UNCANNY X-MEN #32. (Annotations here.) This is a weird story, or rather, a weird issue. The basic premise of the arc seems to be: B-movie aliens that we can’t communicate with come to Earth to wipe out the Brood, but may be even more of a menace than the Brood are. Nothing wrong with that as a concept, but the wrap-up feels really abrupt. The alien invasion winds up as a backdrop to the Outliers sort of proving themselves, and doesn’t really get an ending beyond the aliens being driven off. The fact that there’s a Brood nest under the school feels like something that people ought to be a bit more agitated about, even if they don’t seem to have been killing anyone lately – at the very least, shouldn’t people be looking into it further? Why did the Brood have the same guns as the aliens?

But it’s the ending with the Outliers being anointed as the new New Mutants that reads oddly to me. Partly, it doesn’t quite work to have people graduating into being the New Mutants, who were the trainee team to start with. But mostly, the Outliers’ reaction to Rogue and Gambit going off on a solo mission to get help with Gambit’s demonic possession problem feels way over the top – they’re reacting as if they’re leaving for good, which doesn’t make sense in the context of what the characters know. It’s an issue that honestly left me wondering if Gail Simone was shifting gear to start wrapping up storylines before the inevitable post-DNX line relaunch, and if the scene is going to wind up being more final than it currently appears. Kind of odd.

WOLVERINE #24. (Annotations here.) Business as usual for this book, really. At this point, it’s hard to keep finding things to say about it. It’s perfectly competent, it’s got the character’s voice down, it’s entirely serviceable, but there isn’t much to get your teeth into. We seem to be introducing a new Post, which is a really odd decision. Not only does the character have nothing much to do with Wolverine, there was never much to him in the first place beyond a vaguely memorable character design and a degree of initial heat that came from being a herald of Onslaught before everyone had figured out that the X-office were making up that storyline as they went along. So I’m puzzled about what it was about the original Post that Saladin Ahmed finds interesting enough to revisit – he didn’t inspire much more than dutiful hench-use from writers even at the time. It’s an adequate issue, but the sort of story idea you could have run in an annual.

X-MEN: THE HELLFIRE MURDER. (Annotations here.) The post-Krakoa X-books have kept the annual Hellfire Gala one-shot going, but they haven’t really managed to get it to work. Part of the problem, I think, is that the original Hellfire Gala stories felt like a big deal because they served as turning points for the line, or at least for mutantkind. But the post-Krakoa line is made up of disparate books doing disparate things. I have no problem with that – it’s a perfectly sensible thing to do in order to create distance from Krakoa, quite aside from the fact that it fits better with Tom Brevoort’s approach to other lines he’s edited in the past. But it means there isn’t really a sense of the line having an overall direction in the first place, and that in turn means that it can’t really have turning points. Look at last year’s Hellfire Vigil – what actually came of that? A bunch of characters met up and got together, and 3K went public as a sort of rival leaders for the mutant community at the end… but that hasn’t really come to anything, has it? It’s a theme that’s sort of come up with the Frank Bohannon stuff but that’s about it.

This issue also winds up feeling a bit inconsequential, and also as if some heavy straining is being done to shoehorn a Hellfire Gala into the post-Krakoan era at all. The big events here are the death of Sebastian Shaw, which is a bit of a waste of a character who worked well on the Quiet Council, but not something I can get too worked up about; and the debut of Mystique’s new Hellfire Brotherhood, which I guess might come to something. To be fair, part of the point of the story is that it doesn’t actually matter who killed Shaw because pretty much everyone is glad to see the back of him, and as a story in its own right, that works quite well. Wolverine investigating Shaw’s murder and concluding that he doesn’t really care is a nice angle. But it compounds the book’s problems in terms of feeling like it matters.

It does have some nice character designs, and the masquerade ball is a clever way of justifying a different take on the gala costumes than just another bunch of experimental ballgowns. Cyclops and Psylocke’s scene is interesting. The art is pretty strong for the most part, and there are some decent character beats. It just doesn’t feel terribly important.

MOONSTAR #5. By Ashley Allen, Edoardo Audino, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. The final issue of the miniseries, and in effect the final issue of Allen’s Magik run, from which this spun out. It’s pretty much the plot that you’d expect – Dani is faced with a seemingly impossible decision about how to save all the souls trapped within the magic sword, and comes up with a way around it that saves the day. But Allen makes it work as a vehicle for Dani to give us a pep talk about life and hope, and she did actually have me thinking that the obviously sacrificial romantic interest was going to bite the dust. Once again, there’s a bit of nuance in the characters that adds something to a story that, in purely mechanical terms, seems straightforward. Audino has done some nice cartooning on this series, and the burst of rainbow colour at the finale is really well carried off to stand out from the rest of the story. I’m not sure this mini has been quite up there with the best Magik issues, but it’s still good.

GAMBIT: WANTED #1. By Chris Claremont, Robert Gill, Bryan Valenza & Ariana Maher. It’s another Claremont continuity implant mini, this time following up on his 2022 Gambit miniseries. In a story set in 1990 continuity, it’s a slightly irksome start to open with references to O*N*E, who didn’t debut until after M-Day in 2004 – but that’s a background detail, so I won’t hold it against the story. So let’s set that aside… And in fact, the actual hook here seems pretty reasonable for a continuity implant. We’re at the point where Gambit has just followed Storm to New York. In his absence, someone else tries to fill the void and screws up. What does Gambit do when he finds out? Fair enough, his decision to basically start a new life with the X-Men is something you can argue that the original stories gloss over, and you can make a case for building an untold story around that. The story hangs together nicely enough, and Robert Gill does some great work on art – there’s a lot of scene-setting detail in here, some good design on the minor characters, and he does a lovely manic Bullseye. Chris Claremont’s continuity implant minis can be very erratic, but this is pretty good.