WOLVERINE #28. (Annotations here.) By current standards, this is a busy week – two ongoing titles, two miniseries and a oneshot. Neither of the two ongoings is on particularly good form, though. Wolverine‘s main selling point is some decent interior art from Martín Cóccolo, who really does draw a nice-looking Mexican restaurant, and can make Eagle Plaza feel plausibly city-centre. The giant holographic Forge is nicely done as well. But the point of the story seems mainly to be to set up Lady Deathstrike in a new version of her “obsessed with adamantium” set-up, which both feels like a step backward for the character, and doesn’t even make sense – her father didn’t create adamantium, he created a process for bonding it to the skeleton. That’s the whole reason why she used to be obsessed specifically with Wolverine and not, say, Ultron. And there are some wonky plot mechanics going on here where the idea seems to be that she’s manipulated Wolverine into breaking into the adamantium storage room for her, judging from dialogue, but nothing actually seems to happen to back that up. I do still like Cóccolo’s art on this book, but it’s all a bit half baked otherwise.

GENERATION X-23 #8. (Annotations here.) This is a book I generally really like, but this particular issue is a bit of a misfire. The basic idea that the individual Generated might actually have started as abducted children rather than being created in a lab is perfectly fine – it would give the book somewhere to go next. The problems with this issue are more to do with the fact that the Generated themselves get very little space to do anything, and the Nanny / Orphan-Maker plot feels weirdly incomplete. This book looks to be ending with issue #10, so it’s entirely possible that the story has been cut short in order to get on to something else. But what we get seems to boil down to Nanny seizing control of the facility in order to treat some vaguely-specified injury to Peter, Nanny discovering a bunch of babies (and surely “who was looking after them” is an obvious enough question that someone should have asked it), Nanny initially defending them, and then Nanny just dumping them on the heroes and leaving – presumably taking Peter with her, because nobody suggests otherwise. On top of that, guest artist Emilio Laiso seems to have some extremely odd ideas about how big Nanny is (which I’m assuming is because nobody sent him the correct references), and there’s a big deal about an underground stairwell where everyone goes down and just comes straight back up again. Definitely an off month.

BISHOP #4. By Saladin Ahmed, Mario Santoro, Reese Hannigan, Federica Mancin, Federico Blee & Travis Lanham. Three artists is never a good sign, but visually, this penultimate issue actually hangs together quite well. The bigger problem with this book is that it’s got a fundamentally solid sibling relationship between Bishop and Shard to play with but spends most of its time killing time with the plot mechanics. So this is yet another issue fighting a guy from the future who randomly has the powers of two classic X-villains and who insists that killing Bishop will somehow avert their dystopian future, but can’t or won’t explain why. Finally, at the end, we get to a much more interesting idea – Shard has also come to preserve the timeline by taking Bishop back to his own time against his will. I suppose that’s going to lead to some sort of explanation of how killing Bishop before he goes home would unravel the timeline and potentially prevent his timeline from happening, and that might work as a story. But we should have got to this point about two issues ago.

INFERNAL HULK VS WOLVERINE #1. By Phillip Kennedy Johnson, Jonas Scharf, Alex Guimarães & Cory Petit. This is a one-shot tie-in to Infernal Hulk, which I’m reading on Marvel Unlimited, so I’m a little way behind. You know how these things go – it’s a tie-in to a wider storyline, and so it’s going to be Wolverine fighting the Hulk and escaping without achieving much. And it kind of is that, but to be fair, it’s much better than normal. for this sort of thing. The art gets to go over the top on the gore without feeling too ridiculous about it – we’re going for horror here, in theory. And Jubilee winds up taking the bullet for Wolverine, in a storyline that’ll presumably be resolved in Infernal Hulk. That lets the story play up the angle that Wolverine will always survive everything that’s thrown at him, and it’s the people who try to protect him that wind up dead. So… yes, it’s exactly what you think it’s going to be, but it’s a very good version of that.

GAMBIT: GONE #1. By Steve Orlando, Edoardo Audino, Gerardo Sandoval, Deferico Blee & Ariana Maher. Running two unrelated Gambit miniseries at the same time seems frankly insane, but that’s where we are. This one follows up on the end of X-Men of Apocalypse, which had the two Gambits trading places so that AoA Gambit could spend some time in the regular Marvel Universe. Jeph Loeb seemed to be trying to set up some sort of storyline where AoA Gambit would try to steal the original’s life, but Orlando quite rightly kills that idea stone dead in the opening scene by establishing that everyone has immediately figured out what’s happening. It also screws up the continuity by having M and Quicksilver with the X-Men, even though X-Men of Apocalypse takes place while Graymalkin is still a prison. But that’s a relatively minor point, and I’m glad to see that plot thread booted into touch at the first available opportunity.

So instead of “Rogue doesn’t know her husband is an impostor”, we get a story about the AoA Gambit going off in a sulk after being rejected by this Rogue too, and everyone wondering why on earth our Gambit would agree to swap with this guy, given that Jeph Loeb certainly didn’t provide an adequate motivation for it. The AoA segments are drawn by Gerardo Sandoval, never my favourite artist, though he does do a rather nice Krakoa here. But Orlando’s broad idea is that Gambit has something he wants to retrieve for his own reasons, and he’s hoping to find a version of it on this alternate world. Which is something, at least. Orlando’s Cajun accent is rather excessive – lines like “Anything ta hurt de big man, de great high lord” read more like cod Jamaican. But given the mess that Orlando had to take as a starting point, this is actually surprisingly decent.