X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #6. By Tim Seeley, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. The final part of the Magik story. The basic idea here seems clear enough: because Belasco conjured those Bloodstones from her years ago, when Magik dies her soul gets split in two, and the Illyana part winds up with Belasco while the Darkchild somehow ends up with S’ym. I don’t really get why the Darkchild ends up with S’ym – did he find her wandering Limbo or something – but she does? So Illyana and Darkchild engineer a war between Belasco and S’ym in order to bring themselves together again. They promptly kill Belasco, but then Darkchild seizes control once and for all. It all feels a bit rushed, and honestly it probably needed to be either told at greater length or left to implication.

A bigger problem is that Tim Seeley seems to want this story to be about Illyana learning that Darkchild reflected a dark side that was present in her all along. That’s not quite on the same page with the recent Magik series, but it’s not a million miles away either – that book also wants Darkchild to be a side of Illyana that she’s wrongly interpreted all these years as an infection when it was actually a defence mechanism. But it creates a problem both in having Illyana learn a slightly different version of a lesson that she only just learned in her own book, and in the fact that the actual plot – Darkchild usurps Illyana and replaces her once and for all – doesn’t really dovetail with the message.

My guess is that “Age of Revelation” ends with a lot of characters learning what happened in AoR and setting out to make sure it doesn’t happen – the next phase is billed as “Shadows of Tomorrow”, after all. And besides, Cyclops is clearly going back to the present day, and another of this week’s books sees a second message to the present day (we’ll get to that). So all this material about Illyana’s fate after her death probably becomes significant there. As a story in its own right, though, it doesn’t really work.

UNBREAKABLE X-MEN #3. (Annotations here.) Just one core title this week, and as we make our way through December we’re going to get a lot of minis seeing if they can stick the landing. Unbreakable X-Men is an odd book – I’d struggle to say that the plot really makes sense to me. Not so much the parts about Rogue being a statue for three years – fair enough, that’s the premise – but the bit where Shuvahrak escapes and then… goes after Atlantis? I don’t get it. Her motivation is meant to be about revenge on the people who imprisoned her. This isn’t really meant to be because Namor is the first mutant, is it? Because that’s purely meta, it’s not a thing in universe. And the fact that I genuinely don’t get what we’re doing in Atlantis at all is a problem.

And yet. The emotional core of Gambit on his last mission, and his reunion with Rogue, absoutely works – and on some level the details of the plot don’t really matter, since it’s mainly a device for that to happen. The older versions of the Outliers are interesting to see. I’ve said before that Shuvahrak is a rare example of a character who benefits from a degree of cryptic obscurity because there’s meant to be something unintelligbly Cthulhuesque about her; in a weird way, the fact that her stories don’t quite make sense adds to her aura. And it’s certainly a good looking book. Somehow, somehow it gets away with it all.

The upbeat ending, with the X-family reunited, is a bit weird in the context of the wider event – but then this book has essentially ignored the wider event entirely, in favour of doing a story that could have been done ten years into the future, even if Revelation was nowhere in sight. That plays a little oddly right now, but makes rather more sense if you think of the real objective of this book as being to set things up for “Shadows of Tomorrow.”

SINISTER’S SIX #3. By David Marquez, Rafael Loureiro, Alex Sinclair & Ariana Maher. So Havok’s team fight Revelation and his crew, and get themselves killed. Except for Venom, who turns out to be Polaris, and rescues the kid. This book had a couple of decent issues of set-up introducing the various characters, but the ending is basically “they all die”, and while that’s kind of how these stories end, it doesn’t manage to make that character work mean anything – they’re kind of interchangeable in the end. Well, except for Havok, who does get to go out in a heroic last stand, and it’s nice to see the guy written with a bit of dignity for a change. An epilogue insinuating that Sinister has somehow inserted himself into the DNA of the Revelation Territories’ plantlife seems to come out of nowhere, and while it might possibly come to something in view of Revelation’s plan to transform the world, I kind of suspect we’ll never hear of it again. At any rate, it feels tacked on here. It looks pretty good, and it does at least give us a bit of optimism at the end, but I don’t think it managed to deliver on the promise of the first couple of issues.

IRON & FROST #3. By Cavan Scott, Ruairí Coleman, Yen Nitro & Ariana Maher. Pretty much exactly the ending you’d expect from the previous issue: Emma sacrifices her life to access her telepathy one last time in order to save Tony. The twist seems to be that seeing her die immediately drives him mad again. There’s a weird bit where he’s threatening to blow up and eradicate the eastern seaboard, but then it happens anyway a few pages later – are we supposed to believe that a major disaster actually did happen in this extremely marginal book? The problem here may be that the escalation in stakes is so last-minute, and the book had so clearly pigeonholed itself as “not very important” already, that I just instinctively reject the idea that something like that actually happened. And if it’s not meant to be taken literally, it all feels a bit arbitrary.

Either way, this book wasn’t very successful. It’s too limited to a small number of characters in one extended scene in a rather bland landscape of workshops and rubble – though somehow I really do still like the way Landslide is drawn, since she seems a lot more alive. The book ends with a message being sent back to Iron Man in the present day, which could sensibly feed in to post-AoR stories. That aside, there really wasn’t much to see here.

LONGSHOTS #3. By Gerry Duggan, Jonathan Hickman, Alan Robinson, Wayne Faucher, Calos Lopez, Antonio Fabela & Maher. Look, if we’re going to have a 17-title event – and I remain very sceptical that the market interest came close to justifying that, quite aside from creative considerations – I’m glad that the X-office threw in something genuinely weird into the mix. But that can’t get round the fundamental problem with this book, which is that it’s a wacky comedy series that isn’t funny. The only other thing worth noting in this issue is a scene clearly intended to trail Hellcat and Wonder Man in a Wonder Man comic (which Duggan is meant to be writing in the spring), but let’s just say nothing in this series leaves me wanting more.

SPIDER-MAN & WOLVERINE #8. By Marc Guggenheim, Kaare Andrews, Brian Reber & Travis Lanham. It’s Spider-Man and Wolverine in an alternate world where most characters seem to be mash-ups of two Marvel heroes, and the mash-up of Spider-Man and Wolverine is a bad guy. It’s not deep, guys. But it’s fun empty calories and it’s the sort of silly but viable premise that lets Kaare Andrews enjoy himself on art. Admittedly, his designs for the other mash-ups are surprisingly conservative – he’s just blended already recognisable features and left it at that – but it’s still very nice to look at. And it’s got an Ultron with Iron Fist powers, which is such a pointlessly minor addition to an Ultron that I can’t help liking it.