It’s Christmas!  Well, it’s not really.  But it’s the last X-Axis before Christmas (and given that this week’s delivery will no doubt be subject to the combined vagaries of the holiday season and snow disruption, I’m kind of assuming I won’t see it this week).  Fortunately, I have two weeks of arrears to get through, which includes a whole bunch of X-books and a few other titles worth singling out, so plenty to work on here…

Black Panther: The Man Without Fear #513 – A curious book, this.  It’s picking up its numbering from Daredevil, and the basic premise is that the Black Panther is trying to take over as the local superhero of Hell’s Kitchen now that Daredevil is out of the way.  But although Foggy Nelson puts in a brief appearance, it’s really a case of the Panther taking over Daredevil’s setting, rather than his supporting cast or his storylines.  In fact, it’s an equally direct sequel to Doomwar (the recent Black Panther mini), which apparently ended with T’Challa more or less wrecking Wakanda’s economy in order to defeat Dr Doom, and being kicked out.  So they’re going the back-to-basic redemption route with T’Challa; fair enough, so far as it goes.  Strictly speaking he’s not even calling himself the Black Panther any more, since that’s meant to be his ritual title.  He’s just a guy in a mask, with a civilian identity as a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo.  (If you’re not familiar with the place, just bear in mind the useful rule of thumb: any country that claims to be a Democratic Republic almost invariably isn’t.)

So we’ve got a first issue largely dedicated to establishing the Black Panther as a street level hero in New York in order to redeem himself, and jumping through various hoops to hammer down the “no-frills” premise.  Some of this is decidedly clunky, with the Panther having to give Storm the time-worn “I must do this alone” speech and so forth, and it’s pretty obvious that the character is being wrenched awkwardly into a set-up that doesn’t altogether make logical sense, but at least writer David Liss is trying to deal with all that stuff head-on and get it out of the way so that he can move on with the story he’s really interested in telling.  The other half of the issue is spent setting up a new villain – a Romanian crimelord who figures this is a reasonable time to make his bid for power.  He’s called Vlad the Impaler, which would be painfully awful if it was played straight.  Fortunately, the idea is more that he’s cheerfully trading on stereotypes in order to do some underworld brand-building, and that works quite well.

Francesco Francavilla’s art is beautiful stuff, and on the whole it hangs together quite nicely as a Marvel Universe noir-with-superhero-trimmings affair.  I can’t help feeling that it’s laying on the destitution of Hell’s Kitchen with a trowel, mind you – particularly given that I read this immediately after the Shadowland: After the Fall epilogue, which ends by telling us how much Hell’s Kitchen has been improved over the years.   If you were creating Daredevil today, you wouldn’t put him in Hell’s Kitchen.  I suppose this doesn’t really matter so long as you’re willing to regard Marvel’s Hell’s Kitchen as a genre shorthand rather than as a reference to the real world; and this is enough of a genre piece that it can get away with it, particularly since the real focus seems to be on the battle of wills between T’Challa and his rookie nemesis.  Judged as a pulp/noir piece, though, it’s very readable, and to be honest, a lot better than I’d expected given the gimmicky promotion.

Fables #100 – Not so much a regular issue as a trade paperback in its own right, this $10 issue has a 62-page lead story plus an assortment of back-up features bringing the page count up to 104.  I increasingly find myself wavering about whether to stick with Fables, a book which is still perfectly solid, but feels like it finished the real story when Gepetto was defeated.  The main story revolves around the big fight between Totenkinder and Mr Dark, something the book has been building up for months.  Having this much space to play with, Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham are certainly able to make it appropriately epic, and while the ending seems at first like an anticlimax, it quickly turns out to be a feint.  Buckingham is doing some excellent work here, albeit that the slightly lower paper quality costs it a bit of definition.  And the eventual winner is genuinely surprising, if only because I’d kind of assumed that Willingham was preparing to wrap up this storyline, rather than pursue the same idea to the next level up.  The last few pages, with the newborn fable child, are wonderfully executed, too.  On the other hand, I still don’t find Dark himself a particularly interesting villain – I see that he’s intentionally generic, in a way that logically ought to work for Fables, but it just doesn’t quite click for me.  And there’s a subplot with Mrs Spratt that also feels a bit clunky, with her one-dimensional character and some grade-school life lesson lecturing.  On the whole, it works, and I do applaud the effort to produce an anniversary issue which really does feel like something of an event in every way, from story content through to format.

New Mutants Forever #5 – The concluding part of the miniseries, which hasn’t really come up to expectations.  X-Men Forever has often worked as a guilty pleasure, but New Mutants Forever feels like a bit of a misfire in comparison.  In theory, it made sense for Chris Claremont to do a series picking up where he left off with New Mutants, which he sort of dropped in mid-stream.  And it made some sense for him to pick up on Nova Roma, which was never a particularly successful idea, but was at least a major dangling subplot from the period.  But what he’s actually done is a battle for control of Nova Roma between a suddenly-noble Selene and an inexplicably out of place Red Skull, who seems to have no particularly good reason to be here.  Actually, the basic idea of Selene being a hero to the people of Nova Roma because she looked after them all these years had some potential.  But somewhere along the line the book just wholeheartedly embraces her as a patriotic hero and never really reconciles that with her starting off as a villain.  The Skull doesn’t have any connection with the other characters, and end up as a vehicle for Claremont to wheel out his old favourite, mind control.  And a subplot with Cypher being hideously transformed by the Skull is casually reversed in the final pages in a bizarre anti-climax.  (I was kind of figuring that the pay-off would be Warlock permanently merging with Cypher, which would at least have paid off an old subplot… but no, it’s just a straight reversal.)  All rather flat and disappointing.

Next Men #1 – John Byrne’s early nineties title Next Men was probably the last major work he did before the tide of comics fashion turned irredeemably against him, so it makes a certain degree of sense for him to go back to the book now.   I never read the original series, but I can’t really complain that Byrne doesn’t try to bring us up to speed – on the contrary, he goes soaring off in the other direction with an extended recap of the original series that takes up almost half the book.  Heaven knows I’m all for making books accessible, but this does seem a bit excessive.  The original series, it seems, was full of “everything you know is wrong” stuff, and this issue plays the same card so extensively that it’s hard to know quite what the hell is going on by the time it finishes.  As near as I can make out, it boils down to an extraordinarily round-the-houses way of recapping the plot and bringing us back to the fact that two of the characters are stranded in the past, before bringing on a cliffhanger for the end.  Not really a case of hitting the ground running where the plot is concerned, then.  Mind you, it’s got some of the best art I’ve seen from Byrne in quite a while, firmly in line with his 1990s style and eminently readable; and there’s certainly potential in the idea, even if this issue doesn’t really get far enough into the story to do anything with it.  You couldn’t really say it was a successful first issue, yet I have to admit it does enough to make me curious about what Byrne’s trying to do here.  It’s chaotic, but that’s not without its appeal.

Uncanny X-Force #3 – It’s a fight issue, but then what do you buy X-Force for?  The story actually opens with some one-page vignettes laying out the origin stories of Apocalypse’s new Horsemen, and they’re pretty effective.  They’re brief, but there’s enough to sketch out a back story for each character and make them more than just random bad guys for X-Force to fight.  Curiously, they’re also apparently mutants who we’ve just never seen before, so it seems Marvel may be backing off from the “no new mutant characters” edict – possibly not the smartest move when they’re still trying to sell the Five Lights as important characters, but we shall see.

What follows is basically your traditional fight issue where the villains get the upper hand at first, but then the goodies figure it out and turn the tide.  Perfectly functional as far as that goes, but livened up by the fact that Remender manages to get the new Horsemen across as promising opponents, and uses this story to build them up as characters.  And Jerome Opena’s art gives the characters a theatrical look that works nicely, though he doesn’t seem quite so comfortable doing the comedy segments with Deadpool.  Overall, though, pretty decent – I’d have preferred to see a little more progress with the story, but it’s done with enough style to get away with that.

What If? Wolverine: Father – One of this year’s What If? one-shots, and the premise here is basically “What if Wolverine had raised Daken himself?”  So the divergence point is that instead of Wolverine showing up after everyone in his town has been killed, he arrives a bit earlier, still doesn’t save his wife, but does figure out that the baby is alive.  And from there…

The big problem facing writer Rob Williams with this story is that it’s a question probably best left unanswered.  If we care about Wolverine and Daken’s relationship at all – and presumably we care about it a little bit if we’re reading this in the first place – then surely it’s more dramatically interesting for having the possibility that things might have turned out differently.  But the current orthodox view on Daken seems to be that he’s completely irredeemable – certainly Daniel Way and Marjorie Liu no longer seem to be playing him as particularly ambiguous – and that doesn’t really leave much flexibility for this story.  How would Daken have turned out if Wolverine had raised him?  Well, pretty much exactly the same.

To be fair, Thomas isn’t trying to build his story around that.  He’s more interested in writing Wolverine as a father, and admittedly that’s a side of the character that (for obvious reasons) hasn’t really been done.  So, what Wolverine does, it seems, is to go off and hide in the middle of nowhere, and try to raise Daken in peace and isolation.  Some of it’s quite nicely done, and the book does have a grip on the characters; the details, for the most part, are handled well.  Greg Tocchini’s art is quite interesting, too – a very loose and sketchy style at times, but with plenty of momentum, and some well-handled dramatic moments.  But the story can’t really overcome the fact that Daken is a one-dimensional character; and since this whole thing spins off from a Wolverine: Origins story, you have to ask, where the hell is Romulus?  Wolverine just disappears for years, and the guy who’s supposed to be the manipulative mastermind behind his entire life lets it go?  That doesn’t work.

The back-up strip is the second part of “What if Venom Possessed Deadpool?” by Rick Remender and, er, somebody Moll, which is running through this year’s What If? one-shots.  Despite the title, it’s actually more an exercise in Marvel Universe self-parody, referencing 80s and 90s stories.  Remender kind of botches it near the end when he goes off on a detour to bleat that some people complained about Franken-Castle (which I thought was a funny idea too, but god, Remender comes off as a whiner here).  Still, while it’s not a story so much as a comedy featurette, it’s got some good jokes in there.

Wolverine #4 – The penultimate part of “Wolverine Goes To Hell”, which is all building quite nicely.  In Hell, Wolverine still won’t break, and the idea is that his defiance undermines the Devil enough to make him vulnerable.  Corny, but I kind of like the idea – though the actual fight scene between the two of them is visually a bit confusing.  Actually, I’m not sure I care for Renato Guedes’ design for Satan in the first place; he’s gone for the monster approach, and the resulting character looks rather strange delivering Jason Aaron’s dialogue.  Meanwhile, in the real world, Wolverine’s demonically possessed body fights the X-Men in a decent little sequence, albeit one that seems to have some odd ideas about how Colossus’ powers work.  Aaron comes back to his theme of religious faith in the opening pages but, somewhat to my relief, doesn’t seem to be playing any of this as “Wolverine discovers god”; his trip to hell has given him “faith”, but of an entirely negative sort.  What I like about this issue, though, is that it gets the obligatory fight against Satan out of the way and takes us into rather more interesting territory for the final issue, using the trip to the afterlife as a device to reunite Wolverine with his father.  While we’ve technically seen him before, not much has been done with him, and it’s a nice exercise in bringing the story back onto a human scale after the silliness of the earlier issues.  Oh yes, and there’s another back-up strip, this time drawn by Jamie McKelvie, with the Mongrels going to Madripoor to destroy some of Wolverine’s possessions.  Since these guys clearly aren’t getting to fight Wolverine in the current arc, presumably Aaron’s setting them up as villains for a future storyline.  They’re an absurd bunch, but that’s kind of the point, and I can see them making good foils for Wolverine in Aaron’s faintly crazy stories.

X-Factor #212 – Thor and X-Factor go to confront Hela in Asgard – cue the fighting.  Although since this is Peter David, it’s not just an issue-long fight scene; there’s plenty of stuff about how they’re going to get out of there, and quite why everyone is so worked up about Pip the Troll in the first place.  Actually, Hela’s motivations remain a bit obscure; Madrox suggests that she’s basically just pursuing Thor, but as she points out, that would be an incredibly contrived way of going about it.  And no other explanation is really put forward.  It’s a bit odd.  Perhaps we’re not finished with her yet.  But in fact, even if Hela’s just there to serve the plot – which would be curious, since she’s the main villain – David does have some other good reasons for using her.  He’s got the subplot about Rahne’s pregnancy which he inherited from X-Force, and which involves Asgard.  He’s got another subplot about Theresa’s disillusionment with god, which provides a couple of nice moments.  And he’s got an idea for something to do with Darwin, a character who still hasn’t quite taken flight even in this book, but whose powers do make for a nice logic loop in a story involving a death goddess.  (Looks like he’s being written out next month, judging from the cover, so this might be a case of giving him a big moment so his departure counts for more.)  I’m keeping an open mind about this one; if this is the end of the Hela storyline then bits of it do feel a bit half-formed, but X-Factor doesn’t work in the same rigid story arcs as the other X-books, so for all we know Peter David’s isn’t finished with the character just yet.

X-Men Forever 2 #13 – An issue of pulse-pounding exposition, as Claremont explains what’s going on with the three Storms.  Basically, the idea is that they pulled a switch during the “X-Tinction Agenda” crossover; the “bad” Storm is a defective clone; the child Storm is the same one that met up with Gambit; and the Storm who’s made of energy kind of got separated from the kid during said crossover.  And, pretty much, that’s the issue – explaining where the three came from, and how they got to be where they were at the start of X-Men Forever.  It’s not a particularly great story in its own right, but if you’ve been waiting for over a year for an explanation of what’s going on here – well, here’s the explanation, which does dovetail quite neatly with everything that went before.  Some of Robert Atkins’ art, channelling the late-80s X-books, is pretty good too.  I’m not quite sure what readers will make of a story that turns so extensively on fairly minor plot details from a twenty-year-old crossover, but to be fair, Claremont sets it all out quite clearly, so he’s not depending on memory.  My reservation here is that it’s all quite neat, but I’m not sure the resulting story is really about anything beyond being a neat explanation – if you’re looking for some sort of “different sides of Storm’s persona” concept, well, that doesn’t really come through.  But hey, Claremont built up a mystery for a year plus and he’s come up with a resolution that pretty much delivers, so fair play to him.