X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #119. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Ceci de la Cruz & Travis Lanham. Is this the first time that an X-book has been published on Christmas Day? Truly, it warms the heart to think of the diligent assistant editor, trudging through the snow to the offices of Marvel Comics to press the big red PUBLISH button on the thirty-second floor. That’s dedication. Especially for the middle chapter of an Arakko storyline. This is turning into the sort of Arakko story that doesn’t work for me – the sort where we’re somehow making the logical leap from “expressing your pain is a good thing” to “battering one another with sticks is a good thing”. To be fair, I suppose this sort of ritual combat event is a fairly standard fantasy trope, and the genre has never much appealed to me anyway. But when you start trying to rationalise it in this kind of therapy-speak way, and have a bunch of characters from Earth nodding along and going “yes, this all sounds entirely reasonable”, you end up lampshading how much it doesn’t make sense.

IMMORTAL X-MEN #18. (Annotations here.) This is the final issue – or, if you prefer, the book morphs into Rise of the Powers of X for its final arc. Either way, we really are entering the home stretch of the Krakoan era now. This is the pay off for Mother Righteous’ attempts to become a Dominion, and it rather cleverly hits the accelerator by revealing that Orbis Stellaris and Dr Stasis already tried and failed to become Dominions off panel. Actually, maybe it really is rushing to the end for scheduling reasons, but if so, it’s a very neat way of making it into a positive.

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X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #118. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Ceci de la Cruz & Travis Lanham. On to a new arc, then. It’s Christmas during “Fall of X”, and after a brief opening montage, we’re off to post-war Arakko, where they go in for an evening of semi-ritual mutual cudgeling which apparently unburdens people, or whatever. Out of nowhere, we’ve also got Bei showing up, to remind us that her husband has been missing for months and every one seems to have forgotten about it. This is certainly in the spirit of Al Ewing’s attempts to portray Arakko as a more rounded culture than it first appears, or at least one where we need to appreciate the symbolism to the Arakkii themselves. I can buy the idea that these guys go in for ritualised combat as part of a celebration, particularly since the story does seem fairly clear that joining in just to hurt people is disreputable. I’m rather less sure that I’m interested in reading an actual story about it, but we’ll see.

WOLVERINE #40. (Annotations here.) The last part of “Last Mutant Standing”, though it isn’t a storyline so much as a series of team-up stories. Benjamin Percy has a shot at tying it together into some kind of theme, by pushing the idea that Wolverine has been teaming up with non-mutant heroes to try to recapture the feeling of belonging that he had on Krakoa, and walked away from shortly before the Fall. There’s something in that idea – the book did indeed bring Wolverine to the point of rejecting Krakoa, and it makes some sense for the Fall to be something that makes him appreciate the positive side of the place, without needing to compromise Wolverine’s status as a sceptic. But it feels a bit of a stretch to make that into the moral of four issues of Wolverine Team-Up. Still, these four issues have at least been quite good fun, in a rather grim period, and maybe just taking a step back and doing something lightweight was a better call than putting Wolverine at the centre of the storyline.

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