DNX #4. (Annotations here.) We’re running very late this week, but let’s run through the books quickly anyway. I’ve said before that the mistake with “Age of Revelation” was to try to turn it into a line-wide event when it was better suited to being a storyline in X-Men. DNX hasn’t fallen into that trap, since the event is only running in X-Men itself, DNX (which is just five extra issues of X-Men) and two good but skippable issues of Fantastic Four for… reasons. But even so, I can’t help wondering whether this would have worked better if it had just been an X-Men storyline, maybe paying off in an anniversary issue. The attack on Philadelphia gets averted; the new X-virus doesn’t work and the X-Men already know how they’re going to stop it. (Or think they do, at least, but that’s the plot.) And while Juniper does get annihilated, the core of the story seems to be a final confrontation between Scott and Chairman Hank – all of which is perfectly good in its own way, but it feels like it would play better if it had been presented as a character-driven storyline in X-Men than as an attempted epic in DNX.

UNCANNY X-MEN #38. (Annotations here.) There’s an awful lot going on in this issue. I’m mostly on board with Sarah Gaunt setting up a rival school with the Scavenged, as a dodgy imitation of the X-Men and incoherent attempt to get back at Professor X; taking him off the board has been something of a problem for this character, given her obsession with him, but I can get behind the idea of her repositioning in a wonky attempt to usurp his legacy. It’s harder to know quite what to make of the Scavenged themselves at this stage, since it looks like they’re under some degree of mind control, but there’s enough there to hint at them being promising. Luciano Vecchio’s designs for them are looking good at this point, and Mutina’s slow-burn face turn (or at least her toying with the possibility) has been handled well enough that we can get behind her now.

The Mansion prison plotline, as so often, doesn’t work as well for me. Agent Califf comes across as a little too reasonable to quite deserve the treatment she gets, and while the cobbled-together Sentinel looks great, we seem to go from the X-Men wanting to purify the Mansion to wanting to destroy it a bit too quickly and arbitrarily. It doesn’t ring as true for me.

WOLVERINE #29. (Annotations here.) Start of a new storyline, with Solem dragging Wolverine into helping him with what’s supposedly an auction of an antique wine bottle, though there eventually seems to be more going on than that. As a first issue, it’s lightweight but perfectly fine, and to be fair, that’s probably what a Solem story ought to be like at first glance. Solem’s whole thing is an infuriating refusal to take anything seriously, and Ohta does a rather good take on him. I’ve never really liked Solem, largely because his stories tended have an undertow of “but isn’t he awesomely cool though”, to which my response was no, he’s just awful. Yes, he’s meant to be charming, but we don’t have to buy it. This story also thinks Solem is an insufferable prick and doesn’t try to convince me otherwise, and I am absolutely on board with that.

PUNISHER SHOWDOWNS: WOLVERINE #1. By Tom Waltz, Bruno Büll, Wayne Faucher, Marcio Menyz & Cory Petit. This is one of several Punisher team-up one-shots doing flashback stories, which doesn’t exactly feel like an essential project to start with. It’s Punisher and Wolverine teaming up after the Raiden drug from Wolverine #31-33 surfaces in New York; with admirable devotion to continuity, it’s placed somewhere after Wolverine #107-109, which was also a sequel to the same story. To be fair, if you’re going to bother doing this stuff, you might as well anchor it something specific. The broad idea is that the Punisher just wants to kill everyone but Wolverine is trying to capture the top bad guy alive in order to do the honourable thing for his family. It’s a completely fine throwback story, nicely paced, decent art. I appreciate putting Wolverine in the “no, you can’t just kill them all” role, when his Punisher team-ups have a tendency to make them both the same. It’s perfectly good, but doesn’t quite get to the point of convincing me that a Punisher/Wolverine flashback team-up story is something we particularly needed.