – people who won’t get on board with Nate’s relationship-free, individualist culture.  While the public don’t know about all the mind wiping, or at least know about it only as a rumour, they do know about Department X itself, as a relatively low level outfit policing antisocial behaviour.  From the standpoint of the Age of X-Man public, they’re the vice squad.  (Rather unfortunately, their slogan “Semper Vigilo” – “Always Watching” – is also the motto of Police Scotland.)

But they’re a bit more awful than that, which raises awkward questions for the characters.  After all, sure, they’re under outside influence.  But so is everyone else, and plenty of them are breaking free.  Most of those that aren’t are simply living “normal” lives in Nate’s society.  The Department X members are actively enforcing Nate’s pseudotopia.

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Ed Brisson’s time on the X-books seems to be drawing to a close as we near the Hickman relaunch.  But there’s still time for one more story about Glob Herman, who seems to have become his favourite character.  Glob’s been around since 2001, largely as a background character with a memorable visual – but he’s the one currently selected to play the role of the long-suffering sad-sack trainee.  It’s a role that his design and long tenure leave him well suited to.

NextGen isn’t a solo title – the rest of the core cast are Anole, Rockslide and Armor.  But he’s the lynchpin.  Incidentally, this is one of several Age of X-Man minis where the title isn’t the name of the team.  There is no team here, just a handful of students at the Summers Institute for Higher Learning who realise what’s up.  Because, yes, this is inevitably another Age of X-Man mini where the basic arc is “some characters remember”.

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Considering that Nightcrawler is also starring in the Age of X-Man: Marvelous X-Men miniseries, it seems odd at first that there’s no apparent interaction between the two books.  As it turns out, there is a reason, of sorts: the plot of Nightcrawler’s solo book pretty much rules out the possibility of him coming back to the X-Men to talk about.  I’ll get into why later on, but anyone who’s been even vaguely following Age of X-Man will have spotted that there’s quite a lot of mind-wiping going on.  So fair enough, that turns out to make sense at the end of the day.

Amazing Nightcrawler is still a curious book, though.  There’s a certain same-iness to the Age of X-Man minis, in as much as they tend to fall into two main plots: fighting the forces of social conformity within Nate’s strange little world, or characters starting to recover their normal sense of identity.  Nightcrawler basically does that too, but its starting point is that Kurt is having a rather lovely time in this world, where he is indeed getting to live out his dream of movie stardom before an adoring audience.

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