INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #2. (Annotations here.) Okay, so this is going pretty well so far. Cable’s got an ulterior motive for putting the team together, but it’s mainly just to figure out which team member needs to be saved from themselves. Boom-Boom not being able to get her head round the fact that the villains are younger than her these days is a cute angle. And Ms Marvel seems to be here to provide a contrast with everyone else – the point is for her to drag the team in her direction, not the other way round. Tim Seeley’s reference point is the original X-Force, after all, and they weren’t especially grimdark at all – that only became the norm in the Kyle/Yost era where nobody seemed able to find a lightswitch. The original X-Force was pretty much technicolour. This is a bit more restrained, but it’s still far from bleak. Hellverine is as grim as it gets, and this issue seems to exist mainly to establish early that he’s not going to be the killer – though I’m not entirely sold on bringing in the Blasphemy Cult as doomsday cult villains, which does drag us a bit in the downbeat direction. Still, having them call up old folklore monsters to fight for them is kind of fun, and Michael Sta. Maria gives them the right balance of backwoods extremists and actual magicians. Pretty solid.

SPIDER-MAN & WOLVERINE #10. By Marc Guggenheim, Gerardo Sandoval, Victor Nava, Brian Reber & Travis Lanham. Final issue. I honestly don’t know what to make of the farewell message from Marc Guggenheim, which says that “in these ten issues, we have something very rare for comics these days: a consistent creative team”. Uh, Kaare Andrews drew six issues and Gerardo Sandoval drew four, and they don’t even look much alike. In fact, Sandoval wound up drawing the last two issues. I guess you can make the case that at least they consistently had the same fill-in artist, but come on now.

The first arc of this book was an absolute mess. The back end is better, this being a basically fine alternate reality story where the local villain is a Wolverine/Spider-Man mash-up character. In the final issue, it follows our heroes back to the main Marvel Universe for a final battle, and in a last minute bid for continuity significance, Mariko Yashida shows up. Guggenheim’s approach to her is reasonable enough: she’s been through a lot of quite miserable and traumatic stuff and would prefer to be left alone to not be reminded about it. It’s more an effort to tie her up as a loose end than set her up for future use, although to be fair, this is a final issue. I don’t think the Scarlet Samurai outfit looks that great in Sandoval’s art – the weird shapes make her hard to follow. But it’s all perfectly fine.

ROGUE #2. By Erica Schultz, Luigi Zagaria, Espen Grundetjern & Ariana Maher. Well, the first issue exceeded my expectations, but this one is more of a problem. As we established last time, the basic plot is that Rogue starts having flashbacks about a Brotherhood of Evil Mutants mission that had something to do with Sabretooth, after running into a bystander who seems to have something to do with it. So Rogue sets out to investigate. So far so good. This issue opens with Mystique starting to explain what happened and then just stopping for no remotely apparent reason. I think it’s meant to come across as “Mystique must have her reasons”, but honestly it just feels like Mystique has to say something in order to advance the plot, and then has to stop because if she didn’t then the plot would be over. Then we get Rogue’s powers going out of control and mimicking random X-Men for no terribly clear reason, but okay, whatever. And then she crashes out of the sky into a bunch of villains by… sheer random chance? I mean, it seems to be sheer random chance. Maybe all this is going to come together in a more satisfying way, but right now it all seems like stuff happening for the sake of it, rather than a functioning mystery.

PSYLOCKE: NINJA #2. By Tim Seeley, Nico Leon, Dono Sánchez-Almara & Ariana Maher. This has got some pacing issues, perhaps in part because of the need to dance between the continuity raindrops. Issues #1-2 are somewhere between Uncanny X-Men #256-257, with Psylocke body-swapped by the Hand but not entirely brainwashed yet, and being sent on a mission to kill Elektra before she can get revived by the Chaste after, I guess, Elektra: Assassin. Leon’s art is fine enough for the period it’s going for, for better or worse, and there are some layouts I really do like during the fight scene. On the other hand… well, it’s Psylocke fighting the Chaste for about half an issue, and making an accidental contribution to Elektra’s resurrection. Then we have to reset to fit in the Lady Mandarin stuff, and apparently next time we’re on to the Wolverine-Jubilee-Psylocke Madripoor team – presumably with more of Elektra running around. It’s not exactly bad, and I’m vaguely interested in the idea of fleshing out Matsu’o’s retconned-in emotional connection with Psylocke (or at least, the previous occupant of her body), but I’m struggling right now to see what the point is.