UNCANNY X-MEN ANNUAL #1. (Annotations here.) We effectively have two issues of Uncanny X-Men this week, as a result of this Annual slipping from its scheduled release date. Although there’s a present day segment with Wolverine and Jubilee, the main point of this story is to show us more of the group who were guarding Haven House in the 1920s (in the flashbacks to Henrietta’s arrival, in issues #15-16). The focus is Slaughter Freedman, the four-armed gunman who was pretty much a background figure in that story – though he seems to have been redesigned somewhat since then, as he’s now rather more heavily built and looks about 20 years older. Even if it doesn’t really fit with traditional continuity, I rather like the idea that there’s always been an underground community of mutants, and Slaughter himself is an engaging fellow. To the extent the design has been tweaked by Francesco Mortarino, I think it’s for the better; it does make the Regulators into a rather middle aged group, but I don’t particularly want them to feel lke proto-superheroes. Working Wolverine into the story feels like a gesture towards commercial reality more than something the story really needed, though – particularly when the story has to explain why we didn’t see him in issues #15-16 – but overall, I quite like this as an addition to the mythos. And hey, now we’ve got things in New Orleans to play with that aren’t the Guilds.

UNCANNY X-MEN #26. (Annotations here.) This is the first part of “Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed”, which takes us back to the Mutina storyline and also puts the focus back on the Outliers. Uncanny often feels like an Outliers title that happens to have some X-Men in the supporting cast, and this is one of those arcs – though that’s not something I have a problem with, as there’s far more territory to explore with the kids. We do have a subplot with Gambit talking about starting a family – and of course the whole premise of the two X-Men titles is that this one inherited the family aspect while Scott gets the militarism – and some progress with Kurt and Mackenzie’s romance, but the main point of this episode is to establish that the Outliers are trapped in some sort of dream where they’ve been cast as the New Mutants. Luciano Vecchio does a pretty solid job of echoing some of the scenes from Marvel Graphic Novel #4 but it does feel like Gail Simone is making some quite ambitious assumptions about how familiar people are with the original story. With Giant-Size X-Men #1 you can probably assume that a large chunk of the audience know that Peter saves Illyana from a runaway tractor and so forth. But Marvel Graphic Novel #4 never had the same iconic status, and I do wonder how many readers over 40 years down the line actually recognise references to Moira rescuing Wolfsbane, or Sunspot playing soccer. (It’s not even easy to find on Marvel Unlimited – for some reason it seems to be unavailable on the app, though you can find it on the desktop version filed under The New Mutants Graphic Novel.) Maybe it still works as long as you get the general idea that they’re being plugged into the New Mutants’ role, and it’ll probably become clearer as it goes on, but I can see a lot of readers being kind of baffled by this one.

WOLVERINE #18. (Annotations here.) Well, uh, that’s a fight with Hercules. The Adamantine plot doesn’t directly connect with the New Morlocks storyline, but since that’s what Wolverine happens to be doing right now, that’s where the Adamantine turns up. It does make sense for the Adamantine to turn to Hercules, as about the only character in the Marvel Universe of any profile who actually carries some adamantine around. And Romulus is casually killed off panel, which I’m 100% in favour of. Crushing your established unstoppable villains in order to sell a newcomer is often a cheap move, but in Romulus’ case, it’s pretty much all he’s good for, so we might as well cash in whatever value he’s accrued.

But the story is mostly just Wolverine and Hercules fighting until Athena shows up, to mixed results. Saladin Ahmed kind of manages to sell it as an epic conflict, and Martin Cóccolo’s fight scene has a pretty good flow to it for the most part. It’s still just a fight scene, though, and feels a bit slight for the majority of an issue. And there are some niggling glitches – Wolverine dramatically extending his claws at the bottom of one page only for them to be retracted again at the start of the next page so that he can extend them again later on that page, or Wolverine somehow being able to hold his own in a test of strength with Hercules even though the dialogue has expressly reminded us that he can’t. Plus, the script and art don’t agree about whether the New Morlocks are human-passing mutants or not, which seems like the sort of thing they ought to have figured out by now. It’s not quite clicking, even if the individual elements are mostly solid.

MOONSTAR #2. By Ashley Allen, Edoardo Audino, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. So the story here is that Dani is teaming up with Kian, the last surviving Exemplar of the Society of the Eternal Dawn (from Magik), to stop an ancient Norse warrior who wants to trap everyone’s souls in his sword. There’s a fairly obvious romantic tension angle here, and I quite like Allen’s approach of writing Dani Moonstar as a default-mode team leader stuck dealing with characters who won’t listen to her. Audino’s art is the star of the issue, combining some fluid action sequences with some good cartooning on the romantic elements. And I kind of like the fact that Kyron’s motivation to steal everyone’s souls is that he’s trying to do them a favour – life is miserable, an eternity in the afterlife even more so, so an eternity of non-conscious storage in a sword is a great step up. Straightforward but well done.

PSYLOCKE: NINJA #4. By Tim Seeley, Nico Leon, Dono Sánchez-Almara & Ariana Maher. Four issues into this five-issue flashback miniseries, I’m left in two minds about the whole thing. On the one hand, Tim Seeley has persuaded me that there are worthwhile stories you can do in the period where Psylocke is adjusting to her new body and coming to terms with her new identity. On the other hand, he hasn’t persuaded me that those stories involve Elektra. Sure, Leon draws them both well, and I get the idea that there are parallels between the characters… but those parallels don’t seem to have much to do with what’s interesting about Psylocke at this point in time. If anything, they risk lampshading the fact that the ninja retooling of Psylocke existed in Elektra’s shadow. Maybe it’ll come together in the final issue, but Elektra feels like a plot element dragging this series away from the parts that actually interest me.