UNCANNY X-MEN #29. (Annotations here.) The final part of “Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed”, and unless we’re coming back to some of this, I’m mostly confused. The Greymalkin prison storyline has never really worked, and it’s been one of the weakest strands of the post-Krakoan X-books, so I’m at least glad to see the back of it. Nor do I have a problem with Inmate X being a new character with a link to Corina Ellis (the foreshadowing was there), or with Ellis attempting a last minute face turn and being rebuffed. No, the problem with this arc is that about half of it is devoted to the Outliers/New Mutants material which doesn’t seem to tie in to the main plot in any way at all. It advances Mutina’s storyline, to be sure, but what was any of it about? I just don’t get it. Though it pales in comparison to…

STORM: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST MUTANT #5. (Annotations here.) Final issue of the run. It’s a blatant guillotine cancellation, despite having been solicited as a five-issue miniseries from the start, something which Ayodele only seems to have discovered when issue #1 was solicited. I don’t know what the lead-in times for this book are, but the series reads very much as if it reached for the emergency brake somewhere during issue #4, when the build-up to Storm’s “daughter” came to nothing and a scene set in her alternate timeline was compressed to a couple of pages. The final issue opts for attempting a thematic resolution and make a grand show of not resolving any of the actual plot on the grounds that we all know Storm wins somehow or other. To be fair, Ayodele does make an effort to tie his thematic resolution back to things that have happened over the course of the story. Still, the fact remains that it just stops, and with the best will in the world, this is the second time inside a year that I’ve read a guillotine cancellation issue from Marvel that played the meta card to get out of even going through the motions of resolving its storylines. (The other one was Astonishing Spider-Man Infinity Comic #36.) Sudden endings have always been a feature of superhero comics, and they’re never satisfying, but come on. More generally, the book’s ambition is laudable and always has been, and it’s a good thing that something so off kilter was able to exist in the current line, but it always felt like there were far too many ideas fighting for space at the best of times, coupled with frequently bemusing and confusing storytelling choices. But it swung for the fences, and you’ve got to at least respect that.

X-MEN OF APOCALYPSE #4. By Jeph Loeb, Simone Di Meo, Richard Starkings & Tyler Smith. Meanwhile, here’s the exact opposite of swinging for the fences. There’s a perfunctory plot about the whole “restoring the timeline” thing being a ruse – though it never made the slightest sense in the first place, being completely divorced from the original stories that it’s supposed to be referencing. There’s at least an effort to go through the routine of Gambit meeting an alternate Rogue, which is nothing new, and doesn’t fit with the original storyline that it’s supposed to be referencing anyway. But hell, at least that bit feels like Loeb wasn’t entirely asleep at the wheel when he was writing it. And yes, the art is often very pretty – Di Meo isn’t much good at location and atmosphere, but he does draw nice looking people. He’s making an effort, but there’s nothing else worth your time here.

CYCLOPS #5. By Alex Paknadel, Rogê Antônio, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo & Joe Caramagna. This is a bit more like it. It’s playing the classics, to be sure – isolate Scott from the team, force him to do the story with his eyes closed, have him inspire the sceptical new kids, his resourcefulness overcomes all – but the art is dynamic and the details are well built. You could probably have tightened it up to four issues but that won’t matter so much in the collection or on Unlimited. And yes, it does spell out the moral rather directly at the end. But the idea itself is sound: Scott can come across as a difficult and distant figure, but Donald Pierce serves as an opposite number who doesn’t care about the wellbeing of his followers at all, and regards them all as interchangeable bit part characters even though Paknadel has made sure to give at least a few of them real personality. At the same time, Scott gets to see that Pierce is turning these guys into soldiers and to be reintroduced to civilian non-combatant mutants, to remind him that not everyone ought to be in the X-Men. Very solid.

WHAT IF…? THE UNCANNY X-MEN #1. By Gerry Duggan, Jan Bazaldua, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. It’s “What if Cyclops had stayed with Madelyne Pryor”. Except it’s not quite that, because the turning point is actually that Madelyne gets saved at the end of Inferno, and Cyclops decides to retire as a superhero and go back to his family. That leads to Scott simply being a dad and living a normal life until Nate is old enough to become a teenage superhero, followed by an extremely abbreviated run through an alternate version of X-history. The timelines seem gratuitously garbled – why on earth does he have Atlantis Attacks and Acts of Vengeance taking place after Inferno? It doesn’t matter, but why namecheck them at all just to get it wrong? Anyway, it’s a What If story, so naturally it all ends in disaster, because that’s how every What If story ends. Nice to look at, not without its moments, but I don’t really buy the attempt to sell it as a story about how Scott inadvertently dooms the world by putting his family first; the chain of events is far too remote to make that any sort of moral story. And seriously, can we have a moratorium on What If stories that end with mass death? It’s been a cliche for at least 40 years now.