EXPATRIATE X-MEN #3
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Francesco Mortarino
Colourist: Raúl Angulo
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: The Darkchild holds the X-Men in her hand.

This is the final issue of Expatriate X-Men. The parent title Exceptional X-Men isn’t returning in 2026, but X-Men United appears to be its spiritual successor.

PAGES 1-4. The Providence city wall attacks the X-Men.

This picks up directly from the end of issue #2, which ended with Ms Marvel discovering that there was 3K technology underneath the Flotilla – on re-reading, the idea seems to be that it’s on the hull of the boats, and the storytelling problem is that issue #2 jumps from Ms Marvel reaching underwater to retrieve Lyrebird to being underwater with him, with no apparent moment where she actually goes underwater. Anyway, as soon as this secret is exposed, Melée and Rift teleport the ship to the edges of the Limbo Lands, where they immediately come under attack. The opening caption here establishes that the attacker is the city wall itself, which is “semi-sentient”.

As Ms Marvel points out, the team were hired in issue #1 precisely to bring Lyrebird to the Darkchild, so they were led to believe that she was expecting them.

PAGES 5-8. Darkchild explains the plot.

Colossus understandably tries appealing to his relationship with Illyana, although it looks very much as if she shows up in response to the alarm going off rather than because of anything he’s done. Online translators give his one line of Cyrillic dialogue as “stand”, but I suspect it’s meant to be “stand down”.

Darkchild and Juggernaut appear as they did in Amazing X-Men. However, the city itself looks far more Limbo-like than it did in Amazing, where it was presented as a superfically normal-looking city where ordinary humans lived in stressful misery. It’s possible that the areas right next to the border are made to look worse in order to scare off attackers.

Back in issue #1, Mystique hired the X-Men to bring Lyrebird to the Darkchild in exchange for intelligence. She expressly refused to say why. Darkchild now reveals that she hired Lyrebird to bring the X-Men to her domain, and that he engineered the deal with Mystique. This explains the scenes in issue #2 where Lyrebird turned out to have fire powers that he’d previously been concealing, suggesting that he never needed the X-Men’s help to escape captivity in issue #1.

Issue #1 also revealed that Melée had made a side deal with someone, which involved heading to the Limbo Lands but making sure that Darkchild didn’t get Lyrebird. Darkchild reveals here that she knows (presumably through magic) that Melée’s employer was 3K, and that the deal involved smuggling 3K technology into the Limbo Lands. However, this doesn’t explain why 3K were concerned that Lyrebird should be kept out of Darkchild’s hands.

Somewhat out of nowhere, it also transpires that Lyrebird and Illyana had a daughter, Nika, who somehow “sustains the Limbo Lands”, apparently meaning that she anchors their presence as an intrusion on Earth,. It’s not at all clear when this would have happened, even allowing for time distortion in Limbo. Since Lyrebird doesn’t regard Darkchild as the same person as Illyana (and specifically doesn’t regard her as Nika’s mother), Nika must have been born before Illyana died and was reborn as Darkchild. That happened in the raid to free Fabian Cortez, which we saw in X-Men: Age of Revelation Infinity Comic #4, which appeared to be not very far into the future at all. Obviously, given Illyana’s powers, there’s some potential for time-travel to short-circuit a pregnancy. We haven’t even seen Lyrebird yet in the present day comics.

PAGES 9-10. Melée explains the plot.

Melée confirms her deal with 3K and explains that 3K were offering to help bring back Kitty Pryde in exchange. Everyone else in this book believes Kitty to be dead, but Melée believes that Revelation has trapped her in intangible form. Melée is in fact correct, as seen over in X-Men: Book of Revelation #1. She’s also correct that Kitty has been trapped in her intangible state before (specifically, while recovering from her injuries in the aftermath of the “Mutant Massacre” storyline back in the 1980s).

When faced with the argument that Kitty wouldn’t want the whole team to be sacrificed just for her, Melée offers a very tenuous justification to the effect that Kitty is one of Doug’s former teammates and would somehow be able to assist in taking him down. This doesn’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny, because plenty of other X-Men are still around and some of them are dealing with Revelation on a regular basis. It feels much more like rationalisation.

PAGES 11-14. The X-Men destroy the ship rather than give it to Darkchild.

Of some note, Bronze actually seems able to take a direct hit from Juggernaut without blacking out, though it clearly does her some damage.

PAGES 15-16. Lyrebird fails to rescue Nika.

Nika apparently can’t exist outside the Limbo Lands; Lyrebird appears to have misinterpreted this as a bluff by Darkchild to stop Nika from leaving. However, Nika seems completely happy and relaxed in Limbo.

PAGES 17-19. The X-Men and the Flotillans head for Philadelphia.

Darkchild is apparently persuaded that, despite previously claiming that the Flotilla had fallen to her, the letter of Lyrebird’s deal has been complied with, and so the X-Men should be free to leave. This is a bit puzzling since Lyrebird’s deal with her was to bring the X-Men to the Limbo Lands in exchange for Nika. The more fundamental point is that Nika was unable to leave and so Darkchild doesn’t seem to have honoured her part of that bargain. It’s also not really clear why Darkchild wanted the Flotilla to be brought to Limbo in the first place, though the obvious explanation would be that she wanted her brother with her. Colossus does in fact choose to remain behind.

To be honest, it’s not really obvious why everyone suddenly decides to head to Philadelphia now either, beyond the bare fact that that’s where the plot of the Finale one-shot is going to take place. But apparently these characters will be in it.