It’s been two weeks… there are eight X-books to cover… let’s get down to it.

Avengers: X-Sanction #1 – And so it begins: the four-month prologue to the Avengers/X-Men crossover that Marvel are going to be hyping the hell out of in 2012.

So, then… Avengers vs X-Men.  On the one hand, I’m keeping an open mind.  After all, it’s not like you’d expect Marvel to do anything more at this stage than trail the high concept.  But on the other hand, Marvel are trying to hype this as if the Avengers versus the X-Men was a big deal in its own right, and it’s really not.  It’s the sort of thing you’d get on the cover strap line on a fill-in issue in the mid-80s.  And with Civil War still fresh in the memory, surely it stands to reason that Avengers vs X-Men is something smaller.  The Phoenix angle – that’s maybe a bigger deal.  But Avengers vs X-Men, in itself… I don’t think that’s much of a draw in itself.  We’ll see how it develops.

This prologue miniseries is by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness.  And let’s be blunt – in the last few years, Loeb’s name has graced some truly appalling comics.  It’s not snark but common sense that makes me approach his work with trepidation.  But lo!  This comic does indeed reach the dizzy heights of coherence.

It’s not a great book by any stretch of the imagination.  But it does set up a clear enough premise: Cable finds himself in the far future with hours to live, learns that the world has been destroyed because Hope wasn’t there to save it, learns that the Avengers were to blame, and travels back in time to try and change that in his remaining hours, by killing all the Avengers first.  It’s not exactly War and Peace, but at least we know what’s supposed to be at stake.  It’s decently paced.  The expository flashbacks are interweaved nicely.  Cable’s “one at a time” approach to taking out the Avengers makes reasonable sense.  In short, it’s not the train wreck I’d feared.

This is not to say that it’s a great return to form either.  The explanation for why Cable is still alive boils down to “he just is”, and that’s a particular difficulty when you then want us to immediately care about the prospect of him dying again.  And the book still displays the haphazard approach to basic research that has plagued some of Loeb’s recent work.  Since when is the Falcon a member of the Avengers again?  (Though granted, there’s a plot reason for wanting to use him.)  Why is the Radioactive Man suddenly a villain, after years as a title character in Thunderbolts?  (No such excuse here.)  And isn’t it incredibly convenient that Cable shows up at the precisely the point in the future where somebody can explain the plot to him?

But for all that, while my expectations were rock bottom, it’s actually a passable action story.  It’s okay.

Magneto: Not a Hero #2 – I suppose I should have seen this coming when Skottie Young brought back Joseph last month, but now he’s moving on to Astra.  Now, logically, this makes sense – she was in the story where Joseph died, after all.  But she’s also a really obscure character who appeared in one storyline in the late nineties and was never seen again.  My memory of her is rather hazy, but as best as I can recall, she was a bit of a cipher.  She’s not the sort of character you’d expect anyone to revise in these days of relaxed continuity.

Quite what Young has in mind for her, I’m not sure.  It’s obvious enough that part of this story is about using Joseph to explore how Magneto has changed.  (He thinks he hasn’t; it’s Scott who’s come round to his way of thinking.)  But Astra, if I’m remembering right, wasn’t a true believer so much as a career criminal who wanted revenge on Magneto for booting her out of the Brotherhood.  She’s used strangely in this issue; an extended opening flashback presents her as an old-school villainous mastermind, while the main story has her fawning over Joseph in a rather over-the-top way that we’re presumably meant to take as an act.  She remains rather hard to get a handle on, and I can’t say Young really does anything in this issue to sell me on her as a character rather than a relevant continuity footnote.

Still, I’m willing to give Young the benefit of the doubt that he’s heading somewhere with all this (though I’m slightly troubled by the one-dimensional secondary villain, a businessman exploiting anti-mutant sentiment).  We’ll see how it all comes together.

Uncanny X-Force #18 – The conclusion of the “Dark Angel Saga”, and it’s a pleasure to say that Rick Remender and Jerome Opena have landed it perfectly.  While parts of this storyline have risked cluttering the plot with too many characters, this issue gets the focus right.  Wolverine, Deadpool and Deathlok are barely seen, leaving Archangel, Psylocke and an uncharacteristically serious Fantomex to carry the issue, bringing us in on the romantic triangle.

Remender and Opena’s Archangel has been a great villain, in large part because of his unflappable quasi-reasonableness.  He may have a classic destroy-the-world masterplan, but the way he carries himself makes it all fresh – as well as keeping in mind the idea that this is supposed to be recognisably Warren.  But at the same time that it zooms in on his core cast, the story also keeps ramping up the plot, first with Fantomex revealing what he’s done with the Apocalypse kid he was keeping in the tank, and then with a remarkable sequence at the end as Psylocke says goodbye to Warren – leading to another final twist on the last page.

That farewell sequence is the thing that will stick in most readers’ minds, though, as Psylocke guides Warren through a completely fictitious version of the life they would have had together, in the course of a three page montage.  Not only is it beautifully done in its own right, but it’s got a sense of peace and stillness that contrasts brilliantly with the scenes around it.  It’s truly excellent work, and it’s really great to see this sort of thing appearing in a book like X-Force where you wouldn’t necessarily expect to find it.

Wolverine: The Best There Is #12 – Well, thank god that’s over.

Comics don’t get much more misconceived than Wolverine: The Best There Is.  For one thing, if you really want to do a crazily violent and gory Wolverine comic, it should be in the Max imprint where it belongs.  But more to the point, it’s painfully obvious that this series started with the remit that there should be ridiculous levels of gore and worked back from there, resulting in a villain who’s been contrived, not because he makes for an interesting story in any way, but because he allows for a plot that fulfils the pointless remit.

In this final issue, there is fighting, and then the baddie loses.  There’s a vaguely clever idea about how to defeat him.  But Contagion just isn’t an interesting character, and it’s impossible to care about any of this.

X-23 #18 – So X-23 is babysitting the Fantastic Four’s kids.  They’ve accidentally summoned up a dragon.  Hellion turns up to try and hang out with her, and ends up helping her against the dragon.  And then a cosmic villain shows up at the end.

It’s academic, since the book is about to be cancelled, but I’m kind of confused by the direction Marjorie Liu is taking with this arc.  I can see that X-23 works best when she’s contrasted with something that plays off her deliberately flat demeanour, and I can understand why the previous arc wanted to complete her world tour by letting her be a straightforward superhero.  But the whole milieu of this story seems to drag X-23 away from her own stories towards something largely unrelated.

It’s okay.  The art’s got a nice delicate feel to it, and I like the way it uses Hellion (though his personality is becoming wildly inconsistent between different titles).  Yet with this and the previous arc, the book seems to be steering X-23 in a “high adventure” direction that just doesn’t seem to fit the character, and I can’t quite figure out why it’s doing that.

X-Club #1 – Another miniseries for the X-Men’s Science Team (they had one before during the Second Coming crossover).  Cyclops’ X-Men are helping out with a Space Elevator project because they think it’ll be good PR.  Naturally, it all goes horribly wrong, and crazed mutant thingies start coming out the water.  Also, somebody takes control of Danger.

The thing about the Science Team is that they have a rather unbalanced group dynamic.  It’s obvious that Dr Nemesis is the one that most writers enjoy scripting (who can blame them?), and he tends to dominate the Team’s appearances with his mad scientist rants.  He does that here too, but it’s clear that Si Spurrier is at least trying to mitigate that, by splitting the group up.  That puts a lot of the emphasis on Danger, and pairs Nemesis with Kavita Rao, who’s the one most likely to stand up to him.

That does go a long way to giving the book some balance, but it has to be said that these four characters don’t really feel like a team, or like they particularly want to be in the same story together.  Individually, I quite like them; collectively, I’m not sure they really work.  Nor, to be honest, am I all that interested in a story about weird things under the water.  Still, there are some good moments in here, and the rest is solidly okay.

X-Factor #228 – Continuing the Bloodbath arc.  Madrox is out of commission, but the rest of the team keeps on fighting, only for Bloodbath to draw their attention to the big plot point that he’s uniquely qualified to address: whether Guido actually has a soul any more.  Quite what this actually means in practice, given that Guido’s personality hasn’t fundamentally changed, remains a little vague (no doubt deliberately).  And the team’s reaction is pleasingly more equivocal than you might expect.

Also on the plus side, lovely art from Leonard Kirk, who really knows how to sell the story beats here.  On the other hand, Bloodbath himself remains a decidedly one-dimensional villain, and while I assume that’s somewhat intentional, I’m not quite sure I see what Peter David’s going for there.  Along similar lines, the Hangman’s arc feels a bit tacked on.  But the good easily outweighs the slightly shaky.

X-Men #22 – We’ve already talked about the unfortunately botched naming of Puternicstan.  But now that I’ve got that out of my system, I think I see where this story is going wrong.  Not that it’s especially bad, mind you – but it’s certainly feeling like a rather flat arc.

The problem, I think, stems from shoehorning in a guest star, and then having to distort the story to give them a role.  The basic story hook in this arc is that a small, put-upon country has got its hands on some second-hand Sentinels, and the X-Men go to investigate.  In fact, that country doesn’t want the Sentinels for anti-mutant purposes at all – it wants them for regular old defence.  It’s only one lunatic in their government who wants to cause trouble with them.

In theory, this could work.  You have the X-Men show up looking for trouble and discovering that they’re not facing anti-mutant villains at all.  How do they feel about the Sentinels being repurposed like that?  Does this beleaguered nation actually have a fair reason for wanting to boost its defence?  In fact, isn’t this beleaguered little nation a bit like Utopia?  You can do a whole load of things with that before the inevitable maniac presses the “invade neighbouring country” button in the final act.

But this is a team-up book, so they’ve got to shoehorn War Machine into the plot, and to do that, they’ve got to invent a role for him.  The result is that this becomes a story about the X-Men and War Machine squabbling over whether the X-Men should get involved in the politics of fictional countries, and then generally agreeing that giant killer robots are a bad thing and should be stopped.  Which is all very flat.

There’s also a secondary problem, which is that this story requires us to take second hand Sentinels as a Very Big Deal Indeed, when only a couple of months ago, Schism was using them as comedy cannon fodder.  That’s the sort of thing editors should be avoiding; it’s not about continuity, it’s simply about not requiring the audience to make mental U-turns between two stories coming out so close together.  Oh, and the dialogue has a very samey quality to it as well – Storm and Warpath really shouldn’t sound interchangeable, but at times, they somehow manage it.

But mainly, this wants to be a story about the X-Men wondering how they feel about repurposed Sentinels – but it’s never got around to hitting those beats because it’s been too busy messing about with the guest star.  And that’s why it doesn’t really work, I think.