Before anyone asks, yes, you’re right – I’ve still yet to get around to reviewing X-Factor, X-Force, Gambit, New Mutants and Age of Apocalypse.  Might get to them during the week, or else I’ll catch up on them when the next issue comes out.  In the meantime, let’s cover the most recent X-books.

And don’t forget it’s a podcast weekend – the latest episode is just one post below.

Astonishing X-Men #53 – Lordy, this storyline is interminable.

Leave aside the high-profile gay wedding from issues #50-51, and this storyline has been built around a mystery: who’s the villain responsible for mind controlling people to attack the X-Men, and why are they doing it?  This was never a particularly interesting mystery, since the X-Men get attacked by people all the time, almost as if it were some sort of genre staple or something.  You need something a bit more.  And the storyline hasn’t had it.

With this issue, Marjorie Liu reveals the answers to that question, which aren’t particularly striking either.  The villain is the Susan Hatchi woman we’ve seen in earlier issues (which we kind of knew).  And she’s attacking the X-Men because she’s an evil businesswoman testing out some technology.  And that’s kind of it.  Liu does give her a nicely villainous attitude, complacently explaining the plot to the X-Men in public because she’s terribly proud of herself.  But there’s not really much to the character or to her plan.

The second half of the issue sees the cast trailing her to an abandoned military base in Georgia to try and rescue Karma, and stumbling upon her other experimental subjects.  In another nicely camp piece of villainy, they’re all hooked up with bombs to stop them leaving.  And the story also gives Mike Perkins the chance to draw Iceman intimidating the guards with a well-rendered Scary Ice Giant Thing.  In fact, the whole thing looks just fine.

But there’s no real hook to the villain or her plan, all of which is frankly generic – and that makes it an average issue at best.

Uncanny X-Men #17 – The conclusion of the Sinister arc, which has been a pleasing diversion from the main crossover.  Since the main Avengers vs X-Men story is happening elsewhere, Kieron Gillen has smartly opted to do a complete story of his own in the margins.  And as it disposes of the main villain of his run, it avoids seeming like filler.

With the Phoenix Five captured by Sinister, the rest of the Extinction Team have a go at sneaking into his city to see what they can find.  Sinister, meanwhile, gets to keep up his maddening air of being one step ahead.  And ultimately it all goes wrong because the Phoenix Force just isn’t rational enough for Sinister to have properly predicted everything – so when Emma finally gets a chance to nudge it, it just decides that it doesn’t want to play any more.  It works as a clash of Sinister’s worldview against something that ultimately proves not to fit within it, which handily resolves the themes of his last few appearances.  In terms of the pure plot mechanics, you could make a case that it comes close to Sinister losing just because the Phoenix gets around to ending the story, but I think the story gives the X-Men enough of a role in helping things along to make the ending work.

The ending also tries to segue into a sense of how ominous the Phoenix Five are.  I’m not sure that works quite as well – the final panels feel a bit tacked on to push the crossover storyline – but there’s something to it, with Sinister’s defeat coming in a way that ought to be uncomfortable.  He loses because the Phoenix is beyond logical comprehension, which shouldn’t exactly be reassuring.

Art is split between Daniel Acuna and Mike Del Mundo, which is presumably a deadline issue, since they’re not a great fit.  Their characters look rather different, with Del Mundo’s verging more into caricature.  But the colouring manages to keep a consistent tone.

All told, a good storyline, particularly when you consider everything it had to pull off as a second-tier part of the crossover.

Wolverine #311-312 – The second part of Jeph Loeb and Simone Bianchi’s arc came out while I was away, so let’s cover them both now.  As I said last month, this is certain better than their first Wolverine arc from about five years ago – which is to say, it isn’t utter gibberish.

But it is not good.  It is not good at all.

How did Sabretooth come back from the dead?  Well, it was a clone that got killed.

Seriously?  That’s it?  That’s the big explanation that this whole arc was sold on?  Leave aside the fact that we’ve seen him in the afterlife – that sort of thing happens all the time at Marvel.  The bigger issue is that it’s a boringly obvious, tediously uninspired explanation.  And Loeb seems to have no interest whatsoever in trying to make it anything more than that.

Issue #311 proceeds with Wolverine fighting a bunch of Sabretooth clones for half an issue before the mystery woman from part one shows up to help him, and they escape.  She turns out to be Romulus’ twin sister Remus and she wants Wolverine to kill Romulus.  Is this interesting?  It might be if Remus displayed any sort of personality at all, but she’s written simply as a mystery character who exists to advance the “plot” and be mysterious.  None of this, when you stand back and look at it, coheres into anything approaching a story.

This week’s issue begins with Wolverine fighting Remus for half an issue because he doesn’t trust her, before deciding to stop for no particularly good reason beyond the fact that it’s time for more cryptic exposition.  Remus helpfully tells us that all the nonsense about wolf people from the previous arc was a hoax – not that it matters, since every writer since has rightly ignored it, even Daniel Way, who spent years of his life writing a Romulus arc.

Wolverine and Remus (and, for some reason, Cloak and Dagger) then go to Romulus’ base where he fights Sabretooth again and then confronts Romulus, who claims that the Weapon X project was Wolverine’s idea.  Whatever.  Quite why anyone should take this revelation seriously when Loeb has spent the last issue debunking Romulus’ last set of claims is beyond me.  There was a time when I’d have been a lot more irritated by a needless retcon of this sort, but bluntly, I don’t expect it ever to be mentioned again once Loeb’s off the book, so who cares?

This isn’t a story; it’s a lazy string of “revelations” posing as a plot, attempts to shock the reader standing in for any actual ideas.  First X-Men wasn’t much good, but at least it felt like the work of somebody who was awake at the time.  This nonsense feels like it wasn’t phoned in so much as texted.  I have great difficulty in believing that anyone at Marvel, no matter what they might say in public, honestly thinks this is worth publishing – but evidently a few people there have enough disdain for the audience to think it’ll do.

Wolverine Annual #1 – This is the concluding part of a crossover which started in the Fantastic Four and Daredevil annuals, neither of which I’ve read.  All three are written and drawn by Alan Davis, and the story is effectively his return to the ClanDestine.  That book had a short and well-reviewed run in the 1990s but never really found an audience.

In theory the ClanDestine are the guest stars in this story, but in practice they’re clearly the leads.  In this case, at least, the notional star of the annual seems to have been shoehorned into the plot where a space could be found for him, with some muttering about him having met Adam and Kay in the past.  That’s fair enough if you’re willing to take the project on its own terms – which is to say, it’s a ClanDestine miniseries being labelled as something else in the hope of shifting some more copies.

But if it’s not a Wolverine story, at least an Alan Davis ClanDestine story is a good thing to have.  They’re well thought out characters, and Davis slips comfortably back into the established family relationships with apparent ease.  For those of us who remember the original series, it’s a nostalgic reminder that lives up to the promise of the first series.  Davis’ art remains as good now as it was twenty years ago, and his writing holds up well too.  A good issue, just one that would have been better without the notional lead character having to be worked in.

X-Men: Legacy #272 – Rogue is still trying to get back from the weird planet where insects and aliens are fighting one another, and after last issue’s welcome from the humanoids, this time the insects are trying to enlist her into their hive mind.  In a pleasant change from the norm in these stories, neither race is outright the bad guys, though the scepticism of the insects established in the previous chapter isn’t altogether debunked either.  They’re presented as a communist hive mind with little time for individuality, but as that’s genuinely what their race appears to be like, it’s not really a bad society so much as one you wouldn’t want to be part of yourself.

The actual twist is a different one – and one that comes somewhat out of the blue, since it depends on the world being in the throes of an ecological catastrophe that hasn’t exactly been foregrounded before.  Still, the idea is that the world is overpopulated and the leaders on both sides are engineering a massive battle simply to keep the population in check and to bolster their own leadership positions.  So presumably we’re getting a story where Rogue brings down the leaders on both sides and remakes the world.  Perfectly fine for a three parter.