DNX #2. (Annotations here.) This is the busiest week we’ve had in ages. Three ongoing titles, one event mini, one event tie-in, two miniseries and an out of continuity mini that seems worth a look anyway. So yes, we’re going to take some of this fairly quickly.

DNX is going for the now hallowed Marvel crossover format where the main story clearly belongs in Title A, but for some reason it’s taking place in Miniseries B while Title A does character spotlights in the margins. I don’t really get the thinking, but if doesn’t really matter as long as you’re willing to think of this issue as X-Men #37.5. The first two issues of DNX basically consist of the X-Men storming 3K’s Mothership and failing to stop the release of the virus, while Hank and Reed discuss how they’re going to retrieve the message from Magneto’s DNA. And all of that is pretty much how you’d expect it to play out, the only real twist being the misdirection about the release site – it feels like we should probably have got to this point by the end of issue #1, if you’re going to make it a separate miniseries. Then again, if these were just issues of X-Men, I probably wouldn’t be saying that, would I?

In itself, it’s just a fun action story – which at least tends to suggest that the rest of this event isn’t going to be grim body horror, and I guess that’s a nice signal to have. But what continues to elevate it for me is the Chairman, utterly convinced that this was a good plan despite belatedly figuring out that hiring a group of villains who don’t trust him was a bad idea, and making his best effort to convince Scott that they ought to be on the same side really. It’s essentially the same thing we were doing in Krakoa, but I do like the shift of emphasis from “ends justify the means” to “what do you mean, justify?”

X-MEN #38. (Annotations here.) Meanwhile, over in the character spotlight tie-in, we have Magneto arguing with either a hallucination of Professor X or the real Professor X, delete according to taste. The basic point here is that losing control of his powers goes to the root of Magneto’s identity, which makes sense – not only is it essential to him that he’s a mutant, it’s essential to him that he’s a powerful mutant. So while Krakoa has him come round to the idea of defending all of the oppressed and marginalised, there’s a limit to how far he actually identifies with the idea of being one of them. On one level this is just a straightforward story about Magneto rediscovering his urge to live, but I do like the way that Magneto shrugs off all of the arguments about what a contribution he’s been able to make to the series without his powers – it’s only when he’s given a way of thinking about his situation as a sign of how terribly important he is that he really seems able to embrace it as Magneto-like. That’s a nice take on the character which plays up his ego without making him a villain. And for a story much of which is two people talking in a darkened room, it manages to stay quite visual into the bargain.

FANTASTIC FOUR #17. By Ryan North, Vincenzo Carratù, Edgar Delgado & Joe Caramagna. Ryan North’s Fantastic Four is a great series, but not one that you might expect to lend itself to participating in crossovers. What it does well is high concept, self-contained stories where the FF (or one of them) encounters some bizarre new phenomenon or solves some new mystery. Still, it has done a few tie-ins and North has made it work, largely by prioritising what the book does well over the crossover plot. And that’s pretty much what we have here – it’s an issue of an amnesiac FF trying to work out who they are and what they’re doing, only for us to find out at the end that this is a Fantastic Voyage deal inside Magneto’s body, which has evidently gone wrong. That’s your tie-in, and no doubt it will advance the wider plot in that way, but principally this is an FF amnesia story. How that’ll play with X-Men readers who are only buying this for the crossover, I’m not sure, but it certainly plays to the strengths of Fantastic Four, even if it does raise awkward questions of the “doesn’t this guy have bodily fluids” variety. Ignore the crossover aspects and it’s simply a good issue of FF.

UNCANNY X-MEN #38. (Annotations here.) This is the final part of “Wild Ride”, which means Gambit gets his exorcism, and the X-Men back in New Orleans take down some mutant traffickers. There are some interesting ideas here, but the execution is choppy. So the idea that the X-Men under M are up for killing the mutant who’s helping the traffickers is kind of interesting, but feels like something Nightcrawler ought to have something to say about – and what was the point of tying the compound to the Word of Strength cult in the previous issue, if it’s just about the money? Plus, the crowd of evil rich people only register as present at all at the last moment – their presence just isn’t really established before that.

The exorcism thread works better – the Iron Cathedral is a nice visual, complete with the unexplained red sky, and the iconography of Christian magic seems a lot more unfamiliar and offputting than the usual trappings of Marvel magic. There are some confused signals, though, in terms of playing up the idea that mutants were the victims of persecution by witchfinders in the past, at the same time as showing exorcism as the solution Gambit needs. That tension is intriguing – in the Marvel Universe, after all, the witchfinders had rather more of a point – but it doesn’t feel like the story takes it anywhere. The emotional hook of this story is basically that Rogue and Gambit’s love conquers all, and that’s fine, but Gabriel and Repent feel underused, and the demon itself is never especially interesting.

X-MEN UNITED #7. (Annotations here.) It’s been quite a break from the previous issue, and I’ll give it this – it’s probably the best art we’ve had on X-Men United to date. Ruarí Coleman’s work here has some clarity and energy to it. As for the story, for some reason we’re going on a detour from the Shadow King storyline to helping Blade rescue his daughter from a mutant. Leave aside that this finally picks up on the dangling plot thread from when Justina LaGuardia was introduced in a back-up strip in Giant-Size X-Men; she only shows up at the end of the issue, so we’ll see more of her next time. It just feels like a weird change of direction in the story, despite some heroically unconvincing attempts to persuade me that, why, these two things must be related! I’m not averse to seeing Wither again, but making him a vampire doesn’t seem especially interesting – he already had a thing where he had a hunger to use his decay powers, so what’s the practical difference? And Blade… I’ve never found Blade interesting, so I’m maybe not the audience for this anyway. Generally, there’s a lack of focus in X-Men United, which is trying to juggle too many characters and too many plot threads and doesn’t need another.

TOMB OF APOCALYPSE #2. By Ashley Allen, Domenico Carbone, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo & Joe Sabino. Hmm, this seems to be mostly just Jubilee, Rictor, Shatterstar and Wolverine making their way through a tomb full of traps and things. That’s not a plot that does much for me. Still, it looks nice – that cliffhanger with the giant robot thing is lovely. And it’s Ashley Allen, which means there are at least some interesting character points. Much of this issue is really about following up on how Rictor feels after his plotline as Apocalypse’s protégé ended with him being left behind on Earth. Shatterstar seems to have shown up for this story mainly to let Rictor get it out of his system, and that’s an angle that has some legs to it. I’m much less sure about the way we’re now acting as though nobody ever trusted Apocalypse on Krakoa – this isn’t how I remember Jubilee’s attitude in Excalibur, and it doesn’t ring true for me.

GAMBIT: WANTED #3. By Chris Claremont, Robert Gill, Bryan Valenza & Ariana Maher. This is the flashback mini from around the time of Gambit’s debut. It’s a mid-series instalment which is basically a well-drawn extended chase scene, mostly from the perspective of a supporting character, since Gambit himself is mind-controlled Honestly, I don’t get why he stops being mind-controlled. Maybe it’ll make more sense when I re-read the whole thing at the end.

ALIEN VS X-MEN #1. By Kieron Gillen, Geraldo Borges, Andrew Dalhouse & Travis Lanham. I don’t normally do the out-of-continuity stories, but what the heck. This is an odd IP crossover, not because the two properties can’t fit together, but because we already know they do – Alien is an obvious inspiration for the Brood, as well as for X-Men #143 (the one where an N’Garai demon chases Kitty through the school). So what do you actually do with Real, Officially Licensed Alien vs X-Men? Well, you’re not going for intellectual depth. But you can take advantage of the fact that it’s an out of continuity X-Men, which means you can tease transforming or killing characters without an obvious reset button hanging over everything. And you can do Storm as Ripley. It’s a romp, really, but it pulls that off nicely without being just a string of reference points.

The back-up strip by Chris Claremont and Dave Messina is a completely different out-of-continuity continuity, with Kitty taken from circa Mekanix and the Brood enlisting her to save the X-Men from the aliens. It’s mostly what you’d expect, but the idea of a Brood Queen ghost showing up as Kitty’s guardian angel spirit is genuinely cute.