We’ve got another backlog to clear.  So what we’re going to do here is cover the books that came out last week, plus the ones I bought digitally this week…

A + X #7 – The lead story, by Zeb Wells and Dale Keown, is an Iron Man/Beast story that basically uses a generic threat as a backdrop for a bit of bickering.  There’s a bit of a twist at the end, I guess, but the bottom line is that it’s moderately diverting page-filler (and it suffers from the fact that the character voices don’t seem quite right, so the bickering feels a bit flat anyway).

Chris Yost and the Orphans Cheeps studio turn in a Thor/Iceman story which is a bit more interesting, mainly because it’s beautiful to look at.  Once again, the actual plot is pretty much a backdrop for a bit of character interaction – it’s very rare for writers to attempt anything more than a sketch, it seems, even when they’ve got half a book to play with.  In this case, the Frost Giants are invading Earth again, and Thor is reluctantly saddled with Iceman to help fend them off.

But Yost has at least got a point in mind, which is that Thor treats Iceman as an also-ran because he doesn’t seem to be taking things seriously, while Iceman is sticking to his usual policy of avoiding the usual X-angst.  (Plus, he knows perfectly well these bozos are only going to make him more powerful.)  It’s not much, but it’s something to hang the scene on – and visually, the snow effects are quite beautifully done, so the story is at least playing to the artists’ strengths.  Wouldn’t mind seeing more from the studio.

All-New X-Men #11 – “Which of the All-New X-Men,” asks the cover “will join Cyclops’ mutant revolution?”

Goodness, I don’t know!  Could it possibly be Angel, who’s already been seen joining Cyclops’ group in two issues of Uncanny X-Men already?  Why, yes it could!

What on earth is going on with the scheduling of these two books?  They have the same writer and editor – how can they be stepping on each other’s toes quite this clumsily?  But no, the opening pages of this story really do try to treat the reveal of Angel as a shock.  And what ensues is (surprise, surprise) another issue of mostly talking.  Angel storms off, Kitty has a talk with Jean and tells her to pull herself together.  Oh, and yes, there’s a subplot in which Mystique’s group attack Iron Man’s headquarters while posing as the X-Men, but it’s pretty much a repeat of  what we’ve already seen, and nobody really seems all that bothered about going after them.  I guess that’s presumably what the X-Men are going to do at the end of the issue, but they get waylaid by the Avengers first.

As we explained on the podcast, the problem here is that there’s a lot of shuffling around with interesting subplots, but there’s no actual plot.  There’s no threat other than some villains meandering around in a subplot; the Silver Age X-Men have supposedly decided to stay in the present so they can fix the future, but show no signs of actually doing anything about it.  Okay, granted, the X-Men have a bit of a track record of stating lofty goals while having no actual plan to put them into practice – but shouldn’t they have something in mind?

There are plenty of things I like about this series; there are interesting character ideas, even if some of them are plagued with continuity errors, and the art is generally excellent.  But it needs to go somewhere.

Gambit #11 – If they’re cancelling X-Factor, you’ve got to figure time has to be short for Gambit, which sells a bit less, and is dropping faster.  But they keep on soliciting it, so perhaps not.

Anyway, the Joelle storyline continues, and it looks as though Rogue is here not just to be a random guest star, but to reintroduce her as a love interest.  Not quite sure where that’s going to be played out, given that Rogue’s now a regular in Uncanny Avengers, but we shall see.  More generally, it turns out (much to my relief) that Joelle is not simply a doting mother looking to save her little girl.  Rather more inventively, she wasn’t entirely lying either.  The idea seems to be that Joelle is an immortal, her daughter is an elderly woman dying in hospital, and Joelle can’t face the idea of outliving her.  She’s crazy, in other words, in the manner that comic book villains tend to be, but she’s crazy with something to anchor it.

I’m not sure the ending quite works – it’s a shock moment that artist Clay Mann has to underplay to avoid covering the page in blood and screwing up the book’s T+ rating, and on the whole they might have been better off going for something that the book could deliver on fully.

Uncanny Avengers #7 – The problem with characters who have head-spinningly complicated schemes involving time travel is that you end up with a story involving head-spinningly complicated time travel.  I think Rick Remender more or less cuts through the worst of that, since the basic idea here is pretty clear: Kang has already arranged everything to his satisfaction before the story even starts.  So instead of the usual fiddly messing about with history, there are no changes required, just the sort of convoluted planning that only time-travel permits.

That leaves the way clear for this issue to shift the focus on to the Apocalypse Twins claiming their inheritance and interrupting the attempted coronation of the dimwitted Genocide – their casual disregard for the usual importance afforded to the Celestials is a nice touch which helps to sell the scale to which they’re messing up the rules.  And then there’s an opportunity for the team to squabble, because that’s what superhero teams do.  One of the strengths of Remender’s X-Force was the team dynamic, and it’s good to see that this book is also going to stick to a small defined cast instead of the open-ended sprawl that seems to have become standard for both franchises.  Not surprisingly, it’s also clear that the focus here is going to be on the characters that are unique to this book rather than those like Cap, Thor and Wolverine who seem to be present mainly to certify the team as an X-Men/Avengers hybrid.

We haven’t quite reached the levels of X-Force yet, perhaps because of the awkwardness of setting up such a contrived team in the first place; but the book does seem to be hitting its stride now.

Uncanny X-Men #5 – Hey, an actual villain!  In contrast to All-New X-Men, this book’s cast get to actually do something.  Specifically, Dormammu is launching an attack on Limbo, and the whole group – including the hapless trainees – end up being summoned there.  For whatever reason, Magik is apparently a threat to Dormammu (more by accident than design, it seems).  But fine – this is a good classic set-up, with the X-Men having to defend the rookies, but also having to rely on the rookies for their powers.

It also really plays to the strengths of artist Frazer Irving, who draws a lovely Limbo and a really nice take on Magik’s Darkchilde persona, with gorgeous flame and colour effects, and her face dissolving into a sort of loose sketch.  It’s a great way of selling the concept, particularly thanks to the contrast with his relatively restrained art on the rest of the book.  A good casting decision for this story arc.

Wolverine and the X-Men #28 – Not my favourite arc, to be perfectly honest.  I think we got the point an issue or two ago – Dog is trying to prove himself the superior Logan by leading the survival expedition more effectively than Wolverine could have done – and while it’s a perfectly solid take on Dog (if you’re going to use the character at all), it doesn’t really seem to have anywhere much to go.

On the other hand, we do get some progress on the personal stories of Broo and Eye-Boy.  Broo turns out not to be quite as far gone as he first seems, and while that’s hardly a surprise in itself, it emerges in a slightly unexpected way.  And Eye-Boy’s powers are more useful than they appear, which they’d kind of have to be, if he’s going to stick around.

But this book has always walked a fine line between embracing the ridiculousness of the superhero genre, and being just a little too silly for its own good.  Even within the logic of this series, the idea that Wolverine would try educating a group of kids by dumping them in a jungle for 24 hours is a bit of a stretch – though Jason Aaron just about gets away with it by playing up the idea that, yes, it really was a bad idea and even Wolverine realises that now.  Having Wolverine be quite so relaxed about Glob Herman wandering off on his own really stretches my disbelief, though.  (Yes, he does say that he can tell Herman’s “made other arrangements”, but if that’s the case he must know that Herman’s fallen in with Sauron, and shouldn’t he be a little more concerned about that?)

X-Men Legacy #10 – Continuing what seems to be a string of single-issue stories against the backdrop of Legion’s developing relationship with Blindfold.  May I take a moment at the outset to reiterate the point I made about last issue – that Legion’s power levels are wandering up and down randomly.  In issue #9 the plot needed him to be very powerful, so he was.  This time the plot requires him to be weak unless he strikes a deal with the “Xavier” persona, so he is.  It’s not a deal breaker or anything, but I do think it would help the series if there was some sense that Legion’s power levels correlated somehow or other with the progress he’s making.

But, as usual, the series is on firmer ground when it gets to the concept of the month.  This time it’s the author of the book Aarkus was writing last issue, who turns out to be the (more or less) acceptable face of anti-mutant sentiment.  With an origin story that involves him being maimed in a comically excessive string of crossover cameos, Marcus Glove is not a rabid zealot, but simply somebody making the reasonable enough argument that there are way too many dangerous lunatics wandering around with crazy power levels, and that it would probably be an idea if somebody did something about that.  It’s not so much that he thinks mutants are going to replace humans; it’s more that he thinks they’re probably going to blow up the world for everyone at this rate.  And, if you were an inhabitant of the Marvel Universe who doesn’t conveniently forget everything all the time, you’d probably think that way too.

The story seems at pains to stress that Glove is not a villain but a reasonable man pointing out a fundamental problem with the viability of the Marvel Universe – and while his views are usually attributed to villains, there’s really no reason why they have to be.  Legion isn’t exactly embracing Glove’s approach – the idea is more that he’s looking for practical assistance in limiting his own powers so that he won’t be a danger to others – but it’s also clear that he doesn’t have an entirely convincing answer to any of it.

X-Termination #2 – The end of the “X-Termination” crossover is also, by extension, the end of X-Treme X-Men and Age of Apocalypse.  It actually makes some degree of sense as an ending for X-Treme, since that book at least involved some sort of threat to the multiverse from the outset.

But for Age of Apocalypse, it really is a case of “And then everyone died, the end.”  After a year of the cast struggling heroically to liberate their world and succeeding, the ending is that – quite out of nowhere – a bunch of cosmic weirdos invade and destroy the world, and their timeline gets turned into a quarantine zone.  Leave aside the further problem that the villains in this whole crossover are a bunch of random aliens with no discernible personality or reason.  Even without that, this simply doesn’t work as a resolution for Age of Apocalypse.  Because it’s not an ending, it’s a dead stop.

AoA writer David Lapham makes a brave effort to pull it off in this issue anyway, and comes surprisingly close to succeeding – but he does so largely by playing up the tragedy that everything that his characters achieved has been rendered meaningless.  Harper Simmons is dusted off and sent back to Earth, not so much to save his life, but in order that someone can remember.  Somewhat more interestingly, Prophet is also taken through to the “prime” Earth, despite his stated desire to go down with the ship.  Aside from leaving some characters who were actually affected by the events of the series, it also has the advantage of leaving Prophet as a potentially interesting character – a (virtually) sole survivor now living in a world that would register to him as a borderline utopia.

But while Lapham manages to get some emotion into the ending of this story, it doesn’t really solve the problem that it’s a dreadful ending for the series; it just levers that fact to its short-term advantage.  The tragedy is the fact that it’s a crap ending, when all’s said and done.  Oh, and on top of that, the story has to wrestle with the completely random selection of artists that have characterised this whole crossover.  David Lopez turns up for a few pages to lend some class to the proceedings – though there’s something deeply depressing about the fact that such a talented artist is doing fill-in pages on junk crossovers – but otherwise there’s an abundance of wild tone shifts and artists who aren’t quite ready for prime time.

“X-Termination” is at best a weirdly conceived deck-clearing exercise; and despite the pedigree of the three credited writers, it reads like some sort of parody of closure.  Perhaps that’s what they were going for, but it’s hard to see why.