UNCANNY X-MEN #23. (Annotations here.) The first part of “Where Monsters Dwell”, and it’s an odd thing. We’ve got an apparently-possessed Legion of Monsters showing up to claim New Orleans for monster-kind, which… hmm. I’ve never liked the Legion of Monsters. It’s not so much that magic doesn’t fit in the X-Men – the Dark Artery is already an established element of this book – I just find them a bit wacky. Not my thing. Maybe it plays off the subplot of Gambit’s corruption coming to a head? We’ll see. Alongside that, though, we’ve got a parallel bedtime story about the Rawhide Kid, of all characters. And he’s a different genre entirely. So are we doing something meta about pre-FF #1 Marvel? At this stage, I’m just kind of puzzled about where this is going, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing at the end of chapter 1. And it’s David Marquez on art, so it looks fantastic. A weird enough mishmash of disparate elements to make me curious, at least.

WOLVERINE #15. (Annotations here.) Wolverine and Silver Sable train the Morlocks and fight a bit, and then Department H show up with Alpha Flight in tow for the fight. As you might have picked up, I have a problem with this. Partly, it feels as if Agent Mehta has lurched far too quickly into being a stock hostile government agent, despite the way she was introduced – and she’s a vastly less interesting character as a result. But the whole current set-up of Alpha Flight is a problem.

The last Alpha Flight series, during Fall of X, had Alpha Flight feigning loyalty to the pro-Orchis Canadian government in order to protect mutants from inside, and eventually winding up in jail at the end. And now, long after Orchis were defeated, they’re… still in jail? Why, for god’s sake? It’s a particular problem when the implication is to say, in 2026, that fascism has been more persistent in Canada than in the USA, which: no. Absolutely no.

I suppose you could make a case that Graymalkin is doing something similar in the USA. But Graymalkin is mainly a story about private prisons, and quite what legal basis they have for hauling mutants off the streets has never been remotely coherent – they seem to exist in a parallel USA where “Fall of X” is still in progress, while mutants are living openly in Chicago, have a community centre with a big sign outside in New York, and are being offered a tourist district in New Orleans. It can’t be both!

But… yeah, I’m just not willing to tolerate Americans, any Americans, doing this story about Canada right now, I’m really not. If you can’t or won’t do this story about the USA, don’t do it about Canada.

STORM: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST MUTANT #1. (Annotations here.) It’s never a good sign when the writer seems to have found out that the book was a five-issue miniseries by reading the solicitations; you wonder how the pacing is going to shake out. That said, I think I liked this more than the previous run. The scenes get a little bit more room to breathe, minor characters like Death Siren actually stick in the mind, and we seem to be rid for the moment of the cosmic stuff that made Storm seem to lack agency in her own book. Instead we have a fairly straightforward story where Storm has imprisoned Susanoo to stop him killing himself, and his followers go on a rampage to get him released, so that Storm feels guilty about teh devastation that she’s unleashed in her attempt to stick to her principles. The biggest problem with this issue is the confusing way that it jumps about in time, and even that’s more of a visual issue: if the flashbacks were more clearly coded as such in the art or colouring, then it would be vastly easier to follow and it wouldn’t have taken me two reads to figure out the plot (and a third to figure it out correctly). Once you do, though, it’s not a bad story at all, and there are some genuinely likeable ideas in here.

MAGIK & COLOSSUS #1. By Ashley Allen, Germán Peralta, Arthur Hesli & Ariana Maher. A miniseries from the creative team of Magik, and you could probably have run this as an arc in a Magik solo book. But it does merit the joint billing, and if anything it’s more of a Colossus story. Allen’s main aim here seems to be to confront head on the fact that Colossus has been written into a corner of depression and to see if she can get him out of it. After he goes missing for several weeks, Magik tracks him down in Russia where he’s been trying to make his way back home to help with the harvest, only to keep running into monsters that he thinks are following him from town to town. As it turns out, they’re actually part of some magical plague on all Russia’s farming villages (which sure feels like it would have been noticed by someone before now, but maybe that’ll be explained). That plot feels like it exists mainly to provide some opposition with a bit of local colour in the form of Slavic myth; the main point here is about Piotr’s seeming death wish and Magik’s attempts to steer him back into his traditional heroic role, only for him to end up having to kill the demon-of-the-week with an “oh well, this again” sense of resignation. As Magik points out, she and Colossus have had much less interaction over the years than you might expect, and this issue makes their relationship work rather well – now that she’s come to terms with her Darkchild persona, Magik has really done a much better job of coming to terms with trauma than Piotr has, and that seems to be the angle.

One thing, though: isn’t it past time to retire the “Ust-Ordynsky Collective Farm”? Russia got rid of collective farms over thirty years ago now. There’s no way either of these characters grew up on one.

LOGAN: BLACK WHITE & BLOOD #2. The first issue of this series exceeded my expectations. This one doesn’t – nothing in it is especially bad, but nor would any of it seem out of place as a filler back-up in an annual. “First Kiss” by Benjamin Percy and Robert Gill is a very straightforward story about Logan getting into a fight in the woods in the 1920s and making it away with a cask of bourbon. That’s it. “The Children of the Altered Mind” by Frank Tieri and Raffaele Ienco is basically just a pre-superhero Logan and Carol Danvers running into a Skrull. “One Last Crossing” by Mirka Andolfo is the best of the bunch – a semi-ghost-story about a trafficking ship, that at least uses the spot colouring effectively, including by highlighting things that shouldn’t logically be red. As a package, it doesn’t make a great case for the format.