Okay, you seem to approve of this. Let’s stick with it.

STORM & THE BROTHERHOOD OF MUTANTS #3. (Annotations here.) The risk with “Sins of Sinister” and its vast timescales is that everything becomes a little bit abstract. Sometimes the crossover has played off that very effectively – I’ve noted before the way that we’re obviously inclined to root for the cosmic reset button to be hit, yet the hero character refuse to play ball by lying down and letting their universe be destroyed. But this issue feels a bit too remote. Sinister’s role is kept fairly small, and our main focus is on Jon Ironside as Storm’s heir, accepting Mr Sinister’s proposal to resurrect her. The tension here, in theory, is between Ironside’s faith in Storm – which he seems to have adopted in part as penance for something that went badly wrong when he doubted her in the past – and the Arakkii culture of rejecting resurrection, with Storm herself as one of the most explicit cases of that.  But Ironside has always felt more like a trope than a character, and I have trouble getting very invested in him. It might also be that Ewing’s cosmic-scaled concepts aren’t such a good fit with Alessandro Vitti’s art, which feels better suited to something more intimate. Either way, this didn’t really click for me.

X-MEN #21. (Annotations here.) This is part of a curiously structured crossover with Captain Marvel, which involves two completely unrelated Brood storylines that seem to come together in the final chapter – which will be Captain Marvel #49. Other than the fact that they involve groups of Brood being freed from Broo’s control by Nightmare, the two arcs don’t seem to be connected in any particular way, and thus far, buying the Captain Marvel issues hasn’t notably added to the experience of reading the X-Men ones. It feels a bit more like the books came up with unrelated Brood stories by coincidence and then decided to try and tie them together after the fact, instead of tossing a coin. Maybe Captain Marvel #49 will prove me wrong.

Anyway, this has some very nice art from Stefano Caselli – his Brood are maybe a little too clean, but he does a nice Nightmare and his characters are nice and expressive. The plotting is a bit ropey, though. Why are Forge and Monet returning Knowhere to the mainstream universe again at the start of the issue, when we already saw them do it last time? Is Nightmare meant to be a serious threat or not? What was the point of setting up a whole thing about the X-Men unknowingly taking infected refugees to other worlds and helping to spread the Brood infection, only for the Brood to just burst out and make themselves known during the fight?

That said… in theory, I like the idea of having Scott and Jean divided about how firmly to stick to “save everyone” superhero principles. These two characters hardly ever disagree about anything, but they should probably disagree more. After all, much of Scott’s arc since the Utopia era has about him becoming increasingly radical and ever less willing to play the role of a traditional hero when it conflicts with higher priorities (principally, his overriding loyalty to the mutant race). He’s been dialled back from the period when he was an outright revolutionary but he’s still some way from original Scott, even if Duggan’s incarnation of the X-Men is explicitly trying to reclaim an outreach role as traditional superheroes. Jean, on the other hand, missed most of that stuff, since she was dead between 2004 and 2017, plus her core motivation is tied up with atoning for Phoenix. It feels like there ought to be something in that. But playing up overfamiliar villains like the Brood as an existential threat doesn’t feel like the best vehicle for it.

CAPTAIN MARVEL #48. By Kelly Thompson, Sergio Dávila, Sean Parsons & Ceci de la Cruz. Well, it’s part of the Brood crossover, and a bunch of X-Men are in it – Gambit, Rogue, Polaris, Wolverine (Laura) and Psylocke are all guest starring here, along with regular Captain Marvel supporting characters Spider-Woman and Hazmat – but thus far it’s just been an entirely separate Brood arc. Thompson does write a good Gambit and Psylocke, but this is mostly about Captain Marvel fighting the Brood on the mental plane in some nicely hallucinatory sequences, and her copy Binary completing her own arc by making the grand sacrifice to save Carol. Any X-Men readers who pick up the book for crossover reasons won’t find very much here that bears on the mutants, but they will at least get a pretty solid issue of Captain Marvel.

X-23: DEADLY REGENESIS #2. By Erica Schultz, Edgar Salazar & Carlos Lopez. Marvel do a lot of these continuity implant miniseries these days; most of them seem to be reprises for former creative teams. This one isn’t, and you have to wonder who the audience is for a miniseries set during the early issues of the 2010 X-23 ongoing. Specifically, we’re in the period where X-23 has gone on the road in a quest to get in touch with her humanity. The basic set-up is that Kimura is having another go at recapturing X-23, and she’s sent new villain Haymaker to do the job. Sensibly enough, since you can’t really change Laura’s own arc in a book like this, much of the focus is actually on Haymaker, who has a personal vendetta against Laura after she killed a friend of theirs. It’s perfectly fine and decently polished, but it also feels like a stock X-23 story for that period – which I suppose may be the brief, but it feels rather unnecessary.

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #82. By Grace Freud, Alberto Alburquerque & Yen Nitro. Mojo hauls Jubilee and the Super Trans support group members off to Mojoworld to do… well, the usual, basically. Get them to jump through hoops and call it a TV show. There’s a nice little speech at the beginning about how the X-Men are getting terribly uppity these days, but these kids will surely jump at the chance to be nice and inspirational. I think I preferred the characters when they were a bit more grounded by the real world, though; they become a bit undifferentiated here, when Mojo wackiness tends to overpower them.

MARVEL’S VOICES INFINITY COMIC #48. By Andrew Wheeler, Eleonora Carlini & Brittany Peer. We’re right on the fringes of what might count as an X-book here, but sure, Negasonic Teenage Warhead technically counts right now. This is her getting the pep talk about not running from her power (with a rare outing for Power Pack‘s spirit of spirituality, Numinus), followed by a return to the rather weird plot about her needing to kiss a girl she’s never met before the TVA’s arbitrary deadline. The basic idea is that because her precognition told her that this timeline would set her on the path to reality-warping powers that she didn’t want, she avoided it – and now she has to do something arbitrary and contrived in order to get reality back on track. I think that works, but she’s still not a character I find especially engaging.