UNCANNY X-MEN #37. (Annotations here.) This is a transitional issue, serving both as an epilogue to the exorcism arc and as a lead-in to the Scavengers arc that’s up next. With hindsight, there really are some curious choices being made in this series – what was the deal with the New Mutants acting as if Rogue and Gambit were abandoning them, only for them to come back within a few days? And why was Sarah Gaunt used as the expendable prisoner for Monet to beat up, only for us to go back to writing her as a major threat a few issues later? Literally anyone could have been put in that role. Still, none of that really touches on the retrenching of Rogue and Gambit’s relationship, which serves as a nice ending to that arc, with some nicely delicate art on the flashbacks. The Scavenged are somewhat interesting characters, though a lot depends on what motivation they’re given for siding with Sarah when we go further with them. And if having Sarah lose so quickly to Monet was an error of some sort, at least this issue does something to rebuild her mystique, though I’ll be honest, it’s still taken quite a serious hit.

X-MEN UNITED #8. (Annotations here.) Remember when I used to say nice things about Exceptional X-Men? Well, it’s turned into this now, and this is a disaster. In a series which is only running ten issues, this is basically a Blade story – the only regular character in it is Prodigy, and he does barely anything. The plot points down to Blade storming a vampire stronghold and rescuing his daughter, with a barely-developed subplot about Justina Laguardia having something to do with it in the background. Wither’s arc is reduced to an offhanded mention of how he shouldn’t let himself become a murderer by killing, uh, vampires. You know, the same vampires who are offhandedly slaughtered by everyone else in the issue.

Nothing else really matters and the story is riddled with incoherent plotting (which, to be fair, was something of a failure of Exceptional X-Men too, when it actually tried to do superhero things). The whole thing about the patrol guards wearing biometric harnesses to trigger the security system goes absolutely nowhere, but it also gives us a scene that U-turns twice in three pages as to whether the security system is extremely hi-tech or just an old Yale lock. And the original plan that Blade departs from makes no sense at all – they were going to steal blueprints to the building they were already breaking into? Why? To what end? How did they know where to find them?

Even if you look past the frankly inexplicable decision to commission an X-Men vs vampires story at a time when Midnight X-Men is doing the exact same thing as a prestige project, this is just plain bad on its own terms. (EDIT: Apparently it’s been reprieved, and an issue #11 appears in the January solicitations.)

INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #10. (Annotations here.) This is the final issue of the current run, though it transitions into Fugitive X-Force next month. It does provide a resolution for the storyline of Cable’s possession and the original excuse for gathering this X-Force team together, namely to prevent the assassination of Kamala Khan in an alternate future timeline. It is, however, very plot-heavy and dense to the point of being confusing. The building blocks are all there, and you can piece together a good 95% of it on re-reading, but it’s one of those stories that feels like it’s harder work for the reader than it was intended to be. It feels like it was expecting another few issues in this future timeline, to properly pay off the idea of the individual X-Force members realising why Cable (the suppressed true personality) really brought them together and what he saw in them. There’s a similar issue with the explanation in the epilogue of why they’re fugitives now – I’ll be honest, I read that page several times before I figured out what it was actually trying to explain to me. Still, the faults of this book lie mostly in trying to cram too much stuff into 20 pages, and the art is solid. It’s still pretty good, but needed a bit more space to really breathe.

X-MEN OUTBACK #5. By Steve Orlando, Stephen Segovia, Alex Sinclair and Joe Sabino. If you were expecting the subplot scenes teasing a Mojo story to tie everything together in the final issue, then no. This is just another self-contained story, it’s just had more trailers than the others. And it’s really just Mojo sending people to Earth to kill people for entertainment, and the X-Men showing up to stop him. The emotional core of it is that Mojo is using a mind-controlled woman called Cliffhanger who used to be Longshot’s unofficial wife (as in, the story clearly wants her to be his wife and feels like it’s had to back off from that in dialogue). That’s a very odd thing to retcon into a series like this, unless somebody’s planning to do something with it in a future story. Beyond that, you know, it is what it is. The art’s quite kinetic but there’s a lot of people fighting in blank spaces – half the issue is spent on Tristan da Cunha, of all places, and Segovia doesn’t even attempt an establishing shot or more than a vague gesture at background. It’s not that hard to find images of the place – hell, the island’s only village is on Google Streetview.

In theory there ought to be a story here about the X-Men thwarting Mojo because they’re now unfilmable and so can’t provide him with entertainment, but the story doesn’t go there. Instead Orlando seems more interested in the Rogue/Dazzler/Longshot triangle, and fair enough. In the original run, that never resolved so much as got overtaken by events. But surely the heart of that story was that Dazzler (in this period) is defined by wanting her life as a performer back, and Longshot is defined by having escaped that life? And that’s not really what we’re doing here either. It’s a serviceable issue, to be sure, but it never really answers the question of why this miniseries existed.