Well, look, it was a very heavy week for new releases, and on top of that I started late…

NIGHTCRAWLERS #3. (Annotations here.) You’ll have picked up that one thing I really like about the “Sins of Sinister” crossover is the way it plays with the trope of the cosmic reset button and specifically asks why any of it matters. Part of the answer is that even if it’s all a dead end so far as the narrative is concerned, it’s very important to the characters who’ve lived and died over the centuries in this reality, and there’s something slightly horrifying about the idea of casually rebooting it all. Another answer is that Sinister always planned to send back the facts of this timeline so that it could affect what happens next time round, and Mother Righteous is thinking along very similar lines. Nightcrawlers also “matters” for another reason: it gives us a clearer understanding of Mother Righteous, building on what’s been teased about her so far in Legion of X. So I’m more than happy with this issue, which delivers nicely on all those counts. Granted, there’s a lot of background characters who are arguably underdeveloped, and Vox Ignis’s turn feels rushed… but it works.

X-FORCE #39. (Annotations here.) Mmm. This is a mixed bag. On the plus side, I like the idea of Sage taking over to try and fix the direction of X-Force – even if she comes across as a little naive. And the Quiet Council deciding that as long as Beast is only going after enemies of the state, he’s not exactly a priority… kind of works, I guess? The Colossus storyline seems to finally be going somewhere too, and with Fall of X around the corner, you figure it’s coming to a climax. On the other hand, while I’m all for bringing in Laura rather than having Logan in two books, Percy doesn’t seem to get the character at all. You can’t do “I am a loner yet I am moved by the chance to be a hero” with someone who literally just finished a year in the X-Men. Plus, Laura is just not a character who does drinking games that involve stabbing people. So in practice, I’m not at all encouraged about bringing her in.

NEW MUTANTS: LETHAL LEGION #2. (Annotations here.) It may be very peripheral to the line, but this is good fun. The villains auditioning for the Lethal Legion are a staggeringly obscure selection, which is always nice, but I enjoy the general vibe here of Escapade, Scout and Cerebella being recklessly overconfident, and being lulled into a false sense of security by showing up alongside these Z-listers. There’s something quite charming about the survivalists who’ve moved into the Morlocks tunnels, too. And look, data pages that actually fill the page with text! Enid Balám’s art has a lot of charm to it too; this is quite a dense issue but it flows well, with plenty of character.

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #83. By Grace Freud, Alberto Alburquerque & Yen Nitro. So we’re into Mojo’s TV-making schtick, the idea being that he’s got a time dilation bubble so that the kidnapped mutants can make a whole series for him in hours. This is the weakest issue of the, to be honest, since it’s the most straightforward trad Mojo story. Mojo is played out, and while I get the idea of the even-more-oppressed kids being somehow more desperate and compliant, that doesn’t really feed through into the plot, where they aren’t given a choice. Instead we’ve got them in a montage of saccharine exchanges with duplicate bad guys which is… not obviously something that would be interesting to Mojo? This isn’t the side of this arc that really engages me. (Mind you, issue #84 is a lot better.)

MARVEL’S VOICES INFINITY COMIC #49. By Andrew Wheeler, Eleonora Carlini & Brittany Peer. Yup, that’s pretty much where I figured this was going – Negasonic Teenage Warhead complies with the timeline by kissing the girl she was meant to kiss anyway – though the time warp montage where they have the opportunity to build a relationship first is a nice touch. As I’ve said before, this just isn’t a character that I find particularly engaging.

BISHOP: WAR COLLEGE #3. By J Holtham, Sean Damien Hill, Victor Nava, Alberto Foche & Espen Grundetjern. We haven’t talked about this miniseries yet; ostensibly, it’s picking up New Mutants‘ role as the book about training the youngsters, with Bishop running classes to help train the kids for battle. In practice, the first couple of issues are kind of bland, with quite familiar training stuff, and some B-list villains trying to attack Krakoa from below. This issue is stronger, because of the A-plot: Bishop himself is off in an alternate Earth where only black people are mutants, and the X-Men have actually pulled off the Xavier’s Dream Classic goal of peaceful coexistence. Bishop is understandably a bit sceptical about whether all is as it seems here, but the story does a decent job selling that he’s the paranoid one. As for the Krakoa material… that’s still quite ordinary. It’s not really apparent how these two threads draw together, either, but there’s another couple of issues to answer that question.

X-TREME X-MEN #5. By Chris Claremont, Salvador Larroca & Guru-eFX. This is another miniseries revisiting a previous point in continuity; specifically, it’s meant to come right after the end of the original X-Treme X-Men run. It’s a slightly odd choice of period to revisit, given how much Claremont material there is to choose from, but maybe that’s why it makes sense – X-Treme X-Men is, if nothing else, very Claremont, and it’s not so overburdened with continuity implants and history. Also, Larroca was the original artist on X-Treme, so he’s got a connection with that roster.

What we get in practice is Ogun doing his jumping-between bodies routine, and Claremont revisiting some dropped plots of the era. So here’s Alice Tremaine, the anti-mutant student activist villain of Mekanix. And we’ve got a bunch of random anti-mutant villains called Galérer (it’s French for “to struggle”), with a surprising amount of prominence given to a fellow by the name of Beasty-Brute, whose only previous appearance was in a story that Claremont and Larroca did for Wolverien: Black, White & Blood. I am, shall we say, less than convinced that this guy was in need of being brought back, and the name really doesn’t do him any favours.

Still, while the mini feels like something of an extended fight scene, this is a perfectly good finale. Okay, I could live without Sage talking down an angry mob by explaining the premise to them, but overall it’s a sound ending with Claremont playing the hits. Larroca is very much on form here, and a lot of this issue is very pretty indeed. The strongest issue of the series, I think.

THE X-CELLENT #2. By Peter Milligan, Mike Allred & Laura Allred. Way, way off on the fringes of the X-books, this X-Statix reprise is very much doing its own thing. It’s the second half of the storyline that was started in last year’s X-Cellent mini. Zeitgeist is trying to ascend to godhood using a magical spell that requires him to get more followers on social media, so you’ve got Orphan trying to take him on by proxy in a battle of otherwise pointless publicity. It’s still the sort of book which has captions like “Concurrently, in the award-winning X-Statix building…” And I like the absurdly dated Digital Man, who’s meant to be a robot avatar of the modern internet but has a (presumably intentional) design that looks like he’s wandered out of a sixties Spider-Man comic.  As with the first arc, there’s something a bit behind the times about the whole approach to social media, though part of the point seems to be that Orphan is struggling to catch up. This issue clicks a bit better than some of the first arc did, though; the deadpan absurdity lands a little more consistently.