WOLVERINE #34. (Annotations here.) This is the heaviest week we’ve had in a while, which is not usually a good thing. It’s also a week with a lot of middle chapters where there isn’t much new to be said. This, for example, is part 4 of “Weapons of X”, with half an issue of action sequences in a curiously icebound North Sea, followed by a weird scene of Wolverine and Beast in a restaurant. Beast is a cartoon villain at this point, and you’d struggle to say there’s any real character interest to this, but there’s still something surreal about the way this arc is playing out that I do find quite endearing. Juan José Ryp is okay on the routine action scenes, but he excels when he’s asked to do something grotesque. Two pages of Beast repulsively eating a lobster is an unusual request, but Ryp can certainly pull it off.

X-MEN RED #12. (Annotations here.) Jon Ironfire fills in the back story of how he wound up on Mars, which means most of the issue is the White Sword and his 100 champions, plus a bit of Genesis. Al Ewing has done sterling work on this book in reinventing Arakko and making it much more interesting than the one-dimensional concept that had been established beforehand. As a result, he has got me interested in the characters on Arakko itself. But the White Sword and Genesis haven’t had the benefit of that work, and while they’re given a bit more nuance here than they had in the past, I can’t say I’m immediately interested in seeing more of either character. Honestly, we’ve barely seen Genesis when she wasn’t under the influence of Annihilation, and despite her prominence in “X of Swords”, her main function has been as something for Apocalypse to react to. I’m somewhat interested in knowing what Apocalypse has been up to. Genesis, though, still needs serious work to persuade me that there’s anything to her.

ROGUE & GAMBIT #4. By Stephanie Phillips, Carlos Gómez & David Curiel. This is a weird book. The plot basically works: Power Broker is trying to enslave superhumans so he can sell them as weapons, and the anti-mutant forces are interested in that. But it has a wonky, semi-detached approach to continuity that feels really quite odd to read. You can’t just have Juggernaut show up as a random villain without someone saying “Um, weren’t you in the cast of Legion of X literally a couple of months ago?” You can’t have “remove the implant and Rogue dies” as a plot point when resurrection is a central plot point of the Krakoan era. You can’t have “Gambit died and came back in Knights of X and it was a really traumatic thing” as his central character point for the series when – I repeat – resurrection is a central plot point of the Krakoan era and literally everyone from the A-listers to the Z-listers has been doing it incessantly for the whole era. And if you want to argue that there was something different about the way Gambit came back, you need to explain what that is, rather than just expect people to remember the plot of Knights of X (while completely ignoring central premises of the X-books as a whole and the cast list of Legion of X). And on top of that there’s a sequence of a remote-controlled Rogue fighting Gambit while they talk about their emotional issues which is really heavy handed. I quite liked earlier issues of this series for the breezy style, but this one is a problem.

X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #91. By Steve Orlando, Emilio Laiso & Rachelle Rosenberg. This is the end of the “X-Men Green” arc, which doesn’t go in quite the direction I’d expected. The ultra-obscure Spider-Girl is evidently in this book to be the sympathetic character who gets a relatively happy ending. As for Nature Girl, we’re certainly reminded of the back door that her character change is due to the influence of Curse – something that Nature Girl herself flatly denies, but it’s there if anyone really wants to make her nice again. But the final issue sees Nature Girl being hauled away for a lecture by Gaea herself, who basically condemns eco-terrorist Nature Girl, points out that humans are not something separate from the ecosystem, and makes the point that the damage done by humans is ultimately going to do a lot more harm to them than it is to her. And then… Nature Girl still doesn’t accept the lecture, even coming from Gaea herself, and heads off to resume a career of eco-vigilantism. Hmm. I’m not sure that really works. If the arc is “Nature Girl tragically becomes a villain and rejects every off ramp that’s offered to her” then fair enough, but we passed that a while back and already escalated to a point beyond that that seems to call for more of a resolution.

X-23: DEADLY REGENESIS #4. By Erica Schultz, Edgar Salazar & Carlos Lopez. If you’re in the market for retro X-23 as of about a decade go, then this mini doesn’t break any new ground, but it plays the hits well enough. There’s some genuinely nice art in this book, particularly in the flashback scenes to NYX. And the basic idea of Laura trying to walk the tightrope between keeping Kimura on side and minimising the damage to third parties until she can figure out a way to escape is a good one. On the other hand, Kimura herself has never been all that interesting, and she remains pretty one-dimensional here. And setting up Haymaker as the deluded stooge who thinks Kimura’s a decent person who’s helping him get revenge doesn’t really come off when she shows her true colours only seven pages later. But yeah, this is pretty decent.

THE X-CELLENT #4. By Peter Milligan, Michael Allred & Laura Allred. Off on the fringes of Technically An X-book, this remains an odd little series, where it’s often hard to figure out when it’s dated in a self-aware way, and when it’s just dated. The whole thing about X-Statix and the X-Cellent competing for followers as if it were a zero sum game kind of feels like the latter. But then again, there’s something rather sweet about the retro 50s robot Dox being kicked to the kerb by Zeitgeist when he figures out that his smear campaign doesn’t actually need a robot who can dig up dirt on X-Statix because facts don’t matter anyway. “There’s a rumour on the web… saying we’re keeping Kurt Cobain in suspended animation while we clone him.” In fact, this issue is more about the titular team than X-Statix themselves, and Milligan does pull off the trick of bringing a bit of humanity to both Mirror Girl and Hurt John in the midst of the heavy irony.

MARVEL’S VOICES: PRIDE #1. That’s the third Marvel’s Voices: Pride #1, if you were wondering. I’m not going to review the entire thing, which is 90 pages long. The Voices anthologies tend to be patchy, in large part just because they’re Marvel anthologies, which are always patchy. They can also be a bit one-note in sticking doggedly to the theme. But they’ve been including more stories that run a bit longer and broaden the format, such as the debut of Escapade a while back. This one has several stories that seem to be intended more as backdoor pilots for other books, which is probably an improvement so far as the anthology is concerned – though I have some reservations about putting plot-relevant material in an £8 anthology. It’s tough to justify that sort of price tag to yourself when you could spend £1 more and get a 400 page novel. I know that logic applies with equal force to regular issues, but when you start seeing this sort of price tag, you really do get the voice in your head saying “What the hell are you thinking? It’ll be on Unlimited in three months.” And seriously, unless you’re a completist with money to burn: it’ll be on Unlimited in three months.

Anyway: so far as the X-books are concerned, there are two stories here. Stephen Byrne’s “Jumbo Carnation’s Ultimate Creations” is basically the big guy making outfits for people for Pride, but it’s a nice little 5-pager, and comes across as a celebration of the power of self-expression through fashion. “Today’s Lessons”, by Steve Foxe, Rosi Kämpe and Kelly Fitzpatrick, is more significant, since it’s a 15-page lead-in to the upcoming Dark X-Men #1. It’s a Gimmick story, finally following up on the prematurely cancelled Children of the Atom, with Gimmick struggling somewhat to fit in with the real mutants. The fact that she’s still in the Gambit cosplay doesn’t exactly help her cause. It’s mainly a case of Gimmick proving herself against some minor bad guys – and we’re talking seriously minor, in the form of two nonentities from the Hellfire Academy, but that’s about the level she should be dealing with. It does that job nicely enough, it lays a bit of groundwork for her to find out about Limbo, and in all fairness it feels like more of a useful bridge than essential reading for Dark X-Men.