X-MEN #34. (Annotations here.) This is a Juggernaut spotlight issue, before we get into the DNX event with the next issue. It’s a simple enough idea. A statue of Bolivar Trask has mysteriously appeared in a small town that he was once associated with. It’s controversial. Juggernaut shows up to destroy it. Somehow, it’s protected by a force field (for reasons that I assume we’ll get back to in a future issue). And the rest of the issue is Juggernaut trying to batter his way through the force field while having conversations with assorted characters – Agent Lundqvist, a couple of pro and anti protestors, and eventually the statue itself. Which is to say that it’s basically a character driven conversation issue. Unfortunately, it’s a character driven conversation issue drawn by guest artist Greg Land, the man who’s mastered both the human emotions – Vacant Grin and None Of The Above.

Oh, alright, that’s not entirely fair. His Juggernaut’s actually pretty good. His Agent Lundqvist’s not bad either, for the most part. But those two local campaigners don’t look remotely consistent through the issue, and the woman feels the need to give herself a random hug and squirm in the middle of a conversation. Wonder where Greg traced that from. And when the script calls unambiguously for someone to look surprised or shocked… well, at best, he’s lapsing into a sort of cartooning that looks absurd next to the over-polished hyperrealism of the rest of the issue. I honestly don’t know how the guy gets work. There’s some interesting ideas in the script, but the art smothers it all.

GENERATION X-23 #6. (Annotations here.) Now this is more like it. It’s the obvious second arc for this book – Laura and Gabby have to mentor the three Generated who are still with them, and who have no real idea how to function in the real world. Obviously they get actual names with this issue, because they can’t be a memory test for ever. And while there are some routine low-level bad guys, they’re only really there so we can see how the trio fare against a problem in the outside world. (Badly, in most cases.) I’m a little unsure about equipping them with costumes even before they’ve decided that they want to accept Laura’s pitching of a mutant identity – shouldn’t that logically come after? – let alone having them just wander around Central Park in full costume. That feels off. But the characters work, Emilio Laiso help them feel believable, and the whole thing feels like a book I’d be very happy to see stick around for the long run. Not that I’m holding my breath, in this market – but it’d be nice.

BISHOP #2. By Saladin Ahmed, Mario Santoro, Reese Hannigan, Federico Blee & Travis Lanham. This is settling down into a fairly straightforward story. A bunch of villains from the future have come back in time to kill Bishop because they believe that this will somehow avert the rise of the Sentinels. Bishop’s younger sister Shard has come back in time to stop them, and she doesn’t know that she’s dead by this point in Bishop’s life. They have to fight the bad guys while Bishop decides what to tell her. That’s basically it. It kind of works. The sibling relationship makes sense, but it also forces Bishop into a slightly out-of-character role, which is maybe not what you’re looking for in a Bishop mini. The bit about killing him to stop the Sentinels doesn’t seem to make any sense, but to be fair, it’s all worded in such a way as to suggest that the real target is actually someone else (presumably Shard, because there aren’t any other candidates). The art does a decent enough job with the two leads, if you like your Bishop permanently on the back foot. The villains… uh. The gimmick seems to be that they’re somehow descendants of two classic X-Men villains and have the powers of both, but it’s done in such a gimmicky way that it’s impossible to take them seriously. The Pyro/Avalanche hybrid was just generic, but the Blob/Toad guy doesn’t work at all, visually speaking. Patchy, at this stage.

X-MEN: OUTBACK #2. By Steve Orlando, Stephen Segovia, Alex Sinclair and Joe Sabino. More continuity implant from the Australian era. And despite a bit of character material about how some of the team feel like they’re in a sort of limbo here, and some subplots about Mojo, this seems mainly to be just a collection of extra stories set in that period. This issue, the last Reaver who was in deep freeze wakes up and fights the X-Men. It’s perfectly fine, and Segovia’s art is really rather nice – he ought to be on a higher profile book than a continuity implant mini – but it doesn’t feel like there’s any particular point to the whole exercise.