UNCANNY X-MEN #22. (Annotations here.) It’s a weird schedule, this month. You might have thought that the X-books were simply doing a soft relaunch and spreading out the launches of the new titles after “Age of Revelation”. But then you look at next week’s schedule, which has six X-books… and then the week after that seems to have just the one again. Baffling.

Whatever they’re up to, it means that Uncanny X-Men gets a more-or-less clear week for its return to regular stories. Gail Simone returns to the Mutina storyline from issues #17-18, as she shows up at Haven simultaneously threatening everyone with knives and demanding to be allowed to join the team for PR reasons, as if that was somehow a reasonable thing to request. This doubles somewhat as a Nightcrawler spotlight issue, in as much as it also features his first date with Mackenzie, and he’s the one who actually heads her off. But her storyline isn’t really tied to him more than any other regular cast member, although he is at least well placed to be the most open-minded X-Man about the possibility of redeeming her.

Mutina herself is the real spotlight here, and I think what we’re doing here is mainly an exercise in hinting at the personality that she keeps suppressed beneath her persona. I’m kind of intrigued by the implication that she knows an awful lot more than she ought to, given what we’ve heard about her to date, but I think she’s being set up quite well as a character who has become so subsumed by her public persona that we have to try and figure out what she actually wants here, even if she herself knows. This sort of thing doesn’t always come off, but Mutina’s behaviour feels like it doesn’t make sense because she’s a chaotic and conflicted character, rather than because of any gaps in thinking her through.

And her smiling half-mask allows David Marquez to alternate between her actual emotions and the way she chooses to be seen; if I have a criticism of the art, it’s that her mask gets knocked off in the final fight, and it’s rather easy to miss. (All subsequent panels take care to avoid giving us a clear view of the part of her face that we can’t normally see.) But it’s a typically beautiful issue, with his Kurt having a wonderful air of serene concern about him.

LOGAN: BLACK, WHITE & BLOOD #1. We also have the first issue of this anthology mini. I’m not a big fan of these spot colour anthologies – it’s a nice enough effect when you see it occasionally, but it wears thin pretty quickly for me. And, perhaps driven by the way Marvel choose to banner them, stories tend to gravitate very heavily to “What shall we do with red spot colouring? Ooh, maybe blood again?” “Arms Race” by Tom Waltz, Alex Lins and Cory Petit is pretty squarely in that category, I’m afraid. Logan’s fighting in the Korean war, his battalion get wiped out by Russian cyborg soldiers, he’s really quite angry about it, there’s some bloodshed. It’s all perfectly competent but there’s nothing new here, it doesn’t have any particular reason to use the colour gimmick, and a token gesture to this being a prototype version of the Winter Soldier really isn’t changing that.

“Times Square Red” by Saladin Ahmed, Adam Kubert, Arthur Hesli & Cory Petit is rather better: it’s Logan breaking off from a mission to deal with a serial killer in 1970s Times Square, and it’s much more interested in using the red for mood and seediness. It’s somewhat tongue in cheek – the adult cinema scene circumvents the problems of showing actual porn by doubling down on complete absurdity – but it’s actually a good little story that genuinely has a use for the colouring gimmick.

“Red Claws” by Larry Hama, Dave Wachter and Cory Petit is a lot more straightforward. It’s bestial Logan in the period after he escaped the Weapon X Project, saving some arctic wolves from hunters. There’s nothing really new here in terms of the story – Logan turning the tables on complacent human hunters has been done before and it’s done again here – but it does have some very nice looking, surprisingly delicate art. Wachter is good with animals, and the snowbound setting makes the colouring less gimmicky, since it’s at least drawing attention to the thing that would stand out the most.

So overall, not bad, actually. One genuinely good story, one middling to okay, and the other one is at least passable.